The Rt. Rev. Jennifer Baskerville-Burrows, bishop of Indianapolis, has written a response to this morning’s mass shooting at a FedEx facility near the Indianapolis airport which has left nine dead and at least seven wounded.
Let me confess that I have unease in my soul that we Hoosiers are getting used to having our hearts rent. The city of Indianapolis lost five people to a mass shooting in January, and four more in March. Two hundred and fifteen people were murdered in our state capital in 2020, an increase of 40 percent over the previous year. Across the state of Indiana, nearly 1000 people died by gun violence in 2019. Nearly six in ten of those who died took their own lives with a gun.
Our streets are flooded with guns. Yet our state and national leaders have been agonizingly slow to respond, and so it falls to us to mourn every life that is lost to gun violence, and to organize ourselves and continue pressing for an end to this epidemic.
We find ourselves mourning these grievous losses in the very season when Christians celebrate Christ’s resurrection. Easter is not an abstraction for us, and thus we are called to do what is within our power to bring life out of death. Here in the Diocese of Indianapolis, we are standing with the vulnerable and marginalized to transform the systems of injustice that keep God’s people at risk to gun violence in our homes, our schools, our communities and our workplaces. I find great hope in the many ways we have committed to the long process of dismantling systemic racism, undoing the evil of mass incarceration, and cultivating the conditions in which our communities can flourish.
The full text of the bishop’s statement is here.
We at the Cafe extend our condolences and prayers to the families of all affected by this event.