Another Life Lost to the Insanity of Gun Violence
By Azher Quader
Chicago, IL
He was a student at Loyola, he came from New York, he was a body builder and he was a Muslim who hailed from Pakistan.
It was a botched armed robbery on a street near the campus of Loyola in Chicago's north side Rogers Park neighborhood. Mutahir Rauf 's name will now be written with his blood on the sacred alter of gun rights in America.
Our insatiable appetite for guns feeds a culture of violence that permeates every aspect of our lives, from the imagery of video games to the painful realities of killings in our streets. Every year 30,000 lives are lost to gun violence in America. 1,000 here in Illinois. When DC banned handguns for a period of time (1976 -2008) the homicide death rate from guns fell 25 percent and the suicide death rate from guns fell 23 percent. Defying the logic of these numbers the Supreme Court repealed the ban in 2008 declaring it to be unconstitutional.
No longer is this violence an occurrence in the south side or the west side but this one occurred in the north side, a stone throw from Devon and it takes away one of our own. This one clearly hits home.
We can march, we can light a candle, we can hold hands and we can pray. We have done so before for the ones we knew and the ones we didn't. Then we pull ourselves together and move on as if life has to go on as it must and death should not matter. We remain arrogantly proud of our civility and mock the savagery of others in distant societies plagued with violence and lawlessness. After all this debate has raged for years in our nation that pits rights over reason, interests over logic. Why should it be any different today?
Our faith reminds us to accept such tragedies with patience. We are allowed to grieve and express our sorrow. But we are also told to strive for justice. To be silent is to be indifferent. To be indifferent is to be insensitive, perhaps even less moral.
The argument against guns cannot be more obvious. Guns are meant to do one thing and one thing alone - to kill. They belong not in the hands of ordinary citizens but in the hands of those who fight our enemies in military engagements or those who are charged with securing the peace in our neighborhoods. Let those who wish to hunt take their guns and hunt where the animals roam, not bring their weapons to kill where humans live. This argument needs to be made again and again, by raising our voices and casting our votes. This madness must end before more lives are lost.
Sadly there is very little we can offer to comfort the family and loved ones of Mutahir Rauf. In one fleeting moment, gun violence ended his youthful life with all its hopes and dreams wiped out for ever, all its possibilities never to be realized.
May God give patience to the bereaved and guide our policy makers to see beyond their ideological blinders the vision of a more peaceful society. (The author is President, Community Builders Council, Chicago)
