Dear President Obama, Vice President Biden, House Speaker Boehner, members of Congress,
My name is Jennifer Kiefer. I am an ordained minister in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), I am also a wife, a mother, a gun owner, and a very concerned citizen.
When I was 15, our world was rocked when Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold opened fire in Columbine High School. Just a few days later, I sat with the rest of the student body at Grosse Pointe North High School on the bleachers of the football field after someone had called in a bomb threat to my school. Just a year and a half ago, I stood in a Dunkin Donuts in Lawrence, KS, watching children being led out of Sandy Hook Elementary school wondering what in that world I was doing bringing my unborn child into a world that is so apathetic to violence that not even elementary school children are safe. The worldview that I and my generation possess, and that of the generations that have come after us, is one in which there is a very distinct reality that we will go to school, or work, or a house of worship, and never come home. Because we live with this worldview, because we live in a time when there is such apathy whenever an act of domestic terrorism takes place, those who died at Columbine, Sandy Hook, and all other shooting in this country have died in vain. This shouldn't be.
As leaders of this country, you have a difficult task. The task of upholding the Constitution of this great country. You must do this in the face of lobbyists who believe that what they are selling is the most vital to your re-election to office. A difficult task indeed.
As an ordained member of the clergy, I believe that your first task as a governing body of this nation is to protect the unalienable right to life of all this countries citizens, not their gun rights.
The preamble of the Constitution states the following:
"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."
We are at a juncture in which domestic tranquility, common defense, and general welfare are no longer being promoted with the current gun laws and mental health resources present in this country.
Today, June 10, 2014, is the date of the 4th mass shooting in this nation since the Friday of Memorial Day weekend.
Mr. President, you made a promise on December 19, 2012, to do everything in your power to prevent an event from Sandy Hook from happening again. From my vantage point as an everyday citizen, I've only seen the gun laws become more lax.
In Isaiah, the prophet speaks of a time in which swords will be turned into plowshares, spears into pruning hooks. In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus Christ tells his disciples that those who live by the sword shall die by the sword. We have become a nation that is living and dying by the sword, but in our case we are living and dying by the gun.
Now is the time, now is the time to make moves that will make this country and, in particular, the children of this country, a safer place. I do not want my daughter to grow up with the knowledge that she could go to school one day and not come home, or that she may come home but she may have to watch her best friend be killed.
How many more innocent people have to die before you stand up to the gun lobbyist and 1) change gun laws and 2) reform the mental health care system in this nation?
You may lose donors, you may not win re-elections, but you will be able to sleep at night knowing that your children, your grandchildren, and children all over this nation are safer. And for that you will have the thanks of grateful parents around the world.
In God's Peace,
Jennifer L. Kiefer
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