Houston, We Have a Gun Problem
— and It Reaches Past the Moon
Why Faith May Succeed Where Politics Has Failed
A post for the ELCA Saint Paul Area Synod community
Let’s begin with arithmetic.
If every one of America’s estimated 520 million civilian-owned firearms were held at arm’s length — four feet of steel extended into the air — and lined end to end across the void of space, that chain would travel 393,939 miles.
The Moon is 238,855 miles away.
The guns pass it. By 155,084 miles. One and two-thirds trips to the Moon — built not from rocket fuel but from handguns, shotguns, AR-15s, and ghost guns, purchased legally, fearfully, defiantly, one at a time, across more than a century of American life.
Every day in Minnesota, three people are shot and at least one dies. Every year, guns kill more Minnesotans than either opioids or car accidents. Gun deaths have steadily increased over the past decade, with 525 Minnesotans dying from firearm violence in 2023 alone — one person every seventeen hours.
The math is accurate. The grief is real.
So why, after decades of organizing, legislating, marching, and mourning, does the chain keep growing?
The Organizations Are Real. The Work Is Heroic. The Problem Persists.
Minnesota is not without advocates. The organizations working to address gun violence in our state are serious, dedicated, and doing genuinely important work. Here is who is in the field:
Protect Minnesota — The only state-based gun violence prevention organization in Minnesota, working through research, education, movement building, and advocacy with a presence in communities across the state.
Moms Demand Action (Minnesota Chapter) — Part of Everytown for Gun Safety’s grassroots network. They helped elect a gun sense majority in the Minnesota statehouse in 2022, and stood with Governor Walz when he signed a historic gun safety package into law in May 2023.
Everytown for Gun Safety — The largest gun violence prevention organization in America, advocating for gun safety measures in state legislatures across all 50 states. Gun violence costs Minnesota $6.6 billion every year.
Students Demand Action (Minnesota) — Organizes young people in schools and campuses across the state, working alongside Moms Demand Action on legislative campaigns.
GIFFORDS — The national organization founded by former Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, an active coalition partner with Protect Minnesota, Moms Demand Action, and the University of Minnesota Law School Gun Violence Prevention Clinic.
University of Minnesota Law School Gun Violence Prevention Clinic — Provides legal research, policy analysis, and direct support for legislative initiatives.
Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions — Released a comprehensive Minnesota policy roadmap in October 2025, offering data-backed recommendations divided into six categories for state legislators.
NAMI Minnesota — The National Alliance on Mental Illness has testified before the Minnesota Senate Gun Violence Prevention Working Group, addressing the intersection of mental health and firearm access.
Minnesota Medical Association — Has submitted formal advocacy letters to the legislature, framing gun violence as the public health crisis it is.
Minnesota Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics — Advocates for child safety through legislative channels and professional medical testimony.
Minnesota PTA — Has advocated for school safety measures through the legislature’s Senate Gun Violence Prevention Working Group.
At the municipal level, Saint Paul became the first city in a coalition of 17 Minnesota cities to formally adopt a gun violence prevention ordinance banning assault-style weapons and high-capacity magazines — though it cannot take effect until state preemption laws are lifted.
Even the Governor has acted. In December 2025, Governor Walz issued two executive orders — the first ever by a Minnesota governor focused on gun violence prevention — after Republican legislative leadership refused to hold a vote on gun safety measures supported by seven in ten Minnesotans.
So Why Hasn’t It Worked?
All of this organizing. All of this data. All of this legislation, advocacy, testimony, marching, and mourning.
And yet: Minnesota has still not established an Office of Gun Violence Prevention. In January 2025, the Trump Administration eliminated the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention entirely.
The political machinery grinds. It produces real, incremental gains — background check expansions, red flag laws, safe storage requirements. These matter. People are alive today because of them.
But the chain still reaches past the Moon.
Here is the honest diagnosis: politics operates in the language of policy. And policy, by its nature, is transactional, reversible, and perpetually contested. A law passed in one session can be gutted in the next. An executive order can be rescinded by the next executive.
Policy addresses the symptom. It does not address the wound.
What SPAS ENGAGE Does That No One Else Does
Into this landscape steps the Saint Paul Area Synod of the ELCA — and specifically, ENGAGE: Lutherans for Gun Violence Prevention.
ENGAGE is a Saint Paul Area Synod Public Witness Committee on gun violence prevention. Its mission is to meditate on, educate about, and advocate for gun violence prevention in the non-violent Spirit of Jesus.
In 2015, Bishop Patricia Lull requested the formation of a working group to address gun violence in congregations and communities. Today ENGAGE hosts weekly “Connecting the Dots” sessions every Wednesday at 11 a.m., presenting timely and relevant gun violence prevention issues.
The ELCA has a history of church-wide resolutions going back to 1989 urging synods and congregations to address gun violence. In 2013, the Church-wide Assembly voted 834 to 41 to encourage members to advocate for universal background checks, prevention of gun trafficking, and reporting of lost or stolen firearms.
But ENGAGE does something that Moms Demand Action cannot do. Something Everytown cannot do. Something Johns Hopkins cannot do.
ENGAGE prays. Not as a preamble to the real work. As the work itself.
ENGAGE frames gun violence not merely as a public health crisis or a policy failure, but as a spiritual crisis — a rupture in the fabric of human community that requires a spiritual response. It brings the full weight of Lutheran theological tradition — the theology of the cross, the theology of vocation, the insistence that faith without works is dead — to bear on a problem that has resisted every purely secular remedy.
This is not a small distinction. It is, arguably, the entire distinction.
Why Theology May Succeed Where Politics Has Failed
The history of the great American moral movements is instructive here.
Abolition was not won by policy analysts. It was won by preachers — by Quakers and Methodists and Black Baptist congregations who named slavery as sin and refused to let the nation forget it.
The Civil Rights Movement was not primarily a political operation. It was a theological one, rooted in the Black church, animated by the conviction that every human being bears the image of God and that a society which denies that is not merely unjust — it is in rebellion against the Creator.
In both cases, political change followed moral transformation. The law caught up to the conscience that the church had already formed.
Gun violence in America is not, at its root, a policy problem. It is a problem of the human heart — of fear, isolation, idolatry of power, and the deformation of community. These are theological categories. They require theological medicine.
Legislation can make guns harder to obtain. Only a change of heart can make people unwilling to use them.
This is why SPAS ENGAGE is not just another organization in the coalition, not just another voice at the legislative testimony table. It is — or can be — the wellspring from which the moral energy of the entire movement flows.
A Word About the Moment
We are not in a favorable political season. The federal gun violence prevention infrastructure has been dismantled. Legislative momentum has stalled. The courts have expanded gun rights in ways that constrain legislative options.
In this environment, the temptation is despair. The temptation is to conclude that nothing works, that nothing will change, that the chain will keep extending past the Moon indefinitely.
The Lutheran tradition has a word for this temptation: it is called Anfechtung — the assault of doubt and despair against faith. And Luther’s answer was not optimism. It was not a five-point political strategy. It was the insistence that God works precisely in the places that look like defeat — in the cross, in the tomb, in the moments when every secular measure has been exhausted.
The organizations of Minnesota’s gun violence prevention movement are brave, essential, and doing God’s work whether they name it that way or not. But they cannot do what SPAS ENGAGE can do.
They cannot preach resurrection in the middle of a morgue.
What We Are Called To Do
The Moon is 238,855 miles away.
Our guns go farther.
This is not a metaphor. This is arithmetic. And arithmetic eventually demands a response that goes deeper than legislation — a response that asks not just what laws shall we pass but what kind of people are we becoming, and what does our God require of us?
ENGAGE was formed to ask that question, in community, in prayer, with the full weight of a tradition that has been asking it since Luther nailed his theses to the door.
We are not the only organization in this fight. But we may be the only one that understands why the fight is, at its core, a theological one.
The math is accurate. The grief is real. The rest is ours to carry forward — together, in the non-violent Spirit of Jesus Christ.
ENGAGE: Lutherans for Gun Violence Prevention is a Public Witness Committee of the Saint Paul Area Synod, ELCA. To learn more or join the weekly Wednesday “Connecting the Dots” conversation, contact Rev. Dr. Ron Letnes at letnesron@gmail.com. Visit engageelca.org.
Post by Jon Nils Fogelberg, civic writer and ELCA communicant. Sources: ATF National Firearms Commerce and Trafficking Assessment (January 2025); Small Arms Survey 2025; Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions; Protect Minnesota; Everytown for Gun Safety; engageelca.org.