This past weekend, we took a stand and prayed.
Fifty of us – clergy and lay leaders from 20 different Maine faith communities, including two of us from Lewiston – stood and we offered our “thoughts and prayers” for victims of gun violence. But in a departure from what some have come to consider the empty and trite version of this activity, we sought to activate our prayer.
We stood at the front entrance to Cabela’s in Scarborough, owned by parent company Bass Pro Shops. We were trespassing on private property, prepared to risk arrest, although the police were never called. In front of the iconic moose statue and a sign that announced “free photos with Santa,” we shared our grief. Grief for the loss of strangers we never met, and for dear ones we loved intimately, all claimed by gun violence. We prayed for connection with the hearts of Mainers around us, and for a change of hearts.
We prayed for change because as we stood and prayed, inside this very store, Cabela’s was selling – and some of our fellow Mainers were purchasing – assault rifles. These are machines that are useless for hunting – unless the animal being hunted is a human being. Also on offer were high-capacity magazine clips, designed to unleash a hail of 50 or 100 bullets without the need to reload. And those bullets? Many are intricately adapted to maximize damage to flesh and organs. Human flesh and organs.
Unlike L.L.Bean, which has never sold these weapons, and Dick’s Sporting Goods, which stopped selling them altogether in 2018 in the wake of the Parkland massacre, Cabela’s and Bass Pro Shops continue to sell these weapons of human misery to anyone who is 18 or older and can pass a simple background check.
Among the scores of guns offered by Bass Pro Shops is the Ruger SFAR AR-10. The company website describes this particular item in glowing terms, with a “large-caliber autoloader” and a “mid-length, direct gas impingement system” to keep it “running consistently” so that the “recoil gets even more manageable.” Such high praise turns chilling when one comes to realize that the SFAR was the model used by Robert Card to slaughter 18 people and severely wound others in Lewiston on the night of Oct. 25.
At one point in our gathering, we prayed for connection with the heart of Johnny Morris, the founder and CEO of Bass Pro Shops.
As we learn from the company website, Mr. Morris built his company from scratch, getting his start in 1972 by selling fishing tackle from the back of his father’s store. He is an avid conservationist and appears to have an abiding passion for the outdoors. Mr. Morris has clearly given some consideration to how the weapons for sale in his stores have contributed to our nationwide epidemic of gun violence. There are reports of him meeting with the families of Sandy Hook parents back in 2018 and having a “constructive” dialogue. We trust that Mr. Morris has a big heart. We pray for Mr. Morris and his family to search their hearts, to reflect on their role as purveyors of these weapons. We offer this prayer in the wake of Lewiston and so many other mass shootings and, dare we say it, before the next tragedy.
We will be actively advocating for Maine to join the 10 other states that already have banned assault weapons. But even before the Legislature launches its session in January, we beseech Mr. Morris and his family to give an early Christmas gift to all Mainers – and all Americans – by ceasing the sale of these weapons of war, and by raising the age for all firearms sales from 18 to 21. In doing so, they will be saving countless lives, from teenage suicides that do not occur to mass shooting headlines that will never be written. Let this be your legacy, Mr. Morris.
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