Three staff members at Covenant — the head of school, Katherine Koonce; custodian Mike Hill; and substitute teacher Cynthia Peak — were killed during the shooting while protecting children. Irizarry-Meléndez said she honored their actions and those of the police officers who confronted the shooter. But she also felt a sense of guilt that our culture is asking the impossible of school leaders.
“Teachers and adults that work in schools are not there to be bulletproof vests,” she said. “It feels wrong to me that if my child was to survive a horrific event like this, it will be because a teacher took a bullet.”
She said her faith requires her to do more to prevent that from happening.
Lawyer and author David French, who lives in Franklin, a suburb of Nashville, attended a prayer service for victims of the shooting at Christ Presbyterian church, which belongs to the Presbyterian Church in America, the same denomination as Covenant.
French, who spent nearly two decades in the PCA, said he had been to Covenant before and knew people at the church.
Fitzgerald Moore leads a group in prayer at a memorial at the entrance to The Covenant School on March 29, 2023, in Nashville, Tennessee. (AP Photo/Wade Payne)
Writing about the service for The New York Times, French said he prayed for the families of those who had been killed in the shooting and that lawmakers would find wisdom and “moral courage to enact policies that can make a difference.”
French, a native Southerner, said he is a gun owner mostly because he and his family have been threatened in the past. He is skeptical that broad gun control measures will work — but does support so-called red flag laws, which would bar people who are in crisis or deemed a danger from buying or having guns. French pointed to a Florida red flag law, passed in the wake of a mass shooting, that has been highly effective.
But he fears that even passing that kind of law will be difficult in Tennessee — where the GOP has a supermajority and any Republican lawmaker who supports gun regulation would likely lose their seat in a primary.
French told Religion News Service he is concerned guns have become a fetish in the South, especially among his fellow Christians and among the state’s politicians. He pointed to the case of U.S. Rep. Andy Ogles from Tennessee, who sent out Christmas cards with family standing in front of a decorated tree, holding rifles.
“It’s almost mandatory for a Republican candidate to pose with an AR-15,” French said.
French also worries about the state of America’s soul — and the incongruity in how Americans seem to love both God and violence. Both set the country apart from other industrialized nations.
“There’s a real sickness in our society,” he said.
The Rev. Mike Glenn. Photo courtesy of Brentwood Baptist Church
Lee Camp, professor of religion at Lipscomb University in Nashville and host of the “No Small Endeavor” podcast, agrees guns have become something of an idol for conservative Christians. He sees it as part of a larger idea in American history that justifies violence in God’s name.
“This presumption of righteous violence in service to the kingdom of God is a very old conceit,” he said. “And it has done immense damage.”
The Rev. Mike Glenn, pastor of Brentwood Baptist Church, one of the largest congregations in the area, said that in Nashville, there’s often a veneer of Jesus painted over everything.
But that veneer of Jesus doesn’t change people on the inside or give them the moral and spiritual foundation to deal with crises or tragedies or hard situations.
