While we acknowledge that not all of our citizens – our Black sisters and brothers – have enjoyed or been afforded those same rights and privileges, the arc of our nation’s history has demonstrated time and again that we are capable of righting terrible wrongs and working together to make better our imperfect Union.

This is precisely the challenge we face in our day and time given the scourge of gun violence that continues to terrorize and devastate families and whole communities with such predictable recurrence as to render us numb and seemingly helpless. Once again, extreme violence has become the desperate recourse in satisfying personal grievance, as we saw just days ago in Butler, Pennsylvania, to the horror of all right-minded individuals of every political persuasion.

Again in our community, gun violence has torn from us the promise of a cherished young life, only 3-years old, while forever scarring the life of his sister of just 7 years. What makes this latest incident even more tragic is the age of the perpetrators, mere children themselves, ages 14 and 17. “Babies killing babies,” as Mayor Byron Brown aptly characterized our latest tragedy.

With each devastating incident of gun violence we are left diminished, weaker because it seems we are powerless to stop it, less confident about our individual and collective security, less hopeful for our future, more fearful as individuals, as a community and nation.

Daily routines of our lives have acquired a gnawing sense of dread. Parents sending a child off to school suppress lingering fear of the unspeakable horror that so many other parents have experienced after doing the very same thing. The fear of sudden mayhem and madness taunts us as we simply head out for an evening at the neighborhood movie theater or a casual trip to the grocery store. Fear has denied us the enjoyment of simple, though essential, freedoms.

The recent Supreme Court decision concerning the United States vs. Rahimi, affirming the government’s long-standing right to prohibit the ability of those under domestic violence restraining orders to possess guns, offers a glimmer of hope in our quest for common sense gun regulation. Joining the government’s case in an amicus brief, the United State Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) reaffirmed our society’s responsibility to protect the innocent, and those subjected to domestic violence by reiterating its 2000 Statement: Responsibility, Rehabilitation, and Restoration: “As bishops, we support measures that control the sale and use of firearms and make them safer (especially efforts that prevent their unsupervised use by children or anyone other than the owner), and we reiterate our call for sensible regulation of handguns.”

How we got to the point that gun violence has become not just a daily occurrence in cities and towns across our country, but a hallmark of American life is a long and circuitous discussion. The fact is, it has become our nation’s despicable norm. And with each passing day of delay, inaction and resistance to meaningful gun controls, our basic human freedoms become compromised.

Hiding behind the Second Amendment which guarantees the “right of the people to keep and bear arms” (to ensure “a well regulated Militia”), is a distorted rationale for preventing reasonable efforts to end the proliferation of guns, and enacting common sense measures to keep them out of the hands of those who should never be be able to possess a firearm. Referencing the 2009 Encyclical Letter of Pope Pope Benedict XVI, Caritas in Veritate, the USCCB’s amicus brief further asserts that “The right to keep and bear arms can thus be limited in situations where possession of arms is unusually likely to harm innocent victims instead of helping, such as when the possessor has demonstrated a willingness to engage in unjustifiable violence.”

And so, as we gather for yet another funeral, mourn again the loss of a precious young life, witness yet one more family devastated because of a senseless act of gun violence, we must ask ourselves, when is enough truly enough? Why do we delay when the power to end so much tragedy and suffering is within our grasp?

Unquestionably, we hold in our hearts and pray intensely for those families who now must live in agonizing grief over the loss of their child, and also the lost futures for those children now incarcerated. Yet, our God demands something even more – that the Judeo-Christian faith we profess be demonstrated by action.

Confronted once again with our failure to end this constant threat, we would do well to recall the teaching of James 2:17, “Faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.”

We can best honor the memory of those taken from us – and the God we profess – with determined and relentless efforts to accomplish the urgent work that our human dignity demands, and our claim to be a nation of freedom requires.