I won’t pretend to be more religious than the next person, nor am I afraid to call myself a Christian. Like a lot of Americans, I have a complicated relationship with my faith. But that shouldn’t lessen our sense of moral obligation in the face of what some blithely call the new normal. Nor should we fall for the siren call of more guns, the unproven good-guy-with-a-gun myth, something many of my fellow Texans have indulged in over the past few days. Instead, we have a duty to confront these machines and the profiteering behind them...

I won’t pretend to know the mind of God, so all I can offer is a simple guess at what he would say: Stop the killing. Of course killing will never end, completely; we are imperfect creatures of free will, prone to sin — the absence of good — as well as beauty. But that is categorically different from allowing the proliferation of machines solely designed to kill large numbers of people quickly, machines that bear no more semblance to a rifle than a nuclear weapon does to a firework. And the sin of omission — doing nothing — is nearly as bad as the murder itself.