OPINION – In a recent letter, “Prayer alone isn’t keeping anyone safe,” Stephen Robb took issue with my earlier comments about the mockery of prayer after the Minneapolis church shooting. I appreciate the opportunity to address any reasonable critique. Unfortunately, this effort suffers from several logical inconsistencies, obscuring rather than clarifying the issue.
My original point was simple: public sneers at prayer, especially when the victims were praying, reveal a cultural hostility toward faith, not a serious policy argument. I fully expect progressives to advocate gun control, and I addressed that separately as a political point. But I never claimed prayer would somehow magically stop shootings. I criticized the cruelty of ridiculing believers who turn to God in grief.
Mr. Robb cites national “mass-shooting” figures that collapse under scrutiny. His numbers come from databases that label nearly any incident with four people shot, whether domestic, criminal or gang-related, as a “mass shooting.” That yields hundreds of events but fewer than one death per case. It’s a statistical sleight of hand: an appeal to emotion amplified by equivocation, using inflated totals to dramatize a point that data don’t support. True mass-murder incidents average fewer than 40 per year, not 300.
