This is the fourth anniversary of our column.
When the four of us — two pastors, a priest and a rabbi, which sounds like the beginning of a joke but is in fact a profound friendship — first shared this page in the summer of 2022 on behalf of our coalition of faith leaders, we had a single focus: the breadth and depth of solutions to Chicago’s epidemic of gun violence. We wrote about the outreach workers who know the names and the corners. We wrote about the gun dealers whose inventory floods our streets from across state lines.
We wrote — as we had argued even before this column began — that curfews and crackdowns would not save our young people, but that jobs, mentors and investment would. We wrote about the children we bury each summer, and we refused to speak of their deaths as just passing weather rather than as the result of policy failures that got us here.
After that first summer, we found our concerns could not stop at the city limits. The forces shaping violence in Chicago — incarceration policy, poverty, hunger, hatred — are influenced by what happens in Springfield as surely as they are at City Hall. So we expanded our writing to include issues affecting the state: We championed second chances for the formerly incarcerated, and we argued that Illinois’ explosive growth in firearm possession sentences was filling prisons without making a single block safer.
And soon enough, the nation demanded our attention too. We wrote about the hunger spreading through our communities as federal safety nets frayed. We wrote about standing with our immigrant neighbors when federal forces arrived on our streets. We named white Christian nationalism for what it is — not merely a political movement but a theological heresy, a religion of empire standing in opposition to the religion of creation.
Four years is long enough to be honest about the ledger. Some of the hopes we have raised in our column have yet to come to fruition. But we have also seen what faithful persistence can do. Chief among our celebrations: the passage of Illinois’ Clean Slate Act, a major legislative victory that will automatically seal old records so that millions of our neighbors can work, rent and rebuild. It is a law, as we wrote at the time, not just about redemption but also about restoring the right to work and the freedom to live. We raised that hope in our writing. The people of Illinois, through their legislators, made it real.
Which brings us to these recent days, and to the reason our hearts are full even as our sleeves are rolled up.
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For eight years — since before this column existed — we have worked alongside survivors, outreach organizations and city leaders, across three consecutive mayoral administrations, to establish a permanent department of gun violence reduction: a single home in city government for the prevention work that has helped drive homicides to their lowest levels in six decades. On June 25, Mayor Brandon Johnson signed an executive order establishing the Office of Gun Violence Reduction, with an executive director, a five-year strategy, monthly public reporting and an advisory council drawn largely from the neighborhoods that have carried the heaviest burden.
We celebrated that signing. And yet we must say plainly: An executive order, however welcome, still keeps this lifesaving work at the level of mayoral whim. What one signature creates, another can dissolve. We have watched deputy mayors come and go; we have watched programs disrupted midstream; we have learned that communities cannot build trust with an office that might not exist next year.
That is why this month matters so much. On July 15, members of the City Council introduced an ordinance that would permanently establish this office — transforming gun violence prevention from a political priority that shifts with the wind into a civic institution that endures, protected by law and funded on a timeline that matches human lives rather than election cycles.
This department is the answer to a fundamental question: Should the city have a department that addresses and coordinates a response to gun violence that sits outside of law enforcement? We believe that answer is: Yes. This office will address the instability and high turnover that have made it difficult for the city of maintain a long-term strategy, This is not, as some have claimed, a money grab to hire more street outreach workers. This is the creation of an office with transparency and efficiency baked into its operation by ordinance. Our proposal starts at budget neutrality, so that sustainable city dollars and coordination can be part of the long-term, comprehensive, coordinated approach to creating a safe and peaceful Chicago.
Eight years of organizing and advocating are finally rounding a corner. But a corner is not a finish line. The ordinance must move through hearings, survive a hard budget season and win a majority of a council where skeptics remain — all with elections looming. We all must work to see it through: clergy and congregants, aldermen and organizers, every Chicagoan who has ever stood at a vigil and whispered: “Never again.”
If there is anything we hope to have learned from these four years of writing together, it is that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. told the truth: The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. King was echoing Theodore Parker, an abolitionist preacher who spoke those words when slavery still seemed permanent, which is a reminder that the arc has always been longer than one lifetime and that it has never bent on its own.
It bends because hands like ours direct it toward justice.
Bend that arc with us to establish the Department of Gun Violence Reduction.Insist that what eight years of labor have begun, this City Council completes.
Bend that arc with us — let us hasten the arrival of a more just world.
Chicago faith leaders Rabbi Seth Limmer, the Rev. Otis Moss III, the Rev. Ciera Bates-Chamberlain and the Rev. Michael Pfleger joined the Tribune’s opinion section in summer 2022 for a series of columns on potential solutions to Chicago’s chronic gun violence problem. The column continues on an occasional basis.
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