While law enforcement agencies joined a manhunt for a gunman who shot five people inside a midtown Atlanta hospital, Georgia Senator Raphael Warnock was speaking on the floor of the US Senate.
His two children, meanwhile, were locked down in their Atlanta-area schools.
“They’re there, I’m here, hoping and praying they’re safe,” he said in remarks from the Senate on 3 May. “But the truth is none of us are safe … Thoughts and prayers aren’t enough.”
The gunman, identified by police as 24-year-old Deion Patterson, allegedly killed a 39-year-old woman inside a medical centre in a business-dense area of midtown Atlanta shortly after noon on Wednesday. Four other women – ages 25, 39, 56 and 71 – were injured. The suspect remains at largea and is considered “armed and dangerous,” according to the Atlanta Police Department.
Senator Warnock – a reverend at Ebenezer Baptist Church, where Rev Martin Luther King Jr preached up until his murder – urged members of Congress to take action on gun reform, after failed attempts to renew a federal ban on assault weapons and what he characterised is a complacency among lawmakers in the face of an epidemic of gun violence. He warned it was “only a matter of time” similar attacks affect them personally.
“Thoughts and prayers are not enough. In fact, it is a contradiction to say you are thinking and praying and then do nothing,” he said. “It is to make a mockery of prayer. It is to trivialize faith.”
He delivered similarly urgent remarks in March 2021, after a gunman killed eight people during a shooting spree that targeted three Atlanta-area spas and massage parlors.
“Here I am standing again, this time with a tragedy having occurred in midtown Atlanta, right in my own backyard,” he said on Wednesday.
The senator said he returned to the floor with a “deep sense of anger about what is happening in our country in the area of gun violence and death,” with 190 mass shootings in the US within the first five months of 2023, according to the Gun Violence Archive. There have only been 123 days this year.
“We’re not safe in our schools, we’re not safe in our workplaces, we’re not safe in movie theaters, we’re not safe in spas, we’re not safe in our places of worship – there is no sanctuary in our sanctuary … And now, today, we can add medical facilities to that list,” he added.
“The unspoken assumption is that this won’t happen to me, this won’t happen to someone I love,” the senator said. “But with a mass shooting a day, the chances are great.”
