As we prepare for Holy Week, news coverage of recent mass shootings, describing the Atlanta and Boulder shootings as evidence of “return to normal” has left me sick to my stomach. No one wants this “normal.”

This week’s mission alert from the PC(USA) Office for Public Witness decries gun violence. We must continue to support policies, legislation, and corporate actions that limit accessibility to automatic weapons and other firearms. We must also remember that policies and legislation do not hold all the answers to the problems of this “normal.”

It didn’t take long for me to recall the Aroma Therapy Spa location on Piedmont Avenue, two blocks from the church I served in seminary, a few miles from the hospital where I was born, across from a bank where I worked as a summer teller. Tuesday’s shooter chose a southern point in a corridor of immigrant neighborhoods in northeast Atlanta, where the confluence of three interstates also happens to provide popular, easy access to strip clubs for well-heeled businessmen, visiting athletes, and local commuters.

While the perpetrator of this crime claims sex addiction, given his targeted location and identities of his victims, we cannot deny the realities of race, gender, ethnicity and class. As we grieve the victims and share outrage at the horror of this killing, we at Western stand, grieve, and pray with all whose shared identity means this violence resonates with painful personal experience.