The Way of the Gun

THIRTEEN YEARS ago, on Holy Thursday, 9-year-old Donte Manning was shot around the corner from my house in Washington, D.C.

He died of his injuries four weeks later, on the Feast of Paschasius Radbertus, a ninth-century Benedictine theologian who wrote on intimacy between the body of Christ crucified and the real presence in the Eucharist. Donte’s death impacted me deeply. (I wrote a book about his murder.)

Caught in the crossfire between neighborhood rivals, Donte Manning was the real body sacrificed on the altar of this imperial city where teenage boys shoot each other over $200 Air Jordans and the Pentagon exports more than 1.45 million firearms to various security forces, just in Iraq and Afghanistan. (The Pentagon lost track of more than half of them.)

As theologian Ched Myers reminds, “Against the presence of Power is pitted the power of Presence: God with us.”

Donte Manning’s murder was never solved. It remains a cold case. Mitch Credle, the investigating detective, retired from the D.C. Metropolitan Police. In October, he decided it was time to talk about his one unsolved murder. He was interviewed by local news reporter Paul Wagner.

“Every case that I have been involved in that particular neighborhood, an arrest was made without a problem,” Credle told Fox 5 News in 2006, “and [Donte Manning’s] is the only case that I have been involved in that neighborhood where an arrest has not been made yet.”

Credle grew up in the Columbia Heights neighborhood. For years he volunteered as a basketball coach at the Boys and Girls Club. He knew the neighbors. He knew the players. And, though he doesn’t remember it, he probably met Donte at the afterschool program.

Based on information Credle gathered during the investigation, he thinks he knows who pulled the trigger on that spring evening in 2005 and who that person was shooting at. “I believe we were close to making an arrest,” Credle said in October.

But the arrest never happened. Why?

Because the gun involved in Donte’s death belonged to a cop. That gun, according to an informant, was stolen from a deputy sheriff’s car by one of the men suspected of shooting Donte Manning.

While D.C.-area police recover thousands of stolen guns (the ATF reports tracing approximately 2,000 weapons found in D.C. each year), more than 350 weapons were lost or stolen from those same police over the past six years. A few were stolen while properly stored, but many were left in cars or unsecured somewhere.

I don’t know how many local police weapons were lost or stolen in 2005. But according to Credle, the weapon stolen from the deputy sheriff’s car was recovered after the murder “three blocks from where Donte Manning was shot.”

According to Credle, the gun was stolen from the deputy sheriff, then stolen again from the person who took it. These latter two came across each other outside Donte’s apartment building and shot at each other from separate corners—apparently not caring that the street between them was filled with little kids.

The guys in the shoot-out are both in prison for other things. “Based on all of the information that I gathered during the investigation, those are the two people who ... could bring some type of closure to this particular case, and one is doing 40 years-plus and the other one is doing life,” the retired detective said.

GUNS HAVE ONE purpose: to kill. The Second Amendment has one purpose: to protect white domination over African Americans, Indigenous peoples, and people of color. Gun manufacturers have one purpose: profit. Criminals, cops, and civilians have guns for one purpose: power.

For all these reasons, I’m convinced that Christians must not use or own guns. Period. We wield the power of the real Presence instead and put all fear to submission under Christ. It’s the only means to end the way of the gun.