If prayer worked, nobody would need guns. Kind of sounds like a silly thing to say, doesn't it? Maybe it is, but I'm not so sure. If there really was a god out there that was genuinely interested in human welfare and was willing to be influenced by human requests, it would seem like there would be little need for any sort of weapons. One might still want guns for things like target shooting or hunting, but it is difficult to imagine that there would be a need for weapons of any kind in order to protect oneself. The god would take care of that.
The notion that we'd have fewer school shootings if there was more prayer is absurd for many reasons. Perhaps the most obvious is that nobody is currently being prevented from praying as much as they'd like to. Unless we are expected to believe that some sort of god is counting the number of prayers and only intervenes when they exceed some arbitrary threshold, it makes little sense to think that an individual's prayer would be ignored. And besides, I've heard from many Christians over the years that their prayers are always answered.
If prayer worked, the world would be a very different place than the one we inhabit. We'd all see plenty of evidence of divine intervention, and "miracles" would be commonplace. It is becoming increasingly difficult for anyone to believe that prayer works for anything except self-soothing, and I suspect that many Christians realize this. Unless they are willing to limit themselves to praying for things they already know are going to happen, it is clear that prayer does not result in any sort of godly intervention. Prayer does not stop bullets. If we ever decide we'd like to do something about the problem of gun violence in the United States, it is going to take more than "thoughts and prayers."
