Fortunately, before mayhem could ensue, an armed parishioner took him at gunpoint. This was not what the violent intruder had come for; he surrendered, and a mass murder was averted.
These things don’t always have such happy endings. For a number of reasons, houses of worship are disproportionately likely to be the targets of mass murderers. Across the spectrum of the faiths, clergy and church management have taken to heart the words attributed to Jesus Christ: “If thou hast not a sword, sell thy cloak and buy one.” (Luke 22:36)
Yeah, it’s Sunday. Some of you are religious, some are not. I once gave that quote to a friend who happens to be an atheist, who replied with a puzzled look, “Whose screen name is Luke twenty-two thirty-six? What forums does he post on?” Well, if you don’t read the Bible, you’ll find the same principle in Ethics 101. There is such a thing as a responsibility to protect the innocent from evil. This is why so many houses of worship now provide discreet armed security for their members in attendance.
One such was Jeanne Assam, an ex-cop working volunteer security at the New Life Church in Colorado Springs, Colorado on December 9, 2007. In the wee hours of that morning, a crazed young man had shot multiple people at an affiliated church in a suburb of Denver. The same monster showed up at the Colorado Springs facility with an AR15, a couple of handguns, and a backpack with more than a thousand rounds of ammunition. He opened fire in the parking lot, killing two and wounding two more. Entering the church, he found himself facing Ms. Assam…and his own mortality.
Disregarding her own safety, Jeanne Assam moved in on the heavily armed gunman, firing her Beretta 92 FS with deadly accuracy, and cut him down in a hail of 9mm bullets. Some say that at the last moment he put a fatal bullet into himself, but that wouldn’t change the fact that he died only after Ms. Assam disabled him with multiple solid hits, and stopped a rampage that could have claimed dozens of lives.
We are a nation that seems driven to tear down its heroes, and Jeanne Assam became a target of the mainstream media and other forces thereafter. You can read her compelling story in her own words. Her book “God, the Gunman, and Me” is available for $14.99 plus $5.00 postage from http://www.jeanneassam.com/jeannes-book .
From the brave man in Spartanburg to the courageous lady in Colorado Springs, we have logical testament to the fact that if you’re going to refer to those folks in the pews as “the flock,” and their spiritual advisor as “the shepherd,” it makes a lot of sense to have some sheepdogs around, with good sharp fangs.
The deputy mayor says, with the camera recording, that it’s better to allow yourself to be injured than to fight back. If you start shooting, he says, you might hit an innocent bystander.
It’s not even on the deputy mayor’s radar screen that the great danger to innocent bystanders comes from armed robbers…who, if they have been neutralized by the gunfire of law-abiding armed citizens, can no longer endanger bystanders OR intended victims.
If this office-holder is a spokesman for modern urban ethics, it is no wonder why so many American city-dwellers look longingly at the Backwoods Home lifestyle and values.
You’re a New York City cop, driving home with your spouse and kids from a pleasant family gathering watching a game on TV… a pedestrian runs into your car, you stop to help, and discover the pedestrian was being chased by a guy in a mask with a gun. That guy points the gun at you…and you draw your off-duty 9mm and shoot him. He runs away, wounded.
No, it’s not a real case, though it certainly could have been. It’s an episode from the highly regarded TV series Blue Bloods. You can stream it from CBS’s website.
The whole show, well worth watching, is considerably more complicated than that. Ongoing story lines deeply touch what happened on 9/11/2001, and the survivor guilt of those who lived when their brothers next to them died. But, for purposes of this blog entry, consider the following clip. The cop’s son – present at the off-duty shooting, in the line of fire of a couple of bullets fired by the masked man – asks the police parent about guns. See it here
It’s not about genders. It’s a little bit about cops and their loved ones: in the whole show, Tom Selleck classically says that the only thing tougher than being a cop is being married to one. I know female officers, and female armed citizens, who’ve been unable to get the reality across to the men in their lives.
I wish the screenwriters had done a little bit better job of getting the basic safety rules in order, but on the whole, what’s said by the cop in the above clip strikes me as pretty much gospel truth.
On January 8, the Brady Bunch suggested a lighting of a candle as a protest to gun violence.
Awww…how sweet.
The 8th, of course, was the one year anniversary of the grotesque mass murder in Tucson, Arizona by Jared Lee Loughner. His most famous victim, left brain-damaged for life, was Arizona Congressman Gabby Giffords. She was clearly his intended target.
The gun-banners made much of the fact that Representative Giffords was shot with a Glock 19 9mm pistol. They neglected to mention that Gabby Giffords had, prior to the shooting, proudly stated that she owned and had a license to carry a Glock 19 of her own. The mass-murderer was put to the ground and captured by courageous citizens, including ARMED citizen Joe Zamudio, who was carrying a pistol of his own at the time, a Ruger P95 9mm.
But lighting a candle will prevent the Jared Loughners of the world from carrying out their monstrous deeds? Good Lord…it’s like the candlelight vigils from the Take Back the Night Movement.
It’s nice to know that people care. Hell, I care. I’ve spent an adult lifetime learning how to ward off monsters such as Loughner, and sharing that knowledge with others.
Some pro-gun bloggers got together and did their own January 8 counterpoint to the Brady thing. I wish I had contributed more to that: all I did was take a picture of some strong women with candles and nine millimeters at a Glock match in Clearwater, Florida on the 8th. (Great match, by the way, and kudos to the Wyoming Antelope Club in Clearwater for putting it on.)
The decades have taught me that women won’t take back the night by marching with candles. They’ll take it back when those who prey on them learn – some the hard and final way – that their intended victims can be more dangerous to them, than they are to their intended victims.
Those you see below have it right.
If some monster tries to rape or murder a woman I care about, I don’t want him to see the flickering light of a candle.
I want him to see a muzzle flash, from the front.
I hate to paraphrase Al Capone, but a candle and a Glock will earn women more safety than just a candle. From left: Gail, Kitty, and Lisa Marie of the Alabama Holster Company’s all-girl pistol team, January 8, at Glock match in Clearwater, FL.
Two recent high profile shootings show us that sometimes, in the aftermath, things go as they should, though in only one of those actual shootings did we have what anyone could call a happy ending.
Both occurred over the holidays. In Washington state, an Iraq war vet diagnosed with post traumatic stress syndrome that would normally engender our sympathy, snapped and shot four people. He fled to the boondocks, where he encountered a park ranger, a 32 year old mother of two. He shot her to death. The cop-killer was later found dead; it is unclear at this time whether he swallowed poison or froze to death out in the elements, or drowned. (According to one report, he was found face down in a creek. I haven’t seen the autopsy or toxicology screen yet.)
In Oklahoma, a man had been stalking an 18-year old mother of a baby boy. Her husband had died of cancer on Christmas day, and some of the German Shepherds she and he raised had mysteriously died – perhaps poisoned by the stalker, some theorize now. As if she had not suffered enough, the stalker and a hulking friend showed up at her door New Year’s Eve and tried to kick their way in. The young woman armed herself, pushed a sofa against the door, put a bottle in her infant son’s mouth and called 9-1-1. The calm dispatcher advised her to do what she had to do if he made it through the door before the cops arrived.
He did, and she did. She fired a single shotgun blast as the intruder burst through the door with a foot-long hunting knife, plopping him dead on the barricading sofa. His accomplice fled, but was soon in custody. I’m told the local prosecutor has already ruled it a justifiable homicide…and the first to establish a support fund for the young mother was the local PD, the Blanchard, Oklahoma Police Department. Info is here: http://blog.newsok.com/breakingnews/2012/01/04/fund-set-up-for-blanchard-woman-who-shot-killed-intruder/. Thanks to the retired NYPD officer and gunfight survivor who frequents this blog and sends it along.
Learning points?
n In each case, the death weapon was a 12-gauge shotgun. Some in the anti-gun camp have already blamed the law that allows ordinary, law-abiding citizens to be armed in parks like the one where the ranger was killed, for the depredations of a madman who had already violated every law from the Sixth Commandment on down before he reached the park. I try not to use words like “idiocy” when speaking of the other side, but in this case it fits. The firearm is a tool, which carries out the will of the owner. Evil in the first case, good in the second. Yes, it IS that simple.
n The law-abiding armed citizen and the police are natural allies. We see that clearly here, when a gun owners’ civil rights group is the first to step up with a fund for the family of the murdered park ranger…and when the local police are the first to step up to help an embattled young mom who had to kill in self-defense.
I’ll be sending out two donations tomorrow. I hope all who can, will join me. A lawyer friend of mine, whose specialty is appeals for citizens wrongly convicted after self-defense shootings, suggests that flowers for the Oklahoma dispatcher and prosecutor might also be in order…
Have questions regarding this Blog? Please email us. Comments may appear online in "Feedback" or in the "Letters" section of Backwoods Home Magazine. We read every email you send us, but due to the sheer volume of mail we receive, we can't respond to each one.
