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.

Share or Bookmark

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/mar/1/dcs-crime-solution-be-a-victim/

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.

Share or Bookmark

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.

What’s y’all’s take on it?

Share or Bookmark