Many places responded to the Sandy Hook school shootings by arming up the schools. Now after the Charleston church shooting, we’re going to pack heat in the pews? Our gun craziness goes a little crazier.
It’s often said following each mass shooting that America will numbly do nothing about its guns and violence problem. But that isn’t quite true. We do respond.
What we do is we arm up even more.
By now maybe it shouldn’t be surprising — but still, it was — that the massacre at the Charleston church Wednesday night touched off a call not for fewer guns in our society, but for more. And that you should bring your firearm with you right into church.
“Arm Our Churches” reads the emailed statement from a gun-rights group called the Second Amendment Organization (or 2AO.) It called Friday for its 160,000 members to bring guns to church and help provide comprehensive gun training for church communities.
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“This isn’t a time for churches and Americans to give up their guns and hope that nothing will happen,” said the statement. “This is a time to exercise our 2nd Amendment right to protect ourselves.”
The contact who is listed as heading the Washington state chapter of this group in Bremerton wrote on Facebook that “This is not the first shooting to take place at a church. I am always concealed-carrying when at church. I’ve heard there is an unofficial security detail of armed members as well.”
Later he posted: “When a madman starts killing innocent people, you can: a) run b) hide c) pray d) return fire. Which of those do YOU choose? I choose pray & return fire, because I’m always armed.”
It would be a mistake to dismiss this as just some fringe belief. Even a presidential candidate — admittedly not a high bar these days, but this one used to be a governor — said packing heat in the pews was a perfectly sane response to the massacre.
“It sounds crass, but frankly the best way to stop a bad person with a gun is to have a good person with a weapon that is equal or superior,” said GOP candidate Mike Huckabee. “The one thing that would have at least ameliorated the horrible situation in Charleston would have been if somebody in that prayer meeting had a conceal carry or (if) there had been … somebody with the legal authority to carry a firearm that could have stopped the shooter.”
And in the years since the 2012 massacre of 20 kids at Sandy Hook Elementary in Connecticut, more than two dozen states passed laws allowing teachers or school administrators to carry guns in the schools. Two months ago, a school district near the Tri-Cities, the Kiona-Benton district, started a program in which principals or other officials can carry holstered .380 or 9 mm pistols throughout the school day.
This idea that more guns is the answer is highly debatable. A number of studies have found that more guns usually means more gun crime and gun accidents. And also that armed citizens rarely stop a gunman (though it does happen).
I don’t know when our gun obsession might wane, if ever, to allow for common-sense restrictions such as licensing and stricter ownership rules that also still allow people to hunt and sport-shoot. But this moment — when we’re seriously debating arming the nation’s houses of worship — is yet another sign we’ve gone completely gun bonkers.
I was talking the other day to Jeffrey Lee Barker, the pastor of tiny Columbia Lakewood Church in South Seattle. He is black, and, of course, is worried after Charleston. But he said he’s not even going to accept the city’s offer of increased police protection at his church.
“You have to have faith in the face of fear,” Barker said. “That’s the exact title of my sermon this Sunday! We won’t have a police officer standing sentry for us.”
What if some parishioners want to bring their own guns?
“You know what I would say? You can quote me on this. It’ll be a conversion of the heart that saves humanity. Not a concealed-carry permit.”
Amen to that.