Category: EVIL MF
As a dad I really cannot even imagine the agony of losing a child. The imagery of the aftermath of a school shooting is compelling beyond reason. In the face of such breathtaking tragedy, everybody everywhere wants to do something constructive to make it stop. However, effectively quelling such an egregious horror is a Gordian problem in the modern age.
Leftists apparently live in this surreal twilight zone. The most vocal among them believe that schools are safe spaces that can be made somehow miraculously free from violence solely by means of some fresh new legislative dictum. I want that, too. However, I also want to wake up every morning to a pile of gold nuggets sitting on my doorstep. Just because I want something a lot won’t make it so.
History’s Statistics On School Shootings
Schools have never been safe spaces. They just aren’t. There were three recorded school shootings in the 1850’s and another five in the decade that followed. The 1870s saw seven, while the 1880s had ten. Do you detect a trend?
By the 1970’s that number was up to 42. In the 1980’s there were 62. The 1990s had 99, and much of that was under an assault weapons ban. We endured a total of 298 school shooting episodes in the 20th century.
In the first decade of the new millennium, the number actually dropped to 80. However, we jumped to 252 in the 2010s. Thus far three years into the 2020’s we have had a further 133. Why is that exactly?
It’s not the gun, it’s the people
America is awash in guns, but America has always been awash in guns. Prior to 1934, there were literally no limits on the firearms you could own. Individual citizens could mount a cannon in their front yard or pick up a Thompson submachine gun at their local hardware store over the counter, cash and carry. It’s not the availability of guns. I would posit that today’s problem is the people.
The skyrocketing rates of school violence tend to follow our enlightenment as a society. Movies and video games have grown ever more violent. Murder or rape somebody in the real world and there are legal and moral consequences. However, watching murder or rape on the big screen or on your television is simply entertainment. There’s something intellectually incongruous about that.
At the same time, our society has steadily cheapened human life. Rates of abortion exploded after Roe vs Wade in 1973 (63 million in total to date), and now ten of our fifty states have legalized assisted suicide. Not debating the rightness or wrongness of those things in this venue. Simply observing a temporal correlation.
Plummeting Farther
We have also vigorously excised God from our schools and public spaces. As church attendance has plummeted, random violence and generally poor citizenship have exploded. Just as the absence of light is dark, the absence of God is godlessness. I suggest we might just be getting what we asked for.
The media would have you believe that the scourge of the school shootings perhaps began with Columbine. Back in 1999, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold traipsed into Columbine High School with a TEC-9, a Hi-Point 9mm carbine, an illegal sawed-off shotgun, 99 explosive devices, and four knives and proceeded to slaughter thirteen innocent people.
Those two freaking monsters will have all of eternity to atone for their crimes. However, Columbine wasn’t even close to when it all started. The Alpha school shooting took place in Franklin County, Pennsylvania, on 26 July 1764. Twelve years before we even became a nation, we had already had our first school massacre. Were I pressed to divine an explanation it would simply be that people are horrible.
The Setting of That First School Shooting
The American colonies in the mid to late-18th century were literally unrecognizable from what we enjoy today. The central government hailed from London, and what there was of civilized America was populated by rugged individualists who knew both hard work and discipline. As those early Europeans were busy carving a new homeland out of territory previously occupied by a wide variety of Native American tribes, conflict was inevitable. What follows was one of the most infamous events of what historians call Pontiac’s War.
The French and Indian War had wrapped up the previous year, yet few of the participants were really thrilled with the outcome. A loose confederation of Native American tribes centered around the Great Lakes banded together to drive the British out of their lands. Recall that back then most of who we might view as Americans were loyal subjects of the British crown.
The Reality
It is tough for us modern folk to appreciate just how brutal things were during this time. History has sanitized much of the horror from the narrative, but there was more than enough atrocity to go around on both sides. The Indians kicked off this particular party by attacking British forts and murdering or enslaving hundreds of colonists. Prisoners were routinely killed, and the line between civilian and soldier seemed forever blurred. Along the way, both sides developed a white-hot hatred of the other. As has been the case since the very dawn of human history, humanity fractionated by race and each side slaughtered the other wholesale.
Being captured by the natives was all but unthinkable. Their capacity for torture was limited solely by the technology of the day. During one engagement while Fort Pitt was besieged by Native American warriors, British officers tried to infect the Indians with smallpox by means of contaminated blankets. Such biological warfare would be condemned in the strongest terms by most of the planet today. Back then it was just part of doing business.
The end result was a bloodbath. This raging venom drove those involved to some terribly dark places. One of those dark places was a schoolhouse in what is Newcastle, Pennsylvania, today.
The Massacre
The carnage began the day before when four Delaware Indian braves encountered a pregnant white woman named Susan King Cunningham out walking alone. They clubbed her to death and then cut the fetus from her womb. The Indians later passed by the occupied home of a widow woman who had her windows boarded up against the weather. Presuming the house to be vacant they did not investigate. On 26 July 1764, these four braves made their way to the small wooden schoolhouse that serviced the area.
Inside was schoolmaster Enoch Brown and eleven students. School accommodated all ages back then, so the accumulated kids were of sundry sizes. Brown could tell immediately what the Indians intended to do.
Brown pleaded with the Indians, two of whom were apparently fairly old, to take his life but spare the children. In response, the warriors shot him and took his scalp. They then clubbed and scalped the rest of the children in attendance.
Time has muddled the details somewhat. I found two major narratives. The most common had ten of eleven children perishing in the attack. The eleventh, a young man named Archie McCullough, apparently lost consciousness and came to after the Indians had departed. He purportedly climbed into the fireplace until he was certain the Indians were gone and then made his way to a nearby stream to clean his wounds. He was found there by locals who investigated further and discovered the horror in the schoolhouse. Period reports claimed that the schoolmaster Mr. Brown died with a Bible in one hand trying to protect his charges.
The Rest of the Story
Brown and the ten children were buried in a communal grave. The site was not well marked, and locals feared that its location would be lost. In 1843 the area was excavated and the bodies were discovered. There were indeed ten children and one adult all buried together. There is a granite monument and a well-maintained park commemorating the site today. The names Ruth Hale, Eben Taylor, George Dustan, and Archie McCullough have survived, though the rest of the kids’ names have been lost.
Miraculously, little Archie survived the horrific attack. He recovered physically but was justifiably never quite right afterward. He purportedly married and had a son and daughter. Archie eventually settled in Kentucky, but his trail goes cold in 1810.
A man named John McCullough had been captured by the Delaware Indians and held captive in their camp since 1756. He was apparently a cousin to young Archie McCullough. The elder McCullough was present when the war party returned from their gory foray.
After he was released, McCullough wrote this of their reception, “I saw the Indians when they returned home with the scalps; some of the old Indians were very much displeased at them for killing so many children, especially Neep-paugh’-whese, or Night Walker, an old chief, or half king,—he ascribed it to cowardice, which was the greatest affront he could offer them.”
The Backlash
As you might imagine, when news got around that the Delaware Indians had murdered ten children and a schoolmaster in cold blood, the locals wanted some payback. With the approval of Governor John Penn, the Pennsylvania General Assembly reinstituted the scalp bounty that had previously been in effect during the French and Indian War. This offered $134 for the scalp of any adult male Indian above age ten and $50 for a female, payable by the government in cash.
There resulted a fairly unrestrained slaughter by enterprising capitalists who were handy with a gun and adroit at holding a grudge. The entire Conestoga Tribe was wiped out in the aftermath. The pastoral nature of Enoch Brown Park lends no overt insights into the horrors that took place there some 258 years ago.
Of all of Satan’s many diabolical inspirations, I think school shootings might be the worst. That someone might feel somehow justified in taking the lives of innocent children in response to some political insult, social inadequacy, or warped sense of justice simply astounds me.
However, make no mistake, there is nothing new under the sun. People are bad. We always have been. That’s the reason those incredible old guys penned the Second Amendment in there right behind the First.
I will say this about the current Czar. That Putin is never more dangerous or resourceful than when he is boxed in by events! That & he has been riding that Tiger for a long time. Which means that he is no dummy! Grumpy
Jeanne Assam had a gut feeling that something terrible was about to happen as she watched parishioners leave a Sunday worship service at a Colorado megachurch one snow-covered December day.
That morning, a gunman had escaped after killing two people at a missionary training center about 70 miles away. Assam had a premonition that the gunman would next target the Colorado Springs church where she volunteered as an unpaid security officer. Her feeling was so strong that she volunteered to work that day, even though she had planned to stay home.
At 12:55 pm., Assam heard someone in the church lobby say that something weird was going on in the parking lot. Someone had lit a smoke bomb. A rifle shot then rang out in the parking lot. Assam heard a panicky voice shout from the packed crowd in the church lobby, “Get down! He’s got a gun!”
“I could tell it was the crack of a high-powered rifle,” Assam said. “It [the gunfire] was just thundering out really loud, just booming. People were screaming and running.”
As people fled, Assam reached for a Beretta 92FS 9mm semi-automatic pistol tucked in her jeans and sprinted toward the gunshots. She found a hiding spot near the church church’s main hallway.
She peeked out from her hiding spot and spotted the source of the rifle shots. A man was carrying an assault rifle in his left hand and had a thick black glove on his right hand. He was wearing a bulletproof vest and a backpack, and was cursing aloud as he moved, firing his rifle.
Assam gripped her Beretta and said a silent prayer: “God be with me.”
She then stepped from her hiding spot and faced the gunman.
What happened next at the New Life Church in December 2007 would change the way many churches approached security. It would also foreshadow a disturbing trend that has only worsened in subsequent years: 11 o’clock on Sunday morning is now one of the most dangerous hours of the week in America, pastors and church security officials say.
And for religious leaders, this poses a dilemma.
The church has become a frontline for the nation’s social ills
The New Life shooting was a transformative event that convinced many churches to add armed security to their Sunday morning worship services. But the security issues facing houses of worship have worsened since then, religious leaders and security officials say.
Church leaders say they are concerned about another array of threats that have become more common in a post-pandemic America where many people are on edge. Many of the contemporary issues afflicting the country — too many people carrying concealed weapons, domestic disputes that turn violent, people struggling with mental illnesses — are now spilling into Sunday morning worship services, pastors and security officials say.
Churches have long been concerned about losing members as church attendance plummets across denominations. Now they have a new worry: protecting those members that remain.
“Everything that is happening in the culture spills over into the church,” says the Rev. Brady Boyd, senior pastor of New Life Church, the same church where Assam confronted a gunman 16 years ago. Boyd says it’s rare but not uncommon for uniformed officers to handcuff someone creating a disturbance – usually related to a domestic dispute – in his church.
“That’s actually why the church exists,” he says. “The church should be a place where we see cultural problems manifest. It shouldn’t surprise us that we’re seeing broken families show up in our building, we’re seeing mental health issues and people wrestling with post-Covid anxiety.”
A house of worship, though, is traditionally the last place someone would expect to see lethal violence. Churches are called sanctuaries for a reason. A sanctuary is defined as a place of refuge and safety “set apart from the profane, ordinary world.”
But church and security officials say houses of worship are placed in a uniquely dangerous position every Sunday morning. Congregations are traditionally unprotected and are expected to welcome “the stranger” no matter how dangerous they may look. Houses of faith are one of the few public communal spaces in the country that were created to embrace all comers, including broken or disturbed people on the fringes of society.
The New Life shooting in Colorado ushered in an era of mass shootings where even churches are no longer safe.
In 2015, a White supremacist gunman killed nine worshippers at a historic Black church in Charleston, South Carolina. Two years later, a gunman killed 26 worshippers at a church in Sutherland Springs, Texas. In 2019, a gunman killed two people inside a Texas Church of Christ—including an armed parishioner working security—before he was shot to death by another member of the church’s security team. The entire shooting incident, from the time the gunman pulled a weapon to the time he was shot, lasted six seconds.
And in May 2022 a gunman killed one person and wounded five others at a Presbyterian church in Orange County, California.
And then there are the less lethal acts of violence that don’t make the news. Those are hard to quantify, but a church security firm released a report in 2019 that estimated some 480 incidents of serious violence take place at communities of worship in the US each year. The report also said that two-thirds of the assailants had no affiliation with the congregation.
Mosques and synagogues have become targets too
These mass shootings, though, are not confined to churches. Every house of worship is now considered a soft target. In 2012 a man gunned down six people at a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin. And in 2018, a gunman killed 11 worshippers at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. A 50-year-old man faces federal hate crime charges and the death penalty at his trial, which began in Pittsburgh last week.
Rabbi Hillel Norry of the Temple Beth David in Georgia says synagogues have recently started using more advanced protective technology, such as security apps and surveillance cameras with remote live feeds.
Most houses of worship are trying to find the balance between being too open or too vigilant, Norry says.
“There’s two things that I know are wrong: being wide open and the other is being closed up and shuttered where everything is locked up and only members can get in if they have the code,” says Norry, a black belt in Tae Kwon Do who advocates for armed self-defense in synagogues where it’s permitted.
“That’s why congregations are there – to greet people who we don’t know yet,” Norry says. “If not, close your doors and get into another line of work. If you’re only there for the people who are already there, that’s not church. That’s a club.”
Mosques also face increased fears about security. A gunman who killed 51 people during an attack on two mosques in New Zealand in 2019 demonstrated the potential risks of anti-Muslim sentiment in the US.
The CEO of a company that offers security training says mosques are struggling to pay for added security while now contending with a new threat.
“One of the biggest challenges facing mosques are cyberattacks,” says Shaukat Warraich of Mosque Security. “Aggressive and hateful emails and social media posts against [Islamic] centers have become more and more abusive.”
‘Hope is not a strategy,’ one security consultant says
These threats have led more churches to not only add and train armed security but to hire security consultants like Full Armor Church. Full Armor, like similar businesses, helps churches organize, train and operate security ministries. Dwayne Harris, Full Armor’s president, says the typical house of worship has about five minutes before a first responder answers an emergency, such as an active shooter, a member suffering a medical emergency or a fire.
Some churches’ security plans amount to this: Hope nothing bad happens, he says. Harris says he launched Full Armor in 2016 to accommodate a growing number of churches searching for ways to boost their security.
“Hope is not a strategy,” says Harris, an ordained bishop who says on his website that he “actively serves in full time law enforcement” and has experience with SWAT teams, and de-escalation training programs.
“You have to have some training, walk through and talk-through plans on how you’re going to confront a crisis,” Harris says.
Full Armor and other church security firms offer similar advice: Install video surveillance, train armed security staff, create a single entrance for the church and identify members with military, law enforcement and medical training.
One of the most effective weapons a church can deploy to protect itself is something else: friendliness, Harris says.
The more people can greet visitors to the church the more chance they can access potential risks. He cites the multiple checkpoints, or “touchpoints” that greet airline travelers. Each layer of interaction boosts security.
“Hospitality is the number one tool for church safety,” Harris says. “The more touchpoints you have for individuals, the easier it is to identify risks. Having touchpoints—greeting people at the door, interacting with them, and discovering their needs, their family dynamics—you may be able to identify someone who is agitated or has a grievance.”
Some of the biggest threats are internal
Despite the specter of mass shootings, some pastors say their greatest security challenges are internal. They cite other risks, such as mentally unstable members of the congregation or pedophiles who try to join church ministries that put them into contact with children.
Others also cited the threats of domestic violence or family disputes erupting in a congregation. An enraged man whose wife and children left him often knows where they will be on a Sunday morning.
“What causes some people to go south is they lost hope,” says the Rev. Tim Russell of the Light House Church in Missouri, which has an armed security staff.
“A man may have received a phone call. Their wife said, ‘I’m leaving after 30 years,’ and they lost their job. And they think they have nothing to live for, so they just go south.”
Sometimes a pastor’s sermon also can go south if they anger the wrong person. Pastors said they are seeing more people rushing the pulpit during services out of anger or a misguided attempt to share a message with the pastor.
Boyd, of New Life church, says he was preaching a holiday sermon two years ago about the violence in the Christmas story (Israel’s ruler ordered the execution of infants after hearing about Jesus’ impending birth) when a large young man rushed the pulpit, and started yelling and cursing at him.
At first, Boyd’s security team did nothing. They thought the pulpit intruder was a dramatic prop Boyd had arranged beforehand to deploy during his sermon.
Then they rushed the stage and subdued the man.
Boyd says the emotional demands on church leaders is almost nonstop.
“We have more counseling appointments for anxiety, fear, depression suicide than ever before in the history of our church right now,” he says.
Another concern, some pastors say, is the rise of churchgoers bringing concealed weapons into the pews. Many churches in the Bible Belt are located in open-carry states where worshippers often carry guns into services, pastors say.
Boyd says New Life typically has about 20 armed security officers in its sprawling church complex, which draws an estimated 14,000 members. But his church security does not have a monopoly on Sunday morning firepower. Colorado Springs is home to both an army and air force base. Many military veterans, aware of the church’s prior mass shooting, come to the service armed and ready, he says.
“Because we live in Colorado, where the gun laws are pretty liberal—if you can make fog on a mirror here you can get a gun—I bet we have 200 or 300 other people in our services that are carrying, men and women,” Boyd says.
He adds that having more guns in church does not make him feel safer.
“We would prefer people leave their weapons in their vehicle,” he says. “If a shooting were to happen and everyone pulled their weapons, it would be difficult to determine the good guys vs. the bad guys.”
Can churches go too far with security?
Adding too much security, though, could detract from the historic mission of houses of worship, some religious leaders and security officials say.
Churches are supposed to welcome the stranger, not frisk them, they say.
Churches are directed to minister to the “least of these” on the fringes of society. In many cases, the least of these include people who not dressed well, may be off the streets, may not smell well or act in unusual ways. If churches get too preoccupied with security, they could turn away the very people Jesus gravitated to, says the Rev. Tommy Mason of the Marion County Baptist Association in Alabama.
“You don’t want to turn people away just because they look a little different or because they don’t have the best clothes on,” says Mason, who received training from Full Armor to beef up his church’s security.
“And you don’t to be a place that looks like a prison or where you have a bunch of bouncers standing at the door. You have to welcome and assist them because they’re broken, and they want to hear the Word of God.”
How Assam stopped a gunman
Some broken people, though, may not want help. They may want to inflict pain.
That was the situation Assam, the New Life church volunteer, faced on that bitterly cold Sunday morning when she confronted a gunman in the megachurch”s main hallway.
“Police officer! Drop your weapon!” she shouted at the man as she leveled her Beretta handgun at him.
The man turned to her and leveled his weapon. He said nothing to her, Assam says. She fired.
“He just goes flying backwards, like had been pushed,” Assam says.
The gunman was down but still dangerous. He sat up and start firing at her again as she closed the distance, Assam says. She fired again, hitting him in his carotid artery. His blood splattered on her face, jeans and boots, Assam says.
By this time, the gunman had killed two teenaged sisters and wounded three others.
“It was awful to have to kill somebody,” Assam says. “I had to. He gave me no choice.”
Assam was widely lauded for her actions. President George W. Bush posed for pictures with her. News reports focused on her calm and faith. Assam credits her poise to her experience as a police officer. Before moving to Colorado Springs, she spent five years as an officer with the Minneapolis Police Department.
Assam says she supports churches elevating their security but that hiring armed staff with no experience in law enforcement or the military may not be enough. A shooting range doesn’t replicate the actual experience of facing a yelling, cursing human being charging at you with a weapon, she says.
“You’re going to be shooting at a human being who is probably enraged and not in the right mindset, and you cannot hesitate, or you will die.”
And yet armed church security cannot be too eager to use violence, she says.
“Not everybody who dresses weird is going to be an active shooter,” she says. “They need to be vigilant, but they also need to be compassionate and respectful of people who don’t look or smell like they do. Churches are like hospitals for the hurting.”
Houses of worship must strike a balance between openness and safety
Church leaders want their congregations to feel safe.
But striking a balance between protecting their flock and serving the broken stranger will be one of the most difficult challenges they face in the years ahead.
If they get the balance wrong, they can unintentionally accelerate the already alarming decline in church membership. And what may seem like vigilance could seem instead like hypocrisy.
Consider this sobering Sunday morning scenario:
A spiritual seeker visits a church and finds it filled with metal detectors and armed security guards carrying walkie-talkies. As he or she looks around, they may ask themselves, how can a church sing “A mighty fortress is our God” when they have security teams flanking the pastor and people deemed suspicious being ejected from the service?
This is the tension many places of worship must navigate today as they mobilize to protect their flock from spiritual and lethal threats.
They must somehow find a way to be both a sanctuary, and — when need be — a fortress.