So I clicked through and read the articles about this Texas concealed carry shooting
This was a classic story of a "good guy with a gun"…with a catastrophic rewrite to the ending that many gun-advocates imagine for such tales.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2 ... h-shooting
The shooting, at Starrville Methodist Church, about 100 miles east of Dallas, occurred just after 9 a.m. when only about four people were in the church, authorities said.
The pastor found the intruder hiding in a bathroom stall and drew his weapon, Smith told reporters. The man lunged at the pastor, disarming him, shooting him and injuring two others, Smith said. Smith declined to name the pastor or other victims, but said at least one of the wounded was hospitalized.
A decent Christian human being would feel sorrow for the pointless loss, regret at the event, compassion for the dead man’s family, and would note the terrible tyranny of the gun. The firearm has no conscience, and does not care who pulls its trigger. The local sheriff, however, has a different view:
[Smith County Sheriff Larry] Smith said he believed the pastor was correct in arming himself.
“They did everything we would tell them to do; they were carrying,” Smith said of the church. “But the thing about it is, and I don’t want to get off into it, but if you are going to carry a firearm, you got to be willing to use it.
The is taking the "blame the victim" attitude to a grotesque end. The murdered man is responsible for his fate because he was not a ruthless and remorseless enough killer. There is some truth in that, of course. If a gun appears in a situation, the odds that it will be fired go way up, and that’s the situation the pastor created by carrying a sidearm. But the key phrase here is Sheriff Smith’s first thought: the pastor “did everything we would tell (him) to do.” Asking citizens to rehearse violence as a regular facet of their daily lives, just to be ready when the bad guy shows up is no way to lead a life, especially a Christian life, either an individual one, or that of a society. It’s the ultimate surrender to the tyranny of the gun.
First of all, it is hard for even properly and regularly trained folks to get this right at any random moment when the skill might be needed. We know this by how many police shootings we have each year where innocent victims get shot. Furthermore, there’s no way that your preacher, your teacher, your ER charge nurse, your grocery store asst. manager, your preschool teacher, should be expected to do the impossible. The sheriff said of this situation–”I don’t want to be second-guessing the pastor by any means. You got a much younger person, a much more agile person,” Which, of course, is most often going to be true when dealing with criminals. There is always someone faster, meaner, more remorseless, and luckier.
Accepting stories like this as mere "collateral damage" in the cause of unfettered access to guns in our society is no way to live. It is certainly no way to organize a Christian society.
