… oh, heck, everyone knows the rest of this: Do not mess with Texas. Even if especially if — you are a transient loner with a long record of offenses against the laws of man and God, hopped up on murderous rage against something or other, and looking to take it out on whomever you assume will not retaliate … because word has gotten out. It’s gotten out for quite some time, although I venture a guess that it has not made it as far as the Transient Weirdo Loner With Mental/Rage Issues Community, unless those Transient Weirdo Loners are also set on a variant of ‘suicide by cop’ and the new hotness among them is ‘suicide by volunteer church security’.
I think that the Sutherland Springs church massacre must have been the occasion which got a lot of parishioners in Texas into considering sanctuary defense, although there might have been some creative and soft-pedaled thinking along those lines after the incident at the New Life Church in Colorado Springs, Colorado in 2007. After the Colorado thing, and most definitely the Sutherland Springs church massacre I saw a lot of chatter in blog comments among the regular church-attending and concealed-carry community about the vulnerability of congregations, and testimonials among the CC license holders of the various means and stratagems by which their own home churches were protected, either by official church sanction or quietly by individual volunteers. As was pointed out a good many times in the aftermath of Sutherland Springs normally, the congregants are focused on the front of the sanctuary, the ritual, the hymns, the fellowship, the sermon. They are all, as the many CC license holders pointed out, innocent sitting ducks for the malign, the armed, the murderously inclined. Of whom there are actually not many around, statistically speaking … but that statistic is cold comfort when it suddenly happens in your church on an innocent Sunday morning.
And so quietly and without making very much of a fuss, a fair number of church congregations began to make plans for security; I know that they did long before Sutherland Springs and in another state; the Lutheran church which was Mom’s religious home in Southern California locked the doors after the congregation had assembled for the midnight Christmas Eve service and this at more than a decade ago. In Texas, it appears that religious communities have taken ‘he that hath no sword, let him sell his garment, and buy one.’ to the ultimate logical extent, advice which hints that one might have jolly good need of a sword.
Or a sidearm of the 9mm or higher capacity; which congregations in Texas look to have taken to heart, if the brief and awesomely professional display of readiness at the West Freeway Church of Christ in White Settlement, a suburb of Dallas-Fort Worth. Startling to me, the deceased shooter was not a person of color named Mohammed or Abdul, although the lag-time in which his name and race were reported in the national media did lead me initally to assume such.
And I am reminded to sign up for the class next month to get my concealed carry license renewed. One never knows when all that might come in handy.
Once again, Slow Joe shows how he earned that nickname.Biden Attacked Texas Governor For Signing Law Letting Churchgoers Carry Guns: ‘Totally Irrational.’
That head shot from a distance was impressive. If only the first victim, God rest his soul, had drawn his weapon fast enough the incident would’ve been over in 1 second instead of 6. A sad and unfortunate lesson that every second counts.
Note that Slow Joe kept saying over and over that carrying guns is “irrational” as if that’s all that has to be said. No evidence needs to be given, no attempt made to understand the other viewpoint. A clear example of the lack of any sort of common ground in today’s America, unfortunately.
It’s interesting that churches are becoming targets of the crazies.
I wonder where they get their ideas ? Just kidding.
My first impression was the same as Sgt Mom’s.
Well, we know one thing about him. He should have been in prison.
I suppose the pendulum will start to swing back to a safe society once enough people are killed by these psychopaths.
Well, we know one thing about him. He should have been in prison.
I suppose the pendulum will start to swing back to a safe society once enough people are killed by these psychopaths.
Improbable. Hasn’t happened in the U.K. NOW they want to ban all kitchen knives. :-/
Until you have a people with a government that is more interested in their safety than its own empowerment, it ain’t happening.
And that’ll likely take a revolution, from what I have seen in the last two decades.
The Texas attacker is an indication of the mix in the homeless population. Most are not “homeless” due to bad financial luck. Most of the homeless are mentally disordered. Most of those are “messy” but not threatening. This one, came screaming out of the dark to attack members of the church that had given him aid. He apparently had a history of violence that was ignored.
Use caution. Have a plan, and backup.
“He should have been in prison.”
Maybe going slightly off topic — but is prison “sustainable”, to use the Lefties favorite expression?
It costs a lot to keep someone in prison. The figure that used to be quoted was $20+k per year, and it is probably more now. Why should struggling taxpayers give the worst elements of our society 3 squares and a bed, free medical & dental, a TV and a recreation area? And why should we extend that kindly treatment to criminals who are not even citizens?
A rich society can afford to sweep its problems under the rug — but what is going to happen when governments are forced to (for example) choose between cutting pensions or cutting the cost of the prison system?
If economic progress really does take a downturn, as some suggest it will, it is easy to see the pressure rising for the restoration of speedy trials (per the Constitution), for prison farms where convicts basically have to support themselves at no cost to the taxpayer, for restoration of speedy death sentences, and perhaps in these enlightened times for adoption of certain parts of Islamic law.
but what is going to happen when governments are forced to (for example) choose between cutting pensions or cutting the cost of the prison system?
Capital punishment. It did well for a thousand years. No recidivism at all. Cheap.
Unsustainable… The cost of incarceration has been unsustainable for a long time. Hence the OUTRAGEOUS leniency within the judicial system and the recent push to decriminalize quality of life offences.
The cost of incarceration has been unsustainable for a long time. Hence the OUTRAGEOUS leniency within the judicial system and the recent push to decriminalize quality of life offences.
That was a problem in San Francisco min the 1840s.
Perps got a note with ” 7 x 3 x 77″ written on it.
Next day they were gone; one way or another.
I had no idea what Mike K meant by “7 x 3 x 77.”
Uncle Google came up with this: montanatrooper.com/3-7-77/. It’s a web page from the Association of Montana Troopers.
We need to remove the crazy and the evil from our midst. We should liberate Cuba by force, and relocate the Cubans elsewhere in the Western Hemisphere. Then we turn Cuba into a prison island where we dump our crazies and criminals. Let them survive (or not) on their own. There’s plenty of good soil to grow their own food and raise their own animals. “Three strikes” takes on new meaning.
After decades of assurance by professionals that the mentally ill pose little or no threat, we are suddenly confronted with daily evidence that this isn’t the case any more. The conventional wisdom held up pretty well with only rare contradictions for a long time.
The marijuana that’s now sort of legal is, for all intents and purposes, a new drug. It has a THC content multiples higher than the substance of the same name that’s been around for centuries. That’s before industrial processing to concentrate it even further. All of this widely available where “legal” and, of course, spilling over to the rest of us from there. Now we’re hearing constant stories of how this “benign” herb is causing all sorts of psychiatric episodes, especially in young people.
I’ve started to wonder if the seeming recent appearance of so many of the dangerous-crazy might not be connected to this supper-pot. The saying is that the dose makes the poison, I wonder if there’s any way to put this genie back in his bottle. If marijuana isn’t the whole answer, there are a whole list of drugs, many with very poorly understood actions, that could be having a synergistic effect.
Now I’m being bombarded with ads for CBD which will help with whatever I might think needs correction. It must work because? Anyway, it won’t make me high so how could it possibly be a problem?
None of this addresses the philosophically malign. I suppose the most practical individual response is to practice and buy more ammo.
Get your license to carry or whatever it’s called wherever you live. Mine got me out of a speeding ticket the other day. Deputy appreciated that I had one.
only a certifiable mental defective or suicide cult adherent would try to do a mass shooting at a church in the heart of post sutherland springs texas
either way definitely file what jack wilson did under the heading DSAF:
Did
Society
A
Favor
Bradoplata Says:
Mine got me out of a speeding ticket the other day.
I had a cop mention mine to me one day. And I didn’t have one. It came back when he ran my DL. Government databases are not to be trusted – for good or ill.
FYI Clark, pretty sure 7’x 3′ x 77″ is the dimensions of a pine box and the depth of the hole it’ll be buried in.
My pastor contacted a handful of current or former law enforcement and military types who he thought would have a CCW permit after the New Life Colorado Springs shootings. We formed a semi-organized team to provide at least one CCW carrier per service thereafter.
After I retired and moved to a new area and a new church, I joined the Security Team there, a well organized and trained group, about half of whom are CCW carriers.
If your church doesn’t have an armed volunteer security team, I highly encourage you to start one.
I think it’s pretty certain that the blue state elimination of bail is going to lead pretty quickly to an overwhelming public push for swifter trials and much more harsh punishments. It’s so obviously going to be a disaster that you wonder if those pushing it aren’t double agents. The suburbs want to be nice but the Dems are grabbing tight hold onto their third rails–the quality of their schools, and the safety of their neighborhood (and nearest city).
Sorry about the obscure reference to the dimensions of a grave. When San Francisco had a crime problem soon after the gold rush, a serious vigilante movement arose. The bad guys got that message and most left town. Capital punishment was common in societies that did not have secure prisons or lacked the wealth to keep people in prison for long sentences. We are approaching that state now in some places like California and New York. In England about 1800 there were more than 300 crimes that required hanging. Often hanging was converted to “Transportation.” The loss of the American colonies in 1783 resulted in a crisis as Transportation had been used to send criminals to America. Botany Bay served as the alternative after that but there was a delay until it had been sufficiently organized. The voyage to Botany Bay was so long that about half the prisoners died en route.
Re vigilantism – Glenn Reynolds likes to quip every so often that people tend to forget the police do as much or more to protect the presumed guilty from mob justice as they do to protect society from miscreants.
A thought that crosses my mind from time to time — If instead of us “electing” self-selected power-mad idiots, we filled Congress with normal citizens chosen by random lottery for a single term, how would that Congress deal with some of the issues we face? When normal citizens are faced with the choice — Do we spend big bucks imprisoning people who have broken serious laws, or do we use that money instead to cut taxes, improve roads, build hospitals, etc — the answer is obvious. Then what else would we do with the people who break serious laws?
As Mike K says, capital punishment was the historic norm for many crimes — hence the expression “Might as well get hanged for stealing a sheep as a lamb”. Maybe we should be thinking in modern times about expulsion from society in some form. It would not be reasonable to give lawbreakers all of an attractive environment like Cuba, as Anonymous suggests, but doing a deal with Russia to provide a population for Kamchatka might be doable.
“If instead of us “electing” self-selected power-mad idiots, we filled Congress with normal citizens chosen by random lottery for a single term, how would that Congress deal with some of the issues we face?”
If Congresscretins had to live in their districts and “work” in DC remotely, so they were surrounded by their neighbors and constituents instead of media, lobbyists, activists, and other politicians, would Trump have been impeached? I highly doubt it.
Sgt Mom – a few weeks ago I had a quick tour of some of Texas – Van Horn – down Hwy 90 – Marfa, Big Bend, Langtry, San Antonio, Hill Country…and a theme that stayed with me is how down to earth and sane that place is vs California.
I was reading chatter yesterday about how some of these libs felt “uncomfortable” that ordinary parishioners had weapons and they “should have” waited for the police.
Ya know, when seconds count, they’ll be there in minutes…
It seems there is an ideological gulf in this country that cannot be crossed.
Notice how little play this incident got.
Didn’t fit the narrative.
Not that long ago I was at evening daily services at one of orthodox synagogues around here, and when a friend of mine bowed in prayer, his hunter’s vest pulled up and I noticed the barrel of a pistol sticking out of a holster. The Guardian of Israel may not sleep nor slumber but my prayers feel more secure when I know someone in the minyan is carrying. Good thing it was an orthodox synagogue. Had it been a Reform temple people would have freaked out.
Jewish law generally prohibits the carrying of items in the public domain on the Sabbath. I asked one of the local orthodox rabbis if, in light of violent attacks on Jews, it was permissible to “carry” on Shabbat. His response: “Only if you’re licensed, but don’t worry. There are people here who are and are.”
Let’s hope suicide by Christian doesn’t become a thing.