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Originally Posted by Beth
Oh, I agree. The whole piece was whacked, -silly, in fact.
Better pack a pistol next time I go to church. Dunno when some wacko wolf is gonna come in and pounce.  |
You mean "Pounce" like this?
What happened at the church: On 1999-SEP-15, Larry Gene Ashbrook, walked into the
Wedgwood Baptist Church in southwest Fort Worth TX. An evening youth rally and concert was in progress. It was intended to be a follow-up event for students who had taken part in the
See You at the Pole public school prayer event that morning. About 150 young people from throughout the Fort Worth area were in attendance. A Christian rock group was playing.
Ashbrook was carrying two guns. He opened fire with one, killing 6 and wounding 8 persons. He then set off a pipe bomb. Some media accounts state that the bottom fell off the bomb and it did not detonate. Actually, the pipe did explode, but the shrapnel landed harmlessly in the balcony. Hearing the approaching police sirens, he sat down in a pew and killed himself. One of the wounded victims, a teenager, later died in hospital.
The victims were: Kristi Beckel, 14; Shawn Brown, 23; Sydney Browning, 36; Joseph Ennis, 14; Cassandra Griffin, 14; Susan 'Kim' Jones, 23; and Justin Ray, 17. Justin Laird was one of the wounded; he was permanently paralyzed below the waist by the killer.
Witnesses have stated that the shooter was angrily spouting anti-Baptist rhetoric during the rampage.
I was training a group of police officers in Texas, and during the
break, one officer asked his friend if he carried his weapon in church. The other
cop replied, "I will never be caught without my gun in church." I
asked why he felt so strongly about this, and he told me about a cop he knew who was at
a church massacre in Ft. Worth, Texas in 1999. In that incident, a mentally
deranged individual came into the church and opened fire, gunning down fourteen
people. He said that officer believed he could have saved every life that day
if he had been carrying his gun. His own son was shot, and all he could do
was throw himself on the boy's body and wait to die. That cop looked me in the
eye and said, "Do you have any idea how hard it would be to live with yourself
after that?"
Some individuals would be horrified if they knew this police officer
was carrying a weapon in church. They might call him paranoid and
would probably scorn him. Yet these same individuals would be enraged and would call for
"heads to roll" if they found out that the airbags in their cars were defective,
or that the fire extinguisher and fire sprinklers in their kids'
school did not work. They can accept the fact that fires and traffic accidents can
happen and that there must be safeguards against them.