BREAKING: Mass shooting at Texas church

I support having people with Concealed Carry Permits bringing their guns to church. Take all the precautions, but have guns there. At least it gives you a chance against an armed intruder seeking to murder.

Some churches have a Concealed Carry Gun class in their church; we did.

Don’t wave guns around. Hopefully you will never need them. But it’s better to have a gun and not need it, than need a gun and not have it. If you are comfortable with guns, have one in your car as well.

David R. Brumbelow

A complication with officially including armed persons in the planning is that “gun phobia” is not all that uncommon. Including that still makes sense to me, but in some congregations, that will be very controversial. Might be good to develop policy using a largish, diverse committee to help everyone feel well represented—resulting hopefully in broader support and “buy in.”

Aaron, There’s no reason to tell people. And if people think it’s controversial, ask them who they want you to call when something happens. And there is a 100% chance they will want you to call someone with a gun and it won’t be controversial then. Unfortunately, there’s a good chance people will already be dead or at least severely wounded. What’s the controversy? Good intentions will not honor the sacredness of human life.

We average around 3,000 for attendance. The building is currently 95,000 square feet on two levels. Construction is underway on a 37,000 square foot addition, so we’ll soon have 132,000 square feet. There are seven separate exterior entrances.

Some security measures we employ:

• During services, we pay to have a uniformed, armed local police officer present. (This isn’t cheap: it’s $90/hour.) We started this about a year-and-a-half ago, I believe. The officer maintains a high profile in the building, and a marked Ford Explorer police vehicle is prominently parked out front.
• We have our own roving volunteer security. We happen to have some highly qualified individuals in the church: including current & retired police officers, a current FBI agent, and a retired U.S. Secret Service agent.
• We have 32 ccd cameras around the building (inside & out) recording video, 24/7. Once the new addition opens, that number will increase.
• Our children’s areas (from nursery to grade 4) have lock-down doors that limit access only to screened, authorized people.

You’ve got some who will not enter if there might be guns, and others who will not enter if guns are not allowed. I tend towards the latter group, as I take some exception to the notion that businesses and churches ought to be telling criminals that your victims are disarmed for your convenience, which is exactly what “posting” means, really.

In my view, I think it’s a simple thing where you explain the facts. Criminals don’t respect “no guns” signs, and permit holders are not only among the most law-abiding of people, but also have a far lower incidence of wrong shootings than even police. There are a number of reasons for this, but high on the list is that a permit holder’s tactics are far more defensive than a police officer’s (permit holders are not required to engage or chase), plus he’s also far more likely to know who belongs in a setting and who does not.

So your choice is not guns or no guns. It is whether law-abiding people have a chance to defend themselves, or whether the law-abiding are going to be waiting for minutes or even an hour (Las Vegas atrocity) for the police to come.

A side note; there are many in church who will understand the logic above, but will not want to carry. I’m one of them because I spend so much time working with kids—even with an inside the belt holster, kids climbing over me while I’m armed could be a really bad situation. For them, things like pepper spray or other nonlethal weapons are great options—far better that an active shooter be blinded by pepper than not, no?

[Bert Perry]

Criminals don’t respect “no guns” signs, and permit holders are not only among the most law-abiding of people, but also have a far lower incidence of wrong shootings than even police.

As someone who carries concealed, I can tell you that I obey the law, but “no guns” signs are not technically “the law.” For instance: I don’t take my gun into government buildings and most schools, because that’s against the law. But businesses that have signs saying, “no guns allowed” (such as a movie theater or Panera)? I carry in those places all the time. The most they can do is ask me to leave and not return. But they will never know I’m carrying unless the worst happens, in which case I’ll be happy for them to be upset with me for having a gun, so long as the criminal is ALSO upset with me.

There’s definitely some variety from state to state and city to city as far as the law goes.

I want to emphasize training again. There’s a big difference between shooting at a stationary target and shooting in what is basically a combat situation (active shooter scenario). In most cases we’re talking about pitting a small handgun against an advanced semi-automatic carbine. It’s better than nothing, but in putting together church security policies, it’s worth it to identify a few carriers and send them off for special training—unless you have some that already know how to track a moving target in a combat situation, often while moving around a good bit themselves either in pursuit or for defensive purposes… all without shooting friendlies in the process.

One more note on this whole topic: there is ultimately no comprehensive defense in a society that is losing its moral center. As self-restraint declines, external restraints increase (with proportionate loss of individual liberty), but reach a point where there is no longer much return for the effort. They top out. Humans bent on evil will find ways.

That said, surely it’s prudent to take sensible precautions and make these events less likely and less extensive when they do happen.

Aaron, no quibble that training is great, and quite frankly I’m starting to, when I come to work with kids in AWANA, ask myself “if someone were to try something, what would I do?”, and all that.

That noted, it’s worth noting that even today, most mass killings are not “pistol vs. carbine”, but are rather “active shooter who makes his presence and location very obvious vs. an unknown number of permit holders who stay very quiet until the active shooter is in their sights.” It’s for this reason that as a rule, permit holders tend to win against criminals—the criminal is caught off guard by design. The military comparison is that you need far more men when you’re on the offensive than when you’re on the defensive.

Again, no argument against training, but the data do not support the idea that you’ve got to be combat trained to stop most active shooters. You simply have to surprise him, break into his OODA loop, and present a lethal threat.

Here’s a very quick primer on the OODA loop made famous by John Boyd during the Korean War. It’s more or less a flyboy’s interpretation of Deming’s “Shewhart cycle” of PDCA, but actually makes quite a bit of use of ambiguity and intuition, where Deming’s work is far more deliberative and concrete. The article linked has a lot to do with situational awareness, especially in the face of an armed assailant.

For a church, or office for that matter, you’ve got entrances, exits, hard walls, sheetrock walls, furniture, other items. What will work as a weapon? What works as a shield? Where will you go? Where are lines of sight good? All that.

“active shooter who makes his presence and location very obvious vs. an unknown number of permit holders who stay very quiet until the active shooter is in their sights.”

This does improve the balance a bit if you happen to have…

• More than one concealed carrier well trained enough to think tactically in an active shooter situation
• Only one active shooter
• An environment that allows the concealed carrier time to “stay very quiet until….”

I’m sticking with the experts l read nearly every day on this one. It’s not as easy as many think. But I do agree that a % of the time, the attacker is not going to be prepared to shot back at, even by an amateur who can’t actually hit him. There is value in that. Way better than nothing.

Aaron, I agree that it is not going to be easy for people who don’t have to think of tactical security every day, but still way better than just putting our heads in the sand. The pastor of the previous church I was in not only did not discourage concealed carry, we also sponsored an official NC CCW course that used our fellowship hall. In addition, there were always a couple of armed church men with permits whose job it was to sit on the last row on each side. This started after the rash of church shootings in the 90’s. I agree it wouldn’t have *prevented* a church shooting, but it sure would have resulted in less than 26 dead.

My current pastor doesn’t discourage concealed carry either, but I don’t know of any official policy of having a couple church leaders armed. I’m fairly certain that a couple of our men are always carrying anytime they are somewhere it’s not against the law to do so, and our church doesn’t post. That doesn’t make me uncomfortable at all. I don’t put my trust in guns for my ultimate safety anyway.

Aaron, the trouble I’ve got with what you’re saying is that it’s what I’ve heard from pretty much every group that opposes concealed carry. Unfortunately, chiefs of police (e.g. Chaska’s Scott Knight) were high on the list of people involved—police obviously have a vested interest in being seen as “THE” responsible parties.

But as a rule, it was first claimedt that it would be the wild west and there would be carnage in the streets—data proved them wrong. Then it was claimed that permit holders would be overpowered by criminals—data proved them wrong for the most part. Then it was claimed that permit holders are uneffective against such threats—and again, data are proving them wrong.

So more or less, given what I’ve seen in the data, the notions you have, including at least a significant part of the ALICE model, have gotten a bunch of people killed. It’s an adage, really; when seconds are the difference between life and death, the police are only minutes away. About an hour or more in Orlando and Las Vegas and Columbine, really.

It would be nice if everyone had tactical training and the whole nine yards, but that’s not the world we live in. And that’s a world where we can say in good conscience “Sure, I’m not Sergeant York by any stretch of the imagination, but given a case where a couple dozen of my friends could be dead in the time it takes the police to respond, I’ll take my chances and do my best.”

No, when somebody says A and another party also says A, it doesn’t follow that the first party has some other things in common with the second. To put it another way:

• Karl Marx didn’t like rich snobs
• Aaron doesn’t like rich snobs
• Therefore Aaron is wrong because disliking rich snobs is Marxism

All I’m really saying is that it’s very important not to underestimate the difficulty involved in being effective in an active shooter situation. It’s not an “either concealed carry permit (CCP) are effective or they’re not” situation. It’s a “CCP are better than nothing, but there is no guarantee of success and many, many, many ways to fail.”

I want to just recommend two items out of the pile I’ve read in the last two years on this. Both of these are available without subscription/registration:

Lt. John Weinstein is the commander of Northern Virginia Community College Public Safety District 3. He wrote this article in late 2015. I think he overemphasizes the negatives, but he makes some pretty sobering points:

Should We Allow CCP Holders to Carry Guns on Campus? 11 Reservations of a ‘Gun Guy’ https://www.campussafetymagazine.com/university/should_we_allow_armed_c…

Second, this report is lengthy, but I recommend reading at least chapter 1 (starts at page 9) — and note carefully what happened to CCP good Samaritan Joseph Wilcox.

Las Vegas After-Action Assessment: Lessons Learned from the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department’s Ambush Incident https://ric-zai-inc.com/Publications/cops-w0798-pub.pdf

I’m not saying CCPs are not worth having around. Found out Sunday we have several at our church, and I’m glad they’re there. I’m saying effectiveness in a mass casualty situation is difficult enough that most SWAT teams are required to retrain annually for them. So we need to have realistic expectations in this area and not be over confident. It’s like swimming. You can read all about it, but you don’t know how to swim until you swim. And you can swim quite a lot and not be ready at all for the English Channel.