HOME ALONE
No wonder church attendance is dropping. No house of worship—church, temple, mosque, or synagogue—seems safe these days from some angry wacko entering during services and spraying the faithful with bullets. Witness the recent same-day shootings at a church in Texas and a synagogue in New York that together took three lives and left several wounded.
How do you explain this mayhem in holy places? I can’t. How do you curb it? I don’t know…unless we tighten our guns laws to keep weapons away from unstable minds. But that would infringe on their Constitutional rights, of course.
Leave it to those resourceful Texans to come up with a Texas answer to a national problem; they passed a law in 2017 permitting citizens to pack iron in a house of worship. So last December 29, when a deranged shooter entered the West Freeway Church of Christ in White Settlement and killed two congregants with shotgun blasts, two armed Christian men on the security team returned fire and killed the intruder on the spot. A manly and decisive way to solve a problem, no doubt.
But the Texas solution is not an option for me. I don’t have a gun. And even when I was trained to use a weapon back in the Korean War days, I was a lousy shot…with both a M1 carbine and a .45. Now, with the palsy I have acquired since then, I doubt I could hit the side of a barn if standing inside. So the Texas brand of rough justice is beyond my reach.
How do I stay out of harm’s way? Avoid all churches. Spend Sundays at home listening to J. S. Bach’s music to satisfy my spiritual needs, far from American psychos exercising their Second Amendment rights. Do you have a better answer? Better than the Texas method? Let’s hear it.