Churches are favorite targets for many would-be mass killers. This is likely because of a lot of factors, but one is that many states prohibit people from carrying in church. A lot of people, no guns to be had...seems like a perfect target. This leads eventually to lots of deaths and calls for gun control
But the attempt in a Michigan church did neither.
Over at the mothership, Townhall, Jeff Charles takes a swing at why that's the case.
The quick thinking of the church staff members likely prevented a much bigger catastrophe. The fact that they were armed is undoubtedly why Browning wasn’t able to kill anyone on that day.
Many churches have been using armed security to protect their congregations from potential active shooters. In fact, a 2023 survey conducted by Lifeway Research revealed that 54 percent of Protestant churches rely on armed church members for security. This is a significant increase from 2019, when 45 percent of churches noted that they used armed security.
Of course, the reason why the anti-gunners are exercising their right to remain silent on this particular incident is obvious: It exposes one of their favorite arguments as a lie. Those who favor more onerous gun control restrictions often argue that there is no such thing as a “good guy with a gun” who can defend their lives and others when a crazed gunman decides to get froggy.
The reality is that armed civilians who are already on the scene when an active shooting situation occurs are more likely to stop the shooter than police officers, according to a recent Crime Prevention Research Center report.
Yep.
See, when there's something that shatters their illusions, they just stick their head in the sand and pretend it never happened. While some talked about Luigi Mangione and his alleged assassination of Brian Thompson, the fact that there was literally no way to have stopped him with what anti-gunners push became pretty obvious.
So, they stayed quiet.
Every time there's a high-profile self-defense shooting, they either try to spin it as something else (see also: Kyle Rittenhouse, George Zimmerman) or they just let it fall out of the news cycle. While we get retrospectives about Parkland and Uvalde and even smaller mass killings, the Greenwood Park Mall shooting doesn't seem to get that same treatment. Could it be because an armed citizen put an end to that atrocity with some really good shooting?
It just might be.
With the Michigan church shooting, a good guy with a gun put an end to the incident before it could escalate. So, instead of acknowledging it at all, they'll pretend it never happened, then they'll let it become a statistic that they'll say disproves armed citizens preventing mass shootings. After all, one person was wounded, so it never became a mass killing in the first place.
Yes, that's how it works.
And yes, I'm sick of it.
Jeff notes that if anti-gunners had their way, the people at this church would have been disarmed. Again, he's right. Had that been the case, we'd be having a very different conversation. We'd be talking about things like we did after Uvalde, Las Vegas, or Sutherland Springs.
I don't know about you, but I'm really glad to be talking about this incident this way instead. Las Vegas, in particular, took a bit of a toll on me and I was on the other side of the damn country. It was nothing compared to those who were there. Either way, I much prefer stories with happy endings, such as dead bad guys who did a speed bump impression before being lit up by the good guys.
That's the story I want to cover. That's what I prefer to talk about.
Michigan is just more evidence that guns save lives when people aren't prevented from acting in their own self-defence by stupid laws.
