By Eric Hoover
Friday, November 10, 2017
Last Sunday a little church in Sutherland Springs, Texas
was the site of a mass shooting perpetrated by an evil, nihilistic, volatile
man. Twenty-five people died, including one pregnant woman, whose child brought
the death toll to 26.
When I heard, I was stunned. Any person with a conscience
would naturally feel grief and horror, but the Sutherland massacre hit me
harder than previous shootings because the people targeted, by all accounts,
seemed to be so similar to my own family and friends.
I am from a town like Sutherland Springs, of several
hundred people, a community in which everybody knows everybody. I go to a
Baptist country church not unlike First Baptist, with a Christian flag, an
American flag, carpets on the floors, and straight-back pews. We sing the same
songs they did and, like First Baptist, sometimes do so a little off-key.
Harder still to think about, my church is filled with
families just like First Baptist—little kids who look over the backs of the
seats at you during the service, as if they want to say something but don’t
know what. So I have grieved this week, not fully understanding the pain my
brothers and sisters in Sutherland must be going through, but feeling a hurt
that helped me ask God to somehow send peace and strength to those most in
need.
My home community shared that hurt and a sense of kinship
with the slain. I researched all the details of the massacre as they came in,
trying to piece together a narrative that made sense. But what met me first was
the reaction of celebrities and the “mainstream” media who largely define
opinion at the left-leaning university I attend.
Have You No Human
Decency?
It boiled down to one sentence: those guns-and-Jesus
country bumpkins “got
their prayers shot right out of them”; hope this teaches their kind a good
lesson for supporting Republicans and their “terrorist” arm, the National Rifle
Association. This wasn’t just the keyboard warriors on Twitter. The New York Times editorial board went
out of its way to mock Texas Gov. Greg Abbott for suggesting that Christianity
could combat violence and the Texas attorney general for suggesting that
perhaps congregations should have one or two present who are armed.
I almost couldn’t believe what I was reading. The
emotional detachment of the leftist commentators from the victims of the
shooting combined with an astounding blindness to the facts on the ground led
them to respond to 26 innocents dead by heaping scorn on the prayers of those
who were shot and demanding we take away their neighbors’ guns.
But here are the facts on the ground: Shooter Devin
Kelley was a “vocally anti-Christian” atheist who apparently shared the leftist
elite’s disdain for prayer. His favorite quote on Facebook was from Mark Twain:
“I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before
I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.” I
believe that Kelley is right now suffering significant inconvenience for what
he did. The leftist elite probably
don’t. But that is neither here nor there.
Kelley, a convicted felon, got his hands on guns, and
easily. Why? Not because he was in Texas, but because one giant federal
bureaucracy failed to send paperwork to another. Federal bureaucrats screw
things up. You can pass laws to try to improve such matters, but such laws
aren’t a partisan issue and, ultimately, it’s impossible to outlaw the
incompetence of unwieldy bureaucracies.
Empathy Is a Man
Running Towards a Killer to Stop Him
Kelley takes his illegally obtained gun and begins to shoot
up people in a church. Who stops him? Law enforcement? A posse of U.S. senators
or Twitter warriors? Stephen Colbert’s bodyguard?
None of the above, and there is a lot of bitter irony
here. The average police response time in large cities can range anywhere from
five minutes to an hour. In rural areas, it can take even longer. Even when
officers are responding to mass murder, they can’t be expected to immediately
arrive on the scene. The man who stopped the shooting, Stephen Willeford, was a
private citizen and a long-time member of the “terrorist” NRA. He used his
legally owned AR-15 to stop the murderer in his tracks.
Last night, Colbert complained that every time there’s a
mass shooting, “Nothing gets done, no-one does anything… it’s unnatural, it’s
inhuman.” Colbert wants legislation against bump stocks. Exactly how this would
have stopped Kelley is a mystery to me, since he didn’t use one. Colbert also
wants to get rid of all the other guns, too, because “doing nothing is
unacceptable.” But who actually saved lives: Colbert with his virtue-signaling,
or Willeford with his AR-15?
Who’s doing more good for the world: people who pray for
one another and, if necessary, put their lives on the line to defend their
neighbors, or the leftist agnostics who despise them and try to take their
guns?
I can’t help but imagine—though God forbid—if The New York Times and their kind won,
guns were banned, then one of the thousands upon thousands of felons in Ohio
who wouldn’t mind obtaining guns illegally decided to massacre my church. He’d
have a free hand for ten or 15 minutes to shoot every man, woman, and child in
the place.
Thankfully, this is not the case. It is still legal in
most states for law-abiding citizens to conceal and carry a handgun with a
permit, and seven or eight good people in my church do just that at our Sunday
meetings. They would willingly put their lives on the line to protect their
families, to do something to stop the shooting, even if it costs them
personally.
They’re people like Stephen Willeford, not Stephen
Colbert. I wish we had more of them in the national media.
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