Posted by Cockney Robin | I don't want to harp on the murder-or-attempted-murder-by-assault-weapon phenomenon in the States. But since it keeps happening, somebody's got to do it.
One shooting occurred at the "vast" New Life evangelical mega-church in Colorado Springs, Colorado. (Reuters UK; link added) Fortunately for the 7000 people who were in the building when the shooting started, the church had a security guard---possibly all American churches should consider hiring armed security guards---who shot and killed the gunman. (Reuters UK)
Dressed in black and wearing combat boots, a gunman "holding an assault rifle and at least one handgun," opened fire in the parking lot after Sunday morning services.(Reuters UK) Four people were wounded. (Reuters UK)
The New Life Church is the headquarters for the powerful Christian conservative group, "Focus on the Family." According to the article, the New Life Church "was founded 20 years ago by pastor Ted Haggard who resigned in disgrace a year ago after admitting to sexually immoral conduct following a friendship with a male prostitute" (Reuters UK; link added)
The other (and earlier) incident occurred near midnight in a town called Arvada (a suburb of Denver) at a "missionary training centre."(Reuters UK)
The Arvada gunman---who apparently had only a handgun---murdered "two young missionaries" and wounded two others. (Reuters UK) But first he asked them for a place to stay.(Reuters UK) When told he couldn't stay there, he opened fire. He then "fled on foot in the snow."(Reuters UK) The people he killed were present because they were cleaning up after a Christmas party. (Reuters UK) "Tiffany Johnson, 26, and Philip Crouse, 23, were killed and two men aged 22 and 23 were wounded, police said in a statement." (BBC News)
No information yet on whether the incidents were related or what the motives of the gunmen (or gunman?) might have been. But---bloody hell--- police found several "suspicious devices" at the New Life Church. (Reuters UK) No idea what this means either and they "declined to elaborate."
Senator Ken Salazar finds it "incomprehensible" that attacks of this kind could occur "in places of faith and worship."(Reuters UK) As opposed to what---a shopping mall? A party for teenagers? A university class-room? An Amish schoolhouse? There's never a good time or place for a mass murder or a time or place where the victims expect to become victims. But when it's quite easy for loonies to lay hands on weapons designed for the purpose of facilitating multiple homicides, these attacks are going to occur whenever or wherever a sufficiently loony person decides to make them happen. A church service at or around Christmas time might be regarded as good a place as any by an unhinged person with a grudge against God (or the particular church).
What I find incomprehensible---yes, I've said this before---is that the same people who are most fearful of terrorist attacks are so oblivious to the ongoing threat presented by the easy access by their own mentally unstable compatriots to guns.
Speaking of whom, Michelle Malkin would like for you to celebrate one of the extremely rare occasions when "the culture of self-defense" might have saved lives---or as she puts it "untold lives." Well, that's one for the books, I must admit. If you totted up the cases in which having a gun saved someone's life in one column and the cases in which a looney's access to a gun cost a life, you can credit "untold lives" on the "saved" side of the balance sheet. Which still won't even up the balance, of course.
But of course, I am a mere simple Brit. I can only focus on the many lives that have been lost, and that mightn't have been, if America's gun culture hadn't made weapons available to the country's criminals and lunatics and shake my head over the culture of bloggers who obsess over terrorism but give their unqualified support to America's deadly gun lobby.
UPDATE: According to Jeralyn at Talk Left, there were no explosives at the New Life Church, as the police originally thought. (Shooting Deaths at Two Colorado Evangelical Sites) There were 45 young people at the second location (the missionary training centre) at the time of the shooting. (Talk Left)
In the meantime, the police (and the FBI and the ATF) were searching a house in Arapahoe County.
The bomb squad is there, the warrant was obtained by the Arvada police and they are taking a lot of boxes out of the house. They took out two people from the house. There are 15 to 20 investigators inside, FBI, ATF and local cops (Talk Left)
Memeorandum discussion of Malkin's piece is here.
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LINKED
Three dead in Colorado Shootings (BBC News)
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