Week of action against firearm violence across the Atlantic: faced with the lethal risk during worship hours, the faithful now come armed.
Sunday at 11 a.m. is now one of the most potentially life-risking times of the week in the United States. It is the pastors and those in charge of the security of the churches who affirm it. They explain that they all observed a changeover after December 9, 2007. That Sunday morning, in Colorado Springs, a 24-year-old young man opened fire in the large New Life church before taking his own life. He had time to kill four people.
Examples like Colorado Springs, there have been many since in places of worship across the United States: six deaths at a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, in 2012; nine black worshipers killed by a white supremacist in a church in Charleston, South Carolina in 2015; two years later, in 2017, 26 died in a church in Sutherland Springs, Texas; eleven people killed in 2018 at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh. The shooter was convicted two weeks ago and faces the death penalty.
A firm specializing in church security estimates that there are 480 serious incidents of violence in worship communities in the United States each year.
Security companies to protect places of worship
To protect themselves, these churches, mosques and synagogues use security companies. This was the case in that of Colorado Springs, in 2007. A former police officer from Minneapolis was in charge of security. She wounded the assailant with her pistol. And as in two-thirds of the cases, this man had no connection with the religious community.
The aptly named Full Armor Church is a company specializing in the protection of these places of worship. It was created in 2016 and notably offers video surveillance systems, trained and armed staff and a single entrance to the building, even if it is not easy to transform a sanctuary into a fortress.
She also suggests that weapons remain in cars during services. Church people say that more and more congregants, sometimes 200 or 300, attend the sermon with their guns on them, in states where the carrying of firearms is free.
2023-07-02 04:42:50
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