This morning after scanning all of the Google News numerous "complete coverage" stories on the recent shooting at West Freeway Church of Christ in White Settlement, Texas, I have to report seeing not a single headline anywhere close to mine. Instead I'm seeing the opposite, the event called not a failure but a success story for gun rights advocates. The Dallas Morning News headline is typical:
"A church shooting near Fort Worth ends because good guys with guns fought back."
All the news stories report that the church had a trained and armed "security team," apparently led by former FBI agent and firearms trainer Jack Wilson, who pulled his gun and shot Keith Kinnunen, the "bad guy." But only after Kinnunen had shot and killed two other church members.
How is this a success story? Almost all the news stories praise the "hero" Wilson for – within only six seconds – preventing Kinnunen from killing many more people. I'm very willing to accept Wilson's intervention at that point in time as praiseworthy. But I have to ask why that "trained" security team didn't intervene long before any shooting started.
Wilson is quoted as saying he spotted Kinnunen as a potential threat as soon as he walked into the church, wearing a long overcoat, a fake beard "which he kept adjusting," and a wig, topped with a toboggan. Wilson alerted other members of the security team, went to the audio-visual room to make sure a camera was trained on Kinnunen, and positioned himself so as to have a good view of the "bad guy." He says Kinnunen at one point got up and went to the restroom, came back to his seat, but then went to speak with the minister briefly before sitting down again. In all this time, why didn't Wilson or some other member of the security team confront Kinnunen? Sit down beside him? Talk with him? Maybe even try to discern what his problem was, and how to help him?
Apparently this church security team was prepared for a gunfight, but not prepared to try to keep the peace, to head off violence before it starts, or to reach out to help someone perceived to be a "bad guy." This, to me, exemplifying a national and irrational worship of violence, using one kind of gun or weapon or another, as the only or at least the first response to any problem. And demonizing "others" we don't like in order to justify our violence. Wilson is quoted as saying "I didn't kill a human being. I killed an evil."
Suggested reading: "The myth of redemptive violence," by Walter Wink
https://www2.goshen.edu/~joannab/women/wink99.pdf
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