Jesus wept.

June 11, 2023 8:13 AM

One of the most dangerous hours in America is now 11 o’clock on Sunday morning. [CW: guns, violence, killing, religion, wishful thinking]
posted by chavenet (33 comments total)

I wish the phrase “churches could get behind gun control” had appeared in that article.
posted by warriorqueen at 8:28 AM on June 11, 2023 [43 favorites]

Many churches are behind gun control. Oregon’s measure 114, which is tied up in the courts and has thus far only helped sell a few thousand more guns, was backed by a group of liberal churches.
posted by Just the one swan, actually at 8:38 AM on June 11, 2023 [14 favorites]

I was a little frustrated by the conflating of hate attacks by outsiders on minority religions and Mother Emanuel AME with the violence at conservative Christian churches. All they have in common is that in almost all cases the shooter is a white conservative Christian man. Synagogues all over the world had to have security decades before that one woman shot the shooter at her church in Colorado. And of course white conservative Christian men shot up, burned, and bombed Black churches across the south during Jim Crow, most famously 16th St Baptist in Birmingham. It seems like what has changed is that they're now turning the violence on their own congregations instead of just attacking everyone else.
posted by hydropsyche at 8:53 AM on June 11, 2023 [82 favorites]

That headline really doesn’t work very well at all. “Churches are impacted by gun culture too,” perhaps?
posted by TedW at 8:57 AM on June 11, 2023 [7 favorites]

Many churches are behind gun control.

Sure, but the article talks about training and having armed security and having people greet people in the church and mental health, but as far as I could tell on a relatively quick read, it does not link the issue to gun control.
posted by warriorqueen at 9:00 AM on June 11, 2023 [7 favorites]

Nothing in the article justifies that headline.

I see many anecdotes regarding the increase in shootings at churches & other religious spaces, but that seems to correllate to the general US trend.

Are there any stats on what times & weekdays are most common?
posted by cheshyre at 9:59 AM on June 11, 2023 [6 favorites]

I would be interested to see called out which denominations and theological tendencies have the most gun violence and assault in church. My bet is that it's the megachurches and the conservative churches - even if their pastors are preaching tolerance of "the stranger" - and not so much the unitarians and hippie churches or even the bland old mainline protestants. My bet is that the congregations create a climate of violence because they have let themselves become violent, hateful people who enjoy carrying guns, who enjoy paranoia, who enjoy confrontation. I grew up in a middling conservative Lutheran church and I'm sure there were plenty of racists and abusers in the congregation, because racists and abusers are everywhere, but as anodyne and useless as most of the preaching was, it did at least prompt people to look inward at their thoughts and behavior instead of outward at all those other sinners ruining things.
posted by Frowner at 10:06 AM on June 11, 2023 [20 favorites]

A house of worship, though, is traditionally the last place someone would expect to see lethal violence.

That really depends on who "someone" is. I grew up being reminded over and over again of the burning of synagogues during Kristallncht so I have personally never felt safe in a house of worship.
posted by RobinofFrocksley at 10:25 AM on June 11, 2023 [43 favorites]

The headline obscures where the info is from. “11 o’clock on Sunday morning is now one of the most dangerous hours of the week in America, pastors and church security officials say.”

It’s like saying “the biggest problem in America is cavities, say dentists.”

Even one shooting at even one church is a tragedy, but the people focused on this particular problem can’t be counted on to have a wider perspective about it.

An editor grabbed this un-fact-checked quote, placed it out of context, and made a problematic statement into a dangerously overblown lede.
posted by heyitsgogi at 10:30 AM on June 11, 2023 [36 favorites]

I think a whole lot about how military equipment, like the AR15, moved into widespread civilian use in the US. How that directly contributes to the current annual death toll that surpasses what the US had during Vietnam. Which was the war where that M16/AR15 first saw widespread use. I ask myself how this current level of violence is functionally any different than a civil war.

The common thread I see between 9/11 and the purely stochastic terror attack on the los Vegas music festival in 2017 is the perpetrators were men of means trying to inflict maximum harm. People who can afford the current military tech used on ‘soft targets’ - drones.

So churches beefing up their security for shooters just reminds me of the old adage that folks always prepare for the last war. I think it’s only a matter of time before the first civilian drone strike in the US. Remotely shooting a place up, or lighting it on fire, or even just lobbing over a dumb device randomly shooting would be absolutely terrifying. Arsonists have always posses the asymmetrical power of a match being cheap and the building costing dear. Drones just provide that asymmetry to every guy with a grudge and a budget.
posted by zenon at 10:36 AM on June 11, 2023 [17 favorites]

Good article, broken country, would love a deeper dive on both religious center shooters’ motivations and whether services are really the worst places for mass shootings in the US.
posted by Going To Maine at 10:52 AM on June 11, 2023 [2 favorites]

I found The Violence Project Mass Shooter Database which has dates, not times.

Though the distribution is fairly even, Tuesday & Wednesday had the highest number of mass shootings. Sunday was below-average.

Keep in mind, this only counts mass shootings, not threats, attempts, or incidents with fewer than three victims.
posted by cheshyre at 11:05 AM on June 11, 2023 [20 favorites]

Something about reaping and sowing comes to mind regarding these megachurches.
posted by Artw at 11:56 AM on June 11, 2023 [16 favorites]

I think it’s only a matter of time before the first civilian drone strike in the US.

I'm honestly surprised (and very thankful) this hasn't happened yet. We already live in a world where civilian or hobbyist UAVs have been used in armed conflict. I've seen more than enough random videos online of people messing around with adding fireworks, firearms and flamethrowers and other dangerous shit to civilian/hobbyist drones just for fun to see if they can.

I think that one of the reasons why this hasn't happened in a mass shooting/casualty event is specifically because the cruelty is the whole point.

The people that engage in mass shootings actively want to see the fear and panic in their victims and be there pulling the trigger, and you don't get that if you're hiding behind a screen remotely operating a civilian UAV through FPV. Or why we really don't see things like suicide bombers in the US and why firearms are preferred for mass murder. If they just blow themselves up they don't get to satisfy their fucked up cruel fantasies the way they can with firearms.

I think another part of it is that these mass shooters actively expect and hope to die and never see the inside of either a courtroom or jail cell, which is why so many of these mass shootings tend to end with either suicide or suicide-by-cop.

I have also been to a number of demonstrations, marches and protests and the like where there were active drones in the air, and even when I know they're being operated by people allied with the protests just to observe and record bad actors and potential violence it makes me super uneasy that this is being normalized.
posted by loquacious at 12:00 PM on June 11, 2023 [19 favorites]

~I think it’s only a matter of time before the first civilian drone strike in the US.
~I'm honestly surprised (and very thankful) this hasn't happened yet.

Well, yesterday TFG openly declared "we" are in a war now. I hate to say it, but I'm fearful that a bunch of his followers are not going to take that as a metaphor.
posted by Thorzdad at 12:21 PM on June 11, 2023 [11 favorites]

Honestly don’t see the point of weapon using drones when an AR-15 has legal and social protection. It seems more akin to bomb building than the way most American terrorists like to go about things.
posted by Artw at 1:29 PM on June 11, 2023 [2 favorites]

"'No Way to Prevent This,' Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens" now has its own Wikipedia page.
posted by happyinmotion at 1:32 PM on June 11, 2023 [25 favorites]

That title is going to be cited by the 'Christians are being persecuted' crowd
posted by LindsayIrene at 2:57 PM on June 11, 2023 [17 favorites]

people have been committing violence in houses of worship for 10,000 years.

for example most medieval churches look like a pill box.
posted by clavdivs at 3:17 PM on June 11, 2023 [2 favorites]

Trying to get my head around how an article from an esteemed news organization that has actual paid professional editors could have a subhead saying, “Mosques and synagogues have become targets too.”
posted by sjswitzer at 3:17 PM on June 11, 2023 [27 favorites]

This is so sick. But nothing can surprise me about gun culture (or the healthcare system) in the US anymore.

That said, since you mentioned medieval churches clavdius, here, most old churches have a little side building called the weapons-house, where you had to leave your weapons before entering the actual church. These were added in the late Middle Ages, and not only for weaponry. But the name says it must have been an issue.
posted by mumimor at 3:53 PM on June 11, 2023 [4 favorites]

This is an incoherent, nonsense article with a ridiculous headline. In any case, with so many of these shootings happening in the US, the only surprise would be if some were not happening in churches.
posted by dg at 4:23 PM on June 11, 2023 [5 favorites]

SEE!
Interesting. I was just shelf snapping. the 11th century church at Norwich for example shows how the naves are lengthened probably a dual purpose of a larger congregation and gathering place in case of emergency. if you look at the seal of Chichester cathedral from the 12th century it just looks like a fortification with crosses and stars. Venançon in the Alpes is quite the stronghold. I've only seen one mega church that was in Florida I believe it had its own airstrip and television broadcasting ability and capacity to seat 5,000 people.
guard posts.
posted by clavdivs at 4:33 PM on June 11, 2023 [4 favorites]

I think a whole lot about how military equipment, like the AR15, moved into widespread civilian use in the US.

I think about that a lot too, but the more I have the more honestly weird the issue seems. In particular: following WWII, the US dropped millions of military-surplus firearms onto the civilian market at absolute bargain-basement prices. For decades, you could get a de facto government-subsidized military-grade rifle, carbine, or pistol shipped to your house via mail, for the inflation-adjusted equivalent of a few hundred bucks and some paperwork validating that you were a member of a gun club and could hit a target. And these were modern, reliable, semi-automatic, magazine-fed, designed-for-shooting-humans military firearms.

In retrospect it's a hell of a natural experiment, and doesn't seem to have a historical precedent in terms of scale or volume. (The program and policy dated to WWI, but the sheer quantity of firearms produced during WWII that eventually went onto the civilian market—and still do, very occasionally—is like nothing before or since that I've found. Maybe there were similar transfers in Warsaw Pact countries?)

And it doesn't seem like it touched off a pattern or cultural phenomenon of mass shootings in that period like we've seen in the last few decades.

I can't escape the conclusion that there's therefore something different about the current phenomenon of mass shootings, and the mere presence of guns doesn't seem to really explain it in terms of causation; of course, firearms are obviously a necessary condition for mass shootings (or any other firearm-related crime), but it doesn't seem like they are sufficient.

Because we've been swimming in military-grade firearms for decades, and we spent a long time doing it when there was much more violent crime and social violence (like just casually beating your wife or kids) generally. And strangely, the mass shootings seemed to have really kicked off during a period when crime rates by basically any other metric were really low. That… is not what I would have expected to happen, to put it mildly. And it seems to suggest that the underlying factors driving mass shootings aren't the same thing that drive normal crimes.

Firearms policy is always likely to be a very hot debate in the US, but sometimes it seems like that heat is obscuring something very weird that happened around the same time that mass shootings became A Thing. And while I have a bunch of guesses, I've never really heard an especially comprehensive or convincing explanation. It may well not exist yet.
posted by Kadin2048 at 8:54 PM on June 11, 2023 [18 favorites]

I would be interested to see called out which denominations and theological tendencies have the most gun violence and assault in church. My bet is that it's the megachurches and the conservative churches - even if their pastors are preaching tolerance of "the stranger" - and not so much the unitarians and hippie churches or even the bland old mainline protestants. My bet is that the congregations create a climate of violence because they have let themselves become violent, hateful people who enjoy carrying guns, who enjoy paranoia, who enjoy confrontation.

Please don’t do this. It’s not ok to say churches, temples, and synagogues that get assaulted ‘create a climate of violence’.
posted by bq at 9:27 PM on June 11, 2023 [3 favorites]

I can't escape the conclusion that there's therefore something different about the current phenomenon of mass shootings, and the mere presence of guns doesn't seem to really explain it in terms of causation; of course, firearms are obviously a necessary condition for mass shootings (or any other firearm-related crime), but it doesn't seem like they are sufficient.

Stuff like mass shootings are contagious. I once read a thing (paper? dissertation? I can't find it now), describing a time where there was a wave of nannies killing the children in their care. It was eventually figured out that these young women were suicidal, and that the spectacle of a public execution seemed like an attractive way to die. When the death penalty was abolished for this crime, the killings stopped immediately. It must have felt counterintuitive at the time, more than a hundred or two hundred years ago, but it worked.
I gather mass shootings are a very similar phenomenon, but I can't see as simple a solution. Sometimes the police succeed in arresting the shooter, rather than killing him, but it must be very difficult, for many reasons.
posted by mumimor at 12:20 AM on June 12, 2023 [3 favorites]

the mere presence of guns doesn't seem to really explain it in terms of causation

There's a culture of "I won't get punished if I kill a person, and I might even get celebrated as a hero, as long as I have a good reason to kill them" -- high powered guns just make it easier.
posted by AzraelBrown at 6:22 AM on June 12, 2023 [4 favorites]

Please don’t do this. It’s not ok to say churches, temples, and synagogues that get assaulted ‘create a climate of violence’.

Far-right churches create a climate of violence. If you preach hated of others, paranoia about GLBTQ people, paranoia about immigrants, paranoia about how sinners inspired by Satan are ruining America; if your preaching supports the NRA, if your preaching supports violence against children and women, if you get up there in the pulpit and preach that maybe we're just going to have to murder the gays, you are creating a climate of violence.

This article tries to blend attacks by right-wingers against synagogues and mosques with auto-attacks by right-wing christians against, eg, their ex-wives peacefully attending church precisely in order to cover for the hateful turn in evangelical culture.

A white nationalist attacking a synagogue is in fact motivated by the climate of hate fostered specifically by right-wing Christians in this country.

What has been the toxic reservoir of hate whenever there's some kind of improvement in this country? Far right churches. Far right churches organized the anti-gay and anti-abortion politics which kept white nationalism alive in the nineties and early 2000s. Far right churches drove charter school and home school movements out of right wing Christian hatred of integration. Every time there's some kind of wave of tolerance or generosity rolling across the land, the bigots and the violent retreat to right-wing churches.

What is not happening is a wave of attacks by, eg, atheists or pagans against right-wing churches. The attacks against right-wing Christians are not coming from other religious traditions or motivated by the desire to stamp out Christianity and Christians. They're coming from inside the house, by people who grew up in abuse-heavy, misogynist, gun-happy subcultures where everyone is not-so-secretly hoping to prime some stochastic terrorism as long as it's against the gays or the immigrants or a progressive government official or a synagogue or a mosque.

You certainly don't need to be a right-wing Christian to be a white nationalist in this country, but every white nationalist is backed up and supported by right-wing Christianity.

~~
And ftr, my dad grew up in one of the only non-right-wing evangelical denominations, one that supported the civil rights movement and was generally liberal in its outlook. That denomination has all but died out - it's certainly gone where he grew up - because being self-satisfied and looking outward to find the dangerous sinners is a much more popular approach.
posted by Frowner at 6:44 AM on June 12, 2023 [20 favorites]

Because we've been swimming in military-grade firearms for decades, and we spent a long time doing it when there was much more violent crime and social violence generally.

It's not really correct to compare old carbines to modern AR-15s. The old rifles are much more difficult to shoot, much heavier, have a much harder 'kick' per shot, much longer, have generally smaller magazines, much lower semi-auto shots per minute, and are much less reliable. Technology is the difference. Manufacturing scale is also dramatically different - about 6m carbines were produced for WWII. Way more AR15s are produced, with over 2.5m flowing into the US per year. So over the 4 years of WWII (the max that were produced) you are comparing 6m to 10million.
posted by The_Vegetables at 8:07 AM on June 12, 2023 [2 favorites]

Not well written, not well researched, bizarre lack of perspective. I assume the article was written to appease the Christian Right.
posted by theora55 at 9:03 AM on June 12, 2023 [4 favorites]

There's a culture of "I won't get punished if I kill a person, and I might even get celebrated as a hero, as long as I have a good reason to kill them" -- high powered guns just make it easier.

A parking lot full of well armed people high on Stand Your Ground and Castle Doctrine is not going to be a safe place to be in.
posted by Artw at 11:29 AM on June 12, 2023 [2 favorites]

Former Justice John Paul Stevens:

For over 200 years after the adoption of the Second Amendment, it was uniformly understood as not placing any limit on either federal or state authority to enact gun control legislation. In 1939 the Supreme Court unanimously held that Congress could prohibit the possession of a sawed-off shotgun because that weapon had no reasonable relation to the preservation or efficiency of a “well regulated militia.”

During the years when Warren Burger was our chief justice, from 1969 to 1986, no judge, federal or state, as far as I am aware, expressed any doubt as to the limited coverage of that amendment. When organizations like the National Rifle Association disagreed with that position and began their campaign claiming that federal regulation of firearms curtailed Second Amendment rights, Chief Justice Burger publicly characterized the N.R.A. as perpetrating “one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word fraud, on the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime.”
posted by oldnumberseven at 6:56 PM on June 12, 2023 [8 favorites]

I grew up in a middling conservative Lutheran church and I'm sure there were plenty of racists and abusers in the congregation, because racists and abusers are everywhere, but as anodyne and useless as most of the preaching was, it did at least prompt people to look inward at their thoughts and behavior instead of outward at all those other sinners ruining things.

I also grew up in such a church (LCMS), but by the time they had a guest pastor making a “joke” in the middle of a sermon about how great it would be if then-President Clinton were to be assassinated, and being met with hearty laughter rather than boos from most of my fellow congregants, I figured that church had already gone the way of the dodo.

I stopped attending regularly around that time, and after the *regular* pastor made a thinly-veiled Vince Foster reference during another sermon (which prompted one middle-aged women to literally shout “He was murdered!” from the pews), I stopped attending, period.

Nowadays the synod allows people like this to tweet in their name without consequence, so I don’t imagine I’m going back there anytime soon.
posted by non canadian guy at 1:47 PM on June 13, 2023