As you probably know if you’ve been watching the news today, a gunman walked to the pulpit of the First Baptist Church of Maryville in Illinois this morning and shot pastor Fred Winters to death.
Amazing that on right-wing blogs, as is usually the case with these sorts of gruesome shootings, the first thoughts seem to revolve around the issue of gun control and more specifically how if parishioners had been packing heat, this inexplicable murder could somehow have been prevented. Others utilize the incident to spew their kooky, anti-Obama vitriol:
When you ban guns, only the criminals are armed. When a country is disarmed, you can take it easily. Obama knows that, this is why he wants your guns. This illegal alien will not finish the year, America will wake up and remove that usurper from the predidency [sic]. If not, the whole world will be doomed.
Sigh. What a deeply sick society.
Update: Speaking of which, check out the hate mail that PZ Myers received from some irate reader in Indiana.
how if parishioners had been packing heat, this inexplicable murder could somehow have been prevented.
Do you think any of these rubes have ever considered that cops pack heat yet they’re murdered all the time.
Apparently not.
My point was that to have actually prevented the crime from happening these folks “packing heat” would have had to have preemptively killed the stranger without knowing why he was even there.
“This illegal alien”
I see some folks are still banging that weary drum…
On a related note; U.S. gun sales are up.
“The first thing Hitler did was make sure gun ownership was no longer legal,”
- Steve White (Father of Zach!)
Well, you know Red it is the dirty little secret of the political right that when God-fearing, Bush and McCain voting, anti-abortion, anti-gay marriage, pro-capital punishment, and war-of-civilization folks pack heat they develop telepathy.
So Red their arguments are valid.
“The first thing Hitler did was make sure gun ownership was no longer legal,”
- Steve White (Father of Zach!)
This is an urban legend.
Tell that to Mr. White.
I don’t think I’d want to live in a place where the need for “protection” in the form of a concealed firearm was felt to be necessary.
Indeed. I remember after living in New Orleans for six months, when I arrived in Montreal, what a relief it was to be able to walk around at night and feel safe.
Now I live in Chicago, which I think has as many (or at least almost) homocides per year as does all of Canada.
I’m waiting for someone to show us that this was a manifestation of the mental effects of religion.
RT – better not move to Vancouver…
I used to live in Vancouver for a while. Not exactly a great neighbourhood, either. I still couldn’t imagine carrying a gun.
Okhropir — Should be interesting to learn what the motive for the killing was.
…check out the hate mail that PZ Myers received from some irate reader in Indiana.
Fine. I’ll ask the obvious question: how does that unhinged crackpot know that PZ has a “tightly-puckered asshole”?
I don’t think he’s overly concerned with “facts” or other such bothersome things.
I don’t think he’s overly concerned with “facts”…
Fair enough. But what kind of self-respecting homophobe allows his imagination to be so thoroughly captured by the alleged tensility of another man’s sphincter?
Oh, go ahead: “Buggered if I know”…
Ah, I hadn’t really thought of it that way.
“obliberated” his bible.
That lady sounded like she was upset.
I blame the Democrats…
Tomm, read the comments in the spew link, it’s “Democraps”.
Sorry.
Boy, you can trust us CONs & CRAPpers to mess up good snicker.
I, of course, meant to blame the democraps.
Not one person asking why this particular church and why this particular pastor.
There’s always a story behind this stuff.
Not that it makes it right, but you have to wonder what drives a person to do something like this.
The same kind of guy that goes out to beat-up “fags” and then goes home to beat-off to gay porn. Classic latent homosexuality or as Robin Williams says “better latent than never”.