Do you/would you carry a concealed firearm to Mass?

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SanRafael1102 said:
Question: if you’re in a bigger parish, how do you know that Johnny Gun-carrier isn’t one of those crazies?
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Answer: “crazies”/criminals aren’t going to follow the law anyway. Whether carrying a concealed firearm in a given church is legal or not will have absolutely no bearing on if they arm themselves. Does that make sense? Conversely, law-abiding citizens who might just be able to save some lives with the prudent use of their firearm won’t be able to because they follow the law and they won’t have brought one into the church. Does that make sense?
SanRafael1102 said:
I keep reading one side arguing about whether gun control is the answer, but they keep agreeing about the mental health part (or at least they did before Trump started saying it). Why, for goodness’ sake, do we actually agree on something and not do anything about it?
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First, there are obviously two sides arguing about gun control – else there wouldn’t be an argument. You ask a highly salient about mental health. Mental health (both those that are non-treated and those dangerously doped to the gills) is indeed a HUGE reason for the increase in gun-related violence. Why isn’t gun control a lot more visible? Because doing something about it is extremely difficult, extremely expensive and it takes a long time.

Really digging into the real issues (mental health, drugs, gangs, poverty, etc.) offers no expedient political photo ops. It doesn’t allow politicians to divide and corral voters. That’s why the focus is on “gun control.”
 
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I do not carry a firearm to Mass, but I DO have an emergency plan to personally go after the shooter and lift him up and carry him outside.

If he happens to be focused on shooting someone else in a different direction, I may have three or four seconds to get to him, knock him down or pick him up.
 
Probably depends on where you are. I go to Mass at a time when an on-duty policeman attends, fully armed. Nobody thinks anything about it. Probably people would think it odd if I carried and anybody saw it. Not threatening, just odd because virtually everybody in the parish has guns, it being a semi-rural parish.

This reminds me when I was a little kid, being trained to be an altar boy. The nuns told us how the original servers were grown men and part of their purpose was to protect the priest and the Eucharist against potential pagan attackers. They told us that was a thing from times past, but it was still our duty if it came to it.

Being young and impressionable, I used to scan the congregation for anybody who looked suspicious. I was pretty suspicious of one particular middle-aged parishioner because he just looked sort of threatening. I worked out in my mind how I would tackle him if he entered the sanctuary. But he never did. 🙂
 
Wednesday, my wife was with a group of women at their annual luncheon; they were all protestant and they acknowledged that their minister had hired an armed bodyguard to keep an eye on things at their Sunday service.
 
Duesenberg said:
Answer: “crazies”/criminals aren’t going to follow the law anyway. Whether carrying a concealed firearm in a given church is legal or not will have absolutely no bearing on if they arm themselves. Does that make sense?
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We may well label these gunmen as crazy, but I don’t think that means they are stupid. If a crazy gunman decided to shoot up a church, he could take some time to gain knowledge of that church, and work out how to inflict maximum damage. Only he knows what he is going to do and he will have the advantage of surprise. He will only strike when he feels the odds are in his favour. He may well factor in his own death as a price worth paying.
 
Eric_Hyom said:
We may well label these gunmen as crazy, but I don’t think that means they are stupid. If a crazy gunman decided to shoot up a church, he could take some time to gain knowledge of that church, and work out how to inflict maximum damage. Only he knows what he is going to do and he will have the advantage of surprise. He will only strike when he feels the odds are in his favour. He may well factor in his own death as a price worth paying.
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I wasn’t addressing what you responded to.

One thing is quite possible though. If the criminal took time to gain knowledge of the specific church, they might well choose another if they found that many carried concealed firearms…
 
Duesenberg said:
People are murdered/attacked daily in AU.
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Lets compare murder rates:

Australia: 10 per million.
US: 42 per million.

We have a similar number of assaults.
We have less robberies.

We do have more burglaries (double) and more rapes (5%). That I’ll grant. Murder is worse than both.

You can support whatever laws you want in your own country. Don’t lie and suggest that we’re somehow ‘less safe’ because of our gun laws however. It is simply not true.
 
CatholicSheila said:
Lets compare murder rates:

Australia: 10 per million.

US: 42 per million.

We have a similar number of assaults.

We have less robberies.

We do have more burglaries (double) and more rapes (5%). That I’ll grant. Murder is worse than both.

You can support whatever laws you want in your own country. Don’t lie and suggest that we’re somehow ‘less safe’ because of our gun laws however. It is simply not true.
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Poppycock.

“It is a common fantasy that gun bans make society safer. In 2002 – five years after enacting its gun ban – the Australian Bureau of Criminology acknowledged there is no correlation between gun control and the use of firearms in violent crime. In fact, the percent of murders committed with a firearm was the highest it had ever been in 2006 (16.3 percent), says the D.C. Examiner…”

AUSTRALIA: MORE VIOLENT CRIME DESPITE GUN BAN
 
Duesenberg said:
It’s remarkable how quickly the US’s crime rate drops when you eliminate: Chicago, NYC, Detroit, St. Louis, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Houston, Los Angeles, Seattle and Camden, NJ from the rest of the country.
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If you are going to remove the highest crime areas in the US, then you also need to remove the highest crime areas in the country you’re comparing too.

“Our best areas are safer than your worse areas” isn’t going to convince anyone.
 
Duesenberg said:
Poppycock.
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The stats are correct. They’re not “poppycock” at all.

I don’t trust any site from the US talking about Australian gun laws. It doesn’t matter if it is a left wing or a ring wing organisation. They’re always twisting the situation.
 
Eric_Hyom said:
If we obeyed the greatest commandments, there would be no shootings.
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Problem is people do lots of things they shouldn’t. So society needs to adjust in order to survive.
RandomAlias said:
And he comments on it, to try to put down others for liking posts he doesn’t. It’s not the first time he’s done it.
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It’s always good to keep people up to date on the conversation. I’d hate for people to just like what they agree with and then for the hills just so they can remain in an echo chamber. Tagging other users in the conversation ensures that happens less.
 
CatholicSheila said:
I don’t trust any site from the US talking about Australian gun laws. It doesn’t matter if it is a left wing or a ring wing organisation. They’re always twisting the situation.
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:roll_eyes:

I don’t suppose you have any specific examples?
 
I’ve noticed that many people from other countries have this impression that the US is the Wild West and loads of people carry to keep everyone honest. This is simply not the case. Very few people carry, and the average American will go their entire lives never being in a situation where they will need or want a handgun to defend themselves. Unfortunately the crazies have really come out of the woodwork the last 5-10yrs, especially this year, shooting up crowds of innocent people for their own twisted reasons, giving the impression that we are all in danger of an imminent mass murder.

I am an American and trust me, we all feel perfectly safe going about our lives without a handgun on our person and don’t feel like we are playing Russian Roulette. Now if you fancy yourself the hero type and want to be prepared for that absolute worst case scenario, feel free. Just don’t expect a shootout at high noon every Thursday.
 
I especially cringe at those “fender bender shootout” fantasies of some…
 
I have an Aunt who grew up in East Germany. Her first visit to America, she was surprised to see that no one was armed. One day she was out and about and it began to rain, and another lady offered her umbrella to her. She broke down and cried because she had been told her whole life that Americans were horrible selfish people and every stranger she met had been nothing but kind and generous to her. Mind you this was about 17yrs after the wall was knocked down. People will believe the silliest things about others based on movies and media.
 
Much of the world have GREAT envy for the USofA, despite their strong protestations. The United States has been blessed by God in very special ways.
 
Gun Control in Australia - Watch and Weep
  1. If he had a firearm, the intruder would also have had a firearm and the intruder I’m sure would have drawn his firearm faster and shot before that guy.
  2. The Gun Control argument is not supposed to be an argument for a reduction of crime, but rather to stop massacres, and since we have not had a massacre since, I think they have worked in that regard, there are problems with it though and it has not worked in many other regards, but in this regard they did work.
A lot of the guns I could see getting destroyed in that video are guns that someone can’t commit a massacre with, so I think they went too far with their restrictions.

And like I mentioned before, If we didn’t have the USA at our back, I think our tough gun laws would severely cripple our national security.

If it were up to me, I would have a list of what guns were favored in massacres and I would put restrictions on just those when a massacre takes place. Considering the USA’s second amendment, I would look at safety features like finger print locking mechanisms.

There is also no way I would trust someone like Clinton to put appropriate restrictions on guns though.

I hope this has helped

God Bless You

Thank you for reading.
 
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SuperLuigi said:
I don’t suppose you have any specific examples?
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Statistics can be easily manipulated. When people start touting statistics I think we should all take it with a grain of salt, the Democrats tout out statistics claiming that Gun Control is irrefutably the best thing too.

God Bless You

Thank you for reading.
 
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