This morning, an unidentified gunman entered a missionary training center in Arvada, Colorado, and shot four people. Two died. The gunman fled and was not immediately identified.
Later today, an unidentified gunman entered a megachurch in Colorado Springs, Colorado, with a powerful weapon and opened fire during services. He was shot dead. Casualty figures from the New Life Church (the same church founded by the disgraced Rev. Ted Haggard) are not yet available.
Prayer is not my way, but that doesn’t stop my heart from going out to the families of the victims of these acts of senseless violence. I don’t share the religious convictions of the people who were gathered, but they were gathered in a sense of peace and community and out of a sincere desire to do good. These are innocents in the truest sense of the word. The horror of someone opening fire in a megachurch like that — the main auditorium hall of that church seats something like 5,000 people at a time — is difficult to imagine.
It’s not clear whether the gunman from both incidents is the same person. The missionary facility and the church are not obviously related, although they are only about seventy miles apart, so the gunman from Arvada could easily have left the scene of that crime and drove to Springs to commit the second act. But that’s only a possibility; there is no direct evidence that the two crimes are related.
The temptation is that to think that it’s too easy for crazed individuals to get their hands on powerful weapons, so they should be banned or severely restricted. But that wouldn’t do any good — crazed individuals are the ones most motivated to get these kinds of weapons and so they’ll be the last ones to lose access to them. And, someone in the New Life Church was packing, and so was able to return fire — probably saving tens if not hundreds of lives.
Deterrence also seems like an ineffective way to prevent crimes like this. At least the gunman who went to the megachurch in Colorado Springs probably did not intend on surviving his attack; the idea of criminal punishment would have been no more a factor to him than the weather in Ho Chi Minh City next week. What could possibly have stopped the Omaha mall shooter?
One wonders what warning signs there were. Someone undoubtedly knew this guy (or these guys) and could have seen this coming. One wonders whether they had reported their concerns to any authorities.
One also wonders why so many crimes, not dissimilar from one another, took place in such a short amount of time, in such close geographical proximity.
If prayer is your way, send your prayers to the families of the victims of these crimes; if you are not a believer, a compassionate thought or two should still be in order.
