Do We Need Unholy Guns in Holy Places?

REUTERS  /Carlo Allegri / RNS
A mother and son stand outside Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., on June 22, 2015, at a makeshift memorial for victims of last week’s mass shooting. Photo courtesy of REUTERS / Carlo Allegri / RNS

I keep thinking about one stubborn fact of my own (limited) experience: I have never attended a Christian church that employed armed security, and I have never visited a Jewish synagogue that was not guarded by armed security. I first noticed it at a prosperous synagogue many years ago in northern Virginia, but since then have seen it elsewhere in the U.S. and abroad. I will never forget when my wife and I visited the historic Great Synagogue in Rome — where a 2-year-old boy had been murdered , and 34 children injured, in a horrific 1982 attack on a Shabbat service. A machine-gun-toting Italian police officer guarded that synagogue the day we were there. Armed security was certainly present in Jerusalem when I visited a synagogue in that city.

People regularly victimized by violence, including in their holy places, will seek to protect themselves. I cannot fault them for it. I fault those whose crimes have evoked this response.

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