It’s a new year, and we are several days removed from the events that took place over the last weekend of the year in two houses of worship, located in two distinctly different locales in the United States. And there are teachable moments for everyone, not just the pro civil rights and personal defense advocates among us.
On the last Sunday of the year a felon illegally possessing a short barreled shotgun killed two people in a church in Texas before he himself was put down by a single shot to the head from an armed parishioner who was part of the church’s volunteer security team. The entire incident was over in about six seconds, first shot to last.
Shannon Watts, the Bloomberg funded maven of gun control, was quick to tweet that “lax gun laws” in Texas allowed the killer to be armed and when her false narrative was, again, exposed for what it is she got kind of huffy and headed farther down the rabbit hole, while trying to paper over her blather with deflection about who the “hero” actually is.
The lesson here, for the anti-civil rights crowd, seems to be when an event doesn’t fit your agenda you should apply revisionist history and a dab of moral relativism, then keep moving forward. This is based on the concept, coined by former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel that progressives should “never let a crisis go to waste”.
On the flip side, there is a vast trove of learning available to those who believe in the right of self defense, and those who volunteer to protect their houses of worship. John Correia at Active Self Protection, one of the preeminent voices of evidence based research of self defense issues, did an excellent “no politics” analysis of the event the same day. You can find that video on this link.
What got lost, though, in the coverage of the Texas incident, was an event that happened the night before in suburban Rockland County, New York. A Hanukah event being led in a rabbi’s home, got crashed by a man with a machete. Five worshipers were stabbed before the man fled, he was arrested a couple hours later, covered in the blood of his 
victims, in the 32nd Precinct of New York City. The suspect, 32 year old Grafton Thomas, is in the photos shown here after he went into custody. New York’s governor, Andrew Cuomo, noted that this was the latest in more than a dozen incidents of anti-Semitism in the state in just the past few weeks. Terrible, to be sure, but already largely forgotten by all but the victims, witnesses and a criminal justice system that is charged with seeking justice for those victims in the name of all the people.
Without question there has been a steady rise in the number of violent attacks on houses and places of worship, and without regard to denomination it would seem. Synagogues and Christian faiths seem to be the most heavily targeted from what I can gather based on cursory news searches. Just this morning a friend posted photos of a church of his faith that had been attacked during the night by persons unknown using cement blocks to try and gain entry through the front doors. What they might have done once inside, we can only speculate.
Even the State of California gets it, sort of. After an attack on a synagogue in Poway some months back the state earmarked $15 million in grant money for churches to bolster their security. It’s supposed to pay for things like alarm systems, perimeter reinforcements and security guards. Those guards, most likely, will largely be unarmed and will do what the state expects them to do…. observe what happens and call 911 which, if the Texas and New York incidents are any gauge, will largely prevent nothing. That the program was out there for months and that applications for grants had to be received by early December is kind of funny when taken against a press release from the governor’s office a day after the Texas incident announcing that the money will be released to the grantor agency, California Office of Emergency Services, in the new year.
Yup… never let a good crisis go to waste.
The divide between the events in New York and Texas, when viewed through the prism of California’s reaction to them, and the real lesson to be learned is the difference between people who take the natural right of self defense that lives in all of us very seriously, and people for whom personal convictions, geographical and political circumstances, or a combination of the three, prevents them from exercising the natural right to self defense. Regardless of the form that exercise might take. We can strengthen the doors and windows of churches, we can install alarm systems, we can pay to have empty uniforms stand outside the doors and look important but unless, or until, we as a society are willing to set aside politics and treat the opinions of elites who live behind armed men about how the rest of us are supposed to live for what they are… mere opinions, this stuff is going to keep happening.
These recent incidents, like all the attacks on houses of worship that are growing at an alarming rate, illustrate that there is evil in the world, that evil will find a way to manifest itself in asocial behavior. When someone evil acts out asocially with violence, violence in return, and in the moment, is the only answer, and it is the only way to save lives. As Matt Haught of Symtac Consulting, whose opinion I value and respect, noted on his own social media…
“Carry your goddamn guns, people. Carry medical gear. Get training with both. You don’t get to pick the time or the place, so you’d best be ready when the balloon goes up. No one is coming to save you in time. It’s up to you to save yourself. Do the work.”
We can be like Shannon Watts and deny reality in pursuit of a political agenda that advocates subservience to government in the hope it will protect us, or we can stand up and resist evil where ever it shows its face. There are, really, no other options and that is the real lesson to take away from these events.
I have made my choice, and I don’t begrudge anyone theirs.
The View From Out West 
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