Guns, God and ‘get those heads up’

LOS ANGELES — Just as the people in Mariners Church began to pull off their hats, bow their heads and close their eyes to pray, Jimmy Meeks snapped at them.

“Get those heads up!” said the pastor and retired Texas police officer.

Hadn’t he just warned them that closing their eyes made them targets? Sheep in the presence of wolves. “What’s wrong with y’all?”

Their eyes duly peeled, he then led the crowd in a prayer.

“Wherever we are, Father, should the wolf cross our path, give us the wisdom to know what to do with that moment, and give us the power and the courage to act to stop the wolf and protect our sons and daughters.”

Churchgoers, preachers and law enforcement officers from across Southern California had gathered for a church security seminar in Huntington Beach hosted by the California Rifle & Pistol Association, which delivered a warning: Faith alone will not protect you in a house of God.

In the sleek sanctuary of Mariners Church, the mostly male crowd sipped coffee, jotted notes and punctured the air with shouts of “Amen!” and “Hooah!” as a series of out-of-town speakers at the Sheepdog Seminar encouraged them to be the ones who step up and protect others if, God forbid, an attacker comes.

In the months since a gunman killed 26 people at the First Baptist Church in rural Sutherland Springs, Texas, in November, many people of faith have begun questioning how to keep religious institutions safe, said Rick Travis, executive director of the California Rifle & Pistol Association. His organization has been inundated with requests for church security training and probably will be hosting events for the next several years, he said.

“We don’t want people to be afraid,” said Travis, a churchgoer himself. “We want people to be knowledgeable.”

The seminar happened four days before a mass shooting at Santa Fe High School in Texas killed 10 people, mostly students, and reignited the never-ending debate over gun control, the Second Amendment and the place of firearms in American society.

Appearing on Sunday morning news programs, Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick said that teachers need to be armed. He said guns are not the problem.

“Guns stop crimes,” he said on ABC’s “This Week.” “If we take the guns out of society — if you or anyone else thinks that that makes us safer, then I’m sad to say that you’re mistaken. That will just give those that are evil ... (the ability) to put more of us in danger.”

Were the assembled at the church safety event being told to pack heat in the pews? Not always in so many words — and that wasn’t the whole kit and caboodle of advice. But if you’re legally able to carry a gun, the speakers said, it’s best to do it.

“If you do not have an armed presence in your church, you are simply not ready,” Meeks said.

If, at times, the speakers were a little circumspect about telling people to carry a weapon, there was a reason.

California has some of the strictest gun laws in the country — and there is overwhelming support for keeping it that way.

Meeks, a self-deprecating man whose voice ranged from the fiery yell of a preacher at an old-fashioned tent revival to a subdued, choked-up whisper, began the eight-hour, $75 seminar with a playful jab at the Golden State.

“Wow, it’s good to be here,” Meeks said. “It’s not often we get to do a Sheepdog Seminar in a foreign country.”

Many at the seminar said they were disturbed because the Sutherland Springs shooting, the deadliest church massacre in modern American history, seemed to quickly fade from the national news cycle, especially compared to recent school shootings.

Travis said he was alarmed by another incident on the same day as the Sutherland Springs attack. That morning, a man fatally shot his estranged wife and her new boyfriend in the parking lot of St. Alphonsus Church in Fresno before committing suicide. The Fresno shooting was eclipsed by the larger killing in Texas and received scant attention outside the city.

"I thought, wow, how often does this happen in California and we just don’t know about it?” Travis said.

Statistically, it’s exceedingly safe to go to church on Sunday morning, said Dallas Drake, a criminologist at the Center for Homicide Research in Minneapolis. There is such a vast number of American churches that the number of violent incidents is small.

“It’s such an affront to our moral sensibilities that someone would even bring a firearm into a church,” Drake said. “It really crosses a line that we cannot deal with. We don’t want to see a gun in church. This is a place where we come for peace and solace.”

Drake and other researchers compiled a database of church shootings from 1980 to 2005 and found 139 incidents, an average of 5.5 per year. But the annual rate doubled in ensuing years.

In the Huntington Beach sanctuary, Meeks asked the crowd, “Faith without works is what?”

“Dead!” they yelled back, completing the Bible verse with the same words.

“And you might be, too, if you don’t have a plan.”