A response to a perceived threat of violent attack on churches includes arming the congregation.
This is crazy.
There are about 400,000 churches in the U.S.
There is less than one fatal attack on churches per year.
That means your chances of being at church during a fatal attack are (approximately) less than one in 20 million.
Your chance of winning a pick-6 from 49 numbers lottery is about 1 in 14 million.
If you are a 45 year old man, you have approximately a one in a thousand chance of dying from something next year. Twenty thousand times more likely than to be at church when someone (most likely not you) dies from an armed attack.
Being killed at church is in the noise when it comes to risk. But we tend to worry about exotic, highly improbable events in spite of what the math tells us.
I don't have the numbers, but I'm guessing about a hundred people will die in church this year from a heart attack. Instead of arming the congregants, we should stop high-fat potluck (no, I love it!) and start cardio programs.
When I saw this headline, I thought this was mischaracterizing an issue in a similar manner to how proposals to let qualified teachers carry concealed weapons has been described as "arming teachers." But it seems that in this case "arming the congregation" is actually an apt description.
ReplyDeleteI agree that this is an irrational response. Thanks to the media, people vastly overestimate their odds of being involved in a mass shooting. The left tends to react by trying to restrict legal gun ownership, while the right tends to try to promote "more good guys with guns".
Personally, I think there's nothing wrong with people who habitually carry a concealed weapon also carrying it at church. But for a church to pay for this type of training for its congregants seems a bit much.
(That being said, the article focuses on a church in Texas. There's a good chance that a significant number of church members are already packing, so this could be seen as a way to ensure that the people who are already armed act appropriately, rather than increasing the number of guns in the congregation.)