Question of the day...

[pyat]

Will bradhicks devote any blog inches to the Baptist megachurch shooting? The one where unarmed parishioners disarmed a gunman after he killed the pastor during a service?

Comments

[warphammer.livejournal.com]

Considering it happened not too far from where he lives... Double yes.

And it's usually more like blog feet with him. :>

[pyat.livejournal.com]

My thinking was that he was very eloquent about the shooting at the Unitarian church, and how it was all about the anti-liberal culture war... but I suspect he'll be silent on this one.

[warphammer.livejournal.com]

Mmm. I hadn't even thought of that - I just recall his response to the last big shooting in the STL area. Good thinking, doubly interesting to see then.

[bradhicks.livejournal.com]

Sorry, wasn't watching Google Blog Search for a couple of weeks, I've been sick.

Weekend before last, I had lunch with one of the Belleville News-Democrat reporters who's covering that story. She tells me that we still know basically nothing about it other than "it happened." Reporters have been all over everything involving this guy's life, the pastor's life, the history of the church, and nobody has even the first clue as to what the guy's motive was. Even now that I'm feeling a bit better, I still can't imagine what to say about it, other than to point out one obvious thing that the reporters have been to polite to say: this was an attempt at suicide-by-cop. When they immobilized him, he didn't try to get lose, he tried to slit his own throat. Why he picked a church for his suicide by cop? Why this church? Where did he know the pastor from, where did the pastor know him from? Nobody knows. Freaky, huh? And yes, all the obvious questions have been asked, and still came up negative.

Which, I guess, just makes it a meaningless random crime. What else is there to say, other than to be a standard ghoulish reporter asking survivors "how do you feel?"

[pyat.livejournal.com]

Well, I was wondering if it would inspire musings on culture war, like the Unitarian church shooting. And I was wondering that as someone who attends a Unitarian church - would you be as eloquent about the bravery of the congregants who, unarmed, took down the gunman, etc.? Though I guess if nothing came out about the motives, etc., well, there you are.

There was a modest amount of snark in the question, but also genuine curiosity.

[pyat.livejournal.com]

Also, I should point out that I wasn't snarking in the sense of "Why isn't that lazy Brad Hicks writing about this?" I only read your LJ every few months - I was unaware of your hiatus. Though your excellent bit today indicates that you're on the mend, I hope!

[bradhicks.livejournal.com]

I'm a little uncomfortable with the question, because I don't see the two crimes as all that comparable. The guy in Tennessee's motive was to attack an entire religion and an entire political party. The guy in Illinois, we don't even know what his motive was, as frustrating as that is. For what it's worth, even the people in the church are not (thankfully) painting this as "oh, look, our denomination of Christianity is under attack!" Even they understand that. Which makes this an apples and oranges kind of thing. If the guy had left a note in his pickup truck or at home or whatever that said that this was his attempt to send a message to right-wing Christian fundamentalists that they're destroying the country and decent American liberals like him weren't going to let them get away with it, then they'd be parallel cases. If we ever do find out that this was the guy's motive, you can reasonably expect me to have something to say about the parallel with the Knoxville situation. But until/unless we ever find out a motive, I'm not going to speculate.

When I did get a chance to chat with that reporter, just to make sure, I rattled off the four or five most obvious motivations I could come up with as to why I guy would shoot up a church, just to make sure they'd checked them all. The shooter had never attended that church before. He did not live in the same town as the pastor while he was a child, so it wasn't pent-up rage over molestation. No relative of his lost a ton of money to or gave a ton of money to the church. He had no visible grudge against Christianity, and no visible politics of his own. Yeah, they checked all of that. We're left with: a mildly crazy guy living with chronic pain seems to have maybe decided to commit suicide-by-cop, and picked a popular church's pastor as the guy to kill in order to make the cops show up and kill him, for no reason we can determine. Unsatisfying at best, isn't it?

[bradhicks.livejournal.com]

Ah. I read your question as snark to the effect of, "oh, look, Brad's outraged when a left-wing church gets shot up, but oddly silent when a right-wing church gets shot up." Apologies if I misunderstood your motive.

[pyat.livejournal.com]

Honestly, that WAS sort of my point. :)

But, only because I'd been talking about it with someone offline, and had gotten worked up about it for a reason that currently escapes me.