Holy crap, does America ever have a galactic hard-on for gun. It’s not enough that the country owns more guns than actual people there, now the government wants people to have more, which is why there is a new grant that Churches can apply for if they wish to get free money to pay for armed security guards. I wish I was making this up.
Unfortunately, houses of worship can often be soft targets. By their nature, these locations are easily accessible to large numbers of people and have limited security measures in place, which can make them vulnerable to an attack. With the Houses of Worship Security Grant, eligible organizations can hire trained security professionals who, in an emergency, can mitigate or prevent a tragedy.
What problem are they trying to solve? Mass shootings? Forget about trying to reform their gun laws: instead, the public will need to pay out of pocket so that paranoid churches can have bodyguards. In 2024, there have already been over 200 mass shootings, but only one of them was at a church, which happens to be owned by one of the richest pastors in America: Joel Osteen. This has precipitated churches to ask for volunteers to arm themselves and stand guard, despite the fact that random gun violence is the rarity. Let’s not forget that the megachurch shooter had already made multiple threats before she acted. The fact that she was “taken down” by two off duty officers was all people needed to hear: the solution is more guns.
Keep in mind that the vast majority of these shootings appear to be at parks, birthday parties, and in people’s homes. Does that mean that every house party now needs government subsidies to hire bodyguards for the event? Surely this should instead be a wakeup call for Americans. Even your houses of worship aren’t safe, and the millions of dollars they want to spend to put a sleepy, poorly trained guard on watch is the equivalent of putting a band-aid on an arterial wound. The solution is simple: stop selling guns to mentally unstable people, and then maybe you won’t have so many dead from the world’s most preventable tragedy.
