Officers Providing Security for Faith-based venues / House of worship, Churches, Temples or Synagogue
The shooting at First Baptist Church of Sutherland Springs continues to shock the nation. As stories of the victims begin to filter out into the news, our heartbreak is compounded by the contrast between their faith and the violence, hate, and cowardice of the act. Sunday's shooting at a Texas church underscored the need for security and vigilance even in houses or worship, a task that congregations across the nation have been taking seriously already . Such efforts seem the best hope for countering the long history of violence in the pews. The Center for Homicide Research found 137 shootings in Christian churches between 1980 and 2005. Among those are the June 2015 killings at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina; a 2012 shooting at a Sikh temple near Milwaukee and civil rights-era church violence such as the 1963 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama. freedoms.”...