Reformed Baptist theologian Wayne Grudem speaks on the Bible and the right of self-defense.
About Wayne Grudem:
Grudem holds a BA from Harvard University, a Master of Divinity from Westminster Theological Seminary, and a PhD from the University of Cambridge. In 2001, Grudem became Research Professor of Bible and Theology at Phoenix Seminary. Prior to that, he had taught for 20 years at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, where he was chairman of the department of Biblical and Systematic Theology.
Grudem served on the committee overseeing the English Standard Version translation of the Bible, and in 1999 he was the president of the Evangelical Theological Society. He is a co-founder and past president of the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood. He is the author of, among other books, Systematic Theology: An Introduction to Biblical Doctrine, which advocates a Calvinistic soteriology, the verbal plenary inspiration and inerrancy of the Bible, the body-soul dichotomy in the nature of man, and the complementarian (rather than egalitarian) view of gender equality.
I often struggle to explain to my Canadian and British friends what the second amendment is, and why Americans insist on being able to legally own firearms. I normally make the argument from academic studies to show that banning guns leads to more violent crime, while concealed carry laws reduce violent crime. But sometimes, it’s nice to illustrate the statistics with a case study.
MSN.com reports on a story of an attempted mass-shooting that occurred on the weekend at a church:
A gunman has killed one person and critically injured another inside a packed Texas church during a livestreamed service before he was shot dead by an armed member of the congregation.
[…]Video of the livestream shows a person wearing a large coat, with the hood covering his head, standing up and walking over toward another man at the back of the room.
The shooter appears to say something to the man, prompting him to point in a direction at the back of the church.
In a matter of seconds, the shooter whips out what appears to be a shotgun and fires two rounds.
One of the shots hits a man who stood up in the back of the church and the other shot hits the man the victim had spoken too.
After the second shot was fired, the gunman attempted to flee the scene before he was shot by an armed member of the congregation.
[…]According to one member of the church, the victim had spoken to one of the deacons in the back of the church before he opened fire.
The member wrote on Facebook that another deacon ‘who is a concealed carry instruction, and retired law enforcement officer, shot the guy before he could fire a third time!’
That deacon has not been identified but according to CBS 11, he is actually a former FBI agent and part of the church’s security.
Here’s some video coverage from the far-left CBS News:
Here is what Joe Biden, leading Democrat presidential candidate, has to offer the Christians in that church:
Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden attacked Texas Governor Greg Abbott earlier this year for signing a bill into law that allowed lawful gun owners to carry firearms in places of worship, repeatedly calling Abbott’s decision “irrational.”
[…]“Dealing with firearms, it is irrational, with all due respect to the governor of Texas, irrational what they are doing,” Biden told reporters on September 2. “On the very day you see a mass shooting … and we’re talking about loosening access to have guns, to be able to take them into places of worship, it’s just absolutely irrational. It’s totally irrational.”
[…]Biden continued, saying that any weapon that was capable of carrying “magazines that can hold multiple bullets” should be banned – which is nearly all firearms.
[…]Later asked if there could be any compromises with Republicans on the issue, Biden responded, “None. None on this. I think this is no compromise. This is one we have to just push, and push, and push, and push, and push.”
Biden has armed security everywhere he goes. He just doesn’t want you to have armed security.
Just picture in your mind what would have happened in that church if Joe Biden had prevented law-abiding church members from carrying weapons to defend themselves. That is the goal of every Democrat – they want to disarm law-abiding people, and leave them at the mercy of criminals who don’t obey gun laws.
I want to link to this column from famous black economist Thomas Sowell to help people understand how frequently law-abiding Americans use legally-owned firearms to prevent crimes.
He writes:
We all know that guns can cost lives because the media repeat this message endlessly, as if we could not figure it out for ourselves. But even someone who reads newspapers regularly and watches numerous television newscasts may never learn that guns also save lives — much less see any hard facts comparing how many lives are lost and how many are saved.
But that trade-off is the real issue — not the Second Amendment or the National Rifle Association, which so many in the media obsess about. If guns cost more lives than they save, we can always repeal the Second Amendment. But if guns save more lives than they cost, we need to know that, instead of spending time demonizing the National Rifle Association.
The defensive use of guns is usually either not discussed at all in the media or else is depicted as if it means bullets flying in all directions, like the gunfight at the O.K. Corral. But most defensive uses of guns do not involve actually pulling the trigger.
If someone comes at you with a knife and you point a gun at him, he is very unlikely to keep coming and far more likely to head in the other direction, perhaps in some haste, if he has a brain in his head. Only if he is an idiot are you likely to have to pull the trigger — and if an idiot with a knife is coming after you, you had better have a trigger to pull.
Surveys of American gun owners have found that 4 to 6 percent reported using a gun in self-defense within the previous five years. That is not a very high percentage but, in a country with 300 million people, that works out to hundreds of thousands of defensive uses of guns per year.
Yet we almost never hear about these hundreds of thousands of defensive uses of guns from the media, which will report the killing of a dozen people endlessly around the clock. The murder of a dozen innocent people is unquestionably a human tragedy. But that is no excuse for reacting blindly by preventing hundreds of thousands of other people from defending themselves against meeting the same fate.
Although most defensive uses of guns do not involve actually shooting, nevertheless, the total number of criminals killed by armed private citizens runs into the thousands per year.
Whenever I get into discussions about gun control, I always mention two academic studies by John R. Lott and Joyce Lee Malcolm.
The book by economist John Lott compares the crime rates of all U.S. states that have enacted concealed carry laws, and concludes that violent crime rates dropped after law-abiding citizens were allowed to carry legally-owned firearms. Dr. Malcolm’s Harvard study found that after the UK banned guns, violent crime rates doubled in four years.
An Ohio man with a concealed carry permit was presented Monday with a Citizens Award of Valor for coming to the aid of police officer under attack last year.
Cpl. Michael Wheeler of Ohio’s Mount Vernon Police Department told Inside Edition that he owes his life to Dylan DeBoard, the man who saved him.
“Every time I see him, I let him know how much I appreciate what he did,” he said.
According to Wheeler, he was attacked last year by a homeless man who later admitted to being high on crystal meth. While he was attempting to subdue his attacker, the man knocked Wheeler to his back and straddled him. He ripped away his microphone and reached for his gun.
Wheeler said that in his 14-year career he’s “never been in that situation before.”
“I’ve always been able to take control of a situation,” he said.
According to Wheeler, all of a sudden, the man stopped struggling with him. He looked up to see a man with a gun.
“I didn’t know if he was pointing at me or [the attacker],” Wheeler said.
Then the man with the gun — DeBoard — announced that he was a concealed carry holder. Wheeler was then able to use his attacker’s hesitation to flip him over and handcuff him.
The officer said he is thankful for the opportunity to honor DeBoard for his actions. “I wish a lot more of society would do what he did,” he added. “There were people standing around, but they were just watching. I kept wondering why people didn’t do anything.”
I think the reason why the other bystanders were not doing anything is because they were not armed, they were not trained to use a firearm, and they did not have moral clarity. We have lost moral clarity because we surround ourselves with nonsense on television where celebrity is more important than heroic character.
First, let’s talk about the training factor. To get a concealed carry permit in Ohio, you have to complete a course on handgun safety, pass a written test and you also have to pass a marksmanship test. This is because the evaluators do not want you to bring disrepute on legal firearm ownership because you aren’t qualified to use the tool you are carrying responsibly. The safety and accuracy test is quite difficult, depending on the state – you might be asked to hit 4″ targets at 5, 10 and 15 yards, for example, with 20 out of 25 rounds fired. That’s not easy!
Previously, I blogged about a report that showed that concealed-carry permit holders commit crimes at a lower rate than police officers. This is because the people who get these permits are careful not to do anything to lose them. They want to be safe, but they are also there to watch out for others. It is very important that we recognize that there are some people in our society who make poor choices (e.g. – drug use), and that we need the ability to defend ourselves and others from them.
WINTERY KNIGHT 