Time magazine did a pretty even-handed job of covering the Sunday, June 28, 2009, “bring your gun to church event” at Louisville’s New Bethel-Assemblies of God church. Here are the first two paragraphs:
At 4:55 p.m, five minutes before New Bethel Church’s highly publicized “open-carry service” was set to begin Saturday evening, Lynne Smith walked into the sanctuary with her husband and two friends and took a seat in the front row. Asked what weapon she had with her, Smith had to stop and think about which gun she’d brought but finally said it was a Beretta .25 automatic. Her husband, Michael Houston, wore a Browning .380 in a holster. Their friends, Ted and Barbara Grant, were also carrying weapons. Barbara, wearing a NYPD baseball cap, had a Ruger .38 revolver, while Ted, who wore a ball cap with the National Rifle Association logo on the side and “Silver Bullet Brigade” on the front, had a Taurus .40 caliber automatic.
The congregating arsenal was all perfectly legal as well as perfectly acceptable to the leaders of New Bethel, an Assemblies of God church in Louisville, Kentucky, that invited people to bring their unloaded guns to this first-ever event.
The Associated Press reported it this way:
LOUISVILLE, Ky. – A gun-toting Kentucky pastor says it’s OK to bring weapons to church — at least for one day.
Ken Pagano asked his flock to bring their unloaded handguns — in holsters — to New Bethel Church in Louisville for a celebration of the Second Amendment of the U.S. Consitution that guarantees the right to bear arms.
Then there’s Richard Aborn, a crazy Brady Campaign former official who posted a pile of crap on Huffington Post, then had his head handed to him by commentors:
Did you see the story in today’s New York Times about a pastor who is holding a “bring your gun to church day”? Outrageous. But the real thrust of the article was the growing power of the National Rifle Association, which the article noted is “widely considered the country’s most powerful lobby.”
I know something about the mythical “power” of the NRA. I took them on — and beat them — twice in the 1990s as the president of Jim and Sarah Brady’s Handgun Control, Inc (now the Brady Campaign). With a lot of hard work and organizing, we passed the Brady Bill, which requires background checks before someone can buy a handgun, and the assault weapons ban (which has now lapsed).
