More thoughts on Church Carry

Throwaway, for reasons...Just wanted to offer one more perspective and encourage a bit more discussion on the Church Carry debates, since there's been a few threads about that recently.First, the need: The Charleston Church shooting should be enough to show need for some level of church security. Whether that's formal security, or just guys/gals wanting to conceal carry for themselves.At my church, we've had some custody battles, ugly divorces, and angry boyfriends who've not taken a liking to us when we've tried to help out some women in our church. The church often will get blamed for things like breaking up families, when in reality what we're doing is trying help and protect battered women. That makes us a target for angry ex's. Also, some people are just mentally unstable (see Charleston Church shooting).There are more examples, but those are the big ones.Second, our "security" team: In this previous thread, the idea of having volunteer security was pretty well shot down. I agree with a lot of what was said in that thread, but wanted to offer some perspective on what our church does. Feel free to comment/critique.What we have is a small team of volunteers who care about the safety of our body. We actually like to call it our "safety team", since we have trained medics and nurses on the team in case of a medical emergency. We take the roll seriously, but no one is under the delusion that we are somehow trained security or the police. We are a very small church, and we don't have the funds to pay for private security. If there was a cheap way to get an off duty officer to hang out at the building, we would certainly consider that. We do however have multiple ex-military guys, including a Green Beret and a Navy SEAL. Again, we're not looking to play cops and robbers, but we've gotten a lot of advice and training from these guys. They've been very helpful.The roll of the team is primarily to keep an eye out. If something looks like it's going down, our goal is to deescalate. If things start getting heated, we'll call the police. That's it. Most of our job is keeping an eye on the hallways that lead to the kids classrooms, and if there's someone wandering around, we ask if we can help them. We take protecting our kids extremely seriously. Also, we keep an eye on the front doors for people wandering in late. We'll offer to help them find a seat, get some coffee, etc. However, if someone wanders in looking for trouble, we call the cops.Here's where the CCW part comes in. A few of us choose to carry. Most of us would be carrying regardless, and has little to do with being on the safety team. If some deranged person decides to start waving/shooting a gun around, then there are people on the team with the ability to fire back. That's it. We're not trying to play Commando or Paul Blart. We're just keeping an eye on things, ready to call the police, but potentially fire back if the need absolutely arose. via /r/CCW http://ift.tt/2rdZFiC