It’s harder to count the bodies when they’re still standing.
But, my friends: this is what an Aurora shooting looks like when it’s stopped just in time.
Gwendolyn Crump, communications director for the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department, told LSN that officials responded at 10:45 am to a report of a shooting after a suspect entered the Family Research Council building and was confronted by a security guard in the lobby.
“The suspect opened fire on the security guard, striking the security guard,” said Crump. “The security guard and others assisted in subduing the suspect.” Crump said the guard was listed in stable condition after being taken to a local hospital.
Although police have not confirmed it, Fox News initially reported that the suspect carried multiple weapons and made inflammatory statements about FRC before he was subdued, at which point he told the guard he had shot, “it was not about you, it was what this place stands for.”
I may have had to write a much more horrifying headline this morning if it weren’t for Leo Johnson, the head security guard that took a bullet in the arm but managed to keep this young man (reportedly in his twenties) from entering past the lobby.
Even more disturbing:
Sources also said the gunman may have been carrying a bag from Chick-fil-A, the embattled fast-food restaurant whose president came under fire from gay activists after he said he did not agree with same-sex marriage.
Chick-Fil-A, of course, donates to FRC.
A number of LGBT leaders have expressed sadness and condemned the violence. I’m truly grateful to my brothers and sisters on the other side of the aisle for this swift gesture.
Yet these leaders bear much of the shame for hammering the message that opposing the redefinition of marriage means you “hate” certain people, and pushing the Southern Poverty Law Center’s classification of FRC as a “hate” group to rubberstamp this concept. A quick look around Twitter during the Chick-Fil-A controversy showed prominent LGBT voices, including the groups noted above, attacking pro-family groups in the most hyperbolic terms as hateful, bigoted, and downright evil – for supporting what even President Obama professed a few months ago: that marriage should be between a man and a woman.
The people at Family Research Council hate no one, and are the kindest people you will ever meet. The actual murderous hate that breeds in reaction to fabricated murderous hate is all too real.
“F—k dialog with people who want us dead,” said the “Angry Queers,” one of several gay anarchist vandal groups, who admitted to shattering the windows of a Christian church this spring. It is because of “churches” and Christian society, they said, that transgender people die. The Mormons and Knights of Columbus members threatened with death for supporting Prop 8 received the same message.
There is no doubt that 2012 has proved a year of reckoning, of sorts, for America’s conscience. Amid the advent of visceral hatred for basic Christianity, more visible than ever before in the Chick-Fil-A fiasco, this year also inaugurated the HHS mandate, and with it the start of real religious persecution in the land of the free.
Obviously, we do not yet know with certainty what the motive of this morning’s shooter was, and I have no intention of condemning the currently innocent. Whether or not this scenario was what it seems, it most certainly foreshadows what waits in store for us as our era of trial shudders slowly to life.