This hit home even more than it normally would. My sister, who is a Methodist, taught the confirmation class this year at her church. One of the children she taught has a grandfather who attends that Unitarian Chruch in Knoxville. The little girl, her 2 younger sisters and her parents were in that church yesterday. The child my sister taught was to be in that play that was being put on, but hadn’t gone onto the stage yet when the shooting started and the director got all the children out safely and into a church next door. Jane’s (not her real name) grandfather was one of the men who tackled the shooter to the floor. Fortunately none of her family was hurt, physically. Mentally…that’s something else. I met Jane last May when I attended the Methodist church with my sister. (got married in that Methodist church).
It is a tragic event….and my heart goes out to the families of that church who have expericenced a nightmare.

How sad that anyone is so in despair that they believe Unitarians are somehow responsible for their misery. That Unitarians are somehow a threat.
Unitarians who believe that if there is a heaven…all are going. That everyone is saved.
How much pain he must have been in to go into a church with the intent to take the lives of people he apparently did not even know.
How sad!
Peace!

Thanks for your story ps. This congregation, especially the children, will have this in their consciousness forever. So sorry about the gentleman and lady that died because of this sick-minded man. I hope and pray the injured members will heal without problems in the future.
Does Tenn. have the death penalty? Will this give like-minded evil people the boost they need to physically attack liberal minded people, you have to wonder. Hate crimes are the exhibit of hate, another article I read said they will probably classify this as a hate crime.

John Q you are so nice to think of the killers pain. I don’t think he was in pain, he was in hate. A letter fr. the government was found in his apt., his food stamps were going to be cut back, and possibley cut entirely it said. He had done electrical engr. work in the past it also said. There are places to go for help, he chose to rant his hate in a letter about the liberal movement, his words. I think he felt the need to be a hero for the people like him who debase the liberals and every thing they do for the downtrodden in our society.

Ps if you haven’t already done so go into the Knoxville, Tenn. paper; http://www.knoxnews.com, and read the many articles on this. V.G. reporting. The brave man who shielded people has a foster-son who was acting in the show talking about his Dad on a u-tube video.

p.s., your story shows how very interconnected we are. My thoughts and prayers are with the congregation and your extended family.
This man’s “god” was in his arms and it knew only death and destruction. His frustration with life and all of the problems he was facing made him, as the Bible states it, “as good as dead”. So bringing death to others was an act of no consequence for him.
Henrietta,
I do not think that the death penalty would stop anyone like this man. It is neither therapeutic nor palliative – it neither helps nor relieves the pain.
I sincerley hope this guy gets some serious help in prison. As hapened with the Amish school shooting, I expect this congregation will be forgiving and able to help each other.
Guns kill – they is no reason to have them so easily available or accessible. There are two more smears of blood on the NRA emblem today – but no one will notice because so many are there already.

I wonder where this guy got the idea liberal religious views are bad. I sort of doubt he came up with it himself.
It is a tragedy. Praise for the heroic usher and others who acted bravely.

Thank you, jestrfyl, for your thoughts and prayers…it is appreciated more than you know. It is amazing how interconnected we are, as you pointed out.

Sis, thank G-d your extended family is okay.
It’s incredible how small a world it is, really.
And it’s terribly sad and sickening how “liberals” are so demonized that everywhere you read, it’s the liberals’ fault for the world’s troubles, even if the troubles are but of one desperate person.
The man went into the church to kill. It’s premediated murder. How sick is that?!
On the other hand, is it sick, or is it selfishness, meanness, or something like that? There are, sadly, many desperate people in the world. With our proclivity to point fingers, it’s a wonder there aren’t more incidents like this, especially with groups like the NRA harping on about so-called gun “rights”.
I just heard one more news article today about how it’s going to be easier to take a gun with you to work, as long as you keep it in your car and don’t bring it into your office.
Okay, I get that.
NOT.

Thank you, ecl, for your kind words. Means a lot.

Henrietta, I tried the site you suggested, but got the “this page cannot be displayed” message…but thanks for mentioning it.

This from knoxnews.com:
“Inside the house (Adkisson’s), officers found “Liberalism is a Mental Health Disorder” by radio talk show host Michael Savage, “Let Freedom Ring” by talk show host Sean Hannity, and “The O’Reilly Factor,” by television talk show host Bill O’Reilly.”

“I just heard one more news article today about how it’s going to be easier to take a gun with you to work, as long as you keep it in your car and don’t bring it into your office.”
One such workplace that wants and exemption from the rule allowing guns in the workplace is DISNEYLAND! And 1 (stoopid, imnsho) employee decided to test-challenge Disney’s desire to keep the workplace gun-free by actually bringing one to work, in his car.
Disneyland – the “happiest place on earth”? Not anymore apparently. Bang, Bang, you’re an American.

Guns in schools, guns in churches, guns in the workplace.
Has America gone mad?

This summer our denomination had a gigantic youth event in Knoxville. One of our kids went. I just heard from the kids mom that the whole group had been by that very church several times during the event, and that they saw the crime scene tape after the shooting. We had 3,800 kids at a fairly liberal church event. I am extremely thankful that the shooter did not know about this or it might have been much worse.
As to the guns in the workplace decision – Disney has been sued by a (now former) security “cast member” who insisted it was his right (need?) to keep a gun in his car in the parking lot (a fairly secure lot, so little danger there). They said that because they have fireworks on the property that no employee should have a gun in their car – this is one of the stated exemption from the ruling. It will be an interesting test case for this controversial – and IMO foolish – ruling. We do NOT need more guns laying around.

Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, and other Neocons, who claim to be Christians…..see what you have done. You call gay people “faggots” in public and incite Neocon nuts to kill…and you claim to be Christians. Thou Shalt not kill–You are not Christians. You collect millions to spread hatred and violence and laugh while it happens. There is a special level in Dante’s inferno waiting for these modern day, high-tech Purveyors of hatred–2 rings below Hitler’s.
People must be taught bigotry…”they must be carefully taught”(a line from the original South Pacific musical).
Until these people are quieted down by hate crimes legislation, their incitements to violence will be heeded. They are like the racists and hatemongers of the past..the result is an even more overt and sometimes covert “lynching process.”

The brave Christian who stood in front of the shotgun to shield folk is a real hero. “John 15:13 Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends”
I salute you sir.

Indeed, jestrfyl, I too am thankful that the shooter didn’t know about the children being involved with that “liberal” church event. He didn’t seem to be too concerned whether he was shooting adults or children.
cknuck:
Totally agree…the fellow who stood as a shield is indeed a hero.
Obviously no one knows what kind of plea etc. will be done by the shooter but I sincerely hope his lawyer doesn’t claim he was mentally incompetent at the time or he is mentally unable to stand trial. If he can’t stand trial due to that “disability”, put him in a hospital until he becomes “sane” and then take him back to court. There is no way he should ever be out in public again! I think it will be hard to find a non-biased group of people for a jury. BTW, does he have to be called the “alleged shooter because he hasn’t been convicted yet?
Taking a gun to work and leaving it in your car? Now that sure makes NO Sense!

Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, and other Neocons, who claim to be Christians…..see what you have done.
Ditto this. Absolutely agree.
It’s popular and people feel superior when claiming to be a conservative, egotistically equating it with moral superiority.
A poster on Rod Dreher’s column once told me to “get well soon” because he used my bnet “handle” to surmise that I’m a left-wing liberal amoral person, versus his more “couth” midwest background.
I surely do wonder who as a group holds the higher moral ground here…
And having said that, will be the first to say that it’s individuals who take action or who commit crimes.
However, like Tevye, “on the other hand”, you don’t see “liberal” commentators and columnists blathering on inanely as do so many of their conservative counterparts, such as those mentioned in this post, about the need to get rid of, deride, belittle, and otherwise blame those counterparts for all the world’s ills. As a group, we “amoral Godless liberals” seem to be much more accepting of diversity, at least in public and in the newspaper and in magazines and on TV.
Sad, sad, sad how many people shamelessly hold views like that of Ann Coulter, Sean Hannitty, Bill O’Reilly.
And these scoundrels (remmeber, I’m being polite) are laughing all the way to the bank, having incited hate and profited from it.
If anyone is to blame for the demise of respect for others in society, it is the like of this ilk.

cknuck I salute him, too. But Christian? Maybe, maybe not. Liberal, very likely.
So kudos to the brave liberals who tackled that conservative wacko and ruined his dream of killing innocents till the police shot him.

Hmm…isn’t it the conservatives who believe one should take care of himself, while the liberals are more concerned about social programs and taking care of those in need? Interesting that they should link his cut in food stamps with hate for the liberal movement.
I’ve been threatened before for being a lesbian, but I sure never thought I’d be in fear for my life due to being a UU. I’m about to go to the UUA website to learn more about how to support that congregation in any way I can.

“you don’t see “liberal” commentators and columnists blathering on inanely as do so many of their conservative counterparts”
Is that because you don’t listen to them or that you agree with them?
Rev. Al Sharpton, Michael Moore, Rosie O’Donnell, Bill Mahar. All Liberals who have put their foot in their mouth at any given time. I would bet a month’s salary the book on stupid things liberals have said is as thick as stupid things conservatives have said.
This person was a bomb looking for a trigger.

I saw one of the survivors of this shooting interviewed on The Today Show this morning. (Thanks for sharing your personal story, pagansister.) Those of us who are far removed from this tragedy too easily revert to the tedious liberal vs. conservative, left vs. right arguments.
But, as the gentleman interviewed this morning said, the congregations in Knoxville, many of which are part of the same row of churchs, are all coming together to support the Unitarian Church survivors and victims right now.
They don’t have the luxury to engage in the blame game because they realize how arbitrary this sociopaths choice of victims truly was. It could have been any church along that row. He could have been coming after conservative Christians, Muslims, Jews, African-Americans. He was a hater, but he was also a sociopath. He appears to have chosen this church mainly because one of his ex-wives used to be a member.

ck ‘hails the hero’ (as do we all) then makes an assumption the man is a “Christian”.
But ck it is cowardly to ‘hail’ that man and not accept responsibility that your own frequent anti-gay posts contribute to the hatred that caused this tragedy.

Alicia, you may find the liberal vs. conservative, left vs. right arguments “tedious”, but then again, you aren’t the target of the anti-gay rhetoric of the “conservative” “right” zealots.
To those of us that are the targets, these “arguments” are, quite literally and now demonstrably a matter of life and death. It is no “luxury” – the blame sits squarely on the shoulders of the conservative ‘right’ wing haters.
Nor were the killer’s victims “arbitrary” – he was told very specifically whom to hate. It could not have been “any church” – he only hated “liberal” churches. How you ‘think’ he could have been coming after conservative anything is beyond belief. Time for a reality check.

ck,
I too, agree the man who tackled the shooter is a hero. However, even he might chafe a little at being labeled a “Christian”. This was a UNITARian Universalist church. Granted, they admire and honor Jesus, as they do many other wise and even reverent people of many epochs and cultures. But they are an off shoot of and tangent to Christianity. I am very sympathetic to the UU theology (it has been said the UCC can also mean “Unitarians Considering Christ”), so perhaps more sensitive to this than others might be.
In some ways this guy is like a moose that is driven mad by an infection and wanders into a town, charging anything that approaches him. He needed someone to blame and that could not be the very voices that fed him so much irritating pablum (the source of his very infection). I hope he will receive help in prison – to which he will surely go even if he spends a while in a mental ill-health institution for a long while first.

My observation, recovering ex-Pentecostal, is that people on both left and right are more interested in the fight than they are in actually resolving the issues between them.
Speaking only for myself, I think it’s a game of “Monkey in the mirror.” You know, the one where the monkey thinks he is seeing another monkey, so he raises his hackles and snarls and gets very aggressive. But he is really just looking at a mirror image of his very own self. I don’t mean this as a personal insult to anyone who is involved in the back-and-forth discussion. But this is my own opinion as a moderate (I guess that makes me the “monkey in the middle.”)

Way to dodge, Alicia.

Did you mean to be anonymous?

Thanks for correcting me jest and recovering ex thanks for exceeding my expectations of you by calling me a coward, it is my understanding personal references should be excluded from this interaction. Your idea of who is a coward is wrong and I doubt if you would say that to me personally its easy to be brave in type.

The point I was trying to make, anonymous, is that there is something unseemly about trying to use a tragedy such as this as a way of saying “See this is what the hated “Other” wants to do to me and my people.”
When someone shoots up a conservative Christian church (as happened recently, I think, in Colorado) and conservative Christians say, “See, Christians are under attack and being persecuted. It’s only a matter of time before we are hauled off to concentration camps” we rightly laugh at their paranoia and condemn those who exploit a senseless tragedy to further their own ideological viewpoint.
When the Virginia Tech shootings occured, the response of some in the Korean community was “I hope we aren’t targeted because the shooter was Korean.” That was also an unseemly response.
I attend a very liberal church in the District of Columbia. We could easily have been the target of a crazy man like this one. But, if, God forbid, something like this ever happened to us, I would hope we wouldn’t use a tragedy like this to reaffirm our victim status.
Perhaps the Knoxville shooter will say “Ann Coulter made me do it…” which would be the 2008 version of the justly reviled “Twinkie defense.”

Alicia as far as I know no one from that church claimed a victim status. However it’s fair to point out that publicly and repeatedly expressing hatred toward a group of people for whatever reason can cause some of the less stable members of the audience to try to hurt or kill them. I’ve no doubt a few people target abortion providers because they heard in church or somewhere that “abortion is murder” so they conclude providers are murderers and it’s ok to kill them. Repeatedly hearing how liberals are harming America can cause an unstable person to think it’s patriotic to kill one.
This is all common sense. I’m sorry if it tires you to see it expressed but it’s just true. It’s equally bad when someone says Catholics or Jews are bad people. Since we allow free speech those things can be said; we as a society should show how unpopular and wrong it always is to say them.

When do we control speech nnmns, for which group or party or should we look at for a approval rating system: possibly freedom of speech census should run by folk who agree with who? You me who? Alicia is right all but the “laughing rightfully so” part. The common sense or lack of it could be interpreted into nnmns common sense of course all else is wrong if we let it. But thank God we live in a country where we can disagree. This guys actions cannot be blamed on a group maybe lack of one. There are people out there and for whatever reason in their loneliness their minds fail them in decision making somewhere along the way and for the most part we as a country don’t care until they come to this point. The mental health system is broke in more ways than one and the country in its conscience has better things to do. Reagan thought it wise to cut the mental health system; I see the results of his decision everyday in my facilities. Not only do I see them but thanks to the gun promoters and manufacturers they can get a gun as easy as getting a cheese sandwich.

Good morning, and thanks for responding to me, nnmns and cknuck. I think perhaps I still haven’t made my point clear. I abhor what happened at the Unitarian Church in Knoxville.
One of the survivors who was interviewed said it best, IMO, when asked if he thought there was a “why” to the shooting, he said that the choice of victims was utterly impersonal. This man, a professor, quoted a psychologist from Harvard who said “the sociopath next door may seem normal, but he regards other people as objects.”
There is a lot of rude and uncivil speech in public life today, and I don’t like it any better than any of you. The point I’m trying to make is that this guy could as have easily been the crazy alienated Korean student who murdered his fellow students at the University of Virginia. He could have as easily been the crazy man who murdered the Amish schoolchildren. He could have as easily been the guy who killed people at the conservative Christian church in Colorado recently. He was a sociopath.
What I find laughable, and tedious is when the public response by certain groups who feel that they have been singled out is something along the lines of “See, this is proof that it’s open season on conservatives/Christians/liberals/Muslims/Jews/African Americans.” A lot of people use tragedies like this to play the victim card. Perhaps people are just too self-absorbed to do anything else.
Thanks for listening.

“When do we control speech nnmns, for which group or party or should we look at for a approval rating system”
We control speech when someone yells “fire!” falsely in a crowded room. But we should let people know speech is bad whenever they attack a group of people for their race or religion or things about them they have no control over in such a way as to cause them a lot of grief or as to perhaps incite someone to attack them.
Unfortunately, instead, the business community tried to impose a career-ending sentence on a very talented group of ladies for honestly saying they were ashamed of George Bush. So Michael Savage can rip into whatever group of innocent people he wants to and stay on the air and probably get rich while the Dixie Chicks get taken off the air for commenting in passing on the worst president we’ve probably had.

As long as we have uncontrolled (or laughably controlled) gun ownershiop, we are all potential victims or survivors of the sociopath next door. Until we acknowledge that many of these weapons have no use other than offensive violence (in every sense of the word), we will remain in danger, either as targets or as innocents caught in the crossfire.
As to why this church – I wonder if the shooter was merely confused. My own UCC has been the target of some poorly thought out but still loud commentaries and the shooter may have unknowingly confused United Church with Unitarian Church. Though mutually sympathetic, we are not the same. The Media prostitutes – “we’ll say anything to stay on the air” – simply identify targets without doing any meaningful research, beyond carefully editing certain statements without context. There are fools aplenty who take what they hear as truth and twist their lives to match the hollow-points (pun intended) of these motor-mouths.

I agree with your point about gun ownership, jestrfyl. Someone like the Virgina Tech shooter (I said University of Virginia above, my bad) might have done much less damage if he had been unable to obtain guns so easily, and might have been stopped altogether if it weren’t for the “deregulation” of our mental health care system (thanks to Ronald Reagan) but no matter what we do, society will never be able to entirely protect itself from this kind of random violence by sociopaths.
I believe jerks (IMO) like Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter and Michael Savage should be roundly criticized for being jerks. But, do I hold them directly (or even indirectly) for the actions of every sociopath who hates liberals? No way?
I’m reminded of the plot of “The Fisher King.” The shock jock whose words lead to tragedy… things rarely happen with that kind of clarity in the real world. That doesn’t mean we aren’t responsible for the effect our words and actions have on others, but there are limits to that responsiblity. Also, if you’ve ever seen “The Village,” it has a similar them of a community trying to escape from violence and evil only to be brought down by human nature.

Rev. Al Sharpton, Michael Moore, Rosie O’Donnell, Bill Mahar. All Liberals who have put their foot in their mouth at any given time. I would bet a month’s salary the book on stupid things liberals have said is as thick as stupid things conservatives have said.
While this might be true, especially with most of the individuals you chose, I see a difference in the implementation and focus of most loud-mouthed liberals versus most loud-mouthed conservatives.