Have you met Howard? (In training?) Guns and the timid don’t mix.

The above video is illustrative of how criminals deal with those who have guns but are not adept at using them or psychologically or spiritually ready to use such stop-the-threat-tools. Those criminals will wipe the floor with you, and, unless someone else stops them as in the video above, they’ll just take your gun and shoot you with it.

This priest sometimes writes posts about guns on this blog. This could give people who are NOT ready to use guns the impression that they can do it: “If Father George can do it, we can too!” Why is that? Because I’m a priest?

I wrote about what the Department of Homeland Security says about this:

DHS Active Shooter Preparedness Program for churches

Added to that was the following comment of mine. In case someone missed it I’ll put it up again here. It’s desperately important for everyone’s safety:

I would NOT like to see parishioners participating in this program who have a concealed carry permit but who, other than their first qualification have never fired their stop-the-threat-tool, or have only rarely done so. I can see it now: fumbling around in a purse or ultra-complicated safety holster and with all sorts of unnecessary safeties employed on the gun itself, trying to figure out how to use for the first time red-dot sights or lasers with all their switches or not (depending), with batteries being useful or dead, with zero scenario training, zero indicator awareness, zero situational awareness, and therefore little possibility of recognizing and isolating a target and therefore being caught off guard with a lack of confidence and therefore way too much hesitation and liability to foggy confusion, and therefore with an increased possibility of causing friendly fire casualties.

I’m afraid someone is going to shoot their own foot.

Or even worse, meet Howard and not have the foggiest idea of how to deal with him.