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Thursday, July 8, 2010
Boomer with Attitude / News Lou-zanna OKs guns in church. Nuts or what?
Posted By John Grooms on Thu, Jul 8, 2010 at 1:44 PM
How often has this happened to you? You’re sitting in church on Sunday, and the preacher starts slamming the congregation for not giving enough money to buy him a new car. The more you listen, the more pissed off you get, until finally you think, “I wish to God I could bring my .357 to church, I’d blow this windbag to Kingdom Come.” Well, maybe you should move to Louisiana, where this week, Gov. Bobby Jindal signed a bill to allow people to bring concealed weapons into houses of worship. True, the new law doesn’t say anything about blowing away clergy, but hey, most laws have some unintended consequences, right?
Louisiana state Rep. Henry Burns proposed the bill so that churches in “declining neighborhoods” could protect themselves from potential crimes. The law authorizes those who qualified under state law to carry concealed weapons to bring them to church “as part of a security force,” but also leaves open the possibility of the church allowing weapons for anyone, not just to deter crime. The preacher (or priest, rabbi, imam, or whatever) has to let his/her congregants know that there will be people in the building with weapons, though.
That doesn’t exactly cover bringing a handgun to settle a score with the reverend, but do you really think they’re gonna be checking, aka stepping on your sacred 2nd Amendment rights? Not in Louisiana they won’t! You might even get lucky and have some exec from BP show up and before you know it, you’ve taken revenge for the oil gushing into the Gulf — bonus!
Seriously, the same law also permits churches, mosques, synagogues and what-have-you to "hire off-duty police or security guards to protect congregants," so maybe preachers in Lou-zanna may want to consider that, um, more conventional tactic. And in case you’re thinking that all the bad things Louisiana has suffered in the past few years has driven them gun crazy, we’ll tell you that last year, another bill allowing concealed weapons on college campuses was voted down in the legislature. Phew! It’s good to know they’ve kept their heads about them down there.
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