[NOTE: This post first appeared in 2019. Unfortunately, only the increasing list of mass shooting sites, and the ever-growing roll of victims’ names have changed since.]
If you blog about Quakers long enough, you get asked a lot of questions — including some surprises.
Like the one that came in a few days ago, from the Clerk of a meeting located east of the Mississippi. The Clerk wrote that in an after-meeting discussion, a Friend asked what the Meeting would do if an active shooter appeared there. Did I have any ideas?
Ideas? No.
Paranoia? Plenty.
Five days a week, my grandson who lives nearby goes to a public school. Our town has homicides, too many. But mass shootings? Not in my years here.
Not yet, deo gratias.
So I’m no expert on this subject, and hope never to become one. But such is the sick society we live in, that any of us could become a personal “expert” in it, or a victim, any day. So after pondering the inquiry, I figured I’d do what I could.
The Clerk did have one idea. He vaguely remembered a painting seen in childhood, of a meetinghouse in the woods, in colonial times, filled with plain dress Quakers, sitting quietly as a group of armed Indians came through the door.
Supposedly there was a story that went with it, that the Indians had meant to slaughter whites, and had done so in other similar places. But the warriors were so moved by their pious placidity, and disarmingly Friendly demeanor, that they dropped their murderous plans and let them be.
Was there anything to that? Could this be an example of Quaker “Active shooter training”? Or pious mythmaking. Continue reading An Active Shooter in Friends Meeting. Now what?
