If an armed guard had been on duty at this church, would this man have been shot?

OK.   This is one anecdote, and maybe police officers perform similar acts of courage like this every day without resort to their guns -- and we just don't hear about them.  Good news is so often not treated as news.   If so, then police departments should start letting us know.   It would be the best antidote to the increasing cynicism about fairness in our justice system.

But let's take this inspiring anecdote and instructive lesson just as it was reported by Leslie Salzillo on Daily Kos:

"Minutes before the clock struck midnight and most of the country was about to ring in the New Year, a church congregation in Fayetteville, North Carolina, faced a horrifying scare after a 57-year-old man walked into the church armed with a rifle and ammo clip.  

"Pastor Larry Wright, who is also a Fayetteville city councilman, was giving a sermon to 60 members of adults and children, when he noticed a man enter the church holding a rifle in the air. Wright left the podium and confronted the stranger and convinced him to disarm. Nate Rogers with WNCN news reports:  

He said, ‘I came here with some terrible things on my mind, I was going to do some bad things’,” Pastor Wright told WNCN.

"Church members started screaming, and some ran for the exit. But what happened next is stunning.

Wright says the man calmly shared he’d been previously hurt by the church, recently released from prison and was also a veteran.  He then asked for prayers.  Wright took the gun away and called for other men to come and embrace the suspect.

"The man fell to his knees and cried. . . .  Police lead the man away after the service, did not charge him, and at this time, the man is receiving treatment at a local facility."

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We've been saturated lately by news stories about excessive police use of their guns -- with no apparent effort to handle "a man with a gun" any way except by shooting him, even when it was a 12 year old boy with a toy gun.   In contrast is this story of a courageous pastor reaching out to a disturbed man with a gun and preventing a double tragedy to his congregation and to the man himself.   Everyone is fortunate that there was no armed guard on duty, and the pastor himself handled the situation.

Maybe we need less police training in the use of guns and more in a pastoral approach to disturbed people.   You know the old adage:

If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Ralph