Emergency training for houses of worship is needed to potentially save lives
Twelve years ago, a white supremacist gunned down a half-dozen people at the Milwaukee-area Sikh Temple of Wisconsin.
Three years later, Dylann Roof, another white supremacist, opened fire at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, killing the pastor and eight congregants, all of them Black.
And it was just six years back that a gunman, who wasn't shy about his antisemitic views, shot and killed 11 Jewish worshipers at the Tree of Life synagogue Pittsburgh.
Sadly, there are too many people filled with hate who target religious groups and take sick pleasure in desecrating places where people gather to pray. Congregants can still feel on edge even when they aren't physically harmed. When what appeared to be bullet holes were found on the glass on the front doors of the Muslim Community Center in Irving Park, the attack shattered many local Muslims sense of safety.
Unfortunately, as this editorial board has pointed out countless times before, there are no safe spaces from America's gun violence.
The city's Office of Emergency Management's new training sessions to help houses of worship prepare for active shootings and other emergencies, including natural disasters, are another sad reality. But they are a practical necessity that can potentially save lives.
"You don’t want to be a statistic," as Ryan Hutton, Park Community Church's director of facilities, told Sun-Times reporter Sophie Sherry. "Both spiritual wisdom and practical worldly wisdom would say it’s better to be proactive than to even have the chance of an incident."
The idea for the citywide trainings, which will wrap up later this week, came to senior OEMC emergency management coordinator Beverly Carrington after she sat in on a similar Cook County program in 2023.
We hope the trainings continue, and that religious leaders share what they learn and hold additional seminars to educate their communities on how they can better protect themselves in a variety of scenarios, whether it is Mother Nature's wrath (due to climate change that leaders must address) or a deranged shooter (who may not have had a firearm if leaders more obsessed with gun rights than gun safety did more to enact common sense gun legislation).
The thoughts and prayers of those leaders clearly haven't stopped the bloodshed. Neither will the prayers the rest of us offer, in what should be sacred sanctuaries from violence.
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