Two Catholic dioceses in Georgia have banned guns and other weapons from church facilities in response to the state’s new so-called “guns everywhere” law.
The Catholic News Service reported Tuesday that Atlanta Archbishop Wilton Gregory and Savannah Bishop Gregory Hartmayer had issued an order banning guns and knives with blades longer than 5 inches from any churches, schools and other buildings owned or operated by their dioceses. The order was effective July 1, the same day Georgia’s expansive gun rights law took effect.
“This decree is rooted in the belief that our churches and other places of worship are intended to be sanctuaries — holy sites where people come to pray and to worship God,” the bishops said in a statement, as quoted by the Catholic News Service. “In this nation of ours, they have seldom been the locations where violence has disrupted the otherwise peaceful atmosphere.”
Anyone who carries a weapon in violation of the dioceses’ decree may be charged with trespassing, according to the Catholic News service. The order does allow certain exemptions, including permitting clergy to own and keep a weapon in a rectory.
Georgia’s new gun law allows residents to carry firearms into bars, schools, churches and some government buildings. A showdown between two armed men in a convenience store led to an arrest on the very day the law took effect.
Don’t hold your breath until Southern Baptists ban weapons in their sanctuaries.
It’s a start, maybe more will follow. Guns are intimidating and scare most people, and that’s just the point, isn’t it? The gun toters think they deserve to be feared, but in reality, they are loathed.
1st Amendment vs. 2nd Amendment. Now that would be an interested case for the SCOTUS. I can see religious gun toting freaks in a panic. They’d go with their guns though–it’s the more powerful religion.
It will have no impact. Many Baptists view Catholics as disciples of Satan down here, after all.
If anything, I would half way suspect somebody is going to bring a gun to one of their churches to challenge them.
While its well-known that religion always trumps womens’ rights, I will be very surprised if Church is allowed to trump the right-wing nutjob gun-scum’s phony Second Amendment rights. I can’t wait for the lawsuit to see how the purely partisan low-lifes who are a majority of the Supreme Court rule when two great public goods are in conflict–the ability to impose one’s religion on others here in these United States and the “right” to carry automatic weapons with large capacity magazines anywhere one wants, including church.