‘We absolutely are seeing more animosity towards faith-based organizations,’ founder of one company says.
Carl Chinn, 65, is a man of deep faith who thought church was a place to go to find peace—until he locked eyes with an angry gunman 28 years ago.
On May 2, 1996, a man carrying a rifle, a handgun, and claiming to have explosives walked into the Focus on the Family ministry in Colorado Springs and took four hostages.
Chinn was one of those hostages, and his experience changed his outlook on the vulnerability of churches from that day forward.
Before then, “security wasn’t even in the back of my mind,” he said.
The suspect, a construction worker, carried out the attack four years after he injured himself while building the ministry’s new 256,000-square-foot facility.
He filed for disability at the time, but his insurance ruled the injury was due to “horseplay” and substantially cut his benefits.
It took four years for the man’s anger to reach critical mass—four years to come back to “exact his form of justice,” Chinn told The Epoch Times.
“He wanted to go out suicide by cop.”
During the hostage situation, the man shot into a wall before police were able to arrest him.
“That was my wake-up call,” Chinn said. “That incident changed the trajectory of my life.”
It also wasn’t the only time he encountered an armed intruder in church.
In 2007, Matthew John Murray, 24, killed two people and wounded two others as he opened fire at a church youth training center in Arvada, Colorado.
Murray evaded law enforcement and later that afternoon he shot and killed two more people and wounded three others at the New Life Church in Colorado Springs before he was fatally shot by a security team member.
Chinn was there on the day of the shooting. He knew one thing about the gunman: “He hated Christians.”
The former building engineer said after the first incident in which he was held hostage, he started reading up on the degree to which attacks were happening in churches across the United States.
Chinn looked at law enforcement databases and found violent attacks were a leading cause of death in churches: Around 1,050 people died out of 2,361 total incidents between 1999 and 2020.
He compiled a list of “deadly force incidents” for the 22-year period and found the No. 1 reason was robbery, with 464 incidents (24.4 percent).
The second-leading cause of fatal force encounters was domestic violence, accounting for nearly 15 percent of all cases.
By Allan Stein
