Kentucky Arms The Clergy
by Cliff Walker
from wire copy

April 14, 1998

Kentucky clergy are fearful of armed robbers stealing the collection money after church services. So Kentucky lawmakers passed an amendment to the state weapons law, enabling clergymen to carry concealed guns in church.

The clergy had been deliberately left out of a 1996 law allowing concealed weapons in Kentucky, but rural ministers and priests lobbied state lawmakers to allow them to carry concealed guns. The amendment passed in the House by 76-9 and is due to be signed into law by Governor Paul Patton on April 15.

Some lawmakers and ministers are enraged by the move in the wake of the school killings in Jonesboro, Arkansas. "It's quite disturbing to me, right after the Jonesboro tragedy," said Democrat Kathy Stein, an attorney and former Director of Domestic Violence in Fayette County. Four girls and a teacher were killed in a schoolyard ambush in Jonesboro last month when two boys opened fire on them.

Nancy Jo Kemper, a minister and Executive Director of the Kentucky Council of Churches, blasted the state legislature for its decision. She said: "I am just sick and appalled ... How can we expect our children to learn that guns will not solve problems if they see even ministers, who are supposed to be agents of peace and reconciliation, carrying weapons that can kill?"

Democratic congressman Robert Damron, a co-sponsor of the amendment, said that rural churches made more vulnerable to robberies by their exemption in the original bill. "In 1997, there were two or three instances where an individual took a shotgun at the end of church ceremony and robbed the collection. No one was injured. But churches were more subject to being robbed because they're exempted by law from having concealed weapons," Damron said. "That a man of the cloth would carry a gun sends a strong message to the criminals."

But Stein argued that "it sends the wrong message. That more weapons, not fewer, are a good idea."

On a note much more consistent with what religion tends to teach, Monte Wilkinson, a minster at Southland Christian Church, said: "We don't look to firearms to protect us. Our confidence is in God."