Word: church
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...five minutes before New Bethel Church's highly publicized "open-carry service" was set to begin Saturday evening, Lynne Smith walked into the sanctuary with her husband and two friends and took a seat in the front row. Asked what weapon she had with her, Smith had to stop and think about which gun she'd brought but finally said it was a Beretta .25 automatic. Her husband, Michael Houston, wore a Browning .380 in a holster. Their friends, Ted and Barbara Grant, were also carrying weapons. Barbara, wearing a NYPD baseball cap, had a Ruger .38 revolver, while...
...congregating arsenal was all perfectly legal as well as perfectly acceptable to the leaders of New Bethel, an Assemblies of God church in Louisville, Kentucky, that invited people to bring their unloaded guns to this first-ever event. Neither of the two couples in the front row are New Bethel members. Smith told TIME she read about the service in the Louisville Courier-Journal and came "to see what was going on." All four are longtime NRA members, she said, and all are deeply worried that the federal government will mount an effort to take away the right to bear...
...ways by various people at the service, which became an international media sensation when it hit Louisville's mainstream press early this month. Pastor Ken Pagano, a former Marine and a volunteer chaplain with the Louisville Metro Police Department, suggested the idea more than a year ago when the church board was brainstorming ways to expand its outreach...
Pagano spoke of how the church's insurance carrier refused to cover the event and his the scramble to find a one-day rider. Only one agent in the country was willing to underwrite the event, he said - for $2,600. That, he said, illustrates how insurance companies have too much control over regular people. Those remarks, and others from Pagano, drew spontaneous bursts of "that's right" and "amen." The church eventually found coverage...
...church didn't know what to expect from the first-time event, said member Charles Hinckley, a former pastor who carried a Smith & Wesson .380, but it went off smoothly. Video cameras were prohibited on church grounds, forcing news crews to do stand-ups beyond the entrance to the church's long parking lot, and still photos were restricted to one pool photographer...