Guns at School

Pastor Matt Trewhella, co-founder of the extremist anti-abortion group Missionaries to the Preborn, believes the righteous and the holy have a duty to be fully armed. Not long after the Columbine High School massacre, members of his Mercy Seat Christian Church distributed a Gospel tract entitled "Kids Killing Kids: How Can We Stop the Bloodshed?" at local schools.

• One Church Responds To School Violence  Full text of the Bullet Tract. Also a short piece about Mercy Seat Christian Church in Milwaukee and their tract campaign.

• Church gives out pro-gun fliers at Waukesha school   Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Online, September 22, 1999. "School and law enforcement officials on Wednesday lambasted a group led by anti-abortion activist Matt Trewhella for distributing pro-gun leaflets and fliers shaped like bullets at area schools."

• Promoting Guns at School is Just Wacky   Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Online, September 23, 1999. By Mike Nichols.

• Pro-gun fliers, schools don't mix   Editorial statement of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Online, September 23, 1999. The "secular media" disapprove. "The best response to the distribution of pro-gun literature at a couple of area high schools has come from the students themselves: They threw the material in the trash."

• The Morning Mail   Letters to the editor of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, including a response from Pastor Matt Trewhella: "You exploit the killing of innocent people for your own political agenda, namely, gun control. To encourage citizens to disarm is to do the work of tyrants." One of Trewhella's supporters asks: "Who really cares that the literature was bullet-shaped? That was merely to get the reader's attention."

• Dying for God  October 23, 2002 - The story goes that two victims of the Columbine shootings, Cassie Bernall and Rachel Scott, professed their Christian faith and were killed for it. A survivor disputes this. Take a look at the religious and political aspects of martyrdom in an interview with the author of "The Martyrs of Columbine."

Other "Christian" calls for Violence

Missionaries' Leader Calls for Armed Militias   Planned Parenthood gives various quotes from Matt Trewhella's address to the convention of the US Taxpayers Party, including "This Christmas, I want you to do the most loving thing...buy each of your children an SKS rifle and 500 rounds of ammunition...."

Why Kids are Killing Kids in High School  Rev. Flip Benham of Operation Save America explains that "it has become increasingly obvious that government schools have become the very gates of hell. Why has the public school become, apart from the local abortion mill, the most dangerous place for a young person to be?"

Find further extremist statements on guns and violence on these pages: Calls to Violence and Right-wing Militias and Patriots.