The Marshall County High School Shooting – A Wake-up Call to Churches

By Robin G. Jordan

For Anglicans Ablaze readers I have posted links to four media reports here, here, here, and here from which can be gleaned more details about the Marshall County High School shooting on Tuesday morning and its aftermath. As a precautionary measure the campus police at my university, which is about a 25-minute-drive from Benton, would conduct a campus-wide building check in case a copy-cat shooter decided to target the university. I have also included an USA Today article on the ways 20 years of shootings have changed schools.

In an earlier media report one area resident was quoted as saying that Benton was a small community and everyone knew each other. I must question the accuracy of this statement. Benton is one of four adjoining communities which include Calvert City, Draffenville, and Gilbertsville. In terms of their populations these communities overlap each other and may be viewed as one contiguous area. These communities and other nearby communities in Marshall County have been experiencing steady growth since the 1970s and earlier. The population of Marshall County went from 30,123 in 2000 to 31, 448 in 2010. While these figures are not dramatic, they are not indicative of a plateaued or declining population. The population of the county is also swollen every year by tourists and other summer residents. Indeed tourism is one of its main industries. The growth of the area would prompt the Episcopal Church to plant a new church in Gilbertsville in 1980. The Wikipedia article on Marshall County notes:

From its settlement until the 1930s, Marshall County was almost completely agricultural. In the 1940s, however, the Tennessee Valley Authority created Kentucky Lake, which brought tourism to the county with lake shore resorts. The Kentucky Dam's cheap and plentiful electricity also attracted chemical and manufacturing plants, mainly in the Calvert City area.

While some area residents may continue to view Benton as a small community, the reality is that Marshall County and the surrounding counties contain much smaller communities than Benton. People can live in Benton and the vicinity and not know each other. Due to the proximity of the chemical and manufacturing plants in the nearby Calvert City area, the description of Benton as a rural, farming community is also not entirely accurate.

It is quite possible for a potential shooter to have gone unnoticed.

The shooting at First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, in November 2017 received a lot of attention in Marshall County. The Marshall County Sheriff’s Department would host a church safety meeting at Marshall County High School in the wake of that shooting. The meeting drew a large crowd. I remember thinking to myself how easy it would have been for a potential shooter to attend that meeting when I noticed a young man, a teenager, leaving the meeting early just after the presentation on what to expect when the Sheriff’s Department’s rapid response teams arrived in response to a report of a shooter. The potential shooter would have gained useful intelligence on how the Sheriff’s Department was advising churches to protect themselves and what kind of response a shooter could expect from that department.

Whether the Marshall County High School shooter attended the church safety meeting, I have no idea but it is not outside the realm of possibility. If it was the case, the meeting itself could have been a part of a chain of events that led to the shooting. On the day before the shooting a 16-year-old boy had shot a 15-year-old girl in their high school’s cafeteria in Italy, Texas, using a semi-automatic pistol. This event may have triggered the Marshall County High School shooting which occurred in the high school’s commons area and involved a semi-automatic pistol.

Churches not only need to take steps to protect themselves from shooters but also do whatever they can also to protect their community’s businesses, schools, and outdoor areas from shooters. This means really getting to know the people in the community and what is going on in their lives. Churches can work with other community organizations and groups to identify and help troubled youth in the community. The shooter who killed two at Marshall High School, wounded twelve others, and traumatized the rest of his fellow students also destroyed his own life. A timely mental health intervention might have prevented this tragedy from happening.