>> "User 42" <newsn...@yoohoo.com> wrote in message
>> news:Xns9BC875FF152BBc6e9f@127.0.0.1...
>>> http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2009-03-08-church-shooting_N.htm

>>> MARYVILLE, Ill. - Illinois State Police say a pastor was shot and
>>> killed Sunday morning by an assailant at an 8 a.m. worship service.

>>> In a telephone interview, Jeff Ross, a lay minister at the First
>>> Baptist Church of Maryville, Ill., said Senior Pastor Fred Winters
>>> was shot to death after he was hit in the heart and the neck.

>>> "He's gone home to be free with the Lord," Ross said.

>>> Parishioners tackled the gunman, who wounded himself with a knife,
>>> state police told CNN.

>>> Master Trooper Ralph Timmins says the man walked down the aisle
>>> during the service, exchanged words with the pastor, then drew a
>>> .45-caliber handgun and fired.

>>> Timmins said the man fatally shot Winters once before the gun jammed,
>>> then pulled out a knife and wounded himself.

>>> Churchgoers tried to subdue the attacker, and two of them were
>>> slightly hurt.

>>> Timmins said officials don't know whether Winters and the suspect
>>> knew each other.

>>> Ross said that over the last 21 years, Winters built the congregation
>>> up from about 30 to 1,500 members. "This is just Satan. Who else
>>> would do it? Someone who wanted to stop his message," he said.

>>> Winters was married and had two daughters, Ross said. Winters had led
>>> First Baptist for nearly 22 years and was the former president of the
>>> Illinois Baptist State Association and an adjunct professor for
>>> Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, according to the church's
>>> website.

>>> Ross described the church as occupying a suburban location about 18
>>> miles outside St. Louis in an area largely untroubled by crime or
>>> violence. "He built this church in a cornfield," he said of Winters,
>>> "and now houses are filling in around us."

>>> Winters, he said, "was on fire for the Lord. He only worried about
>>> people who were lost."

>>> He said he and other church members were praying for the gunman.
>>> "He's still alive, so there's still a chance for him to turn his life
>>> around and find the Lord."

>> Are you trying to pass off a genuine news item as a joke?

>> Are you trying to parody anti-Semitism?

>> The gunman isn't even named, and the odds against the gunman being
>> Jewish are astronomical.

> The OP knows he was a liberal Jew, because the voice of God in his head
> said so.  Besides, everybody knows that liberal Jews are all a bunch of
> crazy gun nuts, and if he wasn't a liberal Jew, then he must have been a
> liberal feminist gun nut, a liberal tree-hugging gun nut, a liberal
> Unitarian gun nut, a liberal abortionist gun nut or a liberal stem cell
> researcher gun nut.

> There's no way he coul been someone the pastor knew, because the voice
> of God in the OP's head told him that it had to be a cliched newspaper
> stereotype with a political agenda.  Yeah, that's the ticket.