DALLAS (KRLD) - People may start questioning security at their houses of worship as a result of the shooting at the church in White Settlement and stabbing at a celebration of Hanukkah in New York.
"The biggest thing missing in church people is the mindset that this could happen here," says Jimmy Meeks, a retired Hurst police officer who now teaches "Sheepdog Seminars." Sheepdog Seminars leads training for churches to use their own volunteers for security.
In 2017, the Texas legislature passed a measure allowing churches to train their own volunteer security instead of requiring them to hire off-duty police or an outside security firm. This year, state lawmakers passed a measure that allows licensed gun owners to carry their weapons in houses of worship unless the church posts signs forbidding them.
Meeks says Sheepdog Seminars has run more than 300 clinics in 40 states since seminars started in 2009.
"This violence, the shootings whether it's at Wal-Mart or a church, they're not going to go away," he says. "That means the good people need to say, 'Okay, what do we do?' I'm not saying you need to be a gun fanatic or anything like that, just be prepared."
Meeks says a gunman may consider a church a "soft target" because people in a house of worship will be more welcoming and less likely to question someone behaving suspiciously.
"They think that religious mindset is not going to be one that fights back," he says. "You remember the massacre at the church in Charleston? This man comes in and sits down in summertime wearing winter clothing and a fanny-pack. We call that a clue. Why didn't they say something to him? He was about to kill them, and he did."
Sheepdog Seminars says more people have been killed at churches and religious events since 1999 than in school shootings or police officers killed by gunfire. The group says 114 people were killed on faith-based property in 2017 alone.