Quincy News: Worshippers tote AR-15 assault rifles to Pennsylvania church blessing

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Packing in the pews
A Don Emmer/AFP/Getty Images image
– News from elsewhere covered by Quincy Quarry News with commentary added.

Hundreds of couples toting AR-15 rifles and other firearms packed a Unification church in rural Pennsylvania on Wednesday to have their marriages blessed and their weapons celebrated as “rods of iron” that could have saved lives in the recent Florida school shooting.

Women dressed in white and men in dark suits gripped guns which they had been urged to bring unloaded to the church in the Pocono Mountains.

A crown of bullets
Don Emmer/AFP/Getty Images image
Many celebrants wore crowns – some made of bullets – while church officials dressed in flowing bright pink and white garments to go with their armaments.

The event, hosted at the World Peace and Unification Sanctuary in Newfoundland Pennyslvania, apparently led a nearby school to cancel classes for the day.

The Reverend Hyung Jin Moon – the son of Unification Church founder, the Reverend Sun Myung Moon – said via a statement that the staff of the Florida school recently stricken by a mass killing should have been armed, an option President Donald Trump has said should be explored nationwide but which teacher unions have criticized.

“Each of us is called to use the power of the ‘rod of iron’ not to arm or oppress as has been done in satanic kingdoms of this world, but to protect God’s children,” said Moon, citing the Book of Revelation in the Bible.