Sanctuary safety: Not even churches are off-limits to violence

Last Sunday, Kristy Ragsdale joined two young Colorado Springs women as the latest victims of violence at the place most Americans consider to be a sanctuary — their church.

Ragsdale's slaying in an LDS Church parking lot in Lehi differed from December shootings at an evangelical Christian church and missionary center in Colorado. Ragsdale's husband turned himself in after killing her just days after she filed for separation.

But she was shot in the parking lot, as were Rachel and Stephanie Works, teenage sisters killed by a gunman they didn't know as he fired numerous rounds outside New Life Church in Colorado Springs on Dec. 9, before an armed security guard shot and killed him.

While such killings have sadly become more commonplace in recent years, they always shock the communities in which they occur and leave myriad questions in their wake, many of them revolving around how to prevent such tragedies in the future.

In Utah, most major faith traditions have publicly declared their buildings to be "gun-free" zones, even though they don't formally register that status with the state, as a 2003 law directs churches to do annually. When the law was put in place, several leading clergy held a public press conference to declare that their buildings were off-limits to guns, whether the state of Utah declared them to be so or not.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is currently the only faith listed as prohibiting firearms on its premises on Utah's Bureau of Criminal Identification Web site, meaning those who carry a firearm into an LDS "house of worship" technically can be charged with trespassing. To date, no one has formally challenged the legitimacy of the gun ban by other Utah churches.

The law met with stubborn opposition in the Legislature, where gun rights advocates said the Second Amendment overrides any faith's restriction on the right of someone with a concealed carry permit to take a gun into a church. Lawmakers disagreed, and then-Gov. Mike Leavitt signed the bill.

Brandy Farmer, domestic violence program coordinator with the Utah Attorney General's Office, said Sunday's tragic shooting shouldn't be used as an example of "how it could have been different" by those who favor packing heat at church.

"You simply can't guard against every possibility," she said. "It happened in a parking lot. Domestic violence is about power and control; one person needing to have control over another individual. ... It's important to realize that the killers are the only ones who are at fault for taking the victim's life and sometimes their own."