Grandstanding Preacher Destroys Rifle, Saves Nobody

We told you back in July about the grandstanding Oregon preacher who self-servingly wasted $3,000 of his parishioners’ donations to win a raffle for a $700 rifle.

Now, according to a report in the Portland Tribune, Rev. Jeremy Lucas has followed through on his attempt to bring even more attention to himself by destroying the rifle—making nobody anywhere safer than they were before he instigated the stunt. It’s easy to see why: Whoever won the raffle, had it not been Lucas, would have been required to undergo a background check before taking possession of the rifle. Consequently, the winner would have had to been deemed a law-abiding person to do so.

While the rifle was chopped into pieces to be made into garden tools, Lucas did apparently achieve his purpose of making more people irrationally scared of firearms—particularly AR-15s. “I've never seen one before,” Susie Coffman, Christ Church's director of Christian education, told the Tribune. “It made me very uncomfortable, even though I knew it wasn't loaded and that we were seeing it being cut into pieces.”