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Why We’re Covering a Mosque Shooting
We are covering this because Christian congregations need to take this seriously for their own sake. Two attackers targeted a mosque here. The threat to the church runs the other direction just as hard. Jihadist organizations have spent years calling on followers to attack Christians at worship, and they have done it here in the United States. If you run a security team and you watched this thinking it cannot reach your church, you are thinking the same way every undefended target thinks right up until it becomes one.
Three men were murdered outside a mosque on Monday morning. Some of you already know what the comments will say when I cover this, so I will say my piece first.
I see three men who did not get a chance to come to Christ. They were made in the image of God, and two teenagers full of hate ended their lives in a parking lot.
The Bible is direct about what that means.
Genesis 1:27 (ESV): “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.”
Genesis 9:6 (ESV): “Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in his own image.”
Every man killed Monday carried that image. We do not get to treat the loss as smaller because the name on the building was different than ours.
Study this. Then go look at your own parking lot.
The History of This Site
The Islamic Center of San Diego has a history that goes well past Monday, and this audience needs it on the record. Two of the September 11 hijackers, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, lived in this Clairemont area in early 2000 while they were inside the country preparing for the attack that killed nearly 3,000 Americans. The 9/11 Joint Inquiry found, based on FBI reporting, that San Diego imam Anwar al-Awlaki, who later became one of al-Qaeda’s most effective recruiters and was killed in a 2011 American strike, became their spiritual advisor and held closed-door meetings with them during that period. The record places al-Awlaki’s own mosque most precisely at the nearby Masjid Ar-Ribat al-Islami, and the connection to the Islamic Center of San Diego runs through the hijackers living in this community and the assistance the 9/11 Commission documented them receiving inside San Diego’s Muslim community while they were here.
The mosque’s current imam and director, Taha Hassane, drew national criticism for his response to the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel. In a sermon on October 20, 2023, reported by the Washington Free Beacon and other outlets, Hassane said that when people are occupied the resistance is justified, and that the one defending himself is not the terrorist. The Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Rabbi Abraham Cooper condemned his sermons and posts on the attack. His wife, Lallia Allali, resigned from a University of San Diego position and a San Diego Union-Tribune advisory board after posting an antisemitic image online following October 7. Those are the documented facts about the institution and its leadership. Read them and weigh them as you see fit.
What Happened
On Monday, May 18, 2026, at about 11:43 a.m., the San Diego Police Department received reports of an active shooter at the Islamic Center of San Diego, the largest mosque in San Diego County, in the Clairemont neighborhood. The property also houses the Al Rashid School, which teaches children from age five. Officers reached the scene in about four minutes and found three men shot dead in front of the mosque. One was the mosque’s security guard. The other two were staff members of the school.
The warning had come in roughly two hours earlier. At about 9:42 a.m., the mother of the 17-year-old attacker called police to report her son missing. She said he was suicidal, was last seen in camouflage, and that her vehicle and several of her firearms were gone. She believed he was with another teenager. Officers were already working that information, using license plate readers and checking locations she identified, when the call came in from the mosque. They moved straight to it.
As officers ran an active shooter response through the mosque and the adjoining school, gunfire was reported a few blocks away. A landscaper working in the area was shot at and survived, with a round reportedly deflected by his helmet. Less than a quarter mile from him, police found a vehicle stopped in the middle of the street with the two attackers dead inside from apparent self-inflicted gunshot wounds. The 17-year-old and the 18-year-old had taken weapons from a parent’s home. Anti-Islamic writing was found in the vehicle, hate speech was written on one of the firearms, and a suicide note contained writings about racial pride. The police chief said there was no specific threat to the Islamic Center in the note, that the language was general hate speech, and that the case is being investigated as a hate crime. No officers fired a shot. Every child on the property was evacuated safely, and no children were among the dead.
All three victims were killed outside. Not one person inside the mosque was shot, and the school full of children came out alive. The fight happened at the perimeter, it was met at the perimeter, and it never got past the man standing at the entrance.
Lessons for Church Security Teams
The Fight Is in the Parking Lot
Everything in this attack happened outside the building, and that is not an accident of this case. It is the pattern. The attackers came across the lot and to the entrance, and that is where the killing took place and where it stopped. Treat the parking lot as the incident itself, not the lead-up to it. If your security plan only starts working once someone is through the front doors, your plan starts too late. The men who died Monday died in the open, and the people who lived were the ones behind a defended threshold. Your team’s attention, your camera coverage, and your first decision point all belong in the lot, not the lobby.
Visible and Uniformed, Not Plainclothes
The man who slowed this attack was posted and visible at the place the threat had to come through. There is a strong pull in the church security world toward concealed, plainclothes teams, and I have never understood it as a deterrent, because deterrence requires being seen. The person planning to walk onto your property runs his own assessment from the lot before he commits. If he looks across that lot and sees nothing, he reads a green light. If he sees a posted, uniformed presence watching him, he has to account for it, and a large share of these attackers break off or fall apart once the math changes on them. You do not deter anyone from the third row in street clothes. You deter from the curb, in the open, while he is still deciding. If it does go to gunfire, the uniform still works for you. A uniformed figure holding his ground carries an authority that a man in a polo drawing a pistol does not, and that weight is real in a chaotic event. It also keeps your own people from being shot by responding officers, who are far less likely to mistake a clearly identified security member for the attacker.
Armed Is Not the Standard. Winning the Two-Second Problem Is.
The guard was armed, and that is the entire reason I keep preaching the Bill Drill. It is the single best drill you can run to prepare for exactly what that man faced. Square up on the target, set a timer, draw, and put six rounds in the A-zone of an IPSC target in under two seconds. That standard is not arbitrary. Average human reaction time is already around a second and a half. The attacker has the initiative and you are reacting to him, so by the time your brain registers the threat and your hand moves, most of your two seconds is already spent. If you cannot draw and deliver six accurate rounds inside that window, you are shot before you ever solve the problem. Carrying a gun into the sanctuary does not make you ready for this. Being able to win that two-second problem on demand makes you ready. Run it cold, on a timer, until two seconds is real and not a hope.
Plan for Two, Because the Second One Is the Accelerant
Two attackers acting together is rare, and the research record barely holds examples. In the modern record of mass school shootings, only two were carried out by two gunmen, and the rest were lone actors. Outside schools, the 2002 Beltway sniper attacks and the 2015 San Bernardino attack are about the only paired mass attacks that come up. The pattern inside that short list is the part worth teaching. When two people do this together, it is never two strangers who met that morning. It is a bonded pair: two best friends, a married couple, an older man and the teenager he pulled in. This case fits the same mold, two teenagers who dressed alike and built it together. The second person is not a bystander to the planning. The second person is the reason it moved from talk to action. Most of these individuals never do it alone. Build your response for more than one attacker, more than one point of entry, and more than one direction of fire, because the lone gunman you train for is not the only thing that walks across the lot.
The Warning Existed and Never Reached the Target
A credible warning was in the system roughly two hours before the first shot. A mother told police her suicidal son was gone with her car and several guns and was likely with another teenager. Police believed her, and they were already hunting the vehicle when the shooting started. It still arrived. That gap, between a known and believed threat and the specific place that threat was driving toward, is the hardest problem in this entire incident. Your team cannot assume that because someone in authority knows, the warning will reach your parking lot in time. Build your own detection and your own decision-making as if no one is going to call ahead, because on Monday, no one did.
SB 1454 and the Right to Defend Your Own Congregation
There is a legal layer here that California security teams need to understand. SB 1454 took effect January 1, 2025, and it removed the long-standing exemption that let churches and other nonprofits run their own security outside state regulation. Under it, paid unarmed security personnel must register through the Bureau of Security and Investigative Services, the church becomes the registered employer, and armed personnel must operate under a Private Patrol Operator license with a state firearms permit and a concealed carry license. The bureau has declined to state plainly that volunteer church security is exempt. Set the policy fight aside for a moment and look at the security cost. The pressure this law creates is pushing some churches to strip the word Security off the shirts and go plainclothes to stay clear of the bureau. That buys a legal cushion and a tactical defeat at the same time. The man in the parking lot Monday was deterred by what he could see, not by what the building was licensed to do. A church should solve a licensing problem through the licensing process, not by erasing the one thing in the lot that makes an attacker reconsider. When the state makes it harder for a congregation to protect itself at the door, the congregation does not become safer. It becomes the target that comes out alive only by accident.
Biblical Perspective
Set aside who was standing where on Monday and look at the ground itself. These attacks are decided outside, at the approach and the door, in the few feet of pavement a security member is given to cover. That is the ground Scripture speaks to, and the passage for it is not the one most people reach for.
2 Samuel 23:11-12 (ESV): “And next to him was Shammah, the son of Agee the Hararite. The Philistines gathered together at Lehi, where there was a plot of ground full of lentils, and the men fled from the Philistines. But he took his stand in the midst of the plot and defended it and struck down the Philistines, and the LORD worked a great victory.”
Shammah is barely a footnote in the account of David’s mighty men. What he is remembered for is simple. Everyone else ran from a fight over a field that did not look worth dying for. He took his stand in the middle of it and held. The ground you are given to hold is rarely dramatic. It is a door, a walkway, a stretch of asphalt between the cars and the entrance. It will not look like much until the morning it is everything. When that morning comes you will not choose the ground and you will not get a warning you can count on. You will get the post you were given and the decision to stand on it. The text does not say Shammah held because he was the strongest man in the field. It says he took his stand and the Lord worked the victory through it.
1 Corinthians 16:13 (ESV): “Be watchful, stand firm in the faith, act like men, be strong.”
That is Paul’s closing charge to believers, and it is the charge to the man who stands at the door of his own church. Be watchful is the parking lot. Stand firm in the faith is the conviction underneath the resolve, something settled long before the threat appears. Act like men is the decision made in the handful of seconds you will have and not a second more. Be strong is what you put the work in to build before it is ever asked of you. This is written to you, for your church and your people. When you walk your lot, walk it as a man who has already decided he will not be the one who runs.
Final Assessment
Three men were murdered at a mosque with a documented and troubling history, by two teenagers who built a hateful plan together and died by their own hands before anyone but the man at the door could stop them. Those two facts sit in the same incident and neither one cancels the other. The history of that institution is real and it is on the record. So is the fact that the men killed were a guard and two school staff, and that the people the attackers most wanted to reach, the children, walked out alive.
For church security teams the instruction is narrow and hard. The fight is in the parking lot. Visible presence deters and concealment does not. An armed guard is only as good as his ability to win a two-second problem under stress. Plan for more than one attacker. And do not assume a warning will reach you in time, because in this case it did not, even with police already hunting the car.
This review is about three deaths and not the children inside because the fight stayed outside and never got past the entrance. That is the doctrine in one line: armed, posted, and visible at the perimeter, with people trained to win the first seconds. Build your team to that standard so that when it is their door, the line holds.
Leave a comment
If this was useful, leave a comment with what your team would do differently after reading it, and share it with your pastor or your team leader. These conversations are how congregations get ready before the morning it counts.
