What Christians Can Learn From the LDS Security Debacle and What They Can Do Before the Next Attack

Their failures are the checklist every Christian church in America should be running before the next attack.

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Why I Am Saying This

I live in a neighborhood where I am one of the only evangelicals on the street. Almost every one of my neighbors is a Latter-day Saint, and I love every one of them. That is the reason I am writing this, not the reason I am staying quiet about it.

I am not writing a theological piece. That is a different article and a different day. The people sitting in those meetinghouses on Sunday morning are made in the image of God, and Scripture tells me to protect the innocent. That is the entire basis for what follows. If you came here looking for me to take a position on doctrine, you are going to be disappointed.

Here is what I am saying, and I am putting it in writing so it exists on the record. If the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints does not change how it protects the people in its buildings, more of its members are going to be killed. Not because their people do not care. I have talked to plenty of Latter-day Saints who are deeply worried about this and have been told to stand down. The failure is institutional, it sits at the top, and the people who pay for it will be sitting in the pews.

I am saving this. When it happens again, I am going to publish it again with the date attached.

The Record

The argument I hear most often from large denominations is that an attack on their buildings is unlikely. Let us look at what has already happened on Latter-day Saint property, because history is the best predictor available.

On April 15, 1999, a 70-year-old man walked into the lobby of the Family History Library in Salt Lake City and opened fire. He killed a patron and he killed a Church Security officer who had served the church for 28 years. 5 more people were wounded. From the first shots until police put him down, it took roughly 1 hour and 45 minutes. Their own security man died, and it still took nearly 2 hours to end it.

On August 29, 2010, a 47-year-old former member drove more than 130 miles to a meetinghouse in Visalia, California. He walked in between meetings, asked to speak to a church leader, and was pointed toward the bishop’s office. He sat and waited outside that door. When Bishop Clay Sannar opened it, he shot and killed him. About 30 people were in the building. A stranger walked in, asked for a leader by title, and was escorted to him.

On July 22, 2018, a 48-year-old member of the ward in Fallon, Nevada walked into sacrament meeting after the sacrament had been passed, produced a 9mm handgun, and shot 2 men in front of the congregation. Charles Miller, 61, a longtime volunteer firefighter, was killed. Miller’s brother was wounded. The shooter walked out of the chapel, walked home a block away, and surrendered. That was an insider. He had been sitting in the pews.

On July 23, 2019, a gunman fired at a group of people in a meetinghouse parking lot in St. George, Utah. On August 3, 2020, shots were fired at the Missionary Training Center in Provo. On December 4, 2021, a missionary was shot 5 times inside a meetinghouse in Birmingham, Alabama. On March 27, 2024, at least 3 people threw an explosive device into an occupied meetinghouse in Henderson, Nevada, injuring 4 people inside.

On September 28, 2025, a 40-year-old Marine veteran rammed a pickup truck through the front wall of the chapel in Grand Blanc Township, Michigan, exited with an AK-style rifle, and opened fire on the congregation. He poured gasoline and set the building on fire. Investigators recovered improvised explosive devices. 4 church members were killed, 2 by gunfire and 2 in the fire that followed. 8 more were wounded, ranging in age from 6 to 78. The building was a total loss.

Here is the part of Grand Blanc I want to sit with you, and it is the reason I keep going back to that case. When I debriefed the attack, I confirmed that an officer was on scene within 30 seconds of the first shot fired. Police killed the attacker 8 minutes after the first 911 call. 4 people still died anyway. I have never seen a response time on an active shooter event like the one those officers put up, and I do not believe that officer was standing there by accident. It still was not enough, and it never is, because the killing happens in the first seconds and the police are always arriving into something that has already started. That is the whole argument for having a trained person already inside the room before anybody dials 911.

On December 8, 2025, meetinghouse windows were shot out in Idaho Falls, Idaho. On January 7, 2026, 8 people were shot outside the Rose Park 5th Ward meetinghouse on Redwood Road in Salt Lake City while a memorial service was going on inside. 2 men were killed, ages 38 and 46. One of them left 11 children behind, the youngest 5 months old.

That shooting was Tongan Crip Gang. I worked gangs as a sergeant for years, and I did not need a case file to tell me what I was looking at. The clothing in the footage said it before any paperwork did. The federal government has since said the same thing. On February 25, 2026, a grand jury indicted 2 alleged Tongan Crip Gang members, Ryan Toutai and Fineeva Maka, on firearms charges connected to the shooting, and the United States Attorney for the District of Utah announced it in those exact terms. Arrest documents note that one of them attended that memorial service dressed in gang colors and attire. As of the last reporting I have seen, no homicide charges have been filed against anyone.

That attack was not a hate crime and it was not religiously motivated. It was street violence that walked onto church property because nobody was watching the parking lot, and it should terrify every church security team in America for exactly that reason. You do not have to be a target to bury people.

And then this past Sunday, July 19, 2026, a man dressed head to toe in black on a 100 degree day walked into a Utah meetinghouse during services, sat down in the west lobby, pulled out a revolver, and rested his hand on it. He got that far before anyone spoke to him. The revolver turned out to be unloaded, which nobody in the building knew at the time. The nursery, down the same hallway, found out an armed man was in the building when a father sprinted to the door and pulled the children out himself. I wrote that one up here.

That is a minimum of 9 firearms incidents on Latter-day Saint property in 30 years, plus an explosive attack, plus a mass knife attack that injured 5 in Goiania, Brazil, plus the armed robbery of 70 missionaries at a zone conference in Torreon, Mexico, plus an arson campaign that has burned meetinghouses in more than a dozen states. 10 people have been killed by gunfire on their property in that window, not counting the attackers.

A group with that record cannot describe itself as unlikely to be targeted.

The Fix List

Here is exactly what I would do if I were in charge, starting Monday morning. It runs from cheapest and fastest to hardest.

Sanitize the Public Footprint

The active shooter response procedure is published on their own public website. The meetinghouse security training video sent to members sits on a public resource page. The Global Security Operations Center contact information is in a PDF on a public asset server. And the handbook publicly announces that nobody inside the building is armed.

That last one is not a policy statement to the membership. It is an advertisement to an attacker. The man planning to kill people in that building will read the response procedure, watch the training video, and build his plan around defeating exactly what he knows the congregation has been taught to do.

Pull all of it. Move the operational material behind a login restricted to the people who are actually going to teach it. Keep public what should stay public: how to contact the church, the Scripture, the gospel, the things that lead people to Jesus. Everything operational comes down.

I already know the objection, because I have heard it from Latter-day Saints and from every large denomination with a global footprint. We are a worldwide organization and conditions vary by country. That is true, and it is also beside the point. People are not being murdered in meetinghouses in most of the world. They are being murdered in them here. Regionalize the material. Plenty of worldwide religious bodies manage to do this without publishing their playbook.

Amend the Firearms Prohibition

The current General Handbook language, still standing in the 2026 edition, prohibits firearms and other lethal weapons on church property, concealed included, with the single exception of current law enforcement officers.

That bans retired police officers. It bans combat veterans. It bans every trained permit holder sitting in the pews on Sunday.

Here is what that policy actually accomplishes. The Utah witness from July 19 said on camera that he normally carries at church despite the prohibition, and that Sunday was one of the rare days he did not. The policy did not disarm him on any other Sunday. It disarmed him on the day a man walked into his building with a revolver. Prohibitions do not remove guns from a congregation. They remove them from the people who follow rules, and they leave leadership with no idea who is armed on any given Sunday.

If your congregants can lawfully carry, do not prohibit it. Mandate instead. Anyone carrying in the building attends church training first so they understand their role in an event, and they come back every year. Add a qualification if you want one. Most of the people I know would welcome it.

Build the Academy and Train the Trainers

Stand up a regional training center that certifies instructors who do nothing but teach security tactics to ward level teams. Global security trains the regional instructors. The regional instructors train the wards.

The org chart already exists. Stake, region, area. No other church body in America is better positioned to scale a security program than this one, and that is not flattery, it is a fact about the structure. The structure is excellent. It is simply not being pointed at this problem.

Put a Team in Every Ward

Not at the stake level. Not regionally. Every single building.

I cannot tell you how many people a given building needs without walking it, and neither can anyone else. Anybody who hands you a number without a site visit is guessing.

Set a selection standard: background check, clean history, and a proven track record of stepping toward a problem rather than away from it. If a ward has candidates with the right character but no relevant background, that is trainable. They do not have to be armed. It would be better if some of them were.

Train for Both Threats

Active shooter is the threat everyone thinks about. It is not the one most likely to hurt your children.

A child in your building is far more likely to be harmed by a predator who has been coming to church for months than by a stranger with a rifle. The same team trains for both, in the same cycle. They learn to recognize grooming behavior and policy violations with the same seriousness they bring to a man in the parking lot.

Four Hours a Month, Minimum

Not annually. Not in the two weeks after something is on the news and then never again.

4 hours a month, every month. If you want to know what to train on, go to christianwarriortraining.com. The annual training matrix is free and it lays out exactly what to cover and when. So is everything else on the training tab.

Cameras That Actually Work

Full perimeter and interior coverage. 4K, good enough to read a plate in the lot and see a face through a windshield. Someone actively monitoring the feed rather than a box in a closet recording to a drive nobody has checked since installation. Retain the footage a minimum of 1 year, which also protects the church when an accusation surfaces months later.

Own the Parking Lot

Go back through the record above and count how much of it happened outside the doors. January 7 in Salt Lake City was entirely in the lot. Grand Blanc came through the front wall in a truck. Visalia walked through the front door. St. George was in the parking lot. In the incident data I track, roughly 75% of violent crime at churches happens outside the building.

The lot is where this gets won or lost. Coverage starts outside, not in the foyer.

While you are working on that, understand that not every service on your calendar carries the same risk. Funerals and memorial services are the highest risk events most churches host, and almost nobody staffs them that way. When the deceased had gang ties, or the family does, everyone with a grievance knows exactly where those people will be standing and exactly what time to find them. Salt Lake City in January is the case study. That crowd was assembled and advertised, and the shooting happened in the lot while the service went on inside. If a family asks to hold a service at your building, ask questions before you say yes, and put your people outside for that one.

Screen the Walk-In

Visalia is the case study and it should be required reading for every bishop. A man nobody knew asked for a church leader and was walked toward a closed office door.

Nobody meets a stranger alone behind a closed door. Ever. That protects the bishop physically and it protects him from accusations, which is the far more common risk.

I teach a free course on contacting suspicious persons and suspicious vehicles, and it covers the meet and greet interruption. You close the distance, you get eyes on the person, and you break their decision cycle with something simple and human. You meet him with the heart of Christ and you stay prepared for the other outcome.

Plan for the Insider

Fallon was a member of the ward. He was in the room before he was a threat. Salt Lake City in January came out of a dispute between people attending a service.

A team trained only to watch the door will miss both. They have to be trained to watch the congregation.

What Every Other Church Should Take From This

I did not write this to put a denomination on trial. I wrote it because most of these failures are not unique to them, and the ones reading this from a Baptist, non-denominational, or Catholic parish should stop feeling comfortable.

Go look at your own website tonight. How much of your emergency plan is posted publicly? Your service times, your staff directory with photos, your floor plan for the building campaign, your children’s check-in procedure. An attacker builds a target package out of exactly that material, and most churches hand it to him for free.

Then look at your carry policy. If you have a no-weapons sign on the door and no security team behind it, you have chosen the worst configuration available. You have disarmed the law-abiding and deterred nobody. Either build the program or stop pretending the sign is one.

Then walk your parking lot on a Sunday morning and count how many sets of eyes are actually assigned to it. In most churches the honest answer is zero.

And ask yourself the harder question. When something goes wrong at your church, does the institution get louder or quieter? Every organization in this space, mine included, has a temptation to manage the story instead of fixing the gap. A congregation that gets quiet after an incident is a congregation that will have the same incident again.

Biblical Perspective

I want to speak as a brother for a moment rather than as a security instructor.

In Ezekiel 33, God sets a watchman on the wall and gives him one job. He sees the sword coming, and he blows the trumpet.

“But if the watchman sees the sword coming and does not blow the trumpet, so that the people are not warned, and the sword comes and takes any one of them, that person is taken away in his iniquity, but his blood I will require at the watchman’s hand.” (Ezekiel 33:6, ESV)

That is not advice. That is God assigning responsibility, and notice where He assigns it. Not to the man carrying the sword. To the watchman who saw it coming and said nothing.

So understand what this article is. I am blowing the trumpet. I have watched this sword come down on churches for years and I am telling the Latter-day Saints plainly that it is coming back around. If I stayed quiet because I did not want my neighbors angry with me, or because I did not want a comment section full of people calling me anti-Mormon, that silence would be on my hands.

Now go to Nehemiah, who was rebuilding the wall of Jerusalem while men were coming to kill his workers. He did not tell them to pray harder and hope for the best.

“And we prayed to our God and set a guard as a protection against them day and night.” (Nehemiah 4:9, ESV)

He prayed and he set a guard. Both, in the same breath, in the same sentence.

Then read what he actually did with that guard. He identified the low places and the open spots in the wall, the gaps where an enemy would come through, and he stationed people there by family with swords, spears, and bows. The men hauling material carried a load in one hand and a weapon in the other. The men laying stone worked with a sword strapped to their side. Nehemiah kept the man with the trumpet standing beside him so the alarm could go out the instant anything moved. In today’s terms that is a pistol on the hip, a rifle in the closet, and a radio on every member of the team. Then he stood in front of all of them and told them to stop being afraid, to remember the Lord, and to fight for their brothers, their sons, their daughters, their wives, and their homes.

Here is where that lands. Nehemiah was doing the holiest work happening in Israel at that moment. He was rebuilding the city of God, and he armed the workers. Nobody in Scripture told him that weapons had no place on holy ground. God did not rebuke him for it. God gave him the wall in 52 days.

So when someone tells you that a building set apart for worship is a place where you leave the ability to protect people at the door, understand that this is a preference and not a biblical position. Nehemiah is the biblical position. Pray and set a guard.

Solomon said it shorter than I can in Proverbs 22:3. The prudent man sees the danger coming and takes cover. The simple man walks past it and pays for it. There is no third category in that verse, no righteous option where you see it coming, do nothing, and God honors you for the passivity.

Grand Blanc was not a warning. Grand Blanc was the event. Salt Lake City in January was the confirmation. Michigan, Nevada, California, Utah, Idaho, Alabama. The sword has been seen.

Final Assessment

The question in front of Latter-day Saint leadership is not whether the threat is real. That question was answered on September 28, 2025, and answered again on January 7, 2026, and underlined this past Sunday by a man with a revolver in a lobby who simply chose not to load it.

The only question left is whether the men holding the watch are going to blow the trumpet or account for the silence.

Most of what I have laid out here costs almost nothing. Pulling the operational material off a public server costs nothing. Putting trained eyes on a door costs nothing. Amending a handbook paragraph costs nothing. Meeting with the people who are already carrying in the building costs a calendar invite. The expensive items, the academy and the cameras, are within reach of an institution with this structure and these resources.

If you are a Latter-day Saint reading this, take it to your bishop. Take it to your stake president. Send it to Church Security in Salt Lake. Make somebody sit down and read it, and then make them answer for it. If you are going to cause a stir inside your organization over something, this is the hill worth taking.

And if you are reading this from any other church in America, do not walk away from it feeling superior. Most of you have the same holes. They just have not been tested yet.

Join the Conversation

I want constructive conversation in the comments and nothing else. To the Christians reading this, do not use that space to attack Latter-day Saints. They are made in the image of God, there will be another time and place for that discussion, and this is not it. To the Latter-day Saints reading this, come in with an open mind and skip the excuses. Tell me what you think can be changed inside your structure and where the real obstacles sit, because I am not the one with all the answers here. The Lord is.

If you serve on a church security team anywhere, tell me how your congregation handles lawful carriers and whether anybody is assigned to your parking lot. Send this to your pastor or your team leader today. And if this work helps your team, consider a paid subscription. It keeps the training free for the churches that cannot afford it.

Copyright © 2026 Keith Graves. All rights reserved.