"There is no greater coward than a criminal who enters a house of God and slaughters innocent people engaged in the study of scripture," said Cornell William Brooks, president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, after a visitor to a Bible study group at the historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church shot and killed the preacher and eight parishioners there in Charleston, South Carolina June 17.

I agree with Mr. Brooks. I hope we can all agree that when people arm themselves and travel to a church with the pre-arranged plan to open fire and kill people at that church –- peaceful, innocent people who have caused no one harm — that's evil, and anyone who commits such an act should be charged with multiple felonies and put on trial.

For instance, on Sunday, Feb. 28, 1993, scores of men roared up to the front of the Seventh-Day Adventist Church in Waco, Texas. None of these men ever claimed — even in later, self-serving testimony — to have displayed or attempted to serve any kind of "warrant." They poured out of their vehicles and began shooting into the church building, starting with the planned-in-advance killing by gunfire of a female dog and her puppies in a pen in the front yard.