ASSOCIATED PRESS: KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — An out-of-work truck driver accused of opening fire at a Unitarian church, killing two people, left behind a note suggesting that he targeted the congregation out of hatred for its liberal policies, including its acceptance of gays, authorities said Monday. A four-page letter found in Jim D. Adkisson’s small SUV indicated he intentionally targeted the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church because, the police chief
said, “he hated the liberal movement” and was upset with “liberals in general as well as gays.”
Adkisson, a 58-year-old truck driver on the verge of losing his food stamps, had 76 rounds with him when he
entered the church and pulled a shotgun from a guitar case during a children’s performance of the musical “Annie.” Adkisson was a loner who hates “blacks, gays and anyone different from him,” longtime acquaintance Carol Smallwood of Alice, Texas, told the Knoxville News Sentinel. In Adkisson’s letter, which police have not released, “he indicated … that he expected to be in there (the church) shooting people until the police arrived and that he fully expected to be killed by the responding police,” Owen said. “He certainly intended to take a lot of casualties.” The Unitarian-Universalist church advocates for women’s rights and gay rights and has provided sanctuary for political refugees. It also has fed the homeless and founded a chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, according to its Web site. Owen said authorities believe the suspect had gone to the Unitarian church because of “some publicity in the recent past regarding its liberal stance on things.”
Adkisson “stated that he had targeted the church because of its liberal teachings and his belief that all liberals should be killed because they were ruining the country, and that he felt that the Democrats had tied his country’s hands in the war on terror and they had ruined every institution in America with the aid of the major media outlets,” Investigator Steve Still wrote. MORE
VALUEs VOTERS.ORG: For some decades now supposedly “liberal” and “progressive” forces within our society have waged an insidious campaign to corrupt and destroy the moral foundations of our liberty. Under the compassionate guise of government welfare and social programs they have eroded our fortitude and self-discipline, taxed away our independent resources, and in particular undermined the centrality of family as the locus of individual self-reliance. Under the guise of sexual freedom and self-determination they have corrupted our sense of responsibility for our own offspring in the womb and for our biological relationships in general. This ultimately affects all relationships that draw upon the capacity for self-sacrifice we ought naturally to learn and practice in the context of decent family life.
Under the guise of scientific knowledge, and a fallacious separation of religion from public life, they have thrown off the yoke of reason, and denied our sovereign right to acknowledge, as a people, the existence and authority of the Creator. But the Creator’s being and will represent the principle of unity that makes possible both the diversity of individuals and the orderly community that, on the whole, they may become. Thus, though they masquerade as the champions of community and compassion, these self-styled “liberals” and “progressives” have discarded the principle of unity, the sense of a common good, indispensable to both. MORE
MSN: Jamie Parkey thought the blast that ripped through the sanctuary of the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church was part of the play his daughter and other children were putting on. Then he saw blood on another parishioner behind him and saw a man with a 12-gauge shotgun calmly firing away at the congregation. “He had the gun leveled in our direction,” Parkey told TODAY’s Matt Lauer on Monday, one day after the gunman killed two church members and wounded six others before being wrestled to the ground by parishioners. “That’s when I pushed my mother and daughter to the floor and got under the pew. When I saw the men rushing him was when I got up to join them.”
Parkey was one of the people who tackled 58-year-old Jim D. Adkisson, kicking the shotgun away and holding the gunman on the floor with an arm-bar hold. Parkey’s 16-year-old daughter was in the play, and he had been sitting in the front of the church with his mother and his 6-year-old daughter when the attack began. Parkey’s wife, Amy Broyles, was in the church’s glass-enclosed quiet room with their 2-year-old daughter when Adkisson walked into the Knoxville sanctuary, pulled the shotgun out of a guitar case and opened fire. “I was there with our 2-year-old and heard the first shot,” Broyles told Lauer from Knoxville. “Our daughter had come out on the stage. Then another shot, and I saw Jamie pushing people down to the floor. I looked right outside the window of the room and the man was standing right there with a rifle, shooting. I grabbed the baby and dropped to the floor against the door so that he couldn’t see or be able to come in if he tried to. MORE