Was an Arizona church leader shot for sharing the gospel?
That’s the question police in Glendale, Arizona, are asking after 26-year-old Hans Schmidt caught a bullet in the head while preaching on a busy corner.
One nearby worker told KPHO-TV that Schmidt, a former combat medic who is also the outreach director at a local church, had been subject to hateful comments from passersby before.
The outlet reported that on Wednesday evening, he was “standing with a megaphone on the street corner, preaching the gospel to people passing by, something he’d apparently done countless times before.
“Only this time, someone pulled out a gun and shot him.”
The perpetrator is still at large.
“This is a horrible, horrible offense,” said Gina Winn, Glendale police’s public information officer.
“We have a 26-year-old who was a military medic. He is recently married, he has two small children and he’s currently in a critical state.”
Others close to the preacher can’t understand why it would happen.
“Who knows why someone would want to take it out on a preacher like that because he’s speaking the gospel and good news to everybody. He’s out to help the community,” said Henry Branch, who lives nearby.
Larry Dettman, meanwhile, told KPHO he was at Schmidt’s church on Wednesday when the pastor announced the news of the shooting and then left to check on Schmidt at the hospital.
Dettman put it succinctly: “There’s some real evil in this world.”
Police don’t know much about the shooter — whether he was on foot or in a vehicle, or whether he targeted Schmidt or randomly attacked him — but Winn thinks someone at the busy intersection saw something.
“We know for a fact that there were people within the area. There were vehicles driving within the area,” she said. “So we believe there is somebody … that does know something about what happened.”
As for Schmidt’s exact condition, his church’s website stated that he is “in desperate need of a miracle.”
Is there any talk about this being an anti-Christian “hate crime”? If Schmidt had been a street preacher of a religion that finds greater favor with the left, this would be a cause célèbre for Democratic politicians and media vultures.
They wouldn’t even need to know whether religion had anything to do with the shooting. We’d already be hearing noises out of Washington about civil rights charges — and rest assured, the FBI would be there trying to catch the baddie.
But here? Glendale police seem to be on their own.
It may indeed turn out that religious animus had nothing to do with this. It was just, as they say, one of those things. In the wrong place at the wrong time.
The fact that nobody in authority even feels the need to find out, however, is a damning indictment of the blind eye so many turn to anti-Christian hate. It’s almost like it can’t exist.
Something’s already wrong with our country when someone can just get shot out of the blue on a street corner. Something’s even more wrong when the media, which speculates about “hate crimes” all the time, won’t give the same treatment to a story that doesn’t fit into the left’s narrative.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
