Jeremy Lucas, reverend of Christ Church Episcopal Parish in Lake Oswego, Oregon, spent $3,000 in church “discretionary funds” to win an AR-15 so he could “destroy” it.
The rifle was being raffled for a girls’ softball team composed of players from Centennial, Gresham, and Milwaukie high schools, with the goal of raising money to fund their travels to a tournament in California.
According to Oregon Live, Lucas said he was “disturbed” by the raffle because it “was right after the shootings in Baton Rouge and there was a lot of heat and energy around the issue of guns.” He said, “I want to live in a world where a girls’ softball team doesn’t have to raffle off a gun because it’s the quickest way to make money.”
A total of “499 tickets” were available when Lucas determined to win, so he bought 199 of the tickets and won the AR-15. He said he knows he could have bought multiple AR-15s with the same discretionary funding he used to win the raffle, but “that wouldn’t have gotten [him] to the second goal of getting the girls to California.”
He has now pivoted from completely destroying the gun and decided, instead, to have an artist turn it “into something symbolic.”
Lucas said, “I want it to be a symbol where we take something destructive, because a gun can never be constructive, and turn it into something else. Even if it’s one gun out of a million, it’s one less for someone to hurt someone else or themselves with.”
AWR Hawkins is the Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and political analyst for Armed American Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com.
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