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Utah's Episcopal Bishop Scott Hayashi knows how it feels to have a bullet rip through his flesh.
Decades ago, the future clergyman was a 19-year-old clerk in a Tacoma, Wash., record store when three robbers stormed into the place. One hopped over the counter and demanded the young Hayashi give him all the money in the cash register. It was $9.
As the young clerk turned his head, the thief thrust his gun at Hayashi's abdomen and fired.
"Even though I had been shot," the Utah bishop says in a video produced by the Episcopal Diocese of Utah, "I did not feel any pain."
He laid on the floor in shock until others found him. A few months and multiple surgeries later, Hayashi emerged from his hospital bed forever changed.
At no time, though, did he wish he had a firearm at the store.
"There was nothing I could have done to stop what was happening," he says in the film. "If I had had a gun in my possession, it would have done me no good and most likely it would have been used against me or stolen."
To this day, the leader of the state's 5,000 or so Episcopalians remains convinced that the solution to violence is not more guns — especially not in churches — even in the aftermath of a massacre at a Texas Baptist church, where a single shooter gunned down 26 worshipers in the latest attack on a faith community.
Continue Reading: Utah churches grapple with a scary scenario: What to do if a shooter shows up?
