A North Carolina pastor giving a New Year's Eve sermon may have stopped a mass shooting when he convinced a man carrying a semi-automatic assault rifle to give up his gun and sit down in a pew to pray, NBC News reported.
Larry Wright, a former paratrooper and drill sergeant who retired in 1997, had never seen the disheveled young man before. The man approached the pulpit while Wright had been explaining that "at any moment your life could be taken from you."
Wright, 57, and also a city councilman, didn't tackle the man who seemed to threaten Heal the Land Outreach Ministries, he simply asked if he could help, and if the man would pray for Wright. It worked.
"I asked God to help him and bless him," Wright told NBC News. "He fell to his knees, and he began to weep."
Wright said the man was a parolee and military veteran suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome. His wife had recently been diagnosed with a serious illness, and he was off his medication.
