Americans should fight to retain their constitutional right to carry firearms and Christians should acknowledge their Biblically based duty for self-defense, South African missionary Charl van Wyk said in Tulsa.

Wyk is a full-time Christian missionary from South Africa, in Zimbabwe, Zambia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. He wrote the best-selling book, Shooting Back: The Right and Duty of Self-Defense.

Wyk, in an interview on Tulsa Beacon Weekend on KCFO AM970, said registration of guns is a prelude to confiscation.

“I would caution Americans to fight for their gun rights as hard as they possibly can,” Wyk said. “There is only one reason for registration and that’s for confiscation later.

“We’ve seen this all over Africa. Gun-free zones are the most dangerous places on the Earth. We can see through the 20th Century all of the different countries that have disarmed their people. They have made laws to disarm the population. We’ve seen this in Rwanda, in Germany, and many different countries where, once the people have actually handed their guns over, there has been a genocide. People have been wiped out. Over a hundred million just in the 20th Century.

“It’s happened in the Congo.”

Wyk knows what he is talking about. He was the hero of the Saint James Massacre, July 25, 1993. In his church, 11 people were murdered and over 50 were injured in a terrorist attack during a Sunday night service.

“Suddenly there was a noise at the front door,” Wyk said. “Terrorists stepped in. They had automatic rifles with them and they also had hand grenades. They put nails on the outside of the grenades to get more shrapnel. They lobbed the grenades into the congregation, which was around a thousand people. The church normally seated 1,500 but it was a cold winter’s night in Cape Town.

“And after lobbing the grenade, they opened up fire with their automatic rifles. And it was only when I saw the wood splinter being shot out of the benches of the church that I realized this was an attack happening. I thought at the beginning that it might just be a play or theater that they were doing in the church for the congregation.”

Wyk, who is white and whose family has roots in South Africa that date back to the 1600s, knew he had to take action.

“If you look at the history of South Africa, literally, for hundreds of years we have had war after war after war,” Wyk said. “And all throughout our history, whenever women or children went to churches, that was a safe haven during the war time. Nobody would attack anybody in a church. So, this was extremely shocking. The idea that (would attack) was just foreign to our minds at the times.”

Wyk, who was seated in second from the back row of the church, had a .38-special revolver in an ankle holster. He ducked behind a pew and pulled out his gun.

“I knelt behind the bench in front of me and I took two shots at the attackers,” Wyk said. “I then realized that the long-distance chances of hitting them were pretty slim, so I crawled on all fours to the passageway and I ran out the back door of the church.”

He exited the back of the church and planned to re-enter in the front door and shoot the attackers in the back. But they were already at their get-a-way car.

“They were well aware that there was return fire in the church and they didn’t want to hang around for much longer,” Wyk said. “Apparently, they were also going to throw petrol bombs into the church so that those not killed by shrapnel or by bullets would then burn to death. But because of the return fire, they couldn’t throw the petrol bombs – or Molotov cocktails as you know them in America.”

Later, Wyk heard a statement from the leader of the terrorist group that attacked the church.

“He said they attacked the St. James Church thinking it was a gun-free zone but, boy, did Charl have a surprise for us,” Wyk said. “They didn’t expect any resistance in the church whatsoever and that’s why they attacked us.”

Many people who were in the church service were predictably very happy about Wyk’s heroic actions but not everyone was pleased. The Cape Town police praised Wyk except for one officer who said he would have charged Wyk with attempted manslaughter had even one of his bullets accidentally hit a church member.

“There were people who weren’t happy with what I did,” Wyk said. “And one of them was Arch Bishop Desmond Tutu, a black activist in South Africa – a liberal leader. He made a comment that was published on the front page of one of the newspapers a day or two after the massacre.

“He said something to the effect that Christians must not use such evil tools as these people. He couldn’t understand that I was not taking revenge. It wasn’t revenge – it was self-defense. As a Christian, I don’t take revenge. You leave that up to the Lord to deal with the perpetrators of crime.”

Wyk said that God intervened on his behalf because he was out of bullets (he only had five) when the attackers jumped into their car and sped away.

“They could have blown me away,” Wyk said.

Wyk credited his two years of military service in South Africa.

“I think the mental training was far more important than the actual physical training,” Wyk said. “I was never taught to shoot with a .38-special. We were using rifles. It’s very important to be trained properly on how to use them and the mental aspect of dealing with them.”

Wyk said the Bible asserts the right of self-defense and he thinks one of the challenges Christians face in South Africa is overcoming cowardice.

“Nobody wants to step up to the plate for any reason,” Wyk said. “We have an abortion holocaust in South Africa – over 1.5 million babies murdered. The abortion holocaust was started by Nelson Mandela.”

South Africa has a parliamentarian system. You vote for a party, not a candidate. Then the party picks the winners.

“Nelson Mandela’s group had the most amount of seats,” Wyk said. “And he went before Parliament and he said, ‘You will vote for abortion. And if you don’t, you will be ousted from your seat and we will replace you with somebody else.’”

Life is rough in South Africa, Wyk said. In a recent weekend, 43 people were murdered just in Cape Town. South Africa has more than 18,000 murders a year.

“The torture that goes with it is just absolutely horrendous,” Wyk said. “People use drills to drill into people’s brains. Using blowtorches and irons and slitting people’s throats. The torture goes on for hours and hours and hours before they actually kill the people.”

For more information or to buy his book, go to www.missionaryinafrica.com.