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Before he was shot at an Aurora theater last Thursday night, Pierce O’Farrill was a proponent of the death penalty. After being hit by three bullets — and believing for awhile that he was dying — O’Farrill says he’s changed his mind. He doesn’t want the death penalty for the man who shot a theater full of people. What’s more, he says his faith leads him to forgive James Holmes.

In a radio interview with syndicated talk show host Todd Schnitt, O’Farrill described the importance of his faith in getting through the ordeal, and he said forgiveness is part of knowing Jesus.

“So the truth is I’m blessed — I’m truly blessed — to have forgiveness in my heart and I do forgive him completely for what he’s done,” O’Farrill said.

In the interview with Schnitt, O’Farrill describes his experience in great detail. It’s the most riveting account I’ve heard of exactly what it was like to be in the theater during the shooting. O’Farrill was hit by a bullet from each of the three weapons that Holmes used. When one bullet hit his arm and broke a bone, he ended up in tremendous pain and he bled a lot. He couldn’t figure out where he had been hit, and he says he thought he was dying. (You can listen to the entire interview in two segments at the end of this article.)

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Many crazy ideas are popular until they’re proven wrong. People once believed the earth is flat. They believed you’d fall off the edge of the world if you went too far. The sun revolved around the earth, of course. And there were dangerous dragons waiting in far-off lands to greet anyone who dared to go there.

People eventually realized that all of these notions were wrong. Sailors proved that you could sail around the world, thus showing that the world was round and you couldn’t fall off the edge. Astronomers figured out that the earth revolves around the sun. After all of this, everybody with a brain realized that the earth wasn’t flat.

Unfortunately, a few insane or stupid people maintain today that the earth is flat. Ever heard of the Flat Earth Society? It really exists. Here’s the group’s website.

In the late 19th century, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels developed the idea of communism. Although many thinking people rejected the ideas as obviously impossible and contrary to how human nature works, the idea appealed to a lot of desperate people. Starting with the communist takeover of Russia, the idea took over a large part of the globe.

But the idea failed. It didn’t work as promised. Without a market system to supply basic information about how much things were worth and what people wanted, the system fell apart. Central planners couldn’t have enough information and human nature corrupted even the best intentions of the true believers. The Soviet Union collapsed, taking with it the various governments it had controlled and supported.

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When I’m with a woman I love and something bad happens, my first instinct is to reach out to protect her. It’s not conscious. It’s just the way I feel. But I never feel the same instinct with a man I’m with, even if I care deeply about him.

Some people would say this is cultural, but I think it’s hardwired in some way. The average man has a strong instinct to protect the women in his life that he cares about, and my feeling is that it’s deeply embedded in us in some way. We saw three examples of it on display in a movie theater in Aurora, Colo., late Thursday night.

In at least three cases, men died trying to protect the girlfriends they had with them. In a situation such as that, there’s no time for conscious thinking. It’s all about gut instinct. How many other men in the theater that night were doing the same, but didn’t happen to die? There’s no way to know, but I’d be shocked if there weren’t a lot more who were instinctively willing to die to protect women they felt responsible for.

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