Maureen

My favorite - an older guy that is frightened of doctors goes with his wife for a checkup.  After the checkup the doctor wants to consult with the old guy but in his fear - he sends in his wife to talk to the doctor.  The conversation with the doctor takes place:
Doctor: I am glad you came in - your husband has a very uncommon condition that can be easily treated but you need to be involved.
Wife: What do I need to do?
Doctor: First let me say that his condition is critical so - either your husband must have more sex or he is going to die.
Later on the way home the older guy got up the courage to ask his wife.
Older Guy: What did the doctor say?
Wife: He said you are going to die.
 
The Traveler

It makes me sad that there are so many members that think they need to have a gun to feel safe.  I have never ever carried, nor have I ever had the desire to carry.  How many mass shootings have there been?  How many have been stopped by people with a concealed weapon?  Next to zero.
If someone open fires in sacrament meeting, the chance of you hitting an innocent person when trying to shoot the gunman are tremendously high.  Then the next thing that happens is that people won't know if you are part of the mass shooting either.
The best option is to rush the person and tackle the person.
I am not anti-gun.  I don't care if they are in the church or not.  But I feel sad for those who think they need to carry.  It is not a lens through which I would want to view life.
God knows what is going to happen.  If God wants that gunman stopped, that gunman is going to be stopped.

Maybe.  I think you give credit to how much available time they have on their hands, when they might be a little busier than that.
Either that or the Lord changes his mind REALLY REALLY often, sometimes in the span of less than 3-4 years.  He would even give opposite ideas that contradict each other and change that quickly!!!
Sometimes policy is just that, policy.  Sometimes it comes from the bureaucratic group of individuals at the top trying to figure out how best to interpret what the Lord wants or how to deal with how things are going in society.  I suppose one could imagine that the First Presidency WROTE the entirety of the Come Follow Me Manual or the New Youth Program that will be coming out soon.  More likely they got ideas on certain things and left it up to the bureaucratic arm to figure out how to do it.  They may speak certain things, but it's the bureacrats that write up the details in many instances (though in some there ARE times when the small details are written out by the First Presidency and the Quorum of the Twelve...though normally it's left more to a Seventy to be in charge of with their office staff).
Just my opinion.
The Handbooks are not scriptures, they are more of how things are run in the Church.  It's to keep the house in order, rather than to be a house of chaos.
I have no idea on the gun issue to be honest.  It could be directly from revelation.  It could have been a major thing even.  The Lord could have descended from the heavens and said...you shalt not have any guns in my church, because this is a very pressing issue that needs to be addressed more than anything else right now.
Or, someone may have felt an impression that enacting a certain policy right now would be the best course of action.
OR, it could have simply been after much discussion with various groups in the bureaucracy and the leadership that they made the decision to have this written out in the Church Handbook.
It may have been to many complaints or situations that have arisen and finally someone said...enough...if people don't take a hint one way, we'll make it far more explicit in another way.  It could boil down to a very small group of people (and not necessarily the entire First Presidency even) who decided on this change and got it approved.  Then to make sure everyone is aware of it the public relations department got everything in order with announcements and otherwise.
Various ways that things happen in relation to changes in policy.

Most non-members who spend any amount of time here know that temple matters are sacred. When I saw the OP question I perceived the larger issue--one that is leveled at most Christians, by non-believers: Is your faith sexist? Is it male-oriented, with the women expected to be in submission? The answers to this string have mostly been specific to the temple experience. IMHO, the broader answers to the accusation are in scriptures. Jesus was far more open to women than most in his generation. The Apostle Paul (often labeled sexist by armchair critics) commanded men to love their wives to the point of dying for them. He also insisted that we submit to one another. I suspect there are similar examples in the BoM, the D&C, as well as in the pronouncements of church leaders. It may be that there are unique issues within the temple observances, but the accusation of sexism is one that thoughtful Christians of nearly every stripe find we must respond to.

You seem to be insinuating that because this woman is uncomforable with her temple experience that must mean she must be an anti-mormon. Does that mean you don't think a faithful member can struggle with their temple experience?
M.

@MarginOfError this comment of yours: "I'd love for you to point out any one instance where I've advocated for someone else to wear pants to church, or to wear a colored shirt, or to not shave. I've advocated for people to wear whatever they're comfortable wearing, and against using a dress code as a litmus test for faithfulness. "
Reminded me of this quote by Nibley:
"The worst sinners, according to Jesus, are not the harlots and publicans, but the religious leaders with their insistence on proper dress and grooming, their careful observance of all the rules, their precious concern for status symbols, their strict legality, their pious patriotism... the haircut becomes the test of virtue in a world where Satan deceives and rules by appearances."

I didn't say anything about ownership and the quote I used from you didn't either.  You said 
And I pointed out that no, not all Americans think that way.  Just about every time I see a gun IRL, I think it can kill me.  Maybe it's too much TV and video games.  Maybe it's just a safe perspective of the tool.  Honestly, most gun-owners I know, also have a healthy respect for gun safety BECAUSE they know it can kill them.  Guns were invented to kill.  Their designs have been improved to do it better.  Yes, they have other uses.  But to blatantly ignore the fact that they can kill seems foolish to me.

This American does, and so do many others.

Funny how when it comes to wearing a firearm at church, this seems so totally rational. But when it comes to wearing a colored shirt, it's completely rebellious.

There are lots of comments on this post about people feeling the need to protect themselves and their families. Do you anticipate dealing with violent crime on a regular basis?
The general feeling in the UK is that there is infrequent violent crime, so there is no need to carry guns.  It is safe to walk the streets, even as a woman on my own I have walked through central London late at night. There is a concern with rising knife crime in some cities, and how we can target the youth involved in this but it is not an everyday occurrence; indeed most people would not know anyone involved in violent crime. And I worked in inner city schools and areas of deprivation for 15 years before changing career.
My gut feeling and a little research shows that the UK has FAR lower violent crime than the US

 UNODC homicide rate:

Interesting analysis here:  Discussing the different reporting methodologies, differences in definitions of crimes and affect of estimated under reporting of crimes
https://dispellingthemythukvsusguns.wordpress.com/


Just want to point out that I am not against using firearms. I shoot and hunt and own a Browning 12 Bore. However the difference between owning a shotgun and a handgun; let alone carrying one in public are culturally vast.
 
 

Apparently they do not. "Pants" to an English person means "underwear", while "Pants" to an American is synonymous with "slacks".
M.

I'd be interested in understanding why he thinks the children are in "real danger." 
I'll be extremely forthcoming right now and admit some things that some here may think are hypocritical. Several months ago, I very nearly purchased my first handgun and was preparing to carry it concealed at church. I was considering this because I, unfortunately, had ended up having to make a report to Child Protective Services against another member that attends church at my building. This particular member has some known anger management issues, and I was worried that there may be retaliation and I wasn't sure how that retaliation might manifest. 
At the time, I was aware that carrying firearms at church was discouraged, but I had a specific threat in mind and was willing to carry in order to guard myself against that threat. Fortunately, after some prayer and contemplation, I felt reassured that neither myself nor my family was going to face that kind of threat, and so I ended up not going through with that plan. 
But if I were to have to do that again, and felt that there was a credible need to defend myself, I might speak with the bishop about the potential threat, but this policy wouldn't stop me from carrying.
So if there is a specific and credible threat to your family's safety, I think it's worth considering.  But if there isn't a specific threat, maybe you can encourage him to conduct a rational and objective threat assessment for your church building.

Since I don't know if this woman must consider her temple covenants "carved in stone", so to speak; but maybe she can take comfort that going forward these changes will help others have a more positive temple experience.
M.

The important distinction is that your first time going through the temple you are going for yourself. Every time after you are going for someone else.
So if someone went through over a year ago, the covenants they made them would presumably be different then if they had gone through today. 

I stole this from a poster named Amulek at another website:
 

I wish I knew @mirkwood well enough to give him a friendly jab about how often he's asked to leave  

Except that mass shootings are exceptionally rare, and mass shootings at churches even more so.
I just spent a few minutes reviewing Mass Shootings in the United States in 2019 (on Wikipedia). I've read the news articles associated with the most recent 20 events (It seems the threshold for inclusion on this list is three casualties), and out of those 20, two of them occurred at gun free zones. 
In one of those, the shooting took place in a parking lot near a high school that was hosting a football jamboree. The article wasn't able to specify what the motivation for the shooting was, as suspects had not been apprehended. A linked story related to a shooting (with too few casualties to make the list) that occurred during the same events suggests that this may be related to arguments that broke out at the event.
The other shooting took place at a bar after a patron was banned from the establishment. My understanding is that most states prohibit carrying firearms in establishments that serve alcohol (I hope those reasons are obvious).
For the remaining 18 shootings, five of them took place at private residences;  ten of them occurred in public; two took place at shopping centers (one a grocery store parking lot, the other a Circle K parking lot). 
Nine of them were confirmed domestic disputes, two involved gang violence, one involved alcohol, one involved drugs, and the remaining seven weren't clear on motivations (as suspects hadn't be apprehended), but nothing in these twenty incidents stood out to me as being someone looking for just any target. I suspect, with the exception of the drug related shooting, they were all targeting a specific person or group of people following some kind of dispute.
 
In the summary article on Mass Shootings on Wikipedia (see here) there are seven shootings listed that occurred at a church.  These involve one that was targeted; one that was targeted against the assailant's own church; three that were targeted against religion generally (ideological, the specific church was convenient); one targeted African Americans;  and one was mostly random (the assailant chose the church because it was where his mother in law attended). 
Those seven are in a list of 229 "notable" shootings.
 
Even if we take all seven of those events and consider them truly random, we have seven events in the span of 30 years. That is, seven churches out of, let's say 300,000 churches (according to this random article, that's how many Protestant churches there are).  With that many churches, 52 Sundays per year, and a span of 30 years, that gives any particular church being struck by a random shooting on any Sunday an estimated probability of 0.000000015 (1.5 per one hundred million). Probabilistically speaking, it's hard to argue that carrying a firearm at church makes you safer at church.

Meh. I tossed the judgments of others out the window yesterday and took time to buy a bunch of things at Lowe's, dig a couple holes, and conduct some light carpentry. I also recruited four members of the ward to help me do it all.
Felt pretty good.

The author of the article did not complain about her bishop. She merely mentioned how she was surprised by his question, thinking that even now, after all these years, someone would think that a woman wearing pants to church is a sign of rebellion. When in actuality wearing pants is a lot more comfortable to a lot of women than wearing a dress. From what I read, that is precisely why the author wears them. 
M.

This; I wore a light blue suit and white shirt with orange pinstripes this morning.  Because it's a suit I haven't worn in a while, but dropped a couple pounds to get the pants fitting right again, and the shirt actually coordinated fairly well.  I certainly didn't declare it a "non-white shirt protest."
Got quite a few compliments on it too.  

All good thoughts, but the last one is my favourite.
M.

I really enjoyed meeting everyone. It's always good to put actual faces to names. One of the funny things, I still call JAG and pam by their screen names instead of their real names. JAG just looks like a JAG. And pam, well, she looks very gingery...
So, here's beefche's stupid moment of her life. I booked my flight separate from my husband. When I booked my flight, I booked it to leave Aug 24. That meant I could attend the dinner. I enjoyed dinner, drove to my friend's house (where I was staying), got up the next morning. Took a nice walk along the mountains, showered, packed, left with my friend to return my rental car. On our way to the SLC airport, I tried to checkin on the app. But it said my flight was completed. Huh? I looked at my email confirmation and sure enough my flight was the 23rd! I completely missed my flight! I was dumbfounded as this is completely not like me. After talking to a very kind Delta customer service rep, she was able to get me a flight out this evening. It's the worst flight ever (leave at midnight get into Indy at 10 am), but she saved me $500+. 
Lesson learned: have my husband check our flights to verify date and time!!!!

Or maybe you're just such an obnoxious drunk that we had to neuralize you and plant this whole story about being Mormon so you wouldn't do it anymore. 

There is an idea in vulnerability studies of share, stop and check.  (I'm not sure if that's the right terms, but it's how I remember it)  When you are opening up with someone, it is good to share a little, then stop, see if you are ok with what you shared.  Check with the person about how they feel, what they think.  When you're both good, you can share more.

I worry that I'm coming off as confrontational, and I'm really not trying to.  I am trying to understand this.  I re-read the article a couple times and I don't see it the way you do.  She says she wants to dress how she feels confident and unique.  Apparently that means pants for her.  I don't see her saying that she's making a statement, or that other women should too or those that don't aren't expressing themselves.