If Only God Were as Powerful as a Gun
I was finishing up writing about the policy behind gun laws, and the difficulties of trying to address senseless violence with public policy in the wake of the Club Q shooting in Colorado when this landed in my inbox.
Tim Miller is the best person to hear from about this issue. Tim is gay, from Colorado, and worked at really high levels in the Republican Party, so he sits at every intersection of this event, and he feels it personally. He says what I wanted to say better than I can, so you should read it.
So, now I’d like to take a look at the other angle to all this madness. I cannot stop thinking about is the religious angle.
People. worship. guns.
No matter how we define religion, worship, faith, or zeal, guns in the United States fit that definition.
Almost everyone knows a member of this cult, likely even three or four. Guns have become such an obsession they resemble the golden calf of Israel in Exodus. There are Christian (if we can call them that) churches that hold rallies to bless Semi-Automatic, High Caliber (SAHC) rifles! Where in the Bible do people come up with this crap?
For some reason, to even be taken seriously when talking about guns, I have to make sure people know that I love guns. All my life I’ve enjoyed shooting guns. I think guns are great. I’ve never suggested banning guns as a solution to violent crime because that isn’t a solution supported in the data. In fact, I think people who argue that banning guns is a solution are disingenuous.
But I want to tell you about an experience in my life that illustrates the current problem.
When I was a kid my dad and my uncle took a bunch of us cousins out target shooting. I don’t remember exactly how old I was, but I couldn’t have been older than 10 or 11—though I think I was a bit younger. We were shooting .22s and 12 gauges, and I was particularly excited because it was the first time I was big enough to shoot a 12 gauge. These shotguns have a decent amount of kick, and can knock the shooter on their rear if they aren’t big enough. I was finally big enough, and I was excited.
As we were taking a little walk away from the houses to the place we could safely shoot, one of us in the group of cousins put a .22 on their shoulder, meaning it was pointed in the air. My uncle immediately took the gun, and gave the boy a stern talking to.
See, the rules were clear. They were always clear from as young as I can remember. Guns are always pointed at the ground, and only the ground when walking. If anyone ever, even accidentally, pointed a gun—even an unloaded gun—in the general direction of houses or people, they would lose the privilege of shooting any gun for as long as it took for the adults to believe they were ready to responsible. I’m not talking hours or even days here. This was a long term, serious thing. You’d be lucky to be able to shoot again after a couple weeks. If you were stupid enough to point a gun at someone on purpose, as a dumb joke, you might not get to shoot for months.
The kid who had pointed the .22 in the air cried about it being an accident and that he didn’t realize he did it. And that, my uncle said, was the problem. When we are holding guns, he said, we have to be completely aware of everything we are doing with that gun. Losing concentration or having a momentary accident can be a life or death thing when we’re holding a gun.
Because this infraction was not one that led to a gun being pointed at someone else, the punishment was minor. But this boy still had to sit to the side and watch all the rest of us shoot—he wasn’t able to pull the trigger even once the rest of the day.
Now, as an adult I recognize that these rules are overkill, and so did my dad and my uncle. But we were kids, so overkill was the best way to teach us gun responsibility. This loss of responsibility is the core of the gun problem in the United States.
The fetishization of the Second Amendment has led to too many people—people who think John Wayne movies are historical documentaries—focusing entirely on the rights of gun owners, and forgetting entirely the responsibility that used to be a paired with firearms. The cultural context of the Declaration of Independence makes it easy for Americans to believe that all rights come from God—even though that isn’t what the Declaration says.1 Because of this too many people, who focus not at all on gun responsibility, have concluded that God insists they be allowed to own guns.
And so they worship them.
Gun rights used to be paired with gun responsibility. Now, responsibility is gone, and gun rights are paired with gun religion.
I don’t think any responsible gun owner would argue that a guy who called in a bomb threat against his own mom, and fantasized about murdering police, should own a gun. But we don’t get to make that choice anymore. Gun manufacturers and the NRA have pushed the conversation on guns so far to the extreme that we don’t get to make any choice about guns anymore. Prior to becoming the American political wing of the Kremlin, the NRA existed not to help gun owners, or protect sportsmen, but to make sure gun manufacturers could sell as many guns as possible. Any restriction on gun sales to unfit individuals would cut into gun manufacturers’ profits.
This political marriage pushed the window of discussion about guns into the unalienable rights territory. I’m shocked at how few Americans even know that the Supreme Court didn’t recognize the Second Amendment as having an individual right to bear arms until 2009. Somehow, the country managed to avoid tyranny for 233 years without the individual right to bear arms!
We have transformed almost to the point where the right is not held by the human, but by the gun itself. Against all the scriptural emphasis on doing no harm; loving others; helping others; serving others; putting down our weapons; and turning the other cheek, Americans have insisted God needs them to have a gun. God, they insist, can protect them from a pandemic that killed millions, but He must not be strong enough to protect them from anything that might give them the opportunity to use deadly force.
Now that the right to bear arms is a religion, we can’t do anything to stop these guns, we’re told. Any attempt to put God back above this graven image would be a slippery slope to all guns being taken away. Time and again we’ve heard the fear mongering, and time and again we’ve seen higher gun sales exactly when we are told the big, bad government will be taking guns away. We cannot take guns away from anybody, even a man who threatens police on video, because what would the poor gun do if it were taken?
That gun, that one right there, has the right to exist, and to be held, owned, loved, and operated by any American, no matter how unsuitable. God is no longer all powerful. God’s instruction, as it’s understood through the Bible, is now merely a suggestion. The Gun is too important, too powerful, for reason or theology to get in its way. Just like that, we have replaced God.
Now, we worship a gun.
We put this false god above God, and no amount of innocent slaughter is too much for our god. It doesn’t matter how many people die, our god cannot be made less powerful, lest we lose our right to say idle words about our former God.
Our god must be omnipotent in the face of background checks.
Our god must be immutable in the face of red flag laws.
Our god must be impassible in the face of waiting periods.
Our god must be jealous in the face of body armour bans.
Our god must be indignant in the face of mental health registries.
Then, when our god is used to kill innocent masses, its high priests feign prayer to a usurped, displaced, powerless God they now know in name only.
If only God were as powerful as a gun.
The document itself lists “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Though these are not exhaustive—it states these three are “among” the unalienable rights—there is nothing to suggest the Second Amendment (which is not in the Declaration) is a divine right.