Posted on 03/25/2024 7:45:39 PM PDT by DoodleBob
For over 30 years, I have been frustrated by the inevitable destruction our gun culture imposes on American life. As a state senator in Utah in the 1990s, I promoted carefully modest gun safety bills. As an ordinary contributor to Brady, Giffords, Everytown, and other gun responsibility organizations, or just as another person expressing my opinion, lost in the vastness of our media universe, the disorder of gun violence calls out for my attention as a citizen. As it is for everyone, this call is more immediate for me after a mass shooting of children, but it is always there. It is my conscience, I suppose.
The starting point for me is the falsehood, the false pretense of our gun culture. The right to carry a gun, and the claim to a right to exert that power, must not be the highest right in our land — one which comes ahead of the rest. This bothers me, that I have to confront this falsehood. I really don’t like us avoiding the truth and giving obeisance to the falsehood. We have to keep a few things, which we know to be true, in front of us and give them their due. Here are some.
First, guns are machines designed to kill. Most of the weapons sold today are not designed for hunting or target practice; they are built to kill people. There may perhaps be a proper place for these weapons, in armies or in police forces, but certainly not among the general public. For the general public inevitably includes people who are invisibly unstable and easy prey to acts of hatred or anger.
Second, our gun culture exalts guns over life. We refuse to control guns even though they are the essential instruments in the murders of children and grown-ups time and again. If we say we obey God’s will, and we believe that God wants children to live a full life, and yet we distribute everywhere the ready means to kill children, then this is idolatry. In fact we do not worship God; we worship the gun.
Third, the Second Amendment has proven to be a great obstacle to placing God’s will first, ahead of guns. It is possible to imagine unreasonable restrictions on guns, but the Second Amendment is used to thwart commonsense restrictions intended to keep more people alive.
Fourth, our gun culture should not be so proud of the Second Amendment anyway. The Second Amendment was designed to preserve the institution of slavery. The Bill of Rights, including the Second Amendment, was necessary to secure the ratification of the Constitution. The Southern states felt they needed the right to have militias to suppress slave uprisings. They did not trust the national government to protect slavery for them. Thus the Second Amendment is inextricably linked to the original sin of our nation’s founding, and to me that diminishes its place of honor as a part of the Bill of Rights. We should not be afraid to say so.
Fifth, political forces use the falsehood of the gun culture to stay in power. They are aided by gun manufacturers, lobbyists, and the culture warriors who abide in the gun mythos. These are formidable forces.
Sixth, Christian Nationalism, with its strong support for the Second Amendment, originates in white supremacy. Its supporters’ identification of Christianity with the use of guns defames the name of Christ. Just as the exaltation of guns is idolatry, so identifying gun rights with Christianity is taking the Lord’s name in vain.
Finally, we are desperate enough now to recognize that we cannot overcome this power on our own. I think that we must more often say out loud that our undue protection of gun rights is itself modern idolatry; that it is disordered and wrong. I think our faith leaders can raise awareness that exalting gun rights is wrong and needs correction. We need help from above.
I think we keep trying to require background checks, limit high capacity automatic weapons, require training, ban bump stocks, and so on, because we are drawn to truth and we want to honor it and challenge falsehood. This is stark. It is clear. It is to reject the gun culture with its roots in white supremacy and its opposition to the values of both testaments. So, occasionally discouraged as we may be, we need to keep trying. The alternative is to let the great falsehood triumph.
“There may perhaps be a proper place for these weapons, in armies or in police forces, but certainly not among the general public”
Does not understand what the 2nd Amendment is about, like most liberals.
And he’s a demonrat to boot 🥾.
Exactly.
You Nazi maggots need to get a life and a job. If you want to stop the violence, do something about your illegal alien voters driving drunk and wiping out whole American families. It will be worth deporting every illegal alien currently on the government teat in this country if it will save JUST ONE American family.
Why?
Because everyone knows that there is a good chance the person that just accidentally bumped into you is carrying. So rather then a extended period of chest thumping that devolves into violence the bumped says "Hey!" to the bumpee. Who, knowing that the person he bumped into is also probably carrying, says "Sorry!"
There is no, "What is this little guy doing" or "Big guys think they own the road". They know that when it comes to fire power they are pretty much equal.
There is nothing to be gained in status by taking it further. No one is going to think any less of the two because they let the incident drop. In fact by taking it further you have lost points on the social ladder.
And that is, in brief, why an armed society is a polite society.
We live in a world of good and evil. Guns are in possession by both. If you take the guns away from the good who are honest enough to turn them in if absolutely required, then that leaves the other half, those that do not even try to use them intelligently, still armed. And while you now take away the honest peoples’ ability to protect themselves, you are empowering the other half to use the guns you didn’t get from them. And evil makes no effort not to use them to harm.
So, you won’t be able to get all the guns, and you can’t protect those you disarmed, so what have you accomplished. Certainly not the target you are aiming at. And, in this case, if you are not part of the answer, you are part of the problem.
And while you’re at it, if you are not going to stop people carrying weapons into the Utah State government buildings, then your enemy is the same as ours...evil at some point. The people who handle your security for the building have been lucky so far. But it only takes one.
Lt. Breur said other weapons are also allowed inside the capitol. “We operate under the constructs of Utah State Law,” he said. “We are not going to restrict somebody who can legally possess that weapon.”
Yet a couple of paragraphs before that they say they don’t check if the visitor can legally possess or not and they do see them. Course they are all armed. So if they get a nut, they can just gun him down and then feel bad. But they’re armed.
wy69
After Hurricane Ike hit the upper Texas coast, the rat media types asked the Governor of Texas about looting in Galveston county. The head of the DPS (state troopers) answered that question. He said that is no looting in that county. Galveston county has the highest per capita of CHL license holders of any other Texas County.
An armed society is a polite society.
There was a group of guys that put up a picture on the internet. It was a piece of plywood spray painted with the message, “you loot, we shoot”.
I presume that this person has given up any and all armed security he (or she) has.
And likely would advocate for all democrat gun grabbers to do the same.
“The right to life is the highest right, and the right to defend life is inherent in it. The Right to Keep and Bear Arms is an inherent, inescapable part of the highest of rights.”
Couldn’t agree more.
Stand a liberal gun grabber
against a grizzly. The
liberals only defense
being his walking stick.
Nice bear....
These tards need to only look at 1 culture only. The filth that inner city culture spews is responsible for almost all of it. They’re far too cowardly to attack that though. Hate whitey and Christians is way easier.
Lets see here; I’m a Christian, a Nationalist (i.e. Patriot), Heterosexual, White, Male, gun owner.
DAMN, I MUST BE A TERRORIST!
Somebody stop me before I act like a LGBTQWERTY FOOL!
I know that those experienced in the use of guns make very accurate combat soldiers.
They don’t call them useful fools for nothing.
I remember my dad going down into the basement and shooting his .22 rifle at scraps of paper with bullseyes drawn on them. He let me and my brother shoot it. My brother was nine-years-old and I was ten.
“I don’t recall ever seeing so many errors and/or lies per sentence.”
Perhaps even a new world record. I believe if this guy told me the sun was rising in the Eastern sky that I’d have to run outside to check.
“The shocking thing is that the people of Utah elected this jackwagon and fed his unsupportable sense of self importance.”
Might I take a moment of your time to direct your attention to the esteemed UT Senator and RINO pontificator extraordinaire, Mitt Romney, to illustrate the fallibility of that state’s electorate?
Bkmk
Yep. This guy is infected with the woke mind virus. He recites every old anti gun cliche while adding the latest CRT white supremacy overlay. The real reason he is discouraged is that making guns illegal is out of reach. Let’s keep it that way.
Needs extraction surgery:
And then an attitude adjustment:
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