Politicians attempt to make us believe that God wants you to have guns
By: Markian Hawryluk (Daily Montanan)
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
How many AR-15s do you think Jesus would have had?
It's a question so ludicrous that it seems like a parody, but it's not.
In different times, I might have thought that the question was so preposterous on its face that the average Jesus follower would dismiss it as a statement meant to provoke a response. But that's exactly the sort of question that far-right politicians have been stewing on for more than a year.
I have seen an increasing number of bumper stickers, T-shirts and signs that say something along the lines of "guns, God and freedom." And politicians have been blending the idea of god and guns awhile, hoodwinking citizens into believing that the Constitution was divinely given and as such, firearm freedom is a holy mandate.
For example, last year Rep. Lauren Boebert, a Republican from Colorado, suggested that what Jesus needed was more AR-15s. At a Christian conference, she joked, "Well, he didn't have enough to keep his government from killing him."
For so many reasons, historical and theological, this statement is unmoored from any reality, seeing as how the Roman government didn't really have any guns, nor did Jesus' followers. Asking such a question is about as meaningful as asking what car would Jesus drive?
The danger, though, is that such a blending of politics and Christianity has warped both. And, supporters of Boebert and her brand of politics cotton to the idea that guns are right up there with the Bible and Jesus.
Yet, it cannot be said any more clearly: Jesus' entire life, mission and message was a profound statement against guns. To believe Jesus would have been sitting on a cache of weapons is a misreading and manipulation of the highest order.
Leaders espousing such views become complicit in encouraging this fascination with weapons of war rather than fighting like hell for peace and life. We often think of the separation of church and state as a safeguard against the entry of religious beliefs into law, but it serves as an equally powerful principle to keep politicians from subverting religion into a justification for violence and death.
Even among Jesus' rag-tag bunch of disciples, had he been preparing for a political or military victory, he would have been more interested in amassing a storehouse of swords, soldiers and other primitive weapons. Instead, he commanded his disciples to sell everything, feed the hungry, clothe the naked and heal the sick.
Jesus said famously that his purpose was to have life abundantly. Guns stop life instantly.
And in the garden, as Jesus was betrayed and arrested, Peter, the same disciple whom Jesus predicted the Christendom would be founded upon, was rebuked for taking up a sword - the AR-15 of its time - to stop the arrest. If Boebert would simply read the passage, she could have answered her own question: Jesus would have had zero guns.
"Put your sword back into its place; for all who take the sword will perish by the sword. Do you think that I cannot appeal to my Father and he will at once send me more than twelve legions of angels," Jesus said in the book of Matthew (Chapter 26, verse 53)
If you want to let the Boeberts of the world continue their corrosive attack on government, or spew disinformation on the political process, I suppose that's the ultimate test of the First Amendment. As awful as some of their remarks have been, they're what passes for political discourse these days.
However, it seems like something different to coopt the New Testament in order to justify a death cult that is obsessed with guns, rather than following the example of the person they call "savior." Quite frankly, guns are incompatible with life, and you'd think a group that continuously talks about the sanctity of life would know that.
I cannot tell what's in Boebert's - or any politician's heart. The danger isn't just that she suffers from a misreading of the text, it's that she gives Christians license to believe that same message.
The point of the gospel - the only reason to believe in an obscure Judean carpenter - is that he had the power of armies and instead sacrificed military power for the redemptive power of love. The point is that he had guns and didn't use them to set an example - one that I'd argue Boebert and many others missed.
If we're really as pro-life as politicians would have us believe, then we must start loving life more than we love our possessions, the guns.
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Darrell Ehrlick
Darrell Ehrlick is the editor-in-chief of the Daily Montanan, after leading his native state's largest paper, The Billings Gazette. He is an award-winning journalist, author, historian and teacher, whose career has taken him to North Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Utah, and Wyoming.
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Sometimes wee see a gun lover claim that Jesus would have had guns because Jesus was a freedom fighter. His type of freedom was not of this earth though. If Jesus wanted to fight, he would have joined the guerilla forces in the region that were fighting against the Roman occupation.
Such an understanding would seem to go without saying, but the gun lovers recognize a psychological need, of theirs, to reconcile Christianity with gun love.
2nd Amendment is a Constitutional right.
Democrats want to infringe on that right.
Democrats are shitting on the Constitution.
What else is new?
“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State,” We ignored this part and decided the 2nd is a personal right. “[T]he right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” We ignore this as well since the definition of “arms” is weapons. We don’t allow grenades, bazookas, machine guns… Right now, a majority believes there are not enough restrictions on gun ownership. We could decide, and have in the past, that military style weapons with large magazines are unreasonably dangerous like machine guns. So, we get to decide what kind of society we want to live in. No one is shitting on the Constitution, some people are simply more reasonable than others.
Right and in doing so would display a clear Tyranny of the Majority. It completely disregards the fact that most gun owners are law abiding citizens, fully capable of handling the responsibility of lawful gun ownership. And they do.
More restrictions aren’t required.
Action enforcement and sentencing of existing firearm laws, is.
Simply false. 80% of the guns recovered at crime scenes in NJ come from out of state. In NYC, 93% come from outside the state of NY. In Pa, 80% of the guns recovered at crime scenes come from in state.
NJ gun acquisition laws do not prevent me from getting any gun I want, in fact, it’s not even that much of an inconvenience. However, NJ gun acquisition laws make straw purchases extremely difficult. If we had uniformly strict gun acquisition laws across the nation, we should see a drop of 75% in terms of guns getting into the hands of criminals. Even if it only drops 50%, it’s still a tremendous improvement.
About 200,000 guns are purchased by straw buyers in the US and trafficked into Mexico. AR/AK style weapons are the largest subset. Our lax gun acquisition laws don’t just result in tens of thousands of dead Americans each year, we arm the drug cartels and kill thousands of Mexicans. We make the cartels invincible and then complain about volume of drug trafficking.
The constitution gives us the right to guns. I have been shooting since I was a little kid in Pa. I would not be willing to give up my guns and I don’t think any Supreme Court would deny us that right. I own an AR, but I would support a ban. The weapon is designed to kill lots of people in a very short time. I think we should allow society to decide in cases like that.
I’m old, but I’m also a VR gamer. The physics engine behind some games nails the behavior of guns sans actual recoil. As you play, you level up. In one game I ended up with a AR with a holosight. I was unstoppable. I don't think we should should put such capability in the hands of the general public.
Americans are ingenious and we should allow people to look into our unique gun violence problem. We drive 4 times as far with 3 times as many vehicles on the road as 1965, but fatalities are down 80% per 100M miles driven. Who would have imagined all the changes made to cars, the environment, and even people? None of them bad. With guns we don’t even try because Republicans won't even allow examination. If most legal gun owners are responsible, which I believe is true, you should not fear examining our problem.
I’ve highlighted the cogent words in those sentences. So you think throwing the baby out with bath water by taking guns from law abiding citizens is going to solve that problem? Or making it more restrictive on them? I don’t. That’s a local crime problem. Criminals will find a way
I’d love to see where you are coming up with those numbers. I think I know but link please.
You better look at your data again. Rifles (AR’s etc) account for a small percentage of gun homicides in the US. Last I looked it was in the single digits. Handguns are by far the largest “subset” of weapons used in gun homicides and it isn’t even close.
So you’ve decided black guns bad and other guns good? If I had a nickel for every time I read that on the internet I’d be rich.
And yet, that is not happening. See above. How do you explain that?
I’d love to take you out to the range and show you how much more difficult real life is when shooting. A little bit of stress, that you can’t experience from your gamer chair and you wouldn’t be hitting jackshit. A friend who was in the DEA sent me a compilation of FBI shootouts years ago. One had an agent and crook shooting at each other over the hood of a car. Take a guess how hits there were. Yep, none. Real life and VR? Huge difference.
Ah yes, the car analogy. Another I could get rich off a nickel at a time. First of all driving a car is not a constitutional right and second the criminal element simply doesn’t translate to driving statistics like they do for gun violence but it’s nice to think it’s the same thing.
It’s not imo but there you go.
I point out that in the two states where I have homes, 80% & 93% of the guns recovered at crime scenes come from out of state. This means that anti-straw purchase laws in my states work so well that criminals must largely rely on out of state guns. Your response that I am "throwing the baby out with bath water" and taking guns away from law abiding citizens are non-sequiturs. At no point do I even hint at anything like that.
I don't think it's any leap of logic to conclude that if other states had effective anti-straw purchase laws that it would dramatically cut down on the number of guns available to criminals.
Your response to my pointing out that weak anti-straw-purchase laws result in hundreds of thousand of guns being trafficked into Mexico talks about gun murders in the US. Again, a non-sequitur. I am simply pointing out that we are responsible for a lot of crime & death in Mexico. We should do something about that.
You say "black guns bad and other guns good" and that you see this all over. I haven't seen this anywhere but here, where I've seen it once before. Most of my guns are black, I don't know anyone who's afraid of colors. You brain functions are pretty baffling, but this is a really bizarre non-sequitur.
You then talk about how AR weapons are not used to kill a lot of people in the 38,000 that guns kill here each year. Again, not a point I was making. If we allowed grenades, I guaranty you that grenades would be one of the weapons of choice in mass-murders just like the AR. A mass-murder could heave a grenade into a classroom and move on. You would not find grenades being used to rob Wawas. I feel that military style weapons with high capacity magazines should not be available for the same reasons we don't allow grenades, machine guns, etc.
I've been shooting for almost 60 years. VR is a recent phenomenon, obviously I shoot at ranges. This is one of the least stressful environments in which I shoot. I want to be good at shooting. I have taken LEO situational awareness courses where you're in a theater with no seats holding a Glock modified to cycle with CO2 that fires an infrared beam at the screen. The instructor runs various scenarios which take wildly different paths depending up your reactions. Even though you aren't in danger, it is stressful because you very much want to get it right. You don't want to kill an innocent or be killed.
Finally, I find VR to be the most stressful because the headset monopolizes your sight & hearing. Crawling through a sewer with a flashlight where there are things trying to kill you is stressful. It is also the case that in many games the gun physics is perfect. I can setup a huge play-field full of zombies that are trying to kill me and run around doing double head shots to take them out. I can run through a couple thousand rounds in 90 minutes. It's really good practice and I recommend it highly. After a number of months of this, you begin to use a pistol in the same way you shoot clays. You're not even aware of the aiming process, it's like you are just pointing with your finger to take them out.
WRT the car analogy, again you completely misunderstand what I am saying. My point it that Americans are ingenious and really, really good at solving problems. The path to vastly reduced auto fatalities produced a lot of changes that no one anticipated. I am suggesting that we let bright people look at our gun violence problem and propose solutions. These people cannot force solutions, but they can explain them and we get to decide what we should implement. Republicans won't entertain even that.
Lol ….. have a nice day!
Pretty sure you are correct about grenades and bazookas but are wrong about machine guns. You can own a machine gun if you get the proper permits and pay hefty taxes. No one has ever said that those weapon are wanted or needed by normal citizens.
Heller was decided 5-4, down strict ideological lines (all the conservatives voted with the majority and all the liberals voted to dissent.)
In itself this makes it clear that the second amendment is NOT clear, and probably will be revisited at some point.
The last thing most gun owners have ever thought, is that God wanted them to have a gun.
And most could care less what any politician or partisan thinks on the matter as well.
This article is nothing more than a dog whistle.
Weak!
If it can be proven God wants me to have a gun, then I will be in church the next Sunday.
No one, including God, has ever said they want you to have a gun (or have you go to church for that matter). All that is being said is that as long as you are a responsible, law abiding citizen you can own a gun and no one can say you can't.