Prevailing Winds "For the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is there is freedom . . ." 2 Cor. 3:17, TNIV

February 2, 2011

The Patriotic Citizenry And Its Guns

Filed under: Uncategorized — keelyem @ 1:01 am

Amidst a month of heightened discussion about guns and gun laws, and the previous post regarding Utah’s Official State Gun, my friend Rosemary Huskey makes a point on Moscow’s Vision 2020 that needs to be made. Rosemary, a gun owner, has given me permission to reprint this:

“It is astonishing to me how gun rights issues makes super, constitution-loving patriots out of folks who couldn’t intelligently articulate any other section or amendment in the constitution.”

She’s right. And until the Libertarian, Tea Party-influenced Religious Right gets over its slobberingly idolatrous fixation on the Constitution, politics in America will suffer and the so will the Church.

No part of the Constitution of the United States of America was God-breathed, nor is it inerrant, and no part of the Constitution has been more unevenly and carelessly embraced than its Second Amendment. I am not even a little bit a part of the “No Guns In Private Hands” crowd, even though I was raised in a household where the idea of owning guns was strictly verboten — with an almost religious fervor. I believe that the Founding Fathers provided for the ownership of certain kinds of weapons by those able to prove competence, character, and a record clear of the kinds of things that make a gun unacceptably dangerous in their hands, such as a violent history. Further, I am not a vegetarian, and until I kill my own game or go vegetarian, I will not condemn hunters.

But the Founders could not have anticipated the gamut of semi- and automatic weapons currently available, and evidently did not anticipate the formation of a permanent, professional military. And a proclamation like the one issued by Utah, while perhaps acceptable some 200 years ago, is a terribly sad reflection of the callousness that motivates people to cheer a misguided toast to a murky Constitutional right within days of a tragedy — the Tucson shootings — that horrifically illustrates its misapplication today.

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