New York Magazine:

The Great State of Mississippi is offering an illustration of this principle as we speak with the march toward enactment of legislation to recognize a right of concealed-carry in churches. And the Republican salons, who are promoting the cause of honoring the Prince of Peace by insisting on the right to shoot and kill people right there in His sanctuary, are preemptively concerned that the godless socialists in Washington might interfere. So once again, they’ve gone back to that fine antebellum doctrine of nullification to deny the power of the Feds — or at least the executive branch — to regulate firearms at all.  The Jackson Clarion-Ledger has the story:

The bill would allow churches to create security programs and designate and train members to carry concealed weapons. It would provide criminal and legal protections to those serving as church security.

The bill also would allow concealed carry in a holster without a permit in Mississippi, expanding a measure passed last year that allowed concealed carry without a permit in a purse, satchel or briefcase, and another recent law that allows open carry in public.

The bill also seeks to prohibit Mississippi officials from enforcing any federal agency regulations or executive orders that would violate the state constitution — an attempt to federal gun restrictions not passed by Congress.

Senators argued whether this last provision would violate the Supremacy Clause of the U.S. Constitution.

“Where did you go to law school?” Sen. Hob Bryan, D-Amory, asked Tindell during the debate. “Are they telling people there that the Mississippi constitution trumps federal law?

[ … ]

It’s also entirely predictable that people who think the absence of guns is more dangerous than their omnipresence would extend the principle everywhere, even to bars and, yeah, churches. Beyond that, we see the ongoing radicalization of Second Amendment ultras who think gun rights are not just part of the Constitution but fundamental to it and superior to any other provision — in effect, an object of worship. At some point, the Second Amendment could run afoul of the Bible’s Second Commandment against raising up idols.

The author, Ed Kilgore, doesn’t really believe the things he has written, any more than the Kos kids do when they write things like this.  Here’s how you know.  He doesn’t argue for a prohibition of law enforcement from killing people who are themselves trying to kill people in churches.  In fact, he argues exactly the opposite in his first paragraph, when he says “Of all the cultural divides in these allegedly “United” States, probably none is more stark than the chasm in attitudes toward possession of lethal weaponry. There used to be a general consensus that deadly force should, generally speaking, be monopolized by police officers; possession of, say, a handgun in one’s home, was an exception in recognition of exceptional circumstances. Shooting irons for hunting were another thing, but those were reserved for occasions when one was, you know, out in the woods hunting.”

There’s that notion again about the state having a monopoly of force.  Except in this context, he goes too far for his argument and betrays his plot.  Since he argues for the state having a monopoly of force generally, he has no right to connect it to being in a house of worship and attempting to argue theologically that there shouldn’t be means of self defense in worship.  In other words, the author tries to place himself inside your system, if you’re a Christian, and argue from your perspective, but he taints his argument with the broad appeal to statism and a monopoly of force by the state.  He didn’t stay disciplined.  Rarely do writers stay disciplined when they are throwing everything but the kitchen sink at you, a lazy version of the ten leaky buckets logical problem.

This is what happens when men pretend to be thinkers, try to enter systems they don’t believe, and convince others of world views outside their own when they give up before the end of their own arguments.  In the mean time, we have all been properly briefed on the theological basis for self defense, with worship being no different (man doesn’t suddenly cease being made in God’s image because he engages in worship).

On a related topic, I noticed that Reverend Franklin Graham told the Mohammedans that they would one day bow the knee to King Jesus.  True, that.  And they will confess with their mouths that their “prophet” is a sham and fraud before the Lord of Lords.  But in the mean time, Christians are being slaughtered across the globe because ignorant teachers have taught them that Jesus was a Bohemian hippie pacifist flower child who expects them to lay down and be walked on like rugs.  That’s what Kilgore believes about Christianity too.

Drink a good glass of wine tonight as a toast to a more robust and informed Christianity.  Remember Herschel’s Dictum: “There aren’t too many human interaction problems that can’t be fixed with a .45 ACP 230-grain fat-boy.”