Archive for the 'Second Amendment' Category

Source.

EVANSVILLE, Ind. (WFIE) – In the state of Indiana, gun owners no longer need any sort of permit to carry a handgun while in public spaces. For less than a year, this has been the case after the state removed the requirement for handgun permits, and some in law enforcement aren’t happy about the change.

Before the Indiana state legislature officially removed the requirement for handgun permits, many in law enforcement weren’t convinced.

“I, along with most of my other law enforcement colleagues, were very apprehensive about this,” said Vanderburgh County Sheriff Noah Robinson.

Before the change, a gun owner looking to have a gun in public had to go to their local sheriff’s office or police department for the application and eventually, the Indiana State Police would say either yes or no.

Sheriff Robinson says this gave law enforcement valuable information. Without it, it raises more questions as they try to determine if a suspicious person with a gun is allowed to have it.

“Before, that determination was made in a quiet office over a period of weeks where someone would investigate your background and make that determination,” said Robinson. “We now have to do that on the side of the road. It’s not practical.”

The law doesn’t allow violent felons to have handguns in public, but that doesn’t always apply to those with patterns of violent behavior or mental instability who wouldn’t have been approved for a handgun permit.

“I think it decreases public safety, I think it decreases officer safety, and time will tell whether that’s borne out or not,” said Robinson.

Sheriff Robinson says permits were also valuable when they found people doing things they shouldn’t and they found a gun on them. When other charges didn’t apply, having the gun meant they could arrest the person and take and gun away.

It was also an additional source of information for them when approaching people.

“To have had the information and had that taken away from us is frustrating, because it took a system that wasn’t broken and broke it,” said Robinson.

Or perhaps this made an unconstitutional system finally constitutional.  Everything depends on perspective, yes?

This is a remarkable set of admissions from a CLEO.  They want decisions about your God-given rights to be made in a quiet room with no one watching over their shoulder and no recourse for faulty decisions that infringe on your rights.  He said so.

Also, note the use he sees in the permitting scheme.  For conditions where “other charges didn’t apply,” he could always get his man with a weapons charge.  But what does this mean – other charges didn’t apply?  It means, I take it, that the alleged perpetrator wasn’t really guilty of the crime for which he had been accused.  The LEOs are thus the judiciary in this circumstance.  He’s really guilty of doing something we don’t want, but we can’t prove it beyond as reasonable doubt.  But we can surely prove he was carrying a weapon, so there, perp.  Take that.

As for whether someone is carrying a weapon, his officers should always assume that is the case.  It’s the case with permitted carriers, and it’s the case with criminals who never obeyed the law anyway.  So what’s changed?

Nothing.  And he can’t point to blood running in the streets because of permitless carry because it hasn’t happened.

The sky is falling.  But not really.

Source.

Under the majority’s rule, the defendant wins by default whenever the government fails to prove that a statute unambiguously criminalizes the defendant’s conduct.

Um, yes.  And so what’s wrong with this?  Why wouldn’t any grammar school child come to the same conclusion?  A fortiori, why wouldn’t any educated lawyer come to the same conclusion?

Why would this only have to come from the majority’s rule?  Why isn’t it prima facie obvious to anyone with two brain cells?

It’s effective immediately.  Folks like Rock River Arms and Springfield Armory who ensconce in Illinois now cannot even sell to customers in their own home state.  It’s too bad they didn’t ride the “Gun Valley Moves South” train when it left the station.  I know the gun community.  Some will be reluctant to buy from a manufacturer who cannot even sell their products to folks in their own state.  By the way, Colorado is effectively doing the same thing.

The list of guns citizen in Illinois cannot have is long.  Very long.  You cannot even own tactical shotguns under the new law as best as I read it (I did note that they didn’t specifically mention the Beretta 1301, although I’ll also mention that the new law “strengthens the assault weapons ban by also allowing Illinois State Police to update the list as needed,” Welch said”).  So the ban includes whatever the cops want it to include.

Also, they are preempting the SCOTUS decision on Terry Stops: “If police stop a car driven by a semiautomatic gun owner, they can instantly check to ensure its legally owned.”  What sense this makes one can only guess – if a gun owner has registered the weapon why wouldn’t it be assumed that it’s a “legally owned weapon?”

Also, it’s back to the way it was before Bruen – you cannot have that gun with you (you know, the only ones left not on the list) when you leave home.  You cannot carry it on your person.  So, it’s all the rage now for the communist states to pretend that Bruen doesn’t exist and that the supreme court never spoke to the matter.

I have supreme confidence that this law will be adjudicated, and I expect this law to be struck down, but I’m not sure how long it will be before that happens.  In the mean time, they want citizens to register their guns if they are “grandfathered in.”  Some Sheriffs have said they will not comply, dozens and dozens, somewhere around 70 at last count.

But what does this mean?  Here is one clue.

But that’s not good enough.  Merely refusing to assist the state police isn’t doing anyone any good.  For this to have teeth the Sheriffs would need to ensure that not only were they constitutional Sheriffs, but their deputies were constitutional deputies as well, and that the city and township PDs agreed with this stance.  Those are the preconditions for success.

That would all lead to the next necessary step, which would be a threat to arrest any state police who came into their counties to enforce the new law, and the stomach to follow through with it.  Finally, if those counties have militia to whom the Sheriff could go for assistance, that may prove to be necessary as well.

Do any of the Sheriffs have the stomach for this?  I seriously doubt it.  I’ve said before, nullification laws or threats are dangerous for the citizens if they aren’t serious and don’t carry both the threat and reality of force behind them.  If they are weighty and enforced, they serve as a check on centralized power and authority to infringe on God-given rights.

Illinois is just at the beginning of this whole affair.  Chicago has decided the way it will be for everyone else in their state.  Whether the balance of the state lets it stand will be up to them.

Seen here.

Plaintiffs have demonstrated a probability of success on the merits of their Second Amendment challenge to the relevant provisions of Chapter 131 Section 7(a), which criminalizes carrying handguns in certain “sensitive places,” subparts 12 (public libraries or museums), 15 (bars, restaurants, and where alcohol is served), 17 (entertainment facilities), and 24 (private property), as well as section 7(b)’s ban on functional firearms in vehicles. The State may regulate conduct squarely protected by the Second Amendment only if supported by a historical tradition of firearm regulation. Here, Plaintiffs have shown that Defendants will not be able to demonstrate a history of firearm regulation to support any of the challenged provisions. The deprivation of Plaintiffs’ Second Amendment rights, as the holders of valid permits from the State to conceal carry handguns, constitutes irreparable injury, and neither the State nor the public has an interest in enforcing unconstitutional laws. Accordingly, good cause exists, and the Court will grant the motion for temporary restraints. An accompanying order of today’s date shall issue.

The effects of Bruen continue to be felt.  This is the right decision.  These courts all know that they can be disciplined by the Supreme Court.

But this is just the beginning.  There will be hundreds more where necessary.  I predict the gun control laws will continue to fall, including AWB, magazine capacity limits, showing good character, ad numerous permitting schemes.

Furthermore, I expect constitutional carry to come up again in the South Carolina legislature.  I also expect constitutional carry to pass in Florida because they’ve committed to it on video now.  If this doesn’t include open carry then it will be a failure.

It’s good to see this one go down in the flames it should.  Trump and the ATF should be ashamed.  But I suspect both would defend it to this day and beyond.

Stephen Stamboulieh sends this my way a couple of days ago, but since then it has been covered by others (e.g., see Reason here and here, and reddit/Firearms here and here, and also, never forget the NRA’s position on bump stocks).

This is a very well-written and well-researched opinion and points out the distinction between a function of the trigger and function of the shooter.

Here is the opinion.

BLUF:

1. A bump stock does not turn a semiautomatic firearm into a machine gun by the statutory definition of machine gun.
2. Even if the Fifth Circuit is wrong, the ATF lacked the authority to make this change.
3. We have no business deferring to the authority of the federal regulators to make this determination since there is no lack of clarity on this issue.  The issue is perfectly clear – a rifle outfitted with a bump stock is not a machine gun.

Elsewhere, the ATF is becoming tepid over their upcoming rulemaking on unserialized firearms.

Yet the move, which the Justice Department described as a clarification of the regulation, is not without risk. Because the rule was created through executive action, rather than a statute validated by Congress, it has given companies confidence that they can keep selling individual gun parts.

Administration officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss possible litigation, said the new guidance would almost certainly be challenged in federal court on the grounds that it violates the Gun Control Act of 1968, which allows people to build firearms for their personal use without submitting to background checks or applying serial numbers.

Their upcoming rulemaking on unserialized firearms not only violates prior statutory law, it now suffers from the Fifth Circuit decision on bump stocks, which says that the ATF lacked the authority to inflict this new regulation on the American public.

Queue up the same thing for unserialized firearms.  And a thousand other lawsuits.

The only problem with the Fifth Circuit decision is that it applies only to states controlled by the Fifth Circuit.

Tenth Amendment Center.

Del. Bill Wiley (R) prefiled HB 1420 (HB1420) on Dec. 13. The legislation amends existing state law regarding prohibited concealed weapons to include the following:

For the sole purpose of carrying a concealed handgun, any person who carries a handgun anywhere he may lawfully carry a handgun openly within the Commonwealth and who is otherwise qualified under this article to obtain a concealed handgun permit. Such person shall not be required to meet the requirements of subsection B of § 18.2-308.02 or subsection B of § 18.2-308.06, as applicable, to carry a concealed handgun under this subdivision.

Currently, Virginia gun owners must apply to a city or county circuit court for a permit in order to conceal carry it in public under most circumstances.

Just like in my home state of North Carolina except it’s the CLEO who must approve.  Furthermore, purchasing a handgun requires a permit from the CLEO (of course, a CHP suffices for the five years it’s valid).  We’re an oddball state I must say.  I can’t recall the last time the voters handed the legislature to democrats, if ever since I’ve lived here.

But the legislature has to fight the governor’s mansion for just about everything.  I’m not sure of the makeup of the Virginia legislature, but I’d like to see them move forward while Youngkin is governor of the state.

If I have any readers in Virginia, please keep us posted on progress, and if possible, supply me with the email address of Mr. Wiley so I can stay in touch with him on this issue.

Prior: Virginia lawmakers could consider repeal of state gun laws

Surprising no one, if you haven’t been following the NY case of Ivan Antonyuk v. NY, the state of NY still hasn’t accepted Bruen, and won’t until the SCOTUS slaps them down again.  The federal district court ruled in favor of Antonyuk in a lengthy and well crafted decision that issued a stay on the recently enacted NY law, only to be blocked and held in abatement by the 2nd Circuit by a three-judge panel who said nothing about the merits of the decision.  The 2nd circuit overrode the district court decision with only a few cursory sentences.

The Antonyuk case was appealed directly to the supreme court, with Sotomayor demanding that NY reply.  They did with this brief.  In it, the state of NY insults the SCOTUS and tells them they aren’t needed.

NY to the Supreme Court

Friend of TCJ Stephen Stamboulieh, a terrific attorney, genuinely good man and defender of liberty, issued his reply, and it’s a wonderful thing to behold.

Stamboulieh to the Supreme Court in Response to NY

As Gandalf the Grey said (before he became Gandalf the White), “Until at last I smote my enemy and threw down his ruin upon the mountainside.”

This may not be over so the conclusory sentiment may be wrong, but may Stephen be victorious over his enemies and throw down their ruin upon the mountainside.

Recall that previous jerk in the Governor’s mansion in Virginia?  Yea, him.  Well, they may undo some of the bad he did in Virginia, and I expect Youngkin to sign such a bill if it can pass through the legislature.

House Bill 1428, pre-filed by Republican Del. Dave LaRock and state Sens. Amanda Chase and Frank M. Ruff, seeks to repeal an existing Virginia law that makes it unlawful for individuals to carry certain loaded semi-automatic center-fire rifles, pistols or shotguns on public streets, roads, alleys, sidewalks, public right-of-ways, public parks or “any other place of whatever nature that is open to the public” in certain parts of the state.

The existing law applies to the cities of Alexandria, Chesapeake, Fairfax, Falls Church, Newport News, Norfolk, Richmond and Virginia Beach and the counties of Arlington, Fairfax, Henrico, Loudoun and Prince William. The provisions in the law do not apply to law enforcement officers and licensed security guards, people with a valid concealed handgun permit or those engaged in lawful hunting or recreational shooting at established ranges.

LaRock also pre-filed House Bill 1427 earlier this month, which would remove a locality’s authority to prohibit the possession or carrying firearms in public parks and community centers owned by the locality, as well as public streets, alleys and sidewalks.

I’m glad I found this out – occasionally I’m in Virginia and thought that open carry was legal.  But yea, I can’t imagine the people in Prince William being okay with open carry.  Maybe if Virginia repeals this stupidity, it will be easier on open carriers as well as folks who don’t want to run afoul of the law depending on where they can’t carry.

Stephen Halbrook at Reason.

“Not wanting to itself cherry pick the history,” Judge Reeves concludes, “the Court now asks the parties whether it should appoint a historian to serve as a consulting expert in this matter. … This Court is acquainted with the historical record only as it is filtered through decisions of the Supreme Court and the Courts of Appeals.” Those decisions would be a good start, except that he seems to think that the Supreme Court got it wrong.

[ … ]

Judge Roger Benitez expressed skepticism about “experts” in a hearing on December 12 in Duncan v. Bonta, the California magazine ban case that Bruen remanded for reconsideration. The historical documents that matter are enacted laws, ordinances, regulations, and the like. He ordered the State to prepare an Excel spreadsheet of the laws they consider to be historical analogues to present-day magazine bans, including dates of enactment and repeal and any judicial decisions on their constitutionality. The plaintiffs could then file a rebuttal.

[ … ]

Perhaps we need a reminder from Chief Justice John Marshall in Marbury v. Madison (1803): “It is emphatically the province and duty of the Judicial Department to say what the law is.” Judges may not defer to “experts” to advise what the law is. “Do your job,” as New England Patriots head coach Bill Belichick famously said.

Yea, I read that dummy’s statements when he made them.  He sounded like a second grader trying to write coherent sentences.  By contrast, Judge Roger Benitez is both a scholar and historian, but the thing that makes his decisions on the second amendment right is that they are right.

Do we appoint historians as experts in second amendment cases?  No.  Historians are biased too, and many reach the wrong conclusions.  Everyone takes his pre-theoretical commitments to his work, or his axiomatic irreducibles.  I don’t trust historians in general any more than I trust judges, especially as “educated” by modern universities.

We decide second amendment cases per the words of the second amendment, noting the milieu in which it was written, and remembering how idiotic it would have been for them to have just gotten finished fighting a revolution against King George with weapons they owned – risking their lives, families and fortunes – and then turned around and inflicted their own people with gun control laws.

Surprising no one, The New York Times published one of the most insulting commentaries I’ve ever witnessed, directed mainly at Christian gun owners.  It’s a guest commentary written by Peter Manseau, who claims to have published elsewhere, but I’ve never read any of this books, nor will I considering the lack of scholarship displayed here.  We’ll start, lift some commentary out, and I’ll make remarks along the way.

Is our gun problem a God problem?

The AR-15-style rifle used in the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, last month was made by an arms manufacturer that regards selling weapons as part of its Christian mission. In a state where Gov. Greg Abbott declared, six months after an earlier massacre, “The problem is not guns; it’s hearts without God,” the gun’s provenance challenged pious suggestions that declining religiosity might bear some of the blame.

That this paragraph made it through editing is amazing.  Provenance is “the chronology of ownership, custody or location of a historical object.”  In the following paragraphs he takes aim at Daniel Defense and the religious beliefs of Marty Daniel, but no editor worth his salt would have let this paragraph go unmodified.  Presumably the writer is trying to link Daniel’s views with the gun he built, but that case cannot possibly be demonstrated.  I know plenty of irreligious men who own AR-15s, and many more who work on them.

Daniel Defense, the Georgia company whose gun enabled the slaughter at Robb Elementary School, presents its corporate identity in explicitly religious terms. At the time of the shooting, the company’s social media presence included an image of a toddler with a rifle in his lap above the text of Proverbs 22:6 (“Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, he will not depart from it”). For Easter, it posted a photograph of a gun and a cross resting on scriptural passages recounting the Resurrection.

So Marty Daniel is a Christian.  What of it?  What does that bring to bear on the case he’s trying to prove?

While some might suggest a Christian firearms company is a contradiction in terms, Daniel Defense is hardly alone. According to a Public Religion Research Institute study, evangelicals have a higher rate of gun ownership than other religious groups. Across the country, they account for a significant share not only of the demand but of the supply.

So now the writer has expanded the sweep of his analysis and is targeting all evangelicals.

In Florida, Spike’s Tactical (“the finest AR-15s on the planet”) makes a line of Crusader weapons adorned with a quote from the Psalms. Missouri-based CMMG (“the leading manufacturer of AR15 rifles, components and small parts”) advertises its employees’ “commitment to meet each and every morning to pray for God’s wisdom in managing the enormous responsibility that comes with this business.” And in Colorado, Cornerstone Arms explains that it is so named because “Jesus Christ is the cornerstone of our business, our family and our lives” and the “Second Amendment to our Constitution is the cornerstone of the freedom we enjoy as American citizens.”

For many American Christians, Jesus, guns and the Constitution are stitched together as durably as a Kevlar vest.

“We are in business, we believe, to be a supporter of the Gospel,” Daniel Defense’s founder, Marty Daniel, told Breitbart News in 2017. “And, therefore, a supporter of the Second Amendment.”

He is on the outside looking in.  Most of my readers would say that the constitution (and thus the 2A) only matters the extent to which is comports with Biblical law.  The foundation of our rights is to be found in the Holy Writ, and our philosophical pre-commitments are to the Lord of the universe and His law, not a piece of paper.  The piece of paper is a covenant and contract, null and void upon unfaithfulness.  You don’t have to be a Christian to understand my point of logic.  If the writer is targeting Christians, he’s gotten it exactly backwards.  The constitution isn’t infallible and wasn’t written by God.  Christians don’t turn to the constitution to ascertain rightness and wrongness in their lives.

Entwining faith and firearms this way has a long history. It encompasses the so-called muscular Christianity movement that began in England in the 19th century with a focus on physical fitness as a path to spiritual strength and that in America made exemplars of pastors roaming the frontier armed with Bibles and six-shooters.

More than a hundred years ago, this trope was already so well established that a popular silent western from 1912, “The Two Gun Sermon,” told the story of a minister assigned to a rough-and-tumble outpost; when ruffians menace him, he holds them at gunpoint until they listen to him preach. The film’s message is one with which 21st-century Christian gun enthusiasts would probably agree: Sometimes guns are necessary for the Lord’s work.

It is easy to miss, but this melding of evangelism and the right to bear arms is a step beyond the “natural rights” argument for gun ownership, which holds that self-defense is a law of nature required to protect life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. These rights are often said to be God-given in the sense of being taken for granted, and they are enshrined as such in the Declaration of Independence. As interpreted by many evangelicals, the distant deistic “creator” Thomas Jefferson credited with endowing such rights has become a specific, biblical deity who apparently takes an active interest in the availability of assault rifles.

He has now turned to an irrelevant English movement and a movie to prove his point.  But here he misses so badly that it’s going to take a few moments to sus this out.

If he was a scholar he would have first turned to OT law, where the right of being armed is founded in the Pentateuch.  As I’ve observed so many times before, John Calvin discusses this aspect of the ten commandments and makes it clear that defense of life is not only allowed, but required as a good work by the Godly man.

We do not need to prove that when a good thing is commanded, the evil thing that conflicts with it is forbidden.  There is no one who doesn’t concede this.  That the opposite duties are enjoined when evil things are forbidden will also be willingly admitted in common judgment.  Indeed, it is commonplace that when virtues are commended, their opposing vices are condemned.  But we demand something more than what these phrases commonly signify.  For by the virtue of contrary to the vice, men usually mean abstinence from that vice.  We say that the virtue goes beyond this to contrary duties and deeds.  Therefore in this commandment, “You shall not kill,” men’s common sense will see only that we must abstain from wronging anyone or desiring to do so.  Besides this, it contains, I say, the requirement that we give our neighbor’s life all the help we can … the purpose of the commandment always discloses to us whatever it there enjoins or forbids us to do” (Institutes of the Christian Religion, Vol. 1, Book 2, Chapter viii, Part 9).

Calvin has here expressed the Biblical position.  “Thou shall not kill” also means “Thou shall protect life.”  This is of course at least partially why Jesus himself commanded his disciples to sell their robes and buy a sword.  He won’t have His followers being defenseless against the onslaught of ne’er-do-wells.  Any loss of life, trials or tribulations, will be by His hand, in His timing, for purposes that He knows, not by anyone else.

But here it’s important not to miss one of the main points of the command in Luke 22:36 like so many do.  Quite literally, He is commanding the purchase of weapons in spite of strictures against ownership and carry of said weapons at the time.  He is commanding His followers to be law-breakers for the sake of self defense.

… for some evidence, see Digest 48.6.1: collecting weapons ‘beyond those customary for hunting or for a journey by land or sea’ is forbidden; 48.6.3.1 forbids a man ‘of full age’ appearing in public with a weapon (telum) (references and translation are from Mommsen 1985). See also Mommsen 1899: 564 n. 2; 657-58 n. 1; and Linderski 2007: 102-103 (though he cites only Mommsen). Other laws from the same context of the Digest sometimes cited in this regard are not as worthwhile for my purposes because they seem to be forbidding the possession of weapons with criminal intent. But for the outright forbidding of being armed while in public in Rome, see Cicero’s letter to his brother relating an incident in Rome in which a man, who is apparently falsely accused of plotting an assassination, is nonetheless arrested merely for having confessed to having been armed with a dagger while in the city: To Atticus, Letter 44 (II.24). See also Cicero, Philippics 5.6 (§17). Finally we may cite a letter that Synesius of Cyrene wrote to his brother, probably sometime around the year 400 ce. The brother had apparently questioned the legality of Synesius having his household produce weapons to defend themselves against marauding bands. Synesius points out that there are no Roman legions anywhere near for protection, but he seems reluctantly to admit that he is engaged in an illegal act (Letter 107; for English trans., see Fitzgerald 1926).

Jesus knew the law, and the potential legal troubles He was exposing His disciples to by issuing this command, and yet, that didn’t stop Him.  So going back to the law of Moses, to the command of Christ, and then on to the Crusades which were primarily defensive in nature, the history of armed self defense isn’t traced back to an English movement a few years ago or a silly movie.  It’s in the very nature of the beliefs.

But then the writer can’t stop at merely misunderstanding the subject he purports to analyze.  He then decides to expand his (ill-fated) analysis to insults.  “As interpreted by many evangelicals, the distant deistic “creator” Thomas Jefferson credited with endowing such rights has become a specific, biblical deity who apparently takes an active interest in the availability of assault rifles.”

Christianity has always been about a specific, living being who loves us and redeems us and commands us, not about a distant deity who once interacted with His creation.  If he means that the second amendment would have been written differently if Jefferson was not a deist, that point is unproven at best and misguided and simply historically incorrect at worst.  Jefferson wasn’t responsible for the second amendment.  Maddison wrote the text, but the entirety of the colonies insisted on it, most of the Southern colonies being Presbyterian.  It’s too much to discuss in the present context, but in English circles they knew the basis for the war of independence and called it “The Presbyterian Rebellion.”

Why does this subtle shift in the meaning of “God given” matter? It’s important to understand that for the manufacturer of the Uvalde killer’s rifle, and many others in the business, selling weapons is at once a patriotic and a religious act. For those who hold them to be sacred in this way, the meaning of firearms proceeds from their place at the intersection of American and Christian identities. Proposing limits on what kinds of guns they should be able to buy — or how, when, where and why they can carry them — is akin to proposing limits on who they are and what they should revere.

He’s just making things up now.  Ownership and bearing of arms, if a God-given right, doesn’t depend in the least on where one lives or what system of government obtains.  It didn’t in the case of the Armenian Christians who were slaughtered in the deserts of Turkey by the Muslims, it didn’t to the Christians targeted by Idi Amin of Uganda, and it didn’t to the Russians and Ukrainians starved by Stalin.  He wants a scary boogieman to blame, but the intersection of Christians and America has nothing to do with it except in his imagination.

Since then, despite being debunked by data showing that firearms are more likely to injure their owners or their owners’ families than safeguard them, the protection offered by good guys with guns has emerged as an article of faith, supported with anecdotal evidence passed around like legends of the saints.

I vow never to use that word, debunked.  It has become the wordy-word of progressives trying to prove something wrong and who have run out of ideas.  Guns are only unsafe to those who do not treat them with respect and obey all the rules of gun safety.

As the historian Daniel K. Williams has noted, “Gun rights advocacy is not an intrinsic feature of every brand of evangelicalism.” While recent surveys find that four in 10 white evangelicals own guns, the majority do not, and other denominational affiliations offer examples of religious participation discouraging a fixation on firearms. It is possible that the less one sees oneself as an itinerant loner in a hostile world, like the armed preacher in a silent western, the less one is likely to look to guns as a source of salvation.

Nonetheless, the ways Christian ideas may be contributing to a gun culture that abets our epidemic of mass shootings by helping to keep the nation well armed should inspire reflection. None of the recent mass shootings had explicitly religious motivations, but the religious contexts of our seemingly eternal problem with gun violence — its history, its theology, its myths — are too important to ignore.

Mass shootings are, in a way, assaults on the idea of community itself. They occur where there are people gathered — for entertainment, for learning, for shopping, for worship — in the spaces we create together. Some believe that such attacks are the fault of armed individuals alone and can be addressed only through armed individual response. Others believe they occur within the framework of what we collectively allow and must have communal solutions.

After blaming Christians for mass shootings, he has finally, at long last, divulged his own philosophical pre-commitments, or religion.  He is a collectivist, and says that the solutions to problems are to be found in the collective.

What he doesn’t mention is that in the twentieth century alone there were over 212,000,000 mass murders by governments across the globe.  The writer doesn’t explain how his collectivist solutions would be better than ours, nor do I believe he can.

The New York Times has paid for another loser commentary that wanders and fails to stay on point, refuses to interact with the real scholarship of its intended target, insults a large constituency of Americans, and considers neither the history of the subject nor the failures of its own solutions.

Is it any wonder that they’re constantly begging for money?