“Americans trust
their guns, not God,” and the gun lobby is sacrificing children to a pagan god.
That’s the message of Washington Post ‘On Faith’ theological train-wreck Susan
Brooks Thistlethwaite’s plea for gun control in the wake of the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School.
Thistlethwaite complained in a December 17 post [1]: “It is becoming increasingly clear that Americans realize the unfettered flow of guns into our society is making us less free not more. These guns find their way far too easily into the hands of the mentally unstable and the school and mall-type massacres are increasingly the result. But these guns also circulate easily in cities like Chicago, and more carnage results. There are numerous deaths, including the deaths of children and young people, and they make horrifying statistics. Read this list [2]of homicide victims, most of them from guns in Chicago, just from 2012. This must not be.”
Left unmentioned by Thistlethwaite is the fact that Chicago has some of the strictest gun laws in the country [3], effectively disarming law-abiding citizens. The very measures she argues are necessary for halting gun violence are in part responsible for the rash of violence [4] in Chicago in the first place. (Also left unsaid is the fact that the Sandy Hook shooting took place in Connecticut, which also has some of the nation’s strictest gun laws [5].)
“Americans are the most heavily armed nation in the world, with 90 guns per every 100 people [6] per a 2007 study,” she complained. “In that study, U.S. citizens owned 270 million of the world’s 875 million known firearms. Imagine what that number is now, four years later? Does it approach 100 guns for every 100 Americans?”
This raises the question of why exactly such high levels of ownership are bad – apparently, guns induce innocent people to commit murder. (This statistic also raises the question of how exactly disarmament of American citizens is to be achieved, considering the popularity of firearms.) She cited author Gary Wills to make an overblown comparison of the gun lobby to a pagan deity: “Gary Wills, in an extraordinary piece in the New York Review of Books blog, calls guns “Our Moloch [7].” “Moloch,” a pagan deity, demanded the sacrifice of living children. Obeisance to the gun industry, according to Wills, demonstrates “our fealty, our bondage, to the great god Gun.”
Her conclusion: “Americans trust their guns, not God.”
Her admission of disdain for American gun-owners as idolaters is refreshing for it’s honestly, if revealing. But the “Moloch” rhetoric might come with more weight from a woman who doesn’t actively defend the murder of thousands of children in the womb each day.
But liberals trust their government, not God, and Thistlethwaite appropriately cited the Barack Obama, as the potential savior of America from tragedies like Sandy Hook:
“And to Obama, one American father, this was the final straw.
He raised the policy bar, not only by claiming that failing to protect our children is a national failure, but also by directly challenging the main argument of the pro-gun lobbies and their politicians.
The 'freedom' argument.
Repeated mass shootings are not freedom. 'Are we prepared to say that such violence visited on our children year after year after year is somehow the price of our freedom?' Obama asked.”
She concluded: “No, we are not.”
Never mind the fact that even liberal writers such as Washington Post writer Ezra Klein [8] admitted that stricter gun control measures would not necessarily stop tragedies like the one at Sandy Hook. Thistlethwaite concluded with an emotional appeal: “Here is a moral red line in the sand. No more deaths of children from gun massacres. Not even one is acceptable.”
Any shooting death is never acceptable, let alone the unimaginable tragedy of Sandy Hook. But implementing counterproductive policy is no way to help children; adopting failed Chicago-style gun control policies in order to stop gun violence in Chicago is little short of insanity.
Perhaps Thistlethwaite, with her long history [9] of theological lunacy, doesn't recognize the lack of logic inherent in her position. She made the same argument for gun control after the shooting at the movie theater in Aurora, Colorado [10].