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Jun 3, 2022·edited Jun 8, 2022Liked by Christine Greenwald

Wow, wow, wow!! Powerful piece, Christine! This is another one that should be in the NYT! You are daring and courageous!!

You may recall I wrote about guns a few months back, and I talked about the shallowness of the average gun fanatic who just likes to play with guns. They have no argument—they just like to pretend to be John Wayne on the shooting range or kill innocent animals in the field. To be fair some also engage in serious target shooting competition. Their defense is exceedingly shallow as they insist their fun with their gun is a protected right, no matter how many children and adults die! Their most serious argument is self defense, which may be reasonable, although a nonlethal form of self defense, such as mace or pepper spray would seem much more humane. Still, it seems criminally vapid to protect access to high capacity weapons of war because of a right to self defense or childish gun play that might be satisfied with weapons that have much less capacity for massive carnage.

You take the argument where I never dared. There is a lunatic fringe of gun owners who believe the government or the ravenous hordes of crazed crack addicts from the Big City are coming for them, and they have to stockpile weapons of war and massive ammunition piles. You rightly ascribe their views to a warped selfish paranoid fearful form of “Christianity” and conservatism. These are the folks who join militias and stormed the US Capitol for Trump. What you brought out so amazingly well is the cultural underpinnings, the irrational arguments based in twisted interpretations of the Bible that they stand on as if they are reasonable and rational arguments, both for “Christianity” and for guns. They are NOT reasonable or rational! Thank you for so intelligently deconstructing their false and dangerous arguments. We have to put a stake through the heart of such specious thinking if we are ever to get a handle on our gun culture problem. Your willingness to challenge that thinking and say out loud what it is and why it’s wrong is an essential step that must be taken in order to bring our gun problem under control. Brilliant piece! Thanks for writing it.

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Not about gun rights per se, but about the patriarchy. Came out on same day. experimentaltheology.blogspot.com

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