THE DEEP CONNECTION BETWEEN GOD AND GUNS ON THE RIGHT

You may already know about this:

Gov. Bobby Jindal has signed into law one of the more controversial bills from the recent legislative session, one allowing guns to be carried into houses of worship.

...[Representative Henry] Burns' bill would authorize persons who qualified to carry concealed weapons having passed the training and background checks to bring them to churches, mosques, synagogues or other houses of worship as part of a security force.

...Burns contended that religious institutions in crime-ridden or "declining neighborhoods" need the added protection to ward off thieves and muggers....

Burns, a Republican (naturally), doesn't actually seem to be selling the notion of a deep and profound connection between God and firearm ownership. But that notion is out there on the right, as Sarah Posner and Julie Ingersoll of Religion Dispatches note:

Herb Titus, a lawyer for the far-right Gun Owners of America, is jubilant over last week's Supreme Court decision in the case McDonald v. City of Chicago, finding that state and local regulation of gun ownership must comport with the Second Amendment right to bear arms.

... for Titus, ... the Second Amendment isn't solely about "firepower," he says. "You have to see it in its spiritual and providential perspective."

... Titus ... told RD that "the ultimate authority is God."

... Titus has long been a player at the intersection of Christian Reconstructionism, the standard religious right, and other far-right groups in which the Tea Party finds its roots. He was a speaker at the Reconstructionist American Vision's annual "Worldview Conference" in 2009, has been a member of the Council for National Policy, and is a longtime homeschooling advocate from a Reconstructionist perspective. In 1996 he was the running mate of conservative icon (and Christian Reconstructionist) Howard Phillips for the far-right US Taxpayers Party (now called the Constitution Party) whose platform included the restoration of "American jurisprudence to its biblical premises" and, notably, opposition to every gun law in the United States.

... Titus was a founding dean of Pat Robertson's Regent University Law School, where he was the chair of a three-member committee that supervised Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell's now-notorious graduate thesis....

In 2004, after Judge Roy Moore, another Titus client, was stripped of his position for defying a federal court order to remove his 2.6-ton monument to the Ten Commandments from the rotunda of the Alabama Supreme Court, he joined Titus in drafting the Constitution Restoration Act. The bill, had it passed, would have deprived federal courts of jurisdiction to hear cases challenging a government entity's or official's "acknowledgment of God as the sovereign source of law, liberty, or government."

... "When we're talking about firearms," GOA executive director Larry Pratt told RD, "we're not really talking about a right but an obligation, as creatures of God, to protect the life that was given them."

And you probably know about this:

...In his "Bring Your Pieces to Church" Sunday event, Reconstructionist Joel McDurmon makes this point, suggesting that believers should organize target practice after church:

Christians should be aware that the use of force in preservation of life is a biblical doctrine (Ex. 22:2–3; Prov. 24:10–12; Est. 8–9; Neh. 4; cp. John 15:13–14). Likewise, those who possessed weapons in Scripture are often said to be well skilled in the use of them (Judg. 20:15–16; 1 Chron. 12:1–2, 21–22). We can only surmise that 1) God gave them talent in this regard, and that 2) they engaged in target practice regularly. Further, under biblical law, to be disarmed was to be enslaved and led to a disruption of the economic order due to government regulations and monopolies (1 Sam 13:19–22).

...McDurmon ... argues that gun ownership by individuals should be the basis of national defense and that a standing army is unbiblical....

I lurk on a lot of right-wing sites. This kind of thing no longer seems bizarre to me.



(RD article via Right Wing Watch.)