Joel Watts – www.unsettledchristianity.com – wrote a nice little piece about how the Constitution of the United States takes on cult-like status with many of it's staunchest supporters. This hasn't been more clear than in the wake of the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School. There are many highlights from the article, but here is my favorite:
And yet, when it comes to the ability to hold a weapon and discharge it at someone we, without judge and jury, deem a criminal, or perhaps even loudly threatened the duly instituted government of the United States, we somehow believe that these men who could never have foreseen an African-American president, a modern-state of Israel, or a host of other social and cultural advances, were prophets of guns. Indeed, while we discount their views on who and what citizens were (only white landowning males), or even what people were (slaves were not people, but could be counted as 3/5ths of a person for census-related voting), we still maintain them as demigods who walked the earth speaking the truth out of time, especially about guns, an instrument at that time limited to muskets. While we have systematically dismantled the euro-gentry-centric utopian paradise of the Founders because we have come into our own as equalitarians who recognize the worth of all people even against the Founder’s original meanings, knowledge, and intent, we still rely upon them to tell us how to guide our views on modern-day control when the purchase of 20mm rifles (with a shooting distance of 5000 yards) is almost commonplace.
It doesn't get more plain and rational than that.
