Fred Clark, one of the most completely decent people you will ever read online, posts a link to this column by Garry Wills that makes me want to throw up my hands and give up on any chance of reasoned discussion concerning guns, let alone violence, in the land of my birth and my heart…

Our Moloch

Few crimes are more harshly forbidden in the Old Testament than sacrifice to the god Moloch (for which see Leviticus 18.21, 20.1-5). The sacrifice referred to was of living children consumed in the fires of offering to Moloch. Ever since then, worship of Moloch has been the sign of a deeply degraded culture…

You just know where this is going…

The gun is our Moloch. We sacrifice children to him daily—sometimes, as at Sandy Hook, by directly throwing them into the fire-hose of bullets from our protected private killing machines, sometimes by blighting our children’s lives by the death of a parent, a schoolmate, a teacher, a protector. Sometimes this is done by mass killings (eight this year), sometimes by private offerings to the god (thousands this year).

…and with that I just want to say I’m Done! Done will the lot of you.   Hurl yourselves at each other with your lizard brains rattling at full throttle, I just don’t fucking care anymore.   There will be no rational discussion of guns Or violence in this country in my lifetime obviously.   Or as Wills says without any apparent irony…

The fact that the gun is a reverenced god can be seen in its manifold and apparently resistless powers. How do we worship it? Let us count the ways:

1. It has the power to destroy the reasoning process.

Sure did a number on yours didn’t it Gary.   You could wish those first and second commandments were a tad more exact.   There are no other Gods…Period!   Idolatry is a lie.

Also…I really meant what I said in number nine! But…no.   We always have to take this argument into culture war territory.   Always.

Here’s the thing about idolatry…when you worship an idol you are surrendering what makes you human to a piece of stone. But point your finger at the idol worshiper if you like, attacking that piece of stone as if it were a god-object is the same thing as worshiping it. By tearing it down you are acknowledging it has power.

No. The power is within. The power is always within. Actually Gary, guns Are mere tools, bits of technology, and a political issue we really need to discuss.   But that political issue exists in a context of a culture that is astonishingly violent and discussing the one without the other is as pointless an exercise in generating hot air as I can imagine.   If you could reach around that rattling lizard brain getting all offended at the other tribe’s god to the part that’s capable of reason and empathy you could see that.   But idolatry has made you weak.   You think that if you can just smash the idol it’s power will be gone, but unfortunately Gary it is not Moloch you are dealing with but human beings, and the fault dear Brutus is not in our guns, but in ourselves. Guns. Don’t. Matter.

I posted a wee rant on Facebook the other day, about Todd “Legitimate Rape” Akin and his one last swing at gay people before leaving congress.   I wanted people having this argument about “the gun lobby” to please notice something.   Yes, they are part of the problem, but not because they defend the right of citizens to own guns. So long as people keep thinking of them as a gun lobby they are missing it. This man, Todd Akin has their lifetime ‘A’ rating and the NRA supported him in the 2012 elections Even After he began yap, yap yapping about “legitimate rape”.   So women can own guns, but not their own bodies?   No…just, no. That simply isn’t how people who are genuinely concerned about freedom, individual rights, and “big brother government” think.   They are not that.

Can we please stop the idol worship and look at this…really look at it.   They are not a gun lobby, they are a right wing political action committee that pushes people’s buttons about government taking their guns away to get right wing extremists elected.   Guns are to them, as the bible is to the Family Research Council. They are tools the right uses to drive people to the polls and vote against their own interests.   So is abortion.   So is The Homosexual Menace.   So is the Angry Black Man.   So is The Illegal Immigrant.   That is how idolatry works.   That is what it does to otherwise rational human beings.

Why are we such a violent society?   Well…the right certainly has its opinion about that:

Top Conservative Publication: Shooting Occurred Because Women Ran The School

National Review, whose in-house editorial suggested Newtown was the price of the Second Amendment, published a piece on Wednesday from anti-feminist Charlotte Allen suggesting the reason the shooter was able to kill so many students was because Newtown was a “feminized setting”…

Actually, if our culture wasn’t so out of balance when it comes to male verses female leadership it would probably be a whole lot less violent.   Which is almost certainly why the hard right (religious and secular) is so relentlessly against female leadership.   There’s the problem.   Or at least a big part of it.   Men must either dominate women or be emasculated by them. What does this right wing trope accomplish other than making males more aggressive?   Yes, we can and should talk about sensible restrictions on firearms and firearm ownership.   But can we talk about this too?   Because if we can’t nothing, Nothing we attempt to do regarding gun control will do any damn good whatsoever.   Nothing.   And it’ll just be wash-rinse-repeat every time another horrific crime of violence happens.

So long as we are busy fighting a culture war of the right wing’s making, that only the right wing benefits from, discussions about the roots of violence just aren’t going to happen.   It’s a win-win, not for the culture of guns but the culture of hate.   Please…just stop.   And…Think!

A lot of the people you see (I’ve seen and talked to myself) at gun shows are or were once blue collar union workers, who have been systematically cleaved from the democratic party over this one issue by the NRA.   A lot of them, not all of them certainly, but perhaps a critical mass of them, could be won back if democrats would bother talking to them, and not screaming at them that they’re responsible for the deaths of 20 children, let alone that they are Moloch Worshipers.   Those people have children too and they love them very much.

Also…I really meant what I said in number nine! The first person dragged down into the gutter when you lie about your neighbor, is you.

[Edited some for clarity…]