‘“I don’t think it’s a nuisance,” he said.
The laughter from the audience following that comment temporarily paused the hearing.’
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It isn’t just communities having to fight gun ranges down the street; more importantly, it’s the faith of the gun range owner that daily life permeated by shattering machine gun fire is fine, akin to the ordinary fact of traffic noise. He expects the rest of us to share his faith in the great god Gun, that this god be constantly in our ears. He expects us to sacrifice our peace of mind to that god. Guns in America are the universal god, with us always, blasting away.
After Sandy Hook, Gary Wills wrote:
We guarantee that crazed man after crazed man will have a flood of killing power readily supplied him. We have to make that offering, out of devotion to our Moloch, our god. The gun is our Moloch. We sacrifice children to him daily. … The gun is not a mere tool, a bit of technology, a political issue, a point of debate. It is an object of reverence… Adoration of Moloch permeates the country, imposing a hushed silence as he works his will. One cannot question his rites, even as the blood is gushing through the idol’s teeth. … We are required to deny that there is any connection between the fact that we have the greatest number of guns in private hands and the greatest number of deaths from them. Denial on this scale always comes from or is protected by religious fundamentalism… [T]he Supreme Court has been cowed, reversing its own long history of recognizing that the Second Amendment applied to militias. Now the court feels bound to guarantee that any every madman can indulge his “religion” of slaughter… So let us celebrate the falling bodies … as a demonstration of our fealty, our bondage, to the great god Gun.
Our constant mass murders are religious events, ritual reenactments of the sacrificial blood we offer the great god Gun. Each massacre – today’s, tomorrow’s – prompts this prayer: O Lord, make us truly worthy of this our sacrifice for your bloody majesty.