Guns in the Wrong Hands

In real time these lines are being written three weeks before Donald Trump is due to be sworn in as President of the United States. I’m praying that he survives until his inauguration and then afterward. Survives?

Of all I’ve heard and read concerning reaction to his surprising election victory, nothing has made me more apprehensive than a BBC online report about liberals running to gun stores after the November election and liberal gun clubs now springing up around the country. That is what they actually call themselves: “liberal gun clubs.”

I have always supported the constitutional right of citizens to keep and bear arms, and so have most of my friends, some of them real “gun nuts”. It didn’t surprise me to hear that before the election many such folk were stocking up in anticipation of what nearly everyone assumed (including myself): that Hillary Clinton would win and that once ensconced in the White House would act to weaken Second Amendment rights, as also others.

Hunters and recreational shooters having guns is one thing. The prospect of liberals wielding them frightens me. It isn’t merely that nobody is more intolerant than your typical liberal. She shows it when she starts hollering “fascist” at anybody who simply disagrees with her. What makes her positively dangerous is that she believes all of us may and even should conduct our lives and the affairs of this world without reference to anything higher than ourselves – as if God does not exist. Thus is she driven, never mind the means, to make this world perfect according to her vision of perfection, which is grounded in the false conception of freedom as humans beings at liberty to do whatever is humanly possible.

Do liberals seriously believe that Donald Trump is going to set limits on the exercise of this false freedom, or try? Is that why they’re buying guns? Do they imagine Trumpista storm troopers crashing into their homes and other venues, truncheons cracking skulls, and that they’ll be able to stop them with their new firearms? How silly! Trump is not about to touch what really matters to them: their way of life, otherwise known as American culture. He has spent a lifetime living as they do, or as they would if they had his money. How many Americans aren’t awed when they see the pictures of his high-rise apartment with its faux Louis XV décor, gold gilt everywhere, and the ultimate ornament: a wife other men can’t help staring at?

On other occasions I have explained that a culture is what results when a people live according to the beliefs they profess. This is why our nation is not Christian though seventy percent of Americans claim to adhere to some form of the religion. They don’t live according to the beliefs they profess. If their materialism is exemplified by the Trump apartment, their moral squalor is reflected in abortion on demand, no-fault divorce, the practice of sodomy recognized as a basis for legal “marriage,” a gap between the rich and everybody else that has become a gulf, and the society’s acceptance of all of it so that all of it has become embedded in the culture as well as law.

Donald Trump couldn’t change it even if he wanted. Nobody among today’s political class could. That is because there is no political solution to cultural problems, not unless the politics be grounded in Christian morality. To cite the title of one of the best-selling books ghosted for Mr.Trump, The Art of the Deal, there is the ground of his politics: deals, not Christian morality.

Deal-making may return some manufacturing jobs to the U.S., but that is insufficient to what is truly needed. What definitely is not is for some crazed Hillary Clinton wannabe to go gunning for Mr. Trump and to succeed. Given the state of American society, the event would not be followed by a period of mourning, but a large part of the population going for the throats of another part.

God save us!