When the Full Armor of God isn’t enough…
“Don’t take your guns to town, son…leave your guns at home,” Johnny Cash, 1958
Too bad the Rev. Tim Christopher didn’t listen to more Johnny Cash – or if he did, too bad he didn’t pay heed to what he heard.
Y’see, Tim Chistopher is a Twin Cities preacher man who doesn’t seem to feel all that safe merely clad in the Full Armor of the Lord. Consequently, he feels the need to pack some heat while he spreads the gospel of the Prince of Peace. Apparently, in his Good Book, that bit about living by the sword and dying by the sword doesn’t apply to a .357 magnum.
In any case, last week he told a reporter for the Strib he feels like a “sitting duck” when he walks the streets unarmed among God’s people and would feel equally threatened to be without immediate recourse to deadly force among the folks crowding the state fair midway.
So, rather than seeking counseling for what appears to be a socially debilitating case of paranoid anxiety, Christopher, backed by an outfit calling itself the Minnesota Gun Owners’ Caucus has filed suit to force the Minnesota State Fair to allow folks to bring their weapons to the fair.
Now other than to soothe the psyche of a paranoid preacher, I’m at a loss to discern the need to turn the Falcon Heights fairgrounds into a BYOG shooting gallery. Do they anticipate violent civil unrest at the Giant Slide? People getting carried away at the All-U-Can-Drink milk booth? Fear a gunfight at the 4-H corral? What is it that’s motivating this fearful Friend of Jesus and his courtroom-bound cohorts to insist that mortal danger lurks among the prizewinning canned peaches and homemade pies?
On the face of it, having a bunch of people wandering the fairgrounds with pistols in their pockets is a bad idea. Not only is there a cop on every other corner, but with a couple million people expected to crowd a few blocks of urban landscape shoulder-to-hip over the run of the fair, having a passel of wanna-be Wild Bill Hickok’s primed for some dumb kid to hijack their Pronto Pup is a sure-fire formula for serious collateral damage. I don’t care how good the Reverend Tim is at hitting the little paper target at his neighborhood shooting range, when the probable backstop is a few thousand families, I’d just as soon not rely on his marksmanship.
Or his judgement.
OK. now this is where we all get told this is all about rights. Yeah…riiiiight.
Funny thing about Tim and this Gun Owners’ Caucus … it’s always about what they see as being their rights…and only their rights. The rights of the rest of us be damned. Whenever I hear somebody yelping about rights it always seems to come down to “I want mine … screw the rest of ya.”
So we have these latter-day Bat Mastersons petitioning the court for their rights – utterly indifferent to my right not to catch their stray bullet in the back of my head. Likewise we have the anti-vaxers and acolytes of the Church of the Latter-Day Trump boldly declaring their right to spew an unimpeded toxic spray of infectious virus from their unmasked, unvaccinated faces.
All in the name of freedom, of course.
The framers of the Declaration and Constitution enumerated freedoms for all to enjoy, but I can’t imagine anyone enjoying a case of COVID passed on by folks too stubborn, too stupid to get a shot in the arm that will protect themselves and everyone around them from a real and known threat. Even when the shot is free.
Of course, these graduates of the YouTube U School of Constitutional Law advise the rest of us, “If you’re afraid, you’re free to stay home.”
Well, I’d suggest to Tim and his ad-hoc gunslinger pals, if you’re afraid, you stay home. And continue with that advice to folks who can’t gin up the courage to bare an arm to a sharp needle or hang a mask over their nose.
The rest of us have rights too.