triticale - the wheat / rye guy

Heresy and Felony

The strangest thing about the victim disarmament movement is the way its members view guns. Rather than seeing inanimate objects, tools with the potential to be used for good or bad purposes, they see the embodyment of evil. To me it smacks of Voudoun, but a friend who studied Christian theology identified it with Gnosticism and Manicheanism.

Such a believe can lead a person into doctrinal error, but it can also lead to illegal acts. A group of clergy in Chicago apparantly believe their spiritual power can overwhelm the evil power of guns, and thereby prevent G-d only knows how many deaths (other than guns turned in by criminals to break the chain of evidence, the statistics are strongly against any of these guns being a factor in a death). They problem is that in their hubris, they are, according to Illinois law, trafficking illegally in firearms, possessing unregistered firearms, and most likely possessing firearms without the state's mandatory Firearms Owner ID. Law enforcement authorities are blatantly uninterested in enforcing the law regarding this matter, presumeably because Chicago's mayor is an avowed adherant to the same primitive belief. I doubt that this violates the Establishment Clause as it was originally intended, but clearly it could be deemed a violation of the modern notion of separation of church and state.