Today I picked up my Mossberg 500 Tactical 12-gauge shotgun with a pistol grip and a short barrel. It is not for game. I hate hunting.

There is much blather about guns these days, and not just from the left. Last year one of the deep thinkers at Patheos grunted this very fine argument about the right to own guns: “I think he (sic) real annual mound of 30,000 dead bodies is the central fact. Therefore, I think ‘Guns don’t kill people. People kill people. So let’s give Adam Lanza as much access to the technology of mass death as possible because whaddya (sic) gonna do’ is a stupid argument.”

And just this week the usually very good Evangelical reverend Rob Schenck published a deeply confused piece in the Washington Post about how it is not only anti-life but anti-Christian to own a firearm.

Schenck says he once “believed we had a God-given right to defend ourselves.” Maybe he intended to circle back and make clear that we do have such a God-given right, only not with guns, but he never does. As it is, he seems not to know that the right of self-defense is in the natural law.

Schenck sets up a nice straw man when he “disagrees with my community’s wholesale embrace of the idea that anyone should be able to buy a gun.” Of course, no one in his community or any other community believes that “anyone should be able to buy a gun”; children, felons and the crazy should not be able to buy guns.

He posits the nonsensical notion that “our commitment to the sanctity of human life demands that we err on the side of reducing threat to human life.” Presumably Schenck is joining in the large-soda ban once proposed in New York City.

Read the article “Prolife Leader: “Today I Bought a Gun”” on crisismagazine.com.