The battle for gun rights is spiritual

Outsource your security at the peril of your soul

Militia est vita hominis super terram

(The life of man upon earth is warfare)

— Job 7:1

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The battle for gun rights is spiritual.

Modern man is used to outsourcing his security to organisations, systems, and other men: the police, surveillance technologies, the agencies.

This renouncing of personal responsibility weakens men physically and psychologically. When we do not teach our boys the skills and instincts to protect themselves, they can never fully transition into manhood.

A core part of the coming of age ritual for young men, which involves renouncing childlike innocence, is accepting the eventuality of death and responsibility for grave moral judgements.

In failing to give our boys the education and trust necessary to enact ordered violence, we are implicitly telling them that we consider them unworthy to exercise judgement in the most consequential and morally grave matters. It is infantilizing and disempowering.

This lies at the heart of the failure of modern man to be ready to wield true authority. Instead, he is condemned to a cowardly embrace of the managerial system, in which he can dissipate his authority into structures and launder retribution through vague networks and coalitions.

— You are too free

There is a further cost to outsourcing security: a spiritual one. The boy who is trained to depend on others for his physical security will do the same for spiritual security.

I believe that society should be ordered according to Christian morality. That being said, one observes self-professed Christians who complain about societal degeneracy in a pleading way that suggests that they are seeking to legislate away all their own temptations, removing their need to be strong.

Impossible! The life of man upon earth is warfare. It is good to argue against laws that harm the souls of others, but we must not use the existence of unjust laws to excuse our own weakness.

Mark Maggiori

Attempting to outsource spiritual security is the ultimate expression of progressivism; the notion that systems and technology will not just solve physical want but metaphysical need too. In this sense, what appears on the surface to be an argument for Christianity is actually something closer to hyper-progressivism.

This is worse in a period in which an honest accounting of our society shows no sign that it is about to spiritually right itself. In such a time, by blaming society’s faults for one’s own, one is thus extending oneself infinite license to sin.

Remember that the early Christians flourished within the pagan Roman empire!

No: you cannot outsource your spiritual security. Re-sacralizing the world necessitates understanding it as a battlefield from which you cannot flee. You must fight.