What appeared as a sick and extraordinarily insensitive stunt turned out to be an actual announcement for a raffle to “benefit” the victims’ families of the Orlando massacre at Pulse, an LGBTQ nightclub in which a shooter murdered 49 and wounded another 53 people in the early morning hours of June 12, 2016.
The owners of Second Amendment Sports of McHenry, Illinois, sold tickets in their raffle for the prize of an AR-15 military-grade assault rifle, which is similar to the weapon of mass destruction and death used at the Pulse nightclub. Raffle organizers eventually canceled it not because of the outrage they received on the insensitivity of the event, but, rather, they realized that a raffle conducted by a for-profit company might be declared illegal in their state’s judicial system.
Second Amendment Sports’ insane raffle represents only the latest installment in the volatile and explosive gun culture of the United States.
Spike’s Tactical shop of Apopka, Florida has begun marketing its special AR-15 assault rifle, which company spokesperson, Former Navy SEAL Ben “Mookie” Thomas, claims was “designed to never be used by Muslim terrorists,” as the shop’s never-ending battle in the Christian Crusades.
On one side of the rifle, shop employees laser-etched the Knights Templar Long Cross of the original Crusaders when they marched to reclaim the Holy Land from Muslims in 1099 CE. On the other side, they engraved Psalm 144:1: “Blessed be the Lord my Rock, who trains my hands for war, my fingers for battle.” Called “The Crusader,” the rifle includes a three-setting trigger safety control branded “Peace,” “War,” and “God Wills It.”
“Mookie” Thomas originated the idea for the rifle, stating,
Off the cuff I said I’d like to have a gun that if a Muslim terrorist picked it up, a bolt of lightning would hit and knock him dead.
Unfortunately, owners, employees, and customers at Spike’s Tactical seemed to have forgotten that the Christian Crusades represent one of the most horrific, shameful, and tragic scars on Christendom.
Pope Urban II summoned the First Crusade in Clermont, France to “liberate” Jerusalem from Muslims. In the summer of 1096, as the crusade began, they murdered several thousand Jews along their way in the lands along the Rhine River, looted and destroyed their homes, as the Crusaders stated,
Because why should we go off to attack the unbelievers in the Holy Land and leave the unbelievers in our midst untouched.?
They accused Jews as being treacherous auxiliaries of Muslims. According to Pope Urban II,
Let us first avenge ourselves on them [the Jews] and exterminate them from among the nations so that the name of Israel will no longer be remembered, or let them adopt our faith.
When the Crusaders reached Jerusalem in 1099, they pillaged Muslim buildings and killed thousands. The massacre of the Muslim population of Jerusalem reached epic proportions. In addition, the invaders burned the synagogue on the Temple Mount to the ground with all the Jews inside. One Crusader, an eyewitness to the event wrote:
Men rode in blood up to their knees and bridal reins. It was a just and splendid judgment by God that this place would be filled with the blood of the unbelievers.
The Crusades lasted from 1040 – 1350. By 1204, however, the tide began to turn against the Western European invaders, as the Mamluk dynasty in Egypt drove them out of Palestine and Syria.
Spike’s Tactical shop’s newest call for a Christian Crusade represents only the latest installment in the volatile and explosive gun culture of the United States.
In another installment in the booming and explosive gun culture, Bergeron’s Restaurant in Louisiana, billing itself as the home of “God, Gumbo, and Guns,” offers a 10% discount to any customer who brings a gun with them to lunch or dinner. Says restaurant owner Kevin Cox:
Show it to me out of your purse, out of your back pocket….Show that you have one so if something goes wrong here today, I know you’re here to protect me.
Cox criticizes gun-free businesses like Chipotle and Target: “You make a gun-free zone,” he argued, “that’s where bad people with guns are going to go – dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.” Since instituting the discount this fall, business has increased approximately 25%.
Giving new meaning to the term “hunting for a wife,” Jewelry by Harold owner in North Liberty, Iowa last year gave a husband-to-be a voucher for a new Remington 870 rifle with the purchase of an engagement ring priced at $1,999 or higher. Shop owner Harold van Beek stated: “So say: I’m hunting deer, and here is a diamond ring, dear.” To apply for this “deal,” one must be eligible to own a gun in Iowa, and not have been convicted of a felony.
In its attempt to pull in shoppers a couple of years ago on so-called “Black Friday” (the day following Thanksgiving), the camping and outdoors superstore, Cabela’s, handed out envelopes to the first 800 people over the age of 18 who lined up in front of its stores before 5:00 a.m. for a chance to win a Browning A-Bolt Medallion .300 WSM rifle with a Cabela’s 50th anniversary gun case worth $875.
And maybe it’s not too late to go down to Nations Truck Sales in Sanford, Florida where three years ago they offered each customer a brand spanking new assault rifle with the purchase of a truck. Stated General Sales Manager, Nick Ginetta:
We started on Veterans Day. Hey, so many have given so much for this right!
I’ve heard about people being shot from canons, but for those who want to remain active hunters well after they have “bought the farm,” now their wishes have come true. Be the first on your block to kill long after you have died. For the sum of only $1250, your loved ones can have you cremated with a pound of your ashes stuffed inside genuine bullets, resurrecting you as live ammunition.
For that measly sum, you can metamorphose as 250 shot shells, 100 rifles cartridges, or 250 pistol cartridges. For only $100 extra, until you come alive again as a killing apparatus, your bullet ashes can rest in peace in a decorative wooden coffin-like box.
The company, Holy Smoke Bullet Urns of Stockton, Alabama, has taken quite literally Shylock’s claim in Shakespeare’s 1596 Merchant of Venice: “The pound of flesh which I demand of him is deerely bought, ‘tis mine, and I will have it.”
According to the company’s co-founder, Clem Parnell:
You know I’ve thought about this for some time and I want to be cremated. Then I want my ashes put into some turkey load shotgun shells and have someone that knows how to turkey hunt use the shotgun shells with my ashes to shoot a turkey. That way I will rest in peace knowing that the last thing that one turkey will see is me, screaming at him at about 900 feet per second.
Wow, in this way, you will obtain virtual immortality in the elk antlers hung over your family’s fire place or in the stuffed duck sitting on their living room side table. In addition to the decimation of wild game, the company offers this alternative to traditional burial as a means to “continue to protect your home and family even after you are gone.” So just think of it; now you can kill a home intruder by shooting them right in the gut with your Great Uncle Henry or Aunt Gert!
And just in time for the holiday season, the Scottsdale, Arizona gun club now offers its members the service of sending out their Christmas cards with family members, including infants, posing with Santa while holding pistols and military grade automatic weapons, fa la la la la, la la la la. Joy to the world?
I would ask, though, have so many in fact given so much for the right for us to turn our bodies literally into killing devices or for the right to own a “free” assault or hunting rifle? Do we really want “the last thing that one turkey will see is me, screaming at him at about 900 feet per second.” Do residents of our nation really need so many guns, assault rifles and others?
The very first thing that caught my eye as I entered the grounds of the Iowa Republican Party Presidential Straw Poll in the summer of 2011 were three young children, I estimated between the ages of 4 -7, wearing day-glow orange baseball caps with “NRA” [National Rifle Association] scrawled atop, and round stickers on their T-shirts announcing “GUNS SAVE LIVES.”
Of the mass murders in the United States since 1982, most of the shooters obtained their weapons legally. Demographically, the shooters in all but one case involved males usually white, with an average age of 35 years.
Certainly, Bergeron’s, Jewelry by Harold, Cabela’s, Holy Smoke Bullet Urns of Stockton, Alabama Nation’s Truck Sales of Sanford, Florida, and gun clubs hold the constitutional right to market their devices of death, but what type of messages are they communicating? Are we really “free” as a society when our right “to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed”?
I propose that we reevaluate the political right’s obsession with the so-called “freedom” to bear arms because it is not only “criminals who kill people” as Second Amendment advocates claim, and counter NRA Executive VP Wayne LaPierre argument that “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”
How many more Tree of Life Synagogues, Borderline Bars, Krogers, Mother Emanuel AME Churches, Columbines and Douglas High Schools; Las Vegas outdoor concerts; Auroras; Charlestons; Fort Hoods; Virginia Techs; Northern Illinois Universities; University of Californias at Santa Barbara; Seattle Pacific Universities; Phoenix, Arizona parking lots; Pennsylvania Amish school houses; Santana High Schools; Springfield Oregon high schools…
How many more Jonesboro, Arkansas middle schools; Universities of Texases; Honolulu, Hawaii Xerox Corporations; Atlanta brokerage offices; US postal offices; movie theaters, Jewish community centers and schools; Muslim community centers and Mosques; Sikh temples; Christian churches? How many more dead to urban and suburban violence? How many more firearms-induced killings to domestic violence? How many more accidental killing of small children and adults?
And how many more Gabby Giffords, Harvey Milks, George Tillers, Tupac Shakurs, The Notorious B.I.Gs., Trayvon Martins, Lawrence Kings, Michael Browns, Tamir Rices, Alison Parkers, Adam Wades, Molly Judith Olgins, Mary Christine Chapas, Katherine Coopers, Richard Michaels-Martinezes, elementary school students and teachers, the famous, and the not-so-famous will it take for this country and its politicians to wake up to the reality that, contrary to the NRA’s assertions, guns in the hands of anyone, in any and all stations of life, kill people?
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From ‘across the water’ in the UK we find America’s acceptance or even promotional attitude to Gun ownership disturbing. We have knife crime in some of our capital cities but otherwise we generally feel safe to walk the streets at anytime of day safe in the knowledge that heavy penalties of imprisonment are given for gun crime. It is reassuring that you are questioning openly the topic of gun ownership and the logical argument of dissolving gun ownership. It will take you a monumental shift in attitude and many lives lost to change this attitude but please keep the momentum… Read more »