A Second Amendment Support Test
Dear Christian Conservatives,
How important is the Second Amendment to you? Many, if not most, of you who read this would say it is of the upmost importance. Well, let’s put your desire to defend that right to the test. I have found that the best way to test personal dedication to a liberty is to imagine a scenario where the right in question serves to defend someone we have little in common with, maybe even someone we’re in conflict with. Most Second Amendment supporters in this country imagine using their right to bear arms to protect themselves from a tyrannical government that intends to impose a socialist, amoral agenda on the people. Sure, that could happen I guess. But what if one day it was needed to protect people you never could have imagined?
Let’s imagine this:
The year is 2085 and the Muslim population in the United States has increased from around 1 percent of our population to around 12 percent. Most of this increase is due to conversion rather than immigration. Christianity has become the domain of the privileged and enfranchised. The Christian conservatives have gotten their way over the last sixty years and our government has been increasingly entwined with that religious identification—a long-sought utopia for many. When judges sentence minorities or evict the poor they now site scripture. Holy scripture is used to justify the decreases in aid and competent legal representation of the impoverished and laws that increasingly favor upper-class whites. For these reasons, increasing numbers of disenfranchised minorities and the impoverished become drawn to Islam, which is reaching out to them.
Government funding for Christian schools has become the norm, with mandatory Christian prayer established in public schools across the country. Muslims begin pulling their children out of school and start establishing community-funded madrassas. A small but influential and well organized, native-born extremist sect called the Islamic American Nation springs up. Their membership is in the thousands, still a tiny fraction of the 20 million Muslims in America, but they draw the sympathy of hundreds of thousands more. Factional violence flares up around the country. Muslim gun and shooting clubs spring up everywhere, mirroring the Christian gun clubs already popular today. Fringe Muslim separatist organizations establish headquarters in remote areas. Seventy percent of Muslims in the US support the establishment of Sharia. This terrifies the Christian majority even though they don’t mean what we think they mean when they say Sharia, and efforts by their community leaders to better explain what they mean fall on deaf ears. Propaganda on both sides spreads on social media like wildfire.
One day IAN launches coordinated attacks across the country that kill thousands of Christians and government officials. They raid prisons and free hundreds of their most violent followers. The government and the majority of the population panic. Executive orders are signed and laws are quickly passed that sanction unprecedented levels of surveillance, searches and seizures, arrests and incarcerations without trials, and that massively restrict freedom of travel. The judicial branch, no longer even pretending to be secular, upholds these new laws. National Guard units begin patrolling neighborhoods and questionable killings by the authorities skyrocket. Mosques and madrassas are raided and closed down using questionable evidence of association with the IAN. Despite the fact that 99.5 percent of American Muslims still have nothing to do with terrorism, these actions begin to further alienate them. The IAN membership grows steadily, fed by angry youths being mistreated by the authorities.
Christian partisan groups begin targeting and burning Muslim houses of worship. In response, Muslim shooting clubs that have nothing to do with the IAN begin forming militias to protect their communities from Christian terrorism. Both sides are armed with military style weapons and clashes kill dozens on both sides. In response Congress passes a law that bans all US Muslims from possessing firearms.
Would you support this ban? That’s who the Second Amendment may one day be called to protect against government and religious oppression. Are you good with that?