Has the gun become a sacred object in America?
For 10 years after 9/11, James Strickland fought for the United States Army, slogging, rifle on shoulder, from battlefield to battlefield.
He took and returned fire, he says, for not just a country, but an idea – that America had God’s special blessing. “I used a gun for a living to enforce that idea,” he says.
As the U.S. endures a wave of gun violence, it sometimes seems to him as if the war has come home. In 2021, active shooter incidents increased 52% over 2020, according to the FBI. This weekend, mass shootings in Pennsylvania and South Carolina added to casualties in Buffalo, New York; Uvalde, Texas; and Tulsa, Oklahoma.
To Mr. Strickland, the gun is not the problem. Firearms, he says, only enforce ideas. “I don’t see it as a totem,” he says. But he thinks it may be salvation for a society that, at least to him, seems determined to drum Christian faith out of the public square.
In the decade since the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut, that perspective has helped drive the guns debate toward an almost religious tone – that of a battle between good and evil that goes well beyond good or bad policy. For a small group
