{"id":93172,"date":"2023-05-25T18:01:00","date_gmt":"2023-05-25T23:01:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=93172"},"modified":"2023-05-25T18:01:00","modified_gmt":"2023-05-25T23:01:00","slug":"93172","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=93172","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

This is why the media will never understand gun owners<\/a><\/p>\n

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Most people who read stuff here are either gun owners or know someone who owns a gun. At the very least, they\u2019re sympathetic to having one.<\/span><\/p>\n

Not counting the hate readers, of course.<\/span><\/p>\n

The media, however, is full of people who don\u2019t own guns, don\u2019t know anyone they know has them, and perhaps more importantly, don\u2019t want to know anyone who is a firearm owner.<\/span><\/p>\n

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And yet,\u00a0<\/span>they routinely write crap like this<\/span><\/a>:<\/span><\/p>\n

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The story of a Pennsylvania church blessing AR-15s made the rounds on traditional and social media last week. The ceremony at the World Peace and Unification Sanctuary ministry in rural Newfoundland, PA, was widely ridiculed as bizarre and out of touch, but once you take away some of the theatrics, how different are these worshippers really from millions of Americans and the NRA?<\/span><\/p>\n

The answer, it turns out, is not that much.<\/span><\/p>\n

WhoWhatWhy\u00a0<\/span><\/i>went to Newfoundland twice last week, attended the gun-blessing ceremony and saw some things that the rest of the media seems to have missed.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Now, the church in question is the Unification Church, whose members are often called \u201cMoonies\u201d after the founder, Rev. Hyung Jin (Sean) Moon.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n

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It goes on to describe the church\u2019s ceremony:<\/span><\/p>\n

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Near the end of the ceremony, Rev. Moon directed those who attended to turn toward the camera \u2014 which was live-streaming and recording the ceremony to be posted in full later online \u2014 to wave and bow.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cNew couples become royalty, kings and queens with crowns and rods of iron.\u201d Rev. Moon declared. \u201cRod of iron\u201d is the Biblical term (Revelation 2:26-27) the church uses for guns like the AR-15.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cEach of these couples have the right of sovereignty, to keep and bear arms and to protect the earth from communists and political satanists.\u201d Rev. Moon said. Then, in front of a crowd sporting their own \u201crods of iron,\u201d he wed the seven couples on stage.<\/span><\/p>\n

From the outside looking in, the group seemed like a gun-crazed cult \u2014 a bunch of unhinged, well-armed loonies. And that\u2019s how they were portrayed in the media: As a group of bizarre outliers.<\/span><\/p>\n

But how different are their beliefs from, for example, those of the NRA?<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Well, for one thing, that\u2019s a church and the NRA isn\u2019t.<\/span><\/p>\n

What\u2019s more, that\u2019s a church many consider a cult\u2013though I\u2019m still amazed that the ATF hasn\u2019t busted in the door and burned the place to the ground yet\u2013while the NRA is a civil rights organization with a long history of training Americans to defend themselves and their home.<\/span><\/p>\n

Now, what\u2019s interesting is that this was written originally back in 2018. It\u2019s been brought back out now because of the one-year anniversary of the Uvalde shooting. In other words, this is what this particular publication thought of as somehow relevant.<\/span><\/p>\n

Why?<\/span><\/p>\n

Because it paints gun owners in a negative light, that\u2019s why. It\u2019s likening them to members of a cult, which is something they\u2019ve long tried to do anyway, it\u2019s just now they\u2019re using a group most consider a cult as a point of comparison rather than just declaring it.<\/span><\/p>\n

Their evidence?<\/span><\/p>\n

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Wayne LaPierre, the NRA\u2019s executive vice president,\u00a0<\/span>took the stage at CPAC<\/span><\/a>\u00a0in the same week and told the appreciative crowd that the right to bear arms is not \u201cbestowed by man, but granted by God to all Americans as our American birthright.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Saying your rights come from God is hardly radical. Our Founding Fathers argued as much repeatedly.<\/span><\/p>\n

Take, for example, one of this nation\u2019s most important documents, the Declaration of Independence, where Thomas Jefferson wrote:<\/span><\/p>\n

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We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are\u00a0<\/span>endowed by their Creator<\/span><\/em>\u00a0with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Emphasis added, of course, but you get the point.<\/span><\/p>\n

Believing your rights are divine in origin is a common point for anyone who is someone of faith and believes in natural law.<\/span><\/p>\n

Gun ownership as a right derives from just that, and saying it doesn\u2019t change anything. Trying to connect the NRA to the Moonies is a cheap shot.<\/span><\/p>\n

The fact that it was brought up five years after it originally ran is even worse.<\/span><\/p>\n

The truth is that they don\u2019t get you. They don\u2019t want to get you because to them, you\u2019re nothing but a cult member who is brainwashed. Why else would you refuse to give up your guns for the betterment of mankind? It couldn\u2019t be that you don\u2019t trust the government to respect your rights despite ample evidence that they won\u2019t. It can\u2019t be that criminals will still get guns and you\u2019ll be vulnerable to them.<\/span><\/p>\n

No, none of that.<\/span><\/p>\n

They want to demonize you because understanding you might well shatter their precious worldview that yes, you\u2019re a cultist simply because you believe in the right to keep and bear arms.<\/span><\/p>\n

Well, we\u2019re not the ones who drank the Kool-Aid.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is why the media will never understand gun owners Most people who read stuff here are either gun owners or know someone who owns a gun. At the very least, they\u2019re sympathetic to having one. Not counting the hate readers, of course. The media, however, is full of people who don\u2019t own guns, don\u2019t … Continue reading “”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,75,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-93172","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-crap-for-brains","category-media","category-rkba"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93172","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=93172"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93172\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":93173,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93172\/revisions\/93173"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=93172"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=93172"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=93172"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}