“So let us celebrate the falling bodies and rising statues as a demonstration of our fealty, our bondage, to the great god Gun.”

Toles pretty much says it all. I’ve never been able to track it down, but the perfect companion to it would be a cartoon that Brockington used to have on his office door in grad school. It showed an alternative history of the United States told through the lens of gun nuts with fantasies that unrestricted private gun ownership has actually ever been a defense against tyranny. (Southern Sheriff: “You got to take this little ol’ literacy test.” Civil rights activist holding rifle: “He just passed!”)

For those who prefer a similar point in more learned prose, the great Garry Wills is great once again:

Read again those lines, with recent images seared into our brains—“besmeared with blood” and “parents’ tears.” They give the real meaning of what happened at Sandy Hook Elementary School Friday morning. That horror cannot be blamed just on one unhinged person. It was the sacrifice we as a culture made, and continually make, to our demonic god. We guarantee that crazed man after crazed man will have a flood of killing power readily supplied him. We have to make that offering, out of devotion to our Moloch, our god. The gun is our Moloch. We sacrifice children to him daily—sometimes, as at Sandy Hook, by directly throwing them into the fire-hose of bullets from our protected private killing machines, sometimes by blighting our children’s lives by the death of a parent, a schoolmate, a teacher, a protector. Sometime this is done by mass killings (eight this year), sometimes by private offerings to the god (thousands this year).