“A gun is a tool, Marion, no better or no worse than any other tool; an axe, a shovel, or anything.”
A newly hired ranch-hand said that to a concerned mother after she objected to the man giving her young son some shooting lessons. It’s from the 1953 movie Shane, where a silent and kindhearted man arrives seemingly out of nowhere and helps some poor farmers in their desperate fight against a greedy, land-hungry rancher.
The intriguing thing about the hired hand is that though he is thoughtful and kind, there is an air of mystery and danger about him. After he tells the mother a gun is just a tool, he delivers one of the greatest lines in the movie: “A gun is as good or as bad as the man using it.”
The mother gets the last word in by saying, “We’d all be better off if there weren’t any guns in our valley.” That sounded nice, but was not based on reality, was it? Without guns that woman wouldn’t have a home and a farm. Without guns she most likely would have been tomahawked or shot through with arrows, perhaps mutilated, or sold into slavery. The guns, a product of an advanced culture, brought Western Civilization (Christian Civilization) to the continent and transformed what was a savage society.
The movie Shane ends with a very tense and epic scene in a saloon. The hired hand, Shane, who by trade is really a gunfighter, enters a darkened saloon to face the rancher’s hired gunman. An old dog, smelling the danger, gets up and quietly tip toes out of the room before Shane kills the gunman. And so, Shane saves the people and brings peace. Shot and bleeding himself, with his job finished, he rides off into the sunset.
Anyone can watch the movie Shane. The small amount of violence that occurs is not gratuitous nor gory. The film is an antidote to pride and narcissism as it showcases the virtues of humility, courage, honesty, and charity. The movie was made when the Catholic Church controlled the content coming out of Hollywood, making sure movies would not lower the morality of viewers.
But the Church blinked in the late 1960s and lost control of the movies, and also lost control of what became known as “birth control,” which Chesterton wrote provided no births and no control. From there the Church lost influence over more and more of the once-Christian culture. And now we are the savages. We sacrifice our unborn and call it “healthcare;” we mutilate children’s sexual organs and call it “gender-affirming care.”
A week ago, a disturbed young man who referred to himself as a woman fired 166 rounds into Mass at a Catholic parish where children were praying. Right on que, the talking heads warned about “hatred”—not hatred of Christians, as one might think, but “hatred” of those who terrorize Christians. They ranted about guns and gun violence, as if the guns themselves pulled the triggers and not the mentally ill man using them. They even mocked prayer to God, claiming the children who were praying at Mass got shot anyway, so their prayers were futile. Their warped reasoning hearkens to the Pharisees who mocked Christ, whose prayers—according to the Pharisees’ blind eyes—were futile due to the fact He got crucified anyway.
How did it come to this?
A commentator gave a speech at Hillsdale College in 2023 titled “Inside the Transgender Empire.” He spoke how fringe academics back in the 1980s started teaching students that “male and female” were not biological truths, but rather a “social construct,” and that construct they termed “heteronormativity” supported the white, male, heterosexual power structure. This system, they argued, had to be ruthlessly deconstructed. The best way to achieve this, they claimed, was to promote transgenderism. If men can become women, and women men, then the natural structure of creation could be toppled.
The speech mentioned Susan Stryker, a professor/activist who is a man but refers to himself as a woman. Stryker’s best-known essay is about Frankenstein and “Performing Transgender Rage.” In the essay he contends that the “transexual body” is a “technological construction” that represents a war against Western society: “I am a transsexual, and therefore I am a monster,” Stryker writes. And this monster, he continues, is destined to channel its “rage and revenge” against the “naturalized heterosexual order,” against “‘traditional family values,’” and against the “hegemonic oppression” of nature itself.
The man who shot those Mass-attending children the other day referred to himself as a “monster.” He might have read Stryker’s essay. He, like thousands of other young people, had been duped or, as he put it, “brainwashed” by behavioral and societal manipulators. In his case, he became a suicidal soldier fighting against the natural, heterosexual order.
The transgender assault on society is not a natural evolutionary process in sexuality. It’s manufactured, and it’s political—and politics takes money. The commentator noted how the “combination of well-funded activism and political influence works in practice,” citing the example of Pritzker-funded activists at the largest children’s hospital in Chicago “[providing] local schools with training, materials, and personnel who promote gender transitions for children, using the hospital’s reputation to give their ideology a scientific veneer.” This process results in “a sophisticated school-to-gender-clinic pipeline.” Teachers, counselors, doctors, and activists on social media and elsewhere—many of whom are employed or subsidized by members of the Pritzker family—push children in the direction of “the trans identity rabbit hole.” Evidence shows it is a hole that is almost impossible to escape.
And so, here we are today, my friends, and we are in a hole. We live in a fallen world, from which is impossible to escape. It is only through Christ, through whom all things are possible, that we can be saved.
Christ’s crucifixion was manufactured and political. Money was involved. And so was terror. A crucifixion scene terrorized all who saw it. That was the point. But also understand that the crosses Christ gives us to carry are tools; they are weapons we carry in order to work out our salvation, to cooperate in climbing out of the hole into which we have fallen.
So humble yourself, get low, pick up your cross, and follow your Savior, a quiet and kindhearted man with an air of danger about Him. Do that, and then later you will take a better seat in the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, among countless angels in festal gathering. You will enjoy the esteem of your companions at the table in the resurrection of the righteous.
Photo by Hugo Fergusson on Unsplash
