A posting from Ed Brayton yesterday drew my attention to a Michigan company, Trijicon, which has been supplying precision gun sights to the US Army and other armies of the world with biblical citations embossed on their exterior casings.
Quite apart from the whole Establishment Clause business (in which conservative Christians seem blithely disinterested), can one fathom anything more inappropriate than to put biblical citations on equipment designed--with great precision and care--to kill people? How deeply fucked-up is that? Not that the Bible doesn't give ample justification for the maiming, torture and murder of others; the Old Testament is a pretty bloody place to visit. But these citations seem to be from the New Testament, from the whole Jesus-loves-you-and-is-peaceful-and-forgiving part of the cobbled-together collection of scattered mythologies that constitute the Christian holy book.
(If the fundamental issue eludes us, we need only change the Bible references to Koran references to see it more clearly.)
Now the Associated Press has announced that the New Zealand military is filing the citations off, and other countries are holding reviews of the matter to see how to proceed.
Here's hoping for big fines and a shuttered company. And here's hoping for another lesson that religion is a private matter, a matter between an individual and the voices in his head.
4 comments:
I would say I hope they go out of business, but I am also someone who had to move out of michigan because there are no jobs so I wouldn't want another Michigan business to close. Perhaps they could switch to making necklaces with bible versus or something more appropriate.
Filing the citations off! That's military ingenuity.
Good idea. Make a necklace factory out of it! Just sack the higher-ups.
Not quite the same as biblical passages on the bottom of In-N-Out containers, huh? It just boggles my mind why they would have put it on the guns in the first place. I have my suspicions, though. Putting the stamp of God on your weapons gives them Divine backing and a free pass to kill in His name.
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