Guns 'N' God

Mark Steyn (reg. req.) Curtsy: ninme.

I look on religion like gun ownership. Jurisdictions such as Vermont and New Hampshire with a high rate of firearms possession also have a low crime rate. You don’t have to own a gun, and there are plenty of sissy arms-are-for-hugging granola-crunchers who don’t. But they benefit from the fact that their crazy stump toothed neighbors do. If you want to burgle a home in northern New England, you’d have to be awfully certain it was the one-in-a-hundred we-are-the-world pantywaist’s pad and not some plaid-clad gun nut who’ll blow your head off before you lay a hand on his 70-dollar TV. That’s the way it is with religion. A hyperrationalist can dismiss the whole God thing as a lot of applesauce, but his hyper-rationalism is a lot more vulnerable in a society without a strong Judeo Christian culture.
A New Hampshire non-gun owner might tire of all the Second Amendment kooks with the gun racks in the pickups and move somewhere where everyone is, at least officially, a non-gun owner just like him—Washington, say, or London. And suddenly he finds that, in a wholly disarmed society, his house requires burglar alarms and window locks and security cameras.