By Jacob Prall
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America is threatened. Heavily armed militants, ready to shoot U.S. federal and state officials in the name of their religion, are on our soil. What’s crazy is that their contempt for America today is based on a part of their religious text that is antiquated and increasingly overlooked. Some would call them terrorists, and they would be right to do so. They won’t necessarily attain that title before pulling the trigger because they are Christian. They call themselves “Oath Keepers.”

The oath-keepers planned a security detail for Kim Davis, the Kentucky clerk who refused to process marriage licenses for gays, to protect her from the federal government. They made it clear that they would not be afraid to fight — to use the assault weapons and military technology they’ve legally acquired in this nation. Their claim is to keep an oath to the Constitution, ignoring the fact that Kim Davis was actually fighting the Constitution by denying rights protected by said document. As a federal employee and elected official, she has an obligation to the Constitution and people of the United States.

As unelected, unsupervised extremists, the oath-keepers not only have no obligation to protect the Constitution with force but no jurisdiction over anyone. That’s not how they see it, however. In their minds, the county sheriff is the highest law enforcement in the land and has power over the federal and state government. They’re part of the “constitutional sheriff” movement that affords primarily middle-aged white males to tote assault rifles and pretend they’re helping their country. I’m sure the political power feels great — it is of course, an illusion. Unfortunately for the United States, the oath-keepers have regressed to a more violent form of Christianity, and they are armed with real bullets that could kill real Americans.

Christianity has had a bloody history. The last two millennia have been filled with wars in which Christians took up arms to kill men, women, and children they disagreed with — often other Christians. The development of rationalism and humanism allowed us to look back at these times as misguided, archaic, and mostly secular in motivation. Islam has undergone the same progression, the difference being that today, there is a larger percentage of Muslims who reject rationalism than Christians. They use their religious text as the basis of law and war. This makes some amount of sense, as the Koran is a layout for how to run a government in a different age, whereas Christianity didn’t facilitate bureaucratic operations until the Catholic Church of the early middle ages.

Davis’ legal counsel eventually declined the offer by the oath-keepers, a wise move. One can only imagine the implications of such a confrontation, in which the oath-keepers open fire on federal employees. The gun-control conversation might finally become a reality. In the United States, it doesn’t take dozen of children to change our outrageously lax gun policies. What will it take? Maybe the right targets haven’t been hit. After President Reagan was shot, he certainly took an interest in gun control. “How many need to die?” versus “Who has to die?” I just wish these questions didn’t have to exist in the “land of the free.”