Remember the New Atheists? Originally, the term meant Richard Dawkins, Dan Dennett, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris, all of whom put out books denouncing God in the aftermath of 9/11. Harris later tried his hand at philosophy, with a book claiming that morality could be reduced to science and utilitarianism; this week he put up a long piece on his website arguing that the solution to crazed killers in America is armed guards in every school. Like his earlier demand that al-Qaida suspects be tortured, and indeed like his whole schtick about Muslims, this is a virtuoso display of wrapping the angry confusions of Weimar America in the language of dispassionate objectivity.

He claims, for example, that "100,000 Americans die each year because doctors and nurses fail to wash their hands properly. Measured in bodies, therefore, the problem of hand-washing in hospitals is worse than the problem of guns, even if we include accidents and suicides". Anyway, "mass shootings scarcely represent 0.1% of all murders".

The essential point about his position is that Harris himself is a gun nut: "Unlike my friends, I own several guns and train with them regularly. Every month or two, I spend a full day shooting with a highly qualified instructor… My involvement with guns goes back decades. I have always wanted to be able to protect myself and my family, and I have never had any illusions about how quickly the police can respond when called."

"But when I contemplate atrocities [like Newtown]… I think of how differently the situation might have evolved if the school had had an armed (and, I have to emphasize, well-trained) security guard on campus."

Later in the piece, Harris links approvingly to a graphic YouTube CCTV video in which a motel clerk kills an attempted armed robber, shooting him repeatedly even after he starts to run away. Harris does admit that "the situation isn't perfectly analogous" and even that "the wisdom of using deadly force in what might be only a robbery is at least debatable."

But what's really disgusting is that this footage of a real killing is urged on the viewer as a stimulus to the imagination: linking to a propaganda video put out by the mayor of Houston advising people what to do if a lunatic turns up in their office and starts killing them, he asks: "But is it really so difficult to believe that the [motel] shooter might have been helpful during an incident of the sort depicted in Houston?"

But why stop there? If we're asking which fantasy scenarios could be improved by the addition of firearms, the case for personal anti-tank weapons is unanswerable. After all, they helped Buffy destroy one of her enemies when nothing else would have done.

Behind all this lies the myth of John Wayne, the fantasy of the strong man who is right and just and not entirely dissimilar to the author. Myths have a power that should never be ignored and no one is more helpless against them than the man who supposes he has overcome them with reason.

To quote Harris again, "When viewed from any other civilised society on earth, the primacy of guns in American life seems to be a symptom of collective psychosis." This may appear to be self-contradiction, but open, manly self-contradiction is an essential feature of Harris's rhetoric. Almost everything obnoxious he has ever said he has contradicted elsewhere but there's never any suggestion that he is ever wrong, just differently rational.

You could draw the obvious moral from this: that Sam Harris is a nihilistic charlatan, whose policy proposals, from war with Muslims, to the torture of terrorist suspects and now the arming of all school guards have always aligned with the right wing of the Republican party while dressed in the language of enlightenment.

But it's worth going a little beyond the obvious. This is a man whose books sell in hundreds of thousands. What is extraordinary about the story is that Harris is supposed to be a rationalist, a sceptic, a man who believes nothing except upon evidence. And yet he can at will summon whole phantom armies into existence: "It is clearly possible to hire as many competent guards as we want, should this become a national priority. This is entirely a question of money, not of whether it is possible to enlist, train, and equip 100,000 highly qualified men and women to protect our children."

The real danger of his kind of atheism is that it replaces fantasies about gods (who don't exist) with fantasies about human beings, who do. And which is more dangerous: to be wrong about something imaginary or about something real?