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I don’t know that I’m eminently qualified to address a topic related to Mormons and guns. But as a Mormon and very likely the only BCC blogger who owns and enjoys shooting guns, well, let’s just say you go to war with the army you have.

Anyway, growing up in rural California offered great opportunities with plenty of wide open spaces and ranges in which to plink and shoot at targets. My dad devoted a career to developing weapons systems and all residents owed their livelihoods to a military installation that has been designing, testing and evaluating more effective ways to kill the enemy since World War II. Guns were in the air, and I still have fond memories of the family tradition of getting together after Christmas dinner to go shooting. So feel free to dismiss what I’m about to say, just not on the grounds that I’m a liberal snowflake who hates guns.

Growing up it didn’t seem like there was a Mormon angle to America’s gun culture, just that American Mormons brought their gun culture to church with them. For example, once we had an elders quorum discussion on the relative merits of handguns vs. shotguns in home defense scenarios; I don’t recall a sense that guns were helping us perform a priesthood duty or anything, it was just a discussion that I imagine any group of 20 to 40 year old men might have had in that area on any given Sunday.

But that was then. Today I discovered that there is a Mormon angle to America’s gun culture: the “Liberty Oil Vial” (note: I’m not going to link to the website in this post; you’ll have to operate your preferred search engine yourself). It is marketed as

a symbol of a priesthood holder’s responsibility to protect their families. On the side are engraved the words from the title of liberty: “In memory of our God, our religion, and freedom, and our peace, our wives, and our children” and on the other side the scripture reference: “Alma 46:12”.

With no hint of irony, the purveyor of the Liberty Oil Vial chose the cartridge developed by the Soviets in the 1940s for military use to serve as a vial for oil set apart for anointing and blessing the sick and afflicted. The only hint of sheepishness concerns the foreign design and manufacture of the cartridge: “We really would have liked to use an American round like the .223 or NATO 5.56 but unfortunately the bullet was too small” (note: what about venerable American rounds like the .30-30 Winchester, .30-06 Springfield, .300 Savage or .308 Winchester?).

What’s more, the product apparently owes its life to some focus group testing at BYU Hawaii last fall:

I was amazed how big the demand was for the product so I got it back on track and here we are today. Liberty is something I have always been passionate about so I am excited to share products that promote religious liberty with the world!

Is the demand among temple-recommend-holding Mormons—presumably a characteristic of BYU Hawaii students, staff and faculty—really that high, or can we attribute the product’s purported popularity to overzealous salesmanship?

In either case, someone has missed the mark. Even as someone who doesn’t consider guns to be inherently outrageous, I still have a hard time grasping the attraction of this product. In fact, this whole business idea is so off-putting that I’m tempted to mount my rameumpton and declare that it is not possible for a priesthood holder to carry consecrated oil in a repurposed military round and have any expectation that a blessing performed with it will be efficacious. I mean, talk about new wine in old bottles.

But maybe I’m missing something—Pax Americana wasn’t exactly established by carrots, after all, yet it (eventually) blessed (some of) those under its wings, which I guess is kind of like the gift of healing by the power of God. So why not combine tangible tokens of earthly and godly power and sell it to Mormons as “a symbol of a priesthood holder’s responsibility to protect their families”? Any opposed?