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The two top Republican candidates for an open Senate seat in Utah so far show every sign of failing to live up to a nearly 1700 year old exhortation by the prophet Mormon.

In a debate yesterday between Utah state representative Mike Kennedy and Mitt Romney, who are competing to take the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by Orrin Hatch, both rejected consideration of common-sense gun regulations to save our children.

As reported by KSL:

“Romney said he opposes new federal legislation on guns and would protect the Second Amendment but favors a ban on the sale of bump stocks — a device that makes semi-automatic weapons fire faster — to the public. “Kennedy said banning bump stocks doesn’t work and that wouldn’t be a useful step in making schools safer. He said as a state lawmaker he has voted against any bill that would infringe on Second Amendment rights, but Romney signed an assault weapon ban in Massachusetts. “‘It’s just hard for me to know as our U.S. senator what you’ll do regarding this and other issues,’ Kennedy said. “Romney said the pro-gun lobby and the anti-gun lobby came together on Massachusetts legislation that banned certain weapons and expanded the rights of gun owners. He said he was happy to see them find a solution that worked for that state and that he supported it.”

Mike Kennedy is a medical doctor who went to law school so he could fight plaintiffs suing negligent doctors who’ve horrendously injured them, ruining their lives. This sole, idiosyncratic legal focus probably explains why his notion of the Second Amendment is not well grounded in legal doctrine but rather in the libertine red-state cultural mythos of guns and gun porn — a belief in an unbridled, unmitigated, unregulated, immoderate right to own whatever weapons you happen toin a given moment.

As I pointed out recently after the high-school massacre in Parkland, Florida, the types of common-sense gun regulations most concerned citizens support and are promoting do not infringe on any realistic, historically grounded interpretation of the Second Amendment. These regulations include the following:

14-day waiting periods

No sales by private owners

No sales at gun shows

10 rounds magazine limit

No bump stocks

No cranks

Licenses for all arms

Child lock requirements

Minimum age of purchase at 21

Assault rifle ban

Universal background checks

Domestic violence ban

#GunReformNow

This list is short enough to tweet, and I encourage all to do so. Self-described cultural “conservatives”, like Mike Kennedy and Mitt Romney, reverence late Justice Antonin Scalia as a “conservative” God.[1] Writing precisely from his own self-ascribed “conservatism”, Justice Scalia explained in the most recent Supreme Court decision to directly address the Second Amendment — District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 US 570 (2008) — that the Second Amendment does not preclude common-sense gun regulations:

“Like most rights, the right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited. From Blackstone through the 19th-century cases, commentators and courts routinely explained that the right was not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose. See, e.g., Sheldon, in 5 Blume 346; Rawle 123; Pomeroy 152–153; Abbott333. For example, the majority of the 19th-century courts to consider the question held that prohibitions on carrying concealed weapons were lawful under the Second Amendment or state analogues. See, e.g., State v. Chandler, 5 La. Ann., at 489–490; Nunn v. State, 1 Ga., at 251; see generally 2 Kent *340, n. 2; The American Students’ Blackstone 84, n. 11 (G. Chase ed. 1884). Although we do not undertake an exhaustive historical analysis today of the full scope of the Second Amendment, nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms. “We also recognize another important limitation on the right to keep and carry arms. Miller said, as we have explained, that the sorts of weapons protected were those “in common use at the time.” 307 U. S., at 179. We think that limitation is fairly supported by the historical tradition of prohibiting the carrying of ‘dangerous and unusual weapons.’” (District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 US 570 (2008), https://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/07-290.ZO.html (bold added for emphasis).)

Note that Mike Kennedy rejects Justice Scalia’s explanation of the legal doctrine behind the Second Amendment outright and Scalia’s statement that “Like most rights, the right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited.” Kennedy stated “as a state lawmaker he has voted against any bill that would infringe on Second Amendment rights” and he criticized Romney for supporting an assault weapons ban as Governor of Massachusetts. But Justice Scalia acknowledged in 2008, a year after Dr. Kennedy graduated from law school, that gun regulations, especially of the type being proposed in the wake of continued school massacres, don’t necessarily infringe the Second Amendment. Nevertheless, Dr. Kennedy expressed his opposition to an assault weapons ban signed into law by Governor Romney in Massachusetts, a bipartisan law overwhelmingly supported by the people of Massachusetts and therefore enacted by the democratically elected representatives of the people in that state, according to the processes and institutions of that state’s republican form of government.

Romney, for his part, also evidenced ignorance of Justice Scalia’s acknowledgment that the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms does not prohibit any form of common-sense gun regulations. Romney said even in the wake of our sons and daughters being slaughtered by the thousands in schools and other public places, “he opposes new federal legislation on guns” even though he “favors a ban on the sale of bump stocks” — the barest minimum anyone claiming to be “pro-life” should do to protect our children.

In their position on guns, these two culture warriors reveal themselves to be decadent libertines to the same extent as those they derisively accuse of inappropriately prioritizing “liberty” relating to other constitutionally protected rights — a well worn tactic of culture warriors in the last 40 to 50 years.

But for these two culture warriors in particular, a greater concern than rejecting Justice Scalia’s position on regulating gun rights is their failure to walk up to an emphatic exhortation by the ancient prophet Mormon, applicable to them because of their religion as members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Near the end of, after Mormon witnessed the collapse of his entire civilization as a consequence of unrighteousness including libertine decadence, crushing income inequality and abuse of the poor and suffering, and continual war mongering, he recorded a number of items of prophetic counsel and a few specific exhortations specifically addressed to those who would eventually obtain the religious history now known as, a reference specifically to our society in “the latter days.”

In one such specific prophetic exhortation, Mormon writes

“Know ye that ye must lay down your weapons of war, and delight no more in the shedding of blood, and take them not again, save it be that God shall command you.” (Mormon 7:4)

If God commands us to take up weapons, it will be through his Prophet at the time. Not through a vague cultural political malaise feeding white grievance politics in the twenty-first century.

Mormon politicians who oppose common-sense gun regulations, which Justice Scalia acknowledged aren’t prohibited by the Second Amendment, are failing the ancient prophet Mormon’s exhortation aimed at us in the latter days.

Every peer developed country in the world has the same cultural mixture of mental health issues, aggrieved entitled young white males who believe life has denied them the power, wealth, or influence they believe they’re entitled to (i.e., the profile of almost every single mass shooter in American history, especially in the hundreds of mass shootings in recent decades), violent video games, drugs, pornography, lost jobs, divorces, bullying, and everything else. But this isn’t a problem in a single one of our peer developed countries, where shooting deaths over the last several decades can be counted on one hand compared to our thousands of shooting deaths in a single year. Why are non-Mormon, “secular” citizens of Europe’s free market social democracies fulfilling Mormon’s exhortation better than “conservative”, religious Mormon politicians in Utah, the beating heart of Mormonism? It doesn’t have to be this way. What if politically conservative Mormon politicians were leading the effort to enact common-sense gun regulations consistent with the Second Amendment, such as those listed above, to save our children? Regulating guns appropriately is the answer to these mass shootings — this is beyond any doubt, as conclusively shown in our peer developed countries. How wonderful it would be if Mormon politicians, taking Mormon’s injunction seriously, were leading this charge in the Culture Wars against the dominant, decadent gun libertines of red-state gun-porn culture! We are failing the prophet Mormon’s expectations and counsel in failing to do so.

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[1] In this reverent awe for Scalia, they never quite address how Scalia gutted religious freedom in the United States — an issue such cultural “conservatives” claim to prioritize above virtually all else — in the majority opinion he drafted in Employment Division v. Smith, 494 U.S. 872 (1990). In Smith, because the case dealt with use of Peyote, a drug, Scalia found it necessary to break with decades of legal doctrine protecting free exercise and create a new standard offering far weaker protections of our first freedom — such a severe reduction that Congress felt compelled to act by passing the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993, which passed a unanimous House and only had three senators opposing, and which was signed into law by President Bill Clinton. (This must be remembered when cultural “conservative” pundits on Fox News, in state legislatures, or on “conservative” talk radio repeat the lie that Democrats are against religious freedom. To the contrary, Democrats supported the Religous Freedom Restoration Act after Justice Scalia, the “conservative” god, gutted it in Smith.)