If morality points toward the gallows for murderers, what of that other pillar of a constitutional republic, religion? What does religion, particularly the Christian religion, have to say about it? Let me just get out of the way and let Christians speak for themselves.

Here we go again. Wasn’t it just last week we were talking about the murder of 10 people in Buffalo, New York? Now we see 21 people, including 19 schoolchildren, gunned down in Uvalde, Texas. And just as before, America’s liberals are beating their breasts and demanding more gun control.
“As a nation we have to ask: When in God’s name are we going to stand up to the gun lobby?” President Biden exclaimed after Tuesday’s massacre. “When in God’s name are we going to do what has to be done? Why are we willing to live with this carnage?”
And again, just as before, America’s conservatives are hunkering down. We’ll argue that more gun control is a bad idea, that it won’t achieve its stated goal of making everyone safer. What the country needs, we’ll say, is better mental health services, better security at schools, better enforcement of existing gun laws, etc.

Conservatives, in other words, have our own ideas about “what has to be done.” One thing we won’t do is speak of “the gun lobby” as if it were a space alien, somehow not part of the nation Biden was addressing “in God’s name.”

Surveys of public opinion indeed have found considerable disagreement among Americans about how to battle gun violence. Article summaries in the first page of Google results for “gallup gun control” include things like this: “Americans’ 52% support for stricter gun laws is the lowest since 2014, and the 19% who favor a ban on possession of handguns is the lowest on record.” And this: “A Gallup poll in 2017 found 58% of Americans believing that new gun laws would have little or no effect on mass shootings.”
So, “as a nation” we have to ask: What in blazes are we going to do?
For my part, I have long reproached my fellow conservatives for neglecting the crime issue. From 2013 in the American Thinker, for example:

Conservatives’ chronic silence about crime allows liberal gun-controllers to flatter themselves that they are the champions of public safety and the defenders of innocents, and to pass themselves off as such to the public. . . .
Our slogan has long been: ‘Guns don’t kill people; people do.’ Let us follow that idea to its logical conclusion. While liberals pursue their impossible dream of eliminating murder weapons, we should be setting about the very practical, effectual, and constitutional task of eliminating murderers.
More on that later. First, let’s talk some more about the carnage we’ve been living with.
The Uvalde massacre is not the first time such things have struck near me. In 2017, the slaughter of 26 people, including an unborn child, at a church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, happened less than 30 miles from my home. Before that, I was in Waco in 1993 when the besieged Branch Davidian compound outside of town burned down, with the loss of 76 lives, including 25 children and two pregnant women. And I was in Killeen in 1991 when a gunman crashed his truck into Luby’s Cafeteria there and shot down 23 people, wounding 27 more.
Sad to say, this doesn’t make me the Typhoid Mary (or, rather, the Joe Btfsplk) of American massacres. Anyone who digs around in the Gun Violence Archive will have no trouble at all in finding a mass shooting or three in his own neck of the woods. It’s like the old movie promo: “Coming soon to a theater community near you!”
Again, what are we going to do about it?
At The Federalist, David Harsanyi warns us not to surrender to “do-somethingism” on guns. On guns, that’s good advice, as it is also good advice for opposing the Left’s attempts to abridge the freedom of speech and religion in the name of public safety, social justice and LGBTQWTF rights. But as I argued back in 2013 (just after the Sandy Hook massacre), there’s something we can be doing—something we should have done long ago.

Responding last week to the Buffalo shooting, I quoted John Adams: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” The maladjusted teenagers who committed mass murder in Buffalo and in Uvalde certainly appear to be strangers to morality and religion, and liberals—who for a half-century now have been trashing America’s hidebound “moralizers” and ignorant “Bible thumpers”—are not to be blamed for disliking the perverse fruits of their labors. Who could like the way these little monsters turned out?

We conservatives, meanwhile, should bear in mind that when Adams pronounced the Constitution “wholly inadequate” to the government of an immoral and irreligious people, this included the Second Amendment, and the First Amendment, too. Is it to be expected that liberals, never repenting of their having subverted morality and religion, should shrink from subverting those two amendments as well?
No, the Left looks at the Bill of Rights, and at other parts of the Constitution such as the Electoral College and the Senate, as impediments. It accordingly is intent on bursting through them (to use Adams’ phrase) “as a whale goes through a net.”
What are we going to do about that? Heartfelt prayers are certainly in order, much as liberals—transfixed as they are by their pursuit of gun control as if it were the Holy Grail—might sneer at them.
The prayer-scoffers do have a point, though: More than prayer is required. I don’t mean, as the scoffers do, that we must dream up some magical means of eliminating murder weapons. Leave that to the impossible dreamers. But what did I say in that American Thinker post almost 10 years ago? “We should be setting about the very practical, effectual, and constitutional task of eliminating murderers.”
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The fear of rejection is often a fear piled on top of other fears and uncertainties. The solution is to make the fear of rejection “a small thing”. And the way to make the fear of rejection a small thing is to make the acceptance of Christ a bigger thing. And the only way that can happen is to cultivate with all zeal a relationship with Christ through all the means we have been provided as fellow heirs with him. This takes work and a frank recognition of our fears and the beliefs that undergird them.

1 Corinthians 4:3–4: [3] But with me it is a very small thing that I should be judged by you or by any human court. In fact, I do not even judge myself. [4] For I am not aware of anything against myself, but I am not thereby acquitted. It is the Lord who judges me. (ESV)
“What if they reject me?” This fear runs like an underground stream of thought in the hearts of many of us. When we see someone who seems impervious to the blows of public opinion and/or rejection, we marvel at them in part because we can’t imagine having that ability. It’s almost as though they’re superheroes whose powers we’re not certain we’d like to have.
In speaking with some of these people, it is often the case that there is still a fear of rejection, only that it looks different for them compared to us.
The Fear of Rejection
The fear of rejection often involves friends. One of the reasons peer pressure is such a powerful force is because it leverages the fear of rejection by functionally blackmailing a person into conforming. This threat is rarely made explicitly; normally it is implicit, and that only makes the threat all the more powerful. Not only does a person being threatened feel the power of the threat as the fears arise, but the nature and origin of the power are obscured behind a shadow in their mind. The same can be said of other manifestations of the fear of rejection, such as rejection by family or coworkers.
Why, in general, is the fear of rejection so powerful? How can the apostle Paul say it is a very small thing to be judged by the Corinthians or any other human court? How can Paul be content knowing that the only judgment of him that matters is the judgment by Jesus?
Before continuing, we may need to make the case that Paul is in fact speaking to things that reflect a typical fear of rejection. In speaking of judgment, Paul is invoking language that is more legal than social. Also, Paul speaks of not judging himself, which could hardly be construed as social rejection. How can someone reject themselves?
Nevertheless, Paul is defending himself against the Corinthians, and there is a social aspect to the judgment as well as the overarching legal tones. And the rest of the letter is in a sense a plea for the Corinthians to accept Paul. Although Paul is clearly not driven by fear but rather by faith, we can see in Paul’s words above a lack of the fear of rejection.
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Learn to read the weather and seek refuge in Christ. Tucked into his everlasting arms, we experience no raging storms of wrath. While his glory “thunders” and his voice “flashes forth flames of fire” (Psalm 29:3, 7), we ascribe him glory, and we rest secure in his peace and under his eternal reign.

In sub-Saharan West Africa, the dry season slowly tightens its deathlike grip until that first thunderstorm. It begins as a speck on the horizon. The breeze stills; the furnace-like heat threatens to consume all in its oven. Dark clouds pile upon each other in the distance, as if in a mad race to block out the sun.
Then comes the wind: at first a whisper, but before long a mighty force that lifts months of dust and sand, whirling them into miniature tornadoes. In our early years, my siblings and I would run out and try to fight the strength of these winds. Taking our stand on the old garden mounds of last season’s planting, we would test our young legs against the power of the storm (always an exercise in futility).
Then the sky turns black. The rolling clouds have conquered the sun, declaring victory with lightning flashes and mighty cracks of thunder, a barrage of heavenly artillery. At last, finally, comes the rain — a marching wall of gray obscuring everything it passes, driven by the relentless wind. We fled for home as it approached and then flooded our street, turning the hard-packed earth into a sudden river.
I’ve always been awed by the power of storms. Their sheer might delights and overwhelms me. They produce in me a certain diminishing effect, reminding me that though God gave humans dominion over the earth, I am still made from dust. It’s fitting to flee.
But God designed thunderstorms to teach us about more than our smallness. In their unleashed fury, they are emblems of the wrath of God poured out in judgment. The short book of Nahum, tucked in the middle of the Minor Prophets, is one such place where God teaches us to rightly read events in nature like thunderstorms.
‘Woe to the Bloody City’
Nahum’s brief oracle, a mere 47 verses in our English translations, thunders with God’s righteous judgment against Nineveh, one of the great cities of the ancient Assyrian empire. We usually associate Nineveh with the ministry of Jonah. Jonah knew God to be “a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and relenting from disaster” (Jonah 4:2). Thus, he preached to Israel’s enemies with reluctance, knowing that his prophetic word of judgment might just lead to Nineveh’s preservation.
We know the story. Nineveh repented, and God, in keeping with his character, relented from unleashing disaster upon them (Jonah 3:6–10). These events took place during the reign of Jeroboam II of Israel (2 Kings 14:25), which lasted from about 793 to 753 BC (Dictionary of the Old Testament: Prophets, 456).
It may come as a surprise, then, that Nahum’s prophecy a century or so later contains only words of judgment against Nineveh, with no opportunity to repent. Prophesying to Judah around 650 BC after the fall of the northern kingdom in 722 to Assyria (Dictionary, 560), Nahum declared that Assyria would be washed away “with an overflowing flood.” God would “make a complete end of the adversaries” of his people (Nahum 1:8).
The once-repentant Nineveh had spurned the mercy of God and directed its armies against God’s chosen people, leading the northern kingdom of Israel into captivity and even laying siege to Jerusalem itself during the reign of Hezekiah (2 Kings 18:17–25).
God directed his fury against this “bloody city, all full of lies and plunder” (Nahum 3:1), declaring that the name of Assyria and Nineveh would no longer be perpetuated among the nations of the earth (Nahum 1:14). And through the poetic tongue of Nahum, he captured his fury with the image of a storm.
Chariots of Wrath
Nahum’s oracle begins with a threefold declaration that Yahweh takes vengeance (nōqêm) on his enemies.
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