Florida Man Wants You to Buy a Christian Assault Rifle

The state of Florida attracts the most interesting criminal activity that there are now tumblr, reddit, and twitter accounts dedicated to tracking headlines with the words “Florida Man.”

I’ve been watching the car-crash horrible Amazon series Hand of God lately. It’s portrayal of fundamentalist, vaguely Pentecostal, Christianity as totally off-the-wall crazy and violent is both comical and disconcerting. The latter is the vibe I got when reading the following The Atlantic story about the antics of a Florida Man in the gun industry:

As WSTP notes, a Florida man—of course it’s a Florida man—is marketing a Christian assault rifle. The gun, which of course is known as the “Crusader,” is your basic AR-15 semiautomatic rifle, but with a verse from Psalm 144 etched into the magazine:

“Blessed be the Lord my Rock, who trains my hands for war, my fingers for battle.”

The gun is also adorned with a cross and “Peace,” “War,” and “God Wills It” in both English and Latin. A spokesman for Spike’s Tactical, which is manufacturing the weapon, explained: “We wanted to make sure we built a weapon that would never be able to be used by Muslim terrorists to kill innocent people or advance their radical agenda.” The gun has a lifetime warranty, but there’s no indication whether you can take into the eternal afterlife, or whether the warranty would apply.

What’s interesting is how The Atlantic author then gives Francis the last word and judgment on this Florida Man story:

On the other hand, there are Pope Francis’s comments in June, suggesting that producing weapons was inherently un-Christian. “There is an element of hypocrisy [for a Christian] to speak of peace and then manufacture weapons,” Francis said.

Catholicism seems to have regained its legitimacy with the Jesuit papacy. Writers across various divides are not telling his brand of religion to stay private, but instead are signing on with the pope’s words on the environment and economics.

There is a change among Catholic writers themselves. No longer are they content with hiding their face in the sand and signing up for some version of the Murray Project or the retreat of a Benedict Option (no matter how appealing it remains to me even now). This shift from defense to offense can be seen in the titles of two books. Michael Novak’s Catholic Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism is a benchmark of an age past when Catholics tried hard to baptize Reaganomics. Our new moment instead sees Andrea Tornielli and Giacomo Galeazzi explaining the economics of Francis in a book with a much more actively prophetic title, This Economy Kills.

What a difference a couple years make! I only wish that Benedict XVI could’ve enjoyed the same sort of public hearing, because his views are just as radical (in a Christian way) as anything you might hear from Pope Francis.

No, the gun story is not a joke: