Quote: "You (sic) church is a cesspool of liberal crap. Come and get our guns m***** f*****!!! Talk is cheap bitch. Bring it on."

Hey, NRA: Objects in your rearview mirror are closer than you think.

Outside of war zones, the United States is the most dangerous place on the planet for gun violence. Photographs of dead children will eventually prove too much. Even NRA-beholden pols will line up to pass strong gun control bills.

Like most Wyomingites, I don’t think confiscation is the correct path. However, the NRA will, one day soon, wish they had agreed to less onerous gun safety laws when they had the chance. Even those who blasphemously believe their “right” to bear arms is “God given” will find that god has abandoned them.

Until now, no one was coming after your guns. That didn’t stop the NRA and its wholly-owned subsidiary, the Republican Party, from saying so. They’ve warned you someone wants to take your guns when that wasn’t true. Some bought it as hundreds of people died from gun violence. Will there never be a reckoning? Do you think the American people will allow this to continue into eternity?

The truth is no one wanted to take any of your guns until now. Now, a back-bench Democratic Party presidential candidate openly warns, “Hell, yes, we're going to take your AR-15 and your AK-47. Get it? Hell yes.” Beto O’Rourke is not out in left field on this. A recent NPR/PBS News Hour/Marist poll shows Americans evenly divided on his proposal. 

Actually, it’s a mandatory buy-out, not confiscation and 45% back the idea, including 55 percent of women voters. The day may be upon us when politicians find more support delivering gun-law-reform messages than the old “they’re coming to take your guns” tripe.

Gunowners have no one to blame but the NRA. At every step, they block rational gun safety laws, insisting that people who are seriously mentally ill, convicted of domestic violence, or on the terrorist “no-fly” list be allowed to buy guns.

They carry weapons on the campus of the University of Wyoming in violation of the school’s rational rules, enacted because of legitimate safety concerns. Their badge of honor is “open carry,” flaunting AR-15’s and other weapons, regardless of how frightened those around them are in an environment where telling a “good guy” from a “bad guy” is challenging.

They force their schemes to arm school teachers on nervous students and parents as an alternative to rational gun safety measures. They make political threats against politicians who give any sign of supporting measures that have the backing of huge majorities of voters.

The director of the Marist Institute for Public Opinion says it well, “You’d be hard pressed to find something where the gap between public opinion and legislative action is wider.” His polling data show how huge that gap is and, as he says, “the congressional crowd is very much out of step with where public opinion is on this.”

According to the Pew Research Center, the share of Americans saying gun laws should be stricter increased from 52% in 2017 to 60% this year. What’s more, there are several proposals on which Republicans and Democrats agree. Around nine-in-ten Republicans and Republican-leaning independents and Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents favor preventing people with mental illnesses from buying guns.

And large majorities of both Democrats (93%) and Republicans (82%) favor background checks for private gun sales and sales at gun shows, 72% of women want assault weapons banned, as do 57% of all voters. More than 60% favor red-flag laws, and 57% want gun owners to be licensed.

In 2008, activist Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in District of Columbia v. Heller that while the 2^nd Amendment protects guns in “common usage” from bans, it does not protect “dangerous and unusual weapons.” Nor does it inoculate guns from other rational regulation.

The dam is leaking. The NRA has only so many fingers to stop the leaks. The time is coming, and soon, when they will rue the day they uncompromisingly created barriers to anything and everything supported by large majorities of voters.

How much do you know about the religion of others?

How much do you know about your religion? How about that of others? The Pew Research Center interviewed nearly 11,000 randomly selected Americans, asking 32 questions about the Bible and Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism and Sikhism.

Questions like these were included. Which religion is associated with yoga? In the Muslim tradition, believers have a religious obligation to make a pilgrimage to Islam’s holiest city at least once during their lifetime, if they are able. Which city is that?

In which religious tradition are men generally required to wear a turban in public and may carry a dagger? Which religious groups traditionally teaches that salvation comes through faith alone?

Asked whether Peter, Paul, or Jesus delivered the Sermon on the Mount, only 51% gave the correct answer. Fewer than one person in five identified “truth of suffering” as one of Buddhism’s Four Noble Truths.

Among the more troubling results were these two. Asked the numbers of Jews in the United States, many surmised it to be half or more of the population. The correct answer is under 5%. A majority greatly overestimated the size of both the Jewish and the Muslim populations in America, which may explain some of the current fear-based politics.

Only one in four Americans know their own Constitution prohibits a religious test for holding public office, which may explain the anger when a Muslim is elected to public office and takes the oath with a hand on the Quran instead of a Bible.

The score? Jewish participants scored highest, but only knew an average of 18.7 answers to the 32 questions. The big surprise is that second place went not to Protestants or Catholics but to atheists. Those who believe there is no God landed just behind Jews with and average of 17.9/32. Agnostics followed at 17.0/32.

Evangelicals and Mainline Protestants scored 15.5 and 14.6 respectively followed by Catholics (14.0) and Mormons (13.9). Interestingly, not a single group received what would be considered a passing grade in any elementary school classroom.  

Pew researchers explored whether childhood Sunday school attendance made a difference. It made it worse. Those who attended Sunday school for seven-plus years as a child were able to answer only 9.0 of the 32 questions. Even those who attended private religious schools scored as poorly, i.e. 9.4.

The relatively higher scores among non-believers leads us to ask where and when did they learn more about religion than those who claim one? Did they become non-believers because of what they learned or because of how it was taught?

Measure your knowledge against these results? Take Pew’s shorter, 15-question quiz. Compare your knowledge with the other 10,971 randomly sampled adults. Google the Pew report, “What Americans Know About Religion."

The question left hanging is why people of faith know so little about their own beliefs and those of others. The results must be seen as a failure of faith communities to teach. Regardless, the results provide a roadmap to what does make a difference in religious knowledge, particularly in times where so many are disdainful, fearful, or dismissive of another’s religious beliefs.

The biggest difference maker? Knowing people of other faiths. The more friends that respondents have of faiths other than their own, the higher the score. It’s also true of education. Higher educational attainment is associated with a greater knowledge of faith matters, even in a society where religion is not generally taught in public schools.

But, here’s the kicker. “Those who are most knowledgeable about a religion (and are not members of that religion) tend to rate the religion’s adherents most favorably.” Higher scores “tend to be associated with warmer evaluations of most religious groups.” To know them is to like them.

So, it’s not Sunday school and sermons. They have little impact. Instead, it’s secular education and personal relationships. Save the world by moving beyond the pews and into a classroom. Get to know a Muslim, a Jew, even a Sikh and bring peace on earth, goodwill among all people.

Who hires a pilot to intentionally crash the plane?

When America’s democracy goes down in flames like a Boeing Max 8, future historians will investigate the disaster. They’ll dig through the rubble of Trump’s presidency, seeking to learn how a once great nation crashed to earth so soon after a new pilot took the controls.

This aircraft had many pilots over the years, some better than others. There were smooth flights and scary ones. Some of the pilots flew high. Others were barely able to pull the plane out of a steep dive. One was so bad his pilot’s license was revoked.

Until now, this Great American airline never hired a pilot whose intent it was to crash the plane and do as much damage as possible on the ground. That reality made it all the more important that there be courageous co-pilots on board.  

Among the ruins, investigators will eventually find what is known as the “Black Box.” These devices hold significant clues as to why a crash occurred. One poignant irony about “black boxes” is that they’re really not black at all. They’re orange. A tribute to irony.

These orange boxes were added to passenger planes to assist in uncovering the causes of crashes because most were caused by pilot error. Listening to cockpit conversations preceding a crash offered important clues when investigators were trying to understand why the tragedy occurred.

On that orange box, at the scene of the crash, investigators will discover the voices of co-pilots like Mike Enzi, John Barrasso, and Liz Cheney. They were in the cabin urging Trump on.

They didn’t crash the plane. Trump did. Most passengers didn’t want him to be the pilot. However, there was an anachronistic rule weighting votes in favor of folks flying first class. They didn’t care whether he knew how to pilot the plane. They liked him because he promised to take them where they wanted to go, the rest of the passengers be damned.

They rationalized that if there was a problem, the co-pilots would step up. Copilots Enzi, Barrasso and Cheney, among others, could tell from the start that something was wrong. Still, they didn’t open their mouths except to blame others who were nowhere near the controls.

As soon as the plane began taxiing down the runway, it was obvious to anyone with eyes to see, Trump had no idea how to fly the plane. As the aircraft picked up speed, everyone could see it was rudderless. There was never any hope the jet could stay on a straight, narrow, honest path.

Once in the air, the plane didn’t gain much altitude as it continued flying dangerously close to the tree tops, swerving first to the right and then farther to the right. Frightened passengers screamed while the pilot Tweeted reassurances as the aircraft suddenly plunged hundreds of feet. Air traffic controllers watched helplessly, issuing grim reports, all dismissed by the pilot as “fake news.”

Cheney, Enzi, and Barrasso tightened their seatbelts low around their laps, smiled villainously, and told us to settle in for the ride. They knew but didn’t warn us of the turbulence ahead.

Unlike the pilot of the Malaysian Airliner who apparently crashed his airplane intentionally some place between Beijing and Kuala Lumpur in March of 2014, Trump didn’t lock anyone out of the cockpit before deliberately crashing the plane. He wanted everyone to watch it happen.

Neither Barrasso nor Enzi knew much about flying a plane. They read Mitch McConnell’s best seller, “A Hitchhiker’s Guide to Crashing a Democracy.” John and Mike were satisfied to be hitchhikers and went along for the ride.

Liz Cheney knew what was going on in that cockpit. After all, her father was the greatest crash pilot in history. Dick Cheney crashed our democracy into Iraq to atone for having ignored warnings that Al Qaeda planned to crash airplanes into the Twin Towers. A good father might explain to his daughter how tough it is on one’s soul to know you could have prevented a catastrophe but didn’t.