Dr. Throckmorton, academics produce masses and masses of history volumes every year and very few of them if any attract the attention of anyone outside the ranks of acquisitions librarians, the book reviews editors of academic journals, and the professors who agree to review them (who rarely in those capsule reviews say anything trenchant or critical). Just who is ‘blasting’? We ‘tolerate’ David Barton because we have never heard of him or read his books. If you wish to appoint yourself the scold of the world’s purveyors of conservative or Christian literature, that is your business. Not anyone else’s problem.

My father taught high school in the early 1940′s, and the school had a weapons locker stocked with 1903 Springfield rifles. At least once in his career, he was issued a rifle and bandolier of ammunition to use in apprehending some intruders on campus.

While in high school, I brought an assortment of rifles and shotguns to my Boy Scout troop in the late 1970′s to teach proper gun safety.

I do not believe there was anything inheritently un-Christian about this behavior. It does not prove or disprove Mr. Barton’s example, but it seems that what he sited was far from impossible.

By telling the 1850s story about kids pulling their guns on an intruder, Barton is giving authority to an account from a secondary source (L’Amour) that is impossible to trace to the original source.

Good grief. He was just doing an informal interview. He wasn’t on trial.

The meaning of the phrase “separation of church and state,” which does not even appear in the Constitution anywhere, is grossly distorted by the judiciary which then applies that distorted meaning with a force as though the phrase actually appeared in the Constitution someplace. David Barton is one of the few people doing the critically essential work of restoring the original meaning of the phrase. So what is the point of nitpicking David Barton’s work? Would that as much effort be put into correcting the modern judicial distortion and misapplication of the principle of “the separation of church and state” as has been put into chastising David Barton. Granted, picking on Barton is probably much easier to do, and is certainly more likely to garner applause. Yet the criticism of Barton that I see on First Things is always like harshly criticizing the only soldier who didn’t abandoned his post in a fierce battle, and doing so because his boots weren’t properly shined – and then remaining silent regarding all the deserters.

There is a real problem. At least Barton is addressing it.

Because the last thing that we would want is to teach young people to wield the means of force responsibly? I could understand your being appalled if they did something morally wrong with the guns. Similarly, there’s nothing wrong with carrying a Cub Scout pocket knife (as I did in elementary school), as long as you don’t harm anyone with it, or carve your initials into school property.

Guns allow us to safely do two things every single day that we would have to do whether guns existed or not:

1) Kill animals that we want to use or eat.

2) Stop or kill immediate threats, whether animal or human.

Guns are valuable tools that save lives every single day by allowing us to perform dangerous but necessary acts from a safe distance. Just because you choose to pay someone else to use them on your behalf does not change that fact. They are in no way incompatible with anyone’s notion of a Christian nation.

In our modern context, I can’t think of any healthy situation in which it would occur, but in a time or place where the quality of your dinner might depend upon happening upon a small animal or bird on your way home from school and being ready to capitalize on the opportunity, or where there really were bad guys on the roads on the way to school, there’s nothing remotely disturbing about it, assuming (which is a proper assumption in the 19th century context) that the kids were taught an appropriate relationship with their firearms. I can’t think why a society that functioned that way would necessarily be less desirably Christian than one that didn’t — apart from the fact that in an ideal society there wouldn’t be any bad guys. But recognizing the inevitability of bad guys is not unChristian, either.