AR-15 ‘Cult’ and Culture of Responsible Gun Ownership

As the macabre spectacle of mass shootings returns to America at the end of our pandemic, Matthew Walther argues that the problem is the cult of the AR-15. “The United States should ban the manufacture of these weapons and related accessories designed to make them more lethal,” writes the editor of The Lamp, a Catholic journal, “and severely restrict ownership of those already in circulation, beginning with a voluntary gun-buyback program.”

The occasion for this is the mass shooting in Boulder, Colo., allegedly by Ahmad al-Issa. The shooter used an AR-15 and killed ten people. For Walther, AR-15s are “dangerous toys” unlike the firearms carried by his hunter father or the pistol used by his mother-in-law in need of self-defense. In a counterintuitive way, he argues precisely because millions of AR-15 owners are law-abiding, banning the gun is a “no-brainer” because “no one’s hobby matters more than another person’s life.” Its only imaginable use, for Walther, is terror and insurrection.

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Michael Brendan Dougherty

Michael Brendan Dougherty is a senior writer at National Review Online.

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As the macabre spectacle of mass shootings returns to America at the end of our pandemic, Matthew Walther argues that the problem is the cult of the AR-15. “The United States should ban the manufacture of these weapons and related accessories designed to make them more lethal,” writes the editor of The Lamp, a Catholic journal, “and severely restrict ownership of those already in circulation, beginning with a voluntary gun-buyback program.”

The occasion for this is the mass shooting in Boulder, Colo., allegedly by Ahmad al-Issa. The shooter used an AR-15 and killed ten people. For Walther, AR-15s are “dangerous toys” unlike the firearms carried by his hunter father or the pistol used by his mother-in-law in need of self-defense. In a counterintuitive way, he argues precisely because millions of AR-15 owners are law-abiding, banning the gun is a “no-brainer” because “no one’s hobby matters more than another person’s life.” Its only imaginable use, for Walther, is terror and insurrection.