Plus Thoughts on Giving

Ammunition is starting to reappear in stores! Hooray!

Don’t you wonder how much money the ammunition and firearms makers raked in because people stocked up after the Marxist Messiah was elected? I hope they piled up huge profits they’ll be able to use for R&D, retooling, and lobbying.

Some people claim wars were a big cause of the shortage. Hogwash. I admit, I haven’t sat down and added up the number of conflicts going on at the moment, but things haven’t changed much since the Bush era, and there were plenty of bullets to go around back then. This shortage was caused by the election of a leftist with “Potential Dictator” stamped all over his forehead.

You can actually buy small pistol primers now. And they don’t cost $60 a box, either. They’re back down to 30 or so. I’ll bet they go lower. A saturated market is not good for prices. There are profiteers and neurotics out there whose houses are packed full of guns and ammunition they will never use. Even relatively reasonable people stocked up to some extent. I won’t need small pistol primers for at least three years, and I have no gun purchases in mind, which is amazing, for me.

I paid $600 for my Saiga 12 shotgun. Last time I saw them for sale, the price was $500. You can once again buy Wolf AK-47 ammunition for 30¢ a round. Even 9mm is starting to show up. I’ve seen it for $14 a box, which is still insanely high, given commodity prices and the economic slump. I’ll bet you can buy it for $9 in three months. It is conceivable that I may be able to get more Swiss GP11 ammunition at a reasonable price. I never thought that would happen again.

I wonder what it’s like to be in the firearms industry right now. They must be on their knees every morning, thanking God for their amazing luck.

If there is one silver lining to the country’s tragic willingness to elect unqualified, immature Marxist egotists, it is that we are not nearly as willing to give up our guns. This is one area where leftists aren’t making the headway they hoped for. I have said that I think God is behind that, and I still think it’s true. I think he’s willing to punish this country for greed, cruelty, abortion, sexual sin, and abortion, but I don’t think he is ready to disarm individuals yet. There are too many people here who serve him.

I am hoping to use my machine tools to improve my guns. I need to fix the scope mount on my K31, for example. It’s skewed to one side, causing it to shoot about 6″ to the right at 100 yards. And I have to put all the aftermarket doodads on my Saiga, to turn it into an ergonomic, laser-guided living-room sweeper.

My dad’s concealed carry permit arrived this week. I paid for his course, as a birthday present. When he announced the card’s arrival and showed it to me, instead of saying, “Look at this,” or “Guess what I have?”, he said, “I’m putting you on notice.” I told him I’d watch my back.

Concealed carry is great, but it can be a pain. I get tired of the weight of the gun, but I force myself to do it every day, because it’s a great privilege and blessing, and because safety measures are worthless if you don’t use them. A seatbelt you don’t wear can’t save your life when you need it.

When I joined my church, they gave me a copy of Robert Morris’s The Blessed Life. I’ve been reading it this week. It’s somewhat self-serving to provide new members with this, because the book is about giving, which includes tithes and offerings. And I am extremely wary of greedy preachers and overblown “name it and claim it” prosperity preaching. Still, it’s a wonderful book, and I believe the fundamental message is right. It is true that we are obligated to give generously; not just monetarily, but in all ways, and not just to churches, but to people in need. And it is also true that withholding generosity will cause your life to be cursed. I believe those things wholeheartedly. I don’t believe every Christian can have a private jet, but I believe we are supposed to have “shalom,” which means a very general type of success. Good relationships, good mental and physical health, spiritual growth, and more than enough wealth to cover our needs. A perfect life? No, but a good life which always moves forward toward better things. A life for which each of us can’t help but be grateful, in spite of the challenges.

This is a very tough message for churches to preach, given the shameful and disgusting excesses we have seen in this area. The distinction between valid teaching on generosity and self-serving teaching intended to stimulate gullible people to make preachers rich is slippery, and it will be lost on many Christians, especially those who were victimized in the past. The crooks and psychopaths who took us in didn’t just take money; they poisoned the well against godly teachers who would come later and remind us of the power of generosity. Stealing money is bad. Stealing another person’s willingness to do right is much worse.

The neat thing about this book is that I keep seeing little confirmations of things I came to believe before I read it. The Holy Spirit teaches us, and it’s always amazing and humbling to see how our “brilliant” conclusions have already come to other people.

Pentecostal churches are still going a little heavy on God’s promises to us, and maybe a little light on our obligations to him, but I think they’re headed in a better direction these days. I bailed out about twenty years ago even though I thought they were mostly right about God. I don’t want to repeat the mistake of refusing to go to a good church because it appears imperfect. And I don’t want to give anyone the wrong impression. It’s not like these churches are packed with fools who only show up because they think God will fix all their problems and give them big houses. The people are wonderful, and they are very concerned with doing what is right.

One of the things I like about the book is that it defines “covetousness” as setting your heart on things. This is something I’ve thought about a lot, although it opened my eyes to see it used as a definition of that term. We have natural, normal, righteous desires in this life, such as sexual desire, a desire for wealth, and a desire for food. It’s sick to starve those desires. God never intended for us to do that. It’s sick to call them “lust,” “greed,” and “gluttony,” no matter how they manifest themselves. It’s not wrong to have desires. What’s wrong is overindulging them, serving them, and allowing them to cause you to sin. Fundamentally, it’s wrong to see the things you desire as replacements for God. They become idols. Contentment comes from God, not from sating your desires. It’s okay to see someone else’s house and think it would be nice to have one like it. It’s wrong to resent that person, or want him to lose his house, or set your heart on having his house or one like it, regardless of what you have to do. And it’s wrong to think a house will fix your life. That’s idolatry. It’s the error that keeps socialism alive. Expecting blessings only God can give, from things other than God.

Desire for sex isn’t automatically lust, and desire for wealth isn’t automatically greed, and so on. Stupidly equating all earthly desire with sin leads to warped, unhealthy, self-righteous asceticism. We’re not supposed to be free of these things. We’re supposed to be in charge of them. That’s how I see it.

I think money moving into and out of a person’s hands is like electricity moving through a circuit. It passes through, and along the way, it’s used to do good things. But if charges get stuck in the circuit and accumulate too much, you end up with a destructive disaster. The key is to avoid bottling it up. Or you could think of it as food going through a warehouse. If you shut the “out” door and stop distributing it, it rots, supports rats, causes harm, and benefits nobody. If you shut the “in” door, you have nothing to give others. If you get used to giving and denying your impulses, you learn not to set your heart on things, and they become less dangerous to you.

Living right is complicated. You have to be generous. You have to be responsible. You have to control yourself and be logical. You have to know when to rebuke and when to suffer other people’s faults quietly. You can’t sum it all up effectively in a paragraph or learn it all in a day. Jesus gave a very brief summary of the law and the prophets, but he never suggested we rely on that summary and throw the other stuff out.

Morris gave an interesting interpretation of the confusing verse reading, “Make to yourselves friends of the mammon of unrighteousness.” He believes it means we are to help others in this world with our money, so that in paradise, they will greet us in gratitude.

It’s a pretty good book. I recommend it.

By the way, World Vision now has a special area in their Gift Catalog, listing gifts that carry matching funds. You donate X to some cause, and they get 3X or 10X or whatever in matching funds, so it’s almost as if you donated much more. Very neat idea.