LOL Interwebz: Guns Don’t Grill Bacon. People Grill Bacon.

Every Thursday in LOL Interwebz, Luke T. Harrington explores the quirks and foibles of Internet culture from a Gospel perspective.

“Guns are for killing,” he told me. “They’re not for anything else.”

One of the immutable truths of existence is that all Vietnam vets are strange. I don’t mean that in a bad way—just in the sense that no one can spend a year or three slogging through hell and come out on the other side seeing the world the same way civilians do. And this particular Nam vet—a good friend of the family—had been to hell and back more than once: first in Nam, then as a drug dealer, and then for a long stint in prison. Now he was studying to become a Pentecostal preacher.Serving the Prince of Peace means living as though death has been conquered—because it has.

“Guns are only for killing,” he added again, furrowing his brow with a weight I’ll never fully understand.

I don’t remember what I had said to bring that half-scold on—probably something flippant, as was my wont. I was, after all, a child of the ’80s—raised in an era where firearms were simply fodder for ’Merica-flavored cartoons like G.I. Joe, which taught us that guns only shoot harmless lasers, which invariably miss their targets, anyway. I also had a deep-seated irreverence that I still repent of daily.

Still, despite my spotty memory, the moment itself has stuck with me—partly because his sudden seriousness took me off guard, and partly because it surprised me to hear an Evangelical not toeing the Republican party line of “Guns don’t kill people, etc.” (a meaningless slogan, really—no more profound than “Hammers don’t pound nails in” or “Electric guitars don’t compose rock ‘n roll riffs”). Apparently, you can’t see a gun used for its intended purpose and come away from the experience still feeling sanguine about them.

It’s an undeniable truth, though—that guns are nothing more than efficient killing machines—one you can’t really escape, even if you only use them for target practice, or restoration and display, or…

…cooking bacon.

Because apparently that last one is a thing now—a veritable meme of meatsplosions. There are a few dozen videos floating around YouTube of people frying bacon with their automatic rifles, but arguably the quintessential one is by Dustin Ellerman. “So much ’Merica right now,” he informs us breathlessly as he wraps the barrel of his M16 in two rashers of smoked pork belly, followed by aluminum foil. He then fires off three magazines’ worth of rounds, unwraps the muzzle and feasts on the seared hog flesh. Finally, he turns toward the camera and exclaims, “Let’s go kill some more pigs!”

I’m not sure what it says about me that the first time I heard that concluding line, I immediately imagined a herd of hogs standing just off camera, absorbing the hot lead erupting from his assault weapon; it took me a second or two to realize he was referring simply to the pigs who had sacrificed their delicious bellies for his meager (and expensive) breakfast. Still, the coda was a sobering reminder that, silly or not, the video is little more than a celebration of death—the flesh of slaughtered animals wrapped around a sizzling death cannon.

What does it mean, I wondered, that a video described—albeit with some irony—as “maybe the most American video ever” is essentially a double-barreled death-celebration? What does it say about our culture that we turn to killing for a laugh?

It’s possible to overstate this. Neither war nor meat-eating is explicitly proscribed in Scripture, and in fact both are portrayed as sometimes necessary. But necessary is the important word there. Neither fits within the original Edenic creation, and it’s no coincidence that the Law God gives to Moses in the Torah includes extensive restrictions on both. Even when one or the other is necessary, it’s a sad and somber affair.

Or it ought to be.

I wonder if it’s ever crossed the mind of the ’Merica-loving conservatives who flash their guns on social media on a sacred quest to offend those ’Merica-hating liberals how it looks when they go to a “pro-life” rally the following week? If we serve “The Lord and Giver of Life,” as the ancient Creed tells us, how can we ever deign to celebrate anyone’s death?

To be fair, the charge of hypocrisy is an easy one to dish out, and I’m certainly not defending “liberal” types who condemn war and meat-eating while celebrating abortion and euthanasia as sacred rights. Really, they’re just two sides of the same culture-of-death ‘Merica coin (the one with “In God We Trust” stamped on the front)—we all just have different people we think deserve to die.

But serving the Prince of Peace means living as though death has been conquered—because it has. To glory in death is to glory in the defeated enemy of the Resurrection and the Life. To allow our politics to determine our theology—instead of the other way around—is to be traitors to the Kingdom we serve. Those of us who live in the Risen Light look forward to the day when we can beat our swords into plowshares.

And no, beating your rifle into a bacon grill is not the same thing.

Image via Mr. Usaji at Flickr.