Month: October 2023

Recalls, Christian nationalism, and David Barton’s revisionist U.S. history

The Central Valley School District (CVSD) Board of Directors (like many school boards across the country) is still under attack by folks whose prime motivation stems from the anti-mask, anti-vaccine-mandate, Covid conspiracy theorists who attacked school board members in the lead-up to the 2021 school board elections. In 2021 the name that kept popping up was Rob Linebarger. Mr. Linebarger presented himself as a candidate for the CVSD Board of Directors in 2021, ultimately stepping back to help Pam Orebaugh gain a seat on the five member board. This November three allied candidates, Anniece Barker, Jeff Brooks, and Stephanie Jerdon are the next wave ideological candidates in the ongoing effort to wrest majority control of the board from long-serving, experienced, and knowledgeable Directors Keith Clark, Debra Long, and Cindy McMillan.

Rob Linebarger continues to work with dogged determination toward a takeover of the CVSD Board of Directors even as he pops up elsewhere in support of the Christian nationalist ideologues allied with Matt Shea who now exert control over the Spokane County Republican Party. (The latest in that story is reserved for another day.) 

Christian nationalism denies the separation of church and state specified in the First Amendment. Instead, Christian nationalists yearn to meld their particular understanding of Christianity with national and local government and insist this is justified by the claim that the U.S. was founded as an expressly Christian nation. 

Background

In the elections of 2021, in mid-Covid pandemic, three anti-mask, anti-vaccine-mandate candidates ran in the primary for the open seat in Position 5 on the five member CVSD Board of Directors. Two allies, Pam Orebaugh and Rob Linebarger, advanced to the November general election. Facing a strong, last minute, write-in challenge by retired Central Valley teacher and coach Stan Chalich, Mr. Linebarger made an effort to direct his supporters to vote for Ms. Orebaugh instead. Ms. Orebaugh won by a small margin over Stan Chalich (who garnered more votes than Mr. Linebarger). The marginswere remarkable, since to vote for Stan Chalich required remembering and writing in his name on the ballot. Had the Orebaugh/Linebarger votes split evenly between them, Chalich would have won by a small margin. (Orebaugh’s position as a CVSD Director doesn’t come up again until the 2025 elections.)

Pam Orebaugh and Rob Linebarger were not content with simply pursuing representation on the CVSD Board in the person of Ms. Orebaugh. They wanted (and want) majority control. On October 8, 2021, a month before the general election was even held, Linebarger and Orebaugh mounted a recall campaign against three of the remaining four CVSD Board Directors, Keith Clark, Debra Long, and Cindy McMullen, in an attempt to gain a controlling majority on the Board. Here they are:

In the State of Washington (unlike Idaho) in order to get a recall election on the ballot one must specifically cite the charge(s). Once the charges(s) are written up by the specified official, the person or persons mounting the recall “shall petition the superior court [of the county] to approve the synopsis and to determine the sufficiency of the charges.” That last step is where Linebarger failed—at a necessary step before he and his allies could even start collecting signatures. “The petitions laid out about a dozen charges against each member, but were largely centered around statewide mask and vaccine mandates in public schools” [over which the CVSD Board had no legal discretion]. 

Spokane County Superior Court Judge Harold D. Clark dismissed all charges, calling them “factually and legally insufficient”, later adding that they were “politically motivated and frivolous”. Linebarger would not (and still has not) let it rest. The case (No. 2120289132) has generated a whopping 130 legal documents, the latest one just a week ago on October 6, 2023, related to an appeal filed by Linebarger, two years after he first filed the recall petition. His efforts have cost CVSD $175,000 in attorney’s fees as well as a vast investment of time by countless people at CVSD and in the judiciary (all at taxpayer expense) . Linebarger and his counsel have been sanctioned $30,000 by the Superior Court for his “bad faith” petition and his dogged persistence, $22,500 of that leveled against Linebarger personally—yet, ideologue that he is, he persists.

Who is Rob Linebarger and what makes him tick? He is the “9B [Legislative] District Leader” for the Spokane County Republican Party. He was a vocal disruptor of Central Valley School District Board meetings during the Covid pandemic. He established a 2021 political action committee called “Washington Citizens for Liberty 1st Amendment Protection Committee” that gathered $2,725.00 from precisely seven individual donors. The entire sum was given, on September 21, 2021, to the “charity” (i.e. a tax exempt 501(c)(3) that need not report the identity of its donors) named “Washington Citizens for Liberty” (click, then click “MENU” to explore) run by none other than—wait for it—Rob Linebarger. Washington Citizens for Liberty (aka Citizens4Liberty) consists of a flashy website that aggregates poorly referenced (mis)information that was last updated on August 14, 2022. The organization’s 2021 Form 990 [a required filing for a 501(c)(3)] shows that a total of $15,000 (three quarters of the revenue gathered that year from unnamed donors) went to the Wolf Law Group and the Crago Law Office, presumably spent on Linebarger’s endless (and ongoing) quest to recall three members of the CVSD Board of Directors (discussed above). Consider that—tax free donations spent harassing school board members. This isn’t the image of a “charity” I was taught…

Mr. Linebarger is also the author of a lengthy September 15, 2023 “Guest Opinion” in the Spokesman entitled “Plan to censure mayor an assault on all Christians”. In the “Guest Opinion” Linebarger bizarrely quotes scripture in an attempt to equate “Pastor” Matt Shea’s fringe interpretation of the Christian message as an ideology worthy of defense by all who identify as Christian. Even more bizarrely, he writes:

Psalm 2, written over three millennia ago and summarized in the Founders Bible with the title “Why Do the Nations Rage?” and text “The modern hostility toward Christianity in America is unprecedented, but the conflict is not new. Throughout history, those who hate God have joined forces with one another to oppose God, His Son, and His people.”

The Founders Bible??? The King James version and Revised Standard version are familiar, but “The Founders Bible”? That’s a new one—but an interesting rabbit hole to explore. The author of “The Founders Bible”, including the commentary about “those who hate God” quoted above, is David Barton, a man who has spent his life re-writing the history of the United States to align with his particular religious belief system. He is no historian. Barton’s education consists of a Bachelor of Arts degree in religious education from Oral Roberts University. He is an evangelical author and political activist for Christian nationalist causes. Barton has dedicated his life to re-writing history to convince anyone who will listen that the Founders were deeply religious Christians who established the United States as an exclusively “Christian nation”. Reputable historians, including conservative Christian historians, consider Barton’s work “pseudo-history”. It isn’t subtle. Barton has been caught offering quotes allegedly from Madison and Jefferson that have no basis in the primary literature. The “Accuracy” section of David Barton’s biography in wikipedia is well-referenced and scathing.

In spite of his tattered reputation among reputable historians, David Barton’s writings and speeches are widely admired and accepted by those anxious to promote the idea that Christians (of a particular stripe, i.e. Christian nationalists) should take over government at all levels and enact a biblically based legal system. It should come as no surprise then that “Barton has been praised by many American conservatives, such as Mike Huckabee, Newt Gingrich, Michele Bachmann, Sam Brownback, and Trinity Broadcasting Network president Matt Crouch”.

Is Linebarger even aware of David Barton’s quest to re-write history—or does Linebarger quote Barton’s words from the “Founders Bible” simply because the words bolster Linebarger’s ideology? Ideas have consequences whether or not one knows the origin the ideas. 

Linebarger’s Spokesman “Guest Opinion” quoting from David Barton’s “Founders Bible” identifies Linebarger (with no further analysis) as:

Rob Linebarger, of Liberty Lake, is CEO of Washington Citizens for Liberty, a Washington State nonprofit that advocates for the protection of First Amendment rights. He is also a Republican precinct officer, subdistrict leader, and the Spokane County GOP Candidates Committee and Marketing Committee chair.

“Chief Executive Officer” of Washington Citizens for Liberty seems an undue glorification of a position in a tiny non-profit that appears to consist of nothing more than a glossy, out-of-date, misinformation website maintained by Mr. Linebarger himself. 

Try to keep all this in mind, especially if you live in the Central Valley School District, as you contemplate the ballot you will receive next week. Vote for experience. Keep the stable, long-serving CVSD Board Directors Keith Clark, Debra Long, and Cindy McMillan.

Keep to the high ground,

Jerry

Paradoxically, it is a symptom of our economic “success”

Kudos to Colin Tiernan for the article I’ve pasted below. It appeared yesterday morning, October 10th, “World Homelessness Day”, on the front page of the Spokesman Review. 

The key take-home from the article is this: The prime reason for the striking rise in the numbers of and visibility of homeless people in Spokane (and elsewhere in the U.S.) is the sharp rise in home prices and rental costs on account of market pressures—a rise that has made a place to exist, a house or a rented space, unaffordable for many native Spokanites. In a very real sense the perceived desirability of Spokane—the economic success of our region—is also the main driver of unsheltered (and sheltered) homelessness. In the end it will be much cheaper to help people avoid becoming homeless than to rescue them once they’re on the streets.

Phil Altmeyer of the Union Gospel Mission is quoted in Tiernan’s article as blaming “addiction and mental illness” as the main drivers of homelessness. In so doing Mr. Altmeyer may be misconstruing cause and effect. Addiction and mental illness may in some cases be drivers—but they can also be consequences—of homelessness. If I were rendered homeless by a sudden shift in financial circumstances, reduced to pushing my remaining belongings in a shopping cart, it is not hard to imagine being tempted to try offered amphetamines (“speed”, “meth”) to keep me awake to guard my belongings or being tempted by an offered narcotic pill to simply dull the pain of my situation.

Along with Tiernan’s article I highly recommend “Setting the Record Straight”, a web-based article and downloadable pamphlet prepared by Catholic Charities. The article soberly addresses the facts and misconceptions of homelessness in Spokane, most especially the current administration’s politically expedient characterization of people rendered homeless as drug-addicted, mentally ill, and/or criminal—a characterization that plays into the public’s understandable discomfort with the most visible of the homeless, those few acting out on the streets downtown. “Setting the Record Straight”, much like “Our homeless policy is like putting a bandaid on internal bleeding” by Matthew Anderson, should be required reading for every citizen—and, especially, every voter.

Keep to the high ground,

Jerry

World Homeless Day Underscores Crisis

[The title is as it appeared in the paper version of the Spokesman. The paper version was accompanied by this subtitle (not present in the Spokesman.comversion): “Documentarian asserts that homelessness has become more visible due to lack of shelter space in Spokane”. I see that sub-headline as missing the bigger point. See if you agree after reading the article. Note: the authors of newspaper articles do not pick the title that appears in the print version—the editor does. ]

by Colin Tiernan

October 10, 2023

In the 1990s and early 2000s, homelessness in Spokane was far less visible.

“Every once in a while you’d see, underneath the freeway, little tents and things,” Spokane Homeless Coalition Administrator Barry Barfield said.

Today, on World Homelessness Day 2023, hundreds of people live on Spokane’s streets.

Homelessness has been increasing rapidly in Spokane in recent years. According to the most recent point-in-time count, an annual survey required by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Spokane County in January had 2,390 homeless residents.

That’s a 36% increase compared to 2022 and a more than 100% increase since 2013. For context, homelessness statewide increased 42% from 2013 to 2022, according to the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Maurice Smith, a documentarian and author who has worked with Spokane’s homeless population for the last 18 years, said homelessness has become more visible because the city lacks adequate shelter space. Spokane has about 1,000 shelter beds.

“The reason we have more people on the street is we don’t have any places for them to go,” Smith said.

Local governments rarely discussed homelessness 30 years ago. Today, candidates for mayor and City Council sometimes make homelessness the hallmarks of their campaigns.

Mayor Nadine Woodward, a conservative who spent years as a TV news anchor, told voters during her 2019 run for office that the city should offer homeless people “jail or treatment.” She spoke about homelessness in far harsher terms than her opponent, former City Council President Ben Stuckart. Stuckart said after the election that Woodward had made the race a “referendum on homelessness.”

The primacy of homelessness in local elections has hardly changed in the intervening four years, as Spokane’s struggles with homelessness have garnered more national attention.

Camp Hope, a homeless encampment along Interstate 90 in Spokane’s East Central neighborhood, was arguably the biggest local news story of 2022. The encampment, which has since closed, at one point had more than 600 residents, making it the largest in the state, and prompted national TV stories.

As Spokane’s homeless population has increased, so has the governmental response.

The City Council in the last 20 years has crafted new legislation. Some laws have guaranteed homeless people the right to shelter during extreme weather, while others have aimed to restrict the right to camp on public property.

Spending on homelessness has skyrocketed in recent years, too, although only a fraction of Spokane’s spending has come from local taxpayer dollars. Spokane in 2018 spent less than $10 million on homelessness. That rose to $26 million in 2022.

Most homelessness experts agree that the increase in homelessness has one primary cause: a lack of affordable housing.

Spokane, once known for its affordability, has seen its housing prices soar over the last five years.

According to Zillow, a home sales listing service, the typical Spokane home was worth $223,000 in September 2018. Now the typical home is worth $380,000, a roughly 70% increase.

Tim Hilton, an Eastern Washington University professor who studies social services and homelessness, said the dramatic spike in housing costs has directly contributed to the increase in people living on the street.

Drug addiction and mental health issues play a role in homelessness too, Hilton said, but housing affordability and availability are the primary drivers.

“When you look at homelessness across different cities, you can predict rates of homelessness very accurately by looking at things like median home prices relative to median incomes,” he said.

In the mid-2000s, it was possible to find a Spokane apartment for about $300 a month, Hilton said. That same apartment might cost $900 today. That increase far outpaces the growth in earning power of a typical worker.

Plenty of people had addiction or mental health issues in Spokane 20 years ago, Hilton said, but more of those people used to be able to find affordable housing.

Union Gospel Mission Executive Director Phil Altmeyer, who has spent roughly four decades working with homeless individuals, has a different perspective than many academics and homeless service providers.

Altmeyer agrees that affordable housing plays a role in homelessness, but he argues that addiction and mental illness are bigger factors.

“Street homelessness, you can trace that back to the beginning of legalization of marijuana and the increase of meth, really,” he said.

Altmeyer, whose views are shared by many conservative politicians, also says that Spokane is making homelessness worse by “enabling” people and making it too easy to survive on the streets – an argument with which Hilton, Smith and Barfield disagree. Spending more money on homeless services isn’t doing any good, Altmeyer says.

Barfield said he believes the news media needs to share more positive stories about homeless people. If the public only reads about crime, loitering and vandalism, homeless individuals will continue to be viewed as unsympathetic by the general public, he said.

The vast majority of homeless people have simply fallen on hard times and need help, Barfield said.

“You talk with them and your heart will break,” he said. “Ninety percent of the time you hear their stories and you say, ‘Oh my God, I never knew that was what you’re going through, how can I help you?’ ”

Smith said Spokane’s response to homelessness reveals the city’s character.

“How we as a community treat the homeless, the hungry and the marginalized is a good indication of the condition of our community soul,” he said. “We reveal who we are by how we treat people at their lowest moments.”

An essay by Ruth Ben-Ghiat

This Substack post on Lucid struck me as spot on, not only in its encapsulation of Trump but also of what the national and local Republican Party has become under Trump’s grip and by his example. 

In former State Representative (Spokane valley, LD-4) and now “Pastor” Matt Shea’s “Biblical Basis for War” he recommended “kill all males”. In this quote from the Spokesman, candidate Jeff Brooks, one of the Christian Nationalist trio trying to take over the Central Valley School Board in the upcoming election, shows his violent colors [the bold is mine]:

“We (challengers) have the same goals, and we’re all trying to basically overturn the board, because if we don’t, it’ll be a civil war,” Brooks said. “It’ll be a constant fight between board members that don’t have the same values that I do.”

The local and national Republican clamoring to keep assault weaponry legal, the calls for punishment and incarceration for the crime of being homeless, it’s all of a piece. Read the post appended below and contemplate how it now applies to the rhetoric of the entire Republican Party.

Keep to the high ground,

Jerry

[Click here to visit Lucid and sign up to receive the occasional posts.]

Violence is Trump’s Brand

Ruth Ben-Ghiat

September 27, 2023

How unsurprising that former president Donald Trump showed up at a gun store in South Carolina and declared that he wanted to buy a gun, specifically, a customized “Trump 45.” Glock. Since 2015, his political project has centered on cultivating extremists, radicalizing ordinary Americans, and building a civilian army to commit violence in his name.

Since the Fascist years, authoritarians have used propaganda and their personality cults to change the perception of violence among their followers. The goal is to remove hesitations about tolerating or participating in violence against one’s compatriots by presenting that violence as necessary and even morally righteous.

To that end, authoritarians conjure existential threats from an ever-expanding roster of enemies —immigrants, Jews, and leftists among them—-and present violence as the only way to save the people from annihilation and save the nation from utter ruin. “If you don’t fight like hell, you won’t have a country anymore,” Trump raged to the thugs assembled on Jan. 6, before he sent them off to assault the Capitol.

That terrible day made clear Trump’s endgame in cultivating as many individuals as possible and preparing them psychologically to be willing to persecute his enemies. In doing so, Trump wrote a new page of the coup playbook: if you can’t get the military to cooperate with your takeover attempt, you have a civilian army at your disposal.

On Jan. 6, that army included anti-government extremists and hate group adherents but also many ordinary people with no prior history of militancy. These “middle-aged, middle-class insurrectionists,” in Robert A Pape and Kevin Ruby’s words, believed Trump’s lies about winning the 2020 election and justified their violence on moral and patriotic grounds.

Two years later, it is clearer than ever that inciting political violence is Trump’s political project, and his campaign appearances and events must be seen in that light. Trump is a marketer. In previous decades his work of persuasion involved getting people to buy his branded objects: Trump apartments, Trump wine, Trump steaks, Trump water, and more. Now his brand is violence, and his rallies and other events sell that violence, presenting it as the preferred way to resolve differences in society and as the only way to move history forward. The gun shop stop was merely the most obvious of these attempts to expand his corps of armed followers.

Trump’s greatest success has been with GOP politicians, who have made his ideals of violence into party dogma, declaring in 2022 that Jan. 6 was “legitimate political discourse” and brandishing assault rifles in campaign ads as proof of their commitment to violence.

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Even an appearance at the Iowa State Fair can be a radicalization opportunity. Rep. Matt Gaetz showed up there to be with Trump and delivered a crucial message. “We are having a great time at the fair. We love standing with you. But we know that only through force do we make any change in a corrupt town like Washington, D.C.,” said Gaetz. That “but” is the point. Stumping at state fairs is politics as usual. Gaetz is saying that is no longer sufficient. Change in America will come not through democratic means —legislation, reform, elections—but through violence. Get ready, he is telling the crowd. We need you.

Trump’s 2024 campaign is making that call to violence far more explicit. The kick-off event in Waco, TX, site of anti-government extremist violence, set the tone. So does the visit to the gun store, coming just after Trump’s suggestion that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, who refused to aid Trump’s coup attempt, should be executed.  

“Perhaps it was always going to come to this. A MAGA hat and a gun,” I wrote in 2021. “Two pathways to the heart of America, two symbols of what the country holds most dear: celebrities and their brands, and the right to bear arms. The MAGA hat draws them in, but the gun keeps them there.”

Why we should worry, pay attention, and vote accordingly

In August, City of Spokane Mayor Nadine Woodward, City of Spokane City Council candidate (District 3, NW) Earl (Earline) Moore, and City of Spokane Valley City Council candidate and chairwoman of Spokane County Moms For Liberty, Jessica Yaeger appeared on stage in downtown Spokane with avowed Christian nationalist Sean Feucht and disgraced former State Representative Matt Shea. The event and the controversy were covered nationally. 

Woodard has since tried hard to deny that she knew with whom she would be on stage and what they stand for, which indicates that either she is so clueless she should not be mayor or that she was courting the endorsement by and associated votes from the Christian nationalist leadership of the SpokaneGOP—and is embarrassed that it came to light. 

Perhaps of greater concern are the number of school board candidates on the ballots that will appear in your mailboxes in a couple of weeks, many of whom are strongly associated with Christian nationalism (more specifics in later posts).

Christian nationalism is one of those many “-isms” that is understood in different ways by different people. Wikipedia provides a useful definition [the bold is mine]:

Christian nationalism is a type of religious nationalism that is affiliated with Christianity, in which the end goal is to achieve an absolute Christian theocracy within a society. It primarily focuses on the internal politics of society, such as legislating civil and criminal laws that reflect their view of Christianity and the role of religion in political and social life.

We should all find that chilling, considering the violent rhetoric coming from the armed, modern day Christian nationalism that is increasingly, since Trump, the backbone of Republicanism. Remember “Pastor” Matt Shea’s “The Biblical Basis for War”. 

David French is an evangelical Christian with deep knowledge of Christianity, a former Republican (prior to Trump), and a lawyer who wrote missives on Substack before he began to write for the New York Times. His prior writing about End Times movements and Evangelical Christianity are interesting theologically, but in the piece copied below he crystallizes the drive of Christian nationalists in a new way, explaining their adherence to Trump and Trump-allied candidates—and their intent on taking control of government at all levels, from school boards to the presidency. Much of what he discusses is happening right here, right now in eastern Washington and North Idaho. If you don’t want your lives run by these people you must pay attention and vote accordingly.

Keep to the high ground,

Jerry

One Reason the Trump Fever Won’t Break

October 1, 2023

David French

The more I consider the challenge posed by Christian nationalism, the more I think most observers and critics are paying too much attention to the wrong group of Christian nationalists. We mainly think of Christian nationalism as a theology or at least as a philosophy. In reality, the Christian nationalist movement that actually matters is rooted in emotion and ostensibly divine revelation, and it’s that emotional and spiritual movement that so stubbornly clings to Donald Trump.

Three related stories illustrate the challenge.

First, Katherine Stewart wrote a disturbing report for The New Republic about the latest iteration of the ReAwaken America Tour, a radical right-wing road show sponsored by Charisma News, a Pentecostal Christian publication. [ReAwaken America attracted a large crowd in Post Falls in September 2022. See here and here.] The tour has attracted national attention, including in The Times, and features a collection of the far right’s most notorious conspiracy theorists and Christian populists.

The rhetoric at these events, which often attract crowds of thousands, is unhinged. There, as Stewart reported, you’ll hear a pastor named Mark Burns declare, “This is a God nation, this is a Jesus nation, and you will never take my God and my gun out of this nation.” You’ll also hear him say, “I have come ready to declare war on Satan and every race-baiting Democrat that tries to destroy our way of life here in the United States of America.” You’ll hear the right-wing radio host Stew Peters call for “Nuremberg Trials 2.0” and death for Anthony Fauci and Hunter Biden. The same speaker taunted the Fulton County, Ga., prosecutor Fani Willis by shouting: “Big Fani. Big fat Fani. Big fat Black Fani Willis.”

Then there’s Thursday’s report in The Times describing how an anti-Trump conservative group with close ties to the Club for Growth is finding that virtually nothing is shaking Trump voters’ confidence in Trump. As the group wrote in a memo to donors, “Every traditional postproduction ad attacking President Trump either backfired or produced no impact on his ballot support and favorability.” Even video evidence of Trump making “liberal” or “stupid” comments failed to shake supporters’ faith in him.

And finally, we cannot forget the astounding finding of a HarrisX poll for The Deseret News, showing that more Republicans see Donald Trump as a “person of faith” than see openly religious figures like Mitt Romney, Tim Scott and Mike Pence, Trump’s own (very evangelical) vice president, that way. It’s an utterly inexplicable result, until you understand the nature of the connection between so many Christian voters and Donald Trump.

In the immediate aftermath of the Jan. 6 insurrection, there was a tremendous surge of interest in Christian nationalism. Christian displays were common in the crowd at the Capitol. Rioters and protesters carried Christian flags, Christian banners and Bibles. They prayed openly, and a Dispatch reporter in the crowd told me that in the late afternoon Christian worship music was blaring from loudspeakers. I started to hear questions I’d never heard before: What is Christian nationalism and how is it different from patriotism?

I’ve long thought that the best single answer to that question comes from a church history professor at Baylor named Thomas Kidd. In the days before Jan. 6, when apocalyptic Christian rhetoric about the 2020 election was building to a fever pitch, Kidd distinguished between intellectual or theological Christian nationalism and emotional Christian nationalism.

The intellectual definition is contentious. There are differences, for example, among Catholic integralism, which specifically seeks to “integrate” Catholic religious authority with the state; Protestant theonomy, which “believes that civil law should follow the example of Israel’s civil and judicial laws under the Mosaic covenant”; and Pentecostalism’s Seven Mountain Mandate, which seeks to place every key political and cultural institution in the United States under Christian control.

But walk into Christian MAGA America and mention any one of those terms, and you’re likely to be greeted with a blank look. “Actual Christian nationalism,” Kidd argues, “is more a visceral reaction than a rationally chosen stance.” He’s right. Essays and books about philosophy and theology are important for determining the ultimate health of the church, but on the ground or in the pews? They’re much less important than emotion, prophecy and spiritualism.

Arguments about the proper role of virtue in the public square, for example, or arguments over the proper balance between order and liberty, are helpless in the face of prophecies, like the declarations from Christian “apostles” that Donald Trump is God’s appointed leader, destined to save the nation from destruction. Sometimes there’s no need for a prophet to deliver the message. Instead, Christians will claim that the Holy Spirit spoke to them directly. As one longtime friend told me, “David, I was with you on opposing Trump until the Holy Spirit told me that God had appointed him to lead.”

Several weeks ago, I wrote about the “rage and joy” of MAGA America. Outsiders see the rage and hatred directed at them and miss that a key part of Trump’s appeal is the joy and fellowship that Trump supporters feel with each other. But there’s one last element that cements that bond with Trump: faith, including a burning sense of certainty that by supporting him, they are instruments of God’s divine plan.

For this reason, I’ve started answering questions about Christian nationalism by saying it’s not serious, but it’s very dangerous. It’s not a serious position to argue that this diverse, secularizing country will shed liberal democracy for Catholic or Protestant religious rule. But it’s exceedingly dangerous and destabilizing when millions of citizens believe that the fate of the church is bound up in the person they believe is the once and future president of the United States.

That’s why the Trump fever won’t break. That’s why even the most biblically based arguments against Trump fall on deaf ears. That’s why the very act of Christian opposition to Trump is often seen as a grave betrayal of Christ himself. In 2024, this nation will wrestle with Christian nationalism once again, but it won’t be the nationalism of ideas. It will be a nationalism rooted more in emotion and mysticism than theology. The fever may not break until the “prophecies” change, and that is a factor that is entirely out of our control.

More on Christianity and nationalism

Opinion | Katherine Stewart

Christian Nationalism Is One of Trump’s Most Powerful Weapons

Jan. 6, 2022

Opinion | David French

Who Truly Threatens the Church?

July 9, 2023

Opinion | Ross Douthat

What Has Trump Cost American Christianity?

May 24, 2023

Opinion | Peter Wehner

Why I Can No Longer Call Myself an Evangelical Republican

Dec. 9, 2017

The perils of applying and interpreting

Background

The Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (one of the ten amendments ratified December 15, 1791 that comprise the Bill of Rights) reads: “Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.”

In 2018 a three judge panel of the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit (CA, OR, WA, ID, MT, AZ, NV, AK and HI) ruled in Martin v. Boise (in 38 pages), that “prosecuting people criminally for sleeping outside on public property when those people have no home or other shelter to go to” is a violation of the Constitutional proscription against cruel and unusual punishment under the Eight Amendment. 

This 2018 ruling in Martin v. Boise seems entirely just in its manifest simplicity. After all, for law enforcement to disturb a person sleeping on a cold night in a city park, a person for whom there exists no shelter alternative, awakening them and forcing them to “move on”, or, worse, entangling them in the legal system by charging them with a crime like “vagrancy” and booking them in jail, is, on its face, “cruel”—if not particularly “unusual” in our society, both currently and historically. However, as with any legal ruling, the devil is in the details. Martin v. Boise can be, and to some degree has been, read to prohibit cities and law enforcement from doing anything at all to protect the rights of others of our citizens whose businesses and social comfort is impinged upon by visible homelessness—unless there exists, on any given night a sheltered place for every unsheltered homeless person to sleep (provided by the city or by private groups). 

Martin v. Boise, in its simplicity, begs for interpretation. As Shawn Vestal puts it:

The Martin ruling leaves open the possibility of targeted limits on camping in certain places or at certain times. But it provides no test or standard for what would be permissible in such exceptions, and cities around the West have been looking for ways to thread that needle.

The Martin v. Boise ruling has spawned legal challenges that have reached the Ninth Circuit, the most prominent of which is Johnson v. Grants Pass(now an “Amended” opinion published on July 5, 2023 that stretches 155 pages). It reveals that among several of the judges who weighed in on that July 5th document with either a “Statement” or a “Dissent” there is much dispute over the legal underpinnings of Martin v. Boise. (Dare I point out that the most scathing of the Dissents come from Trump appointees who were likely vetted by the Federalist Society? Our voting choice of President can have far reaching consequences.)

Presumably encouraged by the July 5th Amended ruling in Johnson v. Grants Pass, the City of Grants Pass, Oregon, has since appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court in the hope that the Supreme Court will either clarify the ruling and apply it to the rest of the country (beyond the nine states under the Ninth Circuit) or, better, in the opinion of some, completely overturn the original Martin v. Boise ruling. 

More than 20 other cities, counties, and organizations are piling on to Grants Pass’ request to the Supreme Court to take on Johnson v. Grants Pass (and, by extension, Martin v. Boise)—and that’s where we come in—along with our Mayoral race this November.

The City of Spokane and Mayor Woodward

Last week Mayor Nadine Woodward held a press conference to announce that the “City of Spokane” had signed on Grants Pass’s request to the Supreme Court to review Johnson v. Grants Pass. Tellingly, she was flanked by just one member of the City Council, Jonathan Bingle, along with her two preferred local shelter overseers, Phil Altmeyer of the Union Gospel Mission and Captain David Cain of the Salvation Army (currently managing TRAC the expensive, congregate shelter on Trent near the city limits, in a warehouse leased from Larry Stone). [The entire news conference is available to watch here on YouTube.] From Emry Dinman’s Spokesman article covering the event [the bold is mine]:

“This is critically important to our future,” Mayor Nadine Woodward said at a Friday news conference. “Local jurisdictions need to have more control about how we address homelessness, and we are having to spend more of our resources than we really want on those night-by-night emergency, low-barrier shelters.”

This is pure Nadine. This is the Mayor who declared “I think we need to get to the point where we’re working to make homelessness less comfortable…”, the Mayor responsible for the foot-dragging that led to the “warming center” debacle at the Convention Center in January 2022, the Mayor that kicked out more than a hundred homeless people sheltered peacefully at the Cannon Shelter—with no plan to house them, the Mayor who pursued opening the TRAC Shelter only in response to Camp Hope, and the Mayor who spent City resources to fight the cooling/warming tent set up at Camp Hope, cut off water, and threatened to send law enforcement to drive out the Camp’s residents. 

In the press conference video Nadine added:

I should just let you know too that the Ninth Circuit did provide some clarity to the cases that we’re talking about, making a distinction between involuntary and voluntary homeless. So if we have a shelter bed, if we are moving someone off of a sidewalk or a public space or along the river, and we offer them a bed, they are no longer involuntarily homeless. They are choosing not to seek shelter. They are choosing not to seek services, and they are now considered voluntarily homeless. That is a distinction that was just made this week. It have been done purposely to preclude this particular effort [weighing in with Grants Pass], but I just wanted to update you on that as well.

The wording to which Ms. Woodward refers is actually three and a half weeks old. It comes from a one paragraph interim ruling issued September 5th by three judges of the Ninth Circuit in the context of another case, Coalition on Homelessness v. City and County of San Francisco. The actual wording is this:

“a person is not involuntarily homeless if they have declined a specific offer of available shelter or otherwise have access to such shelter or the means to obtain it…”

You can grasp an idea of where this is going in the mind of Mayor Woodward by reading the following quote from an article posted September 26th in the flagship Republican magazine, the National Review (founded in 1955 by none other than William F. Buckley, Jr.) [the bold is mine]:

Last week, in a ruling requiring the city of Phoenix to dismantle a massive downtown homeless camp, a state judge [Blaney, quoted below] in Arizona blasted that line of thinking. The city of Phoenix “erroneously applied” the narrow Martin ruling and allowed the Zone homeless camp to devolve into a public nuisance, Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Scott Blaney wrote in an order.

“If an individual refuses a shelter bed because she will not be permitted to bring all of her property into the shelter, that individual is not involuntarily homeless. If an individual refuses to go into a shelter because he wants more space than the shelter provides, that individual is not involuntarily homeless. And if an individual refuses to go into a shelter because he wants to live together with his partner, that individual is not involuntarily homeless,” Blaney [a Maricopa County, Arizona, Superior Court Judge] wrote.

The logical inference from Blaney’s statement is that, for example, once law enforcement offers an unsheltered woman a mat somewhere indoors to lie on —even if she is required to lie there bereft of her belongings, her partner, and living with PTSD around enclosed, crowded spaces—and she refuses, then she may be charged with the crime du jour that jurisdiction choses to use to clear public property of the visible homeless. 

The devil is in the details, indeed.

We all want clean streets, streets that do not remind us with every step that the economic policies of our country, especially over the last forty years—have rendered people so poor that they are reduced to living on the streets. 

Yes, I want Martin v. Boise clarified, but once it is I want a Mayor in office in Spokane who knows how to run a city, attract state and federal funds to help its citizens, retain valuable city expertise, and work to clear our streets with a suitable level of empathy and compassion for those being “cleared”. That Mayor is Lisa Brown. Vote for her in November.

Keep to the high ground, 

Jerry

P.S. In the federal court system the Courts of Appeal are one level above the federal District Courts and one level below the Supreme Court. For example, we, in Spokane, are part of the federal Eastern District of Washington, one of 13 Districts that make up the Ninth Circuit. The Ninth Circuit includes nine states, CA, OR, WA, ID, MT, AZ, NV, AK and HI. Currently 28 judges serve on the Ninth Circuit, ten of whom were appointed by Trump after vetting by the Federalist Society. A legal case that rises to the level of the Ninth Circuit is usually heard by a “panel” (three of these judges selected randomly from the among the 28), as in the case Martin v. Boise. The Ninth Circuit is the largest in the Courts of Appeal system, hearing appeals from nine states representing 20% of the population of the U.S. (67 million people).

What We Have Let Ourselves Become

For many decades Republicans have extolled the virtues of free market capitalism, deified the “titans of industry”, and railed against any and all regulation. Regulation, after all, restrains the wondrous workings of the free market. This anti-tax, anti-regulation creed is found in every McMorris Rodgers “Weekly Newsletter” that her staff sends out to ply the faithful. 

The story appended below is a reminder of the horrific consequences of unregulated capitalism driven solely by greed to the exclusion of any concept of the common good. It is a tale of money, marketing, and manipulation by a few at the expense of the many.

The story first appeared in the Wall Street Journal, where, one wonders if it may be read by some as an amoral roadmap to riches. Reading it made me want to vomit with rage over the abject greed of men (yes, all of them men) cynically marketing a weapon that is useful for almost nothing but killing fellow humans, marketing to take advantage of a high profit margin–selling the gun by inflating men’s egos with a promise of “re-issuing your man card”—even as the gun, in its ubiquity, is used to maim and murder innocent people. The business schools that trained these capitalist vultures should be shut down until they learn to train their students in the basics of humanity. 

Signed, 

Thoroughly Disgusted

Keep to the high ground,

Jerry

The Selling of America’s Most Controversial Gun

Private equity turned the AR-15 into a big profit-maker and a charged symbol in the debate over gun rights and mass shootings.

By Cameron McWhirter and Zusha Elinson Sept. 22, 2023 at 5:42 am ET

In December 2005, five groups of Wall Street investors flew in private jets to Portland, Maine, where they took waiting limousines to a warren of metal buildings that resembled a midsize lumberyard. They had come to Bushmaster Firearms in pursuit of a highly profitable product whose market was growing faster than any other in America’s stagnant gun industry. The product was the AR-15, and red-hot Bushmaster, the nation’s leading manufacturer of the rifle, had decided to auction itself to the highest bidder.

Bushmaster’s owner Dick Dyke had once feared that he could never sell the company because so many people had a negative view of the gun. A few years earlier, Dyke had been forced to resign his post as President George W. Bush’s chief Maine fundraiser after the media found out he made AR-15s for a living. After that, his company was again pilloried when two snipers who terrorized the Washington, D.C. area used a Bushmaster in their attacks.

But by 2005, Dyke’s concerns had evaporated. Sales of the AR-15 were growing faster than any other rifle or shotgun. When Dyke let it be known that he might be interested in selling, potential private-equity buyers rushed up to Maine to see his operations and make a bid for the AR-15 maker. “All of the sudden, they became an amazing thing,” recalled John DeSantis, Bushmaster’s chief executive.

The reason Wall Street investors were drawn to the gun was not only current profits but the potential to make a lot more, given increasing market demand. Dyke’s firm was, in many respects, a classic American business success story: Product sells well, investors come in to expand production and marketing, and sales soar.

But this business success story, which led to a massive increase in AR-15 production and civilian ownership in subsequent years, would have profound consequences for the U.S., affecting how we vote, how we go to social events and how our children attend school. The arrival of private equity in the AR-15 market would turn a once-disdained product into one of the most controversial and well-known icons of America’s culture wars.

By the end of the 2000s, the AR-15 had become a badge of honor for millions of supporters of the Second Amendment. As mass shootings with the rifle increased, it also became a symbol for millions of Americans who saw it as the epitome of violent dysfunction in a gun-obsessed America.

Today, the gun’s image is everywhere—bumper stickers, pins, Internet memes, hats and shirts. Signs with the gun’s silhouette crossed out by a line are carried at massive gun-control rallies across the country. Gun-rights advocates wave flags at their rallies with the AR-15’s image bearing the slogan “Come and Take It.” With more than 20 million of the rifles now in civilian hands, it has come to occupy the center of America’s bitter debate over firearms.

The AR-15 was created for the U.S. military in the 1950s by a little-known gun designer named Eugene Stoner at a small company in Southern California called ArmaLite. The weapon’s revolutionary design made it lightweight and easy to shoot. Stoner devised an ingenious way of using the hot gas from the exploding gunpowder to move parts inside the gun to eject spent casings and load new rounds, eliminating metal parts that had been used in other rifles. He also used modern materials like aluminum and plastic instead of wood and steel. The rifle was easy to manufacture and relatively inexpensive to make compared to traditional rifles.

After much bureaucratic infighting, the gun was adopted by the Pentagon as the military’s standard rifle and renamed the M16. The rifle made for the military could be fired on automatic, meaning a person could shoot a stream of bullets by holding down the trigger, or semiautomatic, meaning a shooter had to pull the trigger for each bullet fired. Civilian AR-15s sold in the U.S. are semiautomatic.

Sales of a civilian version of the AR-15, first marketed to hunters in the early 1960s, were weak for decades. Its martial look and function, its small-caliber bullets and the plastic and aluminum parts were a turn-off for many hunters used to rifles made of polished wood and gleaming steel. Serious problems with the roll-out of the M16 in Vietnam led many veterans of that conflict to dislike the gun. Soldiers died on the battlefield with M16s in their hands because of jamming problems caused by changes made by the military to the gun’s ammunition and other issues. Beyond Doomsday preppers and collectors, most gun-owners weren’t interested.

In 1977, Stoner’s patent expired, opening up competition for Colt, the storied gunmaker that manufactured both military and civilian versions of the rifle. By the 1980s, a handful of smaller gunmakers were making and selling civilian versions of the AR-15.

These companies received strongly negative reactions to the guns when they displayed them at NRA conventions in the 1980s and 1990s. “We’d have NRA members walk by and give us the finger,” said Randy Luth, owner of DPMS Panther Arms, one of the AR-15 makers.

Officials organizing the most important gun industry trade show—the Shooting, Hunting, Outdoor Trade Show, or SHOT Show—tried to make it as uncomfortable as possible for AR-15 makers to market their products. “They weren’t members of our club,” said one industry executive.

Cultural and political shifts after the Sept. 11 attacks transformed the gun’s image. Veterans coming back from the wars wanted the civilian version of the M16. American consumers wanted to buy it too, because they saw the soldiers fighting in the Middle East carrying the weapon. The 2004 expiration of the federal assault-weapons ban—which had prohibited the sales of AR-15s on paper, though not in reality—and the passage of legislation to protect gunmakers from lawsuits combined to create a perfect environment for large gunmakers to manufacture, market and sell large quantities of AR-15s.

The same mainstream gunmakers that had ignored the gun for decades jumped headlong into the market. Bill Silver, head of commercial sales at gunmaker SIG Sauer, known for high-end pistols, said he encouraged executives to build their own version of Stoner’s rifle. “I’ll sell as many as you can build,” Silver told them. He believed the gun would be a hit because the tough-looking military-style weapon had what he called the “wannabe factor.”

Dick Dyke’s Bushmaster now became the envy of all gunmakers. As a young man Dyke wanted to be a dancer, but his parents refused to pay for art school, so he studied business instead and embarked on a career of turning around failing companies. In 1976 Dyke purchased the bankrupt Bushmaster for $241,000. By the 1990s, he had turned it into a viable enterprise by selling a semiautomatic version of Stoner’s gun and its parts at a time when few other gunmakers made the weapon. Dyke could get machine shops to churn out parts at a low cost. All his employees had to do was assemble the guns and ship them out.

When John DeSantis, an engineer who had worked for established weapons firms, came to Bushmaster in 1998 he was shocked to learn how much the AR-15 sold for and how little it cost to make. The company had gross margins of around 40%, more than double that of companies making traditional hunting rifles or shotguns, he said. Under DeSantis’s leadership, Bushmaster pushed down the cost of production even further by pressuring suppliers for lower prices. Bushmaster was soon selling a single XM-15—its version of the AR-15—for $750 to $900, when it cost between $250 and $300 to build.

As money flowed in, Dyke became a local hero, paying high wages and donating to philanthropic causes. He also treated himself, driving a Rolls-Royce and drawing a salary of about $1 million a year, according to DeSantis.

Business boomed after 9/11 and the end of the federal assault-weapons ban, and Dyke decided to sell. When the Wall Street investors arrived, DeSantis gave each group of visitors a PowerPoint presentation with charts and graphs showing profits and the company’s growth. In 2004, Bushmaster brought in $46.6 million, with more than $7 million in earnings. By 2005, revenue had reached $60.8 million, with $11.2 million in earnings.

One group of investors caught DeSantis’s attention because they actually knew something about guns. They worked for a Manhattan-based private-equity firm called Cerberus. They told DeSantis that their boss, Stephen Feinberg, liked guns and was interested in buying a gun company. DeSantis had never heard of the man.

Most Americans had never heard of Feinberg or his Manhattan-based private-equity firm, even though the businesses it controlled had more than $30 billion in combined annual sales. Notoriously secretive, Feinberg maintained the trappings of his working-class upbringing as the son of a steel salesman, even as Cerberus grew. He drove trucks and loved to go hunting. In the gun industry, he saw an investment opportunity that other Wall Street tycoons did not.

When Dyke unsealed bids for Bushmaster, Cerberus had offered $76 million—315 times what Dyke had paid for the company. Dyke was thrilled, but Bushmaster’s employees initially were worried about a private equity takeover. DeSantis, who stayed on as chief executive, wondered why Feinberg, a Wall Street giant, wanted to buy Bushmaster. Feinberg’s Cerberus controlled sprawling international operations worth billions. Why did he want little Bushmaster?

DeSantis soon learned that Cerberus’s purchase of Bushmaster was just the first step in its grand plan to shake up and ultimately dominate the gun industry. Feinberg’s point man on the project was George Kollitides II, a Columbia MBA. After the U.S. invaded Afghanistan in 2001, Kollitides came up with the idea to invest in private companies aiding the war effort, according to his deposition in later court proceedings. But the military market for guns was smaller than he expected, and he worried about its volatility. No war meant fewer sales.

Instead, Kollitides grew intrigued by the U.S. civilian gun market. “There was a gigantic, thriving commercial market, and there may be an opportunity there,” he recalled thinking. The gun industry at the time was a fractured ecosystem of companies, most making their own type of firearm. Kollitides decided to apply a standard private equity practice: buy up and consolidate.

If the plan worked, the company could sell gun owners every kind of firearm they wanted, including ARs, and bring down the cost of production through scale. Kollitides understood the AR-15 to be important in this mission. The market for the gun had been growing about 8% every year from 1998 to 2005. “As an investor, this would excite me,” he said.

Cerberus’s efforts to build a firearms conglomerate were not the subject of mainstream media coverage, but the gun world buzzed. After buying DPMS Panther, another AR-15 maker, Cerberus’s gun conglomerate became the largest manufacturer of the rifle in America, producing 118,000 ARs in 2007, almost half the number made in the U.S. that year.

The compounded annual growth rate for the long-gun market—hunting rifles, shotguns, etc.—was 5% from 2004 to 2007. The rate for the AR-15 market was 36%. The men running the new gun conglomerate were sure they could sell even more. They launched a camouflage AR-15 model under its Remington brand, hoping to draw hunters to the semiautomatic rifle. They increased credit lines for wholesalers, the middlemen who bought the guns from manufacturers and then sold them to gun shops. “As soon as that opened up, we just went crazy,” DeSantis recalled.

The 2008 presidential election supercharged the AR-15 market. Barack Obama, the Democratic nominee, took a cautious approach to the gun issue. Obama had learned from watching what happened to his predecessors in 2000 and 2004 that talking about gun control didn’t help Democrats win national elections.

But the Democrat’s moderate stance made no difference to the NRA. The group announced it would spend a record $40 million to defeat him and back Arizona senator John McCain, the Republican nominee. The NRA launched a website, GunBanObama.com, and claimed he would be “the most anti-gun president in American history.” Gun shops taped up NRA posters declaring, “On the Second Amendment, Don’t Believe Obama!” Dealers at gun shows displayed photos of Obama and advised shoppers to “Get ’em before he does.”

On Nov. 4, 2008, Obama was elected president, and panicked gun owners rushed to buy AR-15s. That November, the FBI conducted more background checks for firearms purchases than in any other month since the modern background-check system was instituted in 1998. AR-15 makers called it “the Barack boom.”

Bushmaster’s workers put in six days a week, from seven in the morning to eight at night, assembling rifles by hand. At least 26 different gun companies made 444,000 AR-15-style rifles for sale in the U.S. in 2008, representing nearly 10% of all guns made in the U.S. that year.

Executives at Feinberg’s gun firm moved to grab an even larger share of the expanding AR-15 market. They changed the company’s name from American Heritage Arms to Freedom Group. They pushed their AR-15s into big-box stores such as Walmart, slashing the prices of their low-end rifles to get them on the shelves of America’s largest retailer. “With Cerberus and them, it’s all about the numbers and volume,” remembered Luth, who was still in charge at DPMS.

Freedom Group also dramatically altered the way that Bushmaster’s AR-15s were marketed. In the past, a typical Bushmaster ad would feature photos of rifles and parts with detailed descriptions of their specifications. In one from 1998, Bushmaster highlighted that its rifles had “Heavy Profile Premium Match Grade Barrels” and “manganese phosphate finish for rust and corrosion protection.” This approach appealed to older hobbyists who owned lots of guns.

But industry executives worried that these older hobbyists were tapped out and believed they needed to market to a new generation of consumers. Freedom Group launched an ad campaign in the glossy pages of Maxim, a magazine popular with young men featuring scantily-clad female models. The ads featured an image of the XM-15 and the words “Consider Your Man Card Reissued.”

Sales of Bushmaster rifles soared. The vast majority were purchased by Americans who used them to go target shooting or varmint hunting. But some ended up in the hands of disturbed loners who wanted to use them for something much more sinister.

On Dec. 14, 2012, a frail 20-year-old beset with mental problems used the Bushmaster purchased by his mother to attack Sandy Hook Elementary School near his home in western Connecticut. He shot and killed 20 first-graders and six educators before killing himself.

The immediate aftermath was akin to the U.S. reaction to 9/11—bafflement, sadness, horror, anger. The funerals for the Sandy Hook Elementary School victims began on a gray day, Dec. 17, when Noah Pozner and Jack Pinto, both six years old, were laid to rest. Six-year-old Ben Wheeler’s funeral was held on Dec. 20 at Trinity Episcopal Church. It was filled to capacity. His father read “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost.

On that same day, Freedom Group’s board of directors held an emergency meeting by telephone. Kollitides, who had risen to become Freedom Group’s chief executive, thanked the board members for meeting on short notice. He informed them that Cerberus, under pressure from major investors, had decided to consider selling the gun company after the shooting.

Kollitides noted that gun sales continued to be strong after the tragedy and then turned to other matters, including the possible acquisition of a gun-barrel manufacturer. The board still had business to attend to while they awaited a possible sale. Some in the meeting noted that the deal for the barrel maker would increase margins even further on the company’s AR-15s. The board voted to authorize the acquisition. Cerberus would ultimately decide against selling its gun firm as sales of AR-15s soared after Sandy Hook.

“It was an awful, horrific, huge tragedy, but its impact on the long-term capital decisions of the business were not—were not a factor,” Kollitides later said in a deposition. “We were in the business of legally making guns to legally sell to legal gun owners. So there is no other thing to do than wake up and make guns on Monday morning.”

Cameron McWhirter and Zusha Elinson are reporters for The Wall Street Journal. This piece is adapted from their new book, “American Gun: The True Story of the AR-15,” which will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on Sept. 26.