This is supposed to happen here: American gun culture and the rhetoric of child sacrifice

Abstract

Recent years have seen the god Molech invoked within American gun control discourse as an accusation implying indifference to the loss of children in mass shootings. The historical record on child sacrifice mirrors the use of the accusation today; regardless of whether sacrifices to Molech or Cronos actually occurred, the accusation motivated ostracization. This article examines the record of child sacrifice and situates it within a reading of American gun culture and follows recent scholarship suggesting American gun culture is designed to delegate to persons, white men in particular, the ability to liquidate themselves, their families, and people of color. Finally, this article concludes by examining the gun as a fetish for enjoyment and by framing the gun psychoanalytically as a conversion symptom aiming to produce a “return of the repressed” in another’s body, namely, the corpse of a child which ensures more guns and more corpses will follow.