Guns & God - Less Goofiness

[Editorial Note: Anonymous D claims this still needs some editing. I think it's quite good so he's going to let me go ahead and post it]
From Anonymous D:

Part of the problem in the debate about guns is that not all of arguments on the right are completely loony, and not all of the arguments on the left are sane. Dare I say I support a more moderate approach?  Culturally speaking Americans love violence. I don’t doubt at all that there is a
connection to the cesspool we live in culturally and the violence we see generally.  There sometimes is a need to defend  yourself, the scriptures, both the D&C and Book of Mormon allow for that, but under very strict rules, certainly nothing like “Stand Your Ground”, and also monitoring very strictly our motivations and attitude and circumstances.  It seems clear that the general rule of the scriptures, indeed the first commandment given to the Nephites was to stop all the contention, fighting and bickering.  We are going to have disagreements but they can always be resolved if we observer the teachings of the Savior. "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind….Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.”  God first, everyone else next, yourself last.

Charity, the pure love of Christ, is something we find almost impossible, and is the one thing you can’t do without in the Kingdom.  The Kingdom of God (Zion) is charity manifested in a manner of living and thinking and treating others.  So your Facebook antagonist is correct in the broad sense, "it is the corruption of society ". . . . there shall be great pollutions upon the face of the earth; there shall be murders, and robbing, and lying, and deceiving, and whoredoms and all manner of abominations.” Then the kicker after Moroni has informed us that he has seen our day, (Probably in vision but it must be remembered that he just lived it as well, so he really understood us) he tells us…”And I know that ye do walk in the pride of your hearts; and there are non save a few who do not life themselves up in the pride of their hearts.”  With the normal wearing of costly clothes and the envy that comes with that pride. “For ye do love money, and your substance, and your fine apparel, and the adorning of your churches, more than ye love the poor and the needy, the sick and the afflicted.”  "O ye pollutions”   We are the very pollutants he is warning about.

While we recognize the wickedness of the society in which we live, Mormon and Moroni give us a very different solution than taking up your guns, “Know ye that ye must come unto repentance, or ye cannot be saved. Know ye that ye must lay down your weapons of war, and delight no more in the shedding of blood, and take them not again, save it be that God shall command you.” 

I see the current gun culture as a manifestation of what Mormon warned us about, a people who delight in the shedding of blood. You don’t have to be personally involved in the shooting to delight in it. We delight in it almost every night in the continual scene of wickedness and abomination  on television, In our sporting events, what would football be without the hitting? We delight when the bad guy gets justice, even if he is a really bad guy should we delight that in addition to their victims and their victims families their lives and the lives of their families are shattered? Most of all, some, certainly not all, gun advocates delight in shedding that blood themselves, in imagining themselves meeting out justice to the bad guy personally.