For the price of financial backing from the NRA that keeps conservative evangelical Christians in power, politicians and voters are willing to sacrifice their own children to gun violence—at least they will become martyrs who can continue to rally the church. Unregulated gun culture has created a new kind of martyr myth, one uniquely tailored for the rise of religious extremism in the twenty-first century: teenagers purportedly dying for their faith in school shootings, and also dying for their parents’ so-called right to have automatic weapons, as per the Second Amendment.
