Gun on Bible

 

The week before the US election, the "Idaho Freedom Foundation" issued a video declaration by nine current or former state legislators and the Lieutenant Governor, Janice McGeachin, who chose to speak her lines while placing her handgun on top of her bible.

 

The image buttressed their rhetoric of "God-given rights" from the Declaration of Independence and visually conflated it with the "right to bear arms" in the Constitution's Second Amendment. The actual targets of the statement's complaints, however, are public health orders from the Idaho governor to combat the coronavirus epidemic.

History provides some precedents for extreme reactions to public health orders. Sheldon Watts (in Epidemics and History, 1997) wrote about sixteenth- and seventeenth-century social unrest because of bubonic plague:
"Everywhere they were imposed, plague regulations met with a muted or overtly hostile response from the populace. Evidence ... suggests that people were terrified by the plague for the first week or so after it arrived, but that they then grew accustomed to its depredations and, when left alone, attempted to go about their ordinary affairs. If social breakdown did occur, it was more likely to be caused by the enforcement of a plague code than by the disease itself."