Anxious, depressed, online, and isolated, the once firmly anti-gun left has taken up arms to silence, once and for all, the voice of truth.
By John Mac Ghlionn
December 9, 2025
The country is living through a spiritual vacuum of its own making, carved out by decades of nihilism dressed up as liberation. A culture that once anchored itself to God now anchors itself to nothing. And when people believe in nothing, they turn to anything-rage, tribal identity, self-invention, even violence. We are entering a time when wounded people, especially those wrestling with deep mental-health struggles, are arming themselves not out of duty but out of despair.
For years, the Left mocked guns. A firearm was a symbol of backwardness, a leftover from another America carried by rubes who clung to Jesus and the Second Amendment in equal measure. But now the same people who once lectured America about "gun culture" are buying rifles, training on weekends, and posting videos where cosplay meets combat readiness. It's a strange development, equal parts sad and absurd. But it is also unmistakably terrifying-a new era of fear, resentment, and self-medication through firepower.
The mental-health crisis among America's trans-identifying youth isn't a point of mockery. In truth, it's a tragedy. Rates of depression, anxiety, and self-harm are staggering. These young people were promised peace if they reinvented themselves. Instead, many found isolation, instability, and a body that could no longer bear the weight of its own story.
And now some are reaching for guns as a shield against a world they think wants them gone. They're terrified and furious, pushed along by a belief system that encourages emotional volatility, rejects limits, and insists that personal pain is a political identity. Trans ideology tells them discomfort is persecution and disagreement is violence. In a culture too timid to correct the lie and too disoriented to offer help, these young people end up armed, agitated, and more alone than ever.
Pain mixed with firepower is a dangerous combination. And pain is abundant.
We see the results already. Charlie Kirk was assassinated in cold blood. The attempt on President Trump still casts a long, unbroken shadow over the nation. These moments aren't coincidences. Rather, they're symptoms of a deeper crisis. When a country loses its conscience, when it trades the Gospel for grievance, the bell tower eventually goes silent. In its place comes the crack of a rifle.
Of course, the Left insists that its sudden obsession with firearms is purely "self-defense." But watch long enough and you see the change. For decades, progressives preached gun control as the only option. Overnight, they embraced the very culture they despised, not as a sober civic duty but as an identity. A fashion. A tribe. Guns are no longer tools; they are symbols in a culture fueled by bitterness. And bitterness, once stirred, has a habit of spilling into the streets.
To be clear, millions on the Right own guns. But the difference is moral and obvious. Most conservatives keep firearms for one purpose: to protect their families. Not to posture online. Not to role-play as revolutionaries. Not to pick fights in the desert dressed as characters from science-fiction films.
They train quietly, store carefully, and pray they never need to reach for the thing they are trained to use. They are lawful, not lawless. The Left's new gun culture, by contrast, feels like a pressure cooker filled with people already tormented by identity struggles, anxiety, and emotional instability.
A nation cannot carry this tension forever.
We are living through a spiritual drought. Christianity once gave America purpose. It taught restraint, endurance, and love that was more than sentiment. But as the faith faded from public life, it left behind a vacuum, and nature hates a vacuum almost as much as politics does.
Ideology rushed in. Activism rushed in. Narcissism rushed in. And the great myth of our age-that a person can create a self out of raw desire-became the new religion. But it is a religion without grace, without forgiveness, without a path back home.
That kind of world breeds violence-first in the mind, then in the public square.
Watching the Left discover guns is like watching a toddler discover matches in a dry barn. They don't respect fire and they don't grasp the responsibility it demands. They only know it delivers a quick jolt of power in a world where their own belief system has stripped them of grounding and restraint. They approach firearms the same way they approach identity-something to tinker with, reinvent, and parade without ever accepting the moral weight that should come with it.
Meanwhile, conservatives are painted as the threat even as they hold their firearms for the same reason they always have: to safeguard what matters. They love their country, even when their country seems unsure if it loves them back. And despite endless warnings about "right-wing violence," the loudest cries for confrontation now come from corners of the internet where people fantasize about being soldiers in a cultural war they barely understand. Left-wing terrorism is now at its highest point in decades, a wave the media pretends not to see.
We have stepped into a new age. One shaped by loneliness, despair, collapsing faith, and a rising willingness to settle arguments through bullets instead of ballots. The tragic part is that most Americans, Left or Right, want nothing to do with any of it. They want safety. They want normalcy. They want a culture in which civility reigns supreme. Christians, especially, want a country where stability doesn't depend on who has the faster trigger finger.
This article was originally published on Crisis Magazine.