Religious messages making reference to a number of books in the bible have been coded into the serial markings of gun sights currently being implemented in Iraq and Afghanistan. Despite the fact that this story is getting a great deal of attention thanks to an investigation performed by Abc News, others are arguing that the gun sights are not noticeable enough to be considered religious.
The devices, created by a company called Trijicon, started coming out around 2003 when the contractor began its $660 million contract with the US military. Shortly before he died in a plane crash, Glyn Bindon started coding the passages of verses in the New King James Bible onto the sites. After his death, the company didn’t change its policy.
On the one hand, it’s hard to get bent out of shape over a code inscribed into a gun sight when both the pledge of allegiance and every dollar bill make a theistic comment. These references are often interpreted as a callback to history often, but sometimes are interpreted as a subversive tactic to get a single religion declared officially by the government.
When speaking to a former marine who had served two tours in Afghanistan, an associate who wished to remain anonymous about the controversy created by the investigation said, “Until Abc mentioned it, none of us even knew there were biblical passages coded on our gun sights.” When asked his opinion of the whole matter, he shrugged and said, “There are a lot more important things going on over there and I don’t get why the news is talking about this issue.” When pressed on the issue of what made it a controversy he suggested a tactic held by medical officers for thousands of years, “In triage sometimes when you have so many patients to treat, you treat injuries that need attention, and the rest of them you just ignore until they get better on their own. This seems like one of those that could be micromanaged and treated at the expense of important issues, or just ignored.” The Jewish honorably discharged marine said he didn’t feel threatened by the coded messages, and expressed his feelings toward the issue as “overwhelming indifference.”
It seems an interesting “almost issue”. If any one religion is really pushing to be accepted as the official religion of the US Government, it’s doing so without the knowledge of anyone I was able to track down on the issue. Church and State became a much bigger issue when some people within the government publicly stated that the “war on terrorism” was a religious crusade. Still, it seems this story only really has teeth or controversy one way or another when people talk about it. Very rarely do we actually have a problem that will readily go away once it’d ignored, and it seems this coded gun sight controversy is one of the few problems that would cease to be a problem if everyone stopped talking about it as something frightening. So it really stands to question, why did ABC spend so much money investigating it in the first place?