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From Rev’d Richard Coles, cleric and broadcaster:

There’s a great exhibition on at the British Library at the moment celebrating the 800th anniversary of the Magna Carta. You can see two of the surviving copies there and it is surprisingly moving to see set out for the first time fundamental liberties we still enjoy.

Hurray for us, even if Magna Carta was almost immediately rejected, rewritten, rewritten again, rewritten almost as many times as the job spec for the presenter of Top Gear (I could have been a contender…)

Nevertheless, its prestige and influence endures. You can see just how influential because it’s shown  alongside another document foundational to the cause of liberty, a document which came along more than  half a millennium later, but which couldn’t have been written without it: the US Bill of Rights. Hurray for us.

Well, there are no hurrays this morning, for one of the freedoms the Bill of Rights enshrines in the American Constitution is the right to bear arms. That must had made sense at the end of the18th C when a new nation was being formed with no military of its own and a hostile British army to contend with. But what kind of sense does it make today, when the threat comes from within, from damaged kids who can go the mall and buy enough weaponry to arm a militia? Only it’s not an army they go after, it’s their fellow students, or co-workers, or children or black church worshippers singing hymns of love and peace.

What kind of a right is that? One that needs to be curtailed; it seems President Obama and Piers Morgan agree. Hands off, the gun lobby cries, it’s in the Constitution and its sacred!

Jesus got into this sort of fight too, challenging the religious authorities of his time who forbade gathering food on the Sabbath even to feed the hungry. Hands off, the Pharisees cried, when they caught him at it. He replied, the Sabbath was made for humanity, not humanity for the Sabbath. There is no law so binding, no right so sacred, that it justifies the price paid at Charleston, at Aurora, at Ft Hood, at Columbine, at Sandy Hook.