A Castle Doctrine Christmas
There is no American vice which Christmas does not sanctify—our fetishization of the Second Amendment chief among them.
It’s Christmas Eve, the kids asleep soundly in their rooms. Snow covers the ground. The stars glitter above. Not a creature stirs. You and your wife completed the checklist just an hour ago: stockings stuffed, presents wrapped, cookies munched. She now dreams peacefully beside you. Content, sated, your heart impossibly full, you await the fleeting euphoria of the morning.
Then you hear it. The handle jiggling. The knob turning. The front door creaking open, ever so slowly. A visitor at this hour can only mean one thing—and he ain’t coming down the fucking chimney.
Masked, malicious, most certainly a minority, the man slips in, beelining it to the blinking tree. He begins shoveling gift after gift into his giant bag. The Lego T-Rex, the Jellycat German Shepherd, the seafoam Yeti. It all goes in. Relentlessly. Ravenously. Unforgivably. Nearly complete in his crimes, he slings the bag over his shoulder and creeps back to the front door.
But you’re standing on the landing, Sig Sauer in hand.
BANG.
The hollow-point hits him center mass. He flies backward, bounces off the wall, then spins frantically, bursting through the screen door into the front yard, still defiantly clinging to the bag of presents.
You kick through the door, scanning the front yard, fingering the trigger. A crimson trail lit by your front porch light meanders through the marred white snow, coming to a stop in a shadowy spot next to the twinkling herd of rattan reindeer grazing in the lawn. The bastard is lying on the ground, grunting, moaning, clutching his chest.
You put the gun to his head. “Please,” he pleads. “Call an ambulance. Please, I’m sorry. I just—.” He coughs, violently. “Please. Sir, please. An ambulance—I just wanted something to give my daugh—”
BANG.
He crumples into the snow. You pick up the bag of presents—still intact—and march back to the house. Behind you, your home’s red and green lights glimmer off his lifeless eyes.
Merry Christmas, you whisper.
There is no American vice which Christmas does not sanctify, our fetishization of the Second Amendment chief among them. Hollywood, of course, plays an essential role in the stoking our most barbarous Yuletide fantasies. This phenomenon is most recently observed in films such as Violent Night (2022) and Red One (2024), but the intertwinement of Christmas with violence is an old, old story.
Let us begin with Ralphie in A Christmas Story, the All-American Aryan boy in the quintessential American family. Ralphie craves but one thing for Christmas: the Red Ryder Rifle, a BB gun modeled after the weapon-of-choice of the eponymous Western cowboy, who dispenses justice in a lawless frontier with his reliable redskin by his side. This comic strip hero turned cultural colossus would go on to star in 27 films in under a decade, a feat of excess born from greed, cultural rot, and a dying moral order that would put Iron Man to shame.
Steeped in fantasies of an anarchic land in which justice and peace can only be found in the barrel of the gun, Red Ryder instilled in Ralphie’s generation a conception of violence that was both uncompromising and concrete: Bad guys are bad, and the good guys shoot them. Ralphie’s parents, teacher, and even Santa express dismay at the practical if not moral hazards of such a gift. Ralphie’s repeated request is met with the same answer: You’ll shoot your eye out. Yet in the end, he is granted his wish, gifted the gun by his reluctant parents in a fit of Christmas morning bliss. Upon finally firing that first fateful shot, the bullet ricochets and strikes his face. Yet Ralphie, miraculously, is okay—it only strikes his glasses. Had he actually lost an eye, we may not be here.
Then, of course, there is Die Hard, which lives on in our discourse through the eternal debate: Is Die Hard a Christmas movie? That such a controversy even exists—that it could be a Christmas movie—speaks volumes to an insidious societal sickness, the same warped worldview that puts forth arming teachers as practical policy. The office building, the airport, the elementary school, no place is safe, no place can be safe—it can only be defended.
Yet the most far-reaching of this myth-making manifests in 1990’s Home Alone, a holiday classic that features Kevin McAllister (MacCaulay Culkin), a 12-year-old boy left behind while his family spends Christmas in Paris, forced to defend his home from the “bloodthirsty” Wet Bandits.
Their object was property, their worst crimes flooding insured homes and stealing jewelry boxes. Yet in America there is no graver sin, and so we cheer and we fist bump and we foam at the mouth every Christmas as we watch this prepubescent sadist torture two human beings alongside our cocoa-sipping children. We high-five when a down-on-his-luck burglar with no shoe and no tetanus shot steps on a nail barefoot. We howl at a petty thief (one too decent to even utter an actual curse) whose head is bashed in by an iron bar. Extrajudicial, cruel and unusual—it makes no difference to us. He was a kid and they were criminals. They were Naughty and he was Nice.
The world is under siege and so we must find serenity in steel. The films that flicker across our screens each Christmas night as the fireplace crackles flash the same lustful fantasy of sanctified violence, a fanaticism born from fury and fear, fundamental in our law and fundamental in its depravity. Red Ryder, Ralphie, McCallister, McClane—the Good Guy with a Gun looms large in our collective consciousness, watching over us, protecting us, hearing our prayers—as another homily is disrupted by gunfire, as a career cop cowers outside of a Texas school. He promises order in a lawless land. He grants control in a world of chaos. He absolves us but he does not save us.