AR-15s, in particular, are often called America's gun. They're some of the most popular rifles in the country, especially when it comes to sports shooting.
Exactly who is this God character who is said to be all-powerful yet needs to hire lawyers to take us to court? Isn't he miffed when someone he had always considered to be a true follower turns to the legal system rather than to prayer? Why would the faithful risk making God look ridiculous by losing a trial on Earth when he is certain to win every trial in heaven?
Everyone understood [Charlie Hebdo], as people had understood for hundreds of years, knowing that Rabelaisian tradition of French satire, they knew how to read it. And they understood the kind of release from piety that it represented every week.
Charlie Hebdo were the licensed anarchist clowns of the society.
Charlie Hebdo mocked everyone. They mocked the left. They mocked the right. They mocked, above all, the extreme right, the extreme right of Le Pen's. If anything could identify their politics, they were kinds of anarchists.
Charlie Hebdo was and is not The Onion or "The Daily Show." This is a different kind of satire. Might I put it this way - less politically correct.
I became a pedant of the form. I did my graduate work in art history and particularly in the history of French satirical cartooning. And that made me aware of what a rich and resilient tradition this seemingly scabrous sacrilegious magazine still represented in French life.
I was a kid and it was kind of scabrous, and it wasn't the sacrilege that bothered me so much as the obscenity that challenged a 14-year-old American. But over the years, I came to have a keen appreciation of Charlie Hebdo and what it did.
Fidel Castro takes up so much space in the Cuban mind. It's hard for us to imagine as Americans - isn't it? - how much of everyday conversation he's dominated for 50 years.
In the wake of the deaths of the satirists, Je suis Charlie, I am Charlie, became a slogan of solidarity for free expression around the world.
