I was out of pocket yesterday, and that meant I had time to let all the latest gun madness sink in before I wrote about it.

And here's what coalesced in my brain: That the GOP is really and truly a religion, and its shifting dogma changes day to day, hour by hour. They believe in tax cuts, domination, and guns -- and now, Qanon. Instead of Jesus dying on the cross for their sins, they have the ritual sacrifice of children shredded by assault weapons. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

That's not hyperbole. The AR-15-style weapon shredded the sweet childish faces of these babies so badly, their own parents couldn't identify them. They had to use DNA tests.

Let that sink in.

I have often thought if more people could see the autopsy photos of these sacrificial lambs, something might change. But you can't expect the traumatized parents to be okay with that, so here we are. But I kept thinking about the impact Mamie Till Bradley had after the lynching death of her son Emmett, when she allowed an open casket of his mutilated body and the shocking pictures spread nationwide.

The GOP has a lot of high priests speaking to the masses this week, but Texas Gov. Greg Abbott? He's the frickin' archbishop. The man speaks in self-serving gibberish, because he doesn't care about anybody but himself. (See: Multimillion settlement for me, but not for thee!) To Greg, naked ambition is a holy sacrament.

And so one of the tenets of his religion is "blame everything but the guns."

We have a society where the only acceptable emotions for "real" men to display are hate, anger and rage. Is that a mental health crisis? Sure. But add in easy access to military weapons of mass slaughter to help them express that rage. That's the real problem.

And now, the angry men with guns are the shock troops of their religion. The high priests egg on their violence, and some of that is meant to keep the guns from being trained in their own direction.

You realize that's the real reason why everyone's so reluctant to indict Donald Trump, right? Everyone is so afraid of the weaponized rage of the men with guns.

Democracy held hostage.