Pro-Life. Pro-Gun. Choose
If you really believe in the sanctity of life & protecting the most vulnerable in our society, then gun-control legislation & enforcement should be championed
In researching and writing about the abortion issue I came across these sentiments from various pro-life activists and organizations:
Pro-life. The sanctity of life. Saving babies lives. Love the babies. Atmosphere of life. Cherish life. Life before birth. Protect the rights of the unborn. Protect the most vulnerable people in our society. Fetus’s rights are human rights. The dignity of every person, including and especially every child. The pro-life movement is about the value and equality of all human beings. The belief that all human life is created equal regardless of size, level of development, education, and degree of dependency.
Contrast this pro-life language with this data from a recent New England Journal of Medicine article published on May 19, 2022, tracking the leading causes of death among children and adolescents (age 1-19) in the United States, 1999 through 2020:
Firearm related injury has now surpassed fatalities from motor vehicle crashes, drug overdoses, drowning, and other causes. The data comes from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and includes a staggering total of 45,222 firearm-related deaths in the United States in 2020 alone, an all-time high. The authors of the new study report:
Although previous analyses have shown increases in firearm-related mortality in recent years (2015 to 2019), as compared with the relatively stable rates from earlier years (1999 to 2014), these new data show a sharp 13.5% increase in the crude rate of firearm-related death from 2019 to 2020. This change was driven largely by firearm homicides, which saw a 33.4% increase in the crude rate from 2019 to 2020, whereas the crude rate of firearm suicides increased by 1.1%. Given that firearm homicides disproportionately affect younger people in the United States, these data call for an update to the findings of Cunningham et al. regarding the leading causes of death among U.S. children and adolescents.
I am writing this just two days after the massacre of 19 innocent grade-school children and two adults in Uvalde, Texas. Emotions are raw. Like everyone else I’m outraged and can barely think clearly on the matter, which is how it should be. I will write a longer and more rational analysis of guns and gun-control in a forthcoming article in Quillette, but for now allow me to make a few observations that should be obvious to everyone in America, but apparently isn’t given the current response of Republicans—as is always the case with mass public shootings in general and school shootings in particular—to do nothing beyond sending their “thoughts and prayers.”
In the next issue of Skeptic (Vol. 27, No. 2) we focus on Abortion Matters and include the best arguments on both sides. Here is how our pro-life author—a conservative Christian—thinks about the role of government in protecting and saving lives:
The taking of an innocent life is a case where the government should intervene. Why? Because it is the core function of government to protect our right to life, upon which all other rights flow. The right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, as outlined in the Declaration of Independence, is sacrosanct.
Allow me to draw the obvious conclusion in parallel language:
The murder of 19 innocent children by a teenager with a gun, along with the over 45,000 additional lives snuffed out by guns through homicide, suicide, and accidents each year, is a case where the government should intervene. Why? Because it is the core function of government to protect our right to life, upon which all other rights flow. The right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, as outlined in the Declaration of Independence, is sacrosanct.
Why don’t pro-life Republicans make this obvious connection? Where is their consistency of principle? They contrast their own “atmosphere of life” with pro-choice’s “culture of death”. Well, what do you call this?:
Instead we get the usual sanctimonious GOP pabulum like “Guns don’t kill people. People kill people.” Yeah, well, cars don’t kill people. People kill people with cars— 42,915 in 2021, to be exact. Should the government eliminate the licensing and registration of cars and drivers, relax driver education programs, allow cars to be bought and sold at car shows without background checks, allow manufacturers to produce cars without serial numbers that can be tracked, and eliminate air bags, seat belts, speed limits, and other safety features, regulations, and laws implemented to reduce the carnage? These, and many more measures, have worked to reduce the number of automobile fatalities by miles driven, a crucial adjustment since there are more people driving more cars on more roads in more place over the years.
Yes, of course, it’s not a perfect analogy, since cars weren’t designed to kill people. But isn’t that the point? The automobile industry is massively regulated, and for good reason, so most of us readily accept it. Yet guns, for which many types are designed specifically and solely to kill people, deserve less regulation? Why?
I know, I know, there are purportedly already gun-control measures in place, background checks implemented, waiting periods imposed, traceable guns sold, gun-show loopholes plugged, and the like. And yet…
60 dead in Las Vegas, Nevada
49 dead at the Orlando Nightclub, Florida
32 dead at Virginia Tech, Virginia
26 dead at Sandy Hook Elementary School, Newtown, Connecticut
26 dead at Sutherland Springs Church, Texas
23 dead at the El Paso Walmart, Texas
23 dead Luby’s, Kileen, Texas
21 dead at a San Ysidro McDonald's, California
17 dead at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, Florida
15 dead at Columbine High, Colorado
14 dead at the Inland Regional Center in San Bernardino, California
13 dead at Tops Friendly Markets store, Buffalo, New York
12 dead at an theater in Aurora, Colorado
10 dead at Santa Fe High School, Texas
10 dead at Umpqua Community College, Oregon
10 dead at Red Lake Senior High, Minnesota
and, and, and…
and now…
22 dead at Robb Elementary School, Uvalde, Texas
Wikipedia has a table that runs for pages of all the school shootings in just the 21st century, then pages more before 2000, and a long table of mass public shootings in general. If it were not all so painfully tragic one could attempt an ironic headline to capture the idiocy and obstinacy of the ruling classes on this problem. Something like:
‘No Way to Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens
Oh wait, that headline exists—the Onion, of course:
A meme going around the Internet today, which I believe I’ve seen before in conjunction with mass public shootings (unattributed or variously attributed), suggests (in my own wording here) that every young man who wants to purchase a firearm must meet the same standards that young women are required to meet before obtaining an abortion: a mandatory 48-hour waiting period, a note from a physician indicating that he is mentally stable and fully understands the risks involved and the consequences of this decision, has to watch a video about gun violence and all the things that can go wrong that account for the tens of thousands of gun-deaths each year (YouTube has countless videos of people accidentally shooting themselves), and for good measure is exposed to photographs of blood-splattered crime scenes resulting from gun violence. Then, let’s restrict the number of retail gun shops to just a handful per state, so that any would-be gun purchaser has to drive hundreds of miles to get a firearm. And there, approaching the gun store, he’ll have to wend his way through protesters holding signs with pictures of bloody corpses of people who died by gun homicide, suicide, and accident, and the families of victims of gun violence screaming at him to change his mind. Can you imagine Republicans allowing anything remotely like this to happen? Me neither.
And yet, that is exactly the sort of political change that the Republicans have relentlessly pursued over the decades since the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, systematically chipping away at women’s reproductive rights state by state, county by county, city by city, and clinic by clinic, until today with Roe on the chopping block and women facing daunting challenges to their Constitutionally-protected rights to reproductive choice (including, in some states, access to birth control). So Republicans can get things done when they put their principled political minds to it. We just need to convince them that gun control is a pro-life issue.
I’ll have much more to say about this problem when my rational faculties return, so I’ll close here with the unscripted rant by the legendary Golden State Warriors basketball team head coach Steve Kerr (whose father was shot dead in a 1984 terrorism attack in Beirut), which he angrily blurted out in the middle of a press conference after his team’s game in Dallas on the day of the shooting:
So I ask you Mitch McConnell, I ask all of you senators who refuse to do anything about the violence and school shootings...Are you going to put your own desire for power ahead of the lives of our children and our elderly and our churchgoers?
So far, the answer appears to be: Yes.
Just as the majority of Americans support abortion rights and oppose overturning Roe, the majority of Americans support gun control legislation. So far the GOP leadership has flipped the middle finger to the vox populi, instead preferring to take their marching orders from holy scripture and monied lobbyists.
Let’s see what we can do to change that, starting with challenging those who claim to be pro-life to expand the moral sphere of their empathy and compassion to include already-born children, along with adolescents and adults, and truly commit to the belief, in the pro-life language with which I began this commentary, that “all human life is created equal regardless of size, level of development, education, and degree of dependency.”
All. Human. Life.
Michael Shermer is the Publisher of Skeptic magazine, a Presidential Fellow at Chapman University where he teaches Skepticism 101: How to Think Like a Scientist, and the host of The Michael Shermer Show. His books include: Why People Believe Weird Things, The Believing Brain, The Moral Arc, Heavens on Earth, and Giving the Devil His Due. His next book is Conspiracy: Why the Rational Believe the Irrational.
The New England Journal of Medicine "article" cited by Shermer is actually a letter to the editor written by three gun-control activists. It wasn't peer-reviewed and contains many statements that are simply false. Of course mainstream media, who are always desperate to find any support for gun control, widely disseminated the claims of the authors anyway.
Analyze the data [1] for yourself. There were a total of 43,676 gun-related deaths in 2020, excluding instances where the shooter was a police officer. Of those deaths, 56% (24,292) were suicides. The 19,384 homicides were less than half the number of motor vehicle fatalities (40,698). The CDC data are consistent with a report [2] in the Harvard Political Review, which noted that suicides accounted for nearly two-thirds of the gun deaths in 2019.
While the letter to the New England Journal of Medicine is flawed, there has been a large increase in violence in America during the past two years. From January 1st to April 10th of this year, robberies in the New York transit system are up more than 70% year over year. Felony assaults in the subway have increased by 28%. Grand larceny is up by more than 100%. The problem isn't more guns. More American families had guns at home 50 years ago than they do now. According to the Rand Corporation, 45% of American homes had a gun in 1980. In 2016, that percentage had dropped to 32%. The problem is that people have become more violent, and Democrats have increasingly removed the major deterrent to crime by refusing to prosecute criminals.
The use of antidepressants in this country is increasing dramatically. Between 1991 and 2018, the total consumption of Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), the most commonly prescribed antidepressants, increased in the US by more than 3,000%. In Canada, state-funded antidepressant prescriptions for young people doubled over the last decade. During the COVID lockdowns, SSRI prescriptions increased by more than 20%. More than 107,000 Americans died of drug overdoses in 2021. That's the highest annual death toll ever recorded and a 15% increase from the year before.
So, people are more depressed, more unstable, more suicidal, and, in some cases, more dangerous to others. In addition, people are increasingly disconnected from other human beings. In 2020, adults in the United States spent an average of 8 hours every day on digital media staring at a screen. That's a 20% jump from 2019. The lockdowns made it worse, especially for school-age kids, who were the least likely to spread or suffer from COVID yet were often subjected to the most severe isolation.
One of the people who spent a lot of time online during the pandemic was the shooter in Uvalde. The shooter in Buffalo also spent a lot of time online. In fact, he blamed the Internet for radicalizing him: "I spent almost a year planning this attack," he wrote on April 26. "Oh, how time flies. If I could go back, maybe I'd tell myself to get the f off 4Chan and the worldtruthvideos and get an actual life. Too late for that now."
Both shooters were detached from their peers and families, and both were mentally ill. We should be focused on what makes people like them dangerous, and how we can better help them, rather than blaming the inanimate objects they used to commit murder. If they hadn't used a gun, they would have substituted a knife, crowbar, bomb, arson, or, like the murderer in Waukesha, a car.
As Democrats try to use the recent mass shootings to justify pushing gun control legislation that would outlaw rifles such as the popular AR-15 platform, it’s worth noting that knives, clubs, hands and feet actually kill more people than rifles. If you examine the 2019 FBI homicide data [3], the vast majority of gun deaths do not involve the dreaded semiautomatic rifles Democrats want to ban. Only 364 people were killed by rifles out of 10,258 gun deaths that year, and not all of those rifles were semiautomatic. For comparison, 600 people were killed in 2019 by the use of hands or feet, and 1,476 were killed by use of a knife. More people (397) were killed by the use of a blunt object, such as a hammer or bat, than were killed by rifles.
As is always the case with mass public shootings in general and school shootings in particular, the response of the Democrats, besides trying to exploit the tragedy for political gain, is to do nothing but call for more of the sort of gun control legislation that failed to prevent these shootings in the first place. Regions where the Democrats are in charge and have implemented the strictest gun laws, such as Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York, have the highest homicide rates in the country.
Shermer says that "gun control is a pro-life issue," but more lives are saved by guns than are taken by them. More than 2 million lives [4] are saved each year when potential victims use a gun to defend themselves. That's over 5,000 lives saved each day, and far more than the number of gun homicides. In most cases, simply brandishing a gun is enough to send an attacker running.
Shermer: "I'll have much more to say about this problem when my rational faculties return." When it comes to this problem, Shermer's faculties have been missing for decades and seem unlikely to appear. Mental illness, drug abuse and broken families can lead to violence. Part of the appeal of gun control is the simplicity of its narrative, but it ignores the real drivers of homicide. Politicians and pundits should devote more time and resources to policies that might actually reduce violence, rather than simple-minded tropes that are politically expedient but help no one.
1. https://wisqars.cdc.gov/data/analyze-compare/home
2. https://harvardpolitics.com/suicide-gun-related-deaths/
3. https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-2019
4. https://www.theepochtimes.com/gun-control-myths-how-politicians-the-media-and-botched-studies-ignore-basic-facts-on-gun-control-larry-elder_4336405.html
I love the connection you’ve made between gun violence and abortion. So obvious. I’m mad at myself for not thinking of it.
Anyway, for my brief comment on gun control, I offer the text of a yet to be published letter-to-the-editor I sent to the local paper.
The Second Amendment, which established the right to bear arms, is moot. And it has been for over 100 years. In 1903, HR 11,654, “a bill to promote the efficiency of the militia and for other purposes, and to replace the Militia Law of 1792," was passed into law. It became known as the Dick Act.
The Act, with its subsequent amendments, effectively did away with the militia in the 2nd Amendment. It set up the National Guard and Reserves in its place.
“Arms” means weapons of war. Arms are used by an army and kept in an armory. “Present Arms” is a command in the military.
There are those, of course, who want the 2nd Amendment to say something that it doesn’t say, that it is the right to own guns for any purpose. But rendering the 2nd Amendment inoperable doesn’t mean there is no right to own guns.
That right is a matter of common law or one of the unenumerated rights in the 9th Amendment: “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.” – like owning guns.
Congress has the power to regulate commerce. A common use of that power is to assure that products are safe. Guns, by their nature, are not safe. Therefore, Congress is free to establish such rules as are necessary to make guns safe, including the manufacture, sale, use, and conditions of ownership. If only they would.
As Alexander Hamilton wisely observed, “When the sword is once drawn, the passions of men observe no bounds of moderation”