by Jeffrey Lord
Another day, another mass shooting.
The other week, it was a school in Nashville. This time, a killer launched on a bank in Louisville where he had been employed.
And, but of course, the instant cry goes up from the Left: It’s the guns! The guns, the guns, the guns!
But is it? Guns, after all, are inanimate objects. They don’t shoot all by themselves. They need a person to pull the trigger.
So the obvious question is: What drives a shooter to engage in mass killing? What causes a shooter to look at his or her intended victims and not understand the sacredness of the life in from of them?
Could it be … just maybe, perhaps, might be … that there is a cultural something in America that induces a shooter to not see the value of the lives he or she has busily set about destroying en masse?
If so, what cultural something might that be?
Let’s say the word liberals refuse to say: abortion.
The difference between the two is stark. Guns, as noted, are inanimate objects. Abortions, in contrast, are focused exclusively on a decidedly animate object — an unborn baby in its mother’s womb. An unborn baby who sonogram technology and science confirm is a living human being. A life.
And as the turmoil over the repeal of Roe v. Wade illustrates vividly, the Left holds the taking of the life in the womb as just one big no big deal. The life inside is degraded as nothing more than a “fetus,” an inconvenient cluster of cells that can easily be eliminated without consequence. Abortion is not about a life — it’s about a choice.
The obvious question, which the Left will furiously deny, is whether or not that disregard for human life which is at the center of the abortion movement has become so ingrained in American culture that mass shooters have absorbed the exact same belief.
To say the least, making the decision to walk into a school or bank or anywhere else and kill anyone who crosses the shooter’s path is, yes indeed, a choice. Say again, a choice.
But don’t wait for some officeholder out there to make the case that the “pro-choice” movement has become so infused in American culture that it has wound up producing mass shooters who made their choice to take human lives with a gun.
One can only imagine the fury that would be loosed by the Left on the politician who tied the culture of abortion to mass shootings, with a proposal attached to restrict abortion, as the Reagan proposal went, to cases of rape, incest, and when the health of the mother is at stake. A proposal that would make clear that the unborn baby is, in fact, a human life. And by extension make clear that all human life is to be valued, whether it is targeted by an abortion or a gun.
The bottom line? The pro-choice movement is strong enough to not only preserve “the right to choose,” but it may also be guaranteeing a mindset that allows a prospective mass shooter to believe that his or her mass shooting is just an exciting no big deal.
It’s a choice, silly.
All of which is to say, this is all yet again an illustration of the old wisdom to be careful what you wish for.
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Jeffrey Lord, a contributing editor to The American Spectator, is a former aide to Ronald Reagan and Jack Kemp. An author and former CNN commentator, he writes from Pennsylvania at [email protected]. His new book, Swamp Wars: Donald Trump and The New American Populism vs. The Old Order, is now out from Bombardier Books.
Photo “Held at Gunpoint” by Skitterphoto.
