The horrific Las Vegas shooting has once again brought the debate over the Second Amendment to the Constitution to the forefront in American society. It was an act of evil that is hard to stomach, as 59 people were slaughtered, and more than 200 others injured. Some day we may know the motives of the shooter. Some day we may know how he had access to the kinds of weapons he used to kill all these people.
In social media, it is easy to post "memes", single pictures with captions that attempt - often in snarky fashion - to make a profound point. I saw one today that said, "The uterus is more regulated than assault weapons." The idea, of course, is that we make a woman's body harder for her to control than we make it for people to have access to these weapons that can kill many people in seconds.
Memes are sometimes clever. The pictures and snarky words are meant to catch your attention, but they really don't do much to actually make an argument. I will give this one credit, however - it's made me enter the conversation, albeit in a much more serious way.
So let's take a minute and talk about this.
According to recent statistics, there are approximately 29,000 gun deaths a year in the United States (homicide, suicide, and accident). More than 19,000 of these are suicides. That is a lot of people. That would be like every citizen of the town of Branford, CT (2010 population of 28,026) dying from a gun-related death every year.
That's a staggering number, really, if you think of it that way. One in every 11,000 citizens in the US will die a gun-related death every year.
But now you need to sit down and take a deep breath. Do you know how many abortions take place every year in the United States? According to the Guttmacher Institute, there were 926,200 reported abortions in 2014. Nearly a million abortions per year in the United States.
The number of unborn children killed by abortion is nearly thirty-two TIMES the number of people killed annually in gun-related incidents. It's like entering the cities of Baltimore, MD (2016 population of 614,664) and St. Louis, MO (2016 population of 311,204) and killing them. Every year.
These are the gruesome facts. We can argue whether or not the woman's right to terminate her pregnancy should trump her unborn child's right to live, but the fact is, abortion kills her unborn child. That's its purpose.
Due to the Second Amendment, US citizens who pass through the screening process have the right to own firearms, even certain kinds of assault rifles. It's built into our Constitution. That does NOT, of course, give them the right to murder people with them. People often take lawfully-owned guns and use them in very unlawful ways. To the tune of 29,000 deaths a year, people use guns to kill people (themselves or others).
Due not to a right built into the Constitution but rather to a Supreme Court ruling in 1973 (Roe v. Wade), women have the right to abort their unborn children. And to the tune of 926,000 deaths a year, women use abortion to kill their unborn children.
If we want to talk about how our laws in this country open the door to death, death, and more death, and if we want to make the comparison of government regulation of guns and the uterus, then let's honestly talk about it. Abortion is by FAR a greater killer of human life than guns. It would take nearly 32 years' worth of gun deaths to equal one year's worth of abortions.
Yes, let's talk about this. By all means.
