And in the aftermath of the tragedy at
"This cannot be a political issue. We have to have smart gun safety laws -- our babies are being slaughtered," Harris tweeted.
It was a slaughter. It was preventable. The
The political left, to which Harris belongs, seeks political advantage in public grief, and has vigorously condemned those who support the Second Amendment as being part of a culture of death.
And
It's all being sold this way: as a battle of rights, between the right to bear arms and the rights of the students to life as America approaches the 2018 midterm elections.
And those who don't quickly move to "do something" to weaken the Second Amendment are vilified as moral cowards, as gun nuts in support of the death culture.
Yet there is another culture of death. It is a culture where the lives of other innocent children are also taken -- you might say they're slaughtered -- every day.
Abortion.
Estimates suggest there have been between 50 million and 60 million abortions since the Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade in 1973.
And if 50 million to 60 million souls are not evidence of a culture of death, I don't know what is.
By and large, in media and assisted by their liberal
And those who oppose abortion are quickly marginalized by the left, and mocked on TV as the crazy people who listen to Jesus.
Abortion rates have dropped in the
I'm not going to change your minds over abortion or guns. We're locked into our positions, and we tend to shame those who get in our way. That's politics too.
The left vilifies the
The right points out (although you don't much see this in the news) that abortion rights groups such as
And somewhere in the middle are the American people, seeking commonsense answers on guns and abortion.
Perhaps those who are on pharmaceuticals to control their depression or other mental illness should be prohibited from owning guns, or even from driving, since we now see that vehicles can be deadly weapons. Some people simply stop taking their meds and pose a danger to others. Yet I'm told my idea lacks common sense.
But there is a commonsense idea from
GVRO bills are coming up through the states. Ideally, a GVRO would permit parents, spouses, siblings or others living with a mentally unstable person to seek a court order allowing law enforcement to temporarily take that person's guns away.
It would protect the rights of the individual by allowing him or her to contest those claims, and set a time limit that would expire, unless the petitioners provide additional evidence.
That seems reasonable, doesn't it?
Now what about applying common sense to abortion?
One idea involves the phrase hated by the left, "fetal viability."
After 20 weeks, a mother can see her baby on an ultrasound. Fathers, too.
Parents can see the face and the hands and the beating heart of their child. Once they see this, what they're looking at is not some collection of tissue. It is a life. And advances in medical science have made it possible so that some babies born prematurely can live out of the womb after 22 weeks.
"Women have the constitutional right to make their own decisions about reproductive health,"
In the battle of rights, whose life is protected, whose rights are suspended?
Those high school students in
Do some lives have more rights, because they are older and more powerful, leaving others with fewer or no rights, because they cannot speak or use bullhorns to shout, to tell us that they, too, are alive?
We're all shouting now, aren't we?
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John Kass is a columnist for the Chicago Tribune who also hosts a radio show on WLS-AM.