Brothers and Sisters, Peace be with you.
Like many of you, I've been perusing the more "thoughtful" introspections by writers of national recognition. One by Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker's blog caught my eye. It's titled Newtown and the Madness of Guns. Here's an excerpt:
The people who fight and lobby and legislate to make guns regularly available are complicit in the murder of those children. They have made a clear moral choice: that the comfort and emotional reassurance they take from the possession of guns, placed in the balance even against the routine murder of innocent children, is of supreme value. Whatever satisfaction gun owners take from their guns—we know for certain that there is no prudential value in them—is more important than children’s lives. Give them credit: life is making moral choices, and that’s a moral choice, clearly made.You know, if I were to replace the subject of these sentences "...the people who fight and lobby and legislate to make guns regularly available" and "gun owners" by "the abortion industry," the sentences would still be true.
I submit to you that one factor that ended in the killing of so many innocents is the low regard we have for human life in this country, that is, for those least able to defend and proclaim their own right to live, to grow, and to contribute to the life of our country. There's no difference between killing a child inside a womb, or killing him or her outside the womb. None whatsoever. The objective of abortion is the same as the Newtown's murderer: to kill innocent, defenseless children with the same cold efficiency that an abortion doctor and assistants sport when killing a child in utero.
In 2008, the latest date for which data are available, there were 825,564 abortions reported to the Center for Disease Control. That's a rough average of 2,646 "Newtowns" every month. But who cries for them, other than their mothers? Those who do are labeled "fanatics" and "extremists" and those who do the labeling would be the first to deny that the abortion industry is a mill of death for hundred of thousands of children who had the same right to live as the angels who once lived, and have now departed, Newtown Connecticut.
Since we, as a society, hold life in such a low esteem, should we be surprised when these massacres take place? No, I don't think so. Should we expect these to happen again despite draconian gun control measures? As they've done in China, the crazies will just look for other weapons. In China, where abortion is mandatory after one live pregnancy and where girls are aborted at a higher rate than boys.
As the days go by more evidence will come to light that the shooter in Connecticut was mentally ill. But he acted with the same cold calculation an abortionist has when killing a baby in her mother's womb, and the abortionist does it when supposedly sane. If young, human life is cheap, whether a baby lives inside or outside the womb is irrelevant. The shooter made the connection and acted upon it. He may have been insane, but he made the connection.
Laws will be passed, perhaps some gun control measures similar to the last ones, riddled with enough loopholes to make them meaningless. Questions have been asked from gun control advocates regarding the shooter's weapon of choice and its availability under the previous gun control law. The answer has been, "it's complicated." Which means that no, that the gun used by the Newtown shooter would not have been banned under the previous law. No matter, a new law will pass, politicians will congratulate themselves and run on that "record", and we will once again be lulled into a false sense of security. The set is ready for a new charade.
Massacres like this will happen again, or course. It doesn't matter how many guns are banned or even confiscated. The problem is the Culture of Death that holds human life cheap from the moment of its conception to that of natural death. I repeat, the best way to prevent these tragedies is to adopt a thorough, deep, and proactive life-affirming, life-protecting ethos, where human beings may develop without the threat of untimely, arbitrary death from the moment of conception to that of natural death. Not only we would have prevented school massacres then, but also understood our moral obligations toward the poor, the alien, the orphan, and the infirm (the biblical protected classes) under a new light.
Only when our nation embraces a truly prolife ethic, we will see a new dawn of freedom and domestic happiness the like we haven't seen before, and may never see again, unless we act now with speed and righteousness.
*Revised, 12/19/2012.