Yes, You Can Be Pro-Life and Pro-AR-15

‘Y ou cannot be pro-life and pro-AR15 at the same time.” So says Stanford professor Michael McFaul, echoing a line that is thrown around the political arena each and every time Americans debate gun control. Like those whom he is channeling, McFaul is wrong. Worse still, he is repeating a cheap slogan that is designed to appeal to people who are neither pro-life nor pro-AR-15, and, in turn, to short-circuit the debate with half-witted question-begging. The sole effect of McFaul’s contribution will be to have made us all dumber and less precise in our thinking.

McFaul’s claim rests upon a comparison of apples and oranges from which there is no coming back. Abortion is a process that, as with suicide or euthanasia or murder, causes every person at whom it is directed to die. It is true, of course, that many practitioners of abortion think that they are killing a life of no value, or that they are killing a life of less value than their own. But, irrespective of their moral calculations, they are indisputably still killing. To abort a baby is to stop it living, growing, and, eventually, being born. That is the point — and the sole point — of the procedure.

A gun, by contrast, is a tool — like scissors, or vacuums. Those tools can kill, yes. But they don’t always. There is a reason that you don’t hear pro-choicers saying, “You can’t be pro-life and pro-scissors” and that reason is that you quite obviously can be both things. You just can’t be pro-life and pro-murdering unborn babies with scissors. The same rule applies to guns. I have many guns, and, while they are indeed all capable of inflicting horrible damage, I have never hurt a single person with any of them. As with scissors, I can absolutely be pro-life and keep those guns for my defense; I just can’t be pro-life and murder people with them.

At this point in the discussion, the McFauls of the world usually zoom out a little and say, “Okay, maybe you’re right about yourself, but other people use AR-15s to kill, and, as an opponent of their prohibition, you do not wish to stop that.” But this, too, is silly. For a start, for a person to be against the process of abortion does not mandate that he must be against the private ownership of all dangerous items. There are between 15 and 20 million “assault weapons” in private hands in the United States, and they are used in at most 200 murders per year. Knives, by contrast, are used in around 1,500. I wonder: Can I not be pro-life and pro-cutlery?

Besides, even if one were to concede that AR-15s differ from knives in that they have no purpose other than to kill, McFaul’s submission raises a couple of crucial questions to which the gun-control movement does not have good answers. The first question is whether, in the real world, a ban on AR-15s would indeed “stop” or reduce the deaths that they cause. There are more than 400 million privately owned guns in the United States, and their ownership is protected by a constitutional provision that is understood and supported by 80 percent of the population. Even if the federal government were somehow to craft a plan of which McFaul approved, the chance that it would be perfectly implemented is precisely nil. All too often, gun-control advocates start their entreaties with the presumption that, à la Thomas Paine, Americans have it within their power to “begin the world over again.” But, as Prohibition demonstrated, this is not true. Here, as elsewhere, the practical question before us is what would change within our tough-to-alter system if we changed our rules. And, here as elsewhere, the answers to this question are extremely complex. Reviewing the available evidence in 2020, the RAND Corporation concluded that there was no evidence that banning “assault weapons” would have any effect on murders or mass-shootings in either direction. Are pro-life advocates of the Second Amendment supposed to simply ignore that?

The second question is how pro-lifers should regard the role of firearms in preserving life. During an average year, Americans use guns in self-defense between 100,000 and 2 million times. Even to accept the (suspiciously) low numbers within that range — and there is no problem in our doing so, given that they are promulgated by the gun-control movement itself — is to grasp that there is a large number of moving parts here that McFaul’s construction simply refuses to admit. Add in that tens of millions of Americans believe that they have a duty to own firearms as a deterrent against tyranny — a theory that, as in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, could only be proven or disproven in the real world — and we should begin to see the scale of the error. Judging by his other statements, McFaul seems dismissive of this latter argument, which, given how well he understands tyranny, is odd. But he does not have to agree with his critics’ estimations in order to comprehend that there is nothing inconsistent about believing simultaneously that we should not be killing unborn children and that the lesson of the enormously bloody 20th century is that it’s a bad idea for a citizenry to disarm itself.

Ultimately, McFaul’s proposition fails for the same reason so many glib gun-control slogans fail: It grossly misrepresents the viewpoint to which it is pretending to respond. Inherent in queries such as “What if it were your child?” or “What if you were shot?” or “What if you knew the victim?” is the assumption that the opponents of gun control quietly agree with most of the supporters’ proposals but are simply too selfish or solipsistic or lacking in empathy to admit it. They are not, and neither are the many adherents of the pro-life movement, whose starting point is that the deliberate killing of innocent human beings is wrong, and whose conclusions beyond that position cannot be reduced to idle musings of the sort that might fit neatly onto a bumper sticker.