‘You 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.
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