In his excellent Saturday post, Charles Cooke referred us to The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik’s now-viral screed on the “madness of guns.” In the midst of his rather predictable rhetoric, I ran across this overheated declaration:
After the Aurora killings, I did a few debates with advocates for the child-killing lobby—sorry, the gun lobby—and, without exception and with a mad vehemence, they told the same old lies: it doesn’t happen here more often than elsewhere (yes, it does); more people are protected by guns than killed by them (no, they aren’t—that’s a flat-out fabrication); guns don’t kill people, people do; and all the other perverted lies that people who can only be called knowing accessories to murder continue to repeat, people who are in their own way every bit as twisted and crazy as the killers whom they defend. (That they are often the same people who pretend outrage at the loss of a single embryo only makes the craziness still crazier.)
While there is much to be said about this string of slanders, let’s be crystal clear about one thing. Every law-abiding gun-owner I’ve ever met in my entire life is not only utterly opposed to the taking of innocent life, they aspire to defend innocent life at the risk of their own (though of course, no one knows how they’ll respond to a crisis until the crisis actually comes). Despite his obvious and overwhelming sense of outrage, Mr. Gopnik can’t say the same. If he is “pro-choice,” he in fact believes that some innocent life not only shouldn’t be defended, but that fellow citizens should have a constitutional right to take that life on a whim.