I can empathize with someone who thinks that aborting a baby, at any time under any circumstances, is murder. I don’t agree with it, but I get it. It must be a really deep-rooted emotionally-fueled opinion that they can’t just shake. Even if they have some conflicting intellectual thoughts, like the well-being of the mother, they are shadowed by a foundational instinct that aborting the baby is murder.

What I can’t square is when a person like that is also pro-gun. I’m not trying to judge, I’m trying to understand it, and I come up short. So many guns are designed for murder. They have a single job and it’s the murder of humans. Pro-gun meaning against any sort of restriction or expanded limitation on what kind of guns can be bought and used and by whom.

If you are really deeply against murder, you’d think you’d also be really deeply against guns literally designed for mass murder. And yet that doesn’t seem the case. There is, it seems to me, a weird amount of overlap between pro-life and pro-gun.

That’s gotta be some of the fuel for this massive divide in people. It feels so disingenuous to hold both positions. Like hypocrisy with deadly results. Even if it’s unfair, it seems like perhaps the truth is really that they don’t really care about mothers or babies, they care about fitting in at church. Or perhaps more charitably, they feel that restricting guns won’t be an effective solution to preventing murder, despite all evidence to the contrary.

I do want to understand because I people don’t wake up and be like I’m gonna be a hypocrite today! They feel they are good, they are right, and they have reasons holding the opinions they do. So how is it done? How does one person look at a kid and say, yes, you can walk into a store and buy an AR-15 today, that’s fine, then look at another kid and say, no, you are not allowed to terminate your pregnancy, that is not OK.

I think I can see how they might think the hypocrisy actually works in the other direction. As in, how can someone think they have the right to terminate a pregnancy but not have the right to buy a gun. Like it is a contradiction in liberties. I don’t know, I don’t get it. I do think it’s weird that the isn’t more pro-life-anti-gun people, and more pro-choice-pro-gun people, as those seem to align more logically in my brain.

You could even wrap COVID up into this and make it even more divisive. The “logical” grouping would be pro-life-anti-gun-mandatory-masks (save all lives!) opposite pro-choice-pro-gun-optional-masks (ultimate freedom!) but that is definitely not how it shakes out.

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