As during a Texas church shooting on Sunday, guns save lives, so supporting the Second Amendment is pro-life. Abortion, on the other hand, takes a life every single time.
Studies on incidents of defensive gun use range anywhere from an absurdly low 55,000 to a high of 4.7 million per year. The most commonly cited and widely accepted is the 1995 study by Gary Kleck and Marc Gertz, which estimates that between 2.1 and 2.5 million defensive gun use instances occur in the United States each year.
By contrast, from 1993-2011, nonfatal firearm-related crime ranged between 1,287,190 and 331,618 incidents per year. This data makes a strong case that defensive gun use is much more common than firearm-related crime. Instances of defensive gun use save lives every day, but the stories get very little news coverage, while the statistically much fewer negative gun uses are often covered by the national news media for days on end.
PoliceOne’s Gun Policy and Law Enforcement survey, which was conducted in March 2013, received more than 15,000 responses from verified police professionals. The survey found that almost 90 percent of police agree mass shootings would be “reduced” or “avoided altogether” by the presence of legally armed citizens. It is also not a coincidence that the huge majority of mass shootings take place in gun-free zones.
To actually save lives, we need a lot fewer gun-free zones and a lot more abortion-free zones. The most recent abortion data available from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is for 2015. It shows there were 638,169 legal, induced abortions reported to the CDC from 49 reporting areas. It’s important to note that states and areas are not required to report their abortion data to the CDC, and the large state of California doesn’t at all, so these numbers are certainly underestimated.
Citing stats from the Federal Bureau of Investigation for 2016 and the Guttmacher Institute for 2014, the pro-life organization Live Action states that 7,741 Americans were killed by guns in one year while 926,200 children were killed in the womb in one year. The facts clearly show that abortion is far deadlier than firearms.
There is also strong statistical and circumstantial evidence that abortion is very often carried out in a way that is both racist and sexist. From the 2015 CDC data, black Americans accounted for 36 percent of abortions while only making up about 13 percent of the U.S. population. In very liberal New York City, more black children were aborted than were born alive in 2015.
Why do the statistics show that black Americans are disproportionately targeted? Isn’t it wrong and a form of racism to encourage the abortion of a black child in the womb because his life holds no value to you?
Sex-selective abortion is clearly discrimination against women, and it’s not just happening in China and India. Current estimates are that as many as 200 million girls may have been victims of sex-selective abortion worldwide.
Undercover investigations of U.S. Planned Parenthood abortion clinics by Live Action have documented clinic workers at multiple locations supporting sex-selective abortions. In response, Planned Parenthood issued a statement saying they are against gender bias, but in practice Planned Parenthood seems to support abortion for any reason. The United Kingdom bans sex-selective abortion, but the United States does not have a nationwide law against it.
Less than 1 percent of abortions are due to rape, incest, or a risk to the life of the mother, yet those who are pro-choice use this argument 99 percent of the time to justify killing children in the womb.
Upholding our Second Amendment rights and an increased presence of legally armed citizens will without a doubt save lives. Reducing and ultimately ending abortion will, without a doubt, also save lives, especially of women and black Americans.
