Rhetorical Question: “How did abortion get banned faster than assault weapons? Asking for all the victims of mass shootings.”

A. It didn’t. Abortion is not banned in these United States, and Dobbs did not make any abortion practice illegal.

B. “Assault rifles” are not easily definable — because the term is arbitrarily used as a synonym for “scary looking guns” — and even the ones that are “banned” are available.

C. Abortion, like mass shootings, are forms of homicide. The latter is illegal in every state, and some forms of abortion are illegal in some states — and all over Europe and elsewhere, too. But making a form of homicide illegal is not the same as making a specific instrument of lethality illegal. For an exact parallel between these issues, opponents of abortion would not be content to make abortion illegal, but would also make illegal drugs such as mifepristone and misoprostol, as well as speculums, suction catheters and suction machines, laminaria, and curettes. And other devices and drugs and instruments. “Suction catheters” and “suction machines” are probably the most “assault weapony” of these, but all of these are used — and more. I have never heard an anti-abortion advocate call for the prohibition of any of these, though back in the RU-486 days, this was on the table for a few minutes.

D. The comparison is witless.

E. Oh, and more people are killed by abortionists each year than by murderers using “assault weapons.” But we don’t see the bodies of the dead, and their stories do not get any play on the news, so we forget them. We never knew them. They are, to us, forever dead.

twv