While I have no problem with the administration conversing with religious leaders, the fact that the media isn’t up in arms about this should send a chill down your spine. Why? Because the White House is directing faith leaders to preach about politics from the pulpit! Isn’t that a breach of the separation of church and state? Why is the political left not upset about this? Wasn’t this mix of faith and politics precisely what prompted the media to lash out at Catholic priests who were telling “their flocks” that the HHS mandate was morally wrong? Weren’t pastors who reminded their congregations that abortion and same-sex marriage are offensive to God during the 2012 presidential election accused of preaching politics from the pulpit? Why the radio silence?

If, as the AP report indicates, Vice President Biden “wants pastors, rabbis and nuns to tell their flocks” to keep “up the pressure” by re-framing ”the debate for their followers in moral terms,” doesn’t that make him guilty of breaking the first commandment of liberalism: Thou shall respect the separation of church and state? Apparently not. Apparently the wall of separation between church and state is only visible when a Republican is president. What a sad day for America.

Nevertheless, as a Catholic theologian, I am troubled by accounts suggesting that Catholics who don’t support the U.S. bishops on gun control are akin to Catholics who disagree with fundamental moral teachings like contraception, abortion and marriage.

Read more here.

They did WHAT to babies’ necks?

I’ve been beating a particular drum lately because of the confluence of topics in the national conversation: gun violence in a few spectacular cases on the one hand, and the horror that has taken place at a particular abortion clinic on the other.

A guest post in the Chicago Tribune adds to the conversation.

As you read this piece, try something: in your mind, read all references to abortions-gone-wrong as “gun violence,” all references to abortion clinics as “gun clubs,” all references to Planned Parenthood as “gun manufacturers and retailers,” and all references to the abortion lobby as “the NRA.”

If you can do this successfully, imagine then the hue and cry that would dominate the news cycles for weeks until the Second Amendment were repealed and all gun owners jailed.

Some choice excerpts below (all bolding mine), but I recommend that you read it all.

“We have no idea how many facilities like Gosnell’s have remained out of sight, out of mind of [the Department of Health] for decades,” the [Philadelphia grand jury] report concluded. The department inspected Gosnell’s clinic only “sporadically” from 1978 to 1993 and never again until 2010. Why? Because “officials concluded that inspections would be ‘putting a barrier up to women’ seeking abortions,” the report said. Added an agency lawyer, “People die.”

…

The abortion industry tut-tuts it all as a deplorable, yet a single, isolated incident. It ignores the clinics being investigated for botched abortions or hazardous facilities in Alabama, New Mexico, Minnesota, Maryland, Colorado and Florida. There may be more, since abortion record-keeping is abysmal.

Even Illinois, by law, doesn’t keep records of infants born alive during an abortion, an Illinois Department of Public Health spokeswoman said in an email. Amazingly, Illinois abortion clinics hadn’t been inspected for up to 15 years before the Gosnell case broke, an Associated Press investigation found.

…

In a fog of excuses for their failures, that clinic and the Northern Illinois Women’s Center in Rockford surrendered their licenses last year. That’s two out of nine clinics with serious health and safety problems — 22 percent of the state’s pregnancy termination centers. Hardly isolated incidents.

Then there is last year’s Tonya Reaves case; she allegedly bled for more than five hours from a uterine perforation in a Planned Parenthood office in Chicago before paramedics were called, too late to save her.

Astonishingly, the state health department doesn’t regulate Planned Parenthood — the nation’s largest abortion provider.

…

Today, who can confidently say exactly how carefully abortion clinics are regulated and inspected? Where are the independent audits, newspaper investigations, legislative hearings and proposals to strengthen those regulations? The abortion industry remains one of Illinois’ most powerful lobbies, frustrating any attempt to further protect women and infants from exploitation of the likes of Gosnell and who knows who else? Whether from apathy or outright hostility against pro-life advocates, we’ve placed too much trust in abortionists and their friends to regulate themselves.

Dear Lord, the shrieks that would justifiably be coming from so many quarters if the various federal and state agencies had so utterly failed or simply refused to execute the laws on the books for fear of restricting access, or if actual gun lobbies and actual gun manufacturers and retailers protected this manner of carnage by resisting all regulation of this Constitutional right!

There *are* regulatory laws on the books in both cases that have been ignored by law enforcement.

In 2010, 15,000 felons and fugitives attempted to illegally purchase firearms. Of those 15,000, only 44 were prosecuted by Eric Holder’s Justice Department. MOAR LAWS will not close that gap.

More restrictive gun laws and expanded background checks will not take the guns out of the hands of criminals. They’re criminals. The gun may be more expensive as the market tightens, but the criminal will pay it, especially since the same law means law-abiding citizens will reliably be lightly armed sitting ducks, less likely or able to shoot back.

With abortion laws, we have the message loud and clear from the grand jury report: “Officials concluded that inspections would be ‘putting a barrier up to women’ seeking abortions.” Making sure women got their abortion was more important than making sure women were not treated worse than cattle going to the slaughter.

But for effect, let’s edit that sentence a little: “Officials concluded that an assault weapons ban would be ‘putting up a barrier to citizens’ purchasing weapons.”

Jarring, no?

Some might say “back-alley abortions” are the equivalent in my equivalency  to illegal gun purchases? Well, two things:

1) Abortion always takes an innocent human life and harms the mother even when done in optimal conditions, while guns only do so when misused and/or used illegally (i.e., there is never a time when abortion is good, while self-defense is clearly a good use of a gun).

2) Some claim that the reason women were forced to Gosnell was poor access to abortion due to poverty, the solution being expanded access to abortion, presumably through government dollars. That’s equivalent to saying, “Too many people are doing dangerous things to acquire the guns they feel they need so we need expand access to them.” No matter about people dying anyhow because, as the agency lawyer quoted in the grand jury report said, “People die.”

The question we should be asking is not, “Why were women forced to go to Gosnell?” but, “How could someone like Kermit Gosnell do what he did and get away with it for so long?”

A huge reason gun rights supporters oppose almost anything the government proposes these days is precisely because the government has proven itself incapable of such bedrock responsibilities as protecting the innocent and promoting liberty, but entirely devoted to expanding and protecting the made-up “right” to abortion and the control that same government has over everyone’s lives.

Say what you will, but resisting this topsy-turvy governance is precisely what the Second Amendment is there for.

As reported by the NCReporter, Cardinal Dolan was asked whether the reform process should be slowed down due to the immigration history of the Boston bombers. He said this:

That’s just illogical, for a number of reasons. First of all, just out of common sense, to label a whole group of people, mainly the vast population of hardworking, reliable, virtuous immigrants, to label them and to demean them because of the vicious tragic action of two people is just ridiculous. That’s illogical. That’s unfair. That’s unjust.

It would seem so…

Emily wrote keenly yesterday that measures proposed currently as “gun control” have no apparent nexus to actually reducing murders or killings.

These measures on their face would not have impacted mass killings like Newton and Columbine. They add burdens to law-abiding citizens who want to protect their families. Nearly all gun owners who comply with handgun rules, including those who buy misnamed “assault weapons,” use them in entirely legitimate and responsible ways.

Many background checks and restrictions already exist, and others such as gun bans have been shown to have no effect on crime.  Meanwhile, new gun control measures rarely seek to actually enforce existing laws against criminals, or to truly address the problem of mental illness.

Then let’s apply Cardinal Dolan’s logic.  People including folks associated with the US Bishops point to Newton and other violent incidents. Then they support banning and restricting guns for law-abiding citizens and families seeking self-defense.  They eventually support banning families from owning guns altogether, on the basis of instances of crime and mass violence.

Perhaps Catholics should follow the example of Cardinal Dolan, and respond as follows:

That’s just illogical, for a number of reasons. First of all, just out of common sense, to label a whole group of people, mainly the vast population of hardworking, reliable, virtuous [gun owners and families], to label them and to demean them because of the vicious tragic action of [a few] people is just ridiculous. That’s illogical. That’s unfair. That’s unjust.

You know the Boston bombers? The ones from Chechnya? The ones who turned pressure cookers into sophisticated people killing machines and morphed the streets of Boston into the set of 24?

Well…are you sitting down?

Okay. Here it goes. Neither had a permit to own a gun. That’s right. The firearms they used to kill police officers weren’t registered.

I know. Your world is spinning. It’s like learning Santa Claus doesn’t exist all over again. Game changing and utterly up-ending.

Go ahead and take a minute if you need one. I understand this can be upsetting.

At times like this, therapy can be mighty helpful. Or, you could try to see this moment, not as a challenge, but as an opportunity—the chance to bring good from evil.

Perhaps you could even use this revelation as an excuse to resurrect the gun control legislation that went down in flames last week.

As the Hill tells us this morning:

The news that the suspects were not authorized to own firearms will likely add fuel to calls for tougher gun laws – an issue that was put on the back-burner last week after the Senate blocked the central elements of a gun-control package backed by President Obama.

That makes sense doesn’t it?  If only we’d thought of it sooner. I’m sure background checks and limits on magazine capacity totally would have stopped two mentally unbalanced young men, hell bent on creating mayhem and destruction, from illegally obtaining weapons and dropping homemade bombs at the feet of eight-year-olds.

Such laws wouldn’t have been as effective as more people sporting “Co-exist” bumper stickers on their SUVs, but hey, it would have been a start.

Please forgive the sarcasm. It’s either that or beat my head against a wall out of sheer frustration. You see, I had quite the weekend.

It started, when, at 2:00 on Friday afternoon, about a hundred yards or so from my front door, some kid with as much respect for human life as the Boston bombers, shot two other young men, killing one, critically wounding the other. And he didn’t do it behind closed doors. He did it in the middle of the street, a busy neighborhood street. Then he left the bodies and drove away, which meant the moms driving carpool and the homeschooled kids playing with their friends could get an eye-full.

The next afternoon, this time two blocks over, another kid attempted to rob a woman at gunpoint. When the police showed up, he ran. Then, what the newspapers described as a “running gun battle” commenced. Again, in a busy residential neighborhood. On a sunny Saturday afternoon.

So, given that I spent most of my weekend indoors, keeping an ear out for gunfire, you’ll have to pardon me if I approach gun control legislation with more than a modicum of skepticism today.

To restate the totally and completely obvious: Criminals don’t care about laws. That’s why they’re criminals. Nor do laws stop the mentally unbalanced or deranged from acting mentally unbalanced or deranged.

Accordingly, no background check, in no known universe, could have stopped the murder on my street Friday afternoon. No assault weapons ban could have prevented the shoot-out two blocks over. And no amount of limiting magazine capacity would have done one iota of good in Boston.

Nor could any of those measures have done a darn thing to prevent Adam Lanza from shooting up a kindergarten classroom in Newtown, Connecticut.

None of these guys are playing by the rules to begin with. They’re not buying their guns at Dick’s Sporting Goods, registering them with the state, or working hard to earn that concealed carry permit.

Making the rules harder for those who do play by the rules won’t change that. In fact, the evidence suggests just the opposite.

Ignore reason and the evidence before your eyes. Gun control totally works.

Look, I am not, by any stretch of the imagination, a gun person. I’m a vintage dresses, pink tulips, and fine French wine person. I don’t own a gun, and I don’t want to own a gun. I don’t even like guns. I actually do think the world would be a far better place with far fewer of them.

But until people come up with a way to take the guns away from the baddies and the crazies, not the responsible, law-abiding citizens, color me beyond unconvinced that better background checks are going to put a crimp in the style of Steubenville gangsters, Islamic terrorists, or murderous psychopaths.

So what will make people safer? What can the federal government do, that local governments can’t, to help end gun violence?

Well, as one silly man once said to me when I asked him what I’d done to upset him: “I have a list.”

1. Reform the commitment laws for the mentally ill, making it easier for family members to get their loved ones the help they need before it’s too late.

2. Increase federal funding for institutions that serve the mentally ill, so more people who are a danger to themselves and others are kept off the streets.

3. Make a concerted effort to promote marriage and fatherhood, especially in urban areas and particularly among African-Americans. Recent studies show that only 30 percent of African American children are born into a two-parent family, while only 17 percent grow up in a two-parent family.

4. Reform a welfare system that keeps entire generations trapped in a cycle of poverty, dependency, and entitlement.

5. Promote a culture of life, a culture where all life—from the moment of conception to the moment of natural death—is treated as a gift to be treasured, not an inconvenience to be drowned in toilets or tossed into trash bins.

That, of course, is just a start. There’s more, much more, that could be done—from stricter sentencing laws to closer monitoring of potential jihadists. The violence in our culture is a many-layered problem that requires a many-layered solution.

But laws that make us feel good without actually doing good? That purport to keep us safe while actually making us less safe?

They aren’t one of those layers.

“#NoMoreNames” is an online effort to play on people’s feelings to support any old gun control measures by reading out the names of people who have been killed by guns in the U.S.

They round it out to 30,000 people killed in the U.S. each year with guns and work that out to reading names for 109 consecutive hours.

I wonder: how many of those people were killed in self-defense as they tried to violate someone else? Your sister? Your grandmother? Your mother? Is it justifiable to kill to defend your mother? Sister? If so, are we going to use the death of a would-be rapist to argue for laws that would make it more difficult for your loved one to defend herself?

How many of them were involved in drugs or sex-trafficking or domestic violence? Avoid those behaviors and your chances of being a victim of gun violence plummet. Again, the problem is behavior, not the existence of a gun in the hands of a peaceable, law-abiding citizen.

This dichotomy is all the more important because the push for gun control by invoking those killed in specific incidents should suggest laws that would have prevented that specific incident. Alas, no, the bill that just died in the Senate, to much wailing and gnashing of teeth, would not have prevented the Newtown massacre. All recent efforts have been toward limiting access to guns and ammo and harassing responsible people rather than dealing with root causes of violence and addressing irresponsible people. But so many people think just doing something is more important than doing the right thing.

If the desire is to reduce the number of people murdered, why not go after hammers?

Of course I’m not advocating for background checks before someone purchases a hammer. But hammers have proved more lethal than AR-15s.

#NoMoreNames is co-sponsored by, among other groups, Organizing for Action—President Obama’s unprecedented political activist, cult of personality arm—and Mayors Against Illegal Guns. That’s ironic, because President Obama and all those mayors are protected by men and women wielding guns, not a moving bubble of “gun-free zone” signs. Would President Obama or any of the member mayors argue that their personal security details ought not be able to own or carry guns, even at their own homes? Why should they be granted better security than we allow any citizen in their own home or our children in schools?

By contrast, if we were to read out the names of all children killed by abortion every year the exercise would take 4,360 hours, or 40-times as long. Children like those who had their skulls collapsed by LeRoy Carhart while still in their mother’s womb but were otherwise as alive and independent as any premature baby.

A whole lot of the same people who think limiting access to guns is of the utmost importance to reduce fatalities would bare their teeth and lash out at the notion that abortion access should be limited, let alone banned. Topsy-turvy thinking if ever there was such a thing.

But we can’t read out the names of the persons killed by abortion because those persons didn’t live long enough and were not loved enough by their parents to receive a name. Instead, their names are known only to God and the angels.

I wonder, since they were killed in utero, but were already endowed with a soul, do they intercede on their parents’ behalf for all eternity, praying that their parents realize the horror of what they did and seek forgiveness and healing? That would be a marvelous twist of God’s mercy, bringing great good out of such a horrid scourge of our culture.

I would love to be able to just know that when the USCCB took a position and the bureaucrats promoted it they were responsibly and accurately communicating Catholic social teaching. Alas, no.

Sister Mary Ann Walsh, the director of Media Relations for the USCCB wrote a guest piece for the Washington Post promoting a letter by Bishop Blaire, chairman of the Committee on Domestic Justice and Human Development, in which he supports the gun control bill in the Senate. I’ll take issue with the content of His Excellency’s letter in another post, but for now let’s look at Sister Walsh’s maddening presentation of it.

Her opening:

Some things seem naturally abhorrent – forceps to crush a cranium in an abortion, a needle to deliver a sentence intravenously on death row, and an assault weapon in the hands of the man on the street. Each instrument may have a purpose some time, somewhere, but as used above, each reflects brutality in our society.

So forceps used in an abortion are equal to a needle used in the death penalty are equal to an “assault weapon” some random guy on the street is holding, whether or not he is using it. She tries to qualify this opener, and I’ll get to that in a moment, but let’s take a longer look at this trio first since she decided to start this way.

This is moral equivalency. And it is irresponsible and scandalous. If we want to be taken seriously and have a true Catholic impact on society we need to start by taking our own beliefs seriously and presenting them accurately and fairly. Sister Walsh did not do that here.

Abortion is always a gross violation of the dignity of every human life (CCC 2270-5). The death penalty is not (CCC 2267). Add all the caveats you want about whether it can be justifiable in today’s United States, the fact is it is not on the same level as abortion. Individuals, including those in government, can legitimately differ on the death penalty. Their decision according to their conscience is ultimately between themselves and God. That option is not available for abortion—abortion is always gravely immoral. That’s a huge difference.

But then there’s the guy on the street she talks about with an “assault weapon” in his hands … By her characterization there is no moral content to his actions, so I’m not clear at all how the mere presence of that weapon in that circumstance either  ”seems naturally abhorrent” or “reflects a brutality.”

Perhaps he is gunning down a school full of children. The slaughter of a school full of children is naturally abhorrent and brutal, whether it’s with an “assault weapon” or a fertilizer bomb.

But perhaps he is defending a school full of children from someone who is driving toward the school with a fertilizer bomb. Seems the use of a weapon sufficiently powered to stop the would-be bomber, far from being “naturally abhorrent” or “brutality,” is laudable and would earn him plaudits—not to mention it is entirely consistent with Catholic teaching, (CCC 2263-7). Or, perhaps he’s merely carrying it on his way to go shoot target practice, simply because he likes to put holes in paper with accuracy. No discernable moral content there at all, and I cannot fathom how it is “naturally abhorrent” or “brutality.”

Now. After starting with that frustrating moral equivalency, Sister Walsh offers this paragraph as some sort of clarification:

The Catholic Church opposes use of all three instruments to take a life. The church’s pro-life stand against abortion is undisputed. So is its pro-life stand in opposition to the death penalty. It can only be justified if there is no other way to keep a deadly criminal from hurting more people. And in the most recent – and all too common – threat to human life, the church opposes the growing preponderance of lethal weapons on the streets. It stands as another important pro-life position.

Clears things up, right? I don’t think so.

First, the Church only opposes the use of all three instruments to take a life if the taking of the life is unjustified. If taking a life is justified in self defense or within a just war, any weapon will do. Forceps can legitimately be used in self defense or defense of others (though if that’s your last weapon you’re probably in trouble), as can a needle or an “assault weapon.”

That said, there is another significant problem with this attempt at clarification. She once again rhetorically ignores the difference between the Church’s opposition to abortion and our opposition to the unconscientious use of the death penalty. In the second and third sentences there she rhetorically equates our opposition to abortion and the death penalty. Therefore, when she offers the “it can only be justified…” in the fourth sentence to qualify the certainty of opposition to the death penalty, it has the rhetorical effect of allowing qualifications to the opposition to abortion. In other words, if there are caveats with the opposition to the death penalty, since she has heretofore treated the death penalty and abortion as the same, then it is reasonable to assume there could be caveats to abortion. Or at least someone looking for an out on abortion can rationalize one based on her irresponsible presentation.

Then the final two sentences bring us into the actual purpose of her article: pushing the USCCB’s support for some of the current gun control measures.

Her third paragraph:

The injustice of taking innocent life lies at the heart of the church’s pro-life position. There is no question about the innocence of pre-born children. And Americans are becoming more and more uneasy as we learn of people on death row eventually found innocent of the crimes for which they were convicted. And surely, after the gunning down of primary grade children in Newtown, Connecticut, it is clear assault weapons stand out dramatically as a threat to innocent life.

Yes: ban abortion in toto, and work to reduce the instances of the death penalty as much as prudentially possible to both protect society and respect the dignity of the criminal’s life.

But the third point she makes is not so “surely” self-evident. For one, more people are murdered with handguns and with knives every year than with what she terms “assault weapons.” Why no outcry to ban handguns and knives?

Second, the kids in Newtown were slaughtered by a (1) mentally unstable man, who had been (2) bullied mercilessly as a youth, (3) spent hundreds of hours immersing himself in military-style first-person-shooter video games, (4) had a mind-numbingly irresponsible mother when it came to weapons, and (5) had apparently just has his hopes and dreams dashed of becoming a U.S. Marine, rejected by the recruiters because of his mental disability.

Had he not had the Bushmaster AR-15 available to him, methinks he would have found another way.

And yet, the big national discussion is about “assault weapons” and background checks rather than mental health, bullying, violent video games, and responsible gun ownership (which is, incidentally, the kind of gun ownership practiced by the vast majority of legal gun owners).

The USCCB, in this case Bishop Blaire, and following on him Sister Walsh, have just piled on. It’s the sticky part about the Church opining on matters where a clear-cut teaching is not at stake: There is great room for bad thinking, and policies that sound nice but cannot have the desired effect.

Folks, we tried banning “assault weapons” in the past. It did not work to reduce crime. In fact, once the ban expired, gun crimes actually went down. The disposition to break laws and kill people is the problem, not the instrument a very few people choose to do so.

——-

P.S. The reason I keep putting “assault weapons” in quotation marks is because it is a made-up term with no clear or firm meaning. Rifles that are identical in every way except one small cosmetic difference that does not affect functionality will be treated differently by these laws, thus rendering the laws essentially moot. For instance, the recent disastrous New York ban had this effect:

That may be because no one is talking about it in the major media outlets. I mean no one. Check out this screen capture of Google News results for “Gosnell.” LifeNews.com, a couple of local papers, and someone at HuffingtonPost.com covered it, sure. But look at the last link. It says, “It Is Disturbing That Mike Rice Gets More Coverage Than Kermit…” Yes, coverage about the non-coverage gets higher billing than most coverage. So you could be excused for not knowing about this.

I’ll bet you did know about the ABSOLUTE NEED for more restrictive gun laws nationwide because of the massacre of children in Newtown, Connecticut.

Pardon my French, but this is political opportunism by people who want control at its worst.

Anyone. And I mean anyone who does not want to talk about Kermit Gosnell’s actions and our abortion-saturated culture but does want to use Newtown to push gun control because of our gun-saturated culture does not care about saving kids. They care about control.

The difference between the children gunned down by Adam Lanza and the children who had their spines snipped by Kermit Gosnell is nothing more than time.

The socio-economic wherewithal of the family does not lessen the humanity of the child. To say otherwise is to say the Newtown kids were “more human” because their parents had more money than the poor people who went to Gosnell. That is an abhorrent thought that no feeling person could harbor.

The “choice” of the mother (or the mother’s mother, who is forcing her teenage daughter to have an abortion) does not confer humanity upon the child. If it does, why not extend that principle longer and let the family take the kid home, give it some thought, see how the kid grows up, and let them bring the kid back for an “after-birth abortion” some time down the road when the kid becomes inconvenient or fails to make the honor roll. Just reserve the right to “choose” until later in life.

If you disagree and think an “after-birth abortion” is okay within the first few moments after birth, especially for a kid who should have been aborted, tell me what is different about the kid herself between that moment right after birth and the moment the kid arrives home for the first time (should she be so fortunate). Why would it be murder to intentionally kill the kid once home but it is not murder there in the delivery room? If you have a response, challenge yourself: Provide a response without talking about “should have been aborted,” “the mother’s choice,” or “terrible quality of life.” None of those affect the humanness of the new human person that has left the birth canal alive.

The Newtown victims were murdered by a mentally unstable man who had been mercilessly bullied as a youth, who was mesmerized by hundreds of hours of military-style first-person shooter video games, and enabled by a mother mind-numbingly irresponsible with the weapons she lawfully owned in one of the states with the most restrictive gun laws. They were not murdered by a roving band of renegade scary-looking guns with bloodlust or in a yippy-kai-yay shootout in a town as permissive with guns as the Wild West.

Yet the target in the national rush to DO SOMETHING!!11!!!!!11!! in the wake of Newtown is not violent video games. It is not bullying. It is not even making sure families with mentally unstable members are more heavily scrutinized or required to be more responsible with their guns. No, it’s gun ownership, through blanket measures that will restrict the rights of millions of people who are entirely innocent and entirely responsible with their guns.

Anyone who stands on the graves of the Newtown victims (to borrow Ben Shapiro’s excellent charge) to push for gun control but neither raises a peep about the horror of Kermit Gosnell’s work, nor seeks similar governmental action on bullying or military-style first-person shooter video games, simply wants control. They have shown they do not care about protecting children, they just want to use this awful tragedy to harass peaceable, responsible gun owners and restrict their rights.

Do I exaggerate? Am I making too much about the Gosnell case, since it is one of a kind, and ignoring that there have been many mass shootings lately? No, I’m not, because I dispute that Gosnell was unique.

What was the difference between what Gosnell did and what George Tiller, or any other partial-birth abortionist did? How about any abortionist anywhere who delivered a baby alive after a botched abortion and simply left the child to die in the trash bin (a practice Barack Obama enabled by personally blocking the legislation that would have criminalized it)? In what ways were the children killed different from the children Gosnell killed?

Fact is, the anti-humanity actions of Kermit Gosnell, while more spectacularly gory than the sterile environment of these other cases, are essentially the same as any of those other cases. In all cases, a new human person is born, or nearly born, and is either directly killed through a horrific, violent procedure, or is simply left to die—just as any human person would if denied access to food and water for a long enough time.

Some of the people pushing for more restrictive gun laws may not realize they’re being led by the nose like this—they really and truly do care about children and really had never thought about the horror of the abortion industry (and an “industry” it is, make no mistake). If you fall into that category, open your eyes and consider the horror children face every day in the abortion facilities rather than on the extraordinarily rare occasions that a madman snaps.

But the people pushing this, the ones doing the leading, know exactly what they are doing. It is about control.

Fortunately, based on the sheer politics of it all and the combination of vulnerable senators in gun-friendly states where the people are not buying the President’s snake oil, it does not look like anything extremely restrictive has any chance of passing Congress at. all.

I’ll bet, on the other hand, if a president were to make as impassioned a plea as Obama is making here, surrounded by families members of those hurt by abortion, women who regret their abortion, people who survived abortions (and were spared an “after-birth abortion”), etc., for more restrictions on abortion and greater scrutiny of abortion facilities, complete with a similarly compliant media to what Obama has on gun control, the cause would be a slam-dunk.

That seems to be the position of Sr. Mary Ann Walsh of the U.S. Catholic Bishops’ conference.  She declared in the Washington Post this week that to be pro-life, Catholics must favor banning “assault weapons,” and support other new restrictions.

It’s very hard to determine what Sr. Walsh means, not because Catholic teaching is unclear, but because Sr. Walsh doesn’t tell us what an assault weapon is.

All weapons assault, and all firearms are lethal.  But how can someone say that Catholic teaching requires a ban of assault weapons, if Catholic teaching does not even speak of assault weapons, much less define them?

This problem does not exist for other, actual pro-life causes.  Pope John Paul II’s encyclical “The Gospel of Life” defines abortion and definitively insists that it be banned.  It also speaks strongly, if not dogmatically, against death penalty.  Even the sometimes-disputed term “torture” is defined and discussed in the Catechism.  Neither document discusses, much less bans, “assault” weapons.

Maybe we could read the tea leaves of Sr. Walsh’s article to see what she means.  She says that an assault weapons ban is necessary for being pro-life because the Church opposes “lethal weapons on the streets.”

I live in Maryland, home to one of America’s murder capitals, Baltimore.  According to recent FBI numbers, Maryland has about 275 gun homicides a year. Two of those use rifles–with no evidence that those two rifles were “assault rifles.” (75 additional murders happen with knives. 757 died in car crashes.)

Nearly all these gun homicides were with handguns.  So from this justification, Sr. Walsh might mean that to be pro-life and oppose “lethal weapons on the streets” we must support a ban on handguns.

I can see why Sr. Walsh didn’t call for that.  It’s a much less popular position than calling for an “assault weapons” ban.  Those sound much scarier, but a handgun ban would make Sr. Walsh sound extreme, even to Washington Post readers.

If Sr. Walsh explicitly proposed banning handguns it would mean families must not protect themselves with ordinary firearms.  Is a Catholic family committing mortal sin for owning a handgun, “lethal weapons on the streets”?  According to the Catechism, families have a strong justification for owning firearms (not limited to single-shot rifles): “Legitimate defense can be not only a right but a grave duty for one who is responsible for the lives of others…. For this reason, those who legitimately hold authority also have the right to use arms to repel aggressors against the civil community entrusted to their responsibility.”

It’s also possible that Sr. Walsh’s term “assault weapons” refers to weapons used in mass killings.  But those killings, like Newton, used handguns along with rifles. Columbine occurred during a national ban on scary-looking rifles and on “high capacity” magazines: those killers used handguns only, and fired most of their shots with 10-round magazines.  There is no evidence showing an increase in gun murders after that federal ban expired.

The federal “assault weapons” ban and several state bans define these weapons by cosmetic, symbolic features, not by lethality.  None of them affect “automatic” weapons, which are already illegal.  They deal with “semi-automatic” rifles that have other non-lethal features, like grips and adjustible stocks. Where in Catholic teaching does it say that guns are OK unless they look too scary? Most rifles are semi-automatic, do does Sr. Walsh insist that pro-lifers ban all semi-automatic firearms?

Sr. Walsh should not excommunicate people from the pro-life movement because of their position on how weapons look.  Semi-automatic rifles with cosmetic features are not being used in 99% of crimes that Sr. Walsh uses to justify her new pro-life requirement.  Those rifles are being responsibly and safely owned.  Catholic teaching contains no ban on most guns.

The U.S. Bishops admit that Catholic teaching merely calls for “reasonable” measures.  That standard leaves pro-life Catholics significant room for disagreement.  We all want background checks: and guess what, federal law already requires background checks.  States like Maryland, even without new rules, already impose very strict rules.  Pro-life people can legitimately believe that enough is enough.  They don’t have to buy arguments that ultimately mean Catholic teaching bans semi-automatic guns.

People have been trying to add extraneous topics to “pro-life” for years, always from the political left’s agenda.  Unspecified assertions like Sr. Walsh’s shut down discussion, and unnecessarily divide the pro-life movement.

The question of why Congress can’t pass reasonable gun legislation has a multitude of answers—but I would suggest that at least one answer involves looking at the tactics, mindset and notable omissions by the political Left, including the president himself.

Let’s begin with the tactics—while Barack Obama is hardly the first political leader to exploit public emotions after a tragedy, the decision to shove gun legislation down the nation’s throat immediately after Sandy Hook smacks of bullying. A liberal can reasonably counter that it’s no different than George W. Bush jamming the Patriot Act through Congress in the aftermath of 9/11 and they would be correct. It’s worth noting that in Bush’s memoirs Decision Points, he said he regrets not the legislation itself, but allowing it to be termed the “Patriot Act”, because it unfairly maligned the patriotism of legislators who opposed its provisions. In short, Bush regretted a contribution to an atmosphere of political bullying. Is similar repentance in Obama’s future?

Now let’s go to a mindset that goes well beyond the president. The vast majority of Americans—myself included—do not see owning an assault weapon as necessary for hunting or protecting one’s family, nor do we see it is intrinsic to the Second Amendment. But the mindset of the anti-gun crowd is such that their reaction to every firearms-related crime is exactly the same, regardless of whether it’s a handgun or an assault weapon. This unwillingness to distinguish between the two—between one weapon that truly is necessary to protect one’s self and another that is not—makes the NRA’s charge of an ultimate conspiracy aimed at gun confiscation quite realistic.

Finally, let’s come to the omission, one that was touched on by Campbell Brown in The Wall Street Journal. It’s the unwillingness of the Left in general and the president in particular to go anywhere near the issues of violence in video games and in Hollywood. We know for a fact that Newtown killer Adam Lanza fed his mind a steady diet of violent video games. We know that as sure as we know that he used an assault weapon. Would stiffer regulation of what appears on video games, along with our TV screens and in the theatres be able to reduce violence? I don’t know, but there’s equal uncertainty about whether an assault weapons ban will work, and that hasn’t stopped Obama from pushing on that front.

What this smacks of is political opportunism. Democratic presidents get their backing from Hollywood, while Republicans are backed by the gun industry. Standing up to the other party’s heavyweights is hardly an act of political courage. Opening up a real conversation that involved all facets of gun violence, regardless of whose cages were rattled would be. Obama didn’t act any differently than any other politician of any ideological stripe would have in only targeting his adversary, but that’s hardly a compliment.

I’d like to be more enthusiastic in backing some of the gun control measures that are reasonable and common-sense oriented. Cardinal Dolan in New York, hardly an apologist for the Administration, has been supportive. There’s no reason not have a background check in place—while we can’t expect laws to work in keeping guns away from criminals, we can reasonably expect to keep them out of the hands of the mentally ill, and a background check would go a long way towards that. Even in the current political climate, I would like to see the background check pass. It’s the assault weapons ban where the problems of tactics, mindset and omission give me pause. In an ideal world, I’d be for the ban. But until the debate starts getting conducted on fairer ground and all causes of violence explored, I’ll have to pass.

Maybe when gun control advocates lament an “enthusiasm gap” when it comes to public opinion on these issues, they might examine their own role in creating that gap. I just hesitate to get on board with them, even when there should be room for agreement.