Editorial: Right to life or guns?

Innocents are slaughtered in schools, shopping malls and houses of worship. We are astonished that mass shootings are a weekly event. This is a direct coincidence with the massive effort by the gun industry to relax gun controls and make it politically and legally impossible to remove weapons of war from our streets and the hands of lunatics.

If we were pro-life, we would ban assault rifles used to spray down elementary schools. We would put sheriffs back in charge of issuing concealed weapons permits, and keeping them out of the hands of dangerous people they know. We would take body armor off the market. We would stop the manufacture of cop-killer bullets and high-capacity magazines intended only for professional use. Most Americans (even most Iowans) support these reasonable restrictions on our Second Amendment freedoms, just as they support limited restrictions on what we can say or print.

Most of us support background checks and waiting periods, and registration of gun transactions between private parties or at gun shows.

In short, most people favor things that they know worked. Lifting the assault weapons ban resulted in more gun deaths. There is a coincidence between the proliferation of arms and gun violence. Reducing the number of guns will save lives. So, if you are pro-life you should favor a reduced number of guns. Children are dying every day from gunshots.

That’s not how we are voting. In the face of mass shootings, Iowans chose more guns. We just amended the state constitution to make safety legislation nearly impossible, thanks to the gun lobby. The Cherokee and Spirit Lake school boards have taken to arming their staffs despite reservations from law enforcement. More guns do not equal more safety. Armed officers were at the schools in Orlando and Uvalde. An armed officer was at the shopping mall.

You would think the Iowa pulpits would be on fire.

You would think that in a pro-life climate we would elect people who protect the young and old.

You would think that if you must register to vote, you would have to register to own a gun. Why not require safety training? Why not require screenings? How does that infringe on your right to shoot, and how does that right trump the right of the school children to live?

Ours is not a pro-life culture, plain and simple.

We restrict the ability of poor children to get food and health care.

We clamp down on funding for elderly care through Medicaid.

And we can’t get enough guns.

Guns are the answer, we have come to fervently believe, not the problem.

We actively promote guns in the classroom.

We are dupes for the gun industry.

All the while we claim to be pro-life. The devil is cunning.