I am pro-Second Amendment.
I am a gun owner, an NRA supporter and a vocal proponent of my right to own whatever firearm I want – including my AR-15.
If you aren’t, that’s fine. Feel free to revel in your wrongness. In fact, let me save you some trouble: you can quit reading this right now, because this one isn’t written for you.
No. This one is for my fellow gun-loving, Second Amendment conservatives.
This one is to those lovers of liberty who, just like me, have yelled at more screens than we can count, had more impassioned conversations with more friends and family members and random people in the Walmart check-out line than we care to remember over the last two weeks, utterly repulsed by the idea that someone would dare threaten our constitutional right to own firearms.
This is to those of us who’ve mentally and physically screamed ourselves hoarse at the ignorance of gun-grabbers who couldn’t tell you the difference between a semi-automatic .22 pistol and an M4 carbine, or think the Second Amendment applies only to “musk-ots,” but still demand "common sense gun reform" without an inkling of what that might mean.
This is to those of us who listened to the self-righteous grandstanders over at MSNBC for all of about three seconds, then headed straight to our nearest Green Top and bought another firearm we don’t even need and probably can’t afford, just because we could.
We are right to be angry. And we are right to defend our liberties.
But if only we cared as much about defending innocent life as we care about the right to defend it.
Once every 97 seconds, an innocent, helpless child is butchered at the hands of an abortionist in the United States. Their hearts are injected with poison, their limbs torn from their bodies, their heads sucked out of their mothers' wombs in vacuums, and their remains tossed out in dumpsters along with used needles, dirty gloves and human waste.
Just imagine, for one moment, if we took the same visceral loathing we have against any possible threat to our guns and turned it against this daily genocide of nearly 3,000 unborn children.
Imagine if a company’s public support for Planned Parenthood was met with instantaneous outrage and widespread, coast-to-coast demands for a boycott from millions of law-abiding Americans.
Imagine if cowardly Capitol Hill lawmakers' continued funding of abortion clinics with taxpayer dollars evoked the same passionate outcry that's ignited by the mere whisper of gun control. Imagine if the Internet exploded with the livid screams of every single pro-life American every time a pro-abortion piece of legislation inched its way closer to the president's desk.
Imagine if the moral Right were ready to storm the halls of Congress to protect children with the same righteous fury with which we protect our rifles. If the horrendous fact of a million infants being butchered alive every single year in the Land of the Free were enough to cause patriotic conservatives to stand up, en masse, and demand an immediate end to such an atrocity.
We could bring the abortion industry to a screeching halt within days. After all, the entire system is propped up by our wallets, and we have yet to slam them shut. Should we choose to, red-district lawmakers would rush to defund Planned Parenthood so fast that the halls of Washington would look like the Running of the Bulls.
If we protected the lives of our children with the same vigor which with we protect the Glocks in our bedside tables, we could declare all-out war on abortion today. And we would win.
Just imagine.
Now imagine why we don’t. Imagine how skewed our perspective, how imbalanced our priorities must be that we will gladly plant our flag on a hill built of firearms and vow to defend it or die trying, while the mountain of tiny bodies to our left amasses daily in our silence.
That is not to say that our loyalty to the Second Amendment is misplaced, or overblown – in fact, quite the opposite. I have long stated that I am pro-life for the same reason that I am pro-gun: because the notion that innocent life ever be left defenseless is reprehensible.
But if our primary argument for the Second Amendment is that the right to defend innocent life is inscribed in our Constitution and, even more fundamentally, handed down to us by our very Creator, then how much more vocal should our actual defense of that innocent life be?
In times like these, I often wonder why it is not. And I shudder to think what the answer may be.