It's been a week since the horrific shootings that took place last weekend in Texas and Ohio, and the initial shock has now worn off. Now is probably the right time to dive deep into the underlying issues and hypocritical views that highlight two incredibly important current problems in our country.
In the wake of both of these massacres, I can't help but wonder what would have happened if we had stricter gun laws and more comprehensive background checks in place. It's such a shame that it's 2019 and our country has had more mass shootings than places in Europe. We claim that "we're the greatest nation ever" and yet Congress wants to drag its feet. Congresspeople and senators want to twiddle their thumbs and continue to take as much money as they can from huge pro-gun lobbyists instead of focusing on the lives that they could be saving.
As a matter of fact, the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence ranked 22 out of the 50 states in the U.S. an "F" when it came to having adequate gun control and gun safety laws. It's honestly saddening and disheartening to know that almost half of the country just doesn't measure up when it comes to gun safety.
What's even more alarming is the fact that instead of focusing on potentially saving lives, some politicians seem to be focusing on restricting and seeking to control women's bodies, via attempting to overturn the constitutional right to seek an abortion. It seems incredibly hypocritical to me that members of Congress and others on the political right claim to champion for "the sanctity of human life" by controlling a woman's uterus, while blatantly ignoring the lives of children and others that have actually been born and have rights.
(Because, you know, the Constitution states that we are all born with certain "unalienable rights," and, you can't have rights if you haven't been born yet.)
In fact, according to a US News online article titled "A Guide to Abortion Laws by State," there are 10 states where extremely restrictive abortion laws have been proposed and only six states where the Constitutional right to have an abortion is protected.
While some of the restrictive abortion laws have been blocked, it's crystal clear to pro-choice advocates everywhere that lawmakers would rather legislate the heck out of women's bodies than do anything at all about the serious issue of gun control.
Imagine how many lives could be saved if we, as a nation united, focused on regulating firearms to protect everyone that actually have Constitutional rights instead of fighting for fetuses.
Right-wing anti-abortion advocates should really step up and focus on gun control instead of their insatiable and puritanical need to control women's bodies. They're not pro-life, they're pro-fetus. If they really were "pro-life," they would seek to be a part of the solution and not a part of the problem.