There have been four shootings at educational establishments in the USA in the last week, with 11 people shot, 9 dead and one critically injured (to date). As long as the crazy gun laws that prevail in the States remain as they are, these incidents will continue to happen. But the right to carry arms is a fundamental part of America's constitution; the country has a history of putting choice before life. Campaigns are underway for this to be changed, and we can only hope that they are successful.
But it's easy for us to sneer from across the pond; we're not doing so well ourselves when it comes to valuing life over choice. 200,000 abortions take place every year in the UK (that's nearly 600 a day) . It is legal for babies to be aborted in the first 24 weeks of pregnancy - yet there is more and more clear evidence that children born this prematurely do stand a good chance of survival, and there are more and more frequent cases of this happening.
This means that these aren't balls of meaningless cells that are being removed and disposed of, they are human beings with a decent chance of survival. They should be treated as such, and that means it's wrong to kill them just because their existence is inconvenient to someone.
Saddam Hussein will always be associated with the horrendous gas attacks on the Iraqi Kurds during the Iran-Iraq war. There he was, leader of a nation, and there existed a community growing in his country that he found inconvenient. So he ordered that it be removed. As the appointed leader of Iraq, that choice was his to make. If it was wrong for him to make a choice that put convenience before life, then surely it's wrong for anybody else to do the same.
If life matters more than choice when it comes to Americans carrying guns, or the decisions that rulers and leaders make, then life also matters more than choice when it comes to unwanted pregnancies. Yet a bill is currently going through the UK parliament that some politicians are expected to use to try and make abortion even easier in the UK, and possibly extend rather than contract the time period in which it's legal to remove and kill unborn children. Unless and until our government starts valuing life more, it would be deeply hypocritical of them to condemn the stupid gun laws in the USA and the ever rising death toll that goes with them.
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