Time to Stop Restricting Abortion and Start Restricting Assault Weapons

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http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/12/17-4


A flag in downtown Newtown, Conn., on Dec. 15 is tagged with numbers representing each of the school shooting victims. (Photo: Don Emmert / AFP—Getty Images.)

In the wake of the Sandy Hook massacre, calls for restrictions on the manufacture and sale of a variety of guns, especially assault rifles such as the Bushmaster .223 used by the shooter in his rampage against women and children, have grown stronger. Of course, this creates a strange situation for pro-choicers, who are usually on the end of arguing that restrictions on abortion don’t do much to reduce abortion rates, allowing gun nut anti-choicers (the two tend to go together because gun nuttery, like anti-choice nuttery, is based in a weird mix of misogyny and psychosexual issues) to squee “gotchas” at us. So, I figured I’d go ahead and shoot that nonsense down and explain here why restrictions on the sales of guns and restrictions on access to abortion are very, very different things.

1) Access to safe abortion care makes the world a better place, whereas the proliferation of guns does not. This isn’t a matter of personal opinion, but a demonstrable fact. A Harvard-based review of a multitude of studies has shown that places where there are more guns have higher homicide rates. Researchers concluded, “We found that across developed countries, where guns are more available, there are more homicides,” and also, “After controlling for poverty and urbanization, for every age group, people in states with many guns have elevated rates of homicide, particularly firearm homicide.”

***SNIP

2) Gun control works, but restricting abortion does not seem to reduce the abortion rate. Not all bans are created equal. Citing research from economist Richard Florida, Ezra Klein argued in the Washington Post that gun control does, in fact, work.

Some of what he found was, perhaps, unexpected: Higher populations, more stress, more immigrants, and more mental illness were not correlated with more deaths from gun violence. But one thing he found was, perhaps, perfectly predictable: States with tighter gun control laws appear to have fewer gun-related deaths.