America’s Murder-by-Another-Name
In 2011 more than 30,000 Americans died from gun injuries. A penchant for violence seems to have crept into our everyday life from cell phone games to movies and television, and it has spawned within our nation a culture of cruelty. We seem to have lost our traditional societal bearings, our sense of what is right and acceptable compared to what is wrong and unacceptable. In the process we have developed a culture of personal and collective violence.
It is easy, but wrong, to blame this violence on inert assault rifles and the size of gun magazines which, if left to their own devices, harm no one. No assault rifle or 30 round magazine was used in the recent Boston Marathon massacre; rather, steel pellets were used to maximize wounding and damage to the innocent bystanders. Will Congress now outlaw steel pellets? Will that be effective?
It is neither the assault rifle nor the size of the gun clip that is the problem. It is that violence has become a way of life in these United States; a failed societal and cultural condition has developed. Once human life in America was honored and safeguarded. But forty years ago a new day dawned, one in which the taking of human life became so routine and casual that it fell into the category of the “commonplace.” Why? Because that was where the Supreme Court of the United States ruled it to be. Decency, honor, dignity and value were stripped from human life and its worth was diminished to the point where it could be, with impunity, tossed casually into a garbage dumpster.
That day murder became “matter-of-fact.” The Court took it out of the “Thou shalt not kill” category of the Ten Commandments and grouped it together with the inconsequential. To be sure this grouping was disapproved of by many American citizens, but not by enough of them to force society to reject the new attitude toward murder. That day, in 1973, Roe v. Wade became the law of the land, violence increased, and American civilization started down a lethal road that leads to societal violence and then decay.
Meanwhile, the news media continues to pour gasoline on the raging fire. If a crazy murderer kills someone with a gun, the news media fans it into a major gun violence story. If an abortionist kills a baby and its mother in a botched abortion, the news media does not even cover the story. Gun violence is news worthy; murder by abortion is not news worthy. Yet, by far, more Americans are killed by abortion than by guns.
At the time of the Roe v. Wade, ruling the Court’s reasoning was that unborn babies were part of a woman’s body, therefore they were her property; and, according to the Constitution, women were given the right to dispose of their property in any way they saw fit, much as was the case in the Dred Scott decision which was issued by the Court just prior to the Civil War. In Roe v. Wade the Court ruled that because unborn babies were property, only the legal owner of that property — the pregnant woman herself — could decide whether or not to terminate the life of her unborn property.
Since then the miracle of DNA has been uncovered and DNA now proves, beyond all scientific doubt, that an unborn baby is not part of a mother’s body. Therefore, the unborn child is not property of the mother and the mother has no legal right to kill the unborn baby; so the Court cannot leave it to the mother to decide whether or not to abort the unborn child.
