By Will Hall, Message Editor
While announcing new gun restrictions Jan. 5, President Obama, surrounded by parents of the 20 children murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut during 2012, became deeply emotional.
“First graders,” he said. “Every time I think about those kids, it gets me mad.”
“Our unalienable right to life, and liberty, and the pursuit of happiness — those rights were stripped from college students in Blacksburg and Santa Barbara, and from high schoolers at Columbine, and from first-graders in Newtown,” he said. “First-graders.”
“But I also believe we can find ways to reduce gun violence consistent with the Second Amendment,” he offered. “I mean, think about it – we all believe in the First Amendment, the guarantee of free speech. But we accept that you cannot yell “fire” in a theater.
Then he said something remarkable.
“We understand there are some constraints on our freedom in order to protect innocent people.”
The president is justified in regretting the loss of innocent lives in shootings across the United States. In 2014, there were 8,124 murders using firearms, according to the FBI; and, another 21,175 individuals took their own lives with a gun, the CDC reports – nearly 30,000 needless deaths, altogether.
Unfortunately, he has missed multiple opportunities to grieve an even greater loss of life each year – the needless killing of more than 1 million unborn children in 2014, alone.
Indeed, during President Obama’s two administrations, 7,639,830 innocent lives have been taken by abortion, so far. Moreover, if trends continue to hold, another million unborn babes will be killed in his last year in the Oval Office – on the order of 8.7 million deaths of innocent lives in the abortion mills of our country alone in his two terms.
This is particularly troubling given the president’s repeated claim that he believes abortion should be “rare.”
It has been his standard response to questions about his views on abortion since he first ran for the White House in 2008.
For the record, abortions have dropped by more than 90,000 a year since he took office.
However, this is a trend that began in 1990 when the number of abortions in our country reached a peak of 1,608,600, and is attributable to a number of factors, including conservative lawmakers passing strong pro-life measures in 27 states in the last 25 years.
Indeed, while he supports “some constraints on our freedom in order to protect innocent people” with regard to gun ownership, he tolerates no such constraints, even reasonable measures, on a woman’s right to an abortion.
These are “decisions that are better made between a woman and her daughter” he said in video to Planned Parenthood supporters in 2012 – despite the fact most abortions, three-fourths, are performed for convenience (interference with work or school, or, a drain on finances) with half of abortions repeat business by a woman (second or third abortion).
In fact, he doubled down on his support for Planned Parenthood in 2013, becoming the first sitting American president to speak at a Planned Parenthood conference.
Even when undercover videos showed Planned Parenthood executives discussing the illegal sale of body parts ripped from unborn children’s bodies, President Obama could not muster a statement of shock or disapproval over their callousness for the unborn.
Tragically, there could be another 1 million to 2.2 million first graders sitting in U.S. classrooms this year if President Obama truly believed abortions should be “rare.”
Sadly, his grief over the loss of innocent lives does not include the unborn.
