There’s an extraordinary parallelism in the gun / abortion debate. People want a simple solution – a ban – to solve the the issue and “save lives.” Both groups are completely convinced that a legal ban will stop people from seeking and obtaining guns / abortion pills. Both groups react very aggressively to the suggestion that maybe the issue is more complicated and it makes sense to look at what drives people to seek guns and abortion pills.
Within the past two weeks, I somehow ended up in an online exchange with representatives of both the “ban guns” and “ban abortion” camps. The rhetoric they used was so identical that it would take me a second to figure out which particular debate I was in at any given time. The argument that both groups deployed repetitively, insistently and with no variation was “You want children to die.” It is hard to avoid suspecting that the whole point of both debates is to be able to repeat the words “children” and “die” in the same sentence many times in a row.
It’s very similar to the BLM or the trans debates where absolutely any questioning of puberty blockers or Patrice Cullors’s fabulous wealth merits you an immediate accusation that “you want black people/ trans children” to die. Ditto for the immigration debate. “You want immigrants to die!” Reliving the symbolic death of black people or immigrants in a socially acceptable format seems to be the most important goal of this exercise.