"Man Charged in Fatal Shooting of Two Women and Unborn Child."  This headline ran this weekend in my hometown in a newspaper for a neighborhood that is a bastion of Progressivism.  I had to do a real double-take when I read it because Progressives don't normally like acknowledging those unborn children.  Meanwhile, in nearby Philadelphia this weekend, 15 people were murdered, including a nine-year-old boy in a car with his father.

The leftists say we just need to get rid of the guns.  But does anyone with an honest heart or an I.Q. over 70 think that will solve things?  Reflect how well the Iraqi insurgents did with IEDs — not guns, just homemade explosives.  For the supremely angry, where there's a deranged will, there'll definitely be a way.  I won't waste time here asking about Uvalde's missing school security, both electronic and an armed officer.  I'll stay on target.

Instead, I want to ask: why are these school shooters so angry, so merciless, and so contemptuous of human life?  I grew up in the '50s.  Guns were just as available — or probably more easily available — then than they are now.  But find me the school shootings in the '50s.  Go ahead, I'll wait.  Well, I won't wait forever because they didn't exist.  So what has changed given that guns in America are a constant?

I'd like to throw out there a very unusual hypothesis.  The late Pope John Paul II said America embraced a culture of death in its legalization/mainstreaming of abortion on demand.  He was right in a way I didn't then foresee.

Image: Pregnant woman and ultrasound.  Public domain.

The argument justifying abortion on demand contains a huge non sequitur — an oxymoron, in fact — which is so hypocritical and illogical that it corrodes the national psyche like battery acid.  That headline referenced above said "shooting ... of an unborn child."  Those few words let slip the central illogic of the whole pro-abortion mentality.  Progressives insist that what is being dismembered and ground up in an abortion is not a human being, but our gut inconveniently says otherwise.  And when a pregnant woman is shot, we know who, not what, but who suffers (and often dies) along with her.  And therein lies the searing core of the problem.

In any society, guess who reacts intrinsically the strongest to manifest hypocrisy, illogic, and lies.  It is the very young!  They intuitively and viscerally recoil from those.  If you doubt me, watch a child's or a teenager's reaction when a parent, or any adult, tells an obvious lie.  At the youngster's core, that lie does not go down well.  Young people are simply not jaded enough, worn enough like us adults.

So I would submit that our national culture since Roe v. Wade has encompassed and embraced an unbearable lie that, like the impossible-to-carry Ring of Power in Tolkien's masterpiece, eventually consumes its bearer.

I am not saying the Uvalde shooter consciously even thought of abortion.  Hell, in his broken bitterness, he likely would have been all for it.  But I am saying that the non sequitur, the hypocrisy, and the big lie are out there, affecting all of us.  And the damaged and unhinged are affected subconsciously most of all.

People may think, why bother overturning Roe v. Wade if abortion on demand will freely exist in half the American states anyway?  It gets back to honesty, logic, and truth.  The overturn will subtly — almost subliminally — acknowledge the grisliness and hellishness of the act, and, in so doing, it will be a vital first step in a national psyche cleansing that this country so desperately needs.