Milbank: Shouldnt pro-life extend to issues of gun violence?

Let us hear no more lectures from Clarence Thomas on the sanctity of human life.

The Supreme Court justice, with timing that could be charitably described as clumsy, issued his latest paean to gun rights Tuesday, as the child victims of last week’s school shooting were still being buried.

Reacting to his colleagues’ refusal to hear a case challenging California’s waiting period for gun purchases, he complained that justices would hear similar challenges to abortion, speech or privacy. “The Court would take these cases because abortion, speech, and the Fourth Amendment are three of its favored rights,” Thomas wrote. “The right to keep and bear arms is apparently this Court’s constitutional orphan.”

Not for the first time, Thomas has it backward. Abortions are restricted far more than guns (and abortions are declining, while gun deaths are rising). Even speech is limited if it endangers life. Why shouldn’t there be reasonable restrictions on guns, too?

But Thomas has a bigger problem: claiming to be “pro-life” while his advocacy of unlimited gun rights expands a culture of death. The gun-control movement has been reluctant to use such words, lest it be seen as aping the anti-abortion movement. But the theme is apt, and it points to the hypocrisy of those who profess to be pro-life but are also pro-gun without exception, those who denounce the termination of a pregnancy but not the termination of innocent life outside the womb.

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