In a new post at The College Conservative, writer Avey Owyns examines the classic liberal vs. conservative argument of guns and abortions.

Gun Crimes vs Abortions

“So you conservatives think regulating guns won’t end gun violence, but that regulating abortions will end abortion? Isn’t that hypocritical?” This question can sometimes be asked by liberals when they are told that gun restrictions or gun bans have a negligible and sometimes catalytic effect on gun crime.

However cleverly put this question is, it is still very simplistic, and it is also important to realize that it is a red herring fallacy – it is not an actual rebuttal to a conservative’s objection on gun restrictions, but an attempt to distract from the topic altogether, and so far, it works! After they pose this question, liberals can exit the debate triumphantly because conservatives usually don’t have any good answers for it. The question suggests that conservatives are hypocrites for wanting to end abortions by making it illegal while denying that same principle to liberals for gun crime. Yet if liberals and conservatives understood the massive difference between gun control and abortion in this respect, they would see that conservatives aren’t hypocrites at all.

Firstly; conservatives aren’t so arrogant as to believe that there is some utopia free of evil we can attain if we just had the proper government regulations on human behaviour. As lovely as ridding the world of abortions sounds, we are very aware that making abortions illegal won’t put a stop to all abortions. The reason pro-lifers, American specifically, want government to overturn Roe v. Wade is because the precedent re-labels that which is immoral as moral (or at least, amoral). So not only do we find ‘evil women’ (for lack of a better phrase) committing evil, but otherwise good women are given permission by the law to do evil. Making abortion illegal would discourage otherwise good women from doing evil.