When I heard of the recent shooting in Colorado Springs, my first thought was literally:\u00a0I hope it wasn’t anyone we knew\u00a0from church.<\/i> My second thought was: Goddamn, now that is a fucked-up thing to think.<\/i> My family lived in Chaffee County\u00a0for many years, and basically everyone I’ve met from out there firmly believes that abortion is murder and owns one or two (dozen) guns. You don’t need to spend too much time in\u00a0central Colorado to appreciate the scope of the problem, though.<\/p>\n
At least 37% of Colorado voters<\/a> believe in fetal personhood, although the real number is probably higher than that, as it is possible to believe in personhood as a moral position which ought to guide individual decision making without also believing that the State of Colorado should pass a vaguely written law likely to be struck down in the federal courts. Indeed, the results of this YouGov poll<\/a> indicate that two-thirds of American think of fetuses as persons, and at least\u00a0half of Americans think that abortion on demand should be illegal.<\/p>\n Colorado has over 5 million residents, around 34.7% of whom own guns<\/a>. If we assume (counterfactually) that gun ownership and belief in personhood are independent variables, then at least 37% of the 34.7% are armed with both guns and the firm conviction that abortion is murder, which works out to approximately 645,700 armed “pro-life” citizens in Colorado alone, or over 40,000 armed “pro-life” citizens for each and every surgical abortion provider<\/a> in the state.<\/p>\n The actual number of Colorado citizens armed with (1)\u00a0the bizarre notion that fetuses are innocent persons who ought to be protected and (2) the means to do so using their own\u00a0bullets\u00a0is probably much higher than I’ve calculated here, seeing as I’ve deliberately low-balled\u00a0the probability of believing in fetal personhood\u00a0and also failed to take into account the likely correlation between conservative beliefs and gun ownership.<\/p>\n Given that there are millions\u00a0of Americans\u00a0who have been taught by their faith community\u00a0that fetuses are innocent victims worthy of personhood\u00a0and taught by their political party that gun ownership is sacrosanct, is it really any surprise that\u00a0at least a few of them resort to lethal force? Considering\u00a0the confluence of gun culture and “pro-life” culture, I wouldn’t be remotely surprised if violent\u00a0attacks on abortion providers were to become the new normal in the United States<\/a>.<\/p>\n Your thoughts?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When I heard of the recent shooting in Colorado Springs, my first thought was literally:\u00a0I hope it wasn’t anyone we…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23,"featured_media":988,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3592","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-free-speech"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3592","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/23"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3592"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3592\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/988"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3592"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3592"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3592"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}