The strange convergence of pro-lifers and gun controllers: inside the emotion-fueled politics of planned parenthood and school shootings.

• Author: Welch, Matt
• Position: From the Top - Editorial

ON SEPTEMBER 29, Republicans in the House of Representatives conducted a theatrical grilling of Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards after a series of underground sting videos showed her organization's employees haggling over fetal body parts. Two days later, a gunman at a rural community college in Oregon killed nine people and wounded 20 others in a depressingly familiar school shooting.

Clever culture warriors attempted to link the two stories as an indictment of the opposing side's hypocrisy. "If pro-lifers would just redirect their power toward gun violence, the amount of lives they save could reach superhero levels," said Trevor Noah, new host of Comedy Central's The Daily Show. "They just need to have a superhero's total dedication to life. Because right now they're more like comic book collectors: Human life only holds value until you take it out of the package, and then it's worth nothing."

"The fact remains that no pro-life advocate is in favor of firing a gun at people's heads," retorted Matt Bowman of the Alliance Defending Freedom, writing at CNS News. "Noah, it seems, is in favor of crushing baby heads. He is in no position to accuse pro-lifers of hypocrisy."

These two fights reliably fall along the traditional left-right split whenever there's a mass shooting or an abortion-related controversy, like the 2013 conviction of murderous abortionist Kermit Gosnell or the pro-choice filibuster that same year by Texas state Senator Wendy Davis. The roles are so well-worn by now that the immethate aftermath of such news events, particularly on social media and cable news, resembles less policy discussion than religious ritual, with the opposing side treated as not just intellectually wrong but morally evil.

Gun control advocates and anti-abortion activists may not overlap much in a political Venn diagram, but they actually share many key features in common, in ways that hold particular interest for those of us who find ourselves across the divide from them in moments of heightened stress.

The most important similarity is that on fundamental legal questions, both sides have lost decisively at the Supreme Court. Abortion was legalized nationally with 1973's Roe v. Wade, which located an expanded right to privacy within the 14th Amendment, and that protection was extended in 1992's Planned Parenthood v. Casey. Blanket firearm bans were declared unconstitutional in 2008's District of Columbia v. Heller, which found for the first...