The appalling recurrence of mass shootings of innocent civilians by young men raised without fathers has made gun control once again a live political issue, and some anti-gun rights activists have decided that it would be clever to try to cast their attempt to confiscate guns from American citizens as a “pro-life” issue. Because, you see, guns kill people, and if we’re going to be consistently pro-life, we have to oppose all things that might cause death — or something like that.

This is part of a larger trend to slap the pro-life label on any policy that could conceivably be seen as extending the life of any human person anywhere: Hence, as Archbishop Cupich of Chicago asserted, a “real” pro-lifer would need to support strict gun control; the indefinite expansion of Medicaid and Obamacare; and open borders (since refugees will live longer, healthier lives getting free medical care in Denmark than they would in Turkey).

Cardinal Marcelo Sanchez has yoked the pro-life issue to pull the cart of climate panic, claiming that global warming is already causing countless social problems, including an increase in abortions. Hence pro-choice climate activists like Jeffrey Sachs and Naomi Klein are “really” more pro-life than politicians who want to ban abortion, since the former are getting at the “root cause” of the waning respect for human life: atmospheric carbon dioxide.

By the same logic, pro-choice former NYC Mayor Mike Bloomberg was being pro-life when he banned large, sugary drinks. Why not go further, and embrace the North Korean practice of mandatory gymnastics as a pro-life initiative, since it would surely improve the cardiovascular health of hapless, obese citizens, postponing countless deaths? Now the Washington Post has located an evangelical pro-life activist, Rev. Rod Schenk, who is claiming that gun control is a pro-life issue. As he told the Post: “When we say, ‘Nobody will ever take my life, I’ll take theirs,’ it contradicts the Christian life and message.”

There are even writers out there claiming that conservative Christians like James Robison and Ted Cruz are “anti-abortion, but not pro-life” because while they oppose the intentional murder of unborn children, they deny that the government can and should try to extend the lives of every human being currently on earth (including convicted murders), regardless of the cost to freedom or fairness — or even the impact on the unborn. Hence you have “pro-lifers” all over social media praising the likes of Bernie Sanders, saying that his policies are in fact more pro-life than Marco Rubio’s, since a massive socialist welfare state might bribe some women into carrying their pregnancies to term.

Of course, we could argue over consequences, and show that in fact such a welfare state would not likely have that effect — but that grants a corrupt premise and misses the point, which is that the pro-life movement is aimed at a single, coherent goal: Stopping the direct, willful murder of innocent children, and the euthanasia of the old and sick. It is not a utopian movement aimed at vaguely extending human lifespans, with no regard for human dignity or rights such as liberty and property. That’s the caricature which leftists want to promote of the pro-life movement, precisely to cripple it politically.

One of the crucial documents in the American move toward independence was England’s 1689 Bill of Rights. A crucial liberty guaranteed in this declaration was the right of ordinary citizens to bear arms in self-defense against common crime and government tyranny. America’s Second Amendment was essentially lifted from this Declaration, in support of the same ideal: A free citizenry, of men who were moral equals, with no one inheriting the “privilege” of bearing a sword, or relying on tardy police to protect their families in emergencies. Instead, because all of us were made equally children of one God, with no respect for social caste or political influence, each of us has the right to employ proportionate force in self-defense.

No, our default should never be “shoot to kill.” Nor should we be ripe for revolution. Serious Christians in past centuries have carefully thought out the proper limits of self-defense, and the moral gravity of war and revolution. But the sentimental quasi-pacifism which some Christians are promoting today is a cloying parody of Christian moral thinking.