Another gunman opened fire on a classroom last Thursday, this time at Umpqua Community College in my mother’s hometown of Roseburg, Oregon. Nine people were killed and nine others seriously injured. It was the 294th mass shooting in our country in 274 days.

The same day as the massacre in Oregon, North Carolina’s law imposing a 72-hour waiting period to have an abortion went into effect. North Carolina is now tied with Missouri as having the longest waiting period for women seeking to exercise their constitutional right to abortion.

What do these things have in common? What possible corollary could I be drawing between such seemingly disparate events? The short answer is: North Carolina doesn’t have a waiting period to buy a gun.

Just days before the Oregon shooting, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee – led by chairman Jason Chaffetz, Republican congressman from Utah – held a hearing at which Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards was aggressively grilled over the contents of several edited “sting” videos in a ridiculous show of interruptions and grandstanding. As everyone knows – and law enforcement agencies have confirmed – Planned Parenthood has done nothing wrong, and Richards proved that easily, despite hostile questioning from the majority GOP members determined to rally their base over the issue of denying women critical health care.

Planned Parenthood provides needed, essential health care to 2.7 million Americans – male, female, cisgender, transgender, poor, underserved, and rural populations – each year. These services save lives, help keep families healthy and intact and prevent thousands of unintended pregnancies which, as every relevant health study has shown, reduces the rate of abortion.

Yet while this Congress wastes millions of dollars investigating debunked claims of an imaginary “baby parts” black market, they refuse to even consider funding a simple, non-binding study on the effects of gun violence on public health, which causes more deaths each year than in any other industrialized nation on Earth.

The hypocrisy of GOP “pro-life” ideology has become a joke. While 51 new abortion restrictions have been enacted at the state level this first half of this year alone, not a single bill has reached the floor of the US House that would attempt to address gun violence. Millions of taxpayer dollars are wasted investigating a health care organization that saves lives and, sometimes, provides a constitutionally-protected and necessary health care procedure that interrupts pregnancy. Yet we are told it’s not worth spending a cent to learn how to save the lives of living, breathing, studying, working, family-raising human beings.

The policies of those who claim to care for nothing more than protecting human life are a straw man argument to prevent women from exercising their right to bodily autonomy and participating fully in social, economic, and democratic life.

Unsafe abortions kill 47,000 women annually around the world; there is a strong, continuing correlation between deaths from unsafe abortion and countries where the procedure is illegal or its access is significantly restricted.

Meanwhile, guns kill 2.3 out of every 100,000 women in in the US. Women here are 11 times more likely to die from gun violence than in any other developed country.

Legal abortion is even markedly, dramatically, absurdly more safe than childbirth, resulting in .06 deaths per 100,000 each year in the United States. Safe abortion reduces maternal mortality – and states with higher abortion restrictions see an increase in maternal death rates.

Today, though, 28 states require a waiting period ranging from 24 to 72 hours to obtain an abortion. But only nine states require any waiting period at all to purchase a gun. There are 35 states that require so-called “abortion counseling” before a procedure, which may include misleading or outright false information dictated by the state legislature in a script that your doctor must read, whether they know it to be false or not. Some 24 states require an unnecessary ultrasound. But only six states require any form of training or certification courses to purchase a gun.

In Wisconsin, a child 14 years of age may carry a gun to hunt without a guardian or adult present. But, as in 20 other states, any minor under the age of 18 must have the legal consent of a parent to obtain an abortion.

Republicans’ insistence upon absolute, unfettered freedom to own, carry, or stockpile weapons stands in stark contrast to their dedication to restricting women’s personal choices. Potential life – with all its promise and power – means far more to these demagogues than the actual lives of people here on Earth, now.

For the personhood of embryos, they draft legislation. For the safety of living, playing, laughing children, they do nothing. The potential dreams of a not-yet-sentient organism are paramount – not because it is a human life, as demonstrated by their lack of commitment to actual living humans, but because it is inside of a woman. And that woman must not be permitted to do as she pleases or else all Hell may break loose.

So long as women know their place, we must assume, no amount of blood spilled is too much to protect the status quo. Meanwhile, Hell is already here.