A few weeks ago, I wrote a piece imploring my fellow Americans to—if we truly want to protect our children—do three things in the wake of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting:

1. Stop spreading false information
2. Seek truth
3. Deal in reality

I missed one … a big one.

Care about human life no matter what.

No seriously.

It *should* go without saying in the context of how to keep our precious children safe—and yet in our increasingly callous and selfish world, I actually have to say it: if we want to keep children safe, we have to care about human life no matter what.

Stay with me here.

7,000 pairs of shoes lined the grassy lawn in front of the U.S. Capitol building last week—one pair for every child killed by a gun since 2012.

Do you know how many pairs of shoes you’d need to represent the number of helpless children lost to abortion since 2012?

Approximately 3.2 MILLION.

3.2+ million children who never took a breath outside the womb; who were never cuddled by loving parents; who never even had a chance to go to school.

And we say we care about the children.

Bull. No we don’t.

First off, let’s not play dumb. We all know what’s in the womb; we all know deep down that the birth canal is not some magical pathway that somehow converts a fetus into a human being during labor. I realize our society has spent years convincing itself that it really is just a blob of cells, but we know it’s really not.

People scream and yell at politicians to DO SOMETHING when a crazed maniac shoots up children at a high school, and yet they aren’t pounding the pavement to stop the legal murder of children in the womb. In fact I see many of those same people demanding that women be able kill their children on demand and on the taxpayer’s dime.

Let’s fact facts: our society cares about the children when it’s convenient.

When you get to choose when and where and why you care about life, life is then reduced to nothing more than a preference.

And we’re all a bunch of slobbering hypocrites as a society if we sit here and think Nikolas Cruz is somehow worse than Planned Parenthood’s Cecile Richards.  The only reason he’s in jail today and she (and every other abortion advocate) walks free is because we as a society have made a choice: we get to pick when life matters.

There’s a high school teacher out in California whose job is currently on the line for suggesting what I just did:  that we don’t care about all life. While students across the country planned to walk out of school to protest gun violence, Rocklin High School teacher Julianne Benzel wondered if schools would grant the same leeway to kids protesting abortion.

For this, Ms. Benzel was put on administrative leave.

Yeah, we care so much about the kids in this country that we disciplined a teacher who dared suggest our society *might not* tolerate a student walkout in protest of an act that kills children at an astronomically higher rate than all gun violence.

Brilliant.

For the record, some of her students are planning to do exactly that. They’re planning to walk out of school in protest of a society that doesn’t even give these poor aborted children a fighting chance.

And as our nation’s media and political elites inevitably snub these intellectually honest, morally courageous students, remember this.

These kiddos are doing something countless adults in our society can’t seem to bring themselves to do:

Actually care about the children.

Mary Ramirez is a full-time writer, creator of www.afuturefree.com (a political commentary blog), and contributor to The Chris Salcedo Show. She can be reached at: afuturefree@aol.com; or on Twitter: @AFutureFree