Questionable Iowa Rep. Steve King, in the rare times that he's not worrying about the specter of slavery reparations, frequently speaks to groups of schoolchildren. And his question for these tykes is, "Where do you stand on the abortion issue?"

King apparently asks this difficult adult question to students K-12, just in case any of those five-year-olds are considering baby murder anytime soon. And if one of them responds with the typical psychobabble about "trimesters," he compares abortion to the similarly sunny issue of school shootings:

"In fact, if you want to argue that you really don't know - that it might be first, second or third trimester or viability - tell me: If someone were to walk down this hallway and stick a gun in the door, turn their head away from the gun and pull the trigger and run out the door and we catch him out there, did he kill somebody or didn't he?"

Answering "I don't know" isn't good enough, King says, because if someone is dead, the gunman killed someone. That is why "you cannot guess about when life begins," he said

What a rare opportunity for civic engagement that these lucky five-year-olds have! They can ask him, say, "How are laws made?" and he'll respond with on-the-ground accounts of the Holocaust, or perhaps the firebombing of Tokyo.

[Via TPM]