“The ultimate authority … resides in the people alone. … The advantage of being armed, which the Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation … forms a barrier against the enterprises of ambition.” –James Madison (1788)

I know you’re shocked – SHOCKED – to learn that Democrats have been caught chipping away at the Second Amendment again, now one round at a time. If nothing else, they are persistent.

In 2008, a “nobody from nowhere” presidential candidate who had mastered the art of the “BIG Lie” mesmerized an audience with his faux provincial twang, insisting, “I believe in the Second Amendment. I believe in people’s lawful right to bear arms. I will not take your shotgun away. I will not take your rifle away. I won’t take your handgun away.”

Again, in 2011, attempting to defend his lawless Fast and Furious gun control charade, Barack Obama asserted correctly, “The president of the United States is bound by our Constitution,” a constraint he completely disregards. He then repeated his “I believe” declaration: “I believe in the Second Amendment. It does provide for Americans the right to bear arms for protection, for their safety, for hunting, for a wide range of uses.”

“A wide range of uses” indeed. First and foremost among them is to defend the endowment of Liberty, or, as the Founders put it, “the security of a free state.”

For the record, it is irrelevant whether Obama “believes in the Second Amendment” or not. What is relevant is that constitutional Rule of Law supersedes the lawless rule of men advocated by this president and his Leftist cadres.

James Madison aptly summed up the real reason Americans, and all people, should be armed: “The advantage of being armed … forms a barrier against the enterprises of ambition.” Thus, disarming Americans and removing that barrier has been the highest ambition of the statist leaders of the Democratic Party for the last three decades.

Disarmament by incremental encroachment is the modus operandi of Obama and his criminal co-conspirator, Eric Holder, who recently lamented, “[T]he single failure that I point to in my time as attorney general is that I was not able to … convince Congress to really follow the will of the American people – which was to enact meaningful, reasonable gun-safety measures.” In other words, Liberty was preserved, despite Holder’s best efforts.

In fact, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) unwittingly affirmed the motive for the Left’s assault on weapons. Laughably implying that the Second Amendment is about protecting the right to hunt, Murphy said he hasn’t met “a single hunter or a single person who hunts for sport” who needs more than 10 rounds in a weapon. Instead, he believes those who want more than 10 rounds are “arming against the government.”

As discomforting as this thought might be for many Americans, they all owe a debt of gratitude to gun owners, who understand that it is not only our constitutional right but our duty to stand prepared to defend Liberty over tyranny.

As James Madison’s appointee, Justice Joseph Story, wrote, “The right of the citizens to keep and bear arms has justly been considered, as the palladium of the liberties of a republic; since it offers a strong moral check against the usurpation and arbitrary power of rulers.” Leftists would rather you not have that “strong moral check” against their relentless assault on the Liberties enshrined in our Constitution.

While Obama and his fellow Democrats controlled both the House and Senate until the House-cleaning of 2010, they didn’t manage to pass any substantive legislation that infringed upon the 2A “right to keep and bear arms.”

But that midterm “shellacking” was a mere bump in the road for Obama.

Frustrated by their inability to override the Second Amendment legislatively, in September of 2013 Obama and his left-hand man, John Kerry, decided to turn to “super-authorities” whom they believe have superior authority to our Constitution. They signed the United Nations’ Arms Trade Treaty, ostensibly regulating small arms trade between nations, but which could be clearly construed to infringe upon rights within a nation’s borders. At the signing ceremony, Kerry claimed, “Make no mistake, we would never think about supporting a treaty that is inconsistent with the rights of Americans, the rights of American citizens to be able to exercise their guaranteed rights under our Constitution. This is about keeping Americans safe and keeping America strong. This treaty will not diminish anyone’s freedom.”

Note that Kerry did not specify what rights. Make no mistake, fellow Patriots: The UN’s Arms Trade Treaty is a Trojan Horse.

Obama’s last legislative shot at constricting 2A rights ended with another shellacking in the 2014 midterm Republican Wave that washed away his Senate majority.

Still, Obama has 700 days to use his phone and his pen, and hordes of Leftist administrators at the helm of federal bureaucracies stand ready to do his bidding.

Obama’s latest subterfuge in the name of “sensible gun control policy” is to control “gun violence” by way of decree – having the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to ban a common cartridge type popular with shooters of AR-15 rifles, the firearm Obama and Holder would most like to ban.

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Since they can’t ban the rifle itself, they attempted to ban the ammunition by outlawing its 5.56mm M855 “green tip” cartridge. Obama spokesman Josh Earnest claimed the now-familiar “common sense” rationale for the ban: “I’d put this in the category of common-sense steps our government can take.” (Gosh, who could oppose “common sense”?)

Ostensibly, the administration argues, the ban was intended “to protect the lives and safety of law enforcement officers from the threat posed by ammunition capable of penetrating a protective vest when fired from a handgun.” However, according to FBI and ATF records, fortunately there is no record of a police officer ever having been murdered with an M855 round. Ever. In fact, James Pasco, executive director of the nation’s largest police association, the Fraternal Order of Police, debunked the ATF’s ammo ban, noting, “Any ammunition is of concern to police in the wrong hands, but this specific round has historically not posed a law enforcement problem.”

Having been in law enforcement early in my career, I can tell you that many common knives and other instruments in the wrong hands can penetrate standard soft body armor.

So supremely confident was Obama that he could ram through his ammo ban and conduct an end-run around objections, the news was published in the ATF’s latest annual Firearms Regulation Reference Guide before it was even enacted.

Fortunately, this back-door ban received the immediate attention of 238 House members, who signed a strong letter of protest initiated by House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-VA). The letter, addressed to the ATF’s director, notes that the agency “establishes an unduly restrictive standard, does not comport with the letter or spirit of the law, and will interfere with Second Amendment rights by disrupting the market for ammunition that law abiding Americans use for sporting and other legitimate purposes.”

Of course, the Second Amendment has nothing to do with “sporting purposes” and everything to do with prohibiting the government from infringing on “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms,” in support and defense of Liberty.

The ATF backtracked, claiming the regulation as printed “was an error which has no legal impact on the validity of the exemptions.” After a deluge of comments, the ATF has backed down, but Democrats in the House are now formulating legislation to ban the green-tipped rounds, and Rep. Jackie Speier (D-CA) said she would introduced a broader bill to ban additional cartridge types.

It is ironic that Obama packaged the ammo ban ruse as a “police protection” measure after he spent most of last year spewing race-bait rhetoric against those same police, giving credence to the Left’s slanderous claim that the reason blacks are arrested more often than those of other races is because cops are racist. However, Obama couldn’t resort to the Left’s old claim that “more guns equal more crime,” given that the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports indicate violent crime has dropped almost 50% in the last two decades as the number of firearms increased dramatically – including the sale of more than six million so-called “assault weapons,” many of which use the M855 cartridge.

For Obama and his Leftists, the “inconvenient truth” is that, by every objective measure, more guns equal less crime. By extension, the same is true of ammunition. The real motive behind the Left’s “guns and ammo” ban is to undermine the ability of today’s American Patriots to defend Liberty and Rule of Law.

PUBLISHER’S NOTE: NRA members, your National Board ballots are in your NRA publication and I ask your support for a seasoned member of that board, my colleague Joe DeBergalis, the current Chairman of the NRA’s Education and Training Committee and who serves on the Executive, Finance, Law Enforcement, Legislative Affairs and Sport Shooting Committees. In addition to the NRA, Joe has promoted Essential Liberty nationwide. As the founder of the AR15.com Pro-AM 3 Gun Championship, he is an active opponent of leftist Michael Bloomberg’s gun control schemes across the nation. Support our friend Joe DeBergalis and make plans to attend the NRA Convention in Nashville, April 10-12, 2015.

Semper Vigilans Fortis Paratus et Fidelis
Pro Deo et Libertate — 1776

Follow Mark Alexander on X/Twitter.

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The First Civil Right is To Keep and Bear Arms. It is the “the palladium of the liberties of the republic,” as it is the ultimate assurance of all other rights. Making good people helpless won’t make bad people harmless.

FOOTNOTE 1: Regarding so-called “gun violence,” there were approximately 19,600 homicides involving firearms in the U.S. in the latest year of record, which you can view state by state. Fortunately there are indications that homicides may be declining after the significant surge of violence unleashed by Joe Biden and his Democrat agitators in 2020. The 2022 homicide rate was 30% higher than in 2019.

The Demos ubiquitously and falsely label the generational murderous contagion they have seeded, “gun violence,” and focus exclusively on the infrequent high-profile “mass shootings,” which account for only a tiny fraction of all homicides. More than 99% of murders in the U.S. are not the result of mass attacks. (Notably, guns don’t commit violence, thugs and sociopaths commit violence.) The oft-cited Gun Violence Archive defines a “mass shooting” as any incident that involves a “minimum of four victims shot, either injured or killed.” The vast majority of those violent attacks are the result of drug and gang violence committed in Democrat-controlled urban centers.

In a country and culture that ignores the rising generation of sociopathic murderers – mostly thugs in violent urban centers who are saturated with cultural violence and indoctrinated with mass-media glorification of violence – it is fortunate that the incidence of mass murder is not ten times higher. Arguably, the only thing keeping that number from being higher is that 125 million Americans are legal and responsible gun owners.

Democrats don’t focus on the vast majority of murders, particularly the epidemic of black-on-black murders on their decaying urban poverty plantations, because they want to avoid the “inconvenient truth” about race and violence, which is the direct result of failed Democrat social programs. In fact, black people (13% of the population), are twelve times more likely to be murdered per capita, than white people (62% of the population).

That gross racial disparity in murder rates isn’t useful for the gun control narrative Democrats invoke to evoke emotional reaction from mostly wealthy white suburban women, whom form the Demos’ largest voter constituency.

FOOTNOTE 2: Regarding so-called “mass shootings,” for the record, murders of multiple people by one assailant are very rare in our nation of 335 million people. Less than 1% of all murders nationwide are classified are “mass shootings,” and high-profile attacks, such as the 2017 mass murder in Las Vegas, are extremely rare.

The FBI defines “active shooter incidents” as “one or more individuals actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a populated area.” In 2022 the FBI reported 50 incidents resulting in 313 casualties (100 killed and 213 wounded). That number was up significantly from 2020, when the FBI reported 40 incidents resulting in 164 casualties (38 killed and 126 wounded).

A broader record of “mass shooting” data is maintained by the Associated Press and Northeastern University, which uses the Department of Justice definition of mass public shooting: “A multiple homicide incident in which four or more victims are murdered with firearms.” These numbers fluctuate significantly year over year, and range between 20 and 40 incidents, but notably over the last 30 years, the number of black mass assailants is almost as high as the number of what assailants.

Democrats only focus on these rare instances of multiple murders because these rare high-profile tragedies are political fodder to foment fear – most notably when they can toss out their oft-repeated but erroneous claim that “gun violence is the leading cause of death for children.” If by “children” they mean gang and drug associated murders of those primarily between the ages of 16 and 21, then yes. Democrats are experts at fomenting fear and division.

The fear and angst Demos are intentionally propagating is taking a toll on Americans’ mental health. Psychological researcher, Dr. Riana Elyse Anderson, observes: “Watching it time and time again on your phone or on the headlines can really impact you in ways that I don’t think we knew before to be as impactful. It’s so ‘in our face’ all the time and we have access to so much footage, so many pictures, so many videos, so many accounts that we’re ingesting it in ways that’s really unhealthy for us.” The result for many mothers in particular is an irrational fear that their children will be shot. That is precisely the fabricated fear Democrats want to perpetuate, especially among their female constituents, in order to advance their gun control agenda.

FOOTNOTE 3: Regarding what Democrats and their Leftmedia talkingheads and scribes ubiquitously and falsely label “assault weapons,” are not. An assault weapon, AKA “machine gun,” is a select-fire weapon that can cycle rounds in fully automatic fashion.

For much the same reason Democrats focus only on rare high-profile “mass shootings” to generate fear and angst, when those attacks involve a semi-automatic rifle versus a handgun, Demos call for an “assault weapon ban.”

In 1994, Bill Clinton banned the sale of “military style assault weapons,” but that ban was not renewed 10 years later because it was determined the ban had no effect on crime reduction. According to Rand Research, “We found no qualifying studies showing that bans on the sale of assault weapons and high-capacity magazines decreased any of the eight outcomes we investigated.”

Fact is, rifles and shotguns combined are used in less than 3% of all homicides, but Democrats never let facts get in the way of their “assault weapon ban” political agenda.

FOOTNOTE 4: Regarding firearms and violent crime, researcher John Lott reports, “Over 92% of violent crimes in America do not involve firearms.” Again, the only thing keeping that number from being much higher is that 125 million Americans are legal and responsible gun owners.

FOOTNOTE 5: Regarding firearms and suicide, almost 60% of all deaths involving firearms are suicide, most also involving drugs or alcohol abuse. But the big numbers promoted in “gun violence” reports do not distinguish between murder and suicide, thus implying that homicide rates are much higher. And does this mean that Demo support for assisted suicide is in conflict with their support for gun control?

FOOTNOTE 6: Regarding alcohol versus firearm deaths, if Democrats are serious about protecting Americans, they should outlaw alcohol. Alcohol abuse is far more deadly than firearm abuse. More than 178,000 people died from alcohol abuse last year – that’s NINE times the number homicides associate with fire arms. Drunk driving results in 37 deaths per day. And notably, it is estimated that alcohol is a key factor in at least 30% of homicides where the assailant uses a firearm. (Include drug dealing or use as a factor and that number jumps to about 60%.)

The problem is, the vast majority of alcohol users possess and use it legally and responsibly. Likewise, the vast majority of firearm owners possess and use them legally and responsibly. Enacting a prohibition on firearms is tantamount to enacting a prohibition on alcohol. In both cases, only law-abiding users obey the laws, while lawless users don’t.

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