Barack Obama held his much-ballyhooed town hall last night on guns, as a follow-up to his tear-jerking and totally ineffective gun control measures announced earlier this week. “We should politicize this,” Obama said of gun control in October. In 2008, he criticized those who “bitterly cling” to guns. And yet he supposedly wanted to rise above all that last night for an open and civil discussion about why every American should agree with him on restricting gun rights.

He skillfully insisted that all he wants to do is “make progress” with “modest” proposals, not “solve every crime.” He tried hard to appear to be the reasonable adult in the room, only wanting to protect us from awful things. (Perhaps he should try enforcing the laws on the books then instead of writing new ones.) But his demeanor was a thin veil for the emotional appeal of his nonsensical, illogical, and, most importantly, unconstitutional approach to the issue.

He couldn’t completely conceal his ideological colors, either, resorting as he often does to drawing caricatures of his opponents. “The way it is described is that we are trying to take away everybody’s guns,” Obama said. “Our position is consistently mischaracterized. … If you listen to the rhetoric, it is so over-the-top, it is so overheated.” He dismissed as “a conspiracy” any desire he has to take guns. It’s probably true that he wouldn’t actually try to confiscate guns, knowing that would likely spark outright civil war, but he’s the one who has repeatedly praised Australia’s gun confiscation as a model we might want to look at. He’s also the one hawking the ban on so-called “assault weapons,” which number in the millions. Besides, no one thinks he or the Left will stop with a little “progress.” It will never be enough; we’ll always need more “common sense” gun control, eroding Liberty incrementally.

As we note often, Justice Joseph Story once called the Second Amendment the “palladium of the liberties of the republic.” In other words, owning guns isn’t primarily about hunting, sport shooting, or even stopping criminals. Bearing arms secures all of the rights of a free people against tyrannical government. That’s why Obama and his ilk hate guns so much, and that’s why no town hall will ever find common ground between tyrants like him and the Patriots who hold Liberty so dear.