“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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NOTE: The First Civil Right is To Keep and Bear Arms. It is, as James Madison’s Supreme Court Justice, Joseph Story, rightly defined it, “the palladium of the liberties of the republic,” the ultimate assurance of all other rights.

All defenders of American Liberty and its foundational guarantor, the Second Amendment, should be prepared to articulate and refute the rhetorical gun control agenda disinformation propagated by Democrats and their Leftmedia publicists.

See these updated Footnotes for key points of rebuttal: Firearm Fiction v. Facts.

Only law-abiding citizens abide by the law. Only outlaws perpetrate acts of violence. Making good people helpless won’t make bad people harmless.

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