Don’t just take our word for it. Take the lamentations of New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, who told CNN during a discussion on gun control, “To be honest with you, I do not understand the United States.” What she’s really saying is that she doesn’t respect the U.S. Constitution.

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern tells CNN’s @camanpour that she does “not understand” why the United States has not passed stronger gun laws in the aftermath of mass shooting events https://t.co/dRmumzaIlQ pic.twitter.com/D1XMVfoDSg

— CNN (@CNN) May 15, 2019

Her seeming perplexity isn’t helped when the CNN interviewer erroneously claimed American students have been subjected to “15 school shootings alone this year,” to which Ardern nodded in acknowledgement. That’s a fallacious claim, but that hasn’t stopped other CNN talkingheads from spreading this and other fake news. After all, the appeal is to emotions, not facts.

Speaking of facts, the antagonism shown toward the U.S. Constitution from foreign leaders can be boiled down to this one simply reality: They disdain the Rule of Law. Before admitting she does “not understand the United States,” Ardern stated, “Australia experienced a massacre and changed their laws. New Zealand had its experience and changed its laws.” Therefore the reason the U.S. won’t follow their lead must be because Americans are unsympathetic and/or cowards.

Wrong.

Ardern definitely has allies in the Democrat Party, which would love nothing more than for the U.S. to enact gun control and even gun confiscation. Sadly, Democrats hate American exceptionalism and the Rule of Law, which is why they are so open to imposing upon us other nations’ ideals. Republicans, on the other hand, believe that the Constitution means what it says, and they’ve been steadfast in refusing to bow to the immense pressure coming from emotionally driven gun-control zealots. The Declaration of Independence states, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Those unalienable Rights are codified in the Bill of Rights, the Second Amendment of which reads, “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” What Ardern and her like either don’t understand (unlikely) or refuse to accept (more likely) is that our rights are not derived from man. Which is why Patrick Henry once warned, “Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect every one who approaches that jewel.”

Global elitist leftists “don’t understand” because they disdain the kind of Liberty enshrined in our Constitution, which is second to none.

A respect for the Rule of Law is also where the term “American exceptionalism” came from. Exceptionalism is defending our highest forms of liberties and refusing to acquiesce to the demands of foreign nations whose freedoms are fluid. Take, for example, Venezuela, where weapons were confiscated before that nation fell into socialism’s death trap.

An exit question for Ardern et al.: Why should anyone want to live in a country in which your “rights” can be taken away at whim? Unfortunately, some people will only understand the relevance once it’s too late.