Like vultures, the gun-grabbing left (including the full body politic of the Democratic caucus in the House of Representatives) has pounced on the awful death scene in Orlando in the wake of the most heinous Islamic jihad attack on America since 9/11 in order to conduct its latest sickening feast at the trough of human suffering.  Demonstrating once again an utter inability to modulate their views according to the facts, which in this case should have awakened liberal America to the very real and present danger of Muslim terrorism, leftists instead have chosen for the umpteenth time to ignore the bellicose ideology of the Islamic canon that propelled the murderer to do his despicable deed.  Doggedly persistent in their straw man arguments against gun rights, leftists revel in foisting blame for this act of war against our nation on law-abiding gun owners, the NRA, Republicans, Donald Trump, Christians, and the Constitution.  Their willful ignorance of history, their disdain for liberty, and their gross misuse of the victims and the grieving families in order to pursue their hate-America, anti-Second Amendment agenda is beyond disgraceful.

President Obama declared in his speech in Orlando after the massacre that it defies common sense to think that it would have been beneficial for more people in the Pulse night club to have been armed than merely the terrorist.  Exactly how does that defy common sense?  If just one armed individual were in the building, the killer's weaponry advantage would have been immediately nullified; perhaps an armed bartender or patron would have stopped him much sooner in the conflagration than the several hours it actually took the police to eliminate him.

Consider this: on the same night as innocent blood was flowing in Florida, a local bar in Queens, N.Y. was threatened by an armed assailant.  It appears that this particular thug was not motivated by anything more than greed as he went into the Parkside Pub to rob the place, but having done so while employing a firearm, he immediately put the lives of the barkeep and four patrons inside in danger.  It's a good thing for everyone involved there that a retired policeman frequenting the pub had his own weapon at hand; the ex-cop took down the criminal with one shot, no one else was harmed, and the innocents went home alive.  In spite of Mr. Obama's definition of logic, it seems that an armed citizen did the logical thing with his gun, and everything worked out just fine as he protected the lives of the innocent in the face of an armed bad guy.

Mr. Obama and his coterie of statist acolytes believe that the Second Amendment does not mean what it actually says – that every American citizen has a natural right to possess any firearm, without any infringement by government, for the purpose of self-protection.  Hillary Clinton opines that it is dubious whether individuals have a right to Second Amendment protections.  Andrew Cuomo loses his religion over gun rights, tangentially arguing that our Constitution does not provide protections for people to stockpile ammunition for game-hunting excursions.  Certainly, our elites imply, we are no longer a nation of musket-carrying frontiersmen.  Those previous generations may have needed personal weapons to protect themselves; now we enjoy the benefit of a robust government that provides protection in the form of our modern police departments, thereby eliminating the need for personally owned guns. 

When the Second Amendment was enacted, the ordinary citizens of each state served as a de facto "well-regulated militia," which checked the potential advances against civil liberties by an avaricious central government.  There was little need for crime prevention departments or standing armies in America's founding period because those first Americans took responsibility for the policing and defense of their own communities. But the left argues: because our 21st-century society currently has well developed professional police forces, those 19th-century militias are unneeded; there's a cop just a phone call away, so what does the Second Amendment actually do for us now other than to give ne'er-do-wells a legal right to get a killing tool? 

Today's tyrannical bureaucrats assert that the language of the Second Amendment must be changed to suit our enlightened, therapeutic, postmodern times.  The left's routine implication is that the ideas of the dead white men who authored the Second Amendment are no longer valid, thus in our contemporary civil society, the only people who should have guns are policemen.  The cops, it is suggested, are trained in the proper use of firearms; the risk of vigilantism, collateral damage, and accidental shootings is just too great to deal with if average citizens regularly and without restriction carry guns.

The irrationality of the left's position on guns is put into stark relief when juxtaposed against their vicious anti-police attitude.  On one hand, the left demands a the disarming of the general public so that only trained law enforcement professionals on the public payroll have guns, and on the other hand, they lambaste the police as a uniformly racist, anti-minority posse eager, willing, and able to shoot to kill unarmed African-American men because of their skin color.  If we understand the Second Amendment as a hedge against government tyranny, would it not make sense for minorities to have legal access to firearms to protect themselves against the Klan-like men in blue patrolling minority neighborhoods, salivating over the opportunity to pick off the first available black man?

Furthermore, are not thousands of young black men and women in these neighborhoods dying on an annual basis at the hands of lawbreakers who have no regard whatsoever for gun laws?  Since the police themselves present a threat to black Americans, shouldn't the innocent citizens in minority communities have the right to arm themselves against the urban terrorists who shoot and murder them at will?  Ask the families of Jamiel Shaw and Hadiya Pendleton if they wish they could turn back the hands of time in order to put a firearm in their hands when these innocent teens were murdered in cold blood by violent gang members while merely walking through their own neighborhoods.  Such killings mean nothing to the left other than to serve as a cudgel against the constitutional right to bear arms.

While undermining the Constitution for all Americans, the gun control lobby's efforts perniciously affect the Second Amendment rights of innocent, law-abiding black citizens who may wish to defend themselves in urban cauldrons of gang violence like Chicago, Detroit, and South Central Los Angeles.  Yet the imposition of firearm restrictions commensurate with the anti-cop culture promoted by the left sends a schizophrenic message to minorities living in these crime-ridden areas.  The denizens of these neighborhoods are expected to dismiss their natural, God-given right to protect themselves, while at the same time they are propagandized to disdain the police as irredeemably hateful of and brutal toward African-Americans.  Thus, the left's pogrom against guns contains within it the notion that black Americans should neither arm themselves for self-protection nor call on the police for help.  Sounds a bit like Jim Crow to me.    

John Steinreich is a graduate of the Colorado Theological Seminary and the author of The Words of God?, an analytical comparison of Christianity and Islam, available on Lulu Press and on Kindle.