"Machine Gun Bacon."  It's Ted Cruz's humorous take on breakfast.  Just click here.  The selfie video shows the long tall Texan wrapping bacon around the muzzle of his high-powered rifle and firing at a target.  "It's how we cook bacon in Texas," he smilingly tells viewers.

It's a self-inflicted gunshot wound to his campaign.  That video has had over a million views, and if Ted Cruz is our nominee, it will go viral.

But not as a standalone display.  It will assuredly be shown with mothers from Newtown, Connecticut denouncing Cruz for being so heartless.  The liberals will bring out mothers who have lost children to the murderous violence of the shooter who attacked an elementary school there.

They will not, of course, note that the Newtown shooter used his mother's legally purchased weapons.  Nor will they concede that nothing in President Obama's proposals to limit our right of self-defense would have prevented the shooter's mother from acquiring the murder weapons.

Liberals don't have to deal in facts when emotions are at hand.

Still, why should our nominee write their ads for them?  Why, in a political campaign, supply our opponents with all the ammunition they need to beat us?

Ted Cruz likes to compare himself to Ronald Reagan.  I was a state delegate for Reagan and served in his administration.  I fully supported President Reagan's nuclear weapons buildup and his staunch defense of the Constitution's Second Amendment.

Interestingly, though, I never saw a picture of Ronald Reagan holding a firearm unless he was in the movies.

When my wife and I toured the Reagan home at Rancho Del Cielo several years ago, we were shown his bedroom, his bathroom, and his stables.  I asked our guides where he kept his weapons, and we were told he had a gun safe.  We never saw it.

Ronald Reagan's model was George Washington.  He was another president whom you never see depicted with a weapon unless he is on the battlefield.

Before my Second Amendment friends rush to call me a RINO, let me hasten to add that I think we will all have to be armed and trained to meet the threat of self-activated jihadists.  They may strike next at a daycare center or a church picnic.

But I think we should apply to our locally elected sheriffs to become force multipliers as part of "a well regulated militia."  That way we can be men under authority without further empowering President Obama or his administration.

I'm a military veteran who was taught to treat lethal weapons with the greatest of care.  I was proud that the first time I ever held a rifle, I scored "expert" in boot camp.

Ted Cruz's "Yosemite Sam" foolishness in making that machine gun bacon video should disqualify him from being our nominee.  It treats serious matters with cavalier flippancy.

The stakes have never been higher.  With the death of the great Justice Scalia, our Second Amendment right of self-defense hangs in the balance this fall.  Let's approach this choice with all the solemnity it merits.

Robert Morrison, conservative columnist, has walked precincts in every election save one since 1968.