This column went up at FrontPageMag.com earlier this morning.
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President Barack Obama, who swore he would “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic” when he joined the U.S. Senate in 2005, and that he would “to the best of my ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States” when he entered the White House in 2009, now stands ready, according to his vice president, to consider “19 steps … (he) can take himself using executive action.”
The administration’s intent could not be more clear. It wants to bureaucratically create a de facto repeal of as much of the Second Amendment’s clearly stated and correctly interpreted individual “right of the people to keep and bear Arms” as possible by January 20, 2017 — and if that requires shredding what’s left of the Constitution’s separation of powers, so be it.
The clear-eyed among us warned that this day might come in 2008 if Obama won the presidency that year. During that campaign, Obama tried to quiet a group of skeptics at a Pennsylvania campaign stop, first by claiming: ““If you’ve got a gun in your house, I’m not taking it.” That wasn’t particularly persuasive, nor was his next line, which predictably did not get the press attention it should have: “Even if I want to take them away, I don’t have the votes in Congress.” It’s now clear that he mostly doesn’t care about how many “votes in Congress” he has.
In 2012, we further warned that reelecting the most visceral opponent of the fundamental human right of self-defense ever to occupy the White House to a second term would exponentially increase the danger to our free exercise of that basic right. Now Obama has won his last election (or so we hope), while bragging that “the American people have spoken.” Hardly. 50.61 percent of voters pulled the lever for Obama despite his being opposed by the worst Republican candidate in my lifetime; fewer than 27 percent of all voting-age adults voted for him, a decline from four years earlier. Nonetheless, it remains the case that Obama has four more years to figure out how to gut the Second Amendment — something which has been one of his overarching goals for at least the better part of two decades.
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