The bodies of the Roseburg, Oregon, mass shooting victims weren’t even cold (quite literally) before Barack Obama raced to the podium demanding more gun control laws, even suggesting it was time for the U.S. government to confiscate firearms. Media outlets were immediately flooded with talkingheads aping Obama’s appeal to ignorance.

Leftist sycophant Linda Valdez, writing in the Arizona Republic, declared it’s time to get rid of the Second Amendment because it’s not working. She wailed, “It’s killing us. It’s turning grade schools and college campuses into slaughter houses.” But her most ignorant assertion was this: “Other rights have reasonable limits that can be discussed and accommodated. The Second Amendment has been turned into the supreme law of the land.”

Liberals condescendingly tell us if we don’t like abortions not to have them, but no such standard applies to gun ownership. They tell us Republicans should stop trying to repeal ObamaCare because is “settled law,” yet they have no such respect for the “settled law” of the Second Amendment — a natural, God-given right enshrined in the Bill of Rights for more than two centuries.

Contrary to the Left’s revisionism, the Second Amendment was not included in the Bill of Rights in order to protect the rights of hunters or sports shooters, or even to protect us from the criminal elements of society. It was enshrined in that sacred document to protect us from a far more dangerous entity: our own government.

George Mason, among the most distinguished of the Founding Fathers, explained the necessity of this protected right as he spoke to the delegates of the Virginia convention for the ratification of the Constitution. He said, “[W]hen the resolution of enslaving America was formed in Great Britain, the British Parliament was advised by an artful man, — who was governor of Pennsylvania, to disarm the people; that it was the best and most effectual way to enslave them; but that they should not do it openly, but weaken them, and let them sink gradually, by totally disusing and neglecting the militia.”

Those who claim the Second Amendment was intended only for those serving in the militia are right … sort of. The actual text is as follows: “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.” An astute reader would note that the “right” belongs to “the PEOPLE.” That same astute reader would note that the word “regulated” refers to the militia, not firearms.

According to Webster’s original 1828 American Dictionary of the English Language, “regulate” means “to put in good order; as, to regulate the disordered state of a nation or its finances.” In other words, having chosen a militia rather than a permanent standing army for the protection of the nation, it was necessary that the militia be assembled for training on a regular basis; to be, in the language of the Founders, “well regulated.” It did not mean to restrict.

Furthermore, it should be noted that a militia is not the same as a standing army. In that same speech before the Virginia Ratifying Convention, George Mason stated unequivocally exactly who constituted the militia, answering his own rhetorical question when he proclaimed, “I ask, sir, what is the militia? It is the whole people except for a few public officials.” Get that? We armed and private citizens of the United States constitute the militia.

Richard Lee, another of the Founders, echoed that sentiment, stating, “A militia when properly formed are in fact the people themselves … and include … all men capable of bearing arms.”

The anti-gun crowd claims that times are much different now than when the Second Amendment was written, and it is no longer relevant to our day. Oddly, their view of First Amendment rights is just the opposite. They claim an almost unlimited interpretation of “free speech,” to include even “exotic dancing” and virtual child pornography — pretty much anything except political speech, which they say must be tightly restricted.

Do they have a point? Let us look at some of Valdez’s claims.

“It’s killing us,” she laments. “It’s turning grade schools and college campuses into slaughter houses.” If guns are the problem, then it would stand to reason that those places where guns are most prevalent would be the places where these mass shootings occur. So why is it that, with few exceptions, mass shootings occur in “gun free zones”? Why are there not any mass shootings at gun shows, police stations or gun shops?

“[T]he gun lobby makes sure the mentally unbalanced loners … will always be able to get the high-power, high-capacity killing machines they need to rip people apart,” Valdez complains. In every mass shooting in memory, the guns used have been semi-automatic rifles and handguns with standard capacity magazines, in common calibers. Ironically, she manages to touch on the real problem (mental illness) while simultaneously dismissing it.

Valdez also fails to acknowledge that roughly two-thirds of all gun-related deaths are suicides, and it is ludicrous to believe those would not occur in the absence of guns.

In the aftermath of the Sandy Hook shootings, Obama directed the CDC to commission a study on the best way to reduce gun violence. The surprising (to the topically uninformed) discovery was that the best way to reduce firearm-related crime is to increase the number of guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens, since citizens possessing privately owned firearms used them to stop crime as much as 10 times more often than criminals used them to commit crimes. It should also be noted that the highest rates of gun-related homicides occur in states and major cities with the most stringent anti-gun laws (i.e., states like Illinois, California and New Jersey, and cities like Detroit, Chicago, Washington and St. Louis).

The bottom line is this: In the United States, there are approximately 90 million Americans who own roughly 300 million firearms. Each day, 99.99999% of them don’t commit a crime with a firearm. And most of them believe deeply in their God-given right to possess these guns for their own defense. They will not give them up voluntarily, so getting rid of guns in America would mean having agents of the government coming house to house and taking them by force.

The British tried that here once. It didn’t work out so well for them.