ANALYSIS/OPINION:

American democracy is under siege, and gun control is at the very center of the left’s war on all our freedoms and its agenda for an America in the mold of European socialism.

Facts — terrible massacres in strict gun control jurisdictions like Connecticut and France — have no place in fashioning the left’s gun regulatory proposals. Every horrific shooting is followed by demands for draconian restrictions on gun ownership without reasonable evidence that those measures can’t be circumvented by would be mass shooters.

The establishment GOP in Congress, just as it has on entitlements, taxes and a host of other issues, reverts to the mistake of offering compromises without strict conditions. Over and over again, it falls into the error of believing just one more concession will buy peace with the left but it can’t.

For the executive class of the professional left, a victory on one issue — for example, gay marriage — requires finding another — transgender rights. The civil rights movement must keep alive racism, sexism and white male privilege, no matter the progress of society, or its leaders would have to find honest work.

I have never owned a gun and have fired one only once — at the age of 5, my Sicilian grandmother lifted me up to pull the trigger at a Coney Island shooting gallery. I don’t feel gun ownership is necessary to secure my masculinity — something I am entitled to cultivate even if the liberals at my university enforce the notion in curriculum and public speech that it is the source of all injustice.

However, I am convinced it is impossible to make guns too difficult for would-be shooters to obtain. Even if the government made all gun ownership illegal and could confiscate the 350 million plus guns in circulation, a deranged shooter could make an AR-15 and ammunition with a 3D printer.

Similarly, it is impossible to arm and train American school teachers or harden schools to make those fully safe — unless we surrounded schools with barbwire fences, watch towers and guards armed with machine guns.

America is not Israel, where school teachers believe terrorists can be stopped by a well-trained educator holding a semi-automatic. Rather, American teachers are organized into unions that believe more entitlement spending and supporting Black Lives Matters’ anti-police agenda are vital to ending mass shootings.

Better background checks, denying guns to those pre-emptively identified as mentally unstable or on the No Fly List won’t keep guns out of their hands.

But many measures proposed would make appropriate gun ownership painfully more difficult for citizens engaged in shooting sports or having a legitimate need for self-protection in rural areas — police that are 15-30 minutes away when an armed intruder arrives are not much help.

The same folks that are for gun control — read prosperous urban Democrats and their client voters in government employment or otherwise on the dole — are for limiting CO2 emission by shifting blue-collar jobs to China, race and gender quotas in hiring, a single-payer health care system and guaranteed annual income, squashing free speech on university campuses and firing conservative professors, gutting the military, negotiating endlessly with China on matters relating to security and trade, and denying Donald Trump as a legitimate president.

Polls show alarming numbers of American youth embrace the notions that democracy and capitalism are inferior to a government selected by an oligarchy and an economy run by technocrats. Apparently our universities don’t expose students to poverty, atrocities and everyday state-terrorism imposed by such regimes in Russia and Eastern Europe during the Soviet era.

Such information is too inconvenient for contemporary white-male bashing university faculty and presidents.

Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi treating President Trump like a criminal instead of a duly-elected president, and Sen. Chuck Schumer doing whatever he can to block appointments to staff the Trump administration provides reinforcement to the notion that elections are only legitimate when liberal candidates win.

Gun advocates are right when they say gun ownership is fundamental to all their freedoms.

Gun control is a part of a broader agenda to deprive Americans of free thought and the prerogative to vote for a government not selected by a Democratic Brahmin class hell bent on remaking American civilization in their flawed vision of paradise.

• Peter Morici is an economist and business professor at the University of Maryland, and a national columnist.

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