On the anniversary of last year’s massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, gun rights groups are planning events to drive home a straightforward message:

“No one at Newtown should have been a victim and no one in the future should be victimized by laws that do not allow people to defend themselves.”

That simple statement is from Guns Save Lives Day website, sponsored by the Second Amendment Foundation, DefendGunRights.com and the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms to galvanize gun rights supporters to fight efforts by a gun-grabbing government – abetted by the media – to use the Dec. 14 anniversary to push their agenda.

“The event is designed to counteract what certainly will be a day of activism and misinformation from the gun prohibition lobby,” Larry Ward, founder of DefendGunRights.com, said in an article announcing Guns Save Lives Day.

Why would Ward think the gun grabbers would be planning something like that?

Maybe because the Newtown victims were barely buried before the gun control lobbies were at work, cynically using the tragedy to push a mistaken – ultimately totalitarian – agenda of disarming the American public. To the outrage of liberals, those efforts foundered in the Senate, but not before gun control lawmakers showed again their true colors. (Remember Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy telling a New York Times columnist the Newtown killing ground was an opportunity to “disenfranchise” the NRA?)

Already, the hypocritical hype has started over the anniversary. The liberal New York Daily News put out an edition with a front page calling Second Amendment supporters “heartless animals” bent on “trampling on the graves of the Newtown victims. (Always subtle, that Daily News.) NBC Connecticut led its web story about the controversy with a “Stay out of Newtown” message to gun rights groups, even though the article makes clear there are no events planned for the town where the tragedy took place.

In short, it’s the usual emotional but empty argument, personal attacks and factual distortions that gun grabbers adopt reflexively — and the anniversary is two months away.

Misinformation is the liberal strategy, but the facts are simple: Connecticut already had some of the strictest gun laws in the country before the Newtown massacre, according to the Washington Post. They didn’t stop Adam Lanza from murdering his mother and the 26 people at Sandy Hook Elementary.

A gun in the right hands at the right time could have.

“We wanted to ensure that the public has the facts on gun rights and understands how many Americans stand with them in defense of Second Amendment rights,” Ward said.

In the same article, Alan Gottlieb, president of the Second Amendment Foundation and chairman of the Citizens Committee, defended using the Newtown anniversary for the Gun Save Lives events.

“We’re not doing anything that’s insensitive at all,” Gottlieb said. “Quite frankly, what we think is insensitive is attacking the law-abiding rights of gun owners coast to coast and trying to pass legislation so people can’t have the means to protect themselves.”

That’s a message the gun grabbers need to hear.

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