President Obama is a long-standing opponent of gun rights. He has opposed concealed carry, going so far as to voice support for a Federal law banning concealed carry in every state. One would be hard-pressed to find an anti-gun law that Obama hasn’t supported.

At the same time, President Obama enjoys the armed security provided by the secret service. His neighbors in Chicago are unable to park their cars near their own homes, and have to pass through security checkpoints, in the name of his safety. Recently, President Obama signed into law a bill that provides him and his wife lifetime secret service protection at taxpayer expense. President Obama’s children attend a private school that has 11 armed guards.

It is clear that President Obama is an intelligent person who recognizes that guns are effective tools for stopping those bent on violence. He understands that a gun in the hands of his secret service agents could save him from a would-be assassin. He knows that a gun in the hand of a security guard at his daughters’ school could protect them from a school shooter. That is all well and good. Indeed, I hope that President Obama and his family remain safe, just as I hope that everyone and their family remains safe.

The problem is that President Obama apparently doesn’t believe that my child, and the other 300+ million Americans, are equally deserving of safety. By supporting “gun free zones,” President Obama is ensuring that my daughter and millions of other American children are unprotected against school shooters bent on committing murder and then suicide, who obviously will not care about the legal penalties for having a gun. By supporting bans on so-called “assault weapons,” he seeks to limit my ability and millions of other parents’ ability to have the best possible tool to effectively defend their children against violent attackers. By opposing the NRA’s plan to place armed security in schools, while keeping his own children so protected, President Obama displays a great deal of hypocrisy.

To be clear, I am not proposing that the secret service be tasked with guarding my daughter. I am not suggesting that my neighbors be made to park 3 blocks away and go through security, so as to maintain a security perimeter around my home. Nor am I suggesting that the Present of the United States not be afforded secret service protection. Instead, I would simply like for President Obama to afford myself and the millions of other ordinary Americans the ability to lawfully possess and carry firearms for self defense, and defense of our loved ones.

Gun control just doesn’t work. It has failed in Britain, where it had a far greater chance of success than in the United States. It has failed in US cities such as Chicago and D.C. Even in authoritarian countries such as China, where it is harder to acquire a firearm (legally or illegally), criminals simply use other tools to kill.

The only real solution to stopping a person who, due to criminality or mental instability, decides to kill, is to have a law-abiding human there to meet force with force, and stop the killer. For people such as President Obama, that force can come in the form of the secret service. For the rest of us ordinary Americans, armed self defense is the only viable alternative, as we cannot afford to employ our own private security forces or wait for the police to arrive. Fortunately, guns are mechanically simple tools that virtually any person can skillfully operate after a small amount of training. That fact shows in the self defense statistics and real-life examples of armed self defense.