Near the beginning of the third and final presidential debate of 2016 on Tuesday night, Hillary Clinton was confronted by debate moderator about her position on human right to bear arms reflected by our Founding Fathers in the Second Amendment.

Mrs. Clinton’s answer was as dismissive and ofuscory as we’ve come to expect.

“Well, first of all, I support the Second Amendment. I lived in Arkansas for 18 wonderful years. I represented upstate New York. I understand and respect the tradition of gun ownership. It goes back to the founding of our country.

But I also believe that there can be and must be reasonable regulation. Because I support the Second Amendment doesn’t mean that I want people who shouldn’t have guns to be able to threaten you, kill you or members of your family.

And so when I think about what we need to do, we have 33,000 people a year who die from guns. I think we need comprehensive background checks, need to close the online loophole, close the gun show loophole. There’s other matters that I think are sensible that are the kind of reforms that would make a difference that are not in any way conflicting with the Second Amendment.

You mentioned the Heller decision. And what I was saying that you referenced, Chris, was that I disagreed with the way the court applied the Second Amendment in that case, because what the District of Columbia was trying to do was to protect toddlers from guns and so they wanted people with guns to safely store them. And the court didn’t accept that reasonable regulation, but they’ve accepted many others. So I see no conflict between saving people’s lives and defending the Second Amendment.”

Clinton mouths the words “I respect the Second Amendment,” but her three decades in the public eye clearly show that to be a false statement.

In a 2014 town hall, Mrs. Clinton told the audience that she would support of ban on what she calls “assault weapons” and “high capacity” magazines.

She said, “we cannot let a minority of people—and that’s what it is, a minority of people—um, hold a viewpoint that terrorizes the majority of people.”

Mrs. Clinton not only disagrees with your Second Amendment right to bear arms, she disagrees with your First Amendment freedom to even have an opinion on the subject.

You’ll note that she repeatedly referred to “automatic weapons” in her response, fully aware of the fact that they have been heavily regulated since 1934, that lawfully-owned automatic weapons have only been used in two homicides since then in the United States, and the fact that automatic weapons have been banned for manufacture for civilians for 30 years, outlawed by the Hughes Amendment to the Firearm Owners Protection Act (FOPA) in 1986.

Mrs. Clinton is intentionally trying to con the American people into thinking that common semi-automatic firearms—which have been around for more than 130 years and which are the most common action type for rifles, handguns, and are about to overtake the pump as the most popular action type for shotguns as well—are the same as machine guns.

They aren’t remotely the same thing, as this brief video clearly demonstrates.

In her statement, Clinton overtly and intentionally mischaracterized the single most common firearm type in the United States as  machine guns. She’s boldly lying to the American people, because she doesn’t respect voters any more than she respects our rights.

“Gun violence,” or gang violence?

Last November, Clinton claimed that, “I’m running for president to protect our families and communities from the plague of gun violence.”

“Gun violence.”

We’ve heard the term incessantly in the past few years. It’s a term adopted by citizen disarmament groups after they held focus groups and did extensive polling to determine why their message as “gun control” organizations were failing. “Gun violence,” often paired with the word “epidemic” is a common theme with Mrs. Clinton.

It also doesn’t exist.

From a purely rational standpoint, the very idea of “gun violence” is absurd.  It’s beyond superstitious to assert that physical objects control human behavior. Would you assert that we have a “fork overeating” problem in this country when referring to obesity? Of course not. You rationally recognize it as a human behavior issue, just as we recognize drunk driving as a human behavior issue.

What we actually have is a gang violence problem.

John Kass of the Chicago Tribune is breaking the media’s wall of silence to tell the truth about so-called “gun violence” by admitting that despite the love for that made-up term by Democrat politicians, it doesn’t really exist.

Gang violence does, but Democrats don’t want to talk about that harsh reality.

Some call it “gun violence,” a definition greatly appreciated by Democratic politicians like those at City Hall. They can point to guns and take that voter anger over homicide numbers and channel it into a safe space.

But there are plenty of guns in the suburbs, and suburbanites aren’t slaughtering each other.

It’s the gang wars.

Politicians know that the gangs are reason for the deaths. Calling it “gun violence” is much safer, especially in wards where gangs often provide political muscle.

“Have you ever heard a Chicago alderman call out a street gang by name?” O’Connor asked. “No? Me neither.”

His piece is one well worth reading for those interested in actually getting to the root of the gang violence problem in Chicago. A smaller, over-worked police force using modern tactics of questionable effectiveness, under the stress of civil liberties watchdogs who seem to care more about the rights of violent criminals than the lives of the communities, are coming apart at the seams during one of the bloodiest years there since Bill Clinton was President.

This fictional war on “gun violence” has also become a key focus for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign (along with avoiding indictments for corruption and espionage, and disturbing questions about her health).

It’s perhaps worth noting that Chicago—which has subscribed to the sort of Democrat-led gun control philosophies championed by Mrs. Clinton for decades—recently surpassed 600 criminal homicides for the year, and more than 3,500 wounded. That’s more more than double the coalition casualties of the entire 1991 Gulf War (292 killed, 776 wounded).

Why would politicians embrace a term such as “gun violence” instead of embracing the reality that what we have is a violent criminal subculture problem?

The answer to that question is as easy as it is disheartening: politicians and activists who use the words “gun violence” don’t have any interest at all in reducing the depraved acts of systemic criminal predators. If they did, they would target “gang violence.”

But criminal gangs, as deadly as they are for the average American citizen, don’t threaten the aspirations of legislators safely hidden behind a phalanx of private security, Capitol Police, and Secret Service agents.

It’s about raw political power

The only thing that truly frightens power-mad and greedy legislators is the thought that if they abuse their power that citizens will once again take up arms as they have as recently as 1946, overthrowing a corrupt Democrat government.

After the “Battle of Athens,” former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt penned a warning to her fellow Democrats.

After any war, the use of force throughout the world is almost taken for granted. Men involved in the war have been trained to use force, and they have discovered that, when you want something, you can take it. The return to peacetime methods governed by law and persuasion is usually difficult.

We in the U.S.A., who have long boasted that, in our political life, freedom in the use of the secret ballot made it possible for us to register the will of the people without the use of force, have had a rude awakening as we read of conditions in McMinn County, Tennessee, which brought about the use of force in the recent primary. If a political machine does not allow the people free expression, then freedom-loving people lose their faith in the machinery under which their government functions.

In this particular case, a group of young veterans organized to oust the local machine and elect their own slate in the primary. We may deplore the use of force but we must also recognize the lesson which this incident points for us all. When the majority of the people know what they want, they will obtain it.

Any local, state or national government, or any political machine, in order to live, must give the people assurance that they can express their will freely and that their votes will be counted. The most powerful machine cannot exist without the support of the people. Political bosses and political machinery can be good, but the minute they cease to express the will of the people, their days are numbered.

This is a lesson which wise political leaders learn young, and you can be pretty sure that, when a boss stays in power, he gives the majority of the people what they think they want. If he is bad and indulges in practices which are dishonest, or if he acts for his own interests alone, the people are unwilling to condone these practices.

The corrupt Democrat machine in McMinn County grossly abused its power, and a bipartisan group of young war veterans was forced to take up arms to restore liberty.

We now face another corrupt Democrat machine, but on a national scale.

Untouchable?

Hillary Rodham Clinton thinks that she is nearly untouchable.

She’s spent more than 30 years corruptly trading in influence to amass money and power.

Mrs. Clinton thinks that her hand-selected opponent Donald Trump will be a pushover in November now that her allies in the media have finally released damning accounts of sexual assaults that they’ve been sitting on since before he was the nominee. Their “October surprise” was calculated to vault Clinton into the White House, where she allegedly plans to use “executive actions” to impose restrictive gun control on the citizens of the United States not to stop gang violence, but to seize that essential right of armed self-defense from the law abiding.

Gutting the Second Amendment

While she talks more now about “background checks” and “closing loopholes” as we close in on the election, Clinton has made it very clear that her ultimate goal is repealing or undermining the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA).

The PLCAA exists for one reason, and one reason only: to protect the firearms industry from a wave of frivolous lawsuits meant to drive firearm and ammunition manufacturers out of business. In the early 2000s, the Brady Campaign and other gun control groups hit upon the idea of abusing the legal system to wage what is termed “lawfare” against gun shops, firearms distributors, and firearm and ammunition manufacturers.

Their goal was to file hundreds or thousands of lawsuits on the local and district level when a firearm was used in any crime. It was irrelevant if the gun dealer was in the wrong in these cases, and it didn’t matter if the judge ultimately dismissed the case before trial (which they usually did). The goal was to force companies to hire expensive legal counsel to respond to these frivolous cases, costing them thousands of dollars.

The end game of this “lawfare” practiced by gun control groups was to have dozens to hundreds of concurrent lawsuits against the industry, each costing thousands or tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees even if they never went to trial. The goal was to drive dealers, manufacturers, and gun companies out of business, gutting the ability of the American people to exercise their Second Amendment rights without the hassle of a constitutional amendment battle they know they could never win.

The Protection of Lawful Commerce In Arms Act was written specifically to stop this abuse of the legal system by gun control supporters like Hillary Clinton, who like to mouth the words “I respect the Second Amendment, but…”

Hillary Clinton has promised to gut the PLCAA if elected.

She’s not content to ban some guns, or some magazines, or even close loopholes.

Hillary Clinton has made it very clear that her goal is to make it impossible for you to buy any firearms or ammunition if she is elected President, by destroying the PLCAA and bankrupting the entire firearms and ammunition industry through lawfare waged by her close billionaire friends in the gun control movement.

A sa result, she is the most constitutionally dangerous candidate ever nominated for the office.

* * *

In the end, the 2016 Presidential election isn’t about Hillary Clinton versus Donald Trump.

It’s about preserving the United States, or seeing it irrevocably altered and made into a lesser nation.

Trump, for all his bluster, is a vainglorious loudmouth who will be checked by opposition from both Republicans and Democrats in the House and Senate if elected. He will engage in a stalemated placeholder Presidency of some amusement (and not a little vaudevillian horror) and will not likely run for second term. Ultimately, his most important legacy will come if he carries out his promise to place a textualist judge (or judges) on the Supreme Court. He’s an embarrassment the nation will survive.

We cannot say that about Hillary Clinton.

Mrs. Clinton demands radical change to the core of who we are as a nation. She seeks to follow a path of failed socialist policies that have led Europe into two World Wars, economic instability, poverty, and now foreign invasion and insurrection.

Mrs. Clinton is as dangerous as she is corrupt, and if elected, she would threaten the soul of the United States itself.