The New York Times took an unusual step yesterday, in labeling one of their front page editorials as an editorial for only the second time in the newspaper’s history, and for the first time under foreign control.

The editorial was titled “End the Gun Epidemic.” It’s a quaint title in its sophism.

Their equally sophomoric subtitle, ripped straight from the essay of a struggling 10th-grade student was, “​It is a moral outrage and national disgrace that civilians can legally purchase weapons designed to kill people with brutal speed and efficiency.”

Feel free to read the Times editorial for yourself, but don’t be expected to be blown away by their command of the facts, irrefutable logic, unassailable reason, solid constitutional arguments, or even a persuasive emotional argument.

It is instead a work of acute dishonesty, transparent propagandizing, and demonstrable ignorance.

To lift a line from the Bard of Avon,

“It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.”

Let’s dissect this sad and tumescent effort, if for no other reason to expose the vapidity of what passes for intellectualism among the radicalized Left in the United States in 2015.

All decent people feel sorrow and righteous fury about the latest slaughter of innocents, in California. Law enforcement and intelligence agencies are searching for motivations, including the vital question of how the murderers might have been connected to international terrorism. That is right and proper.

But motives do not matter to the dead in California, nor did they in Colorado, Oregon, South Carolina, Virginia, Connecticut and far too many other places. The attention and anger of Americans should also be directed at the elected leaders whose job is to keep us safe but who place a higher premium on the money and political power of an industry dedicated to profiting from the unfettered spread of ever more powerful firearms.

I do indeed feel “righteous fury.”

The state of California, once thought of as a land of freedom and acceptance of a wide range of ideas and ideologies, has collapsed into the hippie-fascist nightmare so aptly mocked in Jello Biafra’s seminal 1979 work California Über Alles.

Put bluntly, California Democrats hate unapproved liberty. Thought that is truly free, unguided, wide-ranging, and intellectually diverse terrifies them. They’ve done everything possible to restrict and regulate their citizens into a narrowly prescribed range of acceptable behavior. Part of this smiling totalitarianism is their attempt to make exercising the most natural and essential of all human rights, self-defense, as difficult as possible to legally exercise.

It’s a game of constriction and control, disguised as benevolence.

Californians do not have the liberty to decide what kind of firearm they would like to own for family or personal defense. They are limited to a constricted list of tools, arbitrarily determined by untrained politicians who routinely make fools of themselves as they strip away the liberty of their citizens.  The editors of the New York Times would like to see this failed over-regulation—which is no impediment to either criminals nor terrorists—forced upon the rest of the nation.

Like their brethren in California, the pseudo-erudite editorial board of the Times has been carefully and precisely trained how to think “properly,” in a narrow range of “right-thinking” private schools and universities. They are the very definition of an echo chamber, and unfortunately, one that has been told for their entire delicate lives that they are suited to rule, if only that pesky Constitution, written by that obnoxious band of Free Thinkers in the 1700s, could be shunted aside. They view that pesky piece of parchment as an irrelevant, outdated  impediment to a new and improved world where government, run by the right people, would ensure uniform happiness for all… or else.

It is a moral outrage and a national disgrace that civilians can legally purchase weapons designed specifically to kill people with brutal speed and efficiency. These are weapons of war, barely modified and deliberately marketed as tools of macho vigilantism and even insurrection. America’s elected leaders offer prayers for gun victims and then, callously and without fear of consequence, reject the most basic restrictions on weapons of mass killing, as they did on Thursday. They distract us with arguments about the word terrorism. Let’s be clear: These spree killings are all, in their own ways, acts of terrorism.

The biographies of the men who would become known as our Founding Fathers are awe-inspiring. They were imperfect men, to be sure, but they stand as the most philosophically broad-based, historically-aware, and politically-savvy students of the human condition ever brought together at any one place and time in human history, without equal in any time or country.

The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States, and Bill of Rights, along with their supporting documents, express hope for mankind, while grasping the frailties of human weakness.

They knew that man is best when man is free, but that lesser men, when exalted, would feel threatened by the liberty of those they serve, and so would feel compelled to attempt to control them.

The Bill of Rights was created by the Founders to protect individual liberties from the constant threat of Men in High Places designing governments to control people, which has always be the default condition of every government in world history.

The Founders reflected the God-given Right of Rebellion in the Second Amendment. It’s vital that you understand, my fellow Americans, that the right to bear arms was not created by the Second Amendment. It is involate and inherent to the human condition. Every man and woman conceived has the right to defend that most sacred gift of life by any means necessary from man or beast.

The right to bear arms in your self-defense is absolute.

The editorial board of the New York Times and other “right-thinking people,” mis-educated down a narrow path to believe that they have a special knowledge and capacity for superior thought and who believe not-so-secretly that they are suited to rule, find this right to bear arms—among others—to be worrisome.

How can they force you to accept their rules, their constrictions, and their rule if you have the means to resist them?

How can they make the country “perfect” and orderly, if there is a means of resisting what they feel the nation must become?

And so they must attempt to deny you that most natural of rights, by attempting to ban those specific arms most suited to armed resistance against their preferred brand of tyranny.

Opponents of gun control are saying, as they do after every killing, that no law can unfailingly forestall a specific criminal. That is true. They are talking, many with sincerity, about the constitutional challenges to effective gun regulation. Those challenges exist. They point out that determined killers obtained weapons illegally in places like France, England and Norway that have strict gun laws. Yes, they did.

But at least those countries are trying. The United States is not. Worse, politicians abet would-be killers by creating gun markets for them, and voters allow those politicians to keep their jobs. It is past time to stop talking about halting the spread of firearms, and instead to reduce their number drastically — eliminating some large categories of weapons and ammunition.

It is not necessary to debate the peculiar wording of the Second Amendment. No right is unlimited and immune from reasonable regulation.

Certain kinds of weapons, like the slightly modified combat rifles used in California, and certain kinds of ammunition, must be outlawed for civilian ownership. It is possible to define those guns in a clear and effective way and, yes, it would require Americans who own those kinds of weapons to give them up for the good of their fellow citizens.

What better time than during a presidential election to show, at long last, that our nation has retained its sense of decency?

There is noting remotely “peculiar” about the twenty-seven very clear words that make up the Second Amendment.

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.

The Founders left behind no ambiguity in describing what they meant to do in reflecting this pre-existing natural right of all in the Bill of Rights.  Their letters, correspondence, and broadsheet editorials on the matter are stunning in their clear uniformity.

We, the People, are the militia, an obvious fact also codified in federal law.

We, the citizenry, are to be armed with weapons of contemporary military utility against both common savages, and those who imagine themselves fit to rule over men instead of serving them.

Perhaps Founding Father Tench Coxe explained it best in 1799 in the Philadelphia Aurora as tensions arose between Federalists and Republicans:

Do you wish to preserve your rights? Arm yourselves. Do you desire to secure your dwellings? Arm yourselves. Do you wish your wives and daughters protected? Arm yourselves. Do you wish to be defended against assassins or the Bully Rocks of faction? Arm yourselves. Do you desire to assemble in security to consult for your own good or the good of your country? Arm yourselves. To arms, to arms, and you may then sit down contented, each man under his own vine and his own fig-tree and have no one to make him afraid….If you are desirous to counteract a design pregnant with misery and ruin, then arm yourselves; for in a firm, imposing and dignified attitude, will consist your own security and that of your families. To arms, then to arms.

The increasing small and desperate progressive faction within the Democrat Party feels their chance to “make the world a better place” is slipping away, as they’ve lost a thousand elected seats nationwide, and stand to lose many more in 2016.  They are manufacturing the fiction of a “gun violence epidemic” as their last,, best chance of establishing themselves as rulers, even as violence committed with firearms continues to plummet.

Let me take this opportunity to calmly and rationally offer my rebuttal to the editorial board of the New York Times.

I will not give up my guns. You will have to try to take them.

One of us will die.

I will not give up combat-capable rifles, their standard-capacity, 30-round magazines, nor any kind of ammunition that I see fit to run through these guns. I will not give up my combat-capable shotgun, designed to kill a human being the first time, every time with one well-aimed blast of plated buckshot. I will not give up my high-capacity semi-automatic pistols that I can hide under almost any kind of clothing without a hint that I’m armed at all, nor will I give up the hollowpoint ammunition that fills them. You will not take my long-range precision rifle, with which I control anything within a half-mile of my position.

I am one of 100 million armed American citizens, trained in the use of small arms by military and police trainers who want citizens to be armed against an increasingly tyrannical government.

We are free, and we will not submit to you.