While appearing on Meet the Press on Dec. 30th, President Obama pledged to make gun control one of the central aims of 2013. He said he knows it won’t be easy — that “there will be resistance” — but that it has to be done to be sure another Sandy Hook doesn’t take place.  

Clearly, the “there will be resistance” comment was intended to put gun owners on their heels, and put them in an apologetic frame. But it was misplaced. 

For while there certainly will be resistance, it will not be from the gun owners he’s calling out but from the Bill of Rights attached to the U.S. Constitution.

It is crucial to understand that the Bill of Rights sets apart numerous freedoms — the right to keep and bear arms among them — in which the federal government is prohibited from interfering. The Bill of Rights is literally there to handcuff the government and keep the people free (not to handcuff the people and free the government to do whatever it wants). 

From our nation’s founding till now, the Bill of Rights has been a  bulwark for freedom, allowing the rights enumerated therein to be enjoyed by generation upon generation. 

Now Obama pretends the power to step and change our access to the freedoms protected by the 2nd Amendment, and he tries to justify this by saying the goal is to prevent another situation “where someone with severe psychological problems is able to get the kinds of high capacity weapons [the] individual in Newtown obtained.”

This is a classic straw man argument, wherein Obama is trying to shame gun-owners into silence by making it look like opposition to gun control is the same thing as wantonly allowing people with severe psychological problems to obtain weapons. He conveniently leaves out the core issue — Adam Lanza didn’t obtain his weapons legally, thus no amount of psychologically-based gun control measures would have stopped him. 

He was a criminal determined to commit a heinous criminal act. 

Obama is using this shame tactic in hopes of making us forget that our inalienable, God-given rights are just that — inalienable and God-given. This is the message of the Bill of Rights: it’s the message our Founding Fathers communicated to their posterity via the enumeration of certain rights via explicit protections from government infringement.

Criminals can always be counted on to act like criminals. However, such actions should never be used to justify treating law abiding citizens like criminals. Yet that is exactly what Obama, and Sens. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), Chuck Schumer (D-NY), and Joe Manching (D-WV) are trying to do.

Here’s the problem they face — there will be resistance, just as there has been resistance for over 220 years. That resistance is called the Constitution of the United States.