Editor’s Note: Today’s OpEd piece was written by Alan Gottlieb, founder and executive Vice President of the Second Amendment Foundation, and Dave Workman, communications director of the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms.

Once again, as the nation grieves in the aftermath of a despicable mass shooting inside a Texas elementary school by someone who can only be considered a psychopath, the reliably grotesque exploitation of this event by Joe Biden, Capitol Hill anti-gunners and the gun prohibition lobby is unfolding on television screens and newspaper pages.

America’s law-abiding gun owners have weathered such storms before, but this time, the push to trample the Second Amendment and turn a fundamental right into a government regulated privilege is being bankrolled and energized by billionaire elitists, and tacitly supported by a biased establishment media like never before.

The threat to our Constitution has never before been so clear, and so critical. Demagogues including Senators Charles Schumer, Chris Murphy, Richard Blumenthal and Bob Menendez are poised to dismantle the Second Amendment, which has been the goal of the gun prohibition movement all along.

Their agenda isn’t “commonsense,” it’s nonsense; a wish list of gun restrictions that have not, and will never prevent the kind of outrage we witnessed in Buffalo or Uvalde. The sad part is that the gun ban crowd knows it. They’re not interested in crime prevention. They’re just interested in citizen disarmament, something the Founders endeavored to prevent when they protected the right to keep and bear arms in our constitution.

We have seen this coming since before Joe Biden took office 16 months ago, and he—along with his Democrat allies in Congress—has just been waiting for the right opportunity to launch a renewed effort to erase the right to keep and bear arms.

Now, more than ever, America’s 100 million gun owners and the firearms industry are on the defensive, and we must stay the course to preserve the cornerstone of our Bill of Rights.

Franklin D. Roosevelt once declared, “There is nothing to fear, but fear, itself.”

The gun prohibition movement believes they have American gun owners boxed in. Instead of cowering in fear—as the likes of groups such as Everytown for Gun Safety and Moms Demand Action, Giffords and Brady—gun owners should roll up their sleeves and prepare for a fight that will determine the direction of our country and the sanctity of our Constitution for the foreseeable future. In the weeks and months ahead, we can look for efforts to:

• Ban so-called “assault weapons” and “high capacity magazines,” which seem to be the low-hanging fruit for gun grabbers because these firearms have been wrongly demonized and deliberately mislabeled as “weapons of war.” It doesn’t matter to the media that there are upwards of 20 million such firearms already privately owned by people who have harmed nobody and would never consider hurting school children. They look scary to some people, and the gun control movement exploits this fear at every opportunity.
• Expand background checks and thus create what would essentially be a de facto national gun registry. There are only two reasons for such an effort, first to tax guns and then to ultimately take guns from their rightful owners.
• Push licensing of gun owners, and place limits on the exercise of their constitutional rights with such schemes as one-gun-per-month restrictions and mandated permits before being allowed to buy a gun.
• Pass so-called “safe storage” requirements, forcing gun owners to keep their firearms under lock-and-key, which has already been essentially ruled unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court in the 2008 Heller ruling.
• Demonize and discourage gun owners to be involved in the political process. Democrat gun prohibitionists have watched as millions of new first-time gun owners have emerged from the past two years of social strife, brought on by violent protests, efforts to defund police agencies and diminish their capabilities. They desperately need to press their gun ban agenda now before the midterm elections cost them control of Congress and derail their radical anti-rights agenda.

Now, more than ever, the firearms industry should ramp up support for the gun rights organizations that have been fighting to preserve our liberty to own guns for all manner of lawful uses, most importantly the ability to defend ourselves and our loved ones from raging lunatics and common criminals; people who are allowed to roam our streets and who are escaping prosecution because of policies adopted and perpetuated by the same people who want to disarm honest citizens, thus making them even more vulnerable.

By the same token, gun rights organizations, from the national groups down to local gun clubs, should throw their energy into voter registration drives, meet-the-candidate events and education efforts. Only five months remain before the critical Nov. 8 midterm elections, and gun owners must focus not only on congressional races, but also on state legislative and even municipal races.

Several days ago, the Second Amendment Foundation and Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms issued a challenge to the Biden administration to sit down at the table with gun owners and the gun industry, benefit from their knowledge and work to keep our schools and the children inside safe from deranged killers.

Together we can succeed where the gun prohibition agenda has disastrously and repeatedly failed.

So far, it’s been crickets from the White House and an administration that looks increasingly more interested in stepping on the rights of its good people than in standing between dangerous psychopaths and our precious children.

The challenge we face at this moment is great, but we have stood up against severe threats like this before and won. We can all win again if we stay on message and work hard in unity through the November midterms.

We must fight to win, and together we will succeed.

Alan Gottlieb is founder and executive vice president of the Second Amendment Foundation.

Dave Workman is communications director for the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms.