“Now, I want to be absolutely clear at the start — and I’ve said this over and over again, this also becomes routine, there is a ritual about this whole thing that I have to do — I believe in the Second Amendment. It’s there written on the paper. It guarantees a right to bear arms. No matter how many times people try to twist my words around — I taught constitutional law, I know a little about this [applause] — I get it.”

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Those words are from President Obama’s remarks this morning in respect of gun control, and The New York Sun, for one, doesn’t believe him. We don’t mean to suggest that the President is lying; no doubt he believes he “gets it” about the Second Amendment. But his suggestion that making a bow to the second article of the Bill of Rights is a “ritual” that “I have to do” is an off note to our ear. A president who “got it” just wouldn’t use that word “ritual.”

He might have said “there is an obligation about this that I have to keep.” Or an “oath that I took that I have to honor.” Such language would be closer to what we’d have expected from a president speaking of the Second Amendment, which says that the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. But Mr. Obama is irked by the Second Amendment; the truth is that if he could, he’d drop the Palladium of Our Liberty.

It’s not only the language Mr. Obama uses that gives away the game. It’s his actions — or lack of them. We are aware of no case in which the President has gone into court on the side of a gun owner to expand (or merely protect) Second Amendment rights. Not one. Law abiding gun owners seeking to keep and bear arms for lawful purposes have been in court all over the country during Mr. Obama’s two terms without a peep of support from the President.

This includes our own state, where the President and his Justice Department did, to cite but one instance, nothing whatsoever to help Alan Kachalsky and Christina Nikolov levy their suit for the right to keep and bear arms outside of the home in Westchester. Had he done so, it might have made a difference with the Supreme Court, which turned them aside without explanation. Not a peep from Mr. Obama, for all his claims to worry about keeping guns out of the wrong hands

The fact is there was nothing wrong with the hands of Alan Kachalsky. There was no reason for him not to be granted a carry permit. The fact that Mr. Obama was not there for him is one of the reasons that his gun control campaign is going nowhere. His failure to secure the right to carry for stable, sane, law-abiding Americans leaves people nervous in respect of the President’s intentions. They fear that if he’s given an inch, he’ll take a mile.

That is why Congress won’t give him the background checks he wants. It’s why he’s being forced to sneak around the legislature to which the Constitution grants the power to regulate commerce among the several states. It is why the sales of guns soar in this country nearly every time he opens his mouth about guns. This is a tragedy for a President who avers, as Mr. Obama did this morning, that his goal “is to bring good people on both sides of this issue together.”