President Trump turned his speech this morning at the Conservative Political Action Conference into a remarkable moment on guns. It came as he was warning about complacence between now and election in November. Were Democrats to gain control of the legislature, he warned, they would repeal the tax cuts, “put judges in that you wouldn’t believe,” and “take away your Second Amendment — which we will never allow to happen.”

So robust was the applause at the President’s vow to protect the Second Amendment that Mr. Trump stopped his remarks and announced an impromptu poll of the audience. “By the way, if you only had a choice of one, what would you rather have — the Second Amendment or the tax cuts?” The Second Amendment was met with cheers, the tax cuts with relative silence. The president repeated the test, with the same result.

What does that mean? Certainly not what the Democrats would have one believe, which is that the Republicans lack concern for the victims of the mass shootings of the kind we’ve just seen in Florida. One up-and-running program in America, after all, is the National Rifle Association’s School Shield program. No one has any more of a stake in effective programs to address gun violence than gun owners themselves

Nor does the result of Mr. Trump’s mini-poll suggest that the Conservative Union lacks enthusiasm for keeping taxation to a minimum. We see it as a signal that the conservative vanguard in this country has a profound understanding of liberty. They understand the right to keep and bear arms in the way that the great Virginia jurist St. George Tucker comprehended it when he spoke of the Second Amendment as the “palladium of our liberty.”

It was Tucker who called the right of self defense “the first law of nature.” It was also Tucker who issued the warning that “in most governments it has been the study of rulers to confine this right within the narrowest limits possible.” Wherever the right of the people to keep and bear arms is prohibited “under any colour or pretext whatsoever,” he warned, “liberty, if not already annihilated, is on the brink of destruction.”

We understand how much the left loathes the fact that so many Americans are attached to this view today. There are millions in the Democratic Party who would be prepared to repeal the Second Amendment. And who see any mention of it as an obscenity in the wake of a tragedy like that which took place February 14 at Parkland. And who suggest that those who seek to preserve the Second Amendment lack for humanity.

President Trump himself is not a Second Amendment absolutist, we understand. He’s signaled support for curbs on the bump-stocks that can defeat the widely accepted prohibition on fully automatic weapons. He’s also suggested, in the wake of Parkland, that he’s open to adjustments to age restrictions on the purchase of certain weapons. All the more important the message CPAC sent him in his mini-poll this morning.

The idea that the Second Amendment is the palladium of all the other of our liberties was the theme in the speech delivered to CPAC by the NRA’s executive vice president, Wayne LaPierre. He moved beyond the civil rights organization’s historic focus on the second article of the Bill of Rights to warn of a “tidal wave of European-style socialists” who don’t believe in capitalism and the Constitution and have “seized control of the Democratic Party.”

We are not aware of a single case of gun-rights litigation where a government led by a Democrat is on the side of the party seeking shelter under the Second Amendment. Nor of a single Democratic Party politician who is prepared to discuss liberalization of restrictive gun laws in cities and states where, like New York, the Second Amendment no longer applies at all. The Democratic Party is now fully for narrowing the Second Amendment, and CPAC was shrewd to mark the point.