COLUMN: After Orlando, isn't it time to fight back?

Do you get it yet? ISIS, al-Qaida, and millions of Islamic extremists have declared war on the United States and Western civilization. It’s not an accident that people who believe in the Quran keep picking up guns, bombs and machetes and attacking people who don’t believe in the Quran.

Meanwhile, in response, Western civilization has declared a war on itself. We decry the foolishness of jihadi warriors who are willing to become suicide bombers in order to die for their cause, and yet we have offered ourselves up as willing victims to die for our own causes of “tolerance,” “diversity” and “gun control.” We are a suicide civilization.

Instead of blaming the insane Islamists who butcher innocent men, women and children with abandon, we blame ourselves for failing to be sensitive enough to the apparent Islamic cultural values of rape, hate and slaughter (look it up, people!). We create hashtags like “BringBackOurGirls” when more than 200 Nigerian children are kidnapped by the Islamic terrorist group Boko Haram, but we somehow can’t bring ourselves to acknowledge that the impetus for this war crime is the practice of sharia law, which turns women into chattel, gives homosexuals a death sentence and turns non-Muslims into infidels.

It is time that we face facts rather than retreat into fantasy. We are at war, and the sooner we acknowledge that fact, the sooner we will be able to defend ourselves. When the Nazis were dropping bombs on London and other British cities week after week in 1940 and 1941, no one called it terrorism although it certainly terrified the citizens who were its target. The goal like the goal of terrorism was to weaken the resolve of the British people and to force them to surrender to the conditions dictated by Hitler. But it was not called terrorism; it was called the Battle of Britain.

So too, we need to wake up and see that every terrorist attack on Western targets is part of a longer war. We should not speak of these as if they were isolated incidents without meaning. Instead we should talk of the Battle of Paris, the Battle of Brussels, the Battle of San Bernardino, the Battle of Fort Hood as part of a longer campaign, which currently the West is losing. We need to become angry. We need to become distraught that in battle after battle, our side is losing.

Americans suffered a terrible defeat in the Battle of Orlando. More than 100 casualties were suffered by the U.S. forces, including 49 killed in action. Meanwhile, the jihadi enemy only suffered one lone death.

Counter-terrorism strategists said this lopsided death toll was predictable, in part because of the surprise nature of the attack (comparable to the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor) but also because the U.S. forces were demilitarized by entering a “gun-free zone.”

The very idea of responding to the slaughter of the innocents by demanding that American citizens should be further disarmed is so evil that you almost have to consider it satanic. Note to liberals: The bad guys are not going to disarm. As gay activist Milo Yiannopoulos accurately summed it up, “Gun-free zones are the most dangerous places in America. Gun-free zones are safe spaces for killers.”

Talk of repealing the Second Amendment is equivalent to suggesting that we end the American Republic. The first 10 amendments to the Constitution are collectively called the Bill of Rights. When individual Americans start losing their rights to a government that doesn’t think it has enough control over us, that’s when We the People need to resume our fight against tyranny that we started in 1776. If the government can take away our right to bear arms, what’s next on the hit list? The right to free speech? The right to be secure in your own home? The right to a public trial?

The Democrats’ quick pivot from Islamic terrorism to gun control after the Orlando Massacre is symptomatic of the main operating principle of the Obama administration, first verbalized by White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel during the Great Recession: “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.”

Every shooting incident that occurs is seen by liberals as one more opportunity to take away the guns of law-abiding citizens. This despite the fact that we have seen repeatedly that restricting access to guns does not end violence. The terror attacks in Paris and Brussels occurred in countries that practice strict gun control. Nonetheless dozens of people died. If any law-abiding citizen had been in possession of a gun during those attacks, the death toll of innocents almost certainly would have been lower.

What we need to recognize is that the so-called lone wolves who carry out Islamic terrorism attacks are part of an army that is fighting against the American citizenry. They will use any means at their ready to kill us — guns, knives, bombs, fire or fists — and we must decide if we will fight back or surrender. This is where the Second Amendment and its guarantee is needed more than ever:

“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.”

I don’t know how it works in other states, but in Montana the state Constitution says, “The militia forces shall consist of all able-bodied citizens of the state except those exempted by law.”

In other words, you and I are responsible for protecting and defending each other, and you’re going to have a much better chance of doing so if you have a weapon.

To quote a book written during World War I, “Lingo of No Man’s Land; Or, War Time Lexicon” by Sgt. Lorenzo N. Smith, a rifle is “The soldier’s best friend; none to equal him in the trenches. They give him the uttermost care, keep him polished and well oiled. You may need him at any moment to save your life and when you call on him he will be at your service if you treat him as your dearest friend...”

The people who want to take your guns away may not understand that, but the terrorists who want to kill you do. The British Redcoats wanted to disarm the American militia before our revolution as well, and if they had done so, the American experiment in democracy may never have succeeded at all. But it did succeed, and we do have a Constitution that has enshrined our rights as a free people, one of the most important of which is the right to bear arms. We must not surrender to the Islamic terrorists or their allies any more than we surrendered to the Redcoats.

As Capt. John Parker said at the Battle of Lexington in 1775, “Stand your ground. Don’t fire unless fired upon, but if they mean to have a war, let it begin here.”