Senator Barack Obama recently gave us a disturbing foretaste of the contradictory doublespeak we could expect under an Obama presidency.

Last week, a deeply disturbed young man went on a criminal rampage at Northern Illinois University, murdering several innocent people before taking his own life.

Mr. Obama spoke out last Friday on the tragic event, and exposed the crucial disconnect between his rhetoric and his politics.

Speaking of his determination to do “whatever it takes” to end gun violence, Mr. Obama nonetheless acknowledged that the Second Amendment secures a right to individual citizens to keep and bear arms.

Noting that some argue the Second Amendment only grants state governments the power to arm National Guard units, Mr. Obama said he rejected that view in favor of the widely held belief that the Second Amendment—like the rest of the Bill of Rights—involves rights held by American citizens.

The Drudge Report last week even carried the story with the title, “Obama Supports Individual Gun Rights.”

But that title was wrong.

Because later in that same story it says that in the same news conference where he spoke of an individual right in the Second Amendment, Mr. Obama also said he supports the DC gun ban. This is the absolute ban on handguns and readily usable firearms in the city of DC that is at issue in the case District of Columbia v. Heller, currently before the U.S. Supreme Court.

I’ve written about that case before, as have others. The DC gun ban is a complete ban on having any sort of readily usable gun in your own home. You cannot have a gun at the ready in your house in DC to protect yourself or your family.

Yet while Mr. Obama says he supports your Second Amendment rights, he also says he supports that gun ban. He went on to say that local governments should be able to enact any gun control laws they consider necessary to end gun violence, and that any such measures are constitutional.

What kind of gun rights does he supposedly support? What kind of “right” do you have, when the government can completely rob you of 100% of the exercise of that right, anytime they decide they have a good reason?

That’s like saying you have the right to worship as you choose, but the government has the power to ban attending church. Or that you have the right to free speech, but that government has the power to stop you from speaking about any subject it wants. Or that you have the right against unreasonable searches and seizures, but that anything the government wants to search at your house is automatically reasonable. Continued...