Dear NRA Member:

We are under attack, my fellow patriots. The anti-gun forces didn’t waste any time trying to politicize last week’s mass killing in a Colorado movie theater. It’s despicable.

Just because an obviously deranged man can legally purchase an assault weapon with a 100-round drum magazine, body armor, and more than 6,000 rounds of ammunition is no reason for anybody to make this a story about gun control.

We are doing a disservice to our Founding Fathers and our precious Second Amendment rights if we let this time of national grief focus on the easy availability of military-style, high-carnage weaponry to the public.

As you well know, the NRA, with the help of your valuable contributions, fought hard to repeal the 1994 assault weapons ban, which deprived patriotic liberty lovers across this country of their precious right to buy 19 military-style guns and high-capacity ammunition magazines.

This egregious ban on assault weaponry, which left the nation’s grandmothers prey to attacks in their homes by teams of rapists, was corrected in 2004 when Congress, in its infinite wisdom to validate the high-capacity weapons needs of America’s civilians, ended the assault weapons ban.

This is no time to revisit that action just because one person, James Holmes, decided to try out his new AR-15 with its 100-round magazine during a sold-out midnight showing of the new Batman movie.

As columnist Charles C.W. Cooke wrote so poignantly in the National Review Online: ”It was about the shooter, the victims, and their families – and very little else besides – and we would do well to avoid breathlessly proposing radical changes to our constitutional order because a man abused his liberty.”

Well said. Nothing to see here. Let’s talk about something else.

Our political enemies, though, think they can play God. They imagine tighter gun laws can sometimes prevent “tragedy.”

Take, for example, Fortune magazine, which just concluded a six-month investigation of the shooting death of U.S. Border Patrol agent Brian Terry, which became a springboard for the Fast and Furious inquiry.

This unpatriotic magazine blamed the NRA and its influence over Arizona’s weakest-in-the-nation gun regulations for creating a steady pipeline of about 2,000 weapons a day across the border to fuel Mexico’s drug war and make Terry’s death more likely.

“The National Rifle Association has so successfully opposed a comprehensive electronic database of gun sales that the ATF’s (federal Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms) congressional appropriation explicitly prohibits establishing one,” the magazine wrote.

“Customers can legally buy as many weapons as they want in Arizona as long as they’re 18 or older and pass a criminal background check,” the magazine wrote. “There are no waiting periods and no need for permits, and buyers are allowed to resell the guns.”

Because of the legislation that fellow patriots like yourselves helped pay for, ATF agents can’t make criminal cases against Americans who buy guns in bulk and then a day later exercise their God-given rights to sell them to a stranger who may or may not be an arms supplier for a Mexican drug dealer. Teenagers who are too young to buy a beer in Arizona can buy a sniper rifle.

Now, that’s some freedom worth fighting for. But getting lax gun regulation like this doesn’t come cheap. And now with the recent unpleasantness in Colorado, we can’t let our guard down.

We must reload to assure our country’s two political parties will remain on their knees before us.

So please dig deep, and send us your contributions so we can continue to fight the knee-jerk enemies of freedom, those who may now be temporarily emboldened to imagine that America would somehow be better off if we turned our backs on God’s plan to shoot each other.