It’s said that when Nathan Hale was about to swing at the end of rope in the fall of 1776, he held his head up high and told the hangman: “I only regret that I have but one life to give for my country.”

Hale was from Connecticut. What do you suppose he would say now, 238 years after his countrymen began the long fight for freedom and liberty?

“They want to confiscate WHAT?”

That’s what he’d say. And then he’d probably ask to be flung back in the grave, because what’s going on in Connecticut now is too much to bear.

They’re demanding that owners of scary-looking rifles turn in their weapons. They’re warning that failure to do so will mean a felony charge, which in turn will mean surrendering an inalienable right forever. And if the good subjects of Connecticut don’t comply at once, government agents may start knocking on doors. If knocking on doors doesn’t work, they’ll start kicking them down. Men and women with otherwise spotless records will be dragged from their homes, shoved into police cruisers and locked away.

I don’t think Nathan Hale or his compatriots would say much at all, honestly. I think they’d just brush themselves off and pick up the fight all over again.

The news coming out of Connecticut drops my jaw. I keep thinking that sooner or later, somebody — the governor and his sycophants, perhaps — will realize the gravity of what they have wrought. Maybe those well-intentioned activists will wake up from vivid nightmares, understanding in horrifying moments of clarity that what they have put in motion is an abomination.

But no. The people who decided that law-abiding men and women shouldn’t be allowed to possess legally purchased rifles (they call them “assault weapons,” a meaningless political term if ever there was one) have no clue. They think they’re doing it for the children. They think (I use the term loosely because I’ve seen the laws they’ve slapped together in Connecticut) that these bold assaults on the Second Amendment will save lives.

In fact, they won’t. It’s been demonstrated in a variety of ways that seizing guns from the law-abiding, and imposing arbitrary limits on things like magazine capacity, wouldn’t have saved a single soul at Sandy Hook or any of the other scenes of atrocity.

In Connecticut, they’re engaged in safety theater, stomping on the Bill of Rights because they feel they need to do SOMETHING, by gosh. And if that means turning tens of thousands of good people into felons with the stroke of a pen, so be it.

Last week, the Hartford Courant unleashed an editorial demanding that very thing.

When you take guns away from good people, do you know what remains? A whole lot of bad guys laughing their heads off because there’s hardly anybody left to challenge them. The ban is so wrongheaded, it dazzles me. And the situation will get a lot worse before it gets any better.

I’ve had all of two experiences in the state of Connecticut. One was at a saloon located inside an old boxcar, the other was at a West Haven hotel. Fun stuff. And they’re the only experiences I’ll ever have in the Constitution State, because I’ll never visit it again.

If I’m traveling through on the highway and I have to pee, I’ll just keep hopping up and down until I’m somewhere else. Not Massachusetts or New York, of course. I probably won’t find relief until Pennsylvania, but that’s okay. Whatever pain and embarrassment I suffer will be better than shame I’d feel spending time in a place that so brazenly spat upon the Bill of Rights.

So far, tens of thousands have refused to comply with the demands of their Connecticut lawmakers. You might be tempted to shake your head and frown and say “tsk, tsk” at this shocking display of lawlessness, but I would suggest that you reconsider. After all, if government do-gooders can so carelessly disregard one right, what right will they come for next? Free speech? Speedy trials? Protection from cruel and unusual punishment?

If the citizens of Connecticut submit and obey, other states will see that as a sign that the rights of people CAN be trampled. And oh, what mischief will follow.

You want to say it can never happen, but Connecticut is proof that it can. You give them an inch, they’ll take a mile.

If we don’t cherish our rights — even the ones we’re not presently exercising — there’s a chance they will all be pilfered away, one by one.

This isn’t gun control; it’s people control. Submit and obey — or else. And all of that over a class of rifles that bad guys almost never use at all.

“They who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety,” said the wise and wily Ben Franklin, “deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

Especially when that safety is an illusion.