Texas Democrat Prime Example of Why We’re Never Giving Up Our Guns

The purpose of the Second Amendment is the defense of this nation. Our Founding Fathers were generally smart men, and they recognized that defending our nation might mean fighting our government. It’s part of why they were largely distrustful of standing armies in the first place and preferred the militia.

But, as things have chanced in the last 250 years, a lot of people figure that the purpose of the Second Amendment has also changed. They think it’s about hunting or, if they’re feeling charitable, about personal protection, and not anything else. It’s why they want to take certain guns from us–at least, that’s the rationale we get from them now, though we know everything is in their sights.

We’re not giving up jack squat, and a Texas Democrat in the midst of a runoff is a prime example of why.

The top Democrat in a southern Texas House race, sex therapist Maureen Galindo, has called for transforming an immigration facility into a “prison for American Zionists” equipped with a castration center.

Galindo’s campaign made a vile pledge that she will introduce legislation to that effect if she gets elected to Congress after baselessly alleging her Dem runoff foe was “being paid to put Jews and Mexicans in concentration camps via Zionist trafficking networks.”

“When Maureen gets into Congress, she’ll write legislation so that all Zionism and support of Zionism is undoubtedly Anti-Semitic, since it’s Zionism harming the Semites,” her campaign wrote on Instagram last week.
“She’ll turn Karnes ICE Detention Center into a prison for American Zionists and former ICE officers for human trafficking. (lt will also be a castration processing center for pedophiles which will probably be most of the Zionists).”

Now, castrating pedophiles is a rare moment of me agreeing with a Democrat on something, but it’s literally every other word she says that’s the problem.

Zionism is simply the idea that Israel has a right to exist as a modern nation. I get that some people disagree with that position, and we’re not here to debate whether it’s the right concept or not. It is what it is, and Galindo is talking about writing legislation to round up everyone who holds a very particular belief, including a whole lot of Jews, and herding all of them into the very camp her party claims are concentration camps.

While she’s not the nominee as of yet–runoff elections are May 26th–the fact that someone this mentally damaged is this close to being the nominee is troubling, especially when you think about Graham Platner in Maine, who is likely to be their nominee for the Senate.

This is a fringe belief, though. I haven’t seen all that many people who agree with Galindo here, and that’s the good news, but I can’t help but acknowledge that I’m also not seeing loud denouncements from party leaders, either.

Regardless, this is someone who thinks it’s perfectly acceptable to round people up based on their political opinions. Right now, it’s “Zionism,” but do you really think it would stop there?

Hell. No.

So, I’m going to hold onto my AR-15s. I’m going to hold onto my standard capacity magazines. I’m going to urge everyone to do the same, and to stand up to these state legislatures that seem to think that this fringe belief being expressed by a fairly promenent Democrat isn’t anything to worry about. I’m sure the years of others talking about going after their political opponents or “breaking the spirit” in the coming years is nothing at all to be concerned about and we won’t need our guns to fend off these monsters.

But I’m keeping it ready just the same.

You want me to give up my guns and trust my government? That’s never going to happen, because there are people in this country who support some truly awful people who want to hurt me and mine, and they’re not going away anytime soon.

Missouri schools could hire armed ‘rangers’ under bill sent to governor

A bill to create a new faction of school protection officers with “physical fitness superior to a U.S. Marine” got final approval from Missouri lawmakers in the final days of the legislative session.

The legislation seeks to allow schools to hire volunteer or paid guards called “Missouri Rangers” who could carry a gun on school grounds.

The bill’s sponsor, Republican state Sen. David Gregory of Chesterfield, told senators he wanted to give schools “a choice to have a higher trained armed guard.”

He compared current protection-officer requirements to that of a “Walmart guard with a gun.” Currently, schools can appoint teachers and administrators as school protection officers, allowing them to carry a gun or “self-defense spray device” with training and a concealed carry permit.

School protection officers must undergo a minimum of 112 hours of training, according to a Department of Public Safety rule. The state also has school resource officers, which are law enforcement officers with an additional 40+ hours of training related to school safety.

Gregory’s legislation proposes a maximum of 160 hours of training, specifying that the program must include lessons on “close-quarter combat,” bomb and arson training, de-escalation and others.

Prior to training, rangers must pass a physical fitness test. For those 35 and younger, they must “complete a minimum of 40 pushups in less than one minute” and be able to run 1½ miles in less than 12½ minutes. The legislation asks the state’s Peace Office Standards and Training Commission to identify lower standards for older applicants.

The bill’s first pass through the Senate brought little opposition, garnering the support of groups like the St. Louis County Police Association in its first committee hearing. In early April, just two senators voted against the proposal, but Senate Democrats unanimously voted against it when it returned to the chamber last week with less than a day before session adjourned for the year.

House Democrats unanimously rejected the proposal, uncomfortable with the proposition of having more firearms in schools.

“The answer to guns in schools is not more guns in schools,” said state Rep. Elizabeth Fuchs, a St. Louis Democrat, advocating instead for mental health support for students.

Their arguments did not sway House Republicans, who unanimously voted in support of the bill.

State Rep. Burt Whaley, a Republican from Clever, has experience training school staff on what to do in case of a shooting. The key benefit of having a ranger, he said, was being able to quickly respond to threats.

In one school he trained, the local law enforcement estimated that it could take up to 45 minutes for them to arrive.

“It is typically another person with a gun that knows how to use it, that’s trained how to use it … they’re usually the ones that are able to subdue (a threat),” he said.

The bill follows other proposals passed last year addressing security concerns, like laws directing schools to share emergency operations plans with local law enforcement and report school safety incidents to the state’s education department.

Some of the provisions passed in last year’s legislation have yet to be implemented because of a lack of funding, such as a requirement to equip schools with bleeding control kits and train staff on how to apply a tourniquet.

Gov. Mike Kehoe has until mid-July to sign or veto bills before they become law.

The Right They Keep Trying to Qualify

The Second Amendment is the most litigated right in the Constitution right now. That’s not because the doctrine is unclear. It’s because several states have decided the Supreme Court’s rulings are inconvenient and have organized their legislative calendars around working past them.

Three decisions settled the questions that mattered. Heller (2008) established an individual right to keep and bear arms. McDonald (2010) applied it to the states. Bruen (2022) replaced the interest-balancing framework lower courts had used to uphold almost every gun restriction with a historical-tradition test: regulations must be consistent with America’s historical tradition of firearm regulation, and the government bears the burden of proving they are. Those are the holdings. California, New York, and Illinois have spent the years since treating them as starting points for the next workaround.

I’m a Marine Corps OCS graduate with 30 years in institutional investment management. My son graduated from West Point and flies Army aircraft. My brother retired from Army Special Forces as a Green Beret. I’m also a Life Member of the NRA. My family has carried firearms professionally in service to this country. That’s the credential here.

Before Bruen, lower courts evaluated gun restrictions through a two-step interest-balancing test. At step two, courts routinely deferred to the government’s stated public safety interest, and most restrictions survived. Bruen eliminated that deference. Justice Thomas’s 6-3 majority required governments to identify historical analogues to their modern restrictions, regulations from the founding era or Reconstruction period that are relevantly similar in purpose and burden.

The state response wasn’t compliance. California passed new restrictions on carry in expanded ‘sensitive places,’ effectively rebuilding a near-total carry prohibition through categories Bruen had acknowledged as legitimate but hadn’t quantified. New York passed the Concealed Carry Improvement Act days after Bruen was decided, adding dozens of sensitive places and a ‘good moral character’ requirement that functioned as the old discretionary system under a new name. Illinois added similar restrictions. Each law was designed to produce litigation, not to comply.

United States v. Rahimi (2024) gave the states some judicial support. Chief Justice Roberts wrote for an 8-1 majority that Bruen required only a “relevantly similar” historical regulation, not a historical twin. That’s a real qualification that gives regulators more room. It didn’t restore the pre-Bruen deference. The government still has to find historical analogues. Several of the state restrictions enacted after Bruen are still being litigated, and the outcomes aren’t certain.

One gap the Court’s decisions left is the patchwork problem, and it’s one Congress can close directly. A law-abiding gun owner with a valid concealed-carry permit from her home state may find that permit legally worthless the moment she crosses into a state that doesn’t recognize it. The constitutional right doesn’t change at the border. The state’s willingness to honor it does.

The National Constitutional Carry Act (H.R. 645) requires states to recognize valid carry permits issued by other states. The model is driver’s license reciprocity: every state recognizes every other state’s license to drive. No state demands re-licensure when a visitor crosses the border. No constitutional principle places the Second Amendment below the right to drive in the hierarchy of rights that interstate travelers can exercise. H.R. 645 applies the same common sense to a constitutional right that has been affirmed by the Supreme Court three times.

Polling on this question is consistent: support for carry reciprocity routinely exceeds 70% in surveys that cross party lines. The people most burdened by the current patchwork are law-abiding gun owners who travel, precisely the population least likely to be a public safety concern. The argument for H.R. 645 doesn’t require a particular view on gun policy. It requires only recognizing that a constitutional right the Court has repeatedly upheld deserves the same cross-state recognition we give to a driver’s license. We don’t make visitors from other states pass a new driving test. We shouldn’t make them surrender a constitutional right at the border either.

The Founders wrote the Second Amendment for citizens. My brother was a weapons Sergeant in Army Special Forces. My son carries one now as an Army aviator. Both of them took an oath to defend a Constitution that includes the rights they exercised as their profession. The civilian version of that right doesn’t need a cultural argument. Three Supreme Court decisions have supplied the constitutional one.

It’s worth stating clearly: the population most affected by the current patchwork isn’t the population any legislator is actually worried about. Permit holders went through background checks, paid fees, completed whatever training their state required, and carry legally because they’ve done everything asked of them. That population doesn’t become dangerous at a state line, and it wasn’t dangerous before it crossed one. The argument for H.R. 645 doesn’t require defending anyone’s right to break the law. It requires only that Congress treats a constitutionally protected right with the same cross-state respect we give to a driver’s license.

The question is whether the states that disagree with those decisions will eventually accept the answer, or whether they’ll spend the next decade generating litigation designed to look like compliance while achieving the same practical result as defiance.

Bruen’s Text-and-History Test Spreads Beyond the Second Amendment

“The U.S. Court of Appeals just took the Heller and Bruen playbook — founding-era text, founding era dictionaries, founding era silence — and ran it through a First Amendment case. Every yard they gained for the Establishment Clause is a yard also banked for the Second Amendment.”
– Professor Mark W. Smith, Four Boxes Diner

The United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit has handed down an en banc decision in Nathan v. Alamo Heights Independent School District, No. 25-50695 (5th Cir. Apr. 21, 2026), upholding a Texas law requiring public-school classrooms to display a poster of the Ten Commandments. The 9–8 majority, written by Judge Stuart Kyle Duncan, held that the Texas law does not violate the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause. That alone is a big deal. But more importantly for Second Amendment supporters, the en banc court embraced the “text and history” methodology used by the Supreme Court in its Second Amendment decisions.

Some writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins.  Society is in every state a blessing, but Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one.
— Thomas Paine

Protect Minnesota’s Executive Director gave an interview to the Star Tribune.

She had something to say about you.

“People who vote on gun rights are a very, very small percentage of the population, and they’re already aligned with the right side of the electorate.”

She’s not worried about you. She’s not worried about your rights.

In her view, you’re already written off; too small a group to matter, too predictable to bother with.

That’s the mentality behind every gun control bill they pushed this session.

They lost. You won. And we’re going to remind her what a “very, very small percentage” can do in November.

Prove her wrong. Join us at https://gunowners.mn/join

Tennessee Legislation Expanding Castle Doctrine Protections Awaits Governor’s Approval

The Tennessee Conservative [By Paula Gomes] –

Legislation that lowers the standard for use of deadly force on private property, expanding Castle Doctrine protections, is awaiting Governor Bill Lee’s approval.

Tennessee lawmakers passed HB1802/SB1847, sponsored by Representative Kip Capley (R-Summertown-District 71) and Senator Joey Hensley (R-Hohenwald-District 28), after intense debate.

The legislation allows for the use of deadly force if a person “reasonably believes deadly force is immediately necessary to prevent the other’s imminent commission of arson, burglary, robbery, aggravated robbery, or aggravated cruelty to animals” in the event the person using deadly force cannot protect their property any other way or if the use of force by other means would expose them or someone else to risk of death, serious bodily injury or grave sexual abuse.

Shooting someone in the back is not justified under the bill’s protections and Tennessee’s current self-defense standards are not erased by the legislation, still requiring a threat involving serious bodily injury or death.

To fall under self-defense statutes, an amendment clarified that in using deadly force, a person must not be engaged in conduct that would constitute a felony or Class A misdemeanor, such as inviting someone onto your property to sell you illegal drugs, and is present where they lawfully reside.

When the bill passed in the Senate, it did not include the House amendment and had to be returned for concurrence, but the legislation is ready for Lee to take action on, and is slated to take effect July 1st, 2026.

May 19, 1986
U.S. CODE § 922 (o) “the Hughes Amendment” is signed into law by POTUS Reagan, banning the manufacture of new ‘transferable’ machineguns that the general population may possess.

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