Missouri Senator Introduces Second Amendment Financial Privacy Measure

A measure introduced in the Missouri state Senate on February 9 is designed to protect the privacy of lawful gun owners and gun purchasers in the Show Me State.

Senate Bill 216, the “Second Amendment Financial Privacy Act,” was introduced by Republican state Sen. Jill Carter and presented in the Senate Transportation, Infrastructure and Public Safety Committee. The measure would prohibit government entities from keeping a list, record or registry of privately-owned firearms.

Records may be maintained during a criminal investigation and prosecution of gun ownership. It also bans credit card networks from using a merchant category code (MCC) to differentiate firearm sales from other transactions.

At issue is a relatively new MCC for gun purchases adopted by the International Organization for Standardization in early 2023. MCCs are used by payment processors (like Visa and Mastercard) and other financial services companies to categorize transactions. Prior to the creation of the specific gun code, firearms retailers were classified under the MCC as sporting goods stores or miscellaneous retail.

When the new code is used, credit card companies and other payment processors can tell that the purchases were firearms, creating a de facto gun registry. The U.S. Senate is currently considering a measure that would ban use of the gun-specific MCC nationwide.

BLUF
Draconian restrictions on the right to armed self-defense in public don’t make peaceable and law-abiding citizens safer. They just render them far less capable of defending themselves and others.

Look at the Defensive Gun Uses that Hawaii Wants to Criminalize.

Late last month, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Wolford v. Lopez, a case challenging a newly imposed Hawaii law that presumptively bans concealed carry permit holders from any private property open to the public (like gas stations and shopping malls) unless they first get express permission from the owner. Combined with other restrictions, the law has the practical effect of making lawful public carry virtually impossible in Hawaii.

Fortunately, the nation’s highest court appears likely to strike down the new restriction. But there’s still so much work left for the court to do when it comes to protecting the right to keep and bear arms—including, specifically, against infringements by the Hawaiian government. Even without the express permission requirement hanging over their heads, Hawaiian concealed carry permit holders will still be prohibited from exercising their rights in an absurdly long list of “sensitive places.”

These include, among other locations:

  • Any bar or restaurant that serves alcohol, regardless of whether the permit holder imbibes;

  • Any “stadium, movie theater, or concert hall”;

  • Any place at which any sporting event of any level of competition is being held;

  • Any beach, playground, or park, including “any state park, state monument, county park, tennis court, golf course, swimming pool, or other recreation area or facility under control, maintenance, and management of the State or a county”;

  • Any parking area adjacent to the prohibited locations above.

Constitutionally, it’s abhorrent. As a matter of public policy, it’s laughable – and dangerous.

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Some people think that the Second Amendment is an outdated relic of an earlier time. Doubtless some also think that constitutional protections of other rights are outdated relics of earlier times.
We The People own those rights regardless, unless and until We The People repeal them.
For those who believe it to be outdated, the Second Amendment provides a good test of whether their allegiance is really to the Constitution of the United States, or only to their preferences in public policies and audiences.
The Constitution is law, not vague aspirations, and we are obligated to protect, defend, and apply it.
If the Second Amendment were truly an outdated relic, the Constitution provides a method for repeal. The Constitution does not furnish the federal courts with an eraser. –9th Circuit Court Judge Andrew Kleinfeld

VA undoes decades-old wrong and protects Veterans’ Second Amendment rights
February 17, 2026

WASHINGTON — The Department of Veterans Affairs today announced a major new step to protect Veterans’ Second Amendment rights. Effective immediately, VA will not report Veterans to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System as “prohibited persons” only because they need help from a fiduciary in managing their VA benefits.

This corrects a three-decade-old wrong that deprived many thousands of Veterans in VA’s Fiduciary Program of their constitutional right to own a firearm without a legal basis.

After a thorough review, VA recognized that many Veterans had been deprived of their Second Amendment rights without hearings or adequate determinations that they posed a sufficient risk of danger to themselves or others. In consultation with the Department of Justice, VA has determined this practice violates both the Gun Control Act and Veterans’ Second Amendment rights. According to federal law, a decision by a judicial or quasi-judicial body is needed before someone can be reported to NICS.

A determination by the VA that a fiduciary is needed to help manage a Veteran’s VA benefits falls far short of this legal standard.

In addition to immediately stopping the reporting of VA Fiduciary Program participants to NICS, the department is working with the FBI to remove all past VA reporting from NICS, so no Veterans are unfairly deprived of their Second Amendment rights based solely on participation in VA’s Fiduciary Program.

“Many Americans struggle with managing their finances, and Veterans’ Second Amendment rights shouldn’t be stripped just because they need help in this area. But for too long, Veterans who needed the services of a VA fiduciary were deprived of their right to bear arms,” said VA Secretary Doug Collins. “Under the leadership of President Trump, we’re correcting this injustice and ensuring Veterans get the same due-process and constitutional rights as all Americans.”

The Department of Justice supports this action.

“It is both unlawful and unacceptable for Veterans who serve our country to have their constitutional rights threatened,” said Attorney General Pamela Bondi. “It has been my pleasure to partner with Secretary Collins on this project, and I am directing the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms to review its regulations and propose changes that will prevent current and future violations of our Veterans’ Second Amendment rights.”

BLUF
I would only add it’s time to treat the mental illness like we used to and not play into and reinforce the delusions. We’re costing lives playing this game. It needs to stop. And perhaps we should be looking at treating transgenderism itself as a mental illness, again. The indicators are clearly there.

Trans Shooters: The Patterns Are Well Established.

Here we go again, I note this morning with a sad shake of the head. Our Catherine Salgado’s piece on the Rhode Island hockey game shooter reports that he identifies as “transgender.”

The lesson that comes from encouraging mentally ill people to indulge their insanity and to express violent hatred against those who do not affirm their illness is written in the blood of children killed at the high school hockey game.

Remember my column on the case of George Zinn? He’s the one who jumped up, claiming that he was the one who shot Charlie Kirk, not Tyler Robinson? Both Zinn and Robinson shared at least one trait: mental Illness, which includes sexual deviancy. Remember, I’ve already written about Zinn, in which I quoted a New York Post article:

The elderly man who falsely claimed he shot Charlie Kirk to create mass confusion during the conservative influencer’s assassination cried out in court as he was sentenced to prison for keeping “graphic” sexual photos of children.

George Zinn, 71, pleaded guilty to two counts of sexual exploitation of a minor on Thursday after police discovered the vile photos on his cellphone when he was detained at Utah Valley University on Sept. 10, according to the Salt Lake Tribune.

He also pleaded no contest to an obstruction of justice charge.

Then, too, there’s the case of Robinson himself, who was romantically involved with Lance Twiggs, himself another victim of transgenderism, and who, according to contacts within his family, “hates conservatives and Christians,” and who, according to other sources, influenced Robinson’s politics in the year they had been dating.

Then there’s the mass shooting last August at Annunciation Catholic Church and Catholic School in Minnesota. The shooter? Robert “Robin” Westman, who shot some 19 people, including 14 children, two fatally, before pointing the gun at himself. His manifesto told us the story: “I am tired of being trans, I wish I never brainwashed myself.”

Next on this bloody hit parade is Audrey “Aiden” Hale, who in March 2023 entered the Covenant school in Nashville, killing three young students and three staff members before being shot and killed by police.

Then, we have the case of Anderson Lee Aldrich, who on Nov. 19, 2022, killed five people and injured 40 at Club Q, in Colorado Springs, an LGBTQ nightclub. He’s serving a life sentence.

There’s more, of course, but I think the pattern is pretty firmly established. Part of that pattern is the knee-jerk response of blaming conservatives and Christians for the attacks. It doesn’t need to make sense; it just needs to be repeated, often and loudly.

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The Elephant in Gladwell’s Room
Forthcoming book on gun violence by Malcolm Gladwell

A book club member tipped me off to a forthcoming book on gun violence by Malcolm Gladwell, The American Way of Killing (h/t JP). The book drops September 29, 2026. I think it deserves our attention and it is a likely Fall 2026 Light Over Heat Virtual Book Club selection.

Here’s why I’m genuinely interested: Gladwell has a rare ability to shape how millions of Americans think about complex social issues. Love or hate his counterintuitive approach, his work moves conversations in ways academic publications rarely do. A Gladwell book on gun violence may define how a broad public audience understands the issue for years to come.

I’m particularly hopeful because the book builds on his Revisionist History podcast episodes about guns, which I found genuinely curious about the issue’s complexities. Those episodes didn’t rely on easy answers or inflammatory rhetoric. They asked interesting questions and looked in unexpected places for answers. That approach, applied to a book-length treatment, could be valuable.

According to the online press release,

In The American Way of Killing (out September 29, 2026) Malcolm Gladwell, author of New York Times bestsellers including Talking to Strangers and host of the award-winning podcast Revisionist History, gets to the heart of America’s gun violence crisis: Where did America’s violence problem come from? And, why has it proven so difficult to address?

This promises to be classic Gladwell and, as such, could be genuinely important work.

Of course, as a scholar whose research focuses on gun culture rather than gun violence, I’m curious to see how Gladwell bridges these often-separate conversations. Of course, some questions remain about how this conversation will unfold.

There are some red flag warnings here — we are talking about discussions of American gun violence, after all. I certainly can’t criticize a book I haven’t read, but here the framing of the book raises a couple of questions for me.

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Personally, I’d rather such laws didn’t get enacted rather than live through the years it takes for a case to get through the court system

OSD 364: Gun control is quietly having a moment
Huh, normally we like retro vibes.

A few months ago, in “OSD 352: ‘Gun rights are winning and nobody has realized it’, 2025 edition”, we checked in on state-level gun control laws:

Delaware passed an assault weapons ban in 2022 and Illinois and Washington passed one in 2023. Colorado is going to have a permit-to-purchase regime for “assault weapons” in 2026. Those were major setbacks. Previously, we had often cited the pleasing fact that all seven states with AWBs had originally passed them between 1989 and 1994. The idea was that AWBs weren’t a trend, they were a relic from a moral panic. That is no longer entirely true.

This hasn’t been a big topic because it happened on state by state, but it is a sea change. From 1994 to 2022, no state changed its mind in favor of AWBs. But that equilibrium — seven states with AWBs and 43 without — no longer holds. In addition to the states above, Virginia and New Mexico look to be on their way to bans of their own in 2026.

It’s a mirror image of the concealed carry revolution. That also happened state by state, and most of the country was shall-issue before most people even knew that was a trend. The same could happen with AWBs. What will decide that is whether guns continue to build cultural momentum and whether the courts get involved.

On that latter point, a New Mexico ban might have a silver lining. It’s in jurisdiction of the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals. Unlike the circuit courts covering, say, California or New York or Massachusetts, the Tenth Circuit might strike down an AWB. That could generate a circuit split, since other circuit courts to look at the issue have upheld AWBs. And a circuit split makes it likelier for the Supreme Court to accept an AWB case. Justice Kavanaugh has already basically announced that the Court is looking to take such a case in the next 1-2 years.

There’s a “you know you’re over the target when you’re taking flak” aspect to expansions of individual rights. As the rights gain momentum, they provoke a backlash of crackdowns from governments that are hostile to them. So the moment of most contentious backlash is the moment right before you win. But a right has to survive long enough to break through to that point. Keep at it.

The Article is very long and technically involved. I still strongly suggest you “Read The Whole Thing™” as it gives a basis for one of the main problems with Darwinian evolution  i.e. “Irreducible Complexity”

Comment O’ The Day
Davide “Tanner” Taini
So the genetic code has a bootstrap problem identical to compiler theory. The aaRS enzymes are the compiler that translates DNA into proteins, but they’re themselves proteins, compiled from DNA by the very system they implement. Dennis Ritchie solved the C compiler bootstrap by sitting down and hand-writing the first version in assembly on a PDP-11. Someone had to intervene from outside the system to start the loop.

Except in biology, that someone also had to design the hardware, the instruction set, the memory architecture, the power supply, the chassis, and make sure the whole thing was self-hosting from the first clock cycle. Ritchie only had to write the compiler. God apparently handled the full stack, and shipped it without a single patch note!

BLUF
the code and the machinery that reads it had to arrive simultaneously and completely. The literature dances around this without landing on it.

So the short answer to your question is: the literature confirms the co-organization of code and decoder machinery, names it as symbolic rather than chemical, and identifies the second base as its organizational anchor — but does not draw the conclusion that this makes unguided origin not just improbable but logically incoherent.

The DNA Code was Designed; the Decoder is the Code
“The code and its decoder had to arrive simultaneously and completely functional.”

First a synopsis, then the Claude Sonnet conversation that got us here. This is tentative.

The standard codon wheel, RNA version. The radial symmetry graphic of the 4³ codon table requested below.

Code and Decoder as a Single System

The standard codon wheel — the diagram found in every genetics textbook — organizes the code around the first base. In that orientation, the second-base symmetry TES identifies is effectively invisible. It has been hiding in plain sight for seventy years simply because the field adopted the wrong organizing axis early and never changed it.

When the charts are examined directly, the second-base blocks map cleanly onto amino acid physicochemical properties: the C block contains the smallest, simplest amino acids; the T block is dominated by hydrophobics; the A block handles the polar and charged amino acids. This is not incidental. Peer-reviewed work by Carter and Wolfenden confirms that the acceptor stem of tRNA independently encodes amino acid size, while the anticodon encodes polarity — the same two properties that track with the nucleon count progression that The Ethical Skeptic (TES) identifies. Carter explicitly describes the result as “a symbolic mapping,” comparing it to Morse code. The second base, he notes, is the most organizationally conservative position in the entire code.

What the literature does not do is follow this to its logical conclusion. Carter frames the self-referential relationship between code and decoding machinery as a “reflexivity” that enabled evolution. What it actually describes is a closed loop with no entry point for an unguided process: the aaRS enzymes that implement the code are proteins, produced by reading DNA through the code that those same enzymes implement. The code and its decoder had to arrive simultaneously and completely functional. Neither has any meaning without the other.

This is not merely improbable. It is logically incoherent as an unguided event.

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