The real destroyer of the liberties of the people is he who spreads among them bounties, donations and benefits.
—Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus
October 7, 2026
Anti-Gun Orgs Urge Clergy to Use Red Flag Laws to Grab Their Congregants’ Guns.
It’s often been said that gun control is really about people control. Understanding this, the megalomania that anti-gun advocates exhibit in their never-ending pursuit to control others displays a zealotry often associated with religious fundamentalism. It should come as little surprise, then, that gun control orgs are now trying to enlist clergy in their fight against natural rights, by encouraging religious leaders to promote and utilize red flag gun confiscation orders.
In September, the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health’s Center for Gun Violence Solutions published a tract titled “Extreme Risk Protection Orders: A Clergy Resource Guide” (extreme risk protection orders are the gun control advocates’ preferred term for red flag gun confiscation orders). The document was authored alongside groups including Faiths United to Prevent Gun Violence, Faith Leaders for Ending Gun Violence, and Jewish Women International.
Another author was the Presbyterian Office of Public Witness, which the document described as “the public policy information and advocacy office for the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA).” The “progressive” PCUSA currently hosts the guide on its website. Texas Democratic U.S. Senate candidate James Talarico, who has put his version of religion at the forefront of his campaign, trained at a PCUSA seminary.
Astute gun rights supporters will know that the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health bears the name of billionaire gun control financier Michael Bloomberg. For his part, Bloomberg appears to believe he can dictate terms to the divine.
In a 2014 interview with the New York Times announcing the creation and financing of anti-gun group Everytown for Gun Safety, Bloomberg expressed confidence that his efforts to direct the lives of other people would earn him his eternal reward. The piece noted,
Pointing to his work on gun safety, obesity and smoking cessation, [Bloomberg] said with a grin: “I am telling you if there is a God, when I get to heaven I’m not stopping to be interviewed. I am heading straight in. I have earned my place in heaven. It’s not even close.”
⇑ [what utter hubris. I think he’s going to be surprised.] ⇑
The guide seeks to inject gun control directly into the clergy-congregant relationship. The document encourages faith leaders to leverage the trust their congregants place in them, noting, “faith leaders are often trusted confidants. You may be among the first to hear when someone is experiencing crisis…”
Of course, the danger that a pastor may work to have the government strip a person of a fundamental right based on a private conversation will prompt some congregants to forego potentially beneficial pastoral services entirely.
San Diego County Sues Filament Maker Over Its 2A Ties
There’s nothing illegal about selling plastic filament for 3D printers, even if some customers use that filament to manufacture firearms. But according to officials in San Diego County, there’s something legally actionable about a filament maker embracing the Second Amendment community and touting its products to people who print their own guns.
On Monday, San Diego County, aided by Giffords Law Center, filed suit against Polymaker LLC, accusing the company of violating California’s Unfair Competition and False Advertising laws by allegedly promoting it’s products to the 3D-printed firearms community. The county isn’t claiming that Polymaker sells guns, unfinished frames or receivers, or even a product that’s uniquely suited for making firearms. Instead, much of its case rests on what Polymaker has said and done while selling a lawful, general-purpose product.
According to the county’s complaint, Polymaker developed firearm-themed products, sponsored and worked with gun-printing influencers, offered technical advice about using its filament for firearm applications, and cultivated relationships with the broader 3D gun community. San Diego contends those activities helped facilitate violations of California’s restrictive laws governing privately manufactured firearms.
While this lawsuit implicates the Second Amendment, it raises substantial First Amendment questions as well. From the complaint:
To be clear, 3D printing filament is not inherently illicit and has many lawful, productive purposes, and this lawsuit does not seek to ban the sale of filament in California.
Rather, the People bring this lawsuit to hold Polymaker liable for its strategic business choice to design and market its filaments in order to profit from the illegal manufacture of 3D printed ghost guns in California.
These actions violate California law and reflect a conspicuous disregard for the public safety interests of Californians that those laws are designed to protect.
San Diego isn’t taking aim at what Polymaker sells. It’s suing over how the company talks about its products, who it talks to, and what those customers might legally do with them in much of the rest of the country, where California’s idiotic laws are not in place.
Nowhere in the complaint does San Diego allege that Polymaker is designing or marketing it’s filaments with California specifically in mind. Instead, the county heavily relies on California’s ridiculously broad definition of a “firearm precursor part,” which includes “any forging, casting, printing, extrusion, machined body or similar article . . . that is marketed or sold to the public to become or be used as the frame or receiver of a functional firearm once completed, assembled or converted.”
In support of its lawsuit, San Diego County points to the California DOJ’s designation of the Ghost Gunner “AR-00,” which is nothing more than a solid block of aluminum, as a “firearm precursor part” simply because it’s marketed as something that can eventually become a firearm frame or receiver.
While that might buttress San Diego County’s argument, it’s also a perfect illustration of just how expansive and open-ended California’s law is. Under San Diego’s theory, a company that produces a general-purpose product can be held liable for promoting one particular use because California prohibits that activity, even when the marketing isn’t specifically directed at Californians.
Punishing commercial speech directed at a nationwide audience because that speech promotes conduct that’s illegal in one state, even when the same conduct is perfectly lawful elsewhere, seems like a pretty clear violation of the First Amendment to me.
If California can turn a spool of plastic into a regulated “firearm precursor part” based largely on how it’s marketed, then this case isn’t just about what Polymaker sells. What the company says about its products, and even who it associates with and employs, are also fundamental parts of the county’s litigation, and you don’t have to be a Second Amendment supporter or a 3D-printing aficionado to be extremely concerned about where this theory can lead.
Homeowner shoots, kills man who broke into his Lytle home after disturbance, police say
LYTLE, Texas — A 36-year-old man was shot and killed after police say he ran from a disturbance and broke into a nearby home at random, where he cornered the homeowner late Sunday night.
Lytle Police said the incident began just after 10:30 p.m. Sunday in the in a home off Butch Cassidy Street in the Saddle Ridge Estates subdivision.
Police said the man was involved in a disturbance at one home and appeared aggressive and out of control, according to witnesses. He then ran from the house and broke into another residence just a couple of houses away.
Police said the man had no connection to the second home and appeared to have chosen it at random.
Once inside, police said the man cornered the homeowner. The homeowner then shot him to protect himself and his family.
The 36-year-old man died at the scene. His name has not been released.
Police also found a juvenile girl with knife wounds at the home where the initial disturbance occurred. She was taken to University Hospital. Her condition was not immediately released.
The Texas Rangers were called in to assist Lytle police with the investigation at both locations.
“Freedom is always just one generation away from extinction.”
— Ronald Reagan
October 6, 2026
The Flydubai attacker’s motive was even darker than we thought
Israel came terrifyingly close to a mass-casualty aviation attack that could have killed hundreds, perhaps thousands, and severed the country’s principal air connection with the outside world. This is according to new intelligence from the interrogation of the Omani co-pilot who hijacked his own flight to Tel Aviv………
The news of Flydubai flight 1073’s miraculous escape from disaster thanks to its heroic Israeli passenger and crew members has been well documented. It was carrying almost 180 people, including 27 children, when its Omani co-pilot, Hammam al-Hammami, attacked Captain Smit Machchar in the cockpit and attempted to seize control of the aircraft. What is now emerging from the investigation makes the episode considerably darker.
Hammami reportedly told investigators that after killing the captain, he had intended to continue towards Israel as though making a normal landing approach, then divert at the last possible moment and crash into Ben Gurion airport. He also considered high-rise buildings in Tel Aviv. His calculation was straightforward and chilling: get close enough before revealing his intention that Israeli fighter aircraft would have no time to intervene.
That explains why Hammami did not attack at the beginning of the flight. He struck when the aircraft was already over Jordan, much closer to Israel, when the distance between an apparently routine approach and catastrophe had narrowed dramatically.
Ben Gurion would have been a target with consequences far beyond the immediate massive death toll. A passenger aircraft driven into a crowded terminal during the Jewish holiday of Sukkot could have killed people in the air and on the ground on a scale Israel has rarely experienced. The flight was due to arrive at around 9:30 a.m., during one of the busiest travel periods of the year. Tens of thousands of people could have been passing through the airport complex.
Then there is the wider purpose. Ben Gurion is Israel’s principal physical connection with the world. It carries Israelis, tourists, diplomats, businesspeople, foreign workers, families and freight. A successful attack would have hit far more than a building. Airlines would have reconsidered flying to Israel. Insurers would have reassessed risk. Tourism, already badly damaged after years of war, could have collapsed further. The practical and psychological isolation of the country would have deepened immediately.
* * * * * * * *
The details are telling. Hammami prayed, then began his attack. This attack is a definite part of a pattern in which Islamist extremists have fused religious conviction with the deliberate murder of civilians. The ideology has a name. Its adherents have repeatedly told us what they believe, whom they consider enemies and what forms of violence they consider permissible.
Machchar, meanwhile, had no luxury of ideology or analysis. He understood that if he could not open the cockpit door, everybody would die. Badly injured, with his memory fragmented and his vision blurred, he found what he described as ‘one last fight’. The crew outside had been trying to gain access using the cockpit code (though the Israelis on board have said in interviews they did not know whether to trust the crew and were later assigned to shadow their every move until landing), while Hammami prevented the door from opening. Machchar forced himself towards the manual mechanism, reached the knob and twisted it. The door opened.
People outside were ready. That act may have saved nearly 180 people on the aircraft. If Hammami’s reported confession is accurate, it may also have saved hundreds or thousands more at Ben Gurion. And even before the full facts were known, another ugliness appeared.
I do not advise ‘warning shots’. A prosecutor could make the case that you doing so meant you felt your life wasn’t in danger enough to defend yourself, thus putting you behind the 8-Ball of the criminal “justice” system
Ann Arbor Coin Shop Clerk Fires Warning Shot, Foils Armed Robbery Bid
An armed man walked into Ann Arbor Stamps & Coins last Thursday afternoon, pulled a gun, and ran off empty-handed after the store’s own employee fired back with a warning shot. Ann Arbor police are now searching for two people believed to be connected to the attempted robbery, which unfolded at approximately 1:50 p.m. on August 27 in the 3000 block of Washtenaw Avenue.
According to an Ann Arbor Police Department update shared on Facebook by Breaking News 989, an adult male entered the store and produced a firearm before fleeing on foot. Police say a second adult male was already inside the shop and is now considered a person of interest, with investigators working to determine whether the two allegedly worked together in the attempt, as FOX 2 Detroit reports.
Investigators confirmed that the store clerk produced his own firearm and fired one shot during the encounter, an action FOX 2 Detroit describes as a warning shot that scared off the alleged robbers. No injuries were reported, nothing was struck by gunfire, and no property was taken from the shop. The clerk fought back rather than hand anything over, and both suspects ran from the scene.
Yanis: Preserve, Pass On Legacy of Second Amendment
“Remember what brought you to where you are. Remember why you love doing what you’re doing and keep it going.”
That was the message from Jared Yanis, host of the YouTube channel Guns & Gadgets, who addressed the Gun Rights Policy Conference, challenging the audience to not only teach the next generation how to shoot, but why Americans have the special right to keep and bear arms.
“We have some incredible firearms instructors in this country,” Yanis observed. “We have competitive shooting, hunting, concealed carry classes, millions and millions of parents are teaching their kids, sons and daughters, about firearms safety. We have a pretty good chance of them being taught the right way.
“What worries me is much bigger,” he admitted. “Will the next generation understand WHY they have the right to do this? That’s a much bigger question, because there are two different things:
“Knowing how to operate a firearm is a skill,” he explained. “But understanding why the American citizen has the right to keep and bear arms is true education. If we lose that education, we will eventually lose that right.”
Yanis was not so much “preaching to the choir,” he was challenging every grassroots activist in the room to go beyond passing along a tradition, and carry on the process to a next level.
“We need to ask ourselves a difficult question: What exactly are we trying to preserve,” he posited. “Are we trying to preserve gun ownership? I’m not. Are we trying to preserve the principle that makes gun ownership a right in the first place? That’s what I’m about, because they’re not the same thing.”
He acknowledged that people in other countries own firearms, but under far different circumstances. It might involve licensing, government approval, registration and other restrictions.
“America was built around something fundamentally different,” he said. “The government doesn’t give you any of our rights. They’re just stewards of our rights. The Constitution doesn’t give us the right. The Bill of Rights doesn’t give us the right. We had those rights before anyone put quill to parchment.
“Now, the Second Amendment recognizes a pre-existing right that belongs to us, the people and it tells government ‘You shall not infringe,’” he stressed. “That distinction is everything. I don’t think we’re teaching it that way nearly enough.”
One problem with the current battle to protect Second Amendment rights is that people have become focused on “the controversy of the moment,” Yanis explained. This could involve bans on so-called “assault weapons,” original-capacity magazines, pistol braces or the “zero tolerance” philosophy of the Biden administration, which focused on cancelling federal firearms licenses for literally any infraction.
“Sometimes we become so focused on fighting the latest infringement,” Yanis observed, “that we forget to explain why that fire we’re fighting matters in the first place.”
Yanis focused on semi-auto rifles. He brought up the argument anti-gunners have made, that “nobody needs an AR-15.”
“And you’ll say, ‘Yes I do,’” he noted. “But why? Because it’s my right, or because the Second Amendment says so.
“If our education ends there,” he said, “we have a serious problem in America, because somebody on the other side is going to teach that young person, they’re going to give them an explanation of why they think they shouldn’t have an AR15. They’re going to talk about public safety, crime, mass shootings; all the blue tokens they throw out there to make people feel it in their hearts.”
He then boiled things down for the audience to remember and take home.
“The Founders didn’t include the Second Amendment because they loved guns,” Yanis said. “They included it because they understood power, and that’s the conversation we need to bring back to the forefront.
“The Constitution is fundamentally a document about power,” he continued. “Who has it. Where it comes from, how much the government possesses, how that power is divided and what happens when government exceeds it.
“The Founders had just fought a revolution against the most powerful government that they knew, and the most powerful military on this rock,” Yanis recalled. “And they didn’t emerge from that experience believing that human beings would suddenly stop abusing that authority. In fact, they knew it would happen again. So they built a system based on the opposite assumption, that power must be divided, it must be checked, and certain rights must remain beyond government’s legitimate reach.”
Among these are speech, religion, assembly and the right to keep and bear arms. Yanis explained how the Second Amendment is not just about a right to keep and bear arms. It’s about the entire constitutional philosophy, he said; the relationship between the citizen and the state.
“Once you understand that philosophy,” he stated, “once you get that relationship, once you know what the founders believed when they fought for this, the Second Amendment makes a lot more sense to you.”
He closed by reminding the GRPC audience that passing on the tradition in all the traditional ways is good and proper.
“Taking your kids shooting is fantastic,” Yanis affirmed. “Teaching them firearms safety is essential. Teaching them how to hunt is wonderful. But at some point, maybe on the ride home from those things, turn around and ask them this ‘Do you know why you have this right?’
“Teach them about Lexington and Concord,” he advised. “Teach them what happened on April 19, 1775.
Tell them why ordinary people possess arms and why it matters. Teach them about the Bill of Rights.
Teach them that with rights come responsibilities and that an armed citizen should be safe, but a responsible citizen, an informed citizen and most importantly, a citizen, and not a subject.”
“In recent years, women made up almost half of all new gun owners, a striking shift from the historical norm, when women accounted for about 24 percent of gun owners,” Rosanna Smart and Andrew R. Morral of the RAND Corporation recently wrote. “After more than a decade of stable gun ownership, women’s ownership rose starkly between 2018 and 2021, going from 10 percent of adult women owning guns in 2018 to 15 percent in 2021, then up again slightly to 16 percent by 2024.”
They add that the big surge in women’s gun ownership has occurred since 2018 and, almost without exception, is seen across the board without regard to race, age, income, party identification, or education. Men, too, have bought guns amidst record firearms sales boosted by the chaos of 2020, though not to the same transformative extent as women. As broad demand for the means of self-defense has put the lie to the already overstated argument that gun ownership was a passing fixation of rural white men, women have rushed to take advantage of the empowering technology.
“Some of the largest relative increases were among groups of women with historically low rates of gun ownership, such as Hispanic women and those living in the Upper Midwest, who saw ownership rates more than double after 2018,” add the RAND authors.
Smart and Morral draw on data from the General Social Survey (GSS), which is conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago. The GSS numbers largely square with other sources.
“Ownership is demographically diverse: 45.7% of validated gun owners are female, 25.6% do not identify as White (alone), and the gap in ownership rates between White Americans (34.6%) and Black Americans (33.0%) has narrowed to less than two percentage points,” Georgetown University’s William English wrote last month, of numbers from the National Firearms Survey.
— J.D. Tuccille in Women Are Better Armed Than Ever
Pandering to invaders
Gavin Newsom signs Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha into law as new California state holidays.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed into law a bill that formally recognizes two Muslim holidays as state holidays on Sunday, making it the second state to formally recognize both holidays statewide.
California Assembly Bill 2017 officially added Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha to the list of state holidays, which would permit public schools and colleges to close and allow state employees to be eligible to observe the holidays.
However, schools and businesses will not be required to close on these days, and courts will be required to stay open.
This makes California the second state in the country, after Washington state, to pass statewide legislation recognizing the Muslim holidays.
Before signing AB 2017, Newsom had multiple bills on his desk that provided protections and exceptions for other religious observances, including Jewish holidays such as Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.
For example, AB 395, which reached the governor days before AB 2017, would codify these Jewish holidays, among others, into state law and require state agencies and facilities like schools to “make every reasonable effort” to avoid scheduling significant functions for those days.
Another bill, AB 1763, would also guarantee students in K-12 be allowed excused absences for religious holidays.
Though these bills were introduced and presented to the governor before AB 2017, Newsom did not sign the additional bills into law until Wednesday, prior to the midnight deadline.
In a democracy, we have always had to worry about the ignorance of the uneducated. Today we have to worry about the ignorance of people with college degrees.
– Thomas Sowell