karol markowicz with SBR

How I became a gun person

It was Shani Louk’s mangled body that was keeping me from sleeping. She had been beautiful and bright, a real person, having a good time on a warm night. Then she was dead, her body mistreated, the girl gone. She could have been me. I used to dance all night at festivals under the stars too. She could be my daughter, in a few years, heading to a field to hear the music.

Or it was the Bibas family. I also have redheaded children. That could be me clutching my ginger boys, distraught, afraid, missing.

The days and months after October 7th caused sleeplessness like I had not experienced before. Wide eyed, middle of the night, a stress knot in my chest, a tightness I had never known.

When the panic of the first few days subsided, my sleeplessness took on a new pattern. It wasn’t fear or despair anymore. It was anger. “How could they have been so defenseless,” I’d ask myself in the dark, sick with the knowledge that our family would have been just as helpless as any family that day. They were me, I was them.

Inbar Lieberman was a name I’d come to repeat to myself. Inbar was 25 years old on October 7th and head of security at Nir-Am, a kibbutz near the Gaza border. On that day, Lieberman heard explosions nearby and ran to unlock the armory. Her quick thinking, but also specifically her weaponry, saved her kibbutz. Nir-Am suffered no losses that day.

I had long been a supporter of the Second Amendment but it had been entirely theoretical. I was born in the Soviet Union, came to the United States as a small child and embraced everything it meant to be American. You should absolutely have the right to own a gun. We are a free country of free men. The only way to maintain that freedom, as history has shown so often, is to be armed. I fully believed this. But growing up in Brooklyn meant I didn’t know anyone who actually exercised this right. If something happened, you were meant to call for help and hope for the best.

Unfortunately, I had the opportunity to test this call for help. In the last five years, my public image has increased and I have received several threats. I had gone to the police in Brooklyn for one explicit death threat, texted to my phone, but was told there wasn’t much they could do. I had walked into the police precinct ready to spend some time there, give a statement, help with clues. I was outside five minutes later. They didn’t even take down my information. No one was coming to save me.

When our family moved to Florida three years ago, I planned to get more serious about shooting and eventual gun ownership. But we got comfortable in Florida quickly. We felt secure and safe. My husband and I meant to go learn to shoot but never quite got around to it. Everything was so peaceful, it was hard to motivate towards owning guns. October 7th was the reminder: Peace ends quickly.

I knew Jews were changing on guns even before the 7th, I had written about it. But I myself had not changed yet. I had shot a gun only once before, four years prior, on my friend Will Cain’s property in Texas. He had shown me how to hold his shotgun correctly, that it wasn’t a bazooka to rest on top of my shoulder. It was fun but I had seen it as an outdoorsy activity like fishing or golfing. Thinking about shooting as a mechanism for saving our lives is a different sensation.

By October 13th, we were at the gun range. A girl walked out of the shooting area with a huge Star of David necklace and a Chanel bag. My people had gotten the message loud and clear.

In my Florida conservative media world, it was easy to get a better understanding of guns. Buck Sexton and his brother Mason took me to an outdoor course to practice with a variety of weapons. John Cardillo took us gun shopping for the first time and introduced us to the owner of an excellent gun store. Our “gun guy,” Manny, is mild mannered and an extremely polite gentleman. He could be your accountant but he sells the finest weaponry and shoots machine guns with a smile on the weekends. His calm and patient demeanor was helpful when we tried to figure out what we needed. He understands that we are afraid. He has seen a serious uptick in Jewish customers since the 7th.

Manny’s explanations are rational. He isn’t a loose cannon. He told us if you have the option to get away from a confrontation, that is always best. If you can not, you must be ready. He is blunt. He says things like “your handgun is there to get you to your real gun.” We internalized all of his advice. We have guns now, plural.

Once you become a gun owner, so many wrong ideas around guns come into clear focus. “Gun free zones” were always kind of funny, a bad guy will obviously ignore a sign as quickly as he will any number of laws, but they become absurd when you know the only time you’re going to know a good guy is carrying in a gun-free zone is when you’re thanking him. Or the idea that some guns should be illegal. None of the data on banning certain guns makes sense. Most gun deaths happen with handguns and over half of those are suicides. No one is taking my AR-15 because they want to “do something” about guns. And anyway, that gun was lost in a boating accident.

The gun owners we know take training very seriously and so do we. A gun is not a purchase you make and then stick in a drawer for a rainy day. Much like driving a car, learning how to shoot a gun takes practice and requires muscle memory. Unlike driving, a regular activity you do on good days and bad days, if the day ever comes that you will need to use your gun, it will likely be the worst, most stressful day of your life. The idea behind training is to get to a point where your muscle memory will take over, in chaos and fear, and you will know exactly what to do should it ever be required.

The more you train the less the whole thing feels like a joke. It stops being “tee-hee, I own a gun” and becomes a far more practical thing that you just do. How will you carry it? What feels comfortable? This gun or that gun.

“I thought you felt safe in Florida. Why have guns?” a visiting friend from Israel asked us. We do feel safe in Florida, especially as we watch the eruptions of Jew hatred in our old city. But the idea that New York City could become a hotbed of Jew-hatred was once far-fetched too. It’s exactly the “it could never happen here” feeling that has lulled so many Jews before me into complacency. We have not just been killed by our enemies in places like Israel. We’ve been killed by friends and neighbors, in Spain, in Poland and so on. Our guns say: not us, not this time.

There is no reason for a Jew not to be armed in 2024. So much of Jewish culture revolves around being the helper. We expect people to help those in trouble. We count on armed people to step in. When the call comes “someone should do something!” we don’t plan to wait around. That someone will be us.

“We aren’t ‘gun-people,’” some people say. There’s some pride in it. Who, me? Oh no, I don’t own guns, I’m not that kind of person. But unsaid is that the not-a-gun-person expects someone else with a gun to come and protect them at just the right moment. They count on police, security, military to come and help in a real crisis. The not-a-gun-person can never step up and stop a violent attack on someone, they can never protect others, can never be the hero themselves. They can save themselves, maybe, but they’ll never be the one that everyone turns to at a time of emergency. There’s something intrinsically anti-Jewish about this. We have an obligation to each other but the anti-gun Jew can’t meet it. That should be a source of shame not pride. You’re not just a not-a-gun-person. You’re a can’t-help person.

What I want is for my kids to say something else. Yes, we are gun people, actually. I want my kids to grow up shooting, to be good at it, to be comfortable with it, to know their role is not to wait for someone else. We’ll also deter. We send the most peace-bringing message of all: We own guns, we train with guns, we have an arsenal, you do not want it with us. We will help others, we will be the people that step in.

The 10 Commandments Are a Threat to Marxism

The 10 Commandments are back in the news. A federal appeals court this week ruled that it’s fine for them to be printed on posters and tacked to the wall in Texas public school classrooms. The plaintiffs in the case are poised to appeal this decision to the Supreme Court of the United States, so the fate of this law remains uncertain.

The majority opinion noted that “No child is made to recite the Commandments, believe them, or affirm their divine origin,” so the law’s requirements are essentially passive and pretty benign. But liberals continue to regurgitate the same arguments they have since the 1962 Engel v. Vitale decision outlawing voluntary, nondenominational prayer in public schools. But there’s more to this issue than concerns over the First Amendment’s prohibition on the government establishing a religion.

Increasingly, the political agenda and behaviors of the progressive left are antithetical to the Commandments. It was on display this week when Marxist commentator Hasan Piker spoke at length about why he supports theft and why we should take other people’s property. Piker also tried to justify the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, accusing the dead executive of “engaging in a tremendous amount of social murder.”

It’s tempting to ignore Piker as just another left-wing nutcase, but people pay attention to him and what he says. His various platforms capture an estimated audience approaching three million people, many of whom it may be presumed are Democrat Party voters. Piker is also being joined by progressive Democrats, so his influence in party politics is not easily dismissed.

Adultery and related activities are embedded among segments of similarly progressive ideology and behavior. Americans were horrified to learn of rape tents established at a variety of Occupy Wall Street disruptions, with assaults reported in New York City, Dallas, Cleveland and elsewhere.

In Minnesota, it’s perfectly legal for children to disregard their parents as long as the kids want to pursue some sort of medical treatment geared to surgically or chemically mimic certain characteristics of the opposite sex. In Vermont, 199 public schools actively seek to hide the transgender ideology of students from their parents. This is called a “best practice” by the left.

Lying has been part of politics from time immemorial, and politicians from all parties engage in it to varying degrees. But some lies are bigger than others. Take Democrat U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (NY-14) and her 2019 claim that the climate will “destroy the planet” in 12 years. She isn’t alone in telling such apocalyptic lies about how the weather will result in the destruction of Earth, but her prediction will ensure leftists maintain their perfect record of being wrong every single time when foretelling climate catastrophe, dating back to my boyhood.

Politics is also rife with envy, but among the major parties in America, one is largely occupied with coveting the money and property of others, while the other is largely occupied with letting people keep more of what they have. Financially successful people have a lot of money and possessions, so Democrats want more of it. But taxing annual income is no longer enough. Covetous progressives are now looking for ways to seize accumulated wealth in ways that are too numerous to include in a single column.

While all of the 10 Commandments are very good ideas and include wisdom reflected in major religions worldwide, 60 percent of them are secular in nature. They’re also the foundation for much of the common law across the civilized world. Placing this into a political context raises some fascinating questions that have relevance in today’s culture.

What might become of the leftist agenda if school children learned that stealing, killing, lying, coveting, sex outside of marriage and disobeying mom and dad are wrong? All of these behaviors are promoted or institutionalized by the left, so even passively informing kids that they’re wrong does not accrue to the benefit of those embracing this ideology.

It may be that some progressives are deeply and honestly concerned about government involvement with anything having to do with religion. But the 10 Commandments, in whole or in part, clearly undercut the Left. Were I a committed leftist politician, I would be very concerned about losing influence and power by exposing the next generation of voters to this handful of simple rules that expose the destructive nature of my agenda, and I’ll wager I wouldn’t be alone.

There are very few politicians who would publicly admit that the mere presence of the 10 Commandments in classrooms poses a risk to advancing the Marxist ideology spreading across America. But they all know it, and it’s a hill they’re willing to die on.

“…The right of the people peacefully to assemble for lawful purposes existed long before the adoption of the Constitution of the United States. In fact, it is and always has been one of the attributes of a free government.

It `derives its source,’ to use the language of Chief Justice Marshall, in Gibbons v Ogden, 9 Wheat., 211, `from those laws whose authority is acknowledged by civilized man throughout the world.‘

It is found wherever civilization exists. It was not, therefore, a right granted to the people by the Constitution… The second and tenth counts are equally defective. The right there specified is that of `bearing arms for a lawful purpose.’ This is not a right granted by the constitution. Neither is it in any manner dependent upon that instrument for its existence.” 
– U.S. v. Cruikshank (1875)

Attor­ney Gen­er­al Ken Pax­ton Secures Legal Vic­to­ry to Pro­tect Gun Own­ers from Fed­er­al Over­reach by Block­ing Biden-Era Gun Sale Rule

Attorney General Ken Paxton secured a landmark legal victory for gun owners, preserving an injunction that prevented enforcement of a Biden Administration Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (“ATF”) rule that unlawfully sought to violate Americans’ constitutional right to privately buy and sell firearms.

For decades, Congress has deliberately protected the ability of law-abiding Americans to engage in private firearm sales. In doing so, Congress narrowly defined who qualifies as a “dealer” to prevent federal agencies from overreaching into private, non-commercial transactions. The Biden-era rule attempted to upend that framework by broadly expanding the definition and threatened to subject hundreds of thousands of law-abiding gun owners to presumptions of criminal liability for engaging in constitutionally protected conduct.

This unlawful rule exceeded the authority granted to the ATF by Congress and represented a direct violation of the Second Amendment.

In May 2024, Attorney General Paxton led a multistate coalition to sue the ATF over the unlawful regulation. Attorney General Paxton obtained a temporary restraining order followed by an injunction against the rule that prevents enforcement in all states party to the lawsuit. The injunction identified that the ATF rule likely violated federal law by “requiring that firearms owners prove innocence rather than the government prove guilt” which could “trigger civil or criminal penalties for conduct deemed lawful just yesterday.”

Now, the Trump Administration has moved to dismiss its appeal of the preliminary injunction, ensuring that gun owners will continue to be protected.

“The Second Amendment is a cornerstone of American freedom, and I will never allow it to be undermined by unlawful federal overreach,” said Attorney General Paxton. “This Biden-era rule was a blatant attempt to violate our Constitution and criminalize law abiding Americans for engaging in lawful private firearm sales. I am proud to have led this coalition to stop it, and I fully support the Trump Administration’s decision to abandon this appeal and restore the rule of law for gun owners across the country.”

To read the order, click here.

John Ʌ Konrad 

Just as I predicted yesterday…. MSM will falsely claim the Secretary of the Navy was fired because of Battleships.

And the NYTimes is actually worse than I thought. Let me explain….

The mainstream media will make this about the ships because the defense “experts” never want more hulls. They want money flowing into consulting fees, AI “solutions,” and think tank white papers. Steel produces nothing for the Beltway class. A flight deck you can launch F-35s off of does not generate PowerPoints.

But the NYTimes is running an even more sinister play.

Throughout the Biden administration, and later during DOGE’s audit work, I translated every major spending bill into a unit every American can actually visualize: one nuclear aircraft carrier.

Nuclear supercarrier cost: $15 billion.

Biden’s BEAD rural broadband program, which connected zero homes to the internet: $42.5 billion, or roughly three carriers.

Pete Buttigieg’s infrastructure package: $1.1 trillion, or seventy three carriers.

Total DOGE savings to date: $215 billion, or fourteen carriers.

Known Somali-linked fraud in Minnesota, per federal prosecutors: $18 billion, or one carrier plus an Arleigh Burke destroyer.

Why do I keep doing this?

Because for the past two decades the NYTimes has run the same story on loop: the military is the reason for America’s skyrocketing national debt.

That is a psyop. It conditions Americans to believe that steel and sailors, not social programs and grift, are what is bankrupting the country.

Human beings are not wired to understand $15 billion. The mind goes blank at that scale. But every American, left or right, understands the sheer weight and menace of a nuclear aircraft carrier. It is the most visible, most photogenic instrument of state power on earth.

So the NYTimes runs the obvious play.

Paint the carrier as expensive. Pile on delays and cost overruns. Quote an anonymous Pentagon source worrying about bloat. Then anchor the defense budget to “discretionary spending,” a small slice of the real pie, and express it as a percentage of that smaller number.

The Pentagon instantly looks like the whale in the room.

But Medicare alone, roughly $1 trillion in 2025, already eclipses the entire defense budget. Add Medicaid and ACA subsidies and federal health spending hits $1.8 trillion, more than double defense. None of those programs are labeled “discretionary,” so by NYTimes accounting, they “don’t count.”

This is a magic act. The NYTimes holds a shiny capital ship up in one hand to keep your eyes off the social programs bankrupting the country in the other.

Once you see the trick, you cannot unsee it. Every time the NYTimes runs a carrier or battleship exposé, ask one question: what is on the page they did not write?

Nine times out of ten, the answer is sitting just outside the “discretionary” column, quietly metastasizing, while a Ford class carrier gets blamed for the deficit.

America is not going broke building warships. Warships are one time expenses that last decades and are a tiny fraction of the total annual budget.

America is going broke pretending the ledgers that matter do not exist, while a national newspaper gets paid to keep the audience looking the other way.

That’s why they hate battleships. That’s why they tell you they are ridiculous and antiquated warships that are a waste of money. To make you think THIS is the reason why the nation is $39T in debt.

And the best part? Their psyop works on both sides of the aisle… on liberals who hate the military and conservatives who hate federal spending.

Battleships are not a waste of money. All the many fraudulent programs that cost more annually than a single carrier are.

Looks like he is one of those ‘refugees’ imported from Somalia.

Minneapolis man sentenced to 8.5 years in prison over support for ISIS.

MINNEAPOLIS — A Minnesota man was sentenced in federal district court to more than eight years in prison Wednesday for supporting the efforts of the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), a designated terrorist organization rooted in the Middle East.

A statement from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Minnesota said 23-year-old Abdisatar Ahmed Hassan, of Minneapolis, was handed eight-and-a-half years in prison, followed by 15 years of supervised release, after he pleaded guilty in September to attempting to provide material support and resources to ISIS.

Court documents show that in 2024, Hassan began collecting and redistributing ISIS propaganda, while obtaining various manuals about sniper-training skills and how to make “highly explosive” materials and ammunition. Officials said Hassan also researched articles online related to gun ranges, weapons and “ISIS-inspired attacks and terroristic acts.”

Prosecutors found Hassan engaged with ISIS media wings and recruiters in Somalia for months before he decided to quit his job and liquidate his savings, cashing in on a one-way ticket from Minneapolis to Somalia in early December 2024. Hassan was actually turned away from that flight after airport officials discovered he lacked the proper travel documents, but just a few weeks later, he was granted the same one-way ticket with the proper documentation.

According to the district attorney’s office, Hassan made his first flight to Chicago, but was stopped and questioned by Customs and Border Control agents, missing his flight to Somalia and later admitting to his ties to the terrorist organization.

Hassan returned to Minnesota and continued to praise ISIS through his social media accounts until being arrested by the FBI in February 2025. A grand jury then indicted Hassan on one count of attempting to provide material support and resources to ISIS.

“The sentence handed down today takes a would-be terrorist off the streets and sends a clear message that the FBI and our partners will unremittingly pursue anyone seeking to join or support a foreign terrorist organization,” said FBI Minneapolis Division Special Agent in Charge Christopher D. Dotson.

History Shows Pistols Were Common in Revolutionary America

Pistols were commonly owned in America at the time of the Revolution. Clayton Cramer & Joseph Edward Olson lay out extensive evidence in their paper.

Numerous people claim that pistols were not common during the American Revolution. This is done to imply concealed arms were not included in the Right to Keep and Bear Arms. Clayton Cramer and Joseph Edward Olson published a paper outlining extensive evidence of pistol ownership at the time of the American Revolution. The paper was published in the Willamette Law Review on June 3, 2008, pages 699-722.

In early America, pistols were distinguished from guns or firearms. The distinction between pistols and guns, and by extension firearms, persisted in common usage until 1828. One of the most telling pieces of evidence showing the commonality of pistols is the accounting of the weapons turned in to General Gage after the battles of Lexington and Concord occurred on April 19, 1775.

On April 23, 1775, General Gage offered to allow Boston residents to leave if they surrendered their arms. Boston, through the selectmen, voted to accept the offer. By April 27, the people had delivered over 3,400 weapons. From the paper:

 As an incentive, General Gage offered passes to leave Boston to all who turned in their weapons, because no weapons or ammunition were allowed to leave Boston. On April 27th, the people delivered to the selectman 1778 fire-arms, 634 pistols, 973 bayonets, and 38 blunderbusses.

Aside from the bayonets, pistols accounted for over 25% of the weapons turned in. This was probably an undercount, because pistols are easier to hide than the other weapons. After telling the Bostonians the weapons would be returned to them, General Gage confiscated them some months later.

The paper goes on to show numerous examples of pistols being offered for sale, pistols in estates, pistol powder for sale, and remnants of pistols found from the era.

In addition, at least one law exempted pistols from the regulation of long guns, the opposite of what is generally seen today.  Boston banned people from leaving unattended loaded firearms in buildings because of fire hazards. There was no law banning the carry of loaded firearms. The usage of the time separated firearms from pistols. The ban may not have included a prohibition on leaving loaded pistols in houses. Pocket pistols were mentioned in an account from 1772. There were many concealable arms during the revolutionary period. No evidence of laws against the carry of concealed weapons has been found from this period.

The paper is worth reading for any Second Amendment supporter. It shows handguns were in common use at the time of the revolution, and into the early Republic. Clayton Cramer is well known for his meticulous historical research.

Pistols, while not as common as long guns during the American Revolution, were common and readily used.  The story of Samuel Whittemore during the battle of Lexington and Concord is an illustration.

From warhistoryonline.com:

Samuel Whittemore learned of the British attack and armed himself with his prized sword and pistols, grabbed his trusty musket, and went to defend his home. By this point, Whittemore was at least 78, possibly as old as 80. He found a position to hide and observe the British advance and when they got close enough he revealed himself and shot one of the soldiers at nearly point blank range. With no time to reload Whittemore drew his pistols and killed two more soldiers.

Whittemore was shot, clubbed, and bayonetted at least 13 times. Against all odds, he survived and lived for two more decades.

Modern handguns were estimated to account for 27% of the privately owned firearms in the United States in 1945, according to figures in Gary Kleck’s highly acclaimed book, Point Blank. As America has become more urban, handguns have become more popular.  In 2023, handguns made up 54% of the firearms added to the private stock in the USA that year.

I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education. This is the true corrective for the abuse of constitutional power.
–Thomas Jefferson, letter to W.C. Jarvis, 1820.

Tennessee lawmakers pass bill allowing use of deadly force to protect property

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (WSMV) – Tennessee lawmakers passed a bill allowing the use of deadly force to protect property in certain situations.

The House voted to approve the measure on April 23, after the Senate passed SB1847 on April 21.

If signed into law by Governor Bill Lee, property owners will be allowed to use deadly force to prevent someone from attempted or actual trespass, arson, damage to property, including damage to livestock, burglary, theft, robbery, or aggravated cruelty to animals.

“At its core, it asks a simple question: ‘Do we trust law-abiding citizens or do we side with the criminals that prey upon them?’” Because right now, under current law, if someone is breaking into your property, if they’re stealing from you, if they’re destroying what you’ve worked your entire life to build, you’re expected to wait. You’re expected to hesitate. You’re expected to second-guess and take a calculated look at defending what’s yours. HB 1802 simply says, ‘If someone is destroying your property, that you can use lethal force to protect it,’” said Rep. Kip Capley (R-Summertown), who sponsored the bill.

Opponents of the bill argue that it opens a dangerous door.

“The reason we were taught you don’t kill people over property is because they’re not putting at risk an innocent human life. What this legislation seems to be doing is lowering that threshold significantly and substantially, and the department is going to have to re-teach in future classes of people who go get their permit, or their lifetime permits, like my wife and I have done, is that you can now kill people over property. And I don’t think that is right,” said Rep. Justin Pearson (D-Memphis).

The measure does not allow the use of deadly force against someone who is facing away from the property owner.

The law goes into effect July 1, 2026, if the governor signs off on it.

Suspicion confirmed……..

Your Morning Coffee Is Reshaping Your Gut. Here’s What Scientists Found.
So fix yourself a cup of brew in the morning and chug it down, knowing it’s changing you for the better.

It’s been a while since scientists began to reach a consensus that whatever’s going on in your gut microbiome is vital, as it plays a major role in both physical and mental well-being. Those billions of microbes are sensitive, constantly shifting in response to diet and lifestyle. Now, a team of researchers says that one of the most common daily habits among billions of people worldwide can radically reshape your gut microbiome: drinking coffee.

A study published in Nature Communications tracked 62 adults through phases of normal coffee use, a forced two-week break, and a controlled reintroduction of either caffeinated or decaffeinated coffee. The goal was to understand how coffee interacts with the gut-brain axis, the communication network linking digestive microbes and the brain.

They found that habitual drinkers had distinct gut microbiomes compared to nondrinkers, with certain bacterial strains more abundant than others. When the study participants stopped drinking coffee, the patterns began to ebb and flow like ocean tides, with strains that were abundant before now retreating as others that were scarcely found reemerged.

This happened whether the coffee was caffeinated or not. That is a more important detail than it seems on the surface, since many of the changes were tied to the plant compounds in coffee called phenolic acids, which can influence how gut bacteria function and what chemicals they produce. A lot of those chemicals contain compounds that influence or affect the range of bodily functions, from brain signaling and gut health to body inflammation.

Coffee Causes Huge Changes In Your Gut Microbiome

Coffee’s effects show up in the billions of microscopic microbes in your gut, and in your behavior, too. Coffee drinkers were noted to be more impulsive and emotional. Yet after a two-week break, both of those measures dropped. When the coffee was reintroduced, the outcomes started to split.

People drinking caffeinated coffee had reduced anxiety and lower stress hormone levels, which sounds counter to what I would expect. Decaffeinated coffee drinkers also saw some benefit after the break, having shown stronger associations with improved sleep, memory performance, and fewer errors on learning tasks.

Coffee drinkers had a lower baseline of inflammatory markers, which is great. But those levels increased in the absence of coffee, then improved again once the coffee returned, regardless of whether it was caffeinated. If you want to reduce body inflammation, drink coffee in any form.

The point is, coffee doesn’t just wake your sleepy butt up in the morning. It is actively changing the complex biological ecosystem within your body, thus influencing how you think, how you feel, how you react to external stimuli, and, overall, how you function day to day.

So fix yourself a cup of brew in the morning and chug it down, knowing it’s changing you for the better.

Final Rule Drives a Stake Through Anti-Gun Left’s De-Banking Strategy.

The decades long discriminatory tension between the financial sector and the firearm industry underwent a positive shift with a final rule published on April 10 by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. This landmark effort in a long fought battle, which NRA-ILA has reported on extensively, codifies the removal of “reputation risk” as a basis of adverse action under oversight programs that apply to FDIC-supervised financial institutions.

Ultimately, this final rule eliminates reputation risk as a means of injecting politics into banking regulation by prohibiting examiners from using this subjective assessment to pressure or penalize banks. It also prohibits regulators from pushing banks to close accounts or deny services based on their ill-conceived aversion to the lawful firearms and ammunition industries, which are vital to supporting our constitutional rights.

This rule helps to mitigate unjustified biases against these business sectors left over from the Obama-Biden Administration and importantly helps to prevent future efforts in the same vein. In 2013, the U.S. Department of Justice, in coordination with regulators such as the FDIC, began pressuring banks to cut ties and services to industries they considered to be “high risk,” which under the anti-gun Obama-Biden administration unsurprisingly included firearm and ammunition-related business.re

The program, billed Operation Choke Point, encouraged broad financial “de-risking” and led to banks freezing or terminating services to lawful businesses based on “reputation risk,” instead of any proven misconduct or illegality. Guidance documents provided to banks at the time specifically listed firearm and ammunition sales as high-risk activity, although they are some of the most highly regulated industries in the country.

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