Why does the left hate free speech? Because they don’t know how to talk about the substantive merits when they are challenged. Having submerged themselves in disciplining each other by denouncing any heretics in their midst, they find themselves overwhelmed and outnumbered in America, where there is vibrant debate about all sorts of things they don’t know how to begin to talk about. They resort to stomping their feet and shouting “shut up”… when they aren’t prissily imploring everyone to be “civil.”
–Ann Althouse

Which Country Has the Worst Gun-Related Violence? It’s NOT the U.S

By Dave Workman

The nation with the highest total gun deaths—in spite of what you may have read or heard—is not the United States.

According to a report at How Stuff Works, basing its findings on data from the past, it’s Brazil, where more than 49,000 gun-related deaths were reported in 2019. And, as this report noted, “Determining what country has the most gun violence depends on how you measure it, whether by total gun deaths or gun death rates per 100,000 people.

“Globally,” the narrative added, “firearm violence varies widely between countries and is shaped by factors like gun laws, economic conditions and access to firearms. While some nations have the highest total gun deaths, others have the highest rates of firearm homicide.”

The How Stuff Works report acknowledges “The United States stands out among high-income countries for its high rates of firearm mortality. It has one of the highest gun death rates compared to peer countries and leads in civilian gun ownership.

“Nearly two-thirds of firearm deaths are suicides,” the report adds, “while gun homicide rates remain significantly higher than in other high income nations.”

Then, along comes World Population Review, again apparently relying on 2019 data, noting that Mexico has a far higher gun death rate than the U.S. (17.23 per 100,000, opposed to 4.42 per 100,000, with Brazil at 5.81 per 100,000). The data shows Mexico recorded 22,355 homicides for that year, Brazil racked up 12,266 and the U.S. reported 15,186.

Source: Statista

At this point, shouldn’t someone ask if the victims are any less dead in a lower-income nation than a so-called “high-income country.”

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FPC WIN: Second Circuit Strikes Down New York Public Handgun Carry Ban

What: The Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in Firearms Policy Coalition’s (FPC) Christian v. James lawsuit that New York’s ban on firearms at all publicly accessible private property without the express consent of the owner (also known as the “vampire rule”) violates the Second Amendment. The court however also facially upheld the state’s ban on carry in public parks.

Who: FPC is joined in this case by FPC member Brett Christian and the Second Amendment Foundation. The plaintiffs are represented by David H. Thompson, Peter A. Patterson, and William V. Bergstrom of Cooper and Kirk, PLLC, along with Nicolas J. Rotsko of Fluet.

When: The Court’s opinion was issued on May 18.2026. The case will now be sent back to the district court, which will issue a final order in this case.

Where: The opinion was issued by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, which is based in New York City and covers Connecticut, New York, and Vermont.

New Jersey’s Demand for Gun Store Sales Records is an Unconstitutional Attack on Gun Owner Privacy

The Attorney General of New Jersey has sent subpoenas to gun dealers in the state demanding production of customer records regarding sales of Glock pistols to New Jersey residents for the last ten years. The subpoenas are in connection to its lawsuit against Glock, Inc. under the state’s public nuisance law.

(NOTE: The claims in the state’s frivolous lawfare against Glock are not relevant to this particular article. But for context, the state is claiming the over 40-year-old design of the gun is too easy to illegally convert into a machine gun. Other states have filed similar lawsuits, and some like California have now banned the sale of Glocks, which are the most popular handguns in the country. These efforts are a way to coverup the failures of leadership  in antigun states.) It is not immediately clear why New Jersey needs these records, given the state already maintains a de facto registry for handguns through its pistol permitting system. It could be that the Attorney General wants to make these records public, as under New Jersey law and in a small nod towards respecting privacy, firearm registration records are  exempt from public disclosure  under the state’s laws.

Regardless of the reasoning for the subpoenas, they are an unconstitutional attack on gun owner privacy. This article takes a brief look at this emerging issue in Second Amendment law to show why New Jersey’s actions are unconstitutional. It is adapted from prior amicus briefing the Second Amendment foundation has done on this issue.
Privacy in Firearms Ownership Has Always Been a Fundamental Component of the Second Amendment Right

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To trust arms in the hands of the people at large has, in Europe, been believed…to be an experiment fraught only with danger. Here by a long trial it has been proved to be perfectly harmless…If the government be equitable; if it be reasonable in its exactions; if proper attention be paid to the education of children in knowledge and religion, few men will be disposed to use arms, unless for their amusement, and for the defence of themselves and their country. — Timothy Dwight, Travels in New England and New York, 1823

Climate Change: no, we shouldn’t trust the science
“The science” we were supposed to trust was always a lie.

Do you remember Global Warming? It was going to melt the polar ice caps, all the glaciers, and pretty much everything other than mountainous parts of Colorado and the Grand Tetons of Wyoming would be underwater in, oh, ten years or so, until ten years had passed and then it would be another ten years, and this time they meant it! The election of Barack Obama was the moment the planet healed and the rise of the seas stopped, except no healing was necessary and the seas weren’t rising.

Then some annoying, actually replicable, science with data and everything came along that proved global warming and the “science” backing it was falsified, so our existential, certain—in ten years or so—doom became “Climate Change.” Of course, the climate changes all the time and always has, and there was that nasty Medieval Warm Period where there was no man-made pollution that was as warm or warmer than now, but what are you anyway, a science denier?!

Graphic: X Post (See why he’s canceled?)

Oh, we had warnings. Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth among them, but like every other bit of climate hysteria, those predictions of imminent—in ten years—doom didn’t happen, though they made Gore and others multimillionaires. And right up until the second term of Donald Trump—how could anyone not understand that Kamala Harris was an Obama-like savior (cackle, cackle)?—our climate-caused doom was certain…in ten years or so, and then just like that, it wasn’t: 

And now, it seems they are admitting it was BS all along.

It’s nice when something you knew was a fraud all along turns out to be a fraud, but it’s even nicer when the people perpetrating the fraud admit it was a fraud all along.

“The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has just published the next generation of climate scenarios,” science policy analyst Roger Pielke Jr wrote late last week, and in what he called “big news,” the new framework “eliminated the most extreme scenarios that have dominated climate research over much of the past several decades.”

So the oceans aren’t about to boil off or freeze over or whatever the current scare story is?
Exactly: “The IPCC and broader research community has now admitted that the scenarios that have dominated climate research, assessment and policy during the past two cycles of the IPCC assessment process are implausible. They describe impossible futures.”

This is important because the IPCC’s changes resulted in “an update to the Science Based Targets initiative’s rules eliminates the need for steep emission cuts by 2030,” Trellis reported on Friday. In other words, even the people committed to radically reduced carbon emissions now say we don’t need to radically reduce carbon emissions to save the world or whatever.

Interestingly, the IPCC, long ago, quietly admitted that even if climate alarmists got all the trillions they demanded to save the planet, the global temperature might be reduced by about 1° centigrade, give or take, by the end of the century. It was always about the money, which is ironic in that if the world was ending in ten years, wouldn’t money be superfluous? After all, only so many people can live on the top of Mt. Everest, and they’d be a bit short of breath.

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‘An open secret’: New records reveal officials failed to act on fraud warnings

Newly obtained FBI interviews show regulators raised concerns about Feeding Our Future long before the meals program lost millions to fraud.
By Jeffrey Meitrodt The Minnesota Star Tribune
State education officials repeatedly raised concerns about possible fraud in the federally funded meals program during the pandemic, but their supervisors stopped them from taking more aggressive action, according to law enforcement interviews and other investigative records newly obtained by the Minnesota Star Tribune.
Frontline regulators said that they questioned soaring reimbursement claims and suspicious food distribution operations to their supervisors long before prosecutors uncovered what became one of the nation’s largest pandemic fraud schemes.
Three state employees told investigators that their managers discouraged aggressive oversight because they were afraid of lawsuits. One believed the department’s leadership feared accusations of racism from Feeding Our Future, the nonprofit at the center of the fraud case, which largely served Minnesota’s East African community.
The interviews provide a rare inside account of the state’s botched response to early warning signs of fraud — and how legal concerns and delayed enforcement allowed the scheme to grow, ultimately siphoning more than $250 million from a federally funded child nutrition program overseen by the state education department.
The records include FBI interviews with Jenny Butcher, a 25-year veteran of the Minnesota Department of Education who retired in 2024. Butcher told federal investigators in May 2022 that abuse in the meals program was an “open secret.”
She said that her supervisors repeatedly stopped her from digging into suspicious reimbursement claims and discouraged her from visiting sites that seemed “unbelievable” to her.
“No one at our agency was allowed to go to the sites — not even a drive-by,” Butcher said in an interview with the Star Tribune.
At least two other state officials echoed Butcher’s characterization of the education department’s timid regulatory approach, according to the records. One of Butcher’s colleagues told the FBI that Butcher was the first regulator to raise internal concerns about fraud in the meals program.

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NSSF Funds Lawsuit Against Virginia for Unconstitutional Firearm Bans

WASHINGTON, D.C.  — NSSF®, The Firearm Industry Trade Association, is funding a lawsuit filed today against the Commonwealth of Virginia for violating both the U.S. Constitution and the Virginia Constitution. Virginia’s expansive new law, HB 217 / SB 749, bans the sale and transfer of firearms that are expressly protected for private ownership by both the federal and state constitutions.

“Governor Abigail Spanberger, and the Virginia General Assembly, are grossly violating rights held by the citizens of the Commonwealth. The constitutions of the United States and the Commonwealth of Virginia expressly prohibit the government from infringing on the right to keep and bear arms,” said Lawrence G. Keane, NSSF Senior Vice President and General Counsel. “Further, the U.S. Supreme Court has recognized that firearms in common use are protected from radical gun control. Denying law-abiding citizens the ability to protect themselves with the firearms of their choosing does nothing to make Virginia safer. The only thing this unconstitutional law does is surrender the freedoms that the Founding Fathers, including Virginians George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison — who authored the U.S. Constitution’s Second Amendment — so wisely fought for and sought to protect to ensure freedom from tyranny.”

The NSSF-funded complaint, filed by Erick Black, Britton Condon, Clark’s Gun Shop, Inc., Optimus Arms, LLC and Hexmag USA, LLC, in Virginia’s Circuit Court of Fauquier County, details that HB 217 / SB 749 criminalizes not just the sale or transfer of commonly-owned Modern Sporting Rifles (MSRs) and standard capacity magazines, but also commonly owned handguns and shotguns Virginians regularly use for self-defense and hunting. The overly broad definitions of what is wrongfully defined as an “assault firearm” disenfranchise Virginians of their right to keep and bear arms, which are protected by the U.S. Constitution’s Second Amendment and Article I of the Virginia Constitution.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s Heller decision held that firearms in common use are protected by the Second Amendment. That holding precludes bans on the legal sale of MSRs, which number over 32 million in circulation. Likewise, there are a conservatively estimated nearly 1 billion detachable magazines in private possession and hundreds of millions with a capacity exceeding 15 rounds. Many commonly owned pistols are equipped with 17-round magazines, which HB 217 / SB 749 now criminalizes. The law’s expansive definition of “assault firearm” wraps in many commonly owned semiautomatic shotguns and handguns, which will be unlawful to purchase or bear in Virginia.

Virginia’s HB 217 / SB 749 fails the Supreme Court’s Bruen “history and tradition” test, as there were no analogous laws banning the lawful acquisition or bearing of firearms at the Nation’s founding. In fact, it is well documented that rifles with a capacity greater than 15 rounds were available and possessed by Americans when the Second Amendment was adopted in 1791.

Additionally, because HB 217 / SB 749 bans rifles, pistols and shotguns commonly used for hunting, it violates Article XI, Section 4 of the Virginia Constitution.