Category: Question O’ The Day

Why Does Capital One Consider Lawful Gun Sales to be a ‘Prohibited Industry’?

Capital One, the corporate banking giant, has an advertising tagline that asks, “What’s in your wallet?” For one Maryland gun shop, the answer to that question appears to be a banking giant that ignores a White House executive order and dismisses Treasury Department regulations that forbid banking discrimination.

Capital One Financial Corporation has been in business since 1994 and the McLean, Va., international banking giant with over $475 billion in assets boasts that it offers credit cards, auto loans, checking and savings accounts and commercial banking services. That is, unless the customer happens to be a firearm retailer.

Just ask Jonathan Bennett, owner of United Gun Shop in Rockville, Md. Bennett tried using Capital One’s payment platform, administered by Melio Payments, for business and billing transactions. The firearm retailer had previously used the payment platform without issue. That changed on April 11, 2025, when Bennett met with Capital One after services were cancelled without notice. That cost Bennett’s business $75,000 in damages and disrupted services.

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According to reporting by The Daily Wire, Bennett was surprised to learn that his business — legally selling firearms to law-abiding citizens — was considered to be in a “prohibited industry” by the big bank.

Bennett’s not rolling over on the illegal de-banking. He’s making Capital One and Melio Payments answer in court. His lawsuit alleges the two banking service providers blocked United Gun Shop from “making future payments” before disabling the business from completing payment transactions.

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Are Submachine Guns Really Becoming a Thing of the Past?
Well, when you can get an AR in 5.56 NATO that’s not much larger than a Subgun in 9mm, or even .45 ACP…

The sad death of the sub-machine gun

These iconic, sometimes crude, weapons are increasingly rare on today’s battlefields

There’s a tendency when looking back at the weapons we first carried into battle to remember them with a certain affection. Mine was a sub-machine gun: compact, purposeful and, at the time, entirely suited to the environment in which I expected to fight – in a tank.

With its stubby barrel, distinctive curved magazine and folding stock, my little Sterling was perfect for the confined, unforgiving interior of an armoured vehicle. Folded down, it could be stowed almost anywhere – behind charge bins, tucked into corners, ready when needed, invisible when not. It was, in every sense, a practical tank soldier’s tool.

In those days, the logic behind the sub-machine gun was sound. Close quarters demanded speed, volume of fire and manoeuvrability. If you were forced to dismount under fire, or if the enemy got too close to your vehicle, you needed something you could use instantly. The SMG did exactly that. It wasn’t elegant, but it didn’t need to be. It was brutally effective within its limits.

In the hands of resistance fighters during the dark years of the Second World War, weapons such as the Sten gun became instruments of defiance. Crude and often hastily manufactured, yet devastatingly effective in ambush and close-quarter engagements, they allowed irregular forces to strike with speed and then vanish into the shadows. There is little chivalry in that kind of warfare, but there is resolve; and the sub-machine gun, in that context, became almost symbolic of that resolve.

Unsurprising then, that it also became associated with organised crime. Tommy gun-wielding 1920s gangsters found much to admire in its qualities: concealability, controllable automatic fire, and an unmistakable capacity for intimidation. It is a reminder, if one were needed, that tools of war are morally neutral; their character is entirely defined by those who wield them.

Yet if there is a moment when the sub-machine gun achieved something approaching professional reverence, it was during the 1980 Iranian embassy siege in London. When the SAS executed their assault – swift, decisive, and meticulously controlled – they did so armed with the MP5, a weapon that had, by then, refined the sub-machine gun concept to its zenith. What unfolded over those brief, violent minutes was not chaos, but choreography: precise entries, disciplined fire and an almost clinical application of force.


SAS troopers carry MP5 sub-machine guns as they enter the Iranian Embassy to end a six day siege in Central London, 1980 Credit: PA

But modern soldiers are no longer facing lightly equipped adversaries. The widespread adoption of advanced body armour, incorporating hardened ballistic plates, has fundamentally altered the dynamics of small-arms engagements. Pistol-calibre rounds, the lifeblood of the SMG, simply lack the velocity and energy required to defeat that protection reliably. In operational terms, that’s critical. A weapon that cannot neutralise a threat when it must is not just limited, it’s potentially dangerous to the man carrying it.

Range, too, has become a defining factor. Contemporary engagements rarely conform to the tight, urban or trench-bound distances of the early 20th century, despite recent reminders from conflicts such as those in Ukraine that close combat has not disappeared. Even there, however, the anticipated resurgence of the sub-machine gun has not materialised in any meaningful way. Soldiers require flexibility, the ability to engage at 50 metres or 300 metres without changing weapon systems. The SMG, by design, cannot offer that.

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Remember:
“I did not have sexual relations with that woman…” ?
He was bald-faced lying then.
Why would anyone think he’s not lying now?

The core question of the transgender debate is:
Is it more important to cater to the feelings of mentally ill men, or to keep women and girls safe while affirming reality?

Why? Simple. It’s because like all goobermint, they’re scared to death that the peons may one day get fed up enough with the blatant and open corruption (See – among other’s -Nancy Pelosi’s impossible stock portfolio performance) and decide to take care of business, along with the clear understanding that, while Mao was a murderous dictator, he was very correct when he said that political power grew from the barrel of a gun and that the party should control the guns.

Why Does SCOTUS Hear So Few Second Amendment Cases?
The right to keep and bear arms occupies a curious place in American legal history.

The Second Amendment occupies a curious place in American legal history. It has been sitting right there in the Bill of Rights since those amendments were first added to the Constitution in 1791. Yet it was not until the 2008 case of District of Columbia v. Heller that the U.S. Supreme Court got around to recognizing what many legal scholars had been saying all along: Namely, that the right to keep and bear arms is an individual right, not a collective right, nor a state’s right.

Two years after Heller, in 2010’s McDonald v. Chicago, the Court additionally held that the individual right to keep and bear arms that applied against the federal enclave of D.C. also applied against state and local governments.

But then the Supreme Court sort of went quiet for a while. The next truly major Second Amendment case did not arrive until 2022’s New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen, which extended the logic of Heller and McDonald to recognize “an individual’s right to carry a handgun for self-defense outside the home.”

The recent news that the Supreme Court has agreed to hear a new Second Amendment dispute later this term raises the interesting question of why it takes the Court so long to hear so few of these kinds of cases. What gives?

For a persuasive explanation of the Supreme Court’s pre-Heller silence on the Second Amendment, I recommend reading a 1989 Yale Law Journal article titled “The Embarrassing Second Amendment,” written by the liberal law professor Sanford Levinson. “I cannot help but suspect that the best explanation for the absence of the Second Amendment from the legal consciousness of the elite bar,” Levinson wrote, “is derived from a mixture of sheer opposition to the idea of private ownership of guns and the perhaps subconscious fear that altogether plausible, and perhaps even ‘winning’ interpretations would present real hurdles to those of us supporting prohibitory regulation.” In this telling, legal elites basically understood that if the Second Amendment was ever taken seriously, then some (or even many) gun control laws would necessarily fall. So they just declined to take the amendment seriously.

But if that explains some or all of the pre-Heller period, what explains the more recent era? One explanation may be found in an oft-quoted passage from Justice Antonin Scalia’s Heller decision. “Nothing in our opinion,” Scalia wrote, “should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.”

I recall several Second Amendment advocates grumbling to me at the time that this passage by Scalia was both unnecessary to the outcome of the case and potentially quite injurious to the broader gun rights cause. Those advocates feared that the gun control side would immediately grab hold of the “sensitive places” exception and run with it, leading to more regulations on guns instead of less.

And the federal courts would, of course, have to deal with Scalia’s language, too. In fact, Justice Brett Kavanaugh, joined by Chief Justice John Roberts, invoked that very language by Scalia in a notable concurrence filed in the Bruen case. “Properly interpreted,” Kavanaugh wrote, “the Second Amendment allows a ‘variety’ of gun regulations.”

Why did Kavanaugh feel compelled to emphasize that particular point in a separate concurrence that managed to garner the support of only the chief justice? I speculated at the time that Kavanaugh “may be signaling to the lower courts that, in his view, many such gun control regulations are presumptively constitutional, and lower court judges should therefore act accordingly.”

In other words, Kavanaugh and Roberts might be less hawkish on gun rights than some of their colleagues. And there might be a small but growing fissure among the Court’s “conservative bloc” over just how broadly the Second Amendment should be interpreted and enforced. That fissure, if it exists, might also explain why the post-Heller Court has not exactly been in a hurry to take up new gun rights cases.

We’ll learn more when the Supreme Court takes up this latest gun rights case, Wolford v. Lopez, in earnest later this term. For now, we’re still left to ponder the Second Amendment’s curious position.

BLUF:
As with the Ad Council, the federal funding these Agree to Agree “funding partners” enjoy isn’t gun control specific. However, taxpayers should be aware that organizations that receive significant federal resources are involved in propaganda to undermine their fundamental rights.

Why are Tax Dollars Funding a Civilian Disarmament Industry Anti-Gun Agitprop TV Ad Campaign?

The idiot box has been living up to the nickname.

In recent months television viewers have been subjected to a series of anti-gun propaganda pieces produced by the Ad Council. Dubbed the Agree to Agree campaign, the ads typically feature a misleading talking point about “children” and firearms followed by an invitation to go to the Ad Council effort’s website where visitors are bombarded with further gun control agitprop. The website even invites visitors to learn about how to secure red flag gun confiscation orders.

The name might suggest an effort to bridge political disagreements, but the campaign’s list of “stakeholder partners” shows it’s a gun control effort through and through. So-called “stakeholder partners” include: Brady: United Against Gun Violence (formerly Handgun Control, Inc.); Giffords (formerly Americans for Responsibly Solutions and the Second Amendment-denying Legal Community Against Violence); Everytown for Gun Safety; and the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions at the Bloomberg School of Public Health (named for billionaire gun control financier Michael Bloomberg). Handgun prohibition organization Violence Policy Center is not listed, although their longtime benefactor the Joyce Foundation was involved.

The campaign’s headline factoid is the following: “Gun injuries are now the leading cause of death for children and teens ages 1‑17, surpassing car crashes for the first time in two decades.” To justify the claim, the Ad Council cites a report from the Bloomberg School of Public Health.

For decades, gun control advocates and their allies in “public health” have pushed misleading talking points about children and firearms and NRA-ILA has repeatedly called them out for it.

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Why is Bondi’s DOJ Defending the Biden-Cornyn Gun Back Door Registration Scheme?

In a stunning betrayal of gun owners, Attorney General Pam Bondi recently ordered the Department of Justice to continue defending Joe Biden’s “Engaged in the Business” rule — a backdoor gun registration scheme.

And now there’s a new twist: a federal judge in the Northern District of Alabama just ruled that the ATF overstepped its authority with major parts of this rule, and issued a permanent injunction protecting the named plaintiffs and their members from enforcement.

Despite this rebuke, though, Bondi’s DOJ is pressing forward with defending the rule — even after President Trump ordered a full review of Biden’s gun control agenda earlier this year. This is nothing less than a deliberate attempt to kneecap Trump’s pro-gun agenda.

What the Court Did

The court declared multiple provisions of the ATF’s rule unlawful, including:

  • The claim that there’s no minimum number of guns or sales required to be “in the business.”
  • The presumption of “profit intent” even when no profit is shown.
  • The attack on the “personal collection” safe harbor, excluding firearms kept for self-defense.
  • Presumptions that reselling or advertising firearms automatically makes someone a dealer.

These provisions have now been permanently blocked against enforcement for the named plaintiffs. But here’s the catch: the rest of the country is still exposed. Unless the rule is struck down entirely, millions of gun owners remain at risk of being treated like criminals for private sales.

Cornyn’s BSCA Opened the Door for This

Make no mistake: this entire scheme is the spawn of John Cornyn’s Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, drafted with anti-gun Democrat Chris Murphy. Cornyn handed Biden the legislative keys to create a backdoor registry — and Bondi is keeping it alive.

Pam Bondi has a long history of selling out gun owners. She supported red flag laws in Florida, refused to stop anti-gun ordinances, and repeatedly sided with the political elite over grassroots conservatives. Now, as Attorney General, she’s siding with Biden over Trump, fighting in court to preserve Biden’s gun control legacy.

President Trump must get control of his own AG and force her to follow his pro-gun agenda.

The Fight in the Courts

There is hope, however. In the Fifth Circuit, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and Gun Owners of America are suing to stop this same rule. Texas Gun Rights and the National Association for Gun Rights filed a hard-hitting amicus brief in support.

A preliminary injunction is currently protecting gun owners in Texas and several other states. But if Bondi’s DOJ succeeds in salvaging the Biden-Cornyn rule, that protection could vanish, putting every gun owner back in the crosshairs.

As every gun owner knows: registration is the first step to confiscation.

 

Chris McNutt is president of Texas Gun Rights. 

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Did Joe Biden’s Doctor Just Confirm a Cover-Up of His Health?

In a move that should obliterate whatever remains of the myth of transparency in Washington, Joe Biden’s longtime physician, Dr. Kevin O’Connor, finally showed up for a interview with the House Oversight Committee—and proceeded to not answer a single question.

But while O’Connor may have refused to talk, his silence said plenty.

According to Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.), O’Connor was asked two simple but devastating questions: “Were you ever told to lie about the president’s health?” and “Did you ever believe President Biden was unfit to execute his duties?”

O’Connor didn’t say “No,” he pleaded the Fifth both times—choosing constitutional protection over basic accountability.

“This is unprecedented,” Comer said. “And I think that this adds more fuel to the fire that there was a cover-up.”

He’s right. When a sitting president’s personal doctor refuses to answer whether he was told to lie to the American people, it’s not just troubling—it’s damning.

This isn’t some minor bureaucratic hiccup or a routine legal maneuver—this is the doctor who, for years, stood between the American people and the truth about Joe Biden’s fitness for office. Now, when given the chance to clear the air, he chooses silence.

Although O’Connor had previously refused to cooperate, somehow, pleading the Fifth now instead of answering those two questions looks worse.

Let’s not pretend this is normal. O’Connor’s refusal to answer even basic questions about Biden’s condition raises the obvious question: What, exactly, is he trying to hide?

Of course, we all know the answer. For years, the Biden White House dismissed legitimate concerns about the president’s health as partisan attacks, hiding behind carefully worded reports from O’Connor. Those glowing annual assessments were the backbone of the cover-up, reassuring the public while Biden visibly declined.

Let’s be clear: O’Connor’s refusal to answer questions isn’t about medical ethics—it’s about political damage control. This is the same doctor who repeatedly vouched for Biden’s fitness while the public watched a very different reality unfold. If there’s nothing to hide, why not answer questions? Why invoke your right not to incriminate yourself?

Comer said it is “clear there was a conspiracy to cover up” Biden’s cognitive decline.

New York Post:

The only question O’Connor did answer before the deposition concluded was confirming his name, according to an Oversight spokesperson, who pointed out that doctor-patient privilege would have allowed the witness to answer at least some questions.

Dr. Jeffrey Kuhlman, who served as physician to the president during Barack Obama’s first term, agreed with that interpretation.

“In my opinion, [the first question] doesn’t involve HIPAA,” Kuhlman told The Post.

As for the second question, Kuhlman advised, “I don’t think that’s covered by HIPAA,” because it “doesn’t sound like that’s specific health information that they’re seeking.”

When asked whether he would answer questions under oath that don’t directly relate to a patient’s health, Kuhlman said: “In my role as a physician caring for a patient, I probably would.”

Dr. O’Connor’s refusal to answer questions about Biden’s health isn’t just a legal tactic—it’s an admission that there’s something worth hiding. The American people have every right to demand answers. The time for stonewalling is over.

Dr. O’Connor’s silence isn’t just suspicious—it’s a warning sign for anyone who cares about transparency in our government.

Let me rephrase this. Supposed I handed you $1 Million dollars in cash to hold and keep safe for me every Monday through Friday from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. And the place where you work and keep this treasure safe is public property — or at least open to the public. The building is not built like a bank or courthouse. It has no armed guards at all doors or other elevated security — other than a sign warning people about bringing weapons on to the property. Bad people know these facts.

Now let me add that 20 to 25 other people also hand you $1 Million dollars in cash as well, under the same conditions. Which means every Monday through Friday, from 8 to 3, you are holding and taking care of $25 Million. This is your job, you have promised to return the money, safely, to all the people every day at 3 p.m.

Now do you want to be armed?

How close was Iran to the bomb, and how far has Israel pushed it back?

A version of this Editor’s Note was sent out earlier Wednesday in ToI’s weekly update email to members of the Times of Israel Community. To receive these Editor’s Notes as they’re released, join the ToI Community here.

How close was Iran to the bomb, and how far has Israel now pushed it off?

Rafael Grossi, the head of the UN’s nuclear weapons watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, warned a few weeks ago that “they’re not far off,” and also cautioned that Tehran’s obstruction of his agency’s inspectors has meant that the IAEA has not been able to keep track of recent progress by the regime on the various aspects of its program.

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