Second Amendment in the spotlight
If you’ve followed coverage of the Supreme Court’s 2025-26 term over the past few months, you’d likely say this term’s theme is executive power. The court already has added three major cases on the scope of presidential authority to its oral arguments docket – the tariffs dispute and two battles over removing federal agency leaders – and will have the opportunity to take up more, including cases on President Donald Trump’s executive order on birthright citizenship. The court is also fielding several requests related to executive power on the interim docket, perhaps most prominently being Trump’s deployment of the National Guard.
By the time the dust settles on this term, however, the court may have also had a great deal to say about the Second Amendment. So far this fall, the justices have taken up two cases on gun rights, and they’ll be considering several additional petitions on Second Amendment issues over the next two weeks.
The landscape post-Bruen
This wave of gun cases is hitting the Supreme Court three years after it found a New York law unconstitutional that heavily restricted the ability to carry a gun in public in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen. That decision, written by Justice Clarence Thomas, is perhaps best known for its text, history, and tradition analysis. As Haley Proctor explained in a recent column for SCOTUSblog, the court instructed judges tasked with resolving a gun rights dispute to determine “whether the Second Amendment’s plain text covers the conduct in which the challenger wishes to engage,” and if it does, whether the challenged law “is consistent with the Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.”
God grants liberty only to those who love it, and are always ready to guard and defend it. — Daniel Webster
November 15, 2025
Fred Aaron
When I was a kid, one of my favorite shows was the Beverly Hillbillies. This farce was about a bunch of uneducated, backwards country folks who fell assbackwards into tons of money when the patriarch of the clan, Jedd Clampett, found oil on his property while hunting a raccoon for dinner. Called Texas tea, the family of poor mountain folk were suddenly millionaires (which, adjusted for 2026 dollars, but put them in the same place as the Al Thani and Elon Musk). The comedy in the series came from the fact that all that money didn’t change the Clampetts. They were still the same old hillbillies wearing country attire, eating possum, and driving their banker friends nuts.
In all humor, there is a kernel of truth, and with the Beverly Hillbillies, it showed what could happen if you found wealth through no real efforts of your own. Instead of working for it, the money is just given to you. As a result, you don’t develop in the same way you would if you had earned a professional degree, moved up in the ranks of a trade, invested well, invented something, or excelled in the arts, athletics or entertainment. Those kind of experiences change a person, and when it happens at a societal level, it advanced a culture.
So what happens on a cultural level? We actually know the answer to that question. Until oil became big commerce at the turn of the 20th century, most of the Muslim world was in decline. In fact, it had been in decline since the failure of the Ottomans at the Siege of Vienna. While Europe, Asia and the Americas went through an industrial revolution, the Muslim world stagnated. Trapped with a 7th century ideology, limited resources, and a massive chip on their shoulders, the Muslims were going nowhere fast. Until oil. That black gold changed everything.
Suddenly, the Muslim countries found themselves literally sitting on a mountain of money. However, it was money that was completely unearned, it was just the happenstance of geography and geology, combined with the internal gas engine beating out electricity to power vehicles. Oil was cheap and plentiful, and the Muslims found themselves sitting upon its largest reserves.
And just like the Beverly Hillbillies, they didn’t change a damn thing about themselves. They still wore the same clothes, bore the same grudges, followed the same ideology. They hadn’t undergone any cultural development. They hadn’t learned the life lessons that come from sweat equity. They didn’t get the development that comes from education.
So this is why we are in this situation today. A people with a 7th century ideology and a vendetta against the West suddenly found themselves with untold riches. But they continue to live like it is the 7th century. At the same time, practically everyone in their midst who tried to modernize things, drag the Muslims kicking and screaming into the 20th century wound up dead, like the Shah and Anwar Sadat.
The key difference is that the Beverly Hillbillies were well meaning. They didn’t hurt anyone (except a stray raccoon or possum that ended up in Granny’s stew pot). Sure, they drove Mr. Drysdale and Miss Hathaway crazy (they were the Clampett’s beleaguered bankers). But they didn’t send out suicide bombers, oppress other religions, and use their wealth to undermine the West. The same cannot be said for the Islamist Hillbillies. Where the Beverly Hillbillies was comedy, the Islamist Hillbillies are tragedy.
Why No One Cares About the Climate Conference.
Suppose they held an international summit and nobody came? The Brazilian organizers of the annual United Nations climate conference are close to finding out. They pulled out all the stops, including bulldozing tens of thousands of acres of rainforest to clear a new highway to the host city, Belém. International business leaders flocked to earlier summits, and 150 heads of government attended the one in Dubai two years ago. The moguls are steering clear of Brazil, though, and only 53 national leaders are making the trek (a shame, considering all those temporarily converted “love motels“).
The sudden bursting of the climate-alarmism bubble is nearly as shocking as the global shrug that has accompanied it. Not so long ago, the climate movement was widely believed to be the most urgent cause of our time. Global do-gooders flew around the world urging others to cut transportation-related greenhouse gases, agencies and bureaucracies developed plans to slash carbon emissions, and C-suites lobbied their governments for green targets and subsidies. Now Germany is trying to avoid hosting next year’s climate gabfest.
This allegedly existential threat seems to have vanished with little notice, and observers are fumbling for an explanation. Many point an accusing finger at Donald Trump, but he is far from the only bubble-burster. Xi Jinping and the emerging artificial intelligence industry have also forced decision-makers to reconsider the vast amounts of energy and attention poured into the climate crusade.
Joe Rogan’s and Glenn Beck’s opinions on the nine steps to civil war
What are Dangerous and Unusual Weapons?
In District of Columbia v. Heller (2008), the United States Supreme Court said that the Second Amendment does not protect the right to keep and bear “dangerous and unusual weapons,” it protects only arms in “common use.” In support of its conclusion, the Court cited the following authorities and case law:
United States v. Miller, 307 U. S. 174 (1939), at 179. 4 Blackstone 148-149 (1769); 3 B. Wilson, Works of the Honourable James Wilson 79 (1804); J. Dunlap, The New-York Justice 8 (1815); C. Humphreys, A Compendium of the Common Law in Force in Kentucky 482 (1822); 1 W. Russell, A Treatise on Crimes and Indictable Misdemeanors 271-272 (1831); H. Stephen, Summary of the Criminal Law 48 (1840); E. Lewis, An Abridgment of the Criminal Law of the United States 64 (1847); F. Wharton, A Treatise on the Criminal Law of the United States 726 (1852). See also State v. Langford, 10 N. C. 381, 383-384 (1824); O’Neill v. State, 16 Ala. 65, 67 (1849); English v. State, 35 Tex. 473, 476 (1871); State v. Lanier, 71 N. C. 288, 289 (1874).
Neither the Heller opinion nor any of the cited authorities and case law support that conclusion. Most of the Court’s citations are circular, but all invariably point to English common law and statutes that preceded the adoption of the Second Amendment.
Moreover, had the Court bothered to read its own citations, which in turn cited English common law and statutes, it would have discovered that England did not ban “dangerous and unusual weapons.” England’s prohibitions on the bearing of dangerous and unusual weapons (the citations point to body armor) did not prohibit the possession of those arms. What was prohibited was bearing those arms in public except for certain limited exceptions, such as quashing riots and stopping affrays (e.g., street fights).
Moreover, there was no “common use” test. England was a class-based society with restrictions on the arms one could keep and bear, depending on one’s class. For example, in feudal England, only the upper classes could keep and bear what we today call broadswords, except traveling merchants, whose social class would normally have precluded them from doing so. Not that English peasants and serfs could have afforded to purchase a broadsword.
Which isn’t to say that the lower classes never touched a broadsword. But it would have been in a public defense context, and they were not expected to purchase a broadsword or other weapons of war that they could not afford.
If there were a weapon in “common use,” it was the English longbow, which they could afford. The right to keep and bear arms, and the specific arms protected by the Second Amendment, which we American citizens have the right to keep and bear, simply cannot be reconciled with English statutory and English common law. At least not unless American citizens are analogous to Medieval English serfs and peasants. True, this is a view widely shared by judges and politicians, but it was not the view of the Founding Fathers who wrote the Second Amendment, or the American People who voted to enact the Second Amendment into law, or the view of those who wrote the Fourteenth Amendment that was likewise enacted into law by the American People.
During oral argument in my California Open Carry lawsuit, Judge Bybee put to me that the Second Amendment was based on the English Bill of Rights. I responded by saying that we expanded on those rights. Had I been given the time to elaborate, I would have reminded him that the English Bill of Rights applied only to Protestants (and only some of them), not to Catholics. And, of course, the English “right” to keep arms was a statutory right, not a fundamental right that we Americans have even if there were no enumerated Second Amendment right. Statutory rights exist at the whim of the legislature, and the English Parliament has long since ended any right to keep arms, let alone bear them for the purpose of self-defense.
Judge Bybee would go on to write the 7-4 en banc opinion in Young v. Hawaii (2021) that held there is no right to bear any concealable arm in public, openly or concealed, because their mere existence offends the king.
The United States Supreme Court vacated the Young v. Hawaii decision and threw the case back to the 9th Circuit in 2022.
With the exceptions of prohibitions on the use and/or carrying of concealed weapons, which existed from the 13th century, and throughout the history of American colonial and American states, Heller’s embracement of prohibitions on short-barreled shotguns and machine guns cannot be reconciled with the types of arms the American People intended the Second Amendment to protect when it was enacted in 1791 or when the Fourteenth Amendment was enacted in 1868.
19th-century Courts and legislatures disagreed on whether firearms that are easily and ordinarily carried concealed can be banned, but they were all in agreement that the Second Amendment protects arms used in battle.
And that included cannons, a type of arm that cannot be carried on one’s person. Heller’s exclusion of arms that one would take into battle is ahistorical and inconsistent with Heller’s first citation that justified prohibitions on “dangerous and unusual weapons” and seemingly limited the right to arms in “common use”—United States v. Miller (1939). A decision that makes no mention of “dangerous and unusual.” What Miller said was, “[O]rdinarily when called for service these men were expected to appear bearing arms supplied by themselves and of the kind in common use at the time.”
Indeed, the Supreme Court in Miller adopted the view of many 19th-century courts that the Second Amendment protects only weapons of war—”Certainly it is not within judicial notice that this weapon [short-barreled shotguns] is any part of the ordinary military equipment or that its use could contribute to the common defense.”
In 2008, when the Heller decision was published, the M-16 machine gun was part of the “ordinary military equipment,” and certainly contributed “to the common defense.”
So how did we go from the Second Amendment only protects weapons of war to the Second Amendment does not protect weapons of war?
Technically, the Heller opinion did not say that “M-16 rifles and the like” are not arms protected by the Second Amendment, but the paragraph was so poorly worded that judges have leaped to the conclusion that Heller held that they are not.
In a Fox News interview with Chris Wallace, Justice Scalia said that the Court had not decided whether hand-held rocket launchers that can bring down an airplane or firearms that can fire 100 rounds per minute are, or are not, arms protected by the Second Amendment. In the interview, Justice Scalia gave an example of what the right to keep and bear arms did not protect—walking down Main Street while carrying an executioner’s axe in a manner intended to terrorize the townfolk, as that constituted an affray.
While an executioner’s axe may have been unusual, and is certainly deadly, it wasn’t the axe per se that was prohibited; it was the carrying of the axe in a threatening manner. A woodsman’s or shipwright’s axe was commonly carried, and for certain classes of Englishmen, the carrying (bearing) of swords was required by law and custom. It was not a crime to carry them in public unless they were carried in a threatening manner.
And contrary to the defendants’ position in my California Open Carry lawsuit, which claims that simply openly carrying a firearm is, in and of itself, threatening, I have centuries of English and American common law, as well as California statutory law, saying, and California Courts holding, that merely openly carrying a firearm is not threatening.
Some people hate the mere sight of guns, and concealed carriers hate Open Carry for different reasons, but, for now, there is no Heckler’s veto of the Second Amendment.
The Supreme Court could grant an “assault rifle’’ ban cert petition, and clean up the mistakes made in Heller and NYSRPA v. Bruen, and US v. Rahimi. But I fear that if the Court does, it will simply poke more holes in the Second Amendment.
You need only reflect that one of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases which our founding fathers used in the struggle for independence.
—CHARLES A. BEARD
November 14, 2025
Mamdani and His Jewish Supporters
Jewish Naïveté in the Age of Mamdani
My apologies to my Jewish brethren. But, to those who voted for socialist Zohran Mamdani this is unfortunately an exercise in deep self-deception.
First of all, Jewish naïveté didn’t begin on New York’s election night. No. Jews have been in the forefront of many campaigns for social and revolutionary change, only later to shockingly face betrayal by the very movements they helped to foster.
As many readers know, I started my Substack column looking at history, particularly American New Left history. I once was an avowed Marxist and was a roommate with Chicago 7 defendant Rennie Davis.
As might be expected, I personally met and collaborated with many so-called “revolutionary” New Left leaders in the 1970’s from Abbie Hoffman to Jerry Rubin. I was an idealistic romantic about the many benefits of socialism. And I’m Jewish.
History is replete with Jews who were naïve about socialism and socialist ideas.
One of the biggest Jewish leaders who embraced the Leninist Soviet dictatorship is a long-forgotten Jew named Grigori Zinoviev. That’s how he was publicly known. But his original name was Hirsh Apfelbaum. He was a Jew.
Zinoviev became one of the biggest global salesmen for communism after Vladimir Lenin appointed him as the President of the Soviet COMINTERN, known as the Communist International. He traveled to Europe and the United States to propagandize about the wonders of socialism. He also served as one of the troika with Joseph Stalin in governing the Soviet Union.
Zinoviev foolishly thought he was advancing the socialist revolution for the Russian working class. But after decades of being a loyal and an enthusiastic communist, Stalin prosecuted Zinoviev. He sent the Jewish leader before one of his despicable “Show Trials.”
Then in 1936 he sent Zinoviev – or Apfelbaum – before a firing squad. Despite claiming his innocence, he was executed in August of that year.
As the moderate Jewish organization Aish noted about Zinoviev in a 2024 article titled, “For Jewish Anti-Semites, A Cautionary History Lesson: “Yet, for all of his devotion to the cause and his role in giving Stalin the leadership position, his idealism would reveal itself to be naive. At the end of the day, as far as the enemies of the Jews were concerned, a Jew is a Jew.”
Aish further observed that, “As far as his fellow Jews, Zinoviev did not use his influence to help them. He spent his life building the regime that would utterly destroy the Soviet Jewish community.”
Zinoviev, like many of today’s progressive Jews, turned his backs on Judaism. He really didn’t care about his religion or about the Jewish people living in the Soviet Union. Today, many of the Jewish-born pro-Mamdani supporters also elevate their progressive socialist ideas over their affinity toward Judaism. Many also reject Israel outright.
According to exit polls, one out of three New York Jews were ecstatic about Mamdani and voted for him. They did so even though Mamdani is openly anti-Israel, has embraced many antisemitic tropes, along with dogmatic Islamic edicts.
More on USPS Carry; Leaked Memo Confirmed Authentic
A federal judge found the prohibition on possessing firearms on some United States Postal Service properties unconstitutional. A leaked MEMO — confirmed authentic — outlines how USPS employees should deal with carriers.
In October it was reported that the prohibitions on firearm possession and carry on some USPS properties was ruled to be unconstitutional. The opinion said that the law “is unconstitutional under the Second Amendment with respect to Plaintiffs’ (and their members) possession and carrying of firearms inside of an ordinary United States Post Office or the surrounding Post Office property.” How the USPS would be handling potential carriers has not been made publicly known, however a leaked internal MEMO contains instructions and the USPS has confirmed the authenticity of the material.
When contacted last month, the USPS addressed a query concerning the opinion. USPS Senior Public Relations Representative Felicia Lott spoke on behalf of the Service.
“The Postal Service is aware of the recent decision by the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas regarding the ban on firearms possession on postal property, which enjoins enforcement of the ban at certain Post Offices, and the surrounding Post Office property, with respect to certain postal customers,” Lott wrote. “The Postal Service is currently analyzing the court’s decision and taking necessary steps to implement the injunction.”
Via a reddit post, an alleged postal clerk leaked an internal document dated October 24, 2025. The document states the following:
A federal court order currently permits certain postal customers to carry and possess firearms at most Post Offices, including in customer parking lots. In response to that decision, and while we work to clarify the precise scope of the court’s order, we are providing the following guidance to all our retail employees at all Postal Service retail facilities, regarding all of our customers at those facilities.
Because of this decision, there may be instances in which members of the public who are visiting Postal Service retail facilities to pick up their mail, or conduct a retail transaction, will be carrying firearms. Postal Service Employees are directed to refrain from confronting or engaging with the customer about the fact that they are carrying a firearm.
Postal Service employees should allow the customer to conduct their business in the same manner as other customers. Once the customer leaves, immediately report the matter to your supervisor or manager.
Management employees should immediately call the Inspection Service hotline at 1-877-876-2455. The Inspection Service will determine whether the ban on firearms possession can lawfully be enforced under the circumstances, and whether further action is justified. Calls to local enforcement (911) should only be made if the person is interfering with operations or if the customer is acting in a manner that raises immediate safety or security concerns.
The court’s decision does not affect the ban on firearms possession by Postal Service employees on postal property, which remains fully in place. Employees are reminded that carrying or storing firearms on Postal Service property is prohibited and can result in discipline, up to and including removal from the Postal Service. The prohibition on employee possession of firearms also means that storing firearms in vehicles that are parked on postal property is also prohibited.
Thank you for your attention.
Bearing Arms reached out to USPS Senior Public Relations Representative Felicia Lott concerning the document. In response to the request concerning the authenticity of the document, Lott said, “USPS confirms that the Service Talk is an internal employee document and refers back to its previous statement for request of any additional comment.”
An October 28 filing from the Department of Justice requested the court clarify and/or stipulate that the ruling should apply to named plaintiffs only as a membership list would not be provided by the organizational plaintiffs: Firearms Policy Coalition and Second Amendment Foundation. The Justice Department says the court “should accordingly clarify that its declaratory judgment and permanent injunction are limited to the individual Plaintiffs and to individuals who have been identified and verified to the government as members of the organizational Plaintiffs.”
Members of SAF and FPC should be able to simply carry membership cards and or certificates with them in order to prove their status as an affected party. The court has not addressed the DOJ concerning their request as of this time.
The USPS has yet to make a public statement about the decision nor offer any guidance to Postal Service customers directly.
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.
The last penny was minted today [yesterday] in Philadelphia:
The last penny ever to be made was finally struck at the US Mint in Philadelphia on Wednesday — after President Trump cancelled production of the costly copper coin after 232 years.
***
And just like that, the coin that’s been in production since 1793 will never again be made.
It is, I think, a sad occasion.
Penny production was cancelled by Trump for the 2026 year after the coin started to cost about four times more to make than the 1 cent it is actually worth in US currency.
Of course, that doesn’t necessarily mean that pennies are a bad idea. A single penny may be used for hundreds or thousands or transactions. The nickel, for what it is worth, costs 14 cents to produce.
This, though, is more significant:
Trump and other critics have also argued that the penny has become an obsolete denomination with little use in modern markets – and that there are already billions in production to tide America over for the foreseeable future.
You could see that the penny was on the way out when gas stations and other retail establishments set up “take a penny, leave a penny” signs. The pennies were no longer worth worrying about.
Why do I think the demise of the penny is sad? Because it is a tangible marker of the steady inflation that has eroded the value of our currency. In 1900, the dollar was worth $38.57 in today’s money. So a penny was worth more than 38 cents–well over the value of today’s quarter. Let’s hope the dollar is not on its way to becoming like the yen; a single yen is today worth $.0065, or 65/100 of one penny. Literally not worth printing.
And, while it is true that there will be pennies in circulation for years to come, there will not be any shiny new ones. A new copper penny’s shine is different from, and vastly superior to, that of the silver (or “silver”) coins. A shiny new penny heralds the beginning of a new year.
Quite a few years ago, when I was a kid, I got a shiny new 1957 penny. The older pennies were, by contrast, dull. It struck me as the symbol of a new age dawning: 1957 was modernity, everything before then was a somewhat misty past. I still feel that way. For me, 1957 was the beginning of the modern world.
The humble U.S. penny, RIP.