Eric’s 26 Inconvenient Truths

Eric Florack

I’ve been refining this list for several years now. Earlier revisions have been posted in other venues, although most of them are gone now. Even Rush Limbaugh had his 35 Undeniable Truths. As for me — cough, cough — being somewhat less influential, I only have 26.

Buckle up, kids.

  1. There is no such thing as civilized warfare. War is, by definition, the lack of civility and the lack of rules. The rules and the definition of civility are invariably decided by the victor.
  2. Remember that everything Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and Mao Zedong did, including the millions of deaths, was absolutely legal according to the laws of their respective countries. Law, therefore, is not the final arbiter of what is and is not moral.
  3. At the same time, morality is not, and can never be, an individual choice.
  4. People are far too easily fooled by the label of “compassion.” It often isn’t.
  5. When speaking the truth becomes objectionable, be very suspicious about those who object.
  6. Donald Trump did not bring division to this country. He was elected because division was already here, brought on by decades of the establishments of both parties moving in precisely the wrong direction.
  7. Heaven has walls, gates, and a very specific set of rules for anyone wishing to enter. You must be of a specific mindset. Hell, meanwhile, has an open-borders policy and will take anyone regardless of their mindset.
  8. The biggest single mistake that we have ever made as a country, a culture, and a people was to turn the education of our young over to the government. Does anyone expect a taxpayer-funded, government-run education system to properly teach the founders’ vision of limited government?
  9. People who are not taught the value of individual freedom, and its relationship with prosperity, morality, and limited government, will never believe in it and will eventually work to destroy it.
  10. Socialism and globalism have historically been rejected by the people subjected to them whenever they’ve had the power to do so. There’s a reason for that: neither actually works to the advantage of the people.
  11. Just because concepts like socialism or global warming have been disproven several times over does not mean their backers will stop pushing those ideas. It’s all they’ve got to go with.
  12. If you want to know who runs your life, look directly at those whom you may not criticize.
  13. Today’s feminism isn’t feminism. For proof of this one need look no further than the large number of self-proclaimed feminists who spend a great deal of time trying to look like men.
  14. The reason most feminists claim to hate men is because they surround themselves with liberal men who, in the final analysis, are not men at all.
  15. There are two sexes: male and female. You can have all the operations you want, but it won’t matter: your DNA is not going to change. The surgical blade is not a means by which one can run away from the reality of one’s self.
  16. Claims to the contrary not withstanding, because one is of the Republican Party does not make one a conservative. Consider the number of establishment Republicans who have been fighting Donald Trump on every point. Remember, also, that the establishment GOP wasn’t too happy about Ronald Reagan winning elections either and have subsequently gone well out of their way to erase his legacy.
  17. The purpose of government, any government, should be to nurture, protect, and, if possible, extend the influence of the culture that gave it life.
  18. Nothing is for free. Someone must pay for its being available.
  19. Our freedom and our rights come from God, not from government.
  20. The American culture is unique and worth fighting for. It is the basis of our prosperity and our very way of life.
  21. John F. Kennedy wouldn’t want anything to do with the Democratic Party of today. Indeed, it’s a wonder that the Democrats hold Kennedy to be an icon of the party at all. Think: When’s the last time you saw a Democrat mention the man?
  22. The proximate cause of most of our problems is the establishment of both parties, who have come to love the power of government more than is good for the upkeep of the principles put forward in the American Revolution. We desperately need these principles to return if we are to survive as a nation, a culture, and a people
  23. The most glaring lesson taught to us by Donald Trump being elected twice is that both parties’ rank-and-file are rejecting their own establishments.
  24. Ninety percent of what gets passed off as racial issues are actually cultural in nature.
  25. A nation without borders ceases to be a nation almost immediately. That is in fact the goal of pushing for open borders.
  26. Experience has taught us that the cause of world peace would be best served by the dissolving of the United Nations. There is no fixing it.

The Hidden Question for SCOTUS in Its Newest 2A Case

On the surface, the Hemani case the Supreme Court recently agreed to take up is about one thing: whether Section 922(g)(3) is constitutional as it applies to Ali Danial Hemani, who was convicted of possessing guns as an “unlawful” user of marijuana.

In answering that question, though, the justices are almost certainly going to have to answer another: whether the DOJ’s proposed rule allowing prohibited persons to apply to the Attorney General to have their Second Amendment rights resolved should bar prohibited persons from using the courts to regain their right to keep and bear arms.

Solicitor General D. John Saeur made the case for the Court to throw out the Hemani case on those grounds in his cert petition to the Supreme Court, and if the court adopts Sauer’s flawed reasoning it would have a impact well beyond Ali Danial Hemani’s conviction.

To the extent Section 922(g)(3) raises constitutional concerns in marginal cases, 18 U.S.C. 925(c) provides the appropriate mechanism for addressing those concerns. Under that statute, a person may apply to the Attorney General for relief from federal firearms disabilities. The Attorney General may grant relief if the applicant shows that “the circumstances regarding the disability, and the applicant’s record and reputation, are such that the applicant will not be likely to act in a manner dangerous to public safety” and if “the granting of the relief would not be contrary to the public interest.”  If the Attorney General denies relief, the applicant may seek judicial review in district court.

That program was effectively disabled from 1992 until 2025 because the authority to grant relief had been delegated to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), and appropriations statutes have included provisos barring ATF from using funds to act on Section 925(c) applications. Recognizing that the appropriations bar applies only to ATF, however, the Attorney General recently withdrew the delegation of authority to ATF and revitalized the Section 925(c) process. An individual who seeks an exception to one of Section922(g)’s categorical restrictions could invoke that process and, if the Attorney General denies his application, seek judicial review. That process provides a more workable mechanism for granting exceptions than a court-administered regime of as-applied challenges brought by those engaged in criminal conduct.

Section 925(c), to be sure, was not operative at the time of respondent’s offense conduct. But respondent has not argued that he would have satisfied Section925(c)’s standard—i.e., that his record and reputation show that he is unlikely to “act in a manner dangerous to public safety” and that granting relief “would not be contrary to the public interest.” 18 U.S.C. 925(c). Nor did respondent file a civil suit seeking “protection from prosecution under [Section 922(g)(3)] for any future possession of a firearm.” He instead “violated the law in secret,” “tried to avoid detection, ”and raised an as-applied challenge as a defense to a criminal charge after he was caught. Section 922(g)(3) raises no constitutional concerns as applied to him.

The biggest problem with Sauer’s argument is that Section 925(c) is still not operative and available to Hemani. If you look up “federal firearms rights restoration Attorney General” you’ll find this DOJ page that says “The Department is developing a 925(c) program web-based application for those seeking to restore their federal firearms rights” and “An initial version of the application will be available online soon after the final rule is released”.

There is, however, no way for Mr. Hemani or anyone else to actually start the application process. That could change by the time oral arguments are held, but the fact that this supposed remedy has been unavailable to anyone for more than 30 years should give the justices enough reason to reject the DOJ’s position.

Another huge issue with Sauer’s suggestion is that Ali Hemani isn’t just appealing the loss of his gun rights. He’s appealing his conviction for violating a law that the Fifth Circuit has said is unconstitutional as it applies to him. Relief from firearm disabilities is one thing, but Hemani is also trying to void the conviction that led to the loss of his right to keep and bear arms in the first place, and Section 925(c) doesn’t help him in the slightest.

If the Supreme Court agrees with Sauer, then Section 922(g)(3) will still be actively enforced against all “unlawful” drug users; not only guys like Ali Hemani, but the grandmother in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma eating a THC gummy to help with the effects of chemotherapy, or the former district attorney in Pennsylvania who can’t buy or possess a gun because he uses medical cannabis.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m glad the DOJ is restarting the 925(c) process after more than 30 years. It does nothing, though, to address the constitutionality of these statutes and whether or not people should be charged and convicted for violating them going forward. That’s why it’s so disappointing, and frankly disturbing, to see Sauer’s disingenuous argument deployed here, and SCOTUS will hopefully make it clear that they reject his flawed reasoning when oral arguments take place.

Enemies of the People

In 1993, I stood in front of someone and swore my oath of enlistment. I’d joined the United States Navy and vowed then and there to protect and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic.

During my time in Uncle Sam’s Yacht Club, I was never called upon to defend against foreign enemies. However, now that I’m in civilian life, I keep finding myself needing to defend us from domestic enemies.

We call them the Democratic Party, unfortunately.

In recent weeks, the insanity has reached a fevered pace. We’ve got everything from former presidents calling for the regulation of what people say to some reality TV personality from Bravo threatening literally everyone who isn’t as rabidly leftist as she is. We’ve got a sizeable chunk of the Democrats’ base threatening to loot if they don’t get their free food money they did nothing to deserve from the government, even.

This follows weeks of celebration of the assassination of Charlie Kirk and generations of pushing to restrict our ability to resist a tyrannical government.

And yet, they try to present themselves as the people who can be trusted with the reins of power?

Let’s not even get into their own calls for “lowering the temperature” on rhetoric after Kirk was killed, which weren’t even directed toward their own side, but toward us.

These are not people interested in being our countrymen and women. They see us as scum that they must purge from society through whatever means available to them or, at a minimum, who must be suppressed into silence.

What else was cancel culture but an attempt to make everyone too afraid to say what they really wanted to say?

Now, it’s violence. They want us scared, not for our livelihoods this time, but for our very lives.

Reality stars on C-tier cable networks are more than willing to talk big on “going after” anyone who thinks violence isn’t the answer without any pushback from others on the Left, likely because they agree with her.

I don’t want to see violence from either side. I’d rather we battle things out with ideas and words than bullets and bombs.

But I won’t pretend that the people who want me dead are anything but my enemies. More than that, considering the direction the Democratic Party is going, even their own base is likely to be viewed as enemies at some point or another, simply because they’re not willing to completely destroy the country from within.

They are the enemies of not just conservatives or libertarians. They’re the enemies of the American people.

Simply put, we need to not just defeat them in elections, but we need to dismantle the entire governmental infrastructure they want control of so that they can put the screws to hardworking Americans who simply want to be left alone in peace. Take it apart, and they’re powerless no matter what they want to do.

Don’t, and they’ll just keep building it up until no one can stop it from destroying the greatest nation in history.

It doesn’t seem like a hard choice now, does it?

“Let us contemplate our forefathers, and posterity, and resolve to maintain the rights bequeathed to us from the former, for the sake of the latter. The necessity of the times, more than ever, calls for our utmost circumspection, deliberation, fortitude, and perseverance. Let us remember that `if we suffer tamely a lawless attack upon our liberty, we encourage it, and involve others in our doom.’ It is a very serious consideration-that millions yet unborn may be the miserable sharers of the event.”
–Samuel Adams, 1771

Spring Forward, Fall Back
Daylight Savings Time ends tomorrow at 0200 hours.
So don’t forget to run those time keeping mechanism that don’t reset automatically one hour back.

BLUF
To a casual observer in the early 21st century it might seem that the “militia-uses-only” view of the Second Amendment had always been predominant, and the Heller and McDonald decisions involved dramatic legal change. In full historical context, however, it becomes apparent that those decisions recognize the individual rights understanding that had prevailed from the Framing onward. The militia-uses-only approach rejected in Heller and McDonald was in fact a very recent creation of the lower federal courts, utterly ahistoric, and which had been subject to scholarly challenge almost from its outset.

The Rise and Demise of the Collective Right Interpretation of the Second Amendment

Printer Panic: Everytown 3D Gun Summit Targets Technological Advancement

Recently, Everytown for Gun Safety hosted a 3D Printed Firearms Summit in New York City with the goal being to “build cross-sector collaboration and chart actionable strategies to stem the tide of 3D-printed firearm (3DPF) related violence.”  The gathering of gloom is seemingly a leftover from the Biden-Harris administration, which convened similar confabs of gun control absolutists. One positive note is that these kinds of anti-gun “summits” must now be funded with Everytown’s own money rather than by taxpayers through Biden’s defunct White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention.

Media hype ahead of the summit warned, “We’re at the start of a new public safety crisis and there is no time to waste,” and “3D-printed firearms are the new frontier in the fight against gun violence.” Everytown is apparently measuring this crisis by “recovery data from twenty U.S. cities submitted exclusively to Everytown” according to their Facebook post. Exclusive crime-related data given just to Everytown may raise its own kinds of red-flags to consider.

While 3D printing is a newer and developing technology, homemade firearms, or PMFs — privately made firearms — are not. Since the birth of our nation, citizens have enjoyed the right to create their own privately made firearms. A review of the basic facts on PMFs would have made for a helpful presentation at the summit.

As far as federal law is concerned, individuals can legally make firearms for personal use without a license as long as the person isn’t prohibited from possession of firearms, the firearm is detectable, and the firearm isn’t made or sold for profit. Firearms and related items that are illegal under federal and/or state law, however, are still illegal. Items that are already regulated by federal and/or state law are still regulated.

Firearms continue to be heavily regulated regardless of how they are manufactured. Articles referring to 3D printed firearms are a mishmash of terms interchanging 3D printed firearms with “ghost guns” and undetectable firearms. The National Firearms Act of 1934, the Gun Control Act of 1968, the Undetectable Firearms Act of 1988, to name just a few, continue to govern firearms produced by 3D printing.

The mere absence of a serial number does not make a gun undetectable and if 3D printers were capable of producing undetectable firearms, such guns would already be illegal to manufacture and possess anywhere in the country.

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Self-Proclaimed ‘Human Rights Defenders’ Attack Right to Keep and Bear Arms

Self-defense is a human right. In fact, I’d argue it’s the most fundamental of all our inherent rights. Without that right to protect our lives, what does it matter if we have the right to think or say what’s on our mind, or to worship (or not) as we choose?

So, anytime I see a self-described human rights activist talking about the right to keep and bear arms, I’m always curious to see if they’ll actually embrace the human right of self-defense, or pretend that it doesn’t exist.

Sadly, it seems that the group Mindbridge Center falls into the latter category. In a new post at Psychology today, the self-described human rights defenders argue that only by denormalizing gun ownership and adopting laws that make it harder, if not impossible, for people to defend themselves, can we build a safer America.

While many Americans believe gun ownership is widespread and normalized, the truth is more nuanced. Only about 30 percent of Americans own a gun, and among men, 60 percent do not own a firearm (Pew Research Center, 2024). Yet, public perception often overestimates gun prevalence due to cultural portrayals and media emphasis.

If 1-in-3 people engage in a particular activity, I’d say that’s a pretty normal activity, wouldn’t you? More importantly, the Mindbridge Center itself says on its website that human rights defenders are those “advocating for minoritized groups such as racial minorities, Indigenous people, women, LGBTQ+ individuals, or the disabled community.”

So here’s my question to Mindbridge; if advocating for minoritized groups is defending human rights, and “only” 30% of Americans own guns, then why isn’t advocating for gun owners a defense of human rights?

And a followup: if members of these minoritized groups face threats of physical violence because of who they are, do the folks at Mindbridge really believe that they’re better off disarmed and defenseless? Shouldn’t they have the ability to protect themselves from those who would do them harm? Don’t they have the right to protect their lives?

The most obvious answer is that the folks at Mindbridge don’t think so. After all, it’s clear they want to denormalize and stigmatize gun owners. As they write in their call to action::

You don’t need to be a policymaker to help shift the culture. Start by challenging the myths: Most men don’t own guns, and most Americans support regulations like background checks. Share this truth in conversations, on social media, and in community spaces. Campaigns that highlight these facts, such as billboards or digital media stating “60% of American men don’t own a gun,” can help redefine what responsible citizenship looks like.

Got that? For Mindbridge, being a “responsible citizen” means not owning a gun. Which brings up another question: why bother pushing for things like “universal” background checks if they think that gun ownership itself is a problem?

The fundamental premise of their mindset is that, unless “both structural change and cultural transformation” surrounding gun ownership takes place, it’s impossible to “build a safer future.” That ignores the fact that violent crime is dropping at record levels at the moment, and 2025 is on pace for the lowest homicide rate in more than 60 years.

We are building a safer future (and a safer present as well), and we’re doing so while robustly exercising our right to bear arms… as well as our human right to self-defense.

Gun Owners of America, Gun Owners Foundation Successful in Overturning Virginia’s Universal Background Check Law; Judge Halts Enforcement

Gun Owners of America, Gun Owners Foundation Successful in Overturning Virginia’s Universal Background Check Law; Judge Halts Enforcement

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

October 30, 2025

LYNCHBURG, VA – In a landmark decision affirming Second Amendment protections, a Virginia circuit court struck down the state’s universal background check law for private firearm sales, granting a permanent injunction that bars the law’s enforcement statewide. The ruling in Wilson, et al. v. Colonel Matthew D. Hanley, highlights fatal constitutional flaws in the statute, rendering it completely unenforceable.

The Court declared Virginia Code § 18.2-308.2:5 unconstitutional, particularly due to its discriminatory impact on law-abiding adults aged 18-20. The Court then granted our request to enjoin the administration and enforcement of the law across the entire Commonwealth of Virginia.

Erich Pratt, Senior Vice President of Gun Owners of America, issued the following statement:

“This decision vindicates the rights of all Virginians to engage in lawful private firearm transfers without unconstitutional barriers. The Act’s enforcement mechanism was fatally flawed from the start—criminalizing everyday citizens while ignoring basic constitutional principles. We’re grateful the court recognized that patchwork fixes can’t save a broken law.”

John Velleco, Executive Vice President of Gun Owners Foundation, issued the following statement:

“We are thrilled the judge struck down Virginia’s universal background check law because it was unconstitutionally blocking young adults from exercising their Second Amendment rights. This ruling upholds the true meaning of the Constitution by ensuring all law-abiding citizens can acquire firearms without arbitrary government barriers.”

The Virginia Citizens Defense League was also a plaintiff in this lawsuit, along with GOA and GOF.

GOA spokesmen are available for interviews. Gun Owners of America is a nonprofit grassroots lobbying organization dedicated to protecting the right to keep and bear arms without compromise. GOA represents over two million members and activists. For more information, visit GOA’s Press Center.

-GOA-

Halloween, has its origins in the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain, which marked the end of the harvest season and the beginning of winter.

It was believed that on this night, the veil between the living and the dead was thin, allowing spirits to return to earth.

It is said that Pope Gregory III established November 1st as ‘All Saints Day’ also called ‘All Hallows Day’ sometime in the 8th century. So, as the evening before would be ‘All Hallows Eve’ – ‘eve‘ being a contraction of evening – and even more contracted; Hallowe’en, we know how the name came to be.