President Trump is being scolded for not briefing Congress before moving to forcibly arrest Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela. Apparently, national security now requires a group chat. Let us count. There are 535 members of Congress. Each one drags along a small army of staffers, interns, aides, consultants, and political parasites. That is not oversight. That is a leak factory. A disturbing number of these people have zero loyalty to the citizens they claim to represent. They swear an oath to the Constitution, then spend their careers trying to carve loopholes through it with a dull spoon. If hypocrisy were fuel, Congress could power the grid. The brutal truth is this. Some members of Congress would sell classified information for a headline, a cable news appearance, or a friendly nod from a foreign adversary. They are not worried about protecting America. They are worried about protecting their ideology. You do not brief people who cannot wait to betray you.

Let me be crystal clear right out of the gate. Any law restricting the possession, manufacture, or sale of machine guns violates the Second Amendment. I do not give a flying shit what politicians or judges think about it. The language is not vague. It is not mysterious. It does not require interpretive gymnastics. It is plain English. Now for some honesty. Shooting full auto is mostly a great way to turn expensive ammunition into noise. Accuracy disappears, ammo evaporates, and the novelty wears off fast. Semi automatic firearms combined with solid marksmanship beat spray and pray nonsense every time. The real attraction to full automatic weapons has never been practicality. It is desire. People want what they are told they cannot have. Forbidden fruit with a selector switch. There are likely millions of machine guns sitting quietly in safes right now, hurting exactly no one and bothering nobody. Yes, legally transferable machine guns exist. The problem is that banning newly manufac...

Some films shout. Others whisper. Shepherds and Butchers doesn’t do either. It stares you down and waits for you to flinch. This is one of the finest courtroom and moral injury dramas most people have never heard of. That is not an accident. It is a consequence of a film that refuses to pander, refuses to sermonize, and refuses to dumb itself down for distracted audiences. The acting is uniformly exceptional. Not “good for a foreign film.” Exceptional, period. The performances feel lived-in, not performed. The accents matter because they are real. The silences matter because they are earned. An imported A-list American cast would have turned this into dialect theater. Instead, the filmmakers trusted actors who understood the world they were portraying. That decision carries the entire film. The story is devastating in its restraint. Rather than attacking capital punishment head-on, the film exposes the psychological wreckage left behind. Not just on the condemned, but on the men tas...

We now live in a country where police encounters are streamed like reality television and judged by people whose legal education consists of YouTube clips and reruns of cop shows. Every stop suddenly produces a self appointed constitutional scholar. They are confident. Loud. Wrong. And aggressively committed to proving it. These individuals believe they understand the law better than the officer standing three feet away with a badge, a radio, and the legal authority to end their day or their life. They escalate minor encounters into career ending events through obstruction, resistance, and theatrical defiance. Had they simply complied, stayed calm, and shut up, they likely would have driven away with a warning. Instead, they insist on testing dominance over someone whose job requires split second decisions under threat. Police officers typically know almost nothing about the person they are confronting beyond what dispatch relays. Witness statements are often exaggerated or outright ...

Some media outlets breathlessly announce that “60 percent of Americans want stronger gun laws.” Fascinating. Deeply moving. Also legally meaningless. Gun rights are not decided by opinion polls, TikTok vibes, or cable news panels. They are written into the Second Amendment. Changing that requires a two thirds vote of Congress and ratification by three quarters of the states. In other words, a process deliberately designed to survive public mood swings and bad headlines. This is what happens when you live in a republic instead of a national group chat. Gun control organizations are currently having a full emotional collapse because Texas keeps repealing laws that clash with the Constitution. Texas lawmakers are not impressed by press releases or emotional monologues. They read the Constitution and act accordingly. Shocking behavior. There are also two inconvenient realities that keep ruining the gun control business plan. First, there are already roughly 400 million firearms in private ...

  If you want to know where many unconstitutional weapons laws actually come from, do not bother digging through crime data or history books. Just watch a musical. Enter West Side Story. A beautifully crafted, emotionally manipulative stage and film production from Bernstein and Sondheim. Tragic. Romantic. Memorable. Also fictional. That part mattered to everyone except lawmakers. Legislators across the country watched a stylized gang melodrama, dried their tears and promptly went to work banning objects. Switchblade knives, in particular. Not because of statistics. Not because of real world trends. Because a movie made them feel something. Italian stilettos were suddenly public enemy number one. Yes, they opened fast. So what. If speed were the issue, a fixed blade hunting knife would have ended the battle much sooner. But logic does not test well in legislatures. And legislators, as it turns out, do not take intelligence exams. They pose for cameras, shake hands and smile w...