No free government was ever founded, or ever preserved in its liberty, without uniting the characters of the citizen and soldier in those destined for the defence of the state. . . . Such are a well regulated militia, composed of the freeholders, citizen and husbandman, who take up arms to preserve their property, as individuals, and their rights as freemen.
– “M.T. Cicero” 1788

There are things that are too stupid to be said by anyone but a professor of education. – Charlie Martin

It’s called ‘algebra’ because the Arab who figured it out called it “al Jabr”

Prof: Algebra, geometry perpetuate “whiteness”, “unearned privilege” in society.

A math education professor at the University of Illinois has argued in a recently published academic book that algebraic and geometry skills perpetuate “unearned privilege” among white people.

Rochelle Gutierrez, a professor at the University of Illinois, made the claim in a anthology for math teachers, arguing that teachers must be aware of the “politics that mathematics brings” in society.

In the book chapter, the professor explains that she sees her role as a math educator not just in the way of an educator, but that of an activist against whiteness, which she claims facilitates “microagresssions” and “privilege” between those who excel in math and those who do not.

“On many levels, mathematics itself operates as Whiteness. Who gets credit for doing and developing mathematics, who is capable in mathematics, and who is seen as part of the mathematical community is generally viewed as White,” Gutierrez argued.

Gutierrez also worries that algebra and geometry perpetuate privilege, fretting that “curricula emphasizing terms like Pythagorean theorem and pi perpetuate a perception that mathematics was largely developed by Greeks and other Europeans.”

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BLUF
Nowhere in Bruen does the Supreme Court suggest that the only purpose of the Second Amendment is to protect the individual right of self-defense. That’s a ludicrous argument, given both the text and history of the amendment and how the right to keep and bear arms has been exercised since 1791.

Gun Control Advocates: About Those Hunting Rifles We Said Were Okay…

Fifty years ago, the gun control lobby’s position was that handguns should (and could) be banned without violating the Second Amendment, but they had no interest in going after “sporting” arms. Even today it’s not uncommon for anti-gun politicians to argue that nobody “needs” a particular firearm to hunt deer or turkey, which insinuates that they believe those guns are okay to possess, at least in limited circumstances.

In court, however, the gun control lobby is making a very different argument.

The brief filed by Baltimore, Maryland; Columbus, Ohio; Harris County, Texas; Everytown for Gun Safety; Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence; and Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence in support of the BATFE does indeed claim that the Second Amendment only protects those arms that are in common use for self-defense; essentially reversing decades of public statements and policies promoted by the anti-gunners.

Bruen establishes that the “common use” question under the Second Amendment is whether an arm is lawfully “‘in common use’ today for self-defense.” Applying that standard requires consideration of a weapon’s actual use and objective design and features, which establish the uses for which it is suited. Weapons that are commonly used in and suitable for lawful self-defense fall within the scope of the Second Amendment right, but those that are “most useful in military service,” or “ill-suited and disproportionate to the need for self-defense,” do not. That limitation follows sensibly from the “‘common use for self-defense’ rationale for the private right to bear arms.”

In Heller, the Supreme Court held that “The Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess afirearm unconnected with service in a militia, and to use that arm for traditionally lawful purposes, such as self-defense within the home.” That language clearly indicates that self-defense is not the only lawful purposes for keeping and bearing arms, as the gun control advocates (and several federal courts) have asserted.

In their recent amicus brief, the gun control groups and their allies in local government claim that this is a foregone conclusion, which is why “Bruen itself, in analyzing step one, asked specifically whether handguns were ‘in common use’ today for self-defense.’”

That’s too cute by half. The reason why the Supreme Court noted that handguns were in common use today for self-defense is because the case dealt with the licensing of carrying handguns for self-defense. Two of the individual plaintiffs in the case were actually granted New York permits “that allowed them to carry handguns only for purposes of hunting and target shooting,” but they wanted unrestricted licenses that, in the language of the New York statute, would “allow them to carry concealed handguns ‘for personal protection and all lawful purposes.’”

Nowhere in Bruen does the Supreme Court suggest that the only purpose of the Second Amendment is to protect the individual right of self-defense. That’s a ludicrous argument, given both the text and history of the amendment and how the right to keep and bear arms has been exercised since 1791. But the next time an anti-gunner tells you that no one needs an AR-15 for deer hunting, ask them if they really believe that a bolt-action rifle is protected by the Second Amendment. They might tell you yes, but Everytown, Brady, and Giffords would beg to disagree.

Over 1 Million NFA Forms Processed So Far This Year, 6 Million Suppressors on File

It seems that the feds have had to wade through a year’s worth of National Firearms Act forms just in the first four months of 2026.

In the wake of zero-dollar tax stamps for suppressors and short-barreled firearms becoming a reality on New Year’s Day 2026, the ATF’s NFA Division has since processed a million forms as of April 23. The American Suppressor Association told Guns.com via email that over half of those are for Form 4 applications for suppressor transfers.

Of note, for 2024, the most recent year available, the NFA Division processed 1,373,305 forms. The Division only broke a million forms in a single year for the first time in 2011. Going further back, in 2001, only 311,892 forms of all types were processed.

The big takeaway, however, is the growth in suppressor numbers over that period.

“As of April 10, 2026, 5,998,065 suppressors were registered in the NFRTR, a number that has likely surpassed 6 million as of today,” advised ASA last week. “The number of suppressors registered between Jan. 2026 and April 10, 2026, is almost as many as ALL the suppressors registered between 1934 and 2010 (76 years).”

Below is a chart of selected historical suppressor registration numbers going back to January 2000.

Note that suppressors were rare before the past couple of decades, with just 83,627 cans registered nationwide in 2000 and 223,761 in 2010. (Chart: ASA)

Looking a whole lot like “common use” to me. Just saying.

UNBELIEVEABLE: CNN Using Assassination Attempt to Call for More Gun Control

SAF Investigative Journalism Project

ANALYSIS: Just minutes after the third attempt to kill President Donald J. Trump, in addition to senior members of his staff, CNN’s Idiot-in-Chief Brian Stelter was calling for more gun control.

“As CNN anchor Victor Blackwell put it when I joined him on air this morning, ‘The people in that room were confronted with what schoolchildren and moviegoers and congregants and people at grocery stores have been confronted with, and that is the threat of gun violence.’” Stelter wrote in an analysis piece titled: “An extraordinary moment for America’s media elite is all too ordinary in America.”

Ah, the poor media elite felt confronted. Really? The bad guy didn’t even enter their room. Many media elites never even heard any gunshots.

Stelter quoted another CNN hack, Jim Sciutto, whose comments you can probably already imagine.

“One thing we know is that there will be a lot of discussion afterwards about security measures. (A discussion about) rhetoric, perhaps, as well. There won’t be any substantive discussion about access to weapons, right? There just won’t,” Sciutto reportedly said.

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Acting AG Todd Blanche Rejects ‘More Restrictive’ Gun Laws as Response to WHCD Attack

Acting AG Todd Blanche Rejects ‘More Restrictive’ Gun Laws as Response to WHCD Attack
During a Sunday morning appearance on CBS News’ Face the Nation, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche made clear the push for “more restrictive” gun laws is the wrong response to the White House Correspondents’ Dinner (WHCD) attack.

Host Margaret Brennan noted that alleged WHCD attacker traveled from California to Washington, DC via a train and asked if there are plans to change “security protocols” to “match on trains what you are expected to go through when you fly, when you do have to declare a weapon”?

Blanche responded, “This isn’t about… changing the law and making the laws more restrictive around possession of firearms. It appears he purchased these firearms the past couple of years. We don’t know how those firearms ended up in his possession in D.C. We can make some assumptions based upon what I just said about he got to D.C., but I don’t think the narrative here is about changing laws or making our laws more restrictive.”

Brennan said, “If you try to fly you do have to have your firearms declared in some way, you don’t when you get on a train.”

Consider this: Amtrak’s weapons policy statement is actually more stringent than that of an airline. It not only requires checked firearms to be placed in a “locked hard-sided container…” but also mandates that the passenger alert Amtrak of the intent to check guns 24 hours before departure.

karol markowicz with SBR

How I became a gun person

It was Shani Louk’s mangled body that was keeping me from sleeping. She had been beautiful and bright, a real person, having a good time on a warm night. Then she was dead, her body mistreated, the girl gone. She could have been me. I used to dance all night at festivals under the stars too. She could be my daughter, in a few years, heading to a field to hear the music.

Or it was the Bibas family. I also have redheaded children. That could be me clutching my ginger boys, distraught, afraid, missing.

The days and months after October 7th caused sleeplessness like I had not experienced before. Wide eyed, middle of the night, a stress knot in my chest, a tightness I had never known.

When the panic of the first few days subsided, my sleeplessness took on a new pattern. It wasn’t fear or despair anymore. It was anger. “How could they have been so defenseless,” I’d ask myself in the dark, sick with the knowledge that our family would have been just as helpless as any family that day. They were me, I was them.

Inbar Lieberman was a name I’d come to repeat to myself. Inbar was 25 years old on October 7th and head of security at Nir-Am, a kibbutz near the Gaza border. On that day, Lieberman heard explosions nearby and ran to unlock the armory. Her quick thinking, but also specifically her weaponry, saved her kibbutz. Nir-Am suffered no losses that day.

I had long been a supporter of the Second Amendment but it had been entirely theoretical. I was born in the Soviet Union, came to the United States as a small child and embraced everything it meant to be American. You should absolutely have the right to own a gun. We are a free country of free men. The only way to maintain that freedom, as history has shown so often, is to be armed. I fully believed this. But growing up in Brooklyn meant I didn’t know anyone who actually exercised this right. If something happened, you were meant to call for help and hope for the best.

Unfortunately, I had the opportunity to test this call for help. In the last five years, my public image has increased and I have received several threats. I had gone to the police in Brooklyn for one explicit death threat, texted to my phone, but was told there wasn’t much they could do. I had walked into the police precinct ready to spend some time there, give a statement, help with clues. I was outside five minutes later. They didn’t even take down my information. No one was coming to save me.

When our family moved to Florida three years ago, I planned to get more serious about shooting and eventual gun ownership. But we got comfortable in Florida quickly. We felt secure and safe. My husband and I meant to go learn to shoot but never quite got around to it. Everything was so peaceful, it was hard to motivate towards owning guns. October 7th was the reminder: Peace ends quickly.

I knew Jews were changing on guns even before the 7th, I had written about it. But I myself had not changed yet. I had shot a gun only once before, four years prior, on my friend Will Cain’s property in Texas. He had shown me how to hold his shotgun correctly, that it wasn’t a bazooka to rest on top of my shoulder. It was fun but I had seen it as an outdoorsy activity like fishing or golfing. Thinking about shooting as a mechanism for saving our lives is a different sensation.

By October 13th, we were at the gun range. A girl walked out of the shooting area with a huge Star of David necklace and a Chanel bag. My people had gotten the message loud and clear.

In my Florida conservative media world, it was easy to get a better understanding of guns. Buck Sexton and his brother Mason took me to an outdoor course to practice with a variety of weapons. John Cardillo took us gun shopping for the first time and introduced us to the owner of an excellent gun store. Our “gun guy,” Manny, is mild mannered and an extremely polite gentleman. He could be your accountant but he sells the finest weaponry and shoots machine guns with a smile on the weekends. His calm and patient demeanor was helpful when we tried to figure out what we needed. He understands that we are afraid. He has seen a serious uptick in Jewish customers since the 7th.

Manny’s explanations are rational. He isn’t a loose cannon. He told us if you have the option to get away from a confrontation, that is always best. If you can not, you must be ready. He is blunt. He says things like “your handgun is there to get you to your real gun.” We internalized all of his advice. We have guns now, plural.

Once you become a gun owner, so many wrong ideas around guns come into clear focus. “Gun free zones” were always kind of funny, a bad guy will obviously ignore a sign as quickly as he will any number of laws, but they become absurd when you know the only time you’re going to know a good guy is carrying in a gun-free zone is when you’re thanking him. Or the idea that some guns should be illegal. None of the data on banning certain guns makes sense. Most gun deaths happen with handguns and over half of those are suicides. No one is taking my AR-15 because they want to “do something” about guns. And anyway, that gun was lost in a boating accident.

The gun owners we know take training very seriously and so do we. A gun is not a purchase you make and then stick in a drawer for a rainy day. Much like driving a car, learning how to shoot a gun takes practice and requires muscle memory. Unlike driving, a regular activity you do on good days and bad days, if the day ever comes that you will need to use your gun, it will likely be the worst, most stressful day of your life. The idea behind training is to get to a point where your muscle memory will take over, in chaos and fear, and you will know exactly what to do should it ever be required.

The more you train the less the whole thing feels like a joke. It stops being “tee-hee, I own a gun” and becomes a far more practical thing that you just do. How will you carry it? What feels comfortable? This gun or that gun.

“I thought you felt safe in Florida. Why have guns?” a visiting friend from Israel asked us. We do feel safe in Florida, especially as we watch the eruptions of Jew hatred in our old city. But the idea that New York City could become a hotbed of Jew-hatred was once far-fetched too. It’s exactly the “it could never happen here” feeling that has lulled so many Jews before me into complacency. We have not just been killed by our enemies in places like Israel. We’ve been killed by friends and neighbors, in Spain, in Poland and so on. Our guns say: not us, not this time.

There is no reason for a Jew not to be armed in 2024. So much of Jewish culture revolves around being the helper. We expect people to help those in trouble. We count on armed people to step in. When the call comes “someone should do something!” we don’t plan to wait around. That someone will be us.

“We aren’t ‘gun-people,’” some people say. There’s some pride in it. Who, me? Oh no, I don’t own guns, I’m not that kind of person. But unsaid is that the not-a-gun-person expects someone else with a gun to come and protect them at just the right moment. They count on police, security, military to come and help in a real crisis. The not-a-gun-person can never step up and stop a violent attack on someone, they can never protect others, can never be the hero themselves. They can save themselves, maybe, but they’ll never be the one that everyone turns to at a time of emergency. There’s something intrinsically anti-Jewish about this. We have an obligation to each other but the anti-gun Jew can’t meet it. That should be a source of shame not pride. You’re not just a not-a-gun-person. You’re a can’t-help person.

What I want is for my kids to say something else. Yes, we are gun people, actually. I want my kids to grow up shooting, to be good at it, to be comfortable with it, to know their role is not to wait for someone else. We’ll also deter. We send the most peace-bringing message of all: We own guns, we train with guns, we have an arsenal, you do not want it with us. We will help others, we will be the people that step in.

The 10 Commandments Are a Threat to Marxism

The 10 Commandments are back in the news. A federal appeals court this week ruled that it’s fine for them to be printed on posters and tacked to the wall in Texas public school classrooms. The plaintiffs in the case are poised to appeal this decision to the Supreme Court of the United States, so the fate of this law remains uncertain.

The majority opinion noted that “No child is made to recite the Commandments, believe them, or affirm their divine origin,” so the law’s requirements are essentially passive and pretty benign. But liberals continue to regurgitate the same arguments they have since the 1962 Engel v. Vitale decision outlawing voluntary, nondenominational prayer in public schools. But there’s more to this issue than concerns over the First Amendment’s prohibition on the government establishing a religion.

Increasingly, the political agenda and behaviors of the progressive left are antithetical to the Commandments. It was on display this week when Marxist commentator Hasan Piker spoke at length about why he supports theft and why we should take other people’s property. Piker also tried to justify the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, accusing the dead executive of “engaging in a tremendous amount of social murder.”

It’s tempting to ignore Piker as just another left-wing nutcase, but people pay attention to him and what he says. His various platforms capture an estimated audience approaching three million people, many of whom it may be presumed are Democrat Party voters. Piker is also being joined by progressive Democrats, so his influence in party politics is not easily dismissed.

Adultery and related activities are embedded among segments of similarly progressive ideology and behavior. Americans were horrified to learn of rape tents established at a variety of Occupy Wall Street disruptions, with assaults reported in New York City, Dallas, Cleveland and elsewhere.

In Minnesota, it’s perfectly legal for children to disregard their parents as long as the kids want to pursue some sort of medical treatment geared to surgically or chemically mimic certain characteristics of the opposite sex. In Vermont, 199 public schools actively seek to hide the transgender ideology of students from their parents. This is called a “best practice” by the left.

Lying has been part of politics from time immemorial, and politicians from all parties engage in it to varying degrees. But some lies are bigger than others. Take Democrat U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (NY-14) and her 2019 claim that the climate will “destroy the planet” in 12 years. She isn’t alone in telling such apocalyptic lies about how the weather will result in the destruction of Earth, but her prediction will ensure leftists maintain their perfect record of being wrong every single time when foretelling climate catastrophe, dating back to my boyhood.

Politics is also rife with envy, but among the major parties in America, one is largely occupied with coveting the money and property of others, while the other is largely occupied with letting people keep more of what they have. Financially successful people have a lot of money and possessions, so Democrats want more of it. But taxing annual income is no longer enough. Covetous progressives are now looking for ways to seize accumulated wealth in ways that are too numerous to include in a single column.

While all of the 10 Commandments are very good ideas and include wisdom reflected in major religions worldwide, 60 percent of them are secular in nature. They’re also the foundation for much of the common law across the civilized world. Placing this into a political context raises some fascinating questions that have relevance in today’s culture.

What might become of the leftist agenda if school children learned that stealing, killing, lying, coveting, sex outside of marriage and disobeying mom and dad are wrong? All of these behaviors are promoted or institutionalized by the left, so even passively informing kids that they’re wrong does not accrue to the benefit of those embracing this ideology.

It may be that some progressives are deeply and honestly concerned about government involvement with anything having to do with religion. But the 10 Commandments, in whole or in part, clearly undercut the Left. Were I a committed leftist politician, I would be very concerned about losing influence and power by exposing the next generation of voters to this handful of simple rules that expose the destructive nature of my agenda, and I’ll wager I wouldn’t be alone.

There are very few politicians who would publicly admit that the mere presence of the 10 Commandments in classrooms poses a risk to advancing the Marxist ideology spreading across America. But they all know it, and it’s a hill they’re willing to die on.

“…The right of the people peacefully to assemble for lawful purposes existed long before the adoption of the Constitution of the United States. In fact, it is and always has been one of the attributes of a free government.

It `derives its source,’ to use the language of Chief Justice Marshall, in Gibbons v Ogden, 9 Wheat., 211, `from those laws whose authority is acknowledged by civilized man throughout the world.‘

It is found wherever civilization exists. It was not, therefore, a right granted to the people by the Constitution… The second and tenth counts are equally defective. The right there specified is that of `bearing arms for a lawful purpose.’ This is not a right granted by the constitution. Neither is it in any manner dependent upon that instrument for its existence.” 
– U.S. v. Cruikshank (1875)