Some news stories you read twice because they’re serious. This one I read twice because I was grinning. At about 6:10 a.m. on Wednesday, October 14 (hours before the 10 a.m. opening), a black bear let itself into the Mammoth Lakes branch of the Mono County Free Libraries and helped itself to the staff snack stash: “peanut butter, a selection of peach cups, a pawful of cookies and — of course — one jar of honey,” per the library’s own release. The date is the punchline: Winnie-the-Pooh was first published on October 14, 1926. After browsing the new releases and the reference desk, our patron showed itself out. No shelves toppled, no books harmed, and “the honey jar has not been returned at time of publication.” (UPI has the story too.)

Director of Libraries Josef Bopp handled it with the dry wit of a man who has clearly seen things: “we do remind patrons- and perhaps more importantly our bears- that snacks are not part of the circulating collection.” I respect a bear with a plan. It hit the target before opening, went straight for the honey, did no collateral damage, and exfiltrated clean. Low-profile. Reliable. Quiet competence. Meanwhile, I can’t even edit my own DNS records without taking the site down. The real lesson is the boring one the library included: if you live in bear country, lock up the snacks. A good security posture beats a clever bear every time. Happy 100th, Pooh. Pour a dram for the old bear.

#Observations #JustForFun

Everyone says a blue wave is building for 2026. The national generic ballot sits around D+7 to D+9. Pennsylvania-specific numbers have looked even better for Democrats. Special elections and the broader mood have reinforced the narrative that Republican enthusiasm is soft and Democratic voters are motivated.

The early mail ballot returns in Pennsylvania tell a quieter story.

As of October 14, state data showed roughly 245,600 Democratic ballots and 75,400 Republican ballots returned through October 13, 21 days before Election Day. At the same point in 2022, the numbers were about 272,000 Democratic and 68,700 Republican. Democrats are down about 10 percent from their 2022 pace. Republicans are up about 10 percent. The Democratic share of the two-party early vote is a few points lower than it was in 2022, and the overall D–R gap among returned ballots is narrower.

That is not what a wave looks like in the early data.

In 2022, Pennsylvania polls showed Republicans ahead on the generic ballot by about five points. Even so, early mail was still heavily Democratic—roughly four-to-one. That was the normal pattern given longstanding partisan differences in voting method. In 2026 the polling environment is more favorable to Democrats, yet the early mail numbers have moved in the opposite direction of what a strong Democratic surge would produce. Democrats are running behind their 2022 early pace; Republicans are running ahead of theirs.

Mail ballots in Pennsylvania have always skewed Democratic. A genuine blue-wave environment would more likely show Democrats well ahead of their 2022 early returns and Republicans lagging. Instead, volume remains modest, Democrats are behind their 2022 pace, and Republicans have improved their early numbers relative to the last midterm.

None of this decides the election. Early mail is still only a fraction of the total vote that will eventually be cast, and Republicans in Pennsylvania continue to prefer Election Day. The next few weeks of returns, and especially what happens on Election Day itself, will matter more than any snapshot in mid-October. But if a wave were already forming with real intensity, the early ballot returns in a state as closely watched as Pennsylvania would probably look different than they do.

So far, they don’t.

I read the data so you don’t have to. Pull up a chair. Subscribe free.

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Outside of the senior military leadership and the Commandant at the United States Disciplinary Barracks at Leavenworth, however, nobody actually knows the exact operational mechanics. Army Regulation 190-55, which governs executions, remains a restricted, classified regulation for a reason. But beneath the armchair punditry lies a much deeper, more fundamental question about what military service actually means, what an oath costs, and why certain reckonings cannot simply be swept under a bureaucratic rug.

The Legal and Institutional Realities

First, the baseline facts under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which is the law that governs the US Military. The convening authority at Fort Hood, a place whose historic name should never have been discarded for political convenience, properly exercised jurisdiction over Former Major Hasan. A man who chose to wage Islamic Jihad from inside the Army against his fellow soldiers. This is why the execution is taking place at Fort Hood. The convening authority of the general court-martial is the Commander of Fort Hood, not the Disciplinary Barracks Commandant.

When Hasan was convicted by a general court-martial in 2013, the sentence handed down included the forfeiture of all pay and allowances, death by execution, incarceration at the USDB at Leavenworth pending final sentence, and dismissal from the service. Contrary to casual assumptions (my own included), that dismissal did not coincide with the act of execution nor with the act of the crimes. Rather, his dismissal was a matter of fact on the day of his conviction.

It’s important to recall that only the Army, Congress, or specific high-level Federal authorities can formally relieve a soldier of their obligations. The individual can only relieve themself of the oath through honorably discharging their duties and their commission or enlistment. At the exact moment he opened fire on unarmed troops, Hasan was bound by his commission and his oath. The Army finally stripped him of his office, severing the bond of the oath he had already shattered into dust. Today, his correct designation is Inmate Hasan, or Former Major Hasan. He no longer is bound by oath, but Inmate Hasan also no longer enjoys any of the privileges and benefits of a commissioned officer of the United States.

The Public Square and History

Critics of a public and transparent execution will invoke modern sensibilities, claiming that public justice belongs in a medieval past. To some extent, they are right. An execution that becomes a circus, jeering, throwing fruit and rocks at the condemned, and street vendors and prostitutes making money at the edge of the crowd, certainly belongs in 1600, not 2026. And by 1937, most US states had phased out public gallow-scaffold spectacles, transitioning hangings and executions behind prison walls while retaining official witnesses to ensure accountability.

But no such statutory ban exists at the Federal civilian or military level. The manner, date, and time of a military execution are authorized by the executive branch. Naturally, the usual crowd is already preparing 8th Amendment challenges, screaming about “cruel and unusual punishment” at the very suggestion of a firing squad or a digital town square.

They claim to object to the method or the optics, but we live in a culture that mainline-streams stylized, graphic violence 24/7. People gorge on fictional carnage … from John Wick headshots to endless cinematic chaos … without blinking an eye. They do not object to violence; they object to reality. They love the sanitized, Hollywood version of conflict because it has zero moral weight. But the moment real accountability touches the physical world, they demand it be hidden away in a classified annex at Leavenworth so they can pretend the dark edges of the universe don’t exist.

The Real Objection

Let’s call the opposition’s bluff. Let’s do what the President has done and authorize an execution by firing squad on date certain to be live streamed so that the world can bear witness. Because the real objection isn’t about whether a firing squad is too archaic or whether a livestream turns justice into a pay-per-view circus.

The real objection is that a significant segment of the population does not believe Former Major Hasan should be executed at all. And among those who concede he deserves death, a vocal faction insists that any public witness of that death is inherently “cruel and unusual.” They want the monster put down, but they want it done quietly, off-camera, and out of mind, ensuring that civilization’s plumbing remains safely out of sight.

They forget what old soldiers have always known: Tommy bears the weight so the comfortable can sleep. And when the system must execute its ultimate duty, hiding it away breeds institutional rot.

The Terrible Weight of the Oath

An oath is a terrible thing. Not terrible in malice, but terrible in its awe-inspiring, crushing gravity. The Soldier or Officer is bound by it thoroughly and cannot forswear the oath. Else it would be meaningless. When you break the oath, there are consequences.

When an officer raises his right hand, the oath explicitly binds him: “I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion.” There are no loopholes, no tactical retreats into plausible deniability, and no escape clauses. And the oath is taken before God …. it ends with So help me god. The Creator is invoked as witness, guide, and final judge of your oath. This is a terrible, powerful thing.

Former Major Hasan didn’t just break the laws of the land; he enacted an oath-breaking of catastrophic proportions. He turned his weapons on his own brothers and sisters in arms, murdering fellow soldiers, including a pregnant female soldier who begged for her unborn child’s life, while harboring a secret, treasonous reservation of heart. Killing your fellow soldiers, the very people you are explicitly bound by oath to protect and lead, is a crime beyond ordinary civilian treason. It is a desecration of the sacred covenant.

When a man invokes God as witness to an oath of absolute loyalty and then commits mass murder from within the ranks, he brings down an eternal doom upon himself. The military justice system may take its agonizing time, but the moral ledger remains absolute.

For the survivors, for the wounded, including men I served alongside, and for an institution built on trust, the execution of Former Major Hasan must not be whispered away in a dark corner. It belongs in the light. It is the final, binding discharge of an oath he broke, executed in the modern public square where the tribe can bear witness and close the book.

Further Reading

• Danny Deever, Rudyard Kipling - a poem of the execution of a soldier that murder his comrade in arms

• Chapter 9 of The Silmarillion, titled "Of the Flight of the Noldor", J.R.R. Tolkien - detailing the Oath of Fëanor and it’s terrible power

There is a fundamental inversion at the heart of today’s political discourse. Flip on the news, listen to a congressional debate, or read modern legal commentary, and you will quickly encounter a quiet, dangerous assumption: that our rights are gifts handed down by the government. In this upside-down worldview, the state is the benevolent provider of free speech, the custodian of our safety, and the grantor of our liberties, which it can therefore regulate, license, or revoke as it sees fit.

To anyone sitting down with a clear mind, a glass of bourbon, and a good cigar, this perspective isn’t just historically illiterate, it is a direct threat to the American experiment.

To understand the Constitution, we have to return to first principles. Look no further than the document’s Preamble, which tells us precisely who comes first. It is binding because it is the exact place where We, The People create the government to protect our pre-existing rights and liberties. The individual person comes first. Inalienable rights belong to human beings by virtue of their existence, granted by their Creator, long before any government draws a border, passes a law, or writes a constitution. Government is not the source of these rights; rather, government is an artificial structure created by individuals strictly to secure and protect them. The Constitution and its Bill of Rights are not a leash on the citizen—they are a strict, legally binding leash on the state.

The Architecture of Freedom: Life, Liberty, and Property

To see how this architecture works, we can map the Bill of Rights directly to the foundational triad of individual rights: Life, Liberty, and Property.

• Liberty means we possess the inherent freedom of conscience, religion, association, assembly, and movement. The First, Fifth, Sixth, and Eighth Amendments do not grant these freedoms; they build an impenetrable wall around them, explicitly forbidding the government from infringing upon them.

• Life means we have the fundamental right to defend our own lives, to live them as we see fit in the pursuit of happiness, and to own and use the tools necessary to do so. The Second and Fifth Amendments protect that reality.

• Property means that our homes, our land, and our intellectual and artistic creations belong to us, not the collective. The Third, Fourth, and Seventh Amendments protect our domains from trespass, unwarranted search, and arbitrary seizure.

In every single instance, the Bill of Rights acts as a shield. It tells the government: These domains are off-limits.

Reclaiming The Press, The People, and The Militia

To properly read our founding charter, we have to remember what the Constitution actually is. It is a contract for government. It establishes who the parties to that contract are: the people, the states, and the federal government. Furthermore, it is a well-established matter of law that contracts must be interpreted based on the common understanding at the time and place they were written.

Unfortunately, over two centuries of political spin have distorted these clean lines, twisting clear English into legalese designed to expand state power. To reclaim our foundational documents, we have to strip away modern myths and look at what these terms meant to the generation that wrote them in 1790.

Let’s start with “the press.” Today, we are conditioned to think of the press as an institutional guild. Everyone talks about the press as a privileged class of corporate journalists employed by major media outlets. But in the founding era, “the press” meant anyone who put ideas to paper or reported on events. Thomas Paine writing Common Sense in his home and paying for its printing out of his own pocket was “the press.” And so were the countless common citizens who wrote anonymous pamphlets, printed broadsheets, and distributed them to their neighbors.

If you want to think of it this way, the pamphleteers of the American Revolution were the forerunner of today’s bloggers and X journalists. The press is a technology and an action, not a corporate badge. Notably, the press comes before the First Amendmen. It was viewed as a natural extension of free thought, not a government-regulated industry.

The same semantic distortion plagues the Second Amendment. In 1790, the term “militia” meant the able-bodied adult citizens of the nation. The Founders fully intended the People to have weapons …. to keep arms …. and to take them up in defense of themselves, their homes, and their nation …. to bear arms.

When the Second Amendment references a well-regulated militia, it is not creating a prerequisite or a select government-authorized fighting force that alone can own weapons. The Founders viewed a standing army with deep suspicion, knowing that tyranny always wears a uniform. Instead, the prefatory phrase (”A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State...”) explains why the right exists: because a free country relies on a capable, armed citizenry for its ultimate defense.

The Founders did not believe the militia were the only ones who could keep and bear arms; they applied that right to The People as a whole. To grasp how absurd the modern “collective right” argument is, consider a parallel: we would never argue that an adult citizen requires government permission, a background check, or a license in order to own a Bible or a typewriter. Just as a printing press is the tool of free speech and a Bible is the tool of conscience, arms are the tools of self-defense and life. Most certainly, Josef Stalin would believe that a citizen must have the permission of the government to own a typewriter, a Bible, or a pistol. And that is precisely why the citizens of a free republic must never allow the government to regulate those three things above all. If you don’t need a permit to own the tools of your liberty, you certainly don’t need one to own the tools of your survival.

Conclusion

The debate over the Constitution isn’t an academic exercise for ivory-tower lawyers; it is a battle for the soul of a free republic. And the citizens of that free republic must engage in the fight. When we forget that our rights are pre-existing and inalienable, we begin to treat freedom as a privilege subject to government approval.

It’s time to shake off the modern distortions. The Bill of Rights doesn’t give us permission to be free; it warns the government to stay out of our way. And keeping that truth alive requires a vigilant citizenry, a sharp eye on Washington, and perhaps a quiet evening to reflect on what it truly means to be a free people.

Further Reading

• John Locke, Second Treatise of Government (1689) — The foundational text for natural rights, life, liberty, property, and the social contract. (Read via Online Library of Liberty)

• Baron de Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws (1748) — The definitive work on the separation of powers as the structural safeguard against tyranny. (Read via Project Gutenberg)

• Voltaire, Treatise on Tolerance (1763) — A passionate defense of freedom of conscience, speech, and intellectual independence against state and religious censorship.

• Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (1776) — Explores economic liberty, spontaneous order, and the rejection of arbitrary government control over human enterprise. (Read via Library of Economics and Liberty)

• Thomas Paine, Common Sense (1776) — The ultimate example of “the press” in action—a common citizen using print to rally a continent toward independence. (Read via Avalon Project)

• The Constitution of the United States and The Bill of Rights (1787/1791) — Read the original contract and its amendments directly, keeping original public meaning in mind. (Read via National Archives)

#Foundations #Constitution #America250

Here’s the prompt I gave Grok

using this concept as a theme, create a traditional expository essay

I have a proposition ….. whatever is required in order to exercise one constitutionally protected right be applied equally to all others. If you have to take and pass a training class before you can keep and bear arms, then you have to take and pass a training class before you can vote, go to church, assemble to protest the president, or write an article to be published. If you have to pay for the training class yourself before you get a permit to purchase, the same will apply to all other training for your rights. And so forth.

For those not sure, since schools don’t teach it much anymore, this is an expository essay definition from the Purdue OWL:

The expository essay is a genre of essay that requires the student to investigate an idea, evaluate evidence, expound on the idea, and set forth an argument concerning that idea in a clear and concise manner. This can be accomplished through comparison and contrast, definition, example, the analysis of cause and effect, etc.

Now, without further ado, here is the essay that Grok wrote

A Principle of Equal Burden: Applying Conditions on One Constitutional Right to All

American constitutional debate often treats rights as separate compartments. Speech is regulated one way, voting another, and the keeping and bearing of arms a third. The proposition under examination rejects that habit. It holds that whatever condition is required before a person may exercise one constitutionally protected right should be required, on the same terms, before that person may exercise any other. If a training class, a personal fee, a permit, or a waiting period is a legitimate prerequisite to acquiring a firearm, the same prerequisite should attach to voting, worship, peaceable assembly, and publication. The claim is not that every right is identical in history or risk. It is that the government may not invent burdens for one enumerated liberty while treating parallel burdens on the others as intolerable. Read this way, the proposition is a consistency test: it asks whether a proposed limit is a neutral rule about rights, or a selective rule about a disfavored right.

The force of the argument lies in its symmetry. Constitutional rights are restraints on government, not favors the state may price differently according to political taste. Under the proposition, a mandatory safety course before a rifle purchase would imply a mandatory civic course before a ballot is cast. A fee paid by the citizen for a purchase permit would imply a fee for a parade permit, a church registration, or a license to publish. A background investigation, a character reference, or a government finding of “need” would travel with the burden, not with the subject matter. The examples are chosen because they already appear in firearms law in various jurisdictions: classroom instruction, out-of-pocket cost, prior permission, and delay. The proposition simply refuses to let those devices remain local to the Second Amendment. It treats the Bill of Rights, together with the voting amendments, as a single class of liberties. A burden justified only by saying “this right is different” fails the test unless the same difference is willingly accepted when the right in question is speech, worship, or the franchise.

Current doctrine does not work that way, and an exposition of the proposition has to say so. Courts have long allowed content-neutral time, place, and manner rules for assembly, licensing schemes for parades, and campaign-finance disclosures, while treating prior restraints on publication as especially suspect. Poll taxes and literacy tests for voting were struck down; photographic identification requirements have been upheld in some forms and limited in others. Firearms regulation, after District of Columbia v. Heller and New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, is judged in large part by text and historical tradition rather than by open-ended interest balancing. Those frameworks explain why a training requirement for a handgun and a training requirement for a sermon are not treated as legal twins. They do not, by themselves, answer the proposition’s moral question. A doctrine can be internally coherent and still apply heavier practical obstacles to one liberty than to another. The proposition asks the political system to notice that gap and either close it or justify it with a reason it is prepared to repeat in every clause of the First Amendment and every voting amendment.

The difficulties are real, and they cut in more than one direction. Rights differ in the harm they can cause at the moment of exercise: a firearm can kill immediately; a pamphlet usually cannot. Governments have therefore claimed a stronger preventive interest in arms than in worship. The proposition does not deny the difference in physics. It denies that the difference authorizes a unique set of procedural tolls—classes, fees, permits—unless society will impose the same tolls elsewhere. That insistence has an uncomfortable twin. If the public rejects training and fees for voting and speech, consistency pressures firearms law toward fewer prerequisites. If the public accepts training and fees for firearms, consistency pressures voting, assembly, and publication toward more of them. Neither result is costless. Universal training could become a quiet literacy test under another name. Universal deregulation could ignore differences in irreversible harm. The proposition does not choose between those outcomes. It only insists that the choice be general.

The proposition, then, is less a complete theory of rights than a discipline on regulation. It exposes selective burdens by forcing every proposed condition to travel. A training class, a personal fee, or a permit is either a legitimate gate on the exercise of constitutional liberty or it is not; it should not be legitimate only when the liberty is the keeping and bearing of arms. American law currently sorts rights by history, risk, and doctrine, and those distinctions will remain part of any serious account. The value of the equal-burden claim is that it makes the sorting visible. It requires advocates of a limit to say whether they would accept the same limit on the church door, the ballot box, and the printing press—and to live with the answer.

#Constitution, #1A, #2A, #Essays, #Grok

When it comes to the discussion surrounding crime, violence, and self-defense in America, however, we just don’t give the subject the same level of thinking and inspection. Instead, media outlets and policymakers hand us a narrative: it’s all about bad guns (especially the semi-automatic rifles that look scary), whine about an imagined “wild west,” and call for gun and magazine bans. Because criminals will obey that law.

In this article, I’m going to slow down, settle into the leather chair, and unpack a few things beyond “the narrative”. To truly understand security and violence in the United States, you have to evaluate it based on culture, history, size, and scope rather than narratives. We’re going to look at the reality of the scale of the USA, urban vs. suburban and rural settings, and the reality of what a country with 500 million guns actually means for crime, violence and self-defense.

The Scale Illusion: Why 340 Million People Defy Simple Comparisons

To understand America, you first have to grasp its sheer magnitude. The United States is not a homogeneous nation-state the size of a European province; it is a continental superpower of roughly 340 million souls, boasting vast cultural, historical, and regional diversity.

Let’s contrast that with Germany, which is the most populous nation in the EU and almost the highest population density. Germany is #2 on that front and the UK takes #1 on population density. Germany covers roughly 138,000 square miles, which is about 15% larger than the state of Colorado, or almost exactly the same size as Montana. Germany, however, as about 84 million people. When you look at specific regional footprints, the contrast gets interesting. For example, the Munich city area and the Denver city area share a very similar physical size: 120 square miles for Munich and 150 square miles for Denver. However, Munich’s population is 1.5 million and Denver’s is about 740 thousand. The ethnic and cultural diversity of Denver is significantly greater than Munich, as well. What this means is that comparing the United States, a massive country about the size of the entire European continent, spanning multiple time zones, with many waves of external and internal migration in a very short period of time, to a single European nation is a fundamental statistical fallacy.

When foreign observers or domestic critics look at aggregate national crime statistics in the U.S., they completely ignore this mosaic nature. You cannot paint a 340-million-person republic with a single broad brush.

Geography Dictates Reality: The Urban Concentration of Homicide

When you strip away the national averages and look at where violence actually happens, a stark geographic reality emerges: the vast majority of violent crime, especially homicide, is hyper-concentrated in large urban settings and select surrounding suburbs. This is why we see a thug type young man trying to rob another man at gunpoint at a gas station in this article I just wrote, but it’s almost never going to happen in my small town and thousands like it across America.

America’s crime problem is not evenly distributed. Broad swaths of rural America, suburban neighborhoods, and smaller towns experience homicide rates comparable to, or even lower than, many peaceful Western European nations. For example, my small town of Maple Valley, WA has a murder rate in 2024 of less than 3 per 100,000 people, which is basically 1 murder per year. Germany’s murder rate in 2024 was 1 per 100,000 people. Since some years in Maple Valley have no murders, essentially our murder rate and violent crime rate is like Germany’s.

However, Seattle, just 40 miles away from me, has a murder rate of 6.8 per 100,000 people. Dramatically different. And the violent crime is heavily localized within specific urban pockets in the city. In the large urban setting, the violent crime and murder rates are driven less by mere economic scarcity and more by entrenched, generational behaviors and cultural norms that reject accountability and actively resist positive change. This is similar, actually, to the observation we can make about military recruiting patterns, which reveal a disproportionate share of service members emerge from specific cultural traditions and regions.

Treating a localized urban crisis as a nationwide cultural failure of the entire population is dishonest and counterproductive. Policies designed to restrict the rights of law-abiding citizens in quiet rural or suburban communities do nothing to address the specific, localized behavioral and socio-economic drivers of crime in high-density urban corridors. And, in fact, how will those policies reduce violent crime when the focus on a thing (a firearm) and not on the person and the behavior. Does anyone think that making it harder, or impossible, to buy a $1000 semi-automatic rifle after passing a background check will do anything about a criminal with a stolen pistol?

The Unsung Hero: The Reality of Defensive Gun Use

Any honest conversation about American security must also acknowledge what happens when crime actually knocks on the door. While critics hyper-focus on criminal misuse, they routinely ignore the immense, quantifiable impact of Defensive Gun Use (DGU).

Study after study, including research historically supported by agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, suggests that defensive gun uses happen hundreds of thousands and as much as several million times a year in the United States. The vast majority of these defensive encounters don’t even involve firing a shot; simply presenting a firearm is enough to deter a predator, halt an assault, or prevent a home invasion. I have a friend who stopped two thugs trying to rob him in a store parking lot. He happens to be about 70 years old, heavy set, white beard, looks like Santa Claus. He also carries a concealed firearm. I’m sure he looked like an easy target to the two 20’ish year old thugs that were trying to rob him. Right until he shoved his shopping cart into them, drew his pistol from concealment and told them to leave. Which they promptly did.

This is a crime that didn’t happen. In fact, there are tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of crimes that just don’t happen because someone like my friend produces a firearm and stops the crime. The violent crime rate in this country is actually lower by quite a bit because of this. These non-existent crimes represent injuries prevented, families protected, and lives saved quietly every single day. And all of this is completely absent from the evening news cycle. To discuss American firearm ownership purely through the lens of tragedy while entirely erasing millions of peaceful defensive preventions is a gross distortion of reality.

Deeper Than the Wrapper

Lighting a great cigar teaches you that surface-level judgments will always lead you astray. The American security landscape is no different.

If we want to build safer communities, we must abandon lazy, politically motivated talking points that blame the Second Amendment for complex sociological realities. We must look at the true geography of crime, respect the massive scale and diversity of a 340-million-person republic, and recognize that for millions of Americans, the right to keep and bear arms is an active shield against harm.

Pull up a chair, light up, and let’s start having the real conversation.

Further Reading

Dr. John Lott’s Crime Prevention Research Center

Observations from the Late Republic
#Observations #LateRepublic

Origin

Retired Marine Colonel Jeff Cooper was one of the best teachers of pistol and rifle craft seen in the modern era. He built the Modern Technique of the Pistol through experience at the Leatherslap competitions in Big Bear, CA. He wrote the four rules of gun safety that almost every instructor now recites. He gave us the color code for combat mindset, the Scout Rifle, the carry conditions, and a pile of other ideas so common that a lot of people teach them without ever saying his name.

In the early 1970’s, Cooper created the Mozambique Drill based upon a real life engagement in Mozambique involving Rhodesian mercenary Mike Rousseau and an unidentified insurgent at the airport in Lourenço Marques, now Maputo. Rousseau came around a corner and was confronted at short (approximately 10 paces) range by a large FRELIMO insurgent armed with an AK-47. Rousseau fired two rounds from his Browning Hi-Power to center of mass on the insurgent, which did not stop him. So, Rousseau went for a head shot to end the situation, but actually missed the T zone (which is the triangle running from the center of the lips to edges of the eyebrows) and hit the bottom of the throat. However, the shot severed the spinal cord and ended the fight.

Cooper developed this into the Mozambique Drill and began teaching it at Gunsite in the 1970’s. Other shops later called it the Failure to Stop Drill. LAPD SWAT officers Larry Mudgett and John Helms took it home from Gunsite in 1980 and asked to teach it under that blander name. The Marine Corps still runs a Failure to Stop string in rifle tables.

I much prefer Mozambique Drill to the colorless and bland “Failure to Stop”. Call it what it is, a Rhodesian fighting communist guerrillas in Mozambique originated the method, Cooper codified it: The Mozambique Drill.

How-To: As Taught by Colonel Cooper

Col Cooper wrote about this in Cooper’s Commentaries Volume 4, Number 8:

“Upon analysis, it seemed to me that the pistolero should be accustomed to the idea of placing two shots amidships as fast as he can and then being prepared to change his point of aim if this achieves no results. Two shots amidships can be placed very quickly and very reliably and they will nearly always stop the fight providing a major-caliber pistol is used and the subject is not wearing body armor.

“However, simply chanting ‘two in the body, one in the head’ oversimplifies matters, since it takes considerably longer to be absolutely sure of a head shot than it does to be quite sure of two shots in the thorax. The problem for the shooter is to change his pace, going just as fast as he can with his first pair, then, pausing to observe results or lack thereof, he must slow down and shoot precisely. This is not easy to do. The beginner tends to fire all three shots at the same speed, which is either too slow for the body shots or too fast for the head shot. This change of pace calls for concentration and coordination which can only be developed through practice.”

It’s not as simple as “two to the chest, face gets the rest”, although I’m also not going to argue with the Dalai Lama ;-)

Practical Implementation in Training

The Mozambique Drill, as typically taught today, is a fast, controlled pair to the A Zone of the target, a fast assessment of whether that stopped the target, followed by an aimed shot to the T Zone. Combine that with some well understood defensive gun use statistics and we get the following based upon starting the Drill drawing from concealment:

Using a standard training or competition target, such as a TQ15, IDPA, or IPSC target. Pick one target and stick with it every time.

• Set the target on a target stand between 5 and 7 yards distant.

• Set a shot timer with a random delay and no par time.

• When the shot timer beeps, the shooter draws from concealment and fires a rapid, controlled pair of shots at the A Zone then transitions to the head and fires a single, precise shot to the T Zone of the target.

• The first shot should happen at less than 2 seconds, second shot with a rapid split (.25 to .3 seconds), both should be in the A Zone

• The third shot to the T Zone, ideally, happens in less than 3 seconds, but this will depend upon the length of time to complete the first two shots. Don’t rush the 3rd shot chasing times, get it right.

• Evaluate the shot impacts and review the times of each shot.

If your range does not allow you to draw from the holster, then train from the compressed horizontal position or the low ready position.

This is what it looks like on the target. This target was at 7 yards. My pistol was in a concealed holster and I was using a shot timer set on delay. Yes, the first two rounds are not a perfect double tap. But they happened at 1.8 and 2.08 seconds and the head shot happened at 3.06 seconds per my notebook from that day. This is not a full-size target, it’s about 75% of full-size. And it was in a low light indoor range without a weapon light.

Bottom Line is that the Mozambique Drill was developed based on real life experience. Cooper and Gunsite taught it. LAPD SWAT carried it into American police work as the Failure Drill. Marines still use the Failure to Stop idea on the rifle range. Most serious pistol schools put it next to the Bill Drill, which is a different problem and a later article.

If you carry a pistol for self-defense and you are not running Mozambique on a timer, you are practicing a story about self-defense. Two in the body, look, one in the head. Slow the third shot down until it is where Cooper said it had to be.

Modern Minuteman

Practical preparedness for everyday citizens.

Low-profile. Reliable. Quiet competence.

#Minuteman #EDC #Training #Preparedness #Mindset

All Modern Minuteman posts

Further Reading

• Sheriff Jim Wilson, “The Mozambique Drill: A History and How To,” Shooting Illustrated

• Pew Pew Tactical, “Mozambique Drill: [How-To] Better Your Shooting Skills”

• SWAT, “Doing the Double-Tap in Mozambique”

• Jeff Cooper, Cooper’s Commentaries, Vol. 4, No. 8 (you’ll have to search for this, I only found it physically)

The surveillance video from the Shell station in Orland Park on September 15 is making the rounds for a reason. A man in a hood and a mask walks up on a customer pumping gas, produces a firearm, and tries to run an armed robbery. The customer is already watching. His hand goes to the gun. John Correia at Active Self Protection timed the first shot at about 0.6 seconds. Call it under a second. That is fast enough to be true and fast enough to fool people into thinking they would do the same thing because they own a pistol.

This is definitely not true. Unless you have done the three things that video does not show: training and practice before the bad situation, set up your concealed carry rig to present the gun the same way every time, and the boring work that makes a fast first shot a trained response instead of a prayer.

This is not another discussion about gear. You can find that discussion at What Gun Should I Buy. If the pistol, the holster, the belt, and the medical kit are not a settled system, stop here and go fix that. A sloppy holster adds time you do not have. A holster that wiggles on the belt puts the grip in a different place every draw. I’m not arguing about brand, I really don’t care about the brand holster or firearm you prefer as long as they are good quality and work.

This is also not a rewrite of the mindset piece, but you can find that at So You’ve Got the Gear … Now What?. Cooper’s color code still sits at the top of the stack. White is how you get robbed at a pump. Yellow is how you notice a masked man crossing the lot with purpose. Orange is the hand on the gun before the muzzle is in your face. Red is the transition, draw, and the shot. The Orland Park customer was not in White. He won that fight, and did it without injury, because he was situationally aware. He was inside the bad guy’s OODA loop. Training without that habit is a hobby IF you intend to carry a gun for self-defense.

But this meme is absolutely true

What basic carry training is for

If you carry every day, you need a real class, not a certificate you framed. Illinois made this man get a CCL. I am not advocating for state mandated training and licensing. I am advocating for you getting the training that will make you competent while carrying a gun every day. A decent concealed-carry course should leave you with four things:

• A safe draw from concealment on your body, on your belt, the way you actually dress.

• A clear understanding of when deadly force is lawful and moral.

• Enough marksmanship that you can put a round in an A-zone at conversational distance without thinking about the trigger.

• The humility to know a classroom is not a robbery.

If your “training” was a morning in a church basement and a laminated card, you have a license. Go find a good trainer with real world experience. If they don’t appear fit, find a different trainer.

Daily Dry Fire

This is the work that produces this video. It is also the work almost nobody does after week three.

What it looks like: you unload and clear the pistol and put all live ammunition in another room. You put on the holster on the belt you use for concealed carry and wear a shirt you actually conceal with. Draw. Present. Press. Reset. Holster the gun. Do it slow. Make it the same every time. Then add a par time and start going faster.

How much: five to ten minutes most days. Twenty good draws beat a hundred sloppy ones. If you only have five minutes, do five perfect presentations and stop.

Why: the first shot in a robbery is not a marksmanship problem. It is a motor-path problem. You are building the same master grip, the same garment clear, the same trigger press, so that when the brain is busy with a mask and a gun the hands already know the job. Dry fire is cheap. It is also the only way to get the reps a live range will not give you on a weeknight.

And trust me, when the adrenaline dumps into your system, you ARE going to forget everything. You will have tunnel vision, your hands will sweat, your heart rate will hit 150. This is why the mechanics of drawing that gun have to be built into your muscle memory and your body just has to do it. Which is why we add a clock with a buzzer.

You need a clock that has a buzzer. It’s going to teach you to react to the stress of the situation without thinking about the actions. Three options that actually work:

• PACT Club Timer III. Reasonable money, simple, does what a timer is for. Use it for both dry and live training.

• IPSC Shot Timer on a phone. This is fine for dry fire in the house. Phones at a live range are a pain. Leave that app at home when you go shoot.

• Mantis. The Mantis X10 ecosystem is the full meal. If you only want the pistol sensor, the Mantis X2 is under $100 and will tell you the truth about your press.

Your timer can beep at the 2 seconds that we know you need to beat in a real defensive gun use. If you are not beating the beep on a training draw, you most certainly are not going to be under 2 seconds in a real situation. Which is the standard you must meet based on the data we have about defensive gun use.

Monthly live fire, at least

Dry fire builds the pathways in your muscles and brain. And then live fire confirms that AND teaches you what it takes to hit the A zone of a target.

What it looks like: the carry gun, the carry holster, the carry belt, the ammunition you would actually use or a close practice analog. Concealment on. Not a race gun from a range bag. If the Range you are using won’t let you draw from the holster, then start at a compressed ready, present the gun and shoot. Take 1 second off the par times to account for not having to build a grip, draw, and compress to horizontal.

This is my standard live fire session with my current EDC pistol. These are the times I work against. If you’ve never done these kind of drills, start with much more time than me. Do a Mozambique or Bill Drill in 6 seconds, not 3. Really advanced shooters can do these drills in 2 seconds. Good shooters prepared for the real world should get the drills done in 3 seconds. New shooters in the 3.5 to 6 second range.

• Sig Sauer P365XL - 5x12 rd magazines

• Mag 1: warmup - slow, aimed fire, with full grip and sight picture resets

• Mag 2-4: 12x Mozambique Drills …. Buzzer to T-zone = 3s

• Mag 5: 2x Bill Drills … Buzzer to shot 6 = 3s

Use a shot timer. Use a target that looks like a person. You are not training to punch a baseball-sized hole in a square because an influencer did it for the camera. You are training for FIBS: Fuck I’ve Been Shot. It’s the hit that makes a man decide he has been shot and that the fight is no longer worth it. That lives in the A-zone and the T-zone of a full-size silhouette.

My preferred target is Action Target’s F-TQ15ANT. Any honest full-size silhouette with scored A and T zones will do. At seven yards, you should be able to put every shot in the A-zone. If you cannot do that on demand, you do not have a speed problem. You have a shooting problem.

Write the times down. If you do not write them down you will remember the good string and forget the one where the shirt ate the sight.

Once a month is the floor for someone who carries daily. Twice a month is better. A class every year keeps you from inventing your own doctrine in the garage.

The standard that matters

Do not train to the YouTube number. Correia’s 0.6 is what a prepared man did against a gun already out, after he had already staged his hand. That is elite human performance and you are training for a standard that makes a defensive gun use survivable.

Train to this: from concealment, on a timer, first shot in two seconds or less, A-zone hit at seven yards. As you can see from my EDC training session, I am working on buzzer to draw to first shot under 2 seconds and two more shots under 3 seconds total. That is a really solid standard for defensive gun use. Most people who carry cannot do two seconds with an A zone hit. They have never timed it. But they have a story about how fast they would be.

The Orland Park customer had already done the work you cannot see. Heads up. Hand on the gun. A holster that presented. A press that found the A zone while another muzzle was in the problem. That is not gear. That is not a comment-section personality. That is training and mindset, paid for in advance.

If you carry, go time a draw this week. Then you will know. Until then you do not.

Modern Minuteman

Practical preparedness for everyday citizens.

Low-profile. Reliable. Quiet competence.

#Minuteman #EDC #Training #Preparedness #Mindset

All Modern Minuteman posts

For nearly two decades the Supreme Court has been taking apart the scaffolding of twentieth-century gun control. Heller said the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep a handgun for self-defense. McDonald applied that right against the states. Bruen threw out interest-balancing and told every court to measure a gun law against the Nation’s historical tradition of regulation. Rahimi drew a line around people who are actually dangerous. Wolford told states they cannot invent “sensitive places” on private property open to the public. Hemani said casual drug use does not turn a citizen into a prohibited person. Viramontes is still coming.

The pattern is not mysterious. Local hyper-restriction only works if someone else will enforce it at the border. That someone else just lost a round in the Fifth Circuit.

What the Fifth Circuit actually did

On September 18, 2026, in Elite Precision Customs L.L.C. v. BATFE, Judges Jerry Smith and Kurt Engelhardt held that the federal ban on direct interstate handgun sales violates the Second Amendment. Judge Catharina Haynes dissented.

The statutes are a cluster from the Gun Control Act of 1968. Section 922(b)(3) forbids a licensed dealer to sell a handgun directly to a resident of another state. Section 922(a)(3) forbids receiving in your home state a handgun purchased elsewhere. Section 922(a)(5) separately restricts most unlicensed person-to-person transfers across state lines. Congress already treated long guns differently. You may buy a rifle or shotgun in person from an out-of-state dealer. Handguns were the lock on the door.

Elite Precision is a Texas shop. Tim Herron lives in Arizona. Freddie Blish lives in New Mexico. Federal law told the Texas dealer it could not complete those counter sales. Firearms Policy Coalition joined them.

The Department of Justice put about eighteen old laws on the table. They came in three piles: wartime and common-defense rules, bans on selling arms to tribes or foreign sovereigns, and inspection or quality statutes for powder and muskets. None of that is a peacetime ban on a citizen of one American state buying a common handgun from a licensed dealer in another. The government’s other defense was the workaround. Ship the gun to a dealer in the buyer’s home state, pay a second fee, wait, and hope that dealer plays along. The court said a purchase ban does not become constitutional because the government will sell you a slower, more expensive door.

That holding binds Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi. It splits with the Second Circuit’s 2025 decision in United States v. Vereen, which upheld the same basic scheme. It is not yet the law in Pennsylvania or New Jersey. ATF can still treat the 1968 rule as live outside the Fifth Circuit until another court or the Supreme Court says otherwise. The split is why this case is built for a petition.

Why 1968 built a border guard

Congress did not claim a Glock becomes immoral at a state line. It claimed restrictive states would be circumvented if a citizen could buy a handgun where the sale was legal. So it conscripted every federal licensee as a customs agent for the buyer’s legislature. For almost sixty years that federal deputization was the real enforcement mechanism. New Jersey did not have to watch the river. Pennsylvania was required to refuse the sale.

Take that conscription away and the local statute is still on the books. What disappears is the out-of-state shop forced to honor it.

The honor system was already the real regime

Murder is malum in se. People mostly do not do it because there is a victim. Crossing a state line to buy a tool is malum prohibitum. It is a crime because a statute says so. Flood the code with the second kind and you manufacture felons out of geography and paperwork. The citizen who sees no victim does not feel a moral duty. He feels a demand to obey.

Washington’s private-sale background-check rule is the small version of the same fact. On paper every kitchen-table transfer goes through an FFL. In the living room, with no registry, the state is asking for honesty. A lot of people have been giving it the amount of honesty such a rule usually gets.

The interstate handgun ban was the large version. It looked like law because a dealer in another state would catch you. Remove the dealer’s federal duty and the large version becomes the small one.

A right that stops at the state line

Imagine the federal government said you may exercise the First Amendment only in your state of residence. A Washingtonian who drove to Idaho to buy a Bible, a press, or a stack of pamphlets would have to prove local residency before the sale. Nobody would call that a modest paperwork rule. Everybody would call it a confinement of the right.

That is how the United States treated the right to acquire a handgun for half a century. The right traveled with the person in the text of the Constitution. The statute treated it as a privilege that dissolved at the border.

If the Supreme Court agrees with the Fifth Circuit, the live problem looks like this. A New Jersey resident walks into a Pennsylvania shop and buys a Sig Sauer P226. Pennsylvania sells that pistol with standard 15-round magazines. New Jersey makes possession of a magazine over ten rounds a felony and wraps handgun purchases in a permit scheme. Under the old federal rule the Pennsylvania dealer was New Jersey’s border guard. He could not make the sale. If Elite Precision becomes national law, his federal job ends when NICS clears. He still fills out a Form 4473. What he no longer does is hand the gun to a New Jersey FFL so Trenton gets an intercept. New Jersey is left to police the magazine when the car comes home. The buyer is left to decide whether he will walk back into a paperwork felony.

No one was assaulted. No property was taken. The felony is the river.

What restrictive states do next

They do not put a customs booth on I-80. They lack the jurisdiction and the cars.

They prosecute possession when they find it. They demand traces and dealer records from ATF. They ask for a stay. They write letters about “loopholes.” They cannot make a Texas or Pennsylvania licensee enforce a New Jersey permit they cannot see.

That is the collapse. Not every local statute vanishing in a week. The federal mechanism that made those statutes bite across a state line is what breaks. Inside the Fifth Circuit, it has already broken. If the Court takes Vereen and affirms, the honor system is all that is left.

A constitutional baseline stops being a theory at that point. It becomes the only enforcement model the map will support.

Observations from the Late Republic

#Observations #SecondAmendment #FourthBranch #ConstitutionalRights #LateRepublic

Further Reading

• Elite Precision Customs L.L.C. v. BATFE, No. 25-11206 (5th Cir. Sept. 18, 2026)

• Mance v. Sessions, 896 F.3d 699 (5th Cir. 2018) (the pre-Bruen decision this panel rejected)

• New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, 597 U.S. 1 (2022)

• Wolford v. Lopez, 146 S. Ct. 2032 (2026)

• 18 U.S.C. §§ 922(a)(3), (a)(5), (b)(3)

Say that out loud and watch six perfectly ordinary people explain that they, too, have always lived on the edge.

I recently read one of those pieces about Millennials and Gen Z getting tattooed: a single piece, a sleeve, a hand, a neck. The argument was mostly right. Other ways of standing out have thinned out. Work looks the same. Clothes look the same. Cities look the same. Ink is one of the last cheap ways to look like a person instead of a template.

I am not here to retell that article. I am here to tell you what it looks like from the other side of the needle.

I am the earliest slice of Gen X, born in 1966. When I was a kid in the 1970s, tattoos were not a personality or a trend; they were a census category. I grew up swimming in that subculture. The men who had them were the landscape of my daily life: my grandfather’s construction crew, WWII vets, bikers, and a fair number of guys who had been guests of the county. That was the map. Sailor. Laborer. Outlaw. Not the dentist. Not the teacher. Not the kid who wanted a tasteful sprig of lavender on his forearm because authenticity is a brand now.

Then I joined the Army, and at 20, I got my first piece. That wasn’t an accessory choice; it was a line in the sand. It was part of cutting the cord—deciding I was fully inside that culture, with zero feet left in the normal civilian world.

Combat arms and special operations have always been a tattooed culture. Back in the late ‘80s when I was with the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment, a bunch of us ran with various Batman motifs—the Dark Knight himself, Catwoman, or whatever fit the grit of the mission. We didn’t pick comic book icons because we were shopping at a convention; they were symbols of operating in the dark and living outside the rules.

Around 1995 or so, the aesthetic shifted hard into the great wave of tribal ink—endless black bands and sharp geometric work flooding the off-post shops. But if you know how to read it, that ink was always a functional ledger. Just like a patched jacket or prison marks, that old skin told you exactly where a guy came from. If you run into a guy with vintage comic flash melting into mid-90s tribal blackwork, you don’t need to check a DD-214. You’re looking for which Group, Regiment, or heavy armor outfit he ran with.

It was bolder, simpler, and it sat on people who already lived outside ordinary civilian life. You could still hide most of it under a uniform. That was part of the point. The ink was for the tribe, not for the algorithm.

From that day well into the 2000s, I lived wrapped in that visibility: large work on both arms and both legs. In the world I came from, that put you firmly outside normal society. Employers noticed. Churches noticed. Mothers noticed.

I learned that firsthand back in the ‘90s when I met my then-girlfriend’s parents. Back then, living together and navigating life outside of marriage wasn’t yet the frictionless default setting it is today; it still carried weight. She knew I was fully tattooed and warned me not to be too in their face, so I wore jeans and a shirt down to my elbows to keep the peace.

She wasn’t just worried about them spotting the ink and pegging me as an outsider to their middle-class culture. She was worried about the math they would eventually do—realizing at some point that their daughter wasn’t just dating a guy with a few youthful indiscretions, but that she knew exactly why he had them and was living in that world right alongside him.

Naturally, I goofed, and my right arm—featuring a full-length Catwoman from elbow to shoulder—peaked out. Ooooops. When no one else was nearby, her mother leaned in, whispered, “Do you have a tattoo?” and waited for the verdict. I looked her dead in the eye and said, “Yes, I have tattoos.” No apologies, no excuses. I somehow managed to survive the meeting and get accepted anyway—pure luck, I guess.

Back then, you paid a social tax for the ink, and that tax was proof that you belonged to a different country than the one in the catalog.

That country got annexed.

Tattoos did not become rare. They became décor. Surveys will tell you a third of adults have at least one, and Millennials sit near the top of that pile. The shop moved from the bad side of town to the same strip as the yoga studio. You can interview with a neck tattoo. You can teach kindergarten with a sleeve if you wear the right cardigan. The signal flipped.

Here is the part that happens every time I say any of this out loud.

I mention that tattooing used to be an outsider culture: sailors, bikers, felons, combat arms. Immediately three or four people in the conversation start explaining that they are outsiders too. They have a sleeve. They have a story. They “never really fit in.” They are, in every visible respect, mainstream kids who have never spent a day outside normal culture in their lives. Good schools. Safe jobs. Parents who paid the deposit. A life that would have been called ordinary in 1978 and is still ordinary now, except the ordinary now comes with ink.

They are not lying to be cruel. They have been taught that identity is a feeling you announce. If the tattoo is how you announce it, then the tattoo must mean you left the herd. It does not occur to them that the herd got tattooed.

That is what is weird as hell if you come from the old tattoo cultures—the ones I saw on the construction sites of the ‘70s and carried through the 11th ACR and a life in the Army. You are not angry that the art got better. You are watching people wear the old warning sign and then insist the warning was always about their personality.

The irony is that people get tattooed longing to be different, yet the reality is that by doing so en masse, they are just mundanely normal. That is precisely why I haven’t had a new tattoo done in 15 years.

When everyone is tattooed, the tattoo no longer says you left the main road. It says you went to a mall that sells belonging. The biker, the sailor, the convict, the soldier, sailor, or marine: those marks used to be a handshake and a caution at the same time. You knew, roughly, what kind of life had put that ink on that skin. Now the same visual language is worn by people who have never been outside in the old sense. They are not in a club that costs you jobs, acceptance at church, and family dinners. They are in a club that costs you a Saturday and a credit card.

I still have the ink. I still know what it cost when I got it. That cost is the part the new fashion cannot buy. You can copy the lines. You cannot retroactively join the world that made those lines a boundary.

And you cannot talk your way into that world by telling a tattooed sergeant that you, too, have always been a little different. I already know what different used to look like. It did not look like Starbucks customers.

People ask, from time to time, where the writing comes from. The Late Republic pieces. The Modern Minuteman pieces. The fiction about beans, coffee, Zombies, and refusing to become savages. They sound like different projects. But they aren’t.

They come from the same formation. Books I read too young. A family that still remembered war as a fact instead of a movie. An Army enlistment that started on the Iron Curtain and later put me in the desert.

This is not a memoir. It is the short list of influences that actually stuck. If you want the worldview behind Security n Cigars, start here.

A Family Foundation

I was born in 1967. The house I grew up in still had World War II in it. Not as a documentary. As family. Both of my grandfathers fought in that war, one a medic in the Pacific, the other a bomber pilot in Europe. My father and my uncles fought in Korea and Vietnam. When I was a kid in the 1970s, Pearl Harbor was not ancient history. 1976 was only thirty-five years after it. People still talked about it in school, on television, and at the table.

We lived in a small town near Sacramento. Dad had been out of the Army a couple of years. I was eight when the Bicentennial Freedom Train came through Old Sacramento. The whole family went. We stood in line for hours to get inside. Every car was a little museum of the country’s story: the Founding, the wars, the railroad, the wagon trains. People were quiet walking through. Parents pointed things out to their kids. That is what a country still sure of itself looked like to an eight-year-old.

The other part of the house was immigration with a purpose. An English great-grandfather came to America around 1900, by way of Rhodesia and South Africa. A Hungarian grandfather who came during the World War era. He and my grandmother changed their last name, learned English as fast as they could, and raised their children to be American because that is what they intended to be. I am the product of that choice. I do not treat it as an embarrassment or a theory. It is the reason I exist in this country at all. My family taught me that America is built on immigrants who want to be American, to be free, and to build something strong and proud.

By the time I was old enough to read the wrong books for an eleven-year-old, I already knew two things. Wars have names and enemies. America is something people join on purpose.

A Curious Education

The formal schooling mattered less than the year I was eleven. My father was wholly convinced that if I could read it, and I wanted to, I should. And he wasn’t as worried about what happened at school as he was about what I was reading.

And that meant that I ended up reading The Lord of the Rings, Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, and Pournelle’s West of Honor when I was eleven. That is a lot of freight for a kid. But, to me, it didn’t feel that way. It felt like someone had finally described the world in a way that made sense. The puzzle pieces were starting to snap into place.

Tolkien taught me that civilization is fragile and worth defending, even when the defenders of civilization cannot win. He also taught me about courage, and the importance of beauty in the world. Heinlein taught me that citizenship is not a feeling, but rather that it is a duty, and the military is one of the places a society still tells the truth about that. Pournelle taught me the professional soldier’s problem: how to stay competent and loyal to the men beside you when the political order above you is not serious.

Not long after, I found The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. I have been imagining a Mike ever since. Then Asimov’s robot stories. The Bicentennial Man. Gerrold’s When HARLIE Was One. Those books treated a machine mind as something that might become a partner, not only a tool or a threat. That idea never left. And so much more, dreams of the moon, space stations, interstellar travel.

The histories started early too. I remember sitting in my room late at night, fourteen or fifteen, reading one of the histories of Midway. Outnumbered, inexperienced Americans flying straight into the teeth of the Japanese Navy. I was in awe. Not because it was tidy. Because it was true. Men who should have lost went anyway, and the battle turned on skill, nerve, and a few hours when the other side’s carriers were caught with their decks full.

The later reading filled in the rest. Narrative historians who stay inside the facts. Rome, I read a lot about Rome. I was fascinated by how Rome would fall, get back up, rebuild, over and over. For 2000 years. And if The Founders thought Rome was important … Oh, and The Founders and the American Revolution. I learned early to track down primary sources because the people writing centuries later often seemed to try and twist and turn to make the history say what they wanted it to say.

The novels set the frame. Midway taught me that the frame was not only fiction. I have been writing inside both ever since.

A Military Career

I enlisted in the mid-1980s and went to Basic Training at Fort Knox. The drill sergeants were mostly Vietnam veterans who were not interested in whether the training felt modern. What they did care about is if you were tough and competent and ready to be on a tank or in a scout team that might have to go in harm’s way. That is a different education from a classroom.

My first duty assignment was West Germany during the Cold War. I looked into East Germany and saw what it means for a government to control everything. This wasn’t classroom theory or a book about controlling the means of production. This was real towns, real people, and a real socialism. If you want to know why I do not treat the administrative state as a harmless convenience, start there. I’ve seen the finished version, including the people they killed trying to cross the border to be free.

Then Fort Stewart and the 24th Infantry Division, a unit in the 18th Airborne Corps, what is often called the Rapid Deployment Force. Although that name was long gone in 1990. And on August 2, 1990, when Iraq invaded Kuwait we went on alert and deployed the whole division, all 20,000 of us and our tanks, Bradleys, trucks, field artillery in just 3 weeks. Desert Shield was open-ended and austere, a defense deep in the Saudi desert and mostly just us at first. The mail was slow, but we absolutely appreciated the Any Soldier letters. Phone calls, when they finally existed, were measured in minutes. Desert Storm was weeks when the families heard nothing at all. I was a tanker and I did the job. I learned about the hardest things: life and death, the comrades to my left and right, the importance of an ethical and moral frame.

By the time that tour was over, I was who I am now. Although the decades after have added experience, judgment, and a longer view, they haven’t changed that core. The notebooks I carried in the BDU pocket already had the lines I still keep: movement, competence, finish the fight, take care of your people, do not become sloppy because the world has. Duty, citizenship, staying human. I wrote it down and made it me.

The Army did not invent the frame I got from books and family. It tested it. The test held.

That is the formation

A family that named its wars and its enemies. Immigrant grandparents who decided to become American and then acted like it. An eleven-year-old with Tolkien, Heinlein, and Pournelle in the same year. A teenager awake too late with Midway. A young soldier on the Iron Curtain. A slightly older sergeant going to war in the desert.

The Late Republic essays come from watching a country forget how republics die. The Minuteman essays come from the Army’s basic truth: gear is not readiness, and readiness is not a costume. The fiction comes from the same stubborn point. Stay human. Keep the beans. Do not let the collapse set the standard.

I have had more years since. Army and then Civilian jobs. Marriage. Children. Writing. Travel. The notebooks changed color. The list did not. If you read Bougie Apocalypse, I hope you enjoy my characters and their adventures. If you read Security n Cigars and wonder what sits underneath it, this is the short answer. The rest is commentary.

This Section contains the core essays that form the foundation of my writing on Security n Cigars.

#Foundations #Minuteman #Observations #LateRepublic

In the modern era, for America, there are two truly defining single-day events: December 7, 1941 and September 11, 2001. All of us older than perhaps five remember where we were, what we were doing, and what we felt and saw on those days. Different generations, sixty years apart. But Pearl Harbor changed the world the way 9/11 did. An America that believed it was isolated from the rest of the world, able to live in peace even while the rest of the world had serious problems, was woken from that slumber to the reality outside our borders. Twice.

I remember where my family was. My sister-in-law, Raini, was a graduate student at NYU, about six blocks from the towers. Her husband, Jonathon, was across the river at Rutgers. They were both in school, one in dental school, one in law school. We could reach Jonathon. We could not reach her. He could not reach her either. For about twelve hours nobody in the family knew if she was alive. She walked north most of the day until she found a payphone and called him. Jonathon called the rest of the family to let us know she was alive, then went to get her.

When I was a kid in the 1970s, we still remembered Pearl Harbor and World War II. 1976 was only thirty-five years after Pearl Harbor, and it was still a big deal. Pearl Harbor was discussed and taught in school, on television, and generally in society. Both of my grandfathers fought in World War II, one a medic in the Pacific, the other a bomber pilot in Europe. My uncles and dad fought in Korea and Vietnam. We knew the enemy. Imperial Japan had attacked Pearl Harbor. Nazi Germany was the other half of the Axis. The names were specific. The ideology was named.

Now, if you are a 9-year-old kid in 2026, nobody talks about 9/11 with any precision. Not at school. Barely on television. Nineteen hijackers from al-Qaeda murdered nearly 3,000 people in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania. They did it in the name of a jihadist ideology that openly seeks the death of Americans and the destruction of the West.

That movement did not end on September 12, 2001. Al-Qaeda, the Taliban … who rule Afghanistan … ISIS, Hamas, the Islamic Republic of Iran and her proxies, and the networks that share their aims and belief in apocalyptic Islam have continued to kill, recruit, and wait. Afghanistan is not the same thing as the Afghans, any more than the Islamic Republic and the IRGC are the same thing as the Persian people. But those regimes are inspired by an apocalyptic and tribal ideology that drives them to kill and conquer those they term infidels, unbelievers, not of Islam.

December 7 and September 11 were both surprise attacks in undeclared wars. Imperial Japan attacked Pearl Harbor without a functioning declaration arriving first. Al-Qaeda attacked New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania the same way: no warning a nation could act on, no battlefield, no distinction between soldier and civilian. Imperial Japan killed 2,403 Americans at Pearl Harbor. Al-Qaeda killed 2,977 Americans in New York, Washington, D.C., and Pennsylvania. Different tools. Same intent: to change and defeat America.

The call is simple. Remember who did it. Stand guard. Stay vigilant. Protect America, the idea and the nation. Our forebears did that after Pearl Harbor. They named the enemy, stayed awake, and refused to treat a surprise attack as a one-day tragedy. We must not allow those enemies to kill us, or change us. We must stand as firm and hard as our forebears did in WW2.

There is no other place like this one. We owe it to the dead of both days, and to the generations since the Founding, to keep the country dedicated to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.

The bartender says, “What the fuck, you’re a duck. Get out.”

The duck leaves.

Next day the duck walks in again. The bartender starts early. “You’re a duck. Get out.”

The duck says, “I don’t care about that. I just want a glass of milk.”

“You’re a duck. Get the fuck out.”

Third day the duck walks in.

“I’d like a glass of milk.”

“Get the fuck out.”

“I’d like a glass of milk.”

The bartender is done. “Look. Get out. We’ve got no milk. But if you won’t leave I’ll nail your stupid duck beak to the bar.”

The duck says, “Do you have a hammer?”

The bartender, confused: “No?”

“Great. I’ll have a glass of milk.”

I keep a little red duck on my main monitor for that reason.

The bartender has a policy. The duck has an order. The policy is “no ducks.” The order is milk. Those two things are not the same argument, and the bartender never notices.

On the third day the bartender upgrades from policy to threat. I will nail your beak to the bar. That sounds like a control. It is not a control. A control is a hammer in the hand. The duck does the only adult thing in the room. He inventories the kit.

No hammer.

Therefore no nail.

Therefore milk.

I have used this on a firing line, in a security briefing, and in ordinary life, because it is the same failure everywhere.

A rule on the wall is not a skill with a gun.

A PDF is not a control.

A speech about what we will not allow is not a capability.

If you cannot show the hammer, you are not running a bar. You are running a mood.

Most of the desks in American life are that bartender. They tell the un-fancy what they may not do. They talk about children, feelings, safety, order, the next emergency. Then you ask whether the tool exists, whether the rule is applied to everyone, whether the statute was even theirs to write. Often there is no hammer. There is a tone. The duck orders milk anyway.

I am not a duck. I am worse. I am a commoner who thinks We the People meant the people who go to church, go to work, keep a rifle if they choose, and show up for jury duty. Equally so. No lord. No new hat to doff. Homespun if I have to wear it. Wrangler pants. A black man I will introduce as my brother and if you cannot live with that you can leave the bar.

The late republic problem is not that someone asked for milk. It is that the capital keeps threatening a hammer it does not have, and a lot of common people cheer because the threat sounded responsible. Hayek wrote a long book about that road. The duck wrote a short one.

Do you have a hammer?

No?

Great. I’ll have a glass of milk.

#Foundations #Risk #Minuteman #LateRepublic

For years I carried the standard Army notebook in the top pocket of the BDU or DCU. Early on they were green. Later they were black. I still have most of them, including the ones from deployments. I wrote a lot of things in those books. Training notes. Range data. Operation Orders during combat deployments. Fragments of ideas that seemed important at 0200 and less important later.

A few lines survived all of that. They survived more training after the Army, years in the security business, and a lot of thinking about what actually matters when things go wrong. These are not every rule I ever heard. They are the ones that kept proving useful.

Rule Zero: Avoid a gunfight at all costs. If it is unavoidable …

My Own Rules

• Remember: Speed, Movement, Violence.

• He who is most violent usually wins.

• Get off the X. Movement is life.

• Only hits count.

• If your shooting stance is good, you’re not moving fast enough.

• Use cover or concealment as much as possible.

• Decide to be aggressive enough, quickly enough.

• The faster you finish the fight, the less shot you will get.

Things I’ve Learned from Others

Bring a gun. Preferably, bring at least two guns. Bring all of your friends who have guns. If you can choose, bring a long gun and a friend with a long gun. – The OK Corral Rule

Anything worth shooting is worth shooting twice. Ammo is cheap.

In ten years nobody will remember the details. They will only remember who lived.

If you are not shooting, you should be communicating, reloading, and moving. – Army rule

Use a gun that works EVERY TIME.

Someday, someone may kill you with your own gun, but they should have to beat you to death with it because it is empty.

The visible target should be in FRONT of your gun.

Flank your adversary when possible.

Watch their hands. Hands kill.

These are not a complete doctrine. They are the key, in my mind, after years of training, deploying, thinking, and then training again after the military. The rest of the notebooks are full of details. These few lines are what I kept coming back to.

Modern Minuteman

Practical preparedness for everyday citizens.

Low-profile. Reliable. Quiet competence.

#Minuteman #EDC #Training #Preparedness #Mindset

All Modern Minuteman posts

People sometimes ask why I own several carry-capable pistols instead of just one “perfect” gun. Last range trip is the short answer.

My everyday concealed carry pistol, a Springfield EMP, suffered a catastrophic extractor failure. Not the kind that sends metal into your face, but the kind that turns a reliable pistol into a single-shot paperweight in the middle of a string of fire. The extractor ended up clocked horizontally. When that happens, the spent case doesn’t extract, and you get an immediate double-feed.

In the attached picture, the piece I circled should be vertical. It has a claw on it that grabs the empty case and ejects it during the gun’s firing cycle.

The pistol is now on its way back to Springfield Armory for warranty work. In the meantime, I simply switched to a backup. And I have a backup to the backup.

What Happened

Here’s the timeline I submitted with the warranty claim:

In July 2026 the gun had roughly 2,300 rounds through it and started showing a couple of stovepipe failures and an occasional failure to lock back on an empty magazine. Those are classic signs of a tired recoil spring. The pistol was at the recommended maintenance interval, so I replaced the recoil spring with an EGW 14 lb spring that meets OEM specs and installed a new Wilson Combat 1911 firing pin spring. Both are parts I’ve used for years on 1911 pistols. I did a full function check afterward. That maintenance was completed on August 9.

On August 23 I took the EMP to the range for a short live-fire confirmation. The first 50 rounds ran perfectly. The gun was actually shooting very well that day. Round 51 failed to extract. I cleared it, tried again, and got the same failure. After clearing the second malfunction I disassembled the pistol, inspected, and found the extractor had rotated into a horizontal position.

That’s not normal wear. That’s a broken or improperly retained extractor.

The Point

Guns break. Springs wear out. Extractors fail. It doesn’t matter how well you maintain them or how many rounds you’ve put through a particular platform. Mechanical devices eventually do mechanical things. In this case there is likely a material flaw in the extractor that caused a failure with the new recoil spring installed.

I don’t rotate my everyday carry pistol. The EMP is the primary. What I do maintain is a dedicated backup and a backup to the backup, and I train with them on a roughly every-other-month schedule: one this month, the other next month. When the primary goes down, the secondary is already familiar. There is no scramble to learn a new trigger or a different manual of arms under stress.

The EMP will go back to Springfield, get fixed, and eventually return to primary duty. Until then, the backups are online.

That’s the entire philosophy in one range trip: redundancy is not paranoia. It’s just adult ownership of tools that can fail.

A reader commented on my recent post about the USS Abraham Lincoln and pointed to the World War II record of the USS Hornet (CV-12), the “Grey Ghost.” For those interested, here are a few details of what sustained combat operations looked like for an Essex-class carrier in the Pacific.

The Hornet completed an extraordinary combat tour lasting more than 500 days between U.S. port calls. After a short shakedown, she joined the Fast Carrier Task Force (TF 58) at Majuro Atoll on March 20, 1944, and remained in the forward combat zone for the next 16 months. Her air groups destroyed 1,410 enemy aircraft and supported nearly every major amphibious assault in the Pacific from March 1944 onward.

Key Milestones

• March 20, 1944: Joined TF 58 at Majuro after a record-short shakedown cruise.

• September 1944: Her VF-2 fighter squadron became the top U.S. Navy fighter unit in the Pacific by total victories and ace generation.

• February 1945: Launched the first direct carrier strikes against the Japanese home islands since the 1942 Doolittle Raid.

• June 4–5, 1945: Typhoon Connie collapsed roughly 25 feet of her forward flight deck, ending her active combat run.

Major Combat Engagements

• Battle of the Philippine Sea (June 19–20, 1944): Contributed heavily to the “Great Marianas Turkey Shoot,” which devastated Japanese naval aviation.

• Battle of Leyte Gulf (October 23–26, 1944): Struck fleeing Japanese capital ships during critical phases of the engagement.

• Sinking of the Yamato (April 7, 1945): Hornet’s air group delivered opening and decisive strikes during Operation Ten-Go that helped sink the Japanese super-battleship.

Conditions aboard were what you would expect of a wartime carrier operating continuously in the tropics. Roughly 3,000 men lived in tightly packed berthing compartments with bunks stacked three and four high. Fresh water was limited and carefully rationed; saltwater showers were common. Below decks the heat routinely climbed past 100 degrees. Fresh food ran out quickly, and the diet settled into canned goods, Spam in various forms, and whatever the galleys could stretch. Flight operations ran day and night. Later in the war the kamikaze threat meant many men slept fully dressed. Mail from home was irregular at best. When Typhoon Connie hit in June 1945, waves of 50 to 60 feet collapsed 25 feet of the forward flight deck and left the ship fighting just to stay upright.

Hornet was under air attack 59 times and was never seriously damaged by the enemy. She steamed roughly 155,000 miles, burned tens of millions of gallons of fuel, and distilled more than 40 million gallons of fresh water for her crew. Her air groups sank or heavily damaged more than 1.2 million tons of enemy shipping.

This was not a peacetime cruise with scheduled port visits and reliable resupply. It was continuous combat operations across the central and western Pacific, often within range of Japanese land-based aircraft, ending only when a typhoon finally forced her out of the fight.

Perspective matters. The Abraham Lincoln’s recent deployment has been long and demanding by modern standards. The Hornet’s record shows what sustained wartime carrier operations once required.

There’s been a fair amount of public drama lately about the USS Abraham Lincoln’s extended deployment in the Middle East. Families have spoken to the press about difficult conditions on board, shortages, mental health stress, and the sheer length of time at sea without a port call. The Navy and civilian leadership have pushed back, saying some of the reporting has been overstated or misrepresented.

Beege Welborn at Hot Air wrote a clear-eyed piece on the subject that is worth reading:

The Disconnect Between Some Military Families and Their Service Member’s Actual Job Is Stunning

Go read the whole thing. Meanwhile, some of my own thoughts on the topic of the military, deployments, war …. and families complaining.

I spent a career in the Army, including going on alert on August 2, 1990, when Iraq invaded Kuwait. A few observations from that experience and the years that followed.

First, the variation among military families is enormous. In my battalion at Fort Stewart we had a staff sergeant I’ll call Schmoe. He was married with six kids. His wife had no access to the checking account, did not drive, and lived in NCO housing on post. When we deployed in peacetime it was usually only for a few weeks, and Schmoe would leave her with enough cash and food for the duration. During one Emergency Deployment Readiness Exercise we discovered just how unprepared the family was. The company wives’ organization ended up helping get Mrs. Schmoe a driver’s license, a general power of attorney, and access to the bank account. This was 1990. The man was from the old mountains of West Virginia, and both he and his wife expected the arrangement to work that way. Not every family was like that, of course, but the range of readiness and independence among spouses was always wider than outsiders assume.

Second, spouses and parents complaining about the hardships of deployment is nothing new. It was common throughout my career. Some of them learned how to contact their congressman. These days they post it on social media, which reaches farther and faster. The dynamic itself has not changed. Service members deploy. Conditions are often hard. Families feel the absence and the uncertainty. Some handle it with quiet competence. Others do not.

Third, perspective is everything. During Desert Shield, Stars and Stripes ran a story about the “horrors” of life on one of the carriers. The Coca-Cola plant in the region was still using the old pull-tab cans. After too many tabs turned up as foreign object debris on the elevators and flight deck, the captain banned soda on the ship. I was a tanker with 24th Infantry Division out in the desert trying to keep our water below 100 degrees Fahrenheit. You can imagine the level of sympathy and mockery that story received in our battalion.

Deployments have always been hard. Some are longer and more austere than others. Going to Fort Irwin in the Mojave Desert, the infamous National Training Center, for four weeks was tough. And then there is war. Desert Shield was open-ended and extremely austere. My family didn’t get a letter from me for weeks. It was a couple of months before phone banks were set up and we got a chance to call home for a very limited ten minutes.

And then there is War. During Desert Storm, our families quite literally did not hear from us from January 16, 1991 to early March of 1991. The Lincoln’s stretch has clearly been demanding. And frankly, they are at war, not on a peacetime cruise. The gap between what some families expect and what the job actually requires is not new. It is an old, recurring tension in military life.

Family, I gotta tell you, there is no good coming out of what you are doing. You help our enemies and hurt our friends. And I sincerely hope that is not your goal, so rethink your actions and your drama.

I’m always struck by the confident declaration that it was “all just a lie to confuse people” whenever the subject of Hitler and the NSDAP comes up. The standard line is that they were “authoritarian,” “fascist,” or simply “Nazis”—but that they were absolutely not socialists.

Except they were.

If you understand the actual history of socialism, and American high schools do not teach it, you know that Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, progressives, democratic socialists, fascists, national socialists, and the various international labour parties all derived from the same 19th-century political source. There were schisms and fractures, but the different factions still recognized one another as part of the broader socialist family.

You should read the history of the First International and the Second International. Pay attention to how the “left” and “right” of socialism were defined by the socialists themselves. That history includes a range of groups and parties that appear unrelated only because we have been taught, incorrectly, that fascism, communism, and socialism are entirely separate movements and ideologies.

When Mussolini and Hitler said they were socialists, they meant it. Their own speeches and writings, and those of their contemporaries both inside and outside the socialist movement, make this clear. The claim that the socialist label was merely a cynical ploy to attract the working class is a late-20th-century invention—by socialists.

The usual basis for denying their socialism is that they maintained private property and corporations and allowed profits. Notice the key word: allowed. Mussolini and Hitler could have abolished private property and corporations if they had chosen to. Instead, they required those institutions to be subordinated to the state and to serve the state’s purposes. Those who complied were permitted to keep a profit. But that profit existed at the state’s discretion, not as a right of the private citizen. In any meaningful sense, there was no independent private citizen under Fascist Italy or National Socialist Germany.

When Hitler spoke of preserving private property and corporations, it was largely to reassure the German upper classes that they would not meet the fate of their counterparts in Bolshevik Russia.

Those who insist that the Nazis and Fascists were not socialists are usually operating within the Socialist International tradition. They need to disavow fascism in order to present themselves as the “good” socialists, untainted by the “bad” ones. Yet socialism in Russia, China, Vietnam, Cambodia, Iraq, Venezuela, and Cuba has produced outcomes at least as destructive, and often worse, than socialism in Germany and Italy.

Ask yourself why certain socialists are so determined to disavow other socialists. You may find a revealing answer.

I strongly recommend reading contemporaneous or near-contemporaneous histories of the Third Reich. Start with William L. Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Then read Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, which argues that National Socialism is a predictable outcome of centralized economic planning.

There is much more, but that is a solid starting point.

Further Reading

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, William L. Shirer

The Road to Serfdom, Friedrich A. Hayek

The Constitution was ratified by the states as a binding compact. The original 13 states consented through their legislatures. Every state admitted afterward explicitly accepted the same framework. This was never meant to be a temporary or easily discarded agreement.

The Bill of Rights

The Bill of Rights was originally a restraint on the federal government. The 14th Amendment changed that by incorporating most of those protections and making them binding on the states as well.

Yet today we see sustained, deliberate resistance in multiple states to core Bill of Rights protections:

• First Amendment (speech, religion, assembly)

• Second Amendment (the current “assault weapon” cases are only the latest example)

• Fourth, Fifth, and Fourteenth Amendment protections in criminal justice and regulatory contexts

When states treat the Bill of Rights as optional, they are rejecting a central part of the constitutional settlement.

Federal Supremacy and Enumerated Powers

The Constitution allocates certain powers to the federal government and explicitly excludes the states from exercising them. Immigration and border control are among the clearest examples of enumerated federal authority. At the same time, the Ninth and Tenth Amendments reserve all other powers to the people and the states.

This structure is deliberate. If a power is properly federal, a governor’s personal or political dislike does not override it. The state has no more authority to nullify that power than it does to ignore the Bill of Rights. Expressing disagreement is legitimate. Active resistance and nullification are not.

Governance Without Representation

The Framers designed the Senate to give the States direct representation in the federal government. Senators were chosen by state legislatures, not the people at large. This was intentional. It gave the states a powerful institutional voice to protect their sovereignty and check federal overreach.

The 17th Amendment changed that. By making Senators directly elected by the people, it nationalized the Senate and largely severed the states’ formal institutional link to the federal government. State legislatures lost their direct leverage. Today, Senators no longer answer to the State at all. They answer primarily to fundraising, national party interests, and popular vote cycles in their state.

One might almost say the States now face governance without representation — a situation eerily reminiscent of the original colonial grievances against King George and Parliament. Ironically, all that might have been required to prevent the American Revolution was giving the colonies a meaningful voice in Parliament. Consider that in light of the States having no direct representation.

Whether one agrees with them or not, the roughly ten Blue States that are most aggressively resisting federal authority clearly do not feel they have meaningful institutional voices in a federal government that now holds large swathes of power. This situation fuels much of the current tension.

The Legal Foundation of the Constitution

It is worth remembering that the original 13 States had to ratify the Constitution in order for it to binding on them. And then every state admitted after the original 13 was required to formally accept the Constitution as a condition of admission. Through their enabling acts and admission resolutions, which are legal and binding, each new state explicitly consented to the constitutional compact and agreed to be bound by it. This was not a casual formality. It was a positive, binding act. The state legislature and people affirmatively chose to join the Union under the terms set by the Constitution.

The Deeper Problem

The entire point of the Constitution is that certain foundational laws, processes, and protections of individual rights are taken off the table. The government, federal and state, is constrained by those limits. And the municipal governments are bound by the State Constitutions. Every layer of our Federal system has a legally binding structure that they are obligated to.

When those governments overstep, we have peaceful mechanisms — elections, legislation, federalism, the courts, and petition for redress of grievances — to enforce the Constitution.

As President Coolidge observed on the 150th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the genius of the American system was placing certain rights beyond the reach of government. The Constitution is not a grant of unlimited power to majorities or bureaucracies. It is a deliberate restraint — a document in which We the People removed foundational rights and principles from ordinary political control, and the States agreed to this framework.

The real danger we face today is not simply rogue bureaucrats or overreaching federal agencies. It is the growing willingness of states themselves to nullify portions of the Constitution and ignore enumerated federal powers when it suits them. Whether it is the Bill of Rights or clear areas of federal supremacy such as immigration, some states are effectively declaring that parts of the constitutional compact no longer apply to them.

This is far more corrosive than simple policy disagreement. When states, which were parties to the original compact, begin selectively rejecting the Constitution while still claiming its protections and benefits, they undermine the very foundation of the Union. The peaceful mechanisms designed to resolve such disputes are being bypassed. That path leads not to reform, but to constitutional erosion and eventual fracture.

Observations from the Late Republic
#Observations #LateRepublic #Federalism #TheConstitution

Further Reading

• The Federalist Papers (especially Nos. 10, 39, 45, 51, and 62)

• Randy E. Barnett, Restoring the Lost Constitution: The Presumption of Liberty

• Akhil Reed Amar, The Bill of Rights Primer

I received an interesting comment on Thursday’s post about the upcoming Supreme Court cases on “assault weapon” bans. The commenter made a point that deserves a full response:

“It is not ‘government’ that is attacking American freedoms. It is an anti-American sliver of bureaucracy. A parasitic piece of the deep state…”

I understand the frustration with the administrative state. But we have to deal with reality as it exists.

The cases before the Supreme Court — Grant v. Higgins (Connecticut) and Viramontes v. Cook County (Illinois) — were not the work of rogue bureaucrats. They were passed by elected legislatures, county commissions, and city councils, and enforced by the executive branches of those governments. The same is true in California, New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Washington, Delaware, Hawaii, Rhode Island, Illinois, and the District of Columbia.

This is government, state and local, actively infringing on a core constitutional right.

The entire point of the Constitution is that certain foundational laws, processes, and protections of individual rights are taken off the table. The government is constrained by those limits. When it oversteps those bounds, we have peaceful mechanisms to enforce the Constitution. Those mechanisms include elections, legislation, federalism, the courts, and direct petition and redress of grievances.

As President Coolidge observed on the 150th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the genius of the American system was placing certain rights beyond the reach of government. The Constitution is not a grant of unlimited power to majorities or bureaucracies. It is a deliberate restraint. It is a document in which We the People removed foundational rights and principles from ordinary political control and the States agreed to this governing framework.

It is an important point in all of this that each State either ratified the Constitution or agreed to its rules and constraints when they were admitted to the Union. Now, some of the States want to change the deal. But the Constitution has removed that option from them.

Justice Clarence Thomas has made this point powerfully throughout his tenure on the Court. He consistently argues that the Constitution represents a decision by the people to place certain subjects and rights beyond the ordinary reach of majorities and government officials. The Right to Keep and Bear Arms, protected by the Second Amendment, are not suggestions or policy preferences to be balanced away by desire of the government. Rather, they are structural limits on what government is allowed to do, even when majorities want something different.

Calling these actions merely the work of a “sliver of bureaucracy” obscures the truth. We are seeing elected majorities in multiple jurisdictions choosing to override constitutional protections. That is tyranny of the majority, exactly the kind of thing the Bill of Rights was designed to prevent. We must understand what these governments will argue to support violating our rights if we are going to defeat those arguments effectively.

The deep state and unaccountable administrative agencies are real problems. But in these cases, we are also confronting clear exercises of state and local governmental power. We have to name it accurately if we’re going to defend our rights effectively.

The Constitution is the backstop. That’s why these Supreme Court cases matter so much.

Observations from the Late Republic
#Observations #FourthBranch #SecondAmendment #ConstitutionalRights #LateRepublic

Further Reading

• Grant v. Higgins and Viramontes v. Cook County (pending before SCOTUS)

• New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen (2022)

• Federalist No. 10 (Madison on the dangers of faction and majority tyranny)