Especially to new shooters.... you need to be very careful where you get firearms handling advice from. Just because a guy runs some training center doesn't mean he has any clue what he is doing. Learn the 4 rules of gun safety. Memorize them. Make them a part of your lifestyle. I mean that literally.... holding a Windex spray bottle? Practice keeping your finger off the trigger and muzzle awareness. If anything a so called expert tells you seems to conflict with the 4 rules, walk away. Trust your judgement. If someone makes jokes about how to check to ensure the chamber is clear, full stop. Gun safety isn't joke time. It's "your brains get splattered on your ceiling if you screw around" time. Take it seriously. Ignore people who don't. But beyond safety, don't trust any random guy selling shooting training. Research the trainer. Make sure they have credibility with people who know what they are doing. Look for Google reviews mentioning safety issues or ineffective training processes. There are a lot of bad trainers out there. Bad training can be worse than no training. Take your time and find someone reputable.

I struggle with good and evil every day. Constant spiritual battle.

DAY 15 — NATIONAL GUN VIOLENCE AWARENESS MONTH THE ANSWER WAS ALREADY THERE. AUGUST 1, 1966. August 1, 1966. Austin, Texas. The University of Texas. A summer Monday. The kind of day that starts with the full weight of a Texas August already in the air by eight in the morning — the kind of heat that makes everything feel slightly unreal. Students walking across the South Mall. Faculty coming and going. Normal. Entirely ordinary in every way. Charles Whitman climbs to the observation deck of the UT Main Building Tower, 307 feet above the ground. He is 25 years old. He is a former Marine. He is a trained sniper. He has already murdered his wife and his mother. He has brought a footlocker full of weapons and supplies. At 11:48 in the morning, he opens fire. For the next 96 minutes, the University of Texas becomes something America had never seen before on this scale — the first modern mass public shooting. Fourteen people are killed on the campus and surrounding streets. Thirty-one are wounded. Whitman shoots people from a vantage point so elevated that most of the law enforcement arriving on the scene cannot reach him with their service weapons. Pistols. Standard-issue, standard-range pistols — and he is 307 feet up. The math does not work in law enforcement's favor. And then something happens that nobody talks about in the June awareness campaign. The Texans go to their trucks. Private citizens — students, faculty, people from the surrounding neighborhood who heard the shots — retrieved rifles from their vehicles and their homes and took up positions around the tower. Hunting rifles. Civilian firearms. Legally owned, personally acquired, not issued by any government. They returned fire. Officer Ramiro Martinez, who ultimately climbed the tower and killed Whitman alongside Officer Houston McCoy, has spoken in the years since about what the citizen return fire meant in that hallway. A civilian named Allen Crum — 40 years old, a University Co-op employee, not a police officer in any capacity — asked to join the assault, was deputized on the spot by law enforcement, grabbed a rifle, and climbed the tower with the officers. A civilian. With a rifle. Who made the decision himself that he was going to be part of the answer. The citizen fire from below kept Whitman pinned behind the parapet during critical stretches of the assault. He could not aim freely when dozens of people below were shooting back. The attack was less lethal than it could have been because Texans with their own firearms changed the risk calculation in real time — before any policy, before any legislation, before any June awareness ribbon existed. Contemporary accounts from survivors, press photographs, and law enforcement debriefs all document it. People who were there said it plainly. Now here is what I want you to understand about 1966: The assault weapons ban did not exist. Background check laws did not exist in their current form. The entire apparatus of modern gun control — the background checks, the waiting periods, the loophole legislation, the magazine capacity limits — none of it existed. And ordinary Texans with legally-owned rifles contributed to ending a mass casualty attack 59 years ago this summer. The answer was there before anyone asked the question. Before the debate. Before the ribbon. THE DATA THAT BELONGS IN THIS CONVERSATION AND IS NOT IN IT Israel had the same problem America is still debating — and solved it before we started debating it. Up through the early 1970s, Israel faced terrorists who took machine guns into shopping malls, schools, and synagogues and opened fire. That specific type of attack — mass public shooting with automatic weapons in crowded civilian locations — no longer occurs in Israel. The reason is documented in Dr. John Lott's More Guns, Less Crime, citing Israeli criminologist Abraham Tennenbaum's work. In July 1984, in Jerusalem, three terrorists attempted to machine-gun a crowd in a busy public area. They killed one person. Then handgun-carrying Israeli civilians shot them down. The surviving terrorist, presented to the press the next day, said his group had not realized Israeli civilians were armed. They had planned to machine-gun multiple locations, expecting to escape before police or military arrived. One armed civilian population changed the operational calculus of terrorism. Terrorists in Israel shifted to bombs — because armed civilians can stop a shooter. Nobody can stop a bomb once it goes off. The substitution they were forced into is itself the evidence that the armed civilian presence worked. Contrast that with Mumbai, November 2008. India has some of the strictest civilian gun laws in the world. At the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel, while terrorists shot guests systematically, armed police were present — and did not engage. A photographer at the scene described his experience: "There were armed policemen hiding all around the station but none of them did anything." The hotel's security personnel had metal detectors but carried no weapons because Indian gun permitting makes that nearly impossible. The lesson Lott draws from both cases is blunt: law-abiding citizens obey gun control laws. Terrorists do not. Disarming the law-abiding population does not disarm the attacker. It just changes who is standing in the room with a firearm. And here is the data point that should be the center of every gun control conversation and almost never is: Lott's county-level research found that the communities that benefit MOST from right-to-carry laws are high-crime, high-Black-population urban counties. Counties with approximately 37 percent Black populations experienced 11 percent declines in BOTH murder AND aggravated assault after right-to-carry laws passed. Eleven percent. Both categories. The exact communities the gun control lobby claims to be protecting. The political party with a 150-year documented history of disarming Black Americans — from post-Reconstruction statutes to the explicit Congressional testimony that the initial push for federal gun legislation in the 1960s was connected to fear of the Black Panthers carrying firearms openly and legally in California — is still, in June of this year, fighting hardest against the one policy that Lott's data shows benefits those communities most. Duke University Law Professor William Van Alstyne has documented that the urgency behind the Fourteenth Amendment was partly driven by the defenselessness of Black citizens who were denied the right to keep and bear arms by state law. That history does not disappear because it is inconvenient for the June awareness campaign. And then there is this, from the Congressional Record of January 10, 1963, when Congressman A.S. Herlong Jr. of Florida read into the permanent record 45 Communist Goals for America, drawn from Cleon Skousen's The Naked Communist. Goal 29: Discredit the U.S. Constitution as old-fashioned and out of step with modern needs. How many times in the last five years have you heard that the Second Amendment was written for muskets and cannot apply to modern firearms? I was a science teacher before I was anything else. We call that an argument from ignorance when students use it. The Constitution is not a technology document. It is a principle document. The principle — that free people have the right to defend themselves and that government derives its power from the consent of the governed, not the reverse — did not expire with flintlocks. Allen Crum did not climb the UT Tower in 1966 with a flintlock. The three terrorists in Jerusalem in 1984 were not using muskets. Neither was Whitman. Neither was anyone in this series. THE LEGAL FOUNDATION DeShaney v. Winnebago County (1989) and Town of Castle Rock v. Gonzales (2005) confirm what August 1, 1966 demonstrated before the legal precedent existed: the government has no constitutional duty to protect you as an individual. The Austin Police Department responded. They did their jobs under extraordinary circumstances. Ramiro Martinez is a hero. So is Allen Crum — the civilian nobody remembers. The officers could not reach Whitman with their service weapons from the ground. The citizens below with rifles could. Both were necessary. Neither alone was sufficient. That is the actual lesson of 1966. It has never changed. What next — someone is going to tell me that ordinary citizens with rifles cannot contribute meaningfully to stopping a mass casualty event... wait. I just checked the historical record. August 1, 1966. Austin, Texas. Thirty-one people wounded, fourteen killed — and the people below the tower with their own legally-owned firearms kept the number from being higher. That already happened. Fifty-nine years ago. Before any of this debate. Quinn's Law Number One: liberalism always produces the exact opposite of its stated intent. The university campus where citizens with rifles helped end a mass shooting in 1966 is now a gun-free zone. The rate of campus shootings has not gone down since campuses began posting those signs. But what do I know — I am only a medically retired Army combat medic who has studied both the history of armed conflict and the history of what happens to populations that are disarmed, a published textbook author, a science teacher who has been correcting arguments from ignorance professionally for over a decade, and a father of four who knows exactly which lessons from 1966 were learned and which ones were deliberately forgotten. Allen Crum climbed that tower. Say his name too. IF THIS ARTICLE MADE YOU THINK: LIKE it so the algorithm shows it to the people who need to read it. SHARE it — Allen Crum deputized himself and climbed the UT Tower in 1966 and almost nobody knows who he is. Fix that. COMMENT below: The answer to mass public shootings was demonstrated in Austin in 1966, in Jerusalem in 1984, and in fourteen other stories this month. Tell me what the June awareness campaign is actually trying to accomplish. And if you want MORE of this — the data, the history, the science, the stories — JOIN Bski's Classroom or follow me on YouTube. Subscribe to my account. About the cost of a cup of coffee per month. Your support keeps this classroom open, and I promise I will never run out of material as long as the left keeps trying to out-dumb itself. @JoJoFromJerz @GuntherEagleman @catturd2 #MAGA #Veterans #Trump

It’s pretty incredible that Elon now has enough money to personally fund almost 3 and a half miles of Gavin Newsom’s High Speed Rail project

And he still runs circles around you, Ted.

You are kidding me, right?

Hello friends, I am from Belgium. I am visiting America for the first time to see the World Cup. I love your country. I am in Times Square after the basketball game and I see men of all races starting fires and destroying cars. This is amazing. In Europe, only Muslims do this

Elon Musk has enough money now to fix every McDonald's ice cream machine, but he won't because he only thinks of himself.

@RepPressley -- allow me to help you locate a calendar, you absolute Snollygoster. TODAY IS JUNE 13TH. Juneteenth is June 19th. SIX days from now. Six. You scheduled an event, wrote an entire post invoking "Black freedom" and "fascism," and could not manage to get the correct DATE of the holiday literally named after its own date. I genuinely did not think a sitting congresswoman could be this much of a weapons-grade Dalcop -- but here I am, proven wrong again. I may need to add a new unit to my Anatomy curriculum: "The Region of the Brain Responsible for Reading Calendars -- and Why Some Members of Congress Appear to Have Surgically Removed It." Now. Since you apparently slept through the history portion of the celebration you are using for political theater, allow me to assist. Juneteenth marks the day Union soldiers finally delivered overdue news to Galveston, TEXAS -- ONE state -- on June 19, 1865. Slavery did not end that day. Kentucky and Delaware still held enslaved persons LEGALLY after June 19, 1865. The actual, constitutional, nationwide abolition of slavery came with the 13th Amendment, ratified December 6, 1865. Which party passed it? REPUBLICANS. Unanimously. Every single one. Which party opposed it? Built Jim Crow? Wrote the Black Codes? Founded the KKK as their personal paramilitary enforcement arm? And produced Senator Robert Byrd -- a former KKK RECRUITER -- who filibustered the Civil Rights Act of 1964 for FOURTEEN HOURS straight? YOUR party, @RepPressley. Yours. And before the "but the parties switched" script gets read -- Byrd never switched. He died a Democrat in 2010, eulogized by a Democratic president with a smile. There was no switch. They just traded plantations for housing projects, chains for welfare checks, and overseers for social workers. Same architecture of control. Different paperwork. In the 1950s, roughly 80 to 85 percent of Black children were raised in two-parent homes -- the highest rate in America at the time. After the Democrats implemented their Great Society welfare architecture, with its built-in marriage penalties and dependency incentives? Under 30 percent today. That is not systemic racism. That is Quinn's Law Number One operating at full throttle: liberalism always generates the EXACT OPPOSITE of its stated intent. And Quinn's Law Number Six? Facts are the enemy of liberalism. Which probably explains why no one on your team noticed the date was wrong. Speaking of facts -- on January 10, 1963, Congressman Albert Herlong read into the CONGRESSIONAL RECORD a list of 45 Communist Goals for America. Goal Number 40: discredit the family as an institution; encourage promiscuity and easy divorce. ACHIEVED -- and achieved most thoroughly in the very communities your party claims to protect. Goal Number 28: eliminate prayer in schools. Achieved in 1962, one year BEFORE the list was even read aloud. I am not saying your party planned all of this, @RepPressley. I am saying the OUTCOMES are identical to what a deliberate plan would have produced. And your party is still running the play. You want to discuss "authoritarianism and fascism"? Examine your own party's 200-year record before pointing fingers. Because what you are doing -- cycling Black Americans through manufactured grief, racial grievance politics, and government dependency while delivering zero school choice, zero family-formation incentives, and zero actual wealth-building opportunity -- THAT is racist. Not the kind you perform for cameras. The quiet, institutional, vote-farming kind. The kind that shows up six days early to a Juneteenth event and calls it advocacy. A Jobbernowl running interference for a system that has kept the same population subjugated for two centuries, just with updated branding. That is what true satirical mockery in action looks like -- except the joke is not funny for the 40 million Americans your party claims to champion while delivering nothing but dependence. IF you agree: LIKE this post so the algorithm shows it to people who need to read it. SHARE this -- every share counts. COMMENT: Which came first -- the history lesson or the calendar? Tell me. JOIN Bski's Classroom on X or YouTube for more of this. @JoJoFromJerz @catturd2 @GuntherEagleman #MAGA #Veterans But what do I know -- I am only an Anatomy and Physics teacher who can identify June 19th on a standard wall calendar, which apparently places me several intellectual rungs above at least one sitting member of the United States Congress.

This clip of Charles Payne during Obama's second term is really incredible. Well done Charles. In 2010 Obama put the federal government directly in charge of lending money to students. Eliminating private lending made the loans much easier to get, but they were not less expensive. Before Obama took office, outstanding student debt was less than $100 billion. By 2015, outstanding student debt was approximately $800 billion and almost a third of the borrowers were in default. Of course the price of college continued to soar the entire time. This is the best part. Payne predicted that someday the politicians would be promising to forgive student debt as a way to buy votes. He was spot on. There are people like Ro Khanna on this site right now arguing that Elon Musk should be paying down the student debt when it's a problem that politicians created.

It’s pretty fun to watch @SpaceX make me a little side money to be honest. Thanks Elon. 🇺🇸

Elon just created 4,400 millionaires in a single day. 400 of them are now worth over $100 million. These aren't VCs. They're SpaceX employees, and the list includes welders, technicians, and cafeteria staff, because for two decades the company paid every level of the workforce in stock instead of higher salaries. Juan Hernandez immigrated from Mexico and took a $28 an hour contractor welding job in 2015. He says he didn't even know what SpaceX was. The company gave him a $10,000 equity grant and let him buy more shares through payroll deductions. That stake is now worth $880,000. Trevor Hise's parents wanted him to take a stable job at General Electric. He picked SpaceX instead, stayed 12 years, and accumulated over 100,000 shares. At the $135 listing price that's $13.5 million. He's 37 and semiretired. His words: "The magnitude of this has been ridiculous." The most telling detail came before the listing. Over 100 employees quietly banded together and negotiated a group wealth management deal covering up to $5 billion, because none of them had ever needed a wealth manager before. Software IPOs have minted millionaires for 30 years. This is the first one where the money went to the factory floor.

The best post campaign ad ever? Yes.

Elon Musk is about to become a trillionaire If he agreed to pay just 80% of that as a wealth tax to the EU, the EU government could use its efficient operating experience to fund bicycles with solar panels attached to them for over 40 residents of the Netherlands Elon is being selfish by not paying the wealth tax

Success is the sweetest revenge.

There are two types of gun owners. Those that follow the law and those that use firearms to commit crimes. The law-breakers are actually a tiny group. Make laws that focus on the criminals. Maybe much harsher penalties for using a firearm to commit a crime.

A politician calling someone a grifter….

Hey @tim_cook at @Apple, Why does my iPhone autocorrect “Black people,” Hispanic people,” and “Asian people” with capital letters, but leaves “white people” lowercase? Is this a keyboard choice, or did my phone get an advanced degree in grievance studies? Fix it. It’s racist.

Once again, there seems to be some sort of commonality to videos of this sort. But I just can’t quite figure out what it is.