According to Gallup’s latest polling, support for a handgun ban has fallen to just 20 percent and support for an “assault weapons” ban has cratered to just 52 percent.

Gun bans were a constant call from both President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris over the last four years.

President Biden often combined the call with dubious factual, legal, and historical arguments.

Jonathan Turley previously wrote about the failure of politicians to acknowledge the limits posed by the Second Amendment and controlling case law. While there are good-faith objections to how the Second Amendment has been interpreted, the current case law makes such bans very difficult to defend.

In 2008, the Supreme Court handed down a landmark ruling in District of Columbia v. Heller, recognizing the Second Amendment as encompassing an individual right to bear arms.

Yet, the 2024 campaign showed a belated recognition that the Administration has failed to galvanize public opinion in support of gun limits and bans.

Harris came under fire during the campaign when she suddenly seemed to embrace one of the very guns that she previously vilified as it became clear that she was too far left from much of the country.

Years ago, Turley wrote that the rise in gun ownership in the United States, including among minority gun owners, was strikingly out of sync with the Democratic talking point.

In 2019, support for an assault weapons ban stood at 61%. It is now barely at a majority.

The drop in support for a handgun ban is notable in that only 33 percent of Democrats support such a ban.

The rise in gun ownership and the drop in polling raise another issue where Democratic candidates seem to be speaking to an increasingly empty room. The gun ownership rates are a problem for the party because most political issues do not involve a large personal investment by citizens. When someone becomes a gun owner, they spend hundreds of dollars on the weapon, ammunition, and other costs. The ban campaigns become more of a personal and financial issue for them.

Harris’s attempt to appeal to gun owners fell flat after years of calling for limits and bans.

The question is whether the party is ready to pivot on this and other issues — and whether it can given its political base.

That 33 percent is the core voting block in primaries even as the rest of the country moves toward the center of the political spectrum.

On Monday the government of Sweden began issuing pamphlets advising its population on how to survive an unexpected disastrous war scenario, at a moment tensions are on edge with Russia, and after weekend reports saying the Biden administration has authorized Ukraine to conduct long-range missile strikes on Russian territory using US-supplied weapon systesm.

Millions of Swedes are receiving the directives, entitled “in case of crisis of war” – which is an updated version of something the Swedish government issued six years ago. But now things are very different, given there is a hot war in Eastern Europe, and given Sweden is NATO’s newest member state. It’s all about being able to survive for a few days or a week, and imagines something like a shock invasion by a foreign hostile power.

The newly updated booklet is said to be twice the size as the one that was issued in the last decade. The other new NATO member, Finland, has also issued its own guidelines to the Finnish population on “preparing for incidents and crisis”. The warnings document how to cope with not just war-time situations where basic services and infrastructure may go offline, but how to survive extreme weather events as well.

According to the BBC, the Swedish pamphlet reflects the new realities of Stockholm having abandoned its historic post-WW2 neutrality: 

For Swedes, the idea of a civil emergency booklet is nothing new. The first edition of “If War Comes” was produced during World War Two and it was updated during the Cold War.

But one message has been moved up from the middle of the booklet: “If Sweden is attacked by another country, we will never give up. All information to the effect that resistance is to cease is false.”

“We live in uncertain times. Armed conflicts are currently being waged in our corner of the world. Terrorism, cyber attacks, and disinformation campaigns are being used to undermine and influence us,” the booklet’s introduction section reads.

“To resist these threats, we must stand united. If Sweden is attacked, everyone must do their part to defend Sweden’s independence — and our democracy. We build resilience every day,” the pamphlet continues. “You are part of Sweden’s overall emergency preparedness.”

The booklet even addresses local collective preparedness, such as citizens banding together to form volunteer defense units, and giving blood, or giving classes on CPR and survival skills.

in the case of Finland, its digital booklet states that the country which shares a border with Russia “has always been prepared for the worst possible threat, war.”

🚨🇸🇪 SWEDEN TELLS CITIZENS TO PREPARE FOR WAR

Sweden is sending 5.2 million “If Crisis or War Comes” pamphlets to households, urging people to stockpile food, water.

The booklet, updated for modern threats, declares, “We will never give up.”

Finland has launched a similar… pic.twitter.com/6COEVILUZ6

— Mario Nawfal (@MarioNawfal) November 18, 2024

Such instructions from Nordic governments, envisioning the worst-case scenarios that could befall the region, have only stepped up since the start of the Ukraine war. 

One 24-year old Finnish student, Melissa Eve Ajosmaki, has told BBC: “Now I feel less worried but I still have the thought at the back of my head on what I should do if there was a war. Especially as I have my family back in Finland.”

Authored by Josiah Lippincott via American Greatness,

Liberals who are in the throes of capitulation and despair after Donald Trump’s crushing electoral and popular vote win can lay blame for their disastrous loss at the feet of one man: Barack Hussein Obama.

Obama built the Trump wave. His failure to live up to the promises of his populist 2008 run has cursed the Democratic Party, probably for a generation. The Washington DC establishment in just two short months is going to get “scholonged” by an angry and vengeful Trump, ready to rain executive hellfire on the bureaucrats and institutions that have spent the last nine years fighting him tooth and nail.

All of this could have been prevented. In 2008, Obama swept into power with a crushing electoral college and popular vote majority. He won Iowa, Florida, Ohio, and North Carolina. He even won Indiana. Democrats swept into power in Congress with a 74-seat lead in the House, nearly 59% of seats, and were gifted with a magical 60-seat filibuster-proof supermajority in the Senate.

This was a generational victory, a sign that voters were fed up with politics as usual and the failures of the GOP and the Washington and Wall Street establishment as such. This victory wasn’t just about electing the first Black president, though that was important: The policies and platform at stake appealed deeply to voters.

It is worth remembering what exactly those policies were.

Obama promised to end the war in Iraq, end the Afghanistan war with honor, help the economy by reducing health care costs (prioritizing “Main Street” over Wall Street), and bring about a new era of racial harmony. Moreover, Obama explicitly eschewed radical leftist politics. He explicitly defended traditional marriage. In his DNC nomination speech, he condemned employers who “undercut American wages by hiring illegal workers.”

Obama ran a campaign on bringing “change” to DC. He made much of his status as a newcomer who lacked the “typical pedigree” of a candidate for the nation’s highest office.

Put another way, Obama won a decisive victory in 2008 by campaigning as a Washington outsider bent on ending foreign wars, boosting the economy by helping ordinary people, and being a moderate on social issues like abortion and gay marriage. Does this message sound familiar? It should.

In broad measure, it is the same formula that brought Donald Trump to power in 2016 and has given him, like Obama, unified control over the executive and legislative branches after a crushing electoral and popular vote win.

Obama’s hubris is the reason the Democratic Party stands here today—powerless in the face of “Orange Hitler.”

Obama did not close Guantanamo Bay, he ended the Iraq War only to get sucked back in, killed Osama Bin Laden but kept troops in Afghanistan, started wars in Libya and Syria, and, most damningly, inflamed racial tensions when he had a chance to calm them.

Far from being a moderate on social issues, Obama was the president whose picks for the Supreme Court rammed gay marriage down Americans throats after it had suffered numerous state-level electoral setbacks, including in California of all places in the very election that brought Obama to power!

Obama’s pledge to reduce health care costs in 2008 did not come with an individual mandate to purchase health insurance. The final bill that snaked its way through Congress and was signed into law did contain such a penalty. Instead of lowering health care costs, Americans watched as their premiums went up.

Instead of fewer foreign wars, we got more. Instead of declaring victory after the death of the mastermind behind 9/11, we got eight more years of war. On every front, Obama didn’t just fail to follow through on his mandate, he actively worked for the opposite outcome.

Obama lacked the strength of character and will to follow through on his promises and to deliver the shake-up in Washington that he promised. He was more concerned with hanging out with celebrities and being cool than facing down his own Party’s bosses to deliver on the promises he made to the American people. Nancy Pelosi, 16 years later, still remains one of the most powerful figures in the Party.

Americans sent a refined, urbane, grassroots college professor to do their bidding in DC. When he failed, they decided to send their message in a language that no one could misunderstand. They sent Trump.

Trump is everything Obama is not: loud, dominating, and brash. There is none of Obama’s snark in his demeanor. And, unlike Obama, Trump has proven durable and faithful. Unlike Obama, Trump has built on his popular vote total with each successive election.

Nothing can stop him: not the GOP leadership class (compare Paul Ryan and Nancy Pelosi’s careers), not the bureaucracy, not the media, not even an assassin’s bullet. Trump is the avenging angel of American populist rage. The post-1945 world order—especially after the fall of the Soviet Union—was supposed to deliver peace and prosperity on an untold scale.

Instead, we’ve gotten more war, more debt, and more of our economy shipped overseas. Americans, even those who are successful, live in a world increasingly pockmarked by obesity, homelessness, crazed radicalism, and a flood of foreigners looking for a hand-out.

This was not what we were promised! Looking back on the last two decades of war in the Middle East, what can anyone say we won in these places? Peace? Stability? The region is as broken and violent as ever. The 9/11 hijackers all came in legally. No one has ever solved that problem or even acknowledged that it existed.

Moreover, the wars never end. Trump is the only president in my lifetime not to get us engaged in any new conflicts, but even he wasn’t able to bring the troops home from Afghanistan in his first term. Biden did, but then immediately hauled the nation back into war in Europe.

We are never allowed to be neutral, never allowed to focus on ourselves, never allowed to rest. Millions of migrants invade our southern border and flood our communities with drugs that kill more than a hundred thousand Americans yearly and not one politician in DC blinks. They care infinitely more about Ukraine’s border than our own. Americans are fed up with this attitude.

Obama’s failures on race were the most striking feature of his presidency and have done the most lasting damage. Race relations have hit an all-time low. Obama could have put a lot of the turmoil to rest, using his position as the first Black president as a way to shore up confidence in our institutions. He could have brought the Civil Rights movement to an end, insisting that our work now was not to gain equality but to preserve the hard and painful work we’d already accomplished. But no. Instead we got George Floyd and the 2020 Summer of Love, in which a dozen major American cities burned because a career criminal died in police custody from an overdose.

And every year, some new cause gets added to the pantheon of aggrieved minorities demanding social justice. First, it was gay marriage; now it is transgenderism. God only knows what will come next. Furries? Polycules? Worse? With each new wave of leftist radicalism has come vicious shrieking from activists aimed at ordinary Americans. The latest cause—the post-COVID explosion of transgenderism—has touched ordinary Americans’ lives in a way that even homosexuality did not.

The LGBT wave has finally hit upon children and teens with its full force. The loss of community and the social upheaval of the COVID period has resulted in a generation of youth particularly susceptible to the promises of transgender identity.

Speaking of COVID, the American medical establishment worked for two whole years to end normal life, destroy free association, and impose draconian measures on the population.

Once the COVID paranoia died down, the regime immediately turned to trying to put the opposition leader into prison for made-up crimes. That all-out media and legal blitz ended with two attempted assassination attempts, one that nearly blew the president’s head off on live television.

The supposedly “apolitical” military, medical, media and legal establishments have shorn themselves of any pretense of neutrality. They have thrown their lot in with the Democratic Party and its most radical wing.

None of this had to happen.

Obama had a golden chance in 2008 to lock in Democratic rule for a generation. All he had to do was follow through. He had to keep his word and he needed to stand up to his own party when they sought to drag him back into their moribund consensus. But Obama chose wealth and respectability over doing the right thing.

He chose to divide the country further instead of rallying it around a new multi-racial coalition dedicated to peace abroad and prosperity at home. Trump has inherited that mantle. Here, in his second term, Trump finally has the full, unquestionable mandate that once rested on Obama’s shoulders.

If he succeeds, the GOP can expect decades of political and cultural dominance. The Trump era will last far beyond Trump’s actual death. There is reason to hope, as well. Trump’s first term and his years in the wilderness have armed him with a better knowledge of DC and a clearer understanding of the qualities and allies he needs to advance his goals.

His slate of cabinet picks is hated by the DC chatterati. This bodes well. Clean house. Go to war. Trump has nothing to lose and everything to gain.

All he needs to do is deliver. He needs to give the voters what he promised them: mass deportations, increased election security, and no new wars. Do those things on Day 1 and the Republicans have 2026 sewn up. Get us out of Ukraine and deliver real economic growth and JD Vance is a lock for 2028. It really is that simple.

Trump has everything he needs. Now all that remains is to act.

It appears Netanyahu’s reported “gift” of a Lebanon ceasefire in the wake of Trump’s election victory is coming to fruition. Reuters and other international outlets are reporting that agreement on a US-proposed ceasefire has been reached.

“Lebanon and Hezbollah have agreed to a U.S. proposal for a ceasefire with Israel with some comments on the content, a top Lebanese official told Reuters on Monday, describing the effort as the most serious yet to end to the fighting.”

A Lebanese source, Ali Hassan Khalil, an aide to Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri, has said “Lebanon had delivered its written response to the U.S. ambassador in Lebanon on Monday, and White House envoy Amos Hochstein was travelling to Beirut to continue talks,” Reuters writes late in the day Monday.

Israel has yet to issue official comment, and much remains to be seen on whether it will actually take effect or hold:

“Lebanon presented its comments on the paper in a positive atmosphere,” Khalil said, declining to give further details. “All the comments that we presented affirm the precise adherence to (U.N.) Resolution 1701 with all its provisions,” he said.

It comes as a bit of a surprise, given how violent the past 24 hours have been on both sides of the border. 

At least five Lebanese were killed Monday due to an Israeli strike on the Zuqaq al-Blat area, with casualty figures expected to increase amid an emergency response. Over 30 were injured in the attack, others remain missing.

On the Israeli side of the war-ravaged border area, Israeli sources are saying a number of Hezbollah missiles scored direct hits on civilian areas:

A woman was killed and at least 17 people were wounded in several rocket barrages fired by Hezbollah on Monday, as the terror group launched more than 100 rockets at northern Israel and one missile at the country’s center throughout the day.

The woman, identified as Safaa Awad, 41, was killed and dozens of others wounded in the evening by a rocket that hit a three-story building in the northern town of Shfar’am after Hezbollah fired five projectiles at the Galilee.

Among the wounded victims were a woman aged 41 and a 4-year-old boy in serious condition, Rambam Hospital in Haifa said.

The medical center said a total of 56 victims were brought for treatment, mostly for acute anxiety. Among the victims were 18 children, the hospital adds.

There was also a major Hezbollah missile strike on Tel Aviv Monday:

⚡️Impact on terrorists in Tel Aviv pic.twitter.com/68GYokrfHG

— War Monitor (@WarMonitors) November 18, 2024

Israeli media has also picked up on the breaking report of the ceasefire deal, also emphasizing there’s been no initial comment from the Israeli government:

Its terms require Hezbollah to have no armed presence in the area between the Lebanese-Israeli border and the Litani River, which runs some 30 kilometers (20 miles) north of the frontier — clauses the terror group violated from the get-go.

Khalil claims the success of the initiative now depended on Israel, saying if Israel did not want a solution, “it could make 100 problems.

Lebanese officials are now saying the ball is in Israel’s court. Currently an Israeli ground offensive is still active, and Beirut has been heavily pummeled by Israel’s aerial offensive, which has also reached into central and northeastern Lebanon of late, especially the Bekaa Valley.

Like with Ukraine, President-elect Trump is pledging to quickly bring to an end wars which have Washington involvement; however, in a phone call last month he told PM Netanyahu to “do what you have to do” against Hezbollah and Hamas.

One career US diplomat in the Middle East region was cited in WaPo as saying “Netanyahu has no loyalty to Biden and will be focused entirely on currying favor with Trump.”