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On Wednesday, the Supreme Court handed down its long-awaited ruling in Bondi v. Vanderstok, upholding the Biden administration’s 2022 rule that allows the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) to regulate so-called “ghost guns.” But while headlines may frame this as a Second Amendment loss, that’s not the real story here.

The real story is this: the administrative state just scored another narrow, but important, win—and once again, it did so not through an act of Congress, but through bureaucratic interpretation.

Let’s walk through what actually happened. //

This case was a challenge to the ATF’s rule under the Administrative Procedure Act (APA)—a law meant to prevent executive agencies from exceeding their statutory authority. //

This may sound reasonable on paper—especially given concerns over untraceable firearms—but it opens the door to something much more troubling: the broadening of executive power through regulation rather than legislation.

Congress never passed a law banning or regulating ghost guns. Instead, the ATF reinterpreted existing law to give itself that authority. And the Supreme Court just signed off on that approach.

That’s the real concern here. Not the regulation itself, but the process. //

In a blistering dissent, Justice Clarence Thomas warned that the Court was effectively rewriting the statute to allow the executive branch to regulate products Congress never intended to regulate. He pointed out that the Gun Control Act only allows the ATF to regulate certain gun parts, not any part or unfinished frame that might one day become part of a gun.

He also noted that the logic behind the majority’s ruling could eventually be used to justify classifying AR-15 receivers as “machineguns” under the National Firearms Act—an outcome that would have massive legal implications for millions of gun owners nationwide.

One of the distinctives of Christianity is the call to behave otherworldly.

Revenge is a human instinct and something most people would say is a natural right. Christ tells Christians to turn the other cheek and let God take care of vengeance for them. Humanity has no natural impulse to love their neighbor if their neighbor is from a different tribe. Christ says to love your neighbor with no exception—yes, love even that neighbor. The natural order does not call for sacrificial love. Christ does. //

A Christian leader should be able to say, “I screwed up.”

We do not live in Christian times.

We live in pagan times where we behave like Romans. Lawsuits are all the rage. Doubling down on behaviors and attacking the other side, no matter the merit of their argument, is what we do. Our politicians in a post-Christian America, even many of the Christian ones, cannot admit a mistake. It is a sign of worldly weakness. It is likewise a sign of worldly weakness when too many Christians are willing to go along for the ride with the lie because it is easier than accepting that the leader made a mistake.

Christian theology is about mercy and grace. The early Church Fathers embraced the apology, and Christians have long been urged to behave contrary to the spirit of the age—show grace and apologize when you mess up. Ask for forgiveness. Be quick to forgive. And move on.

The pagans will always try to hold the mistake over your head. The pagans will always try to shame you with past sins. The pagans will never show grace. And the pagan does not apologize because paganism sees confession as weakness.

However, Christianity shows that grace and confession make us stronger, and a simple apology from the powerful to the people goes a long way to restoring trust when trust in institutions is needed. Instead, our politicians gaslight us, hoping the faithful repeat their spin. We’ve gone from demands for and respect of others’ pronouns, to demands for a restatement of and acceptance of each other’s lies.

If only we had in leadership on display today the humility to admit a mistake. It is harder to find in politics and the church as the West leaves Christianity behind, not for something new, but for the things that existed before Christ. The old gods are creeping back in from the shadows. And yes, just like turning your cheek, saying “sorry” helps keep them at bay.

Russia does not provide medical assistance at the front to its own soldiers. So, if you get seriously wounded, too bad for you and your family.

I've seen drone videos of such Russian men writhing on the ground in filthy trenches littered with dead bodies. And they end up killing themselves with a rifle or grenade rather than die slowly alone in agony.

The thinking in news media is often that graphically detailed news coverage of such conflicts is too gruesome for viewers or readers back home. Often, they don't even show or describe dead bodies.

We should have provocative discussions about such unofficial censorship that sanitizes the horrors of war. Because that reduces the awful ongoing events basically to an imaginary game far away. Who's going to oppose war — or support it, for that matter — if they never see how bad it really is? I ran into some of this editorial opposition at the end of the Vietnam War. //

While Russian forces are killing Ukrainian men in combat at the front lines (and thousands of civilians in indiscriminate artillery, bombing, and missile attacks on cities), other Russians are kidnapping children from Ukrainian homes behind the front lines. They are simply seizing them from their families — I call that kidnapping — and shipping them off to Russia, never to be seen again.

There, they are punished if they don't speak Russian. The goal is to erase from the minds of these Ukrainian youngsters the national identity that Putin maintains does not exist. Hundreds of thousands of children stolen from their families.

he Democracy Fund lawyers champion Amish clients in the legal battle over ArriveCan tickets.

WELLAND, ONTARIO: The Democracy Fund (TDF) has successfully reopened a number of ArriveCan tickets for five Amish clients. These individuals received tickets in 2021 and 2022 for allegedly failing to complete the ArriveCan app but had not received any notification of court dates or convictions, leading to outstanding fines being sent to collections and, in some cases, liens placed against their family farms. These individuals, due to their faith, avoid modern technology. They do not use any form of electricity and have little to no experience using a telephone, much less navigating an app on a modern smartphone.

TDF recently filed documents with the court seeking to have these tickets reopened. The court has now granted this request, which will allow the clients to receive a Notice of Trial and, eventually, set a trial date.