(Daily Signal)—Donald Trump by all accounts survived another assassination attempt earlier this month when Secret Service agents engaged a rifle-wielding man lying in wait in bushes adjoining a hole at his private golf club in West Palm Beach, Florida, where the former president was playing.
As is so often the case after high-profile incidents involving the criminal misuse of firearms, a lot of gun control activists immediately took to the internet with their “hot takes,” declining to wait for correct information to come to light or to analyze whether their initial gut feelings had any relationship to reality.
And, as usual, many of these immediate hot takes really missed the mark. Here are three of the most common assertions erroneously made in the days following the second known attempt to assassinate Trump.
1. This happened because of “weak” gun laws.
Right on cue, many major gun control organizations insinuated that “weak gun laws” were to blame not only for the assassination attempt but basically for all social ills.
As with the first assassination attempt on Trump, these groups made no effort to explain which of their much-touted “stronger” gun laws, specifically, would’ve prevented this individual from committing this specific criminal act, or how.
Since he is 58 years old, the second gunman’s actions certainly wouldn’t have been hindered by age-based restrictions on gun sales.
Nor was the gunman’s attempt to kill Trump facilitated by Florida’s recent change to its permitless public carry law, which (to the chagrin of gun control activists hoping to place as many barriers as possible between ordinary Americans and their rights) authorizes all non-prohibited adults to carry concealed handguns in public after first obtaining special licenses.
Not only was the gunman a convicted felon who couldn’t lawfully possess any firearm, much less carry one in public, but Florida law continues to prohibit the open carrying of long guns in public places.
Moreover, no reasonable person believes that a highly motivated criminal willing to commit premeditated murder with an illegally possessed rifle would have been dissuaded from doing so just because of public carry restrictions.
Moreover, as with the first gunman who attempted to assassinate Trump (at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania), there’s no evidence that Florida’s supposedly lax public carry laws confused Trump’s security detail or led it initially to downplay the severity of the threat posed by a rifle-wielding man setting up a sniper’s nest several hundred yards from a former president and current presidential candidate.
Looking at the standard “wish list” of laws supported by gun control activists, the only proposal that might plausibly come into play is their desire to eliminate private intrastate gun sales—i.e., “universal background checks.” For several reasons, however, it seems unlikely that a federal version of that law would have mattered.
It’s not yet clear precisely when or how the gunman in Florida got his rifle. But since he’d been a prohibited person for more than two decades, we can safely assume he didn’t buy it from a licensed seller within the past 20 years.
Several other possibilities remain. He may have lawfully purchased the rifle prior to becoming a prohibited person and illegally retained possession of it. That would hardly be surprising, as even states such as California—with their universal gun registration laws—struggle to confiscate guns from tens of thousands of prohibited persons whom officials know failed to surrender their previously lawfully possessed guns.
In theory, the gunman also could have purchased the rifle via a private intrastate sale by an unlicensed seller who acted in good faith, not knowing the buyer’s status as a prohibited person.
Such a sale still would have been completely illegal on the gunman’s part. It also would mean that he most likely kept the rifle stored somewhere (or with someone) in North Carolina after moving to Hawaii. Taking it back-and-forth from one of the nation’s most restrictive gun states would’ve required him to formally declare the rifle with an airline, an incredibly high-risk move for a convicted felon.
To be even quasi-legal, such a private gun sale also must have occurred prior to 2018, when the gunman moved to a state that effectively bans private sales.
In fact, if the gunman took possession of the rifle within the past six years, it by definition was through an illegal sale. No, he couldn’t just bypass Hawaii’s de facto prohibition on private sales by buying a gun in another state—at least not legally. Interstate sales must be conducted by licensed sellers, who are legally obligated to conduct background checks and ensure a sale complies with all laws of the buyer’s state of residency.
Most likely, however, the gunman either bought the rifle “off the street” in an illicit, black-market transaction with a seller who knew or didn’t care whether he was a prohibited person or he obtained it through an illegal straw purchaser.
Authorities said the serial number on the gunman’s rifle had been obliterated, an illegal technique commonly employed by black-market dealers and straw purchasers because it significantly hinders the ability of law enforcement to trace the weapon back to its last transaction through a federal firearms licensee—and thereby potentially work out a chain of custody that could incriminate the dealer or straw purchaser.
Finally, even if the gunman got his rifle through an otherwise lawful private sale, it’s quite the stretch to suggest that he could not just as easily have gotten it the same way as the vast majority of criminals—illegal black-market sales by people lacking any motivation or incentive to abide by federal gun sale laws.
2. The gunman used an “assault-style” AK-47 rifle.
Perhaps one of the most commonly repeated gun control talking points is that the gunman in Florida used an “assault weapon,” allegedly demonstrating why we should ban these firearms.
To be fair, this seems to stem from the fact that many major media outlets repeatedly have mischaracterized the gunman’s SKS rifle as an “AK-47” or “AK-style” gun, likely due to ignorance.
Based on photos released by law enforcement and other official documents, the rifle at issue seems to be a semiautomatic SKS platform that’s been mildly “sporterized” from its original World War II-era design. The most notable modifications were replacing the straight stock with what appears to be an Anschutz grip and substituting the internal box magazine for a detachable one.
The differences between an SKS platform and AK platform are more than just technical specifics or mere semantics.
For purposes of the “assault weapons” debate, the differences are inherently legal.
Typically, the statutory distinction between a prohibited “assault weapon” and its “non-assault counterpart” is the presence of one or more specific “military-style” features, such as a collapsing stock, barrel shroud, pistol grip, or vertical foregrip. Although an AK platform utilizes a pistol grip (rendering it, for statutory and “visual” purposes, an “assault weapon”), the gunman’s SKS-platform bears none of these prohibited features.
To the extent the rifle qualifies as an “assault weapon” under any current state law, it’s only because some states (such as California and Illinois) also prohibit hundreds of specific semiautomatic rifle models for seemingly arbitrary reasons, regardless of whether they otherwise meet the quasi-objective “feature-based” definition.
Even in those states, the SKS is considered a perfectly lawful “nonassault” weapon as long as it utilizes a “fixed magazine” instead of a detachable one, even though internal box magazines may be reloaded with stripper clips just as easily as empty detachable magazines may be replaced with fully loaded ones.
Not that any of these distinctions are relevant in the context of rendering the rifle “less lethal” or less capable of being used to kill at a distance. Consider that the bolt-action rifle used to kill President John F. Kennedy ironically would not be considered a “military-style” assault weapon by modern gun control activists despite having been literally designed for and used by the Italian army.
3. Blame Trump—he’s the one who made it easier for crazy people to get guns.
As just one example, in a viral post on X one major left-leaning account reasoned: “Here’s irony for you. Trump ended laws preventing the mentally ill from owning guns. This is the second attempt where a mentally ill person with a gun tried to assassinate him.”
You’ll be shocked, I’m sure, to learn that none of this is true.
First, Trump never “ended laws preventing the mentally ill from owning guns.” Presumably, this poster and others are referring to Trump’s role in rescinding a highly controversial, Obama-era administrative rule promulgated by the Social Security Administration.
That rule, which went into effect just days before Trump took office in 2017, required the agency to report to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System as “prohibited persons” anyone using a representative payee to help manage disability benefits.
As a result, an estimated 75,000 Americans would be stripped of their Second Amendment rights without the slightest bit of due process—no hearings, no individual medical assessments declaring them dangerous, and no opportunity for rebuttal. Worse, at the time these individuals requested or were assigned representative payees, none of them had any reason to believe the decision would dramatically affect their right to keep and bear arms.
The Obama administration rule was staunchly opposed not just by pro-gun groups, but by dozens of national organizations that traditionally have supported greater restrictions on the exercise of Second Amendment rights. The American Civil Liberties Union, for example, denounced the rule as lacking any basis in reliable evidence or solid data, particularly with respect to whether those whose rights were stripped had any increased propensity toward violence.
As president, Trump didn’t unilaterally rescind the rule, which he doubtless could have done. Instead, he signed legislation passed by Congress with bipartisan support that prohibited the Social Security Administration from reporting recipients to the background check system as mentally unfit merely because they had a representative payee.
The unpopular and unconstitutional nature of the rule notwithstanding, there’s absolutely no evidence that either gunman accused of trying to assassinate Trump ever received disability payments, much less required a representative payee to manage those benefits such that the rule plausibly would have resulted in their being reported to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, or NICS.
To the extent there’s any irony to these viral claims, it’s not based either on the gunman’s mental state or Trump’s role in overriding a controversial administrative rule with limited reach. No, the irony is that the second suspected gunman is a convicted felon whose name was already on the NICS list of prohibited persons when the Obama-era rule took effect, and he remained a prohibited person even after Congress overrode it.
In conclusion, there’s truly nothing new under the sun when it comes to gun control activists in the wake of concerning national headlines. They’ll say just about anything to cast the blame on lawful gun owners and insist that our rights be restricted further, regardless of how little capacity their laws actually have to render us all safer.
Their proposed laws certainly wouldn’t have made a difference for Donald Trump.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
