Hey there! Welcome to Monday, Oct. 19, 2026. Back to the grind, and the grind brought soup.
My calendar says it's Seafood Bisque Day, Kentucky Day, and Evaluate Your Life Day. So grab a bowl of bisque, pour a Kentucky bourbon (Hi, Chris Queen), and take stock of your life choices. In that order, and preferably not on a weekday.
Today in History:
1216: King John of England dies at Newark Castle, barely a year after barons forced him to seal Magna Carta.
1469: Ferdinand of Aragon marries Isabella of Castile in Valladolid and lays the groundwork for a unified Spain.
1745: Satirist Jonathan Swift, author of Gulliver's Travels, dies in Dublin.
1781: Lord Cornwallis surrenders his army to George Washington at Yorktown. Armed citizens win the argument.
1789: John Jay takes the oath as the first chief justice of the Supreme Court.
1812: Napoleon begins his disastrous retreat from Moscow.
1864: Confederate raiders slip down from Canada and rob three banks in St. Albans, Vt., the Civil War's northernmost land action.
1914: German and Allied forces open the First Battle of Ypres in Belgium.
1943: Rutgers graduate student Albert Schatz isolates streptomycin, the first antibiotic effective against tuberculosis.
1950: United Nations forces capture Pyongyang, the North Korean capital.
1960: The Eisenhower administration slaps a trade embargo on nearly all exports to Cuba.
1977: The supersonic Concorde makes its first landing at New York's JFK Airport.
1987: The Dow Jones Industrial Average plunges 508 points, or 22.6%, on Black Monday, the largest one-day percentage drop in its history.
2003: Pope John Paul II beatifies Mother Teresa in Rome.
Birthdays Today include: John Lithgow, actor (3rd Rock from the Sun, Footloose, Conclave); Jeannie C. Riley, country singer ("Harper Valley P.T.A."); Jennifer Holliday, singer/actress (Dreamgirls); Evander Holyfield, boxer; Ty Pennington, TV host (Trading Spaces, Extreme Makeover: Home Edition); Jon Favreau, director (Elf, Iron Man, The Mandalorian); Trey Parker, writer (South Park, The Book of Mormon); Chris Kattan, comedian (Saturday Night Live, A Night at the Roxbury); José Bautista, baseball player; Gillian Jacobs, actress (Community, Love); Rebecca Ferguson, actress (Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation, Dune).
If today's your birthday too, you share it with a heavyweight champ and a Yorktown surrender. Pick which one you'd rather celebrate.
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Let me get one thing out of the way before the hate mail starts: Kaylub Giamanco is a hero. Full stop. Understand that right now before reading further.
Giamanco is the 36-year-old father who grabbed his pistol from his truck, followed a 16-year-old gunman into Silver Rail Elementary School in Bend, Ore., and put him down. Three children and a teacher died before he got there. Nobody knows how many more would have died if he hadn't.
And I want Oregon to charge him for carrying a loaded firearm on school property.
Yeah, I know. “Say what?”
Hear me out, because my reasons aren't what you might expect. What Giamanco did saved lives, and I hold that his actions were justified, both morally and legally. Oregon law even has a name for it: the "choice of evils" defense, which excuses breaking a law to prevent a greater, imminent harm. If a 16-year-old firing a shotgun into a classroom full of special-needs kids doesn't qualify, nothing does. I don't lose a minute of sleep over the idea of a jury convicting him, even in deep-blue Oregon.
Here's the problem, though. Bend-La Pine Schools bans guns on all district property, concealed-carry license holders included. The district passed that ban after the state legislature handed every school district the option in 2021. For a licensed carrier, breaking it is a class A misdemeanor, punishable by up to a year in jail. By the letter of the law the Left wrote, Giamanco should have stayed in the parking lot.
Think about what staying in the parking lot would have meant. Police say the gunman fired roughly 15 rounds inside that classroom. Officers arrived within about three minutes, which is a fine response time by any standard, and still not fast enough. When seconds count, police are minutes away. That isn't a slogan. It's arithmetic.
The district had done everything the safety consultants recommend. Secure vestibules at every entrance. A classroom door-locking system. None of it mattered. According to police, the gunman shot out the glass panes in a set of outside doors and walked in. Locks buy time. They don't end an attack. Two people ended this one. One was a teacher who, according to police, threw her phone at the gunman, tackled him, and fought him for the weapon with her bare hands. The other was a dad with a .40-caliber pistol; the law said he had no business carrying it through that door.
So charge him. Make a Soros-paid prosecutor stand up in open court and argue that a father had a legal duty to wait outside while a teenager with a shotgun worked his way through a classroom. Make the gun-grabbers defend their gun-free zone with the bodies still warm. Put the district's own policy into evidence and read it aloud to the jury. They'd have to admit what we've said all along: the good guy with a gun saved lives, and their law stood in his way. Make the whole thing public on national TV and do it before the election.
They won't, of course. Nobody has announced charges against Giamanco, and nobody will, because the trial would be the best pro-gun ad ever produced. So the Left does the next best thing. It talks around him.
Take Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.), who still harbors presidential ambitions for reasons I can't fathom. Kelly and his wife, Gabby Giffords, posted Thursday that "extremists keep blocking critical, lifesaving laws." Not a word about the lifesaving, law-abiding gun owner who ended the attack. That's about as thin as a statement gets. Because you see, in light of these events, it’s Kelly that’s the extremist, and he knows it.
Kelly has company. Rep. Janelle Bynum (D-Ore.), who represents Bend, flew home and told reporters the laws "don't go far enough, fast enough." Funny thing about that. A law enforcement official told reporters the shotgun belonged to the gunman's mother, who bought it. Oregon already rates among the strictest gun-law states in the country, according to the Giffords Law Center itself. The laws on the books didn't stop a 16-year-old from getting his hands on that shotgun. The only law in this story that worked as written is the one that tried to keep Giamanco out.
One criminologist told PBS that his database covers 26 years and nearly 400 school homicides. This is the first case in it where a civilian shot and stopped the attacker. The left will cite that as proof that armed citizens rarely matter.
I read that stat the other way. Of course it's rare. We've spent three decades making sure the armed citizens are locked outside. What do you expect?
Now let’s add another reason to drop the gun ban law insanity. Look across the Atlantic. Our Catherine Salgado reported yesterday that rioters in Marseille torched Jewish-owned shops and left Muslim-owned ones alone: Report: Marseille Rioters Burned Jewish-Owned Shops, Left Muslim-Owned Ones Untouched.
That isn't a mob losing its head. That's a target list, and a certain blood thirst to go with it. Somebody scouted those streets. Somebody knew which doors to kick in and which to walk past. I've warned for years, along with about half the planet, that Europe is our canary in the coal mine. What happens there arrives here sooner or later.
Related: The Morning Briefing: The Burqafication of France Is Nearly Complete
And when it does, people who plan their attacks will pick the softest targets they can find. Our schools have been softer than a roll of Charmin for years, and the news has said so every time another one gets hit. Does anyone seriously believe the planners haven't picked up on that yet? They'll look for places where they know in advance nobody can shoot back. Places that publish the fact on the district website.
Places like, say, Silver Rail Elementary, for example.
Let's be real, here. A lone, troubled 16-year-old needed less than three minutes to kill four people in that building. Now imagine a team that spent months planning, the way somebody clearly planned Marseille. Then tell me the answer is another sign on the door. Think October 7 attacks only happen in Israel?
So go ahead, gun-grabbers. You bring those charges. I'll bring the popcorn. With the amount of explaining you would have to do, we’d be going through a value bucket of the stuff.
But don't worry. They'll never do it. That kind of courage simply doesn't exist among Democrats.
Thought for the Day: A gun-free zone is a promise only the law-abiding keep.
VIP members: Time for you to do that stuff you do so well.
Take care, gang. I’ll see you here tomorrow.