Earlier this month, the Supreme Court agreed to hear a challenge to a Hawaii gun law that renders concealed carry permits in that state practically useless. While the nation’s highest court appears poised to strike down the law, it nonetheless indicates gun control advocates’ deep misunderstanding of the importance of the right to armed self-defense. In 2022, the Supreme Court struck down restrictions on concealed carry permits that states like Hawaii used to eliminate the right of public carry for most ordinary, law-abiding citizens. In response, Hawaii and several other states passed a series of spiteful measures—including the so-called “Vampire Rule” now before the court—intentionally designed to make as many public places as possible off-limits to gun owners. The name “Vampire Rule” derives from old folklore that a vampire can’t enter a home unless first invited inside by the owner. Historically, the default rule for public carry presumed that lawful gun owners could carry firearms on private property unless the owner expressly prohibited it. Hawaii’s law, however, turns this historical default on its head, essentially treating concealed carry permit holders like vampires. It presumptively bans concealed carry permit holders from carrying firearms on private property—including private property that’s open to the public, such as stores, restaurants, and other businesses—unless the owner affirmatively grants them express permission. While this might not seem like a big deal at first glance, the lower courts that upheld the law freely acknowledged that, regardless of the default rule, most private property owners will decline to post any signs that give or revoke specialized permission. As a practical matter, then, the rule all but ensures that the vast majority of public spaces remain “Second Amendment-free” zones. Indeed, this was the law’s entire goal. In reality, Hawaiians have far more to gain from exercising their Second Amendment rights in public than their politicians are willing to admit. It’s not just that concealed carry permit holders are among the most law-abiding members of society and rarely commit crimes of any nature. It’s that, on the whole, lawful gun owners are incredibly effective at stopping the violence so often committed by unlawful gun owners. Almost every major study—including the most recent report on the subject by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—has found that Americans use their firearms in self-defense between 500,000 and 3 million times annually. In 2021, a professor at the Georgetown McDonough School of Business conducted the most comprehensive study ever on the issue, concluding that roughly 1.6 million defensive gun uses occur in the U.S. every year. For this reason, The Daily Signal publishes a monthly article highlighting some of the previous month’s many news stories on defensive gun use that you may have missed—or that might not have made it to the national spotlight in the first place. (Read accounts from past months and years here.) The examples below represent only a small portion of the news stories on defensive gun use during crimes that we found in September. You can explore more using The Heritage Foundation’s interactive Defensive Gun Use Database. Sept. 2, Decatur, Illinois. Early in the morning, a career criminal (who was out on parole while serving a 10-year prison sentence) entered a storage building, confronted the owner at gunpoint, and fired several rounds at him. The building owner—a concealed carry permit holder—returned fire, wounding the assailant. He then called 911 and successfully detained the injured suspect at gunpoint until police arrived. Sept. 3, Brooksville, Florida. Police say that a woman’s 42-year-old boyfriend began physically attacking her children, kicking in a locked door to continue his assault. The children tried to defend themselves with a curling iron and a kitchen knife before one of them grabbed a family gun and shot the boyfriend. The boyfriend, who was already on probation for federal gun and drug offenses, now faces additional charges for felony child abuse and battery. Sept. 7, Chicago, Illinois. Several armed suspects (including, allegedly, a local teen rapper known for posting gun-filled photos on social media) opened fire on a woman and her teen passenger during an attempted carjacking. Despite being shot twice in the leg, the woman—a concealed carry permit holder—was able to return fire, forcing the suspects to flee.   Sept. 10, Milpitas, California. When a large group of masked individuals rushed into a jewelry store during an attempted smash-and-grab robbery, the store’s legally armed owner fired a single shot that sent them all fleeing. Notably, on the very same day, armed employees at an Oakland pawn shop engaged multiple armed robbers in a gun battle, killing two and wounding three others in self-defense. Sept. 13, Chattanooga, Tennessee. A man who later told police he was “tired of being homeless” attempted to carjack a vehicle from a mother of two young children as she and her father-in-law loaded the kids into the car just outside of a museum. Fortunately, a retired law enforcement officer happened to have made a wrong turn at precisely the right time, saw the carjacking unfold, and intervened. He drew his firearm, forced the suspect out of the driver’s seat, and held him at gunpoint until police arrived. Sept. 18, Ridgeland, South Carolina. Police say that two masked men—one equipped with a large blade described by some sources as a machete—entered a barbershop through a back door meant for employees and began threatening the barbers and customers alike and demanding their money. A legally armed barber drew his pistol and fatally shot the machete-wielding robber. The second suspect fled. The armed barber told reporters that he just did what he “had to do to make sure” he returned home to his wife and children. He explained that this is the “exact reason” we have the right to carry firearms. Sept. 20, Chicago, Illinois. When a woman’s ex-boyfriend showed up at her home threatening to kill her and her children, she called both 911 and a female relative. The relative, a concealed carry permit holder, arrived first, and fatally shot the man after he broke a bedroom window to get inside the home. The man had an extensive criminal history, including 64 arrests and 11 criminal convictions since 2009—many of those for domestic violence offenses. Less than a month before the shooting, he’d been arrested at the same address and charged with domestic battery but granted pretrial release. Sept. 24, Alden, Minnesota. An elderly man fatally shot one of his adult sons in self-defense after the son entered the family property in violation of a restraining order and began assaulting various family members with a metal pipe. Sept. 26, Shelby, North Carolina. Three weeks after robbers stole nearly $86,000 from a small family business, the store’s owner once again found his livelihood threatened when two robbers targeted the store again. This time, however, the owner was armed. He shot one suspect in the ankle and sent both fleeing. Police quickly apprehended the injured suspect, a Honduran national with an active immigration removal order. The store owner’s wife expressed concerns that, if the suspect is merely deported, he’ll just return and continue posing a threat to the community. Sept. 28, Cumberland, Indiana. Police say that a woman fatally shot a man who tried to sexually assault her in her own home. The man began making “unwanted sexual advances” toward her, then followed her and started to assault her as she tried to get away. She managed to grab her gun and shoot the man one time in self-defense. The woman was treated at a hospital for injuries stemming from the assault but is expected to recover. As these examples help demonstrate, lawful gun owners aren’t “vampires” who need to be feared or protected against. Instead, they play an integral role in public safety, capably protecting themselves, their loved ones, and complete strangers from violent crime—just as the Second Amendment intended. The post Defensive Gun Use Proves Armed Citizens Aren’t ‘Vampires’ appeared first on The Daily Signal.

In April 1820, the Brontë family arrived at a modest parsonage in Haworth, Yorkshire. Patrick Brontё was the new curate, coming with his wife Maria, and 6 small children, Maria, Elizabeth, Charlotte, Branwell, Anne and Emily. While beside the open moors, their new home sat right beside the town cemetery, a daily, visceral reminder of the omnipresent death that gripped this overcrowded, industrial township. Yet, from this place of loss and illness, no-one could know that this simple, unassuming household would soon become the crucible for some of the world’s most enduring literature, including Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.  In History Hit’s new documentary, Death in the Parsonage: The Brontës, Dr Madeleine Pelling and Dr Anthony Delaney investigate this extraordinary paradox. They explore the grim reality of life in 19th-century Haworth – where the average age of death rivalled London’s worst slums – and how this family, steeped in tragedy, created such enduring, vibrant art, finding their escape in their wild, gothic imaginations. A life lived with loss Whilst a pretty place today, 200 years ago, Haworth was an industrial town where deadly diseases like cholera and typhus were rife, with tuberculosis (or ‘consumption’) being the most common killer. For the Brontë children, living cheek by jowl with death was their reality. Nevertheless, on the edge of the town, the Brontё sisters could step out of the confines of Haworth. Surrounded by books and periodicals and treated as intellectual equals to their brother, this tightly-knit group of creative, intelligent siblings needed no company but their own.  However, tragedy struck the family early and relentlessly. Little over a year after they arrived, their mother, Maria Brontë, died of cancer. The enduring longing for her, especially among the younger siblings who barely remembered her, is hauntingly captured in Charlotte Brontë’s idealised portrait of her mother – a ghost haunting the parsonage and the pages of their novels, which are full of motherless children yearning for family. The loss intensified when Patrick Brontë sent his daughters to a new clergy daughters’ school at Cowen Bridge, which, unbeknownst to him, was a harrowing experience of harsh discipline and appalling hygiene. The unsanitary conditions led to devastating outbreaks of typhus and tuberculosis, claiming the lives of the two eldest sisters, Maria and Elizabeth, within weeks of each other. Patrick brought his remaining daughters home soon after. Charlotte later immortalised her harrowing time there in ‘Jane Eyre’, describing the school as a place that left her “physically stunted.”  Imagination and rebellion Faced with relentless death, the surviving Brontë children – Charlotte, Branwell, Emily, and Anne – found a powerful escape in their wild, gothic imaginations. Their home was rich with intellectual stimulus, and their father encouraged them to read widely from his private library, treating his daughters as intellectual equals. To fill the void of their lost family members, the siblings created elaborate imaginary worlds, including their ‘Glass Town Confederacy’, ‘Angria’ and ‘Gondal’. In the documentary, Anthony talks to the Principal Curator of the Brontё Parsonage Museum, Ann Dinsdale, and explores the tiny, hand-stitched miniature books they created. Filled with microscopic script for secrecy, they were full of shocking content – murder, dark romance, and immoral heroes – and became the blueprint for their later, world-shaking novels. Ann Dinsdale, Principal Curator of the Brontё Parsonage Museum, being filmed with the Brontё’s miniature hand-stitched books.Image Credit: History Hit The documentary shows how these creative worlds became a vital sanctuary. Their youthful tales, featuring burning beds and murderers driven mad by ghosts, became precursors to the potent gothic sensibility that would define their masterpieces, such as the fire set by Bertha in Jane Eyre. Branwell’s downfall Forced by financial necessity to find careers, historian Juliet Barker explains that the fiercely private sisters viewed education as essential for future independence, knowing they would have no income after their father’s death. While initial work as governesses proved miserable, Charlotte and Emily sought opportunity by traveling to Brussels to improve their teaching skills, hoping to eventually open their own school. However, their time abroad was cut short by the death of their aunt, and the costly venture ultimately failed, forcing them back to the parsonage. While the sisters channelled their passion into their writing, their only brother, Branwell, struggled under the weight of expectation. After failed attempts as an artist and a railway clerk, he found work as a private tutor for the wealthy Robinson family. This job, meant to provide stability, instead led to a consuming and scandalous affair with the family’s mistress. Dismissed and his romantic world shattered, Branwell spiralled into a devastating addiction to opiates and alcohol, which masked the real cause of his decline: consumption. Anthony visits the Brontë Parsonage Museum to see a recreation of Branwell’s chaotic room and a chilling sketch he drew in his final year, showing himself in bed with Death as a skeleton looming over him – a powerful, creative self-prophecy. Branwell died in his father’s arms in September 1848, having declared he had done “nothing either great or good.” The power of the moors Grief over his wife and children galvanised Patrick into action. Taking his role as a minister seriously, he successfully campaigned for an inspection of Haworth by the general board of health which produced the damning Babbage Report. Its shocking findings revealed the horrifying local reality: the average age of death was just 25.8 years old, rivalling London’s worst slums. In the midst of their grief, the remaining sisters found solace in the raw, elemental landscape of the moors. For Emily, walks on the moors with her beloved dog ‘Keeper’ were a potent creative force. She began work on her singular masterpiece, ‘Wuthering Heights’, where the wild, untamed nature of the landscape becomes an active participant in the savage saga of doomed love and vengeance. The moors near HaworthImage Credit: History Hit The landscape was littered with folklore that directly inspired their darkest novels. In the documentary, Madeleine explores local legends of the moors like the Gytrash (a spectral dog or horse that portended misfortune) and the “wailing woman” with folkloric historian Dr Ceri Houlbrook. She explains how such tales were passed down to the Brontës by their family servant, Tabitha Ackroyd. Such stories blurred the line between religion and folklore, reinforcing the gothic sensibility that defined the Brontë’s writing. The Brontë sisters published their visionary novels under male pen-names of Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell. Madeleine speaks to historian and Brontё expert, Dr Claire O’Callaghan to discuss how the Brontё’s imagination shaped their rebellious literature. Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre – quintessential gothic masterpieces – blended dark romance and supernatural elements that immediately shocked Victorian society, yet they were overwhelmingly successful. But just as the world discovered Emily’s genius, she too fell victim to tuberculosis, dying on 19 December 1848 after stubbornly refusing medical aid. Anne followed her sister just months later on 28 May 1849, having spent her final months with her sister Charlotte and friend Ellen Nussey in her beloved Scarborough. Presenter Dr Madeleine Pelling (left) with Director & Producer Laura McMillen (centre) and Shooting Assistant Producer, Shane Smith (right) – on location in Scarborough.Image Credit: History Hit An enduring legacy Charlotte was now left alone, her life becoming, in her words, “a long, terrible dream”. However, as Dr Claire O’Callaghan tells Madeleine, her solitude led her to safeguard her sisters’ legacy, publishing their works and writing their biographies (and collections of poetry in ‘The Literary Remains of Acton and Ellis Bell’) to appease Victorian critics and which would become the foundation of the Brontë myth. Charlotte found a brief moment of unexpected happiness with her marriage to her father’s assistant curate, Arthur Bell Nichols, in June 1854, only to be cut short by illness (likely exacerbated by pregnancy and extreme morning sickness) less than a year later on 31 March 1855, aged 38. As Madeleine points out, while the Brontës’ story is one of relentless tragedy, their enduring legacy lies in the literature they left behind. Their novels – exploring themes of madness, sex, and violence – were rebellious works that pierced the veneer of Victorian politeness. As the documentary concludes, the Brontës were shaped by their unique environment: the close family life, the ambition of their father, the constant presence of death in Haworth – and the wild elemental landscape just outside their door. Their literature is a mirror reflecting the gritty truth of the volatile world they lived in, proving that you cannot have the Brontës without Haworth. Watch Death in the Parsonage: The Brontës to discover how a family steeped in loss created a literary legacy that still speaks to human nature today.

Too Funny: VA Democrats Demand Sears Call for Resignation of Young Republicans, Still Back Jay Jones

The Ultimate Townhall Media Experience Has Arrived

The first-ever detection of this rare form of water in a protoplanetary disk suggests that what we drink might have been around for a very long time.

Fourteen down, over 1.8 million species to go.

Despite its astonishing success, JWST has a flaw that made its observations on some targets borderline unusable, but PhD students have found a solution.

A poem praising Saladin seems to reference a galactic supernova, lighting up the skies for 185 days.

Back in 2023, CNN’s Kaitlin Collins spent the entirety of a televised town hall contradicting and interrupting her guest, then-presidential candidate Donald Trump. By contrast, when Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Bernie Sanders joined Collins for a town hall on Wednesday night (October 15), she repeatedly permitted her guests to launch into talking point-laden stump speeches with no pushback. SUMMARY OF FINDINGS Analysts found Collins interrupted Trump 12.5 times more than Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders. On average, Collins interrupted or attempted to interrupt Trump once every 22 seconds. In total, Democrats were permitted roughly 50% more time to speak. MRC analysts examined the entirety of both CNN town halls hosted by Collins: one featuring Trump on May 10, 2023, and one featuring Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders on October 15, 2025. In 2023, Collins interrupted Trump 113 times — 12.5 times more than she interrupted either liberal guest. The combined speaking time of both Democrat guests in 2025 totaled exactly 60 minutes — almost 50 percent more than Trump’s 41 minutes two years earlier. Across Trump’s 41 minutes, the 113 interruptions average out to 2.75 interruptions per minute, or one every 22 seconds. For the Democrats, Collins’s nine interjections during their full hour of speaking time means they were interrupted only 0.15 times per minute, or once every 6.6 minutes. Trump often continued speaking despite an interjection by Collins, resulting in an average response duration of 37 seconds during his town hall. Democrats, meanwhile, enjoyed an average response duration of 67 seconds at their event.  The final portion of the October 15 town hall perfectly highlighted Collins’s deference to her Democrat guests. When asked by an audience member about national unity, Ocasio-Cortez responded with a three-minute stump speech in which she claimed Senator Sanders had a “tremendous bipartisan record,” touted her work regulating sexually explicit AI, and complained that labeling others as “un-American” was un-American. This was immediately followed by a  two-minute response by Sanders, which included an enthusiastic plug for the Democrats’ upcoming “no kings day” rally. These combined responses amounted to five minutes and 17 seconds of uninterrupted prognosticating. That’s more than one fifth of the total amount of speaking time allotted to Trump back in 2023.

The government is “shut down.”  Media call this a “crisis.” A “crisis (with) no deal in sight,” says Fox News. Reuters says it's a “key risk to US stability.” But when I look around, I see business as usual -- families raise children, workers work, people play music ...  The media act like government is the most important part of life. It isn't. Fortunately, most of life, and the best of life, happens outside government. Yes, we need government. Limited government. Enough to keep us safe. But most of life doesn't depend on what goes through D.C.  Most of life thrives without government, often, despite government. During shutdowns, government tells “nonessential” workers not to come to work. But if they're nonessential, why do we employ them? The shutdown is certainly a problem for the 1.4 million federal employees currently working without pay or furloughed. But they will likely get paid once government's back in business. That's what happened before. The media claim flights are delayed because of Air Traffic Control staffing shortages. CNN writes, “Delays spread to major airports across the country, as the government shutdown impacts travelers.” But many of these delays happen because government runs Air Traffic Control, and government management isn't good.   In other places (airports in Canada, the U.K., Germany, Australia), Air Traffic Control is privately run. A Government Accountability Office report found that private systems lead to fewer delays. Even security screenings work better when they're private. At San Francisco's airport, security lines move faster, and passengers told me, “The screeners are nicer!”  They're nicer and faster because in San Francisco (also Kansas City and some smaller airports), private companies handle security. The TSA even acknowledges that private screeners are better at finding contraband. So why does government do these things?  It shouldn't. Private operators are better because they must compete. Competition makes everybody sharper. Succeed, or you get fired. But government never fires itself. It's why its incompetent government workers stay incompetent. It's also why the Pentagon flunks audits and uses outdated computers. Shutdowns are supposed to show how vital government is. Instead, they show the opposite. Now, some farmers complain that they're not getting government support checks. But why should farmers get taxpayer funding in the first place?  Politicians said it was needed to “save family farms,” but it doesn't. It mostly subsidizes big agribusiness.  Some claim America needs government aid to “guarantee the food supply.” But we don't. Fruit and vegetable growers get nothing from Washington. There's no shortage of tomatoes, peaches or green beans ...  We should take a chainsaw to much of government. Consider government inspections of food. We're told to be glad USDA inspectors are considered “essential” and will stay on the job to keep us safe. But meat is safe not because of bureaucratically mandated inspections but mostly because of competition. Food sellers have a reputation to uphold. If their food poisons us, people won't buy from them.  As a result, today's food producers take more safety measures than government requires. One told me they employ a thousand more safety inspectors than the government demands.  Stories like that rarely get coverage. Politicians, gathered in D.C., are easy to report on. Journalists lazily obsess about them because they’re easy to interview. It’s impossible to cover millions of individuals pursuing our own interests. But it’s we who make America work. Not bureaucrats bickering in D.C.  Media pundits will continue to act as if shutdowns are a crisis, but they’re not.  We’ve “survived” shutdowns before, and we’ll “survive” this one.