Those of us who grew up on westerns (I’m dating myself) carry a picture in our heads of frontier towns: dusty streets, swinging saloon doors, every man with a six-shooter on his hip, and gunfights settling scores at high noon. It’s a romantic picture in its own way, and it’s almost entirely the product of magazine writers from the late 19th and early 20th centuries that were later picked up by Hollywood and serialized TV. But the people who actually lived in these towns knew the truth.

In just 20 minutes, a Florida thunderstorm grew nearly three miles taller. Nine people died, and the coverage focused on a young woman in the cockpit instead of the warming world outside it... A little after noon last Sunday, a Learjet 60 from Texas carrying a family, their nanny, two friends and two pilots was flying across Florida at 35,000 feet on their way to the Bahamas. The co-pilot, Nathalia Filgueiras, radioed Miami Air Traffic Control Center that they had light, clear ice that was manageable with moderate turbulence and asked for permission to climb to 37,000 feet, presumably to get above the storm. About ninety seconds later, she was calling mayday and the pilot was reciting the Lord’s Prayer. The airplane went from 35,000 feet to a crater on the ground in roughly 76 seconds, and on Tuesday NTSB investigators announced they’d found most of the jet’s left elevator — part of the tail assembly that steers the plane — scattered in three pieces across 3.8 miles away from the hole in the ground. The tail had come apart in the air. While I’m not rated to fly jets, I’ve been a licensed pilot since I was 21 years old and one of the first things any flight instructor pounds into your head is that thunderstorms kill airplanes. The most dangerous ones aren’t the fully-formed ones you see on radar from 100 miles away, but the ones that are rapidly building.

The polls may show Democrats ahead, but are they missing the Red state voters who won't be allowed to cast a ballot? It’s Election Day and if you believe the polls both Democrats and democracy itself are heading for a very good night. The final generic ballot averages show Democrats about 9 points ahead, which is the widest margin by which either party has carried a midterm in years. And while I hope those numbers hold up — or even turn out to be conservative — I’m haunted by the last week of October of 2024 when Kamala Harris had a solid 4-point lead over Trump in the national polls but still lost the election by an average of 2.7 points, a spread of almost 7 percent. Fully sixty percent of the 81 national polls taken in the final two weeks before the election had Harris winning big. According to the pundits, there are a zillion “reasons” for the big spread between the polling and the final vote (she also lost the popular vote by about 1.5%) but the biggest variable has never been included in the polling and should be: voter purges by Republican secretaries of state in Red states with large Blue cities.

What’s a “well-regulated militia”? “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” — Second Amendment, ratified on December 15, 1791 . Every argument about gun control and safety in America eventually runs into the thirteen words that open the Second Amendment: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State...”