In my senior year, my parents bought a senior ad that went into the back of our yearbooks. It had a picture of me and a note from Mom and Dad. I've lost the yearbooks over the ages, through several moves, and I don't remember the exact words. I do remember that it started with, "To everything, there is a time and a season for every purpose under Heaven."
My very Christian homeroom teacher, the late Mrs. Maxine Jordan, who taught me three years of typing--one class I use every day--recognized it from Ecclesiastes.
My friend Brett Buckner, a fellow writer, recognized it from a song by The Byrds.
Both were kind of accurate, considering my mother.
But the idea that there is a time for every purpose under Heaven may well be one of the most profound parts of the Bible that doesn't deal directly with our salvation. It's something I tried to remind myself when I lost my mom, and then my father.
"Tom, what the hell, bro? What does this have to do with guns and stuff?" you might ask, which is fair because this got a little longer than I intended.
I mention this because over at America's 1st Freedom, Charles C.W. Cooke touched on it being a particular time, and that triggered everything else. Titled, "Parting Shot: There is a Time to Rejoice," how could it not?
When fighting for your constitutional rights, it can be tough to know when—if ever—to sit back for a moment and favorably review the scene. Decades of hard-won experience teach us that our opponents are still out there, that there is no such thing as a permanent victory and that such complacency inevitably allows the enemies of our freedom to try again. In consequence, we are devotees of the “but,” the “however” and the “for now.”
But, sometimes, one needs to ignore this sensible instinct and just come out and say it. Here, I will do just that: Despite all the challenges that persist, we gun owners are in a much, much better place at the end of 2025 than we were at the beginning of 2025. We have a president who has reoriented the federal government into a strongly pro-Second Amendment position. We have a judiciary that is no longer being filled with judges who wish to read the right to keep and bear arms out of the U.S. Constitution. And we have an electorate that, day by day, is being shown that the gun-control tropes of yesteryear are a frivolous—and even dangerous—distraction.
Within a few months of taking office for the second time, President Donald Trump (R) instructed his attorney general to “examine all orders, regulations, guidance, plans, international agreements and other actions of executive departments” to “assess any ongoing infringements of the Second Amendment rights of our citizens.” At the same time, the assistant attorney general for civil rights at the U.S. Department of Justice confirmed that the right to keep and bear arms is a fundamental civil right.
Cooke is, of course, right. There is reason to celebrate.
No, things aren't as good as they could be. They're not necessarily as good as they should be. I get all that. However, our rights aren't under constant attack by the administration, and while the Department of Justice isn't going to pass any purity tests, the worst-case scenario is that the infringements we have at the end of this four-year term are still fewer than what we started the term with.
Is it everything we hoped for? Maybe not, but in this first year, we've made real gains. We have one more year to keep trying to make them via the legislature, which is where those gains really need to be made in the first place, and then hope Republicans can hold the line in the midterms, which isn't as firm a hope as one might like.
But for now, things are still better than they were a year ago.
There is a time and a season for every purpose under Heaven. Now is, in fact, a time to rejoice at where we've come in a relatively short time.
Next will be a time to fight for everything we haven't achieved.
