ENDORSED: Judge to lawyers: Please get out of bed and put on a shirt for Zoom court hearings. “And putting on a beach cover-up won’t cover up you’re poolside in a bathing suit. So, please, if you don’t mind, let’s treat court hearings as court hearings, whether Zooming or not.”

NICE: Stuck At Home With Your New Gun? Some Gun Owners Want To Help You Stay Safe.

Jon Ogawa, a sales associate at Grandpa’s Pawn & Gun in Longmont, Colorado, says sales in the past few weeks have been higher than ever.

“More first-timers than, generally, we’ve ever seen before,” Ogawa said. “They’re worried about looters, people breaking in, looking for toilet paper, food, water…”

It’s vital that new gun owners understand what they’re getting into, Ogawa says.

“It’s a little bit concerning because it tends to be uneducation or ignorance that ends up being the reason why people end up getting hurt,” he said. ”It’s important that we all understand the responsibility.”

Ken Constantine, the owner of Elk River Guns in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, described his sales as “skyrocketing.”

“The majority of customers coming in the door in this increase are new customers,” Constantine said. “My guess is that many of these first-time buyers are people who had been thinking about it for a while, on the bubble as to whether or not to spend money, and now they’re coming in because of this virus and they’re nervous. They’re deciding to spend the money on personal protection.”

New gun owners represent an opportunity for the gun rights community, eager both to keep people safe and to add to its ranks.

Not only are firearms a constitutionally protected right, but shooting is fun — and I’ve never met nicer or more generous people than I’ve met at the range.

SOVEREIGNTY RULES:

The great Yale economist Irving Fisher, a towering figure of the early 20th century, has long suffered from an opinion he expressed on the eve of the 1929 stock market crash that stocks had reached ‘a permanently high plateau’. In a similar way, a lot of today’s intelligent and credentialed people came unprepared for what has befallen us. If there is a Fisher-type statement for our own era, it might be the column published in the Financial Times on the day of Trump’s coronavirus speech, in which Robert Armstrong opined that coronavirus ‘is not the result of a flaw in the organization of the world economy, in the way people, goods and money flow across the globe. It is a global crisis, not a crisis of globalization’.

That sentiment has become less and less tenable with each passing day.

Read the whole thing.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Harvard Announces Salary And Hiring Freezes, Discretionary Spending Reductions, Potential Deferral Of Capital Projects, And Leadership Salary Cuts.

HARSH BUT FAIR: A Remedial Explanation Of Federalism For Jonah Goldberg. “It’s unclear whether Goldberg understands this or if he was just trying to be funny, but praising federalism on the one hand and calling out the abuse of power on the other isn’t contradictory, it’s complementary. If I say I like whole milk, and then complain that I hate spoiled milk, I’m not contradicting myself. Sometimes milk goes bad and you have to throw it out.”

AN IDEA SO CRAZY, IT JUST MIGHT WORK: Here’s One Thing Officials Can Do to Make Lockdown Life Better: Stop Being Hypocritical Tyrants.

There are the police officers who thought it was a good idea to pester a little girl shooting baskets alone in a park. She was socially distanced. She was fine. If a game of street 3-on-3 suddenly broke out, well, that’s a different story. But she was alone. So leave her alone. The police later apologized, but they should have just used some common sense and avoided the whole situation. And there are the police officers in Colorado who arrested a dad playing ball with his daughter in a park. Leave people alone or this could start getting ugly. Most Americans support the police, but we don’t support a police state.

There are the officials who decided Easter weekend was a good opportunity to start messing with churches struggling like everyone else to deal with the new reality. California’s Mendocino County is banning church singing on a livestream. How does this help stop the spread of coronavirus? Kentucky’s Democrat governor took to taking down Christians’ license plates for going to church in their cars. How does this help halt the virus from spreading? It doesn’t. It just makes people who are already on edge that much edgier. Elections matter. Remember this in a few years and do better.

Michigan should also do better. It elected the cluelessly tyrannical Gretchen Whitmer as its governor. A few weeks ago Whitmer was a rising Democrat star. Now, she’s a petty thug who’s in over her head (which doesn’t rule her out of still being a rising Democrat star). She’s awful. She has gone on a power trip worthy of Blofeld, the nutty Bond villain who built a fortress in a volcano and fed his underlings to piranhas. . . .

It’s very hard on free people who are used to being able to do what they want when they want, who had a job one day and thanks to a government decree they don’t have a job the next day. They didn’t ask for any of this, nor did they cause it. When we see Chicago’s mayor ban haircuts, and then get one herself because she’s privileged and you’re not and she imposes a curfew on others for no evident reason, and when we see a Texas county judge apparently violate his own stay at home order, it sends the entirely wrong signal in a republic where the people are supposed to be the government.

It also hints at something a whole lot darker that our dear leaders had better not let fester. And the best thing they can do to prevent that is to stop acting like petty little tyrants.

I’m not saying that these people should be horswhipped naked through the streets. Yet. But examples need to be made, and I don’t just mean half-assed after-the-fact apologies.

GOOD: Trump DOJ Steps Up to Defend Christians Fined $500 for Drive-In Church Service.

WHO GETS THE BLAME IF CORONAVIRUS LOCKDOWN WAS MASSIVE OVERREACTION? Good question and one that day-by-day becomes more relevant.

TO BE FAIR, MOST PROFESSORS WEREN’T PREPARED FOR THIS AND ARE WINGING IT:  Many College Students Unimpressed With Online Classes.

ANYONE ORGANIZING ONE OF THESE FOR COLORADO? BECAUSE IT’S TIME:  Operation Gridlock: In-Vehicle Protest To Jam Lansing (MI) Protesting Gov. Whitmer’s Insane ‘Stay-At-Home’ Overreach.

AND THEN THERE’S THIS. THIS IS GOING TO MAKE IT HARD FOR ME TO SLEEP AT NIGHT:  First Amendment Fail — Raleigh Police: “Protesting is a non-essential activity”.

WHEN THE NUMBERS ARE COOKED NOBODY KNOWS ANYTHING:  A Quick COVID Research Roundup.

IN THE MIDDLE OF ALL THIS, I GOT 15 MINUTES OF FAME. AS USUAL THESE COME WHEN I’M DOING DISHES, OR SOMETHING EQUALLY GLAMOROUS:  On Losing Respectability.

NOT AS DEPRESSING AS MINE, BUT CLOSE ENOUGH:  Random thoughts about the current American condition.

THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU GIVE STATES AND HOSPITALS INCENTIVE FOR FUDGING THE NUMBERS BY HAVING THE FEDS PAY FOR WINNIE THE FLU CASES:  Literally no one has any idea how many people COVID-19 has killed.

AS DO THE REST OF US:  Tucker Carlson asks an important question about the shutdown’s end.

DUH:  Why Is New York Hardest Hit?

COMMIES GOT TO COMMIE:  Ralph Northam Shoves Virginia To The Left.

YOU MEAN, THEY WEREN’T BEFORE?  Media Burned By Own Words, CNN Goes Full TDS.

OKAY, GUYS, BUT AS ANYONE WHO HAS EVER STUDIED THIS STUFF KNOWS, (YES, I HAVE BECAUSE I CATCH EVERYTHING) WITH A RESPIRATORY VIRUS YOU NEED HERD IMMUNITY. NOTHING ELSE WILL WORK:  COVID cases trending down, states without lockdowns do better.

And the way to get herd immunity is to concentrate on keeping the at-risk from catching it, while letting as many of the non-at-risk as possible catch it and get over it, so that this will protect the at-risk.

What we’re doing instead, besides violating the basic rights of Americans and destroying the economy and giving us famine (bet you! I know what happens when the government declares who can and can’t work. There’s always missed steps and slips in the distribution, and sooner or later famine.) as a second order effect, is also bloody stupid from an immunological perspective. Quite possibly the stupidest thing we could do short of shooting everyone through the head, because that would save them.

SIGNS OF LIFE:  Southeast Kansas town backs off cruise night ban.

BUT DID YOU DIE THOUGH? Chloroquine gave Rita Wilson, Tom Hanks ‘extreme’ side effects. Every TV drug ad has a sad litany of side effects, but somehow these are the ones that matter.

STANDING UP FOR BALLOT INTEGRITY: Kentucky lawmakers override veto of voter ID measure. “Republican lawmakers in Kentucky swept aside the Democratic governor’s veto of a bill to require the state’s residents to show a government-issued photo ID in order to vote. Votes to override Gov. Andy Beshear’s veto easily cleared the GOP-led Senate and House as lawmakers reconvened Tuesday for a wrap-up session amid the coronavirus outbreak.”

But why is the ACLU standing with voter fraud?

DON SURBER: Explaining America to the NYT.