President-elect Donald Trump is expected to push to relax gun laws when he takes office, but significant changes in the firearms industry began as soon as he was elected – and some put the law of unintended consequences squarely in the cross hairs.

For instance, while Trump’s unapologetic pro-Second Amendment stance may be good for gun owners, it has already dealt a blow to manufacturers, who enjoyed record sales throughout President Obama’s eight years in office. Stocks in companies like Smith & Wesson and Sturm, Ruger & Co. plunged on Nov. 9, and experts say it is because Trump’s election erased fears that guns would become harder to get.

“A lot of people were buying guns simply because they were worried Hillary Clinton’s regulations would make it more costly and more difficult to buy guns, and people are not going to feel quite the need to go out and buy guns now,” Crime Prevention Research Center President John Lott told FoxNews.com. “I think the stock market is a pretty good predictor of what’s going to happen, and the fact that you see drops in stock prices by almost 20 percentage points –I think that’s pretty significant.”

While the government does not publish an official number of gun sales, background checks, a gauge of how many people try to buy guns, skyrocketed under President Obama. In 2008, 12.71 million background checks were conducted, a number on pace to double this year, to set an all-time record. (Read more from “Trump’s Pro-Second Amendment Platform Could End Gun Sales Boom” HERE)

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President-elect Donald Trump requested Congress pass a short-term spending bill to fund the government through March, according to reports.

House Republican members are looking to pass a spending bill, or continuing resolution, that would fund the government through March 31.

A continuing resolution funds government programs short term through appropriations legislation.

“I would say the simple solution for a lot of us here is just look at the [continuing resolution],” Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, told reporters Wednesday at a monthly forum with lawmakers and journalists on Capitol Hill. “Set the [continuing resolution] at the 1040 spending level [$1.040 trillion] … so there’s an opportunity for the new Congress to be seated and the new president to be sworn in and pick it up from there. We know what that path looks like. It’s clean, it’s simple, and it should be doable.”

Senate Republicans have raised concerns over waiting to allocate federal funds for 2017.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., has told reporters he would support a spending bill that would fund the government through September. Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., favors passing a long-term term spending bill now, CQ Budget Tracker’s David Lerman wrote in a Thursday morning email briefing.

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., says those who support a short-term spending bill are “idiots” and “will do great damage to the military and our ability to defend the nation.”

“Whatever the House can pass, we’ll pass over here,” Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn, R-Texas, said.

In a closed-door meeting Thursday, House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., was reported to have been in favor of a short-term spending bill.

“A long-term spending bill is a needless concession to Democrat priorities,” Rachel Bovard, director of policy services at The Heritage Foundation, told The Daily Signal. “It makes absolutely no sense for Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell to waste time cutting a long-term spending deal with a departing president, when Republicans will have unified control of the government in January.”

The now lame-duck Congress must pass a spending bill to keep the government from shutting down.

The government is currently funded until Dec. 9.

“I don’t think anybody expects that [Trump] balance the budget the day he gets here,” Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, told reporters on Wednesday. “So he’s got to have some runway for that.”

The Hill reported on Thursday:

House Appropriations Chairman Hal Rogers, R-Ky., told reporters that Trump was driving factor behind the short-term spending bill—which his committee had largely opposed.

“I would have certainly liked to have finished up our bills,” Rogers told CQ Budget Tracker. “And we were making good progress. But time is running out. And secondly, we thought it important that the new president have input on the spending plans.”

An omnibus spending bill funding the government for longer than a short-term package would be a “mistake,” Heritage’s Bovard wrote in a recent op-ed.

“Furthermore, any long-term bill will limit President-elect Trump’s ability to implement his agenda upon taking office,” Bovard said. “If Republicans are at all strategic, they will pass a short-term bill into early next year, therefore giving themselves and the new president the maximum ability to implement GOP priorities.”

Vice President-elect Mike Pence met with House Republicans Thursday morning on Capitol Hill.

“We’re going to be working with the administration to make America strong, more prosperous, and to do the things that frankly President [Barack] Obama hasn’t been able to do in the last eight years and we’re pretty excited,” Rep. Raúl Labrador, R-Idaho, told reporters Wednesday.

Ryan met with Pence Thursday, both desiring to work “hand-in-glove over the next two months.” (For more from the author of “Trump Wants a Short-Term Spending Package. Will Congress Back Him?” please click HERE)

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A few months back, I wondered aloud here why campus leftists would invite fellow students to bite the heads off fetus cookies. Or what purpose was served by hanging a Jesus dartboard in a dorm. The answer I found was simple. And alarming.

The left in America is engaged in what Catholic philosopher Thomas Molnar called “cultural terrorism.” As someone who survived both a Nazi concentration camp and post-war Stalinist Hungary, Molnar knew whereof he spoke. And the post-election actions of America’s left, from the streets of major cities to the halls of Congress itself, come straight from the radical playbook of Saul Alinsky and his disciples (which included both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton).

Cultural terrorism is designed to work much like the bombs-and-bullets variety, using words and symbols instead. Its objectives, laid out in Molnar’s classic, The Counter-Revolution, are

To shatter the sense of normalcy, peace, and civic order that make it possible to live a middle-class existence in a free society.

To profane the sacred spaces and shatter the pious conventions that hold citizens together by wholesome inertia.

To introduce division, fear, distrust, and ethnic groupthink — whatever it takes to detach people from their natural deference to legitimate, elected authority.

To produce a sense of crisis, in which radical ideologies and rash actions seem no longer off the table, but somehow proportionate and maybe even necessary.

The Worse Things Get, the Better it is!

The Italian Communists used to cooperate with neo-Fascist terrorists planting bombs in the 1970s, under the slogan, “The worse things get, the better it is!” Their theory was that social chaos and widespread killing would lead to a crackdown by the government, which would speed up the coming of a Communist revolution. On a lesser scale (so far) that is where we are today.

I doubt that the average outraged campus snowflake or needlessly frightened black or Latino protestor has any idea of how he is being used, but the leaders behind the unrest across America are self-aware, and politically ruthless — as were the organizers of the Occupy movement. That fact was documented in Occupy Unmasked, which Trump strategist Stephen Bannon helped to make.

When radical activists encourage thousands of ghetto residents to block public roads, and cossetted students to mock and defy police, they are attacking the sense of predictable public order. When protestors gather outside the Trump International Hotel in our nation’s capital holding a sign that says “Rape Melania,” they are asking for a street fight with Trump supporters — or really, any passerby possessed of a sense of decency. The leaders who organize these outrages are hoping that something gets violent and ugly — that an outraged (white) motorist runs somebody down, or a stressed-out cop (of any color) starts shooting civilians. All that would feed into and verify their manufactured emergency, give millions more citizens the false impression that we are approaching martial law.

Never Let a Crisis Go to Waste

If that sounds outrageous and implausible to you, keep in mind the Clintonite mantra “Never let a crisis go to waste.” Remember that Wikileaks revealed the fact that a senior Clinton campaign staffer hoped that mass shooters would turn out to be white Christians. Recall that the riots in 1968 that handed vast cultural power to the radical left in West Germany were started when a policeman shot a student. Decades later, it turned out that the policeman was in fact an East German spy, who probably acted on orders to light the spark for revolution.

What does it mean when the losers in an election announce that the winner is “Not My President”? When reporters give millions of dollars in free publicity to a contemptible fringe figure like white nationalist Richard Spencer, who played no role whatsoever in the election of Donald Trump? (The Communist Party, USA endorsed Hillary Clinton. Had she won, would the media have featured its leader in alarmist photo spreads?) What does it signify when Trump’s newly-elected Vice President cannot even attend a Broadway show without being challenged and humiliated? When the next president’s appointees (such as Steve Bannon and Sen. Jeff Sessions) are subject to a non-stop campaign of lies and vilification as racists and extremists, outside the bounds of decent society and therefore ineligible for office?

Recall that before the election, Hillary Clinton herself discounted half of Trump’s supporters as “deplorables” motivated by hatred. Outraged, out-of-touch elitists cannot accept the fact that their fellow citizens rejected their grab at power — which remember, was supposed to pack the Supreme Court with far-left mandarins who would have taken critical issues, from abortion and gun rights to free campaign speech and religious liberty, out of the hands of the grubby, untrustworthy masses. These privileged “progressives” came so close to attaining that final liquidation of democracy that they could taste it. And now they’re not willing to let it go.

They will go on and on and on, promoting civil disorder and stoking the flames of division, in the hope that something goes horribly, bloodily wrong in some American city. Then they can send out their experts in “healing” and “reconciliation” across the media, and demand that the Trump administration back off on its central policies — which will clearly have proved to be too “radical” and “provocative.” To ease the crisis which they provoked, they will work up bipartisan measures with bland, defeatist establishment Republicans, so both parties can work together to annul the effects of Trump’s historic victory.

For our part, we must stay calm. We must insist in firm but measured tones on the legitimacy of our country’s last democratic election. We must frustrate attempts at character assassination on decent men whom President-elect Trump appoints to office, and wait out this national paroxysm of elitist rage and envy. We must pray that Trump’s supporters, and policemen across America, have the patience and long-suffering to let these arsonists’ fires simply burn themselves out. Then normalcy will return. We must stand firm by principles, insist on justice and order, and turn the other cheek. Do anything else, and the cultural terrorists win. (For more from the author of “The Left’s Post-Trump Win Campaign of Terror” please click HERE)

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Recently, the governments of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras agreed as a bloc to seek support from Mexico in response to the election of President-elect Donald Trump.

This move comes in response to the president-elect’s comments during a “60 Minutes” interview, where he vowed to deport unlawful immigrants with criminal records back to their country of origin.

But such knee-jerk reactions are quite shortsighted.

Rather than viewing Trump’s election as a challenge, these countries should capitalize on this unique opportunity to set the region on a proper course. The new administration’s strong focus on immigration and U.S. national security could potentially benefit them long-term.

Located directly south of Mexico, the Northern Triangle countries of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras are caught in the crosshairs of a dire economic and security crisis.

For many years, Honduras and El Salvador have jostled for the top spot among nations with the highest homicide rates. Violent local and transnational gangs operate with virtual impunity. Drug trafficking runs rampant and has corrupted state institutions that are already fragile.

Guatemala’s 600-mile border with Mexico is a porous haven for drug and human trafficking. High-level corruption within the government, particularly the law enforcement and military, make it virtually impossible to begin addressing these problems.

On the American side, monetary aid to the region has been politicized under the Obama administration. Much like its foreign policy writ large, the administration’s strategy toward Central America has reflected the narrow interests of progressive constituents.

Rather than addressing these countries’ basic security and development challenges, the administration has focused on softer projects like gender issues and climate change.

All the while, security conditions in the region have continued to deteriorate while unlawful migration to the U.S. keeps surging. Mexicans no longer make up the majority of unlawful migrants—these now primarily come from the Northern Triangle countries.

And here again, the Obama administration’s misguided policies have aided the immigration surge.

Consider its response to Honduras’ constitutional crisis in 2009. Instead of supporting the democratic ambitions of a regional partner, the administration declared the lawful deposing of its president to be a “military coup” and responded by suspending critical aid.

Counternarcotic assistance was particularly hit hard, resulting in a further reduction of the country’s already insufficient capacity to combat drug trafficking. Shortly thereafter, a State Department study found that “87 percent of all cocaine smuggling flights departing South America first land in Honduras.”

In addition to America’s porous border and weak immigration laws, these destabilizing factors in Central America play a direct role in incentivizing unlawful migration to the U.S.

As evidenced by various indicators, like the continued flow of unlawful migrants and high homicide rates, the Obama administration’s foreign policy toward Central America has been ineffective.

The doomsday prophecies pushed by the media about the coming Trump administration are baseless. Instead of buying into the hype, the Northern Triangle countries should embrace an administration that is so keenly focused on restoring security to the region. (For more from the author of “Central America Should Not Worry About Trump’s Election” please click HERE)

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