Most people know Thomas Jefferson was the primary author of the Declaration of Independence. But how many know a year earlier, in 1775, he penned a U.S. Declaration to Bear Arms?

A year prior to Congress' adoption and ratification of the Declaration of Independence, the members were signing a declaration to pick up arms against England. And Jefferson was again the primary author.

Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence when he was only 33 years old, the youngest member of Congress. He penned the Declaration of Arms when he was just 32.

Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) introduced a new resolution in the House on Thursday, calling for the United States to end its military and financial aid to Ukraine as the conflict with Russia approaches the one-year mark.

The "Ukraine Fatigue Resolution," which touts 10 co-sponsors, notes that since the start of the invasion, the U.S. has been Ukraine's top contributor. It says the U.S. has given more than $110 billion in financial, military, an d humanitarian aid. It also said the country had spent more than $27.4 billion in security assistance. "America is in a state of managed decline, and it will exacerbate if we continue to hemorrhage taxpayer dollars toward a foreign war," Gaetz said in a statement.

No sooner had Biden announced his plan for student loan debt forgiveness – $10,000 for non-Pell grant recipients and $20,000 for Pell Grant recipients – the president of the NAACP was complaining that it should be more than twice as much. At least $50,000.

We have a problem here known popularly as the chicken and the egg.

Do we need to pump a lot of tax money into higher education so students can afford to deal with runaway tuition costs? Or do we have runaway tuition costs because we're pumping billions of taxpayer funds into higher education?

The shooters have been male, and unfortunately, we don't know the rationale for their attacks. The common thread is using a high-powered weapon and shooting at innocent, unarmed people. The only good news from the shootings is that most of the gunmen are dead. Unfortunately, one of the themes of news reports and commentary is that the mere possession of a gun is, by its very nature, "bad." While that makes good headlines and grabs at our emotions after a shooting tragedy, the idea that simply having a gun is bad is simply not true. There are times when it is "good" to have a gun handy. There were at least three news stories this week that illustrate that. Unfortunately, those stories did not make the headlines, no doubt because there were no innocent victims. There was a birthday-graduation party in Charleston, West Virginia. The festivities for dozens of people were outside of an apartment complex, and in the midst of the celebration, 37-year-old Dennis Butler showed up. He pulled out his AR-15 style rifle and fired into the crowd. A woman attending the party had a pistol, drew it and fired at Butler, killing him before he fatally injured anyone. In fact, no one at the party was injured.

We know her not by her name, but by her deeds, and those are heroic. She aimed, shot and dispatched to hell one Dennis Butler, a career criminal, who was poised to do mass murder in South Carolina. A birthday-graduation party got too noisy for Butler's liking.

She had a handgun; her opponent an AR15. More crucially, the Lady from Charleston had the male bits and the moral compass that upwards of 19 police officers, hunkered down at the Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, last month – all SWATTED-up and swaddled in Kevlar body armor – were without.

At the same time, the trapped children cried out to 911 as they were being mowed down. These babies screamed for grown men to quit cowering and pondering bureaucratic distinctions – active shooter or barricaded shooter – a distinction without a difference if the barricaded shooter is also holding the kids hostage and picking them off one-by-one.