Mike Johnson’s legislative scorecard this week is more than a routine victory lap—it’s a reminder that the House majority is still willing to put hard power behind the rhetoric of peace through strength. The National Defense Authorization Act that cleared the chamber contains the largest real-dollar increase in defense spending in years, and tucked inside are procurement lines for precision munitions, shipbuilding, and munitions replenishment that directly affect the industrial base that keeps America’s rifle, optics, and ammunition makers humming. When the Speaker says “the American people can trust House Republicans to govern,” the 2A community should hear the subtext: a Congress that funds a credible deterrent abroad is less likely to turn its regulatory gaze inward on domestic gun owners.

Former Secretary Pompeo’s warning that Iran is “degraded but not neutralized” lands with particular weight for those who remember the Obama-era JCPOA and the scramble to re-impose sanctions. A regime that still funds proxy militias from Lebanon to the Red Sea is one miscalculation away from another round of regional chaos—chaos that historically drives up the price of imported components and invites new domestic calls for “crisis” gun-control measures. Pompeo’s blunt assessment that religious freedom is still a mirage across much of the Muslim world also underscores why the United States must maintain an unmatched conventional edge; the same ideological currents that suppress Christians and Jews abroad have no trouble finding fellow travelers who would happily import those restrictions here under the banner of “public safety.”

Tony Perkins’ closer—that the decisive battle will be won in America’s pews rather than its hearing rooms—ought to resonate with Second Amendment advocates who have watched decades of cultural erosion precede every legislative setback. Churches that teach the moral legitimacy of self-defense inoculate the next generation against the narrative that the right to keep and bear arms is a grudging concession rather than a God-given duty. If the House can keep delivering defense bills and the pulpits can keep delivering that message, the policy fights in the Senate and the cultural fights in the courts both become winnable.