Month: July 2025
Jonny Kim in a high-altitude pressure suit worn in the WB-57 aircraft, which is capable of flying at altitudes over 60,000 feet. Photo by Norah Moran, courtesy of NASA/Wikimedia Commons.
If there really were an award for the Most Interesting Man in the World, 39-year-old Jonny Kim would be a top contender. He’s a Navy SEAL, a medical doctor, an aviator, and a NASA astronaut. His successes are even more remarkable for all the obstacles he had to overcome to achieve them. As the strongest steel is forged in the hottest fires, Kim was shaped into the extraordinary man he is today by circumstances that would have broken most people.
Jonny Kim, astronaut candidate, in 2017. Photo by Robert Markowitz, courtesy of NASA/Wikimedia Commons.
A Family Tragedy
In Kim’s telling, his uncommon drive is a byproduct of a tragic indicent that occured when he was 16 years old. One night, in February 2002, Kim’s alcoholic father came home drunk and brandishing a gun. According to a version of the story Kim recounted years later on the Jocko Podcast, his father attacked him with pepper spray before proceeding to beat his mother with the pistol. When Kim tried to intervene again, his father struck him in the head with a dumbbell.
Kim recalled that, despite being barely conscious, he pleaded with his father not to kill him and his mother. In a stroke of uncharacteristic mercy, his father ceased his assault, took the gun, and fled the house — or so they thought. When police arrived, they found him barricaded inside the attic. A brief stand-off ensued and the officers shot Kim’s father, wounding him fatally.
In his interview with Jocko Willink, Kim said the events of that night changed him on a fundamental level.
“It became the benchmark for me to do so many more things in my life I never thought possible,” he said. “Standing up to someone who was threatening to kill you — and who you loved the most — liberated me. It taught me I’m not the scared little boy I thought I was. I can do these things. I can be a part of something bigger than myself.”
Jonny Kim and fellow Navy SEAL Kevin Lacz in Ramadi, 2006. Photo courtesy of Reddit.
Navy SEAL
Kim first learned about the Navy SEALs from a childhood friend. Determined to never again feel the fear and helplessness he felt the night his father was killed, Kim was drawn to the SEALs’ rigorous training, the profound sense of camraderie, and the opportunity to protect others. Furthermore, the Navy offered an escape from his tumultuous childhood in Los Angeles.
In 2002, Kim enlisted in the Navy as a hospital corpsman. Upon completing Navy bootcamp, he reported to Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training with BUD/S class 247. After completing the notoriously brutal course, he reported to Navy Special Warfare Group 3, aka SEAL Team Three, in Little Creek, Virginia.
As a SEAL during the early days of the Global War on Terror, Kim saw action on the front lines. He deployed twice to the Middle East. In Iraq, he conducted more than 100 combat missions, including in the insurgent strongholds of Ramadi and Sadr City. Over the course of his two tours, he served as a combat medic, sniper, navigator, and point man. During the fight for Ramadi, he distinguished himself by repeatedly braving enemy fire in order to drag wounded Iraqi allies to safety, receiving a Silver Star.
Jonny Kim was a member of legendary Task Force Bruiser during the Battle of Ramadi. Photo courtesy of Reddit.Medical Doctor
Ultimately, despite all that he endured and accomplished as a SEAL, the experience did not transform Kim in the way he had hoped or expected. Instead of filling him with confidence, it left him angry and bitter. Yet, as far as his future was concerned, it also revealed a path forward.
The deaths of Kim’s teammates weighed heavily on his conscience — particularly the death of his close friend, Ryan Jobe, who was shot in the face during a mission in Ramadi. Kim believes that Jobe may have survived had it not been for a procedure performed by an Army physician that only exacerbated his injuries.
Kim also blamed himself, telling Willink he felt guilty for not doing more to protect his friend. The whole ordeal eventually led him to the realization that being an elite trigger-puller wasn’t his true calling. What he really wanted to do was help others.
“It took years for me to learn to be human again, to let go of that anger, to sublimate all those experiences and all those raw emotions into good,” Kim said on the Jocko Podcast. “I owed it to them to be a positive mark on this world. That’s why I wanted to be a physician.”
Kim left the SEALs in 2009 to pursue a career in emergency medicine. He became a full-time student and graduated from the University of San Diego in 2012. He then attended Harvard Medical School, earning his M.D. in 2016.
Kim conducted his residency at Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham and Women’s Hospital. It was there, while working in the emergency room, that he met and befriended another physician, Scott Parazynski, who would convince Kim to set his professional aspirations even higher — to space.
Jonny Kim receives water survival training at NASA Johnson Space Center’s Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory in 2017. Photo courtesy of NASA/Wikimedia Commons.
Astronaut and Aviator
At Parazynski’s urging, Kim eventually applied to NASA. In 2017, he was one of 12 astronaut candidates selected from a pool of more than 18,300 applicants. Once selected, Kim completed three years of training in robotics, geology, and Russian. In January 2020, he officially became the third former Navy SEAL to become a NASA astronaut.
After joining NASA’s Astronaut Group 22, Kim underwent flight training at Naval Air Station Whiting Field. He graduated in March 2023 with the rare dual-designation of both a Naval aviator and a flight surgeon. Currently, he and 17 other astronauts are training for a moon-landing mission scheduled to take place in 2024.
Mac Caltrider is a senior staff writer for Coffee or Die Magazine. He served in the US Marine Corps and is a former police officer. Caltrider earned his bachelor’s degree in history and now reads anything he can get his hands on. He is also the creator of Pipes & Pages, a site intended to increase readership among enlisted troops. Caltrider spends most of his time reading, writing, and waging a one-man war against premature hair loss.
There is no practical difference between these two firearms. The top weapon is registered under the National Firearms Act. The bottom is an uncontrolled handgun.
Drunk people should never get behind the wheel of a car. Likewise, angry folks should eschew keyboards. Spock, not Kirk, should forever be your role model. The most successful people control their emotions. However, I am going to willingly violate that axiom today. As I settle in behind my trusty MAC, I am absolutely livid.
This is the reason short-barreled weapons need to be removed from the purview of the NFA. The Pistol Stabilizing Brace is on top alongside a conventional M4 buttstock.
Quiet Power
The Senate Parliamentarian is an unelected woman named Elizabeth MacDonough. Ms. MacDonough is 59 years old and a breast cancer survivor. She earned her JD degree from Vermont Law School in 1998. She took her current job in 2012. She was appointed by Nevada Democrat Harry Reid.
The Parliamentarian’s job is to interpret the Standing Rules of the United States Senate. What makes her so important is that the parliamentarian has sole discretion concerning what can and cannot be done under the Senate’s budget reconciliation process. The details of this process stem from something called the Byrd Rule. Subjecting budget legislation to this scrutiny is colloquially referred to as the Byrd Bath.
All the chaos stems from the fact that Left and Right cannot agree on anything at all these days. In the past, everybody acknowledged that Mom, apple pie, and America were awesome.
The philosophical differences between the two political poles were nuanced at best. Nowadays, however, thanks to such hot-button topics as abortion, gun control, trans surgeries for children, and the like, the two sides might as well come from two different planets. That’s fine, except that nothing gets through the US Senate without a 60-vote majority.
That used to be two-thirds. The Founding Fathers, bless their hearts, knew that human beings were rambunctious, emotional, and chaotic. That’s the US House of Representatives in a sentence. Stuff passes the House via a simple majority.
The requirement for a two-thirds majority in the Senate was a safety valve of sorts to ensure that the tyranny of the majority did not unfairly target the little guy. However, the unintended consequence nowadays is that nothing ever gets done. You couldn’t get sixty senators to agree that the sky was blue or that puppies were cute.
The one gleaming exception is the budget reconciliation process. Knowing that nothing as partisan as the budget would ever pass the 60-vote threshold, budget bills move out of the Senate via simple majority.
However, not before Ms. Elizabeth MacDonough gives her seal of approval. Ms. MacDonough, with the stroke of a keyboard, can edit out anything she feels does not comport with the budget process. This is designed to keep our idiot lawmakers from levying a transfer tax on spitballs or replacing the Bald Eagle with the Archaeopteryx as the national bird, all by falsely claiming it was budget-related.
Possession of the bottom semiautomatic rifle is uncontrolled in most places in the US. If unregistered, the top gun will get you ten years in federal prison. That seems pretty stupid to me.
The rifle on top has a 14.5-inch barrel and therefore currently demands registration with the government and a $200 tribute. Everything else is cash and carry.
Erasure Legislation?
Now fast forward to the Year of Our Lord 2025, and Donald J. Trump, the most disruptive person in all of human history, takes his mail at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
Miraculously, language got inserted into the 2025 Budget Reconciliation Act (the Big Beautiful Bill) that rights a grievous historical wrong, removing both sound suppressors and short-barreled weapons from the purview of the NFA. This was going to be American history’s first meaningful pushback against the inexorable juggernaut that has been a century’s worth of gun control. And Elizabeth MacDonough just scribbled it all out.
So, there we are. Forget that the entire issue orbits around a tax statute. That’s the only way they got it passed back in 1934. For the first time in my lifetime, both houses of Congress would have agreed to grant Americans a little bit more firearms freedom. Now that’s gone. Senator Thune and Vice President Vance have the option of either firing or overruling Ms. McDonough, but they won’t. They have bigger fish to fry. American gun owners don’t matter. We never have.
The gun on top has to be registered with the government. The shorter version on bottom does not. It never did make any sense.
Lasting Impacts
This seems a niche issue. However, Randy Weaver’s wife Vicki, his 14-year-old son Sammy, and a Federal Marshal named William Degan all died because Weaver cut the barrel on a shotgun down to 13 inches. Google Ruby Ridge siege if you’d like the details. This is a big deal.
You can walk out of an American gun shop with a handgun that will fit in your jeans pocket. However, cut the barrel on your favorite AR15 back to less than sixteen inches, and that’s a felony good for a $10,000 fine and ten years in the Big House. It’s simply asinine, and we came within one keystroke of finally making that right.
We American gun owners have lost every legislative fight we have ever waged. Every single one. The 1986 Firearms Owners Protection Act sounded great, but that was when Uncle Sam banned machineguns.
If the bill does pass in its current form, it does remove the onerous $200 transfer tax. That is no small thing, and I am sincerely grateful for the legislators who squirreled that bit of prose into the beast.
While all of the superfluous registration requirements still remain, abolishing the transfer tax will open up a fresh new market in used cans and short-barreled guns. It should also supercharge the suppressor industry as a whole. However, it should have been so much better.
I once wore the uniform and was both willing and available to die for this great nation if that was what it took. I love my country.
However, I am profoundly disappointed with my government. What was originally supposed to be of the people, by the people, and for the people simply isn’t any more. Who knows, perhaps in another fifty years we’ll have another shot at it. I will, of course, be dead by then, but at least somebody else will be the Parliamentarian.
Categories
Merica
Categories
Have a Great Independence Day! NSFW
