Although the big word on the left is ‘compassion,’ the big agenda on the left is dependency.
– Thomas Sowell
October 30, 2026
The legal possession and carrying of assault weapons in New York City’s crowded public spaces would also force officers to make rapid, highly fraught determinations based on little information about who is likely to be a lawful and peaceful firearm carrier and who intends to use the firearm for criminal harm. To be sure, police officers are tasked everyday with decisions that test the tensions between public safety and constitutional rights. Officers rely on their training, understanding of the law, and best judgment to determine which activities require further investigation and which do not.
But the legalization of assault weapons in New York City would make these encounters even more difficult to navigate. The presence of these weapons in public places would lead to alarm and increased emergency calls, and it would be the rare situation where an officer could discern without intrusive investigation whether the person was carrying the firearm legally. Judging correctly whether an individual carrying an assault weapon means no harm could be the difference between life and death. NYPD officers, committed to following the law and keeping people safe, would regularly be put in a seemingly impossible position. A constitutional doctrine that puts our officers in this bind ignores the reality of policing in a densely populated and pedestrian-focused city like New York.
NYPD officers regularly do not encounter this problem with handgun possession because the City’s licensing regulations allow only concealed carry. See 38 R.C.N.Y. § 5-01(b). Currently, if an officer sees a firearm carried in the open or receives a report of such behavior, there is probable cause to believe that a violation has occurred, permitting the officer to intercede. That certainty would disappear if the carrying of assault weapons became legal because assault weapons can only be carried openly. NYPD officers should not be placed in a position where they are constantly having to determine, with no good options, how to thread the needle between Second Amendment rights and their mission to protect the public from harm.
Finally, the NYPD is aware that organizations representing other law-enforcement entities have filed a brief in support of petitioners, arguing, among other things, that those entities “welcome the help” from citizens armed with assault weapons “in fighting crime” so that the “burden on law enforcement” is eased.22 The NYPD strongly disagrees with this sentiment. In the NYPD’s institutional experience, the job of law enforcement will become much more difficult and dangerous, at least in a densely populated city such as New York, if members of the public are carrying highly powerful and particularly lethal firearms.
Whatever the merits of these amici’s views when it comes to their own jurisdictions, they simply make no sense in a place like New York City. The Second Amendment should pose no barrier to New York City and New York State choosing a different path for protecting our officers and the public.
— New York Police Department amicus brief in Viramontes v. Cook County
BLUF:
The tools have changed. The craftsmanship has evolved. But the American tradition of building firearms predates the Constitution itself, and that history cannot be erased by calling privately manufactured firearms “ghost guns.”
America’s independence depended on private gunsmiths who manufactured, repaired, and improved firearms. That history carries significant implications for today’s fight over privately manufactured firearms and the Second Amendment.
As America celebrates its 250th anniversary, the Department of War is recognizing the gunsmiths who helped secure the nation’s independence. These craftsmen did more than repair broken muskets. They manufactured firearms from raw materials, developed new weapons, and kept American forces armed throughout the Revolutionary War.
In a historical feature published May 29, 2026, the Department of War acknowledged the essential contributions of private gunsmiths who supplied the Continental Army, Navy, Marine Corps, and colonial militias with firearms.
The report highlights an important piece of American history that remains relevant today: Americans were manufacturing their own firearms long before the Second Amendment was ratified. The ability to manufacture, repair, and maintain firearms was not merely a popular pastime. It was essential to colonial life, individual defense, and ultimately the fight for American independence.
That historical tradition carries particular significance as gun-control advocates and government regulators continue targeting privately manufactured firearms, frequently labeling them with the politically charged term “ghost guns.”
Oregon Gun Rights Advocate Pens Legislation to Prevent Another Bend Shooting
The shooting in Bend, Oregon has largely fallen out of the news cycle. That’s hardly surprising. After all, not just are the midterm elections sucking a lot of the oxygen out of the room, but an armed citizen ended the attack, thus making it an incredibly inconvenient incident to continue discussing for the mainstream media.
But we really should talk about it. After all, for the people in Oregon, it’s still news, and Cam noted that anti-gun groups want new gun control legislation while state Democrats aren’t exactly pouncing on the opportunity. Republicans have differing thoughts.
And so does gun rights advocate Derek LeBlanc.
Derek LeBlanc, winner of the “Activist of the Year” award from the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, posted a lengthy message on the ORGOAL website.
“No longer will we tolerate the elites protecting themselves with guns only to leave our children defenseless or without the same level of protection,” he declared.
“I wrote a piece of legislation on Friday, the day after the shooting, that would repeal all of the insane ordinances that have led to the slaughter of one of our most valuable resources, our children. The bill I wrote would modify all of the Oregon Revised Statutes that created potential criminal penalties for the hero in Bend. It would also give civil protections for the defenders. Gone are the days when we will allow the hypocrisy of gun control to continue to put lives at risk. We are the captains now, if you understand the meme.”
On Nov. 3, Oregon will choose either a new governor, or re-elect its current governor, Tina Kotek, who has shown no appreciation toward gun owners or the Second Amendment.
LeBlanc’s lengthy actually challenges his readers to give this some thought.
“So how do we fix this problem, you ask,” he posits. “For one, we end the war on guns. Yes, we can admit some guns are used inappropriately, but in the majority of cases, guns are used for defensive purposes. In fact, the CDC just reported that guns are used defensively up to 3 million times annually, quite often without a shot being fired.”
Trump’s CDC Resurrects ‘Buried’ Data on Armed Self-Defense
Gun control advocates have a bad habit of attempting to rewrite history. Few of their revisionist efforts, however, have been as brazen as their campaign to strong-arm the Biden administration into scrubbing the website of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention of accurate but inconvenient data on defensive gun uses. Now, as the Trump administration restores the agency’s longstanding acknowledgement of basic defensive gun use data, gun control advocates have audaciously declared it a “politically motivated” move to “inflate” defensive gun use numbers.
It’s hilariously bad faith framing, even for them.
For years, the CDC’s website included a small but objective and accurate section providing information on defensive gun use data and related research. It linked to a 2013 report commissioned by the CDC itself, and in a single sentence informed the public that the report “indicates a range 60,000 to 2.5 million defensive gun uses each year.” The CDC only removed this information from the website in 2022 at the behest of gun control advocates, who spent a year in private closed-door meetings with the agency, browbeating it with demands to erase the defensive gun use data for purely and blatantly political reasons. One prominent gun control activist went so far as to attack the data as something that “needs to be killed, buried, dug up, killed again and buried again.”
Their anger is somewhat ironic, given that the CDC’s original online characterization was arguably far more favorable to gun control advocates’ claims than the actual language of the 2013 report. Compared to the one-sentence website summary, for example, the report offered a more robust and positive assessment of the available research, including evidence that defensive gun use effectively decreases the risk of victim injuries. The website also neglected to include the report’s assessment that “defensive use of guns by crime victims is a common occurrence.”
The 2013 report, moreover, strongly downplayed the lower end of the defensive gun use estimate range, asserting that “almost all national survey estimates” actually fall within a range of 500,000 to 2.5 million incidents. It noted that only a few outlier scholars reached “radically lower estimates” of 60,000 to 120,000 times a year, based on a survey that didn’t even specifically ask about defensive gun use. More recent and comprehensive studies have only bolstered the evidence for annual defensive gun use numbers well into the 1-to-2.5 million range.
To celebrate the CDC’s “resurrection” of its buried defensive gun use data, here are some of the defensive gun use stories you probably missed last month (and that gun control advocates love to pretend rarely happen):
The Founders expected the people to have ‘weapons of war’ not just as a right, but as a duty, and anyone who tells you otherwise is ignorant, a liar, or both. – David Codrea
The ‘weapon of war’ argument has backfired on AR-15 bans
The Supreme Court will soon hear arguments in December in Viramontes v. Cook County, a challenge to state and local bans on AR-15 semiautomatic rifles. The challengers say the rifles are “in common use” for lawful purposes such as self-defense. The state governments defending their gun-bans say they are weapons better suited to war than to civilian life.
Neither side recognizes that the Second Amendment’s reference to the “militia” counts in favor of protecting AR-15s either way.
The challengers emphasize self-defense, an individually focused concern, while the governments argue that AR-15s’ military character is a reason to ban them. But AR-15s are the sort of small arms historically suited for a militia. This is actually the heart of the case, as we argued in a friend-of-the-court brief for the Cato Institute.
Small arms that an infantryman would historically have kept and borne are not marginal to the Second Amendment. Rather, they sit at its center. The amendment’s self-professed rationale for protecting the right to keep and bear arms is that a well-regulated militia is necessary to the security of a free state.
Although self-defense is also an important aspect of the right, debates about how useful AR-15s are for that purpose as compared to, say, pistols — or about how useful they are on a modern battlefield versus against a nighttime home intruder — miss the point.
The Second Amendment’s own text says it is protecting an individual right out of a recognition of the militia’s importance. The provision reads: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
The Second Amendment is unique in spelling out both a social purpose and an individual protection. Advocates for gun-control have long argued that the purpose cabins the protection, such that the Second Amendment protects only “the right of the people of each of the several States to maintain a well-regulated militia,” in the words of Justice John Paul Stevens’s dissent from the landmark case District of Columbia v. Heller.
Stevens had a point in taking the amendment’s reference to the militia seriously. But the majority of his colleagues better understood what it means. In an opinion by Justice Antonin Scalia, they observed that historically, the militia referred to “all able-bodied men,” who would be called into duty by the government in emergency situations.
Further, the term “free State” meant “a free polity,” not the specific state governments existing within the United States. The Second Amendment’s Framers deemed an armed population a safeguard for a free society. The militia, writ large, would be “useful in repelling invasions and suppressing insurrections.” It would discourage the establishment of “large standing armies” that could threaten republican liberty. And if need be, a public “trained in arms and organized” would be “better able to resist tyranny.”
This last aim, enabling resistance to tyranny, deserves particular emphasis. The “people’s militia” could fight a tyrant and thus defend freedom. A militia controlled exclusively by the government could not. The Second Amendment guarantees an individual right for more than just individually focused purposes.
It is possible to overread the prefatory clause, and the Heller majority takes care to note that the Second Amendment does not cover dangerous and unusual weapons, nor does it guarantee that the general populace will be able to effectively fight against a modern military. The court also anticipated an objection: If “weapons that are most useful in military service — M-16 rifles and the like — may be banned, then the Second Amendment right is completely detached from the prefatory clause.” The governments in the Viramontes ruling agree.
The historical context of the Second Amendment’s reference to the militia provides the answer. At the time the Bill of Rights was enacted, men were expected to keep small arms suited to infantry service and bear them when summoned for militia duty. They were not expected to lug around artillery, much less to show up at muster with crew-manned weaponry. The AR-15, a readily portable semiautomatic rifle (indeed, this is a major feature distinguishing AR-15s from M-16s, which are capable of fully automatic fire), sits neatly within the class of arms a militia member held historically. Far from being a fatal strike against its constitutional protection, that weighs in its favor.
In deciding Viramontes,the court should decline the invitation to build an ahistorical wall between guns for self-defense that enjoy protection and what some courts call “weapons of war” that lack it.
Matthew Cavedon is the director of the Cato Institute’s Project on Criminal Justice.
Man arrives uninvited at East Side home, gets shot after fight breaks out, SAPD says
Man allegedly attempted to run over 2 people at the home with his vehicle, police say
SAN ANTONIO – San Antonio police are investigating whether a shooting on the East Side was an act of self-defense after a man was hospitalized with a gunshot wound Monday night.
The shooting happened just before 11:30 p.m. near North Onslow and Lamar streets, not far from the Freeman Expo Hall.
According to a San Antonio Police Department preliminary report, the man arrived at a home uninvited and wanted to fight the people there. A fight broke out between them.
The man fled but later returned and allegedly attempted to run over the two people at the home with his vehicle, the report states.
One of the people at the residence, a 21-year-old man, was armed with a handgun and fired multiple rounds at the vehicle, according to SAPD.
The man fled again and was located in the 300 block of Coleman Street. Police at the scene said he crashed into a parked vehicle nearby at the corner of East Carson and Ash Streets, before walking and calling for help.
Police treated the man for his injuries and transported him to the hospital in critical condition, as he reportedly had gunshot wounds to his abdomen and arm.
The two people at the residence were not injured.
At the original location on North Onslow Street, police at the scene said officers detained two people for questioning.
Authorities are working to determine whether the shooting was an act of self-defense or whether charges will be filed, police said.
“The only solution for bad and violent people is good people more skilled in violence”
-Miyamoto Mushashi
October 29, 2026
If you need convincing that the current bunch of gun-grabbers had their intellectual development stop when they hit puberty in middle school, read these first two moron level amicus briefs.
“Not everything can be resolved through kindness, which is why angels carry swords, not flowers”
attributed to C.S. Lewis
October 28, 2026