Weapons are the means to Liberty
Your Freedoms are not secured by God, a document, or by the bravery of your forefathers.
They are secured because people fear that should they try to take them from you, you will fight back with weapons.
Category: Rights
Gun Owners Have a Lot to Be Worried About With Cameras, AI, and Gun Rights
George Orwell’s 1984 was a warning, not an instruction manual. It was based on the very real concern of a government becoming a totalitarian surveillance state where all the people did was observed, recorded, and scrutinized for any sign of WrongThink. It was a terrifying glimpse into Orwell’s fears should his own preferred ideology of socialism take hold and go too far, but it wasn’t just about socialism, either. It was what the state could do when no one stopped it.
And while we’ve often invoked the imagery of Big Brother to make a point about surveillance overreach, things are scarier now than ever before…and gun owners are especially concerned.
Manufacturers of AI software that uses surveillance cameras to search for guns say it makes people safer, but some gun rights activists told Cowboy State Daily they think that’s a brazen violation of Second Amendment and privacy rights.
Companies such as Volt for years has provided gun-detection software to schools, which the company claims helps stop school shootings.
The city of Hobbs, New Mexico, has outfitted about 70 video cameras with software from another company, ZeroEyes.
ZeroEyes claims that the software helps cameras quickly detect drawn firearms, which are then verified at company facilities by human observers, who can alert local authorities.
Gun-detecting AI software doesn’t require dedicated cameras, it can be applied to existing surveillance, traffic and web cameras.
What Difference Would It Make?
Firearms enthusiast Nic George of Sheridan told Cowboy State Daily that he understands the good intentions behind the software, but the broader implications of what gun surveillance might lead to are troubling.
“Right now, it might not be a problem. But what’s the next step?” he said.
As things stand, programs like ZeroEyes raise murky questions when it comes to gun rights, George said.
Now, this particular piece goes on to suggest one potential problem would be someone being charged with brandishing because they pulled their gun in a legitimate self-defense situation, but the camera doesn’t see the other person’s weapon. It’s a fair concern, but I have bigger worries.
Earlier this week, Cam wrote about some concerns regarding the controversial Flock cameras. Thanks to an add-on to the system, your neighborhood Flock cameras can potentially detect all of your electronic devices, such as cell phones, Bluetooth-enabled earbuds, smart watches, etc.
And yeah, the RFID tag on your gun that the dealer forgot to remove.
Still, even without that, these are still cameras. If a system like ZeroEyes can be installed on Flock cameras, imagine you go for a walk, only to have the cameras detect you and that you’re armed. They follow you as you walk around the block, stop to chat with the neighbors, pet the dog from down the street that always wags its tail at you, then circle back home.
Congratulations, you’ve just shown them that you do have a gun in your home, that you carry it, and they may well know every electronic device in your home, which the authorities could then use to spy on you.
I’m not saying that this will happen, mind you, only that I’m not seeing a lot of reasons why it can’t, and that worries me. The fact that AI gun detection software has a track record of not being able to tell the difference between a gun and a bag of chips doesn’t make me feel any better.
Maybe I’m being paranoid, but just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean people aren’t out to get you, and while I know that the ATF probably has a lot of ways to determine who has a gun and who doesn’t, that doesn’t mean I have to allow them to make it easier for them, state authorities, or the local cops.
Supreme Court Ducks the 1791 vs. 1868 Second Amendment Fight—Again
“The United States Supreme Court has now refused again to decide this big fight between when you interpret the Second Amendment, whether it’s the year of our Lord 1791 when it was written, or is it 1868 after the Civil War, with the adoption of the 14th Amendment,” constitutional attorney and host of The Four Boxes Diner Mark W. Smith informed his followers Monday. “After the Civil War, there were three constitutional amendments that were adopted to basically expand the Bill of Rights … to all Americans, not just as applied against the federal government, preventing the federal government from stopping you from exercising these rights, but also making sure that states and local governments could no longer impact or infringe on your rights as well.”
The technical holdup is essentially one of emphasizing due process and ignoring privileges and immunities, which to a layperson seems a bit like arguing how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Legal precedents aside, there’s a more basic argument: The Constitution and Bill of Rights were ratified based on the understanding of the people and their representatives with debates based on arguments posited in the Federalist and Anti-Federalist essays. There has never been a magic crystal ball that allows decisions to be based on what will happen in the future.
And while it’s inarguable that the Fourteenth Amendment mandates “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws,” another basic question needs to be explored:
Would the Framers have thought it necessary?
“The Founders Intended for the Bill of Rights to Apply to the States,” Second Amendment writer Brian Puckett concluded back in 2001. “[I]f we set aside any Supreme Court decisions relating to that matter, we are left with the writings of the Founders and – most important of all – the actual legal document they produced, the Constitution and its first ten Articles of Amendment.”
“Who is this guy and what are his legal qualifications to make such an assertion?” seems a legitimate question only if one ignores the arguments he makes and the questions he raises, which then makes such a challenge ad hominem, that is, a logical fallacy. What has to be refuted and dismissed are his assertions, not the man, and he offers some that naysayers need to refute, if they can.
Proof of this understanding is contained in a passage from William Rawle. In his book View of the Constitution, published in 1829, Rawle wrote about the Second Amendment: “No clause in the Constitution could by any rule of construction be conceived to give the Congress a power to disarm the people. Such a flagitious attempt could only be made under a general pretence by a state legislature. But if in any pursuit of an inordinate power either should attempt it, this amendment may be appealed to as a restraint on both.” [emphasis added].
In other words, Rawle says that the Second Amendment may be used as a legal argument to quash an attempt by either Congress or a state legislature to disarm the people.
It cannot be any clearer that Rawle – a contemporary of the Founders and the man to whom George Washington offered an appointment as the first U.S. Attorney General – understood that the Second Amendment (and by extension the entire Bill of Rights) applied to the state governments as well as to the federal government. Keep in mind that View of the Constitution was the standard constitutional law text at Harvard until 1845 and at Dartmouth until 1860.
Rawle’s was not the only voice.
“The man most involved in writing the Constitution, James Madison [argued] for adding a national bill of rights by pointing out that some states have insufficient bills of rights,” Puckett added. “The logical implication is that this national bill of rights will correct the problem of states that have insufficient bills of rights. Therefore, he is acknowledging that the national bill of rights will apply to the states.”
There’s another historical/legal example – from the Supreme Court — that predates the Fourteenth Amendment that must also be considered, and that was in the Dredd Scott decision, which noted:
“It would give to persons of the negro race, who were recognised as citizens in any one State of the Union, the right to enter every other State whenever they pleased, singly or in companies, without pass or passport, and without obstruction, to sojourn there as long as they pleased, to go where they pleased at every hour of the day or night without molestation, unless they committed some violation of law for which a white man would be punished;
and it would give them the full liberty of speech in public and in private upon all subjects upon which its own citizens might speak; to hold public meetings upon political affairs, and to keep and carry arms wherever they went.” [Emphasis added]
Stipulating that I’m not a lawyer versed in the intricacies of case law, just a citizen who somewhat knows how to read, I’ve seen those who are qualified admit stare decisis über alles may not be what the Founders intended, particularly when it comes to the Bill of Rights. So don’t take this as a critique of admittedly more formally educated Second Amendment scholars. I’m not trying to start a fight.
Consider it instead a hope that they’ll add the Rawle, Madison, and Scott examples to the arguments they’ll want the High Court to consider – or cogently explain to the rest of us why they’re irrelevant in determining Founding intent.
What becoming an American taught me about liberty
Growing up in Australia, I lived in what most people would call a “free” society. But it wasn’t until I moved to the United States and embraced the U.S. Constitution that my entire worldview transformed. I realized that back home, freedom was treated as a privilege carefully defined by the government. In America, the Second Amendment taught me a profound truth: we are born free.
Today, as a firearms instructor and the Northeast Regional Director — and former New Hampshire State Director — of Women for Gun Rights, I live by a simple creed proudly stamped on my adopted home state’s license plates: Live Free or Die.
To me, the motto means embracing personal responsibility and never surrendering the agency that belongs to free people. The U.S. Constitution, which is now my Constitution, does not create those rights — it recognizes them and establishes a government whose powers are limited so those rights may endure.
I am now one of millions of American women who choose to live prepared, not scared. Many of us volunteer our time to defend this civil right. Yet for years, well-funded gun control organizations have tried to convince the public — and women in particular — that passing more restrictions is the only way to keep our children and communities safe.
These groups often claim to speak for all women and all families. But those of us working alongside women in our communities know the rhetoric does not match reality.
Now, hard data has finally caught up to what we’ve known all along.
A national survey commissioned by the Crime Prevention Research Center and conducted this year validates what Second Amendment advocates have long argued: the public rejects the gun control premise. When asked what would do the most to reduce violent crime, voters overwhelmingly favored holding criminals accountable over passing new restrictions.
Thirty-one percent of respondents chose enforcing existing laws as the best way to lower crime rates, while more than 30% favored arresting and prosecuting violent and repeat offenders. Only 30% supported passing new firearm-related legislation. Combined, enforcement-focused solutions outperformed new gun-control measures by more than 30 percentage points.
The message from the American people to their legislators is remarkably simple: hold violent criminals accountable, stop treating law-abiding citizens like the problem, and trust ordinary people pursuing their own happiness.
Crucially, the Center’s survey shatters the myth that women universally support disarmament. Substantial numbers of female voters favored enforcing existing laws over passing new restrictions.
Among women, the data highlights a growing trend. Instead of looking to politicians or an unreliable government for a false sense of security, women are increasingly choosing self-reliance. Nationally, concealed carry continues to grow among women, reflecting a profound cultural shift.
According to the survey, 20% of voters report possessing a concealed carry permit, and nearly 30% report carrying a firearm at least occasionally. More importantly, the number of Americans carrying concealed firearms increased by more than 5% in just over a year. Carrying a firearm for protection is no longer exceptional — it has become part of the American mainstream.
In New Hampshire, we understand the value of removing unnecessary obstacles to liberty. We are consistently recognized as one of the safest states in the nation while respecting the right of law-abiding citizens to carry without first asking government permission. A culture that values
So what concerns me in the Live Free or Die state is not death itself, but the slow erosion of personal agency — the quiet cultural shift that teaches us to look first to the government, rather than to ourselves, for our safety, our well-being and ultimately our freedom.
The right to self-defense is not a bureaucratic luxury. It is an inherent human right.
Coming from a country that chose a different path, I can tell you that restrictions do not deter violent offenders. They only disarm the vulnerable. Australia continues to grapple with violence against women and violent home invasions despite some of the world’s strictest firearms laws. While these challenges are not unique to Australia, America remains exceptional in one important respect: it trusts ordinary, law-abiding citizens with access to an equalizing force.
That is true empowerment.
The Center’s survey suggests Americans are waking up to this reality. They don’t want more laws that turn peaceful citizens into criminals. They want safety, accountability and the freedom to protect what they love. They want to live free.
When I first arrived in America, I thought freedom was something carefully defined by the government. Becoming an American taught me something far more profound: we are born free. Liberty is our birthright. The Constitution did not give us that birthright — it recognizes it and establishes a government whose powers are limited so that liberty may endure.
Yet liberty is more than a birthright. It comes with a solemn civic responsibility. As a naturalized American citizen, I swore an oath to honor and defend it. That responsibility belongs to all of us: not only to preserve liberty for ourselves, but to pass it intact to the Americans who will one day inherit it.
FLOCK™ surveillance camera company has been getting called out about the use of their cameras for goobermint surveillance. They went and stucj their feet into their mouths
Well, “Safety” has never been a right and such is a fallacious appeal to emotion, not to also point out:
“Für eure Sicherheit” (“For your safety”) was a common authoritarian justification used by the NAZIs to mask coercion, surveillance, and repression behind the language of protection.
Flock’s appeal obscures several important realities:
- Mass data collection — license plates, vehicle movement, timestamps.
- Networked surveillance — neighborhoods link into police databases.
- False positives — misidentification can lead to wrongful stops.
- Normalization of constant monitoring — cameras become default infrastructure.
- Power asymmetry — those who control the system gain disproportionate visibility.
None of these are framed as risks; they’re framed as features.
Evidence-Free: How the Gun Control Industry Justifies Red Flag Gun Confiscations.
According to a recent editorial by an anti-gun spokesman, Florida’s version of a “red flag” law—also known as an Extreme Risk Protection Order law—is a “success” simply because it’s being used. By that standard, perhaps he would consider constitutional carry laws a similar success because millions of Americans lawfully carry in the 29 states where such laws exist.
We’ll just have to wait for that particular editorial, but we won’t hold our breath.
The author, Christopher Carita, is a retired law enforcement officer who serves as an “advisor” to the anti-gun organization called 97Percent—a name derived from a long discredited poll that tried to claim that 97% of gun owners support so-called “universal background checks.” Besides working in law enforcement, Carita was also indoctrinated at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg (yes, that Bloomberg) School of Public Health, where he was a Bloomberg American Health Initiative Fellow.
That “Constitutional Carry Success” editorial is seeming less likely all the time.
Florida’s “red flag” law, which Carita refers to as a Risk Protection Order law, is a little different than what many anti-gun states have implemented. Most “red flag” laws allow virtually anyone to allege a gun owner represents a danger to themselves or others, which could compel the removal of the individual’s firearms as a sufficient resolution to the perceived risk of threat or harm. Most of these laws allow for the suspension of due process, including the right of the accused to face their accuser.
In Florida, however, petitioning for an ERPO must be instigated by law enforcement. While that doesn’t negate the threat of the law being abused and the rights of law-abiding gun owners being infringed upon, some argue that’s a type of safeguard.
As for the “success” touted by Carita, the only “evidence” of this success he mentions is that “[n]early 4,700 RPO petitions were filed in the first two years” of the law. He also mentions that, after the state trained officers in working with the law, “RPO filings increased roughly 58%.”
But the success of a law shouldn’t be measured by how often police officers try to enforce it. Laws are intended to spell out what behavior is prohibited, with the actual goal being that people will obey the law and refrain from doing that which is prohibited. Police, after all, aren’t expected to be everywhere at all times to thwart the commission of a crime.
The Black Codes Are a Cautionary Tale, Not a Useful Precedent
It has not been a great few months for Neal Katyal. As Charlie Cooke has detailed, Katyal and Hawaii got trounced, and properly so, in Wolford v. Lopez, which sought to masquerade a state law by which the government criminalizes having a gun on any private property as merely private conduct, because it allows the property owner to explicitly permit guns to be carried. Nobody in the 6–3 majority was fooled.
The really contemptible thing in this case was Katyal trolling the Court’s consideration of history and tradition in gun regulation by arguing that Hawaii was just following in the path of Southern states that adopted strict “Black Codes” during Reconstruction that limited the right of freedmen to carry guns. As I explained after the argument in January, this is the worst possible use of history:
It was left to Justice Thomas to ask the obvious rejoinder: “If you’re going to cite the Louisiana black codes of 1865, don’t you also have to cite the subsequent adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment that was in part generated because of laws like that?”
Thomas is right. It’s not just that the Black Codes were later found to be unconstitutional; it’s that the people who wrote and ratified the 14th Amendment were specifically responding to those laws. . . .
The history of the Black Codes [should be read] not as proof of our history and tradition, but as proof of what defenders of that history and tradition were aiming to abolish by enacting the 14th Amendment.
. . . Reading the Black Codes into the 14th Amendment is like reading the law of slavery into the 13th Amendment or reading bans on black voting into the 15th. It has the whole point of the amendment precisely backward.
Alito dismissed Katyal’s troll with the scathing contempt it deserved, saying that it “cannot be taken seriously” given the actual history. But Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was taken with the argument, and as has happened several times of late when Jackson decides to promote some nonsense about the methodology of the Court’s work, Justice Amy Coney Barrett felt compelled to respond.
Jackson — joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor but, pointedly, not by Justice Elena Kagan — leaped at the analogy to the Black Codes as a club to wield in her continuing campaign against the use of history and tradition in reading the Second Amendment. That’s why Katyal was offering her the argument — not because he seriously believed that anybody applying the Court’s existing tests in good faith would fall for this hackish fallacy, but so that the Court’s test itself could be attacked. That’s also why commentators such as Mark Joseph Stern like the argument: “Virtually all of the laws that SCOTUS credits as relevant to the Bruen analysis were written by racist white men . . . by and for heterosexual white males.” Here’s Jackson:
As I see it, there are two potential reasons to use—or exclude—the Black Codes in Bruen’s history-and-tradition test. First, it could be that the Black Codes regulated guns consistent with the Second Amendment but States chose to exercise their regulatory authority in a discriminatory fashion. . . . Under this framing, those gun regulations are not examples of an unconstitutional abridgment of the right to bear arms, but rather exemplify a violation of a different constitutional Amendment—the Fourteenth.
Alternatively, it could be that States did not have the constitutional authority under the Second Amendment to enact such regulations but did so anyway for discriminatory reasons. Under that framing, not only did the States violate the Constitution by acting on the basis of race; they also violated the right to bear arms. Only the second set of circumstances justifies removing these laws (and the experiences of those they targeted) from the body of evidence that determines the historical reach of the Second Amendment under Bruen.
Jackson writes this as if she is completely oblivious to both the cause-and-effect relationship between the Black Codes and the enactment of the 14th Amendment and the fact that states could violate the Second Amendment with impunity before 1868 because until then it only bound the federal government. (Of course, nearly all such states had their own state constitutional guarantees, but Jackson just blows past the distinction.)
We Won’t Let Anti-Gun Billionaires Who Finance Civilian Disarmament Live in the Shadows Anymore.
For far too long, anti-gun groups have been nothing more than snake oil salesmen. They claim to speak for a vast army of grassroots citizens, but the reality is these groups are astroturf. They aren’t rooted in anything more than anti-gun animus. They’re also not nearly as down-to-earth with the people they claim to represent.
They’re a high-price, but cheap knockoff of the real thing. It’s fugazi grassroots.
NSSF has called them out in the past for their bought-and-paid-for activism and it’s time to do it again. Pull back the curtain and it’s easy to see that the antigun movement isn’t much more than a few billionaires and activist foundations pouring cash into their pet gun control projects…to the tune of over $400 million every year.
It’s also a willing media that goes right along with them, parroting half-truths and twisting narratives to demonize American gun owners and the firearm industry that serves them.
No more. Welcome Gun Rights Insights.
Gun Rights Insights is a new outreach initiative, including periodic videos, to pull back the veil that these anti-gun billionaires creep around telling America to give up their Second Amendment rights while they enjoy paid armed security. The “rules-for-thee, not-for-me” era must come to an end. That’s why NSSF’s Gun Rights Insights will be taking note of the gun control hypocrisy.
Anti-Gun Billionaire Michael Bloomberg
Take for instance, anti-gun billionaire Michael Bloomberg. The former New York City Mayor has made it his life’s goal to eliminate Second Amendment rights across the nation, spending over $50 million to attack lawful firearm ownership. While mayor, he organized Mayors Against Illegal Guns. That group was discredited when they “honored” the terrorist and Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev as a “gun violence victim” in 2013. Add to that, several MAIG members have, ironically, been charged with firearms-related offenses.
Bloomberg, of course, is the financier of Everytown for Gun Safety, Moms Demand Action and funds their anti-gun media mouthpiece The Trace.
The Trace was seeded with funding tied to the gun control movement. The Trace claims to be “editorially independent,” but when a newsroom is funded by and built around a single political issue with the backing of major gun control activists, it’s fair — necessary, even — to scrutinize how it frames the facts.
After all, The Trace is headed by John Feinblatt, who also heads Everytown for Gun Safety and once served as a senior advisor to Bloomberg when he was mayor. Feinblatt is the principal officer listed on tax filings for The Trace. Everytown, of course, is a gun control organization that wants to see lawful firearm ownership eliminated in America.
To top it all off, The Trace admits that it has “more than a thousand readers who have stepped up to support financially.” The Trace reported they received over $6.3 million in 2024, according to the watchdog group InfluenceWatch. That means to make its budget work, each of those readers would have had to donated over $6,300.
That’s not likely. The Trace’s own website states they make public all donors who give over $1,000 or more per year. The Trace lists over 60 donors and donating foundations that reads like a veritable “who’s who” of gun control supporters.
The Soros Family and Foreign Money
George Soros, and now his son Alex, are another source of deep pockets for anti-gun efforts. George Soros’s entities spent $9 million for lobbying efforts to attack Second Amendment rights, including fighting to allow frivolous lawsuits to clog the courts and attempt to bankrupt the firearm industry through their “legislation-through-litigation” strategy.
Soros even worked with the Gun Action on Gun Violence, which assisted in the ill-fated and frivilous $10 billion lawsuit by Mexico against U.S. firearm manufacturers.
That doesn’t even take into account the Hollywood celebrities who regularly harangue gun owners and the firearm industry. They do this while making movies and television shows featuring firearms, many times being used in irresponsible and illegal ways. And they do it while enjoying the safety of armed bodyguards.
The time is past due to expose this astroturf effort for what it is. It’s a paper-thin campaign to ostracize lawful firearm ownership, funded by wealthy elites who can afford their own armed security, but want to deny Second Amendment rights to law-abiding Americans. Poking holes into that false narrative is what Gun Rights Insights aims to do. Stay tuned.
Armed Americans: New Public Polling Reveals What the Firearm Industry Has Seen for Years
By Larry Keane
That loud sound you’re hearing is the collective jaws of gun control activists hitting the floor. They’re exasperated and can’t believe years of their antigun propaganda hasn’t worked. They are beside themselves that Americans would choose exercising the constitutional rights to keep and bear arms over backing more gun control restrictions and being lenient and soft on repeat criminals.
The polling also backs up recent reporting from big national media outlets revealing that antigun organizations and politicians have “conceded” that “gun control is no longer their top issue.”
“We know the political realities,” U.S. Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) recently told NOTUS. That “political reality” is that Americans don’t want more gun control.
That’s exactly what the firearm industry has seen over the past few years. And polling is now catching up.
The ‘New’ News
So, what’s all the “new” news? Recent survey data conducted in partnership between the Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC) and the well-respected polling firm The McLaughlin Group revealed Americans are significantly more likely to support and exercise their Second Amendment rights now than they were just 18 months ago. They are less likely to support increased gun control restrictions pushed by antigun activists.
AP Poll Shows Dems Not As Worried About Threat to Gun Rights They Don’t Value.
Our friends at the Associated Press have polled about 2500 Americans in an effort to take their collective temperature on the level of security they feel in some of their most fundamental civil rights, They include freedom of speech, religion, voting rights and — you guessed it — the right to keep and bear arms.
The non-news here is that the Democrats who were polled are largely dismissive of any perceived threats to their gun rights in the current climate while Republicans surveyed in the AP-NORC America 250 poll were less sanguine. Of course, you’d expect those who find less value in the right to keep and bear arms to be less worried about efforts to limit that right.
And for those of you who haven’t been paying attention, those efforts are alive and well and progressing in almost all of the usual suspect states. According the Grok’s AI gnome miners, here’s a selection of anti-gun measures enacted in the last year or so
Like All Gun Control Measures, 3D Censorware Mandates Are Doomed to Fail.
The Assn. of 3D Printing supports the legislation in New York and California, but “it’s not going to work,” [Chairman Bill] Decker said. “It’s more of a political statement than anything else.”
Criminals still will come up with ways to make guns from 3-D printers, either by altering their designs or taking their printing projects elsewhere, Decker said.
The more aggressive the technology becomes, the more likely that it also blocks unintended items, said Rory Mir, director of open access and technology community engagement at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit digital rights group. Some harmless pipes might look like gun parts, or an S-shaped wall hanger might resemble an auto sear trigger used to modify a semiautomatic weapon into a machine gun.
“These sort of censorship algorithms don’t work, and they wind up capturing and blocking a lot of lawful speech,” Mir said.
If print instructions are submitted for a cloud-based artificial intelligence search, it also risks the privacy of people’s artistic and proprietary creations, Mir said.
— David A. Lieb in In California and New York, a push to take aim at guns made with 3-D printers
Machine Guns and Bootleggers | Rightly Decided
The litigators from TPPF’s Center for the American Future begin by breaking down a major Fifth Circuit victory that struck down an 1869 federal ban on home distilling of spirits. They analyze the McNutt and Hobby Distillers Association v. U.S. Department of Justice case, dissecting standing doctrine, the limits of the taxing power, and the Necessary and Proper Clause’s role in preserving federalism.
They also highlight their litigation targeting the Hughes Amendment’s ban on post-1986 machine guns (Temple Gun Club v. Blanche), and the FinCEN case (Corley v. U.S. Dep’t of the Treasury) involving Treasury rules on residential real estate transfers.
Panic Setting In As Administration Moves to Bolster Americans’ Gun Rights Advance.
In the last 17 months, the Trump administration has delivered win after win for the nation’s most ardent gun-rights advocacy groups, chipping away at dozens of federal regulations. While many of these efforts target regulations from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives — the law enforcement agency within the Justice Department tasked with regulating the nation’s millions of firearms — the administration’s work stretches across the executive branch.
Supporters of tighter gun restrictions have pilloried the Trump administration, saying officials are acting recklessly and could endanger the public with a wholesale rollback of regulations. But gun rights advocates who portrayed the Biden administration as trampling on the Second Amendment have praised the current administration’s actions as a needed corrective.
Trump vowed on the campaign trail to be a pro-Second Amendment president and pledged that, under his leadership, “no one will lay a finger on your firearms.” He said he would roll back Biden-era ATF regulations and received the backing of the big gun rights groups.
Critics, however, have said that the Trump’s administration’s push to unwind gun regulations contradicts the president’s tough-on-crime political agenda. And, they say, the efforts could make it easier for potentially dangerous people to access firearms. …
[ATF general counsel Robert] Leider has been working on the regulations for more than a year. The plan had been to announce them July 4, 2025, at an Independence Day celebration, The Post previously reported.
But [Acting Attorney General Todd] Blanche has said the proposed changes took longer than expected to complete because lawyers had to scrupulously review them to ensure they passed legal muster. Justice Department officials expect them to face court challenges.
Because the Trump administration is making these changes through the regulatory process — and not by legislation passed in Congress and signed into law — the next administration could reinstate the scrapped rules. The goal, Justice Department officials said, is to ensure that the regulations do not run afoul of laws so that they can remain intact.
“We were very careful on how we did the rules,” Leider said. “Congress has decided that certain people cannot be trusted with firearms. ATF has to enforce those congressional judgments. It is not the agency’s job to amend Congress’s criteria in an effort to predict who will become violent.”
— Perry Stein in Inside the Trump administration’s rapid rollback of gun regulations
On Building Guns, Difficulty or Ease is Irrelevant, Only Our Rights Matter
There’s been a push this year, especially, to try and step in the way of people who want to use a 3D printer to make their own firearms. Some states have banned so-called ghost guns entirely, but others are also trying to tell printer manufacturers that they can’t sell their products in those states unless they include software in the printers that bars it from making certain shaped parts entirely.
And, there’s a problem with that. Being able to make your own firearm is something Americans have been able to do since well before the Boston Massacre. It’s something we continued to be able to do until very recently. It wasn’t until a politician stood up before the press, panicking because “ghost guns” were a thing, and we just couldn’t have that.
A recent story I came across that was looking at the state-level restrictions on printers, though, started off by really kind of highlighting what the issue really does seem to boil down to.
For decades, making an untraceable firearm required specialized tools, technical expertise and hours of work.
Today, it can start with a downloaded file and a consumer-grade 3D printer.
As advances in additive manufacturing, commonly known as 3D printing, make it easier to produce firearms at home, lawmakers in a growing number of states are pursuing new restrictions specifically for 3D-printed guns. That rapidly evolving category of weapons can be manufactured from digital blueprints and often lack serial numbers used by law enforcement to trace firearms.
The implication here is clear: these guns are way too easy to make for them to be permitted.
First, let’s understand something. Nearly a decade ago, I wrote about P.A. Luty and his wonderful little book that took fairly common tools and hardware store parts to build a submachine gun. It never required specialized tools or particular expertise. Hell, making an “untraceable” gun was as simple as scratching out the serial number, if we’re being honest.
Still, let’s also understand something else. At no point in time did the ease or difficulty in building a gun have any bearing at all on whether someone has the right to build a gun on their own.
As noted already, we had this right and the legal ability to exercise it for centuries. Many of the guns on Revolutionary War battlefields two and a half centuries ago were made in someone’s home workshop. They bought parts from gunsmiths, the ones they couldn’t replicate, then did much of the other work themselves to build rifles that were not just functional, but some are works of art.
While the skills to do so might not be as common today as they were then, it wasn’t considered some esoteric skillset, either. Many farmers and others in rural communities know how to work the wood, do some metalworking, and build themselves a functional gun with a few parts from the big city.
Over time, things get easier. At the time of the nation’s founding, farming was a small operation. Farms didn’t tend to have more cultivated land than the farmer and his family and/or farmhands could work. Weavers used small looms and made cloth by hand. Blacksmiths made tools and hardware like nails one piece at a time, taking up valuable time to produce products. Gunsmiths had to do much of the work for a single firearm one piece at a time, as well.
When the Industrial Revolution came about, it changed all of that. Suddenly, nails could be made in massive lots. Cloth could be woven by the mile. Farms saw mechanization that allowed a single farmer to handle much more acreage than he could have dreamed before. Things got easier.
The 3D printer has taken the concept of an individual being able to make his own firearm and, like the advancements of years gone by, made it easier for everyday people to take advantage of something that was always legal for them to do, and that is what really bothers the anti-gunners.
On the same token, though, that shouldn’t matter.
Do we suddenly decide that free speech is irrelevant now that we can easily communicate with millions with a few strokes on a keyboard? Does freedom of the press stop working because someone can create a blog or Substack at home in their underwear and become a journalist? Obviously not, and in that same spirit, the difficulty or ease of making a gun isn’t relevant, either.
And considering how few are used in crimes even today, that there’s no evidence that they increase crime, and that the Founding Fathers thought nothing at all negative about people making firearms for themselves, it’s well past time for these states to step the hell off and accept that our rights don’t stop existing just because they don’t like them.
At the end of the day, our rights are what they are. It’s up to states like California to learn to accept this as fact and move on.
Bruen’s Text-and-History Test Spreads Beyond the Second Amendment
“The U.S. Court of Appeals just took the Heller and Bruen playbook — founding-era text, founding era dictionaries, founding era silence — and ran it through a First Amendment case. Every yard they gained for the Establishment Clause is a yard also banked for the Second Amendment.”
– Professor Mark W. Smith, Four Boxes Diner
The United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit has handed down an en banc decision in Nathan v. Alamo Heights Independent School District, No. 25-50695 (5th Cir. Apr. 21, 2026), upholding a Texas law requiring public-school classrooms to display a poster of the Ten Commandments. The 9–8 majority, written by Judge Stuart Kyle Duncan, held that the Texas law does not violate the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause. That alone is a big deal. But more importantly for Second Amendment supporters, the en banc court embraced the “text and history” methodology used by the Supreme Court in its Second Amendment decisions.
New Jersey’s Demand for Gun Store Sales Records is an Unconstitutional Attack on Gun Owner Privacy
The Attorney General of New Jersey has sent subpoenas to gun dealers in the state demanding production of customer records regarding sales of Glock pistols to New Jersey residents for the last ten years. The subpoenas are in connection to its lawsuit against Glock, Inc. under the state’s public nuisance law.
(NOTE: The claims in the state’s frivolous lawfare against Glock are not relevant to this particular article. But for context, the state is claiming the over 40-year-old design of the gun is too easy to illegally convert into a machine gun. Other states have filed similar lawsuits, and some like California have now banned the sale of Glocks, which are the most popular handguns in the country. These efforts are a way to coverup the failures of leadership in antigun states.) It is not immediately clear why New Jersey needs these records, given the state already maintains a de facto registry for handguns through its pistol permitting system. It could be that the Attorney General wants to make these records public, as under New Jersey law and in a small nod towards respecting privacy, firearm registration records are exempt from public disclosure under the state’s laws.
Regardless of the reasoning for the subpoenas, they are an unconstitutional attack on gun owner privacy. This article takes a brief look at this emerging issue in Second Amendment law to show why New Jersey’s actions are unconstitutional. It is adapted from prior amicus briefing the Second Amendment foundation has done on this issue.
Privacy in Firearms Ownership Has Always Been a Fundamental Component of the Second Amendment Right
Big Win in Pennsylvania on Fourth Amendment Violation
Without the Second Amendment, the rest are vulnerable. Even with it, rights are usurped all the time. A recent Fourth Amendment win pulls into focus just how fragile everything is.
It’s a slippery slope when rights start to get violated. Especially when it comes to our protections of having our persons and papers secured, right to not self-incriminate, and right to an attorney. It’s a simple formula to follow and remember when dealing with the authorities: “I want to invoke my Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendment rights.” Or in other words: you can’t look/come in here, I’m telling you nothing, and I want my lawyer. But what happens when a governmental body creates a law that violates those protections from warrantless and suspicion-less searches?
Pennsylvania attorney Josh Prince with the Civil Rights Defense Firm, P.C. had a client in this very circumstance. According to a post on Prince’s website, “Bristol Borough enacted an ordinance permitting their enforcement officers/inspectors, on a biennial basis, to inspect – absent any form of warrant or any form of suspicion of wrongdoing – any building, and the apartments within, where the apartments are rented or leased out.”
When Prince’s client refused the Borough to gain entry to his property, “the Borough sent a letter to … (him), expecting him to capitulate, and threatening fines for non-compliance. …” The penalties that Prince’s client was facing included a fine up to $1,000.00 per day as well as potential incarceration.
“(Prince) attempted to amicably resolve the matter, by the Borough agreeing not to enforce the unconstitutional ordinance against his clients, the Borough’s attorney responded back that the only amicable resolution would be for Josh’s clients to comply with the Borough’s ordinances,” Prince’s post noted.
After filing for an emergency injunction in Katz, et al. v. Bristol Borough, et al., Katz was granted some of the relief he sought. Prince obtained “an emergency, ex-parte preliminary injunction, precluding enforcement of Bristol Borough’s warrantless and suspicion-less searches of his clients’ buildings and apartments” and a future hearing was scheduled for a permanent injunction.
One hiccup Prince noted about the proceedings was the bond that his client was required to post. It was said that the judge ordered a $5,000.00 bond to be posted. While it might be customary to ask for someone similarly situated to post bond, Prince said that usually would run from anywhere between $1.00 and $100.00 — not $5,000.00. He’s hopeful that the court will not hold onto the bond for long.
The fact that Prince was able to secure the injunction as swiftly as he did may point at how the court views the merits of the case. “Because emergency injunctions are issued ex-parte (i.e. without the other side being heard), they are virtually unheard of, except in dire circumstances, where a clear violation of the law or constitution will occur, absent immediate court action,” Prince’s post explains.
When it comes to constitutional rights and liberties, they’re all closely connected. What of the Second Amendment right if one is having their Fourth usurped? Once one thread begins to unravel or break, it won’t be long until all is lost. Kudos to Prince on this monumental win.
Virginia Illustrates Insidious Anti-Gun Threat
I’ve joked before that Virginia’s politics swing back and forth like an unlatched screen door in a hurricane. From red to blue to red to blue, all so fast it makes your head spin.
But last year’s elections opened the door for a lot of troubling things in Virginia, up to and including their redistricting plan that seeks to essentially wipe out Republican representation from the state, and with it, support for gun rights. Sure, there’s one district, but only because there was no way to gerrymander the state badly enough to make it solid blue.
However, Virginia reveals an insidious threat because the state is too purple to suddenly swing this far left.
Progressive groups are behind a wave of tougher restrictions on firearms, wielding a quiet power that Second Amendment proponents worry could unravel gun rights in friendly territory.
Earlier this month, Virginia lawmakers sent a spate of gun bills tightening firearms restrictions to Gov. Abigail Spanberger’s (D-VA) desk. It’s a development fueled by Moms Demand Action, and one that one of the country’s most prominent pro-gun rights organizations fears foreshadows things to come in other purple states.
“Virginia is a purple state, and so having this sweeping, massive gun control package in the state that’s got a lot of gun owners, to see that happen and happen so rapidly should really be alarming to everybody in this country,” National Rifle Association’s Director of Public Affairs, Justin Davis, told the Washington Examiner.
“It’s really just a blueprint of what’s to come in this country. This is a trial balloon for the midterm elections,” he said. “They’re seeing what they can pass in a purple state? What is the backlash from that? And how do people react?”…
Davis said many such state races can be “so easily” flipped with small “injections“ of cash. Due to progressive activism, every state is “ripe for flipping at any time,” he said.
“To think that the stuff they’re pushing here is happening in Virginia should wake up every single purple state in the country, any place that is, it was in the realm of what a ‘moderate state’ is that there’s a very well-trained, very concerted effort to get progressives elected positions,” Davis said. “There are people who literally look at these races, race by race, and say, ‘How do we make sure that we can flip this for a broader scale, to flip this state to pass these same leftist laws?’”
Groups like Moms Demand Action and Everytown for Gun Safety are specifically named for injecting a significant amount of cash into the race, and the truth of the matter is that these groups will run ads that feature policies other than gun control, usually pretty progressive ones.
So what happens is that for a few million dollars, they can push a candidate who might not appear all that bad in the grand scheme of things–remember, Spanberger tried to position herself as a moderate, and a lot of people listened–only to take office and start trying to run the table with things like gun control.
Virginia is a purple state, but the current agenda in Richmond looks like something you’d expect in California.
No, it doesn’t help that Virginia governors can only serve a single term at a time, thus meaning they never have to worry about re-election. That means they can trot out their agenda on day one, and other than the midterms, there’s nothing stopping them from going as far left or right as they’d like. In this case, it means trotting out the most ridiculous anti-gun agenda you’re ever going to see in any part of the South.
This is something we need to be on guard against and work to counter if we don’t want to see our rights destroyed at the state level.