Category: RKBA

Despite Democrats’ Best Efforts, a New Generation Discovers the Joys of Shooting

Colorado’s lurch to the left over the past couple of decades has led to repeated attacks on lawful gun owners and the right to keep and bear arms, but despite their best efforts, Democrats haven’t managed to destroy a culture of responsible gun ownership.

In fact, in Lake County, Colorado, interest in the shooting sports has led to the creation of the county’s first ever high school trap shooting team.

The team was formed after students expressed interest in having a local trap shooting program. One of those students was senior Raymond Harvey, who previously had to travel to Buena Vista to participate in the sport.

“I started attempting to get a team up here my freshman year,” Harvey said in sharing his determination in bringing the sport to Leadville. “I contacted the athletic director at the time. Then we got a new athletic director, and I worked with Jake, and we finally got a team up here.”

Now, trapshooting is an official club sport at Lake County High School and counts as an extracurricular just like football or any other sport. [Head Coach Jake] Farber said the team is also integrating with 4-H and partnering with the Amateur Trapshooting Association (ATA) and the Scholastic Clay Target Program for special events.

It’s great to see another high school embrace shooting sports, and it’s even better that the push came from students like Raymond Harvey.

“Trap shooting is one of the fastest-growing female sports,” Josh Homer said. “It’s great because it’s a nice integrated sport where males and females compete right next to each other and still have a great time.”

He also emphasized that trap shooting is the safest high school sport.

“Year after year, it ranks as the safest, with very few accidents,” Josh Homer said. “We really emphasize firearm safety and proper conduct.”

Students interested in joining don’t need their own firearm. The Ascent Opportunity Development Division (AODD), a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, provides shotguns for participants who don’t have their own. The provided gun is a single-shot break-open model to ensure safety. If a student decides to purchase their own firearm, AODD can assist in choosing the right one.

Who could be opposed to this? Even gun control activists should be okay with high school trap teams. After all, Tim Walz an out-and-proud trap shooter and hunter, and that didn’t stop virtually every gun control group in the country from endorsing him and self-proclaimed gun owner Kamala Harris. If there’s any gun-related activity that groups like Giffords, Brady, and Everytown find acceptable, it has to be trap shooting, right?

Wrong.

“The NRA’s influence concerns Kris Brown, president of Brady, the national gun-violence prevention group. “I look at anything funded by the National Rifle Association with a jaundiced eye, because about 30 years ago they stopped talking publicly about any risks associated with firearms,” she said. “In this country, suicide with a firearm is at a 40-year high, and that is particularly true with teenagers.”

Brown claims not to have a problem with the shooting sports, but if there’s any involvement by the NRA or other Second Amendment groups then there’s an issue. I’m honestly surprised that Brady and other anti-gunners haven’t complained more about 4-H’s shooting sports programs, but maybe we just need to give them a little more time.

Youth shooting sports programs are apolitical in nature, but the anti-gunners still view them as a gateway to Second Amendment activism. They can’t stand the idea of kids learning how to be safe and responsible with firearms while also having a truly great day at the range. But while they complain about the NRA and other groups promoting youth shooting sports, the programs themselves keep growing in popularity… even in those places where responsible gun culture is under sustained assault.

More Support For Challenges To New Massachusetts Gun Law.

We’ve reported recently how Massachusetts’ sweeping new anti-gun law, launched early by an emergency preamble attached to it by Gov. Maura Healey, is facing a lot of pushback from pro-freedom groups.

Not only have two lawsuits already been filed to challenge the law in court, but an initiative petition to get a question on the 2026 state ballot to repeal the law already has more than the 90,000 signatures needed to put the matter to the vote.

Just two weeks after the measure was signed into law the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF) ponied up $100,000 to help fund the court challenge by the Gun Owners’ Action League (GOAL). Now, according to a report at masslive.com, others within the firearms industry are joining the efforts to repeal the law or have it declared unconstitutional in court.

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Well, that didn’t take them long, did it?
And the Supreme Court again displays its cowardice concerning the Right to Keep and Bear Arms.

Second Circuit’s Second Opinion on NY Carry Laws Same As the First

The Second Circuit Court of Appeals has issued its second opinion in the multiple challenges to New York’s post-Bruen carry restrictions, but the court ended up making no changes to its initial ruling that was issued almost a year ago.

Instead of granting cert to Antonyuk v. James and hearing the appeal themselves, the justices on the Supreme Court granted cert but vacated the Second Circuit’s first ruling and remanded the case back to the appellate court after SCOTUS released its decision in Rahimi back in June. If the justices were hoping that Rahimi would guide the Second Circuit in a different direction they, like Second Amendment advocates, must be disappointed by today’s ruling.

Essentially, the only portions of New York’s post-Bruen laws the Second Circuit takes issue with are the requirement that concealed carry applicants disclose their social media accounts to licensing authorities and the state’s “vampire rule”, which prohibits concealed carry on all private property in the state unless signage specifically allowing concealed carry is conspicuously posted.

Virtually all of the other “sensitive places” defined by the deceptively named Concealed Carry Improvement Act were upheld by the Second Circuit on Thursday, including houses of worship, public parks and zoos, public transportation, establishments where alcohol is served, theaters, conferences, business centers, and “gatherings of individuals to collectively express their constitutional rights to protest or assemble.”

As Chuck Michel said, the entire decision is more than 200 pages long, so while you can read it in its entirety here, we’ll be focusing on just a couple of aspects of today’s decision in this post.

Just like the Second Circuit’s original ruling in Antonyuk, the panel makes a few staggering leaps of faith that aren’t supported by what the Supreme Court has said about the right to keep and bear arms. The Court has held, for instance, that modern gun control statutes must fit within the national tradition of gun ownership, and doubted “that just three colonial regulations could suffice” to prove a national tradition of restricting concealed carry to those that have demonstrated a justifiable need.

But the Second Circuit says that even if there are no “distinctly similar historical regulation[s]” to point to in defense of a current gun law, that may not matter.

Legislatures past and present have not generally legislated to their constitutional limits. Reasoning from historical silence is thus risky; it is not necessarily the case that, if no positive legislation from a particular time or place is in the record, it must be because the legislators then or there deemed such a regulation inconsistent with the right to bear arms.

No, but it definitely proves that those legislators didn’t create certain laws restricting the rights of lawful gun owners in response to concerns about violent crime or public safety, and that is telling… or at least it should be. The Supreme Court’s “text, history, and tradition” test is relatively straightforward, but it’s been squarely rejected by the Second Circuit in favor of a more “nuanced” approach that, conveniently enough, allowed the panel to conclude that even where there are no historical analogues in place, modern restrictions on the right to carry are permissible.

The Second Circuit also continues to place a lot of reliance on gun laws that were in place around 1868, when the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted, not just 1791, when the Second Amendment was ratified. In theory, that makes some sense, given that the Fourteenth Amendment was meant in part to prevent states from intruding on those freedoms enshrined in the Bill of Rights. But in the aftermath of the Civil War, many states, particularly in the former Confederacy, instituted laws that were designed to stop freedmen from exercising their right to keep and bear arms. In some case those laws were facially about depriving former slaves and freedmen from possessing or carrying a gun, but others were couched in racially-neutral terms but were enforced primarily or solely against groups.

The Second Circuit’s decision upholding most of New York’s newest restrictions on the right to carry relies largely on rewriting the Bruen test and an over-dependence on a handful of mid-19th century statutes. Again, even the absence of any historical analogues is no barrier for the Second Circuit, which is utterly ridiculous.

Antonyuk and the other related cases have yet to go to trial on the merits. So far, all of the legal wrangling has been about preliminary injunctions issued by the district courts, and the Second Circuit has now remanded these cases back to the lowest level of the federal judiciary to start the process all over again. Given the hostility the Second Circuit has historically displayed towards the Second Amendment (it originally upheld New York’s “may issue” law, for instance), today’s decision isn’t exactly surprising. But that doesn’t make it any less frustrating for those New Yorkers who’ve seen their right to carry become even more limited in scope and practice in the two years since the Supreme Court declared that right is just as fundamentally important as the right to keep a gun in the home.

Walz’s Interview With ‘The View’ May Have Revealed More Than He Intended

Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz was asked another softball question about gun ownership and the Second Amendment on Monday, this time from the hosts of The View. While most of Walz’s answer was nothing more than a regurgitation of his campaign talking points claiming that gun owners have nothing to fear from the candidate who previously supported banning handguns and declared the Supreme Court shouldn’t find that the Second Amendment protects an individual right, one jab at Donald Trump highlighted the draconian stance that the Harris/Walz ticket has taken on who, exactly, possesses the right to keep and bear arms.

Walz made one more shady dig at his Republican opponent Donald Trump, telling the co-hosts, “The Republican nominee can’t pass a background check to get a gun,” referring to Trump getting convicted on 34 felony counts in his hush money trial early this year.

“We understand the Second Amendment and lawful gun owners, folks who have been doing this for 50 years like I have, we understand that there’s not a single thing that we’re proposing that takes away your right to be able to own that firearm, to be able to have it in your possession,” he continued. “But it does go a long ways to making sure that folks who shouldn’t have it, don’t have it.”

Clearly Walz believes that Trump’s felony convictions for the non-violent crime of falsifying business records should prevent him from lawfully possessing a firearm, though the Minnesota governor still believes felons should be able to cast a vote. Just last year Walz signed a bill allowing felons to have their voting rights restored after they complete their sentence, though their ability to legally own a firearm is still prohibited under Minnesota law.

Walz’s stance is right in line with Biden/Harri’s DOJ, which has argued that a lifetime prohibition on gun ownership is entirely appropriate for anyone convicted of a felony or criminal offense punishable by more than a year in prison, even non-violent crimes. That argument has its share of critics, however, including multiple judges on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, which seems poised to once again rule in favor of a Pennsylvania man seeking to get his 2A rights restored almost 30 years after he pled guilty and received probation for falsifying his income on a food stamp application.

The Third Circuit previously ruled in favor of Bryan Range, but the Supreme Court remanded the case back to the appellate court after it issued the Rahimi decision. The appellate court held oral arguments in the Range case for a second time earlier this month, and the panel seemed skeptical of DOJ attorney Kevin Soter’s position that only “serious crimes” result in a lifetime loss of the right to keep and bear arms.

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New Mexico governor won’t renew ban on carrying firearms in public

New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham said she will not renew a public health order that temporarily banned carrying firearms in public parks and playgrounds in Albuquerque, the state’s largest city.

The temporary order, which went into effect in September 2023, was intended to slow gun violence in the metro area, but high-ranking state officials, gun advocates and members of her own Democratic Party widely viewed it as a violation of the Second Amendment right to bear arms.

The order drew lawsuits from national gun rights and advocacy groups, which forced her to narrow its scope from applying to public places throughout Bernalillo County to applying to parks and playgrounds in Albuquerque.

Lujan Grisham said in a news release Wednesday that more than 1,700 firearms were collected in gun buybacks over the past year because of the order. She also said it had reduced the number of gunfire incidents in the area, but she did not cite any numbers.

Lujan Grisham, who was unavailable for comment Thursday, said in the news release, “The public health order, though temporary, allowed us to implement urgent and necessary measures that have had a measurable, positive effect on public safety in our state.”

State Senate Republican leader Greg Baca said Thursday that he did not support the order.

“From the onset, the governor’s action was unconstitutional and an easy distraction to keep from curbing the crime epidemic gripping our state,” Baca said in a statement. “Unfortunately, the feckless shell of the original order stood for over a year.”

The National Association for Gun Rights filed a lawsuit against the action last year; it was dismissed after Lujan Grisham scaled back and modified her policy.

“This is a win for gun owners,” said Dudley Brown, the association’s president. “This is a quiet way to admit her plan didn’t work.”

Bernalillo County Sheriff John Allen, a Democrat who decided not to enforce the ban because he believed it was unconstitutional, could not be reached for comment Thursday.

Allen said last year: “This order will not do anything to curb gun violence other than punish law-abiding citizens from their constitutional right to self-defense. It’s unconstitutional. So there’s no way we could enforce that order.”

Lujan Grisham issued the temporary order, originally a 30-day ban, in September 2023 after an 11-year-old boy was shot and killed in an Albuquerque park.

In addition to restricting firearms in public parks and playgrounds in Bernalillo County, it strengthened oversight of firearm sales and implemented wastewater testing for fentanyl in public schools.

State Attorney General Raúl Torrez, a Democrat, wrote in a letter last year that he opposed Lujan Grisham’s decision.

“Simply put, I do not believe that the Emergency Order will have any meaningful impact on public safety but, more importantly, I do not believe it passes constitutional muster,” he wrote

Shades of Commie East Germany and its STASI
The “monkey wrench” is for lots of tips on the demoncraps.

Michigan And Hawaii Launch Tip Lines To Encourage Anonymous Snitching On Gun Owners

Michigan and Hawaii, both Democrat-led states, have launched taxpayer-funded tip lines for individuals looking to report perceived firearms violations anonymously. While these dumpster fire states claim the lines are aimed at lawbreakers, Second Amendment groups are reasonably skeptical, as they should be, because such a system can easily be abused. Let’s face it, we know that the weaponization of this service against law-abiding gun owners is exactly what they are intended for.

On Thursday, October 10, Hawaii’s Democrat Governor Josh Green announced the state’s Department of Law Enforcement had established a confidential “Gun Tip Line for people to make anonymous reports of illegal gun ownership and gun crimes,” where tipsters can either call, text or drop a dime via the DLE’s website or a downloadable app where they can submit photographs and videos to back up their report.

The governor’s office went even further during the brown shirt recruiting exercise saying, “People reporting tips are encouraged to leave detailed information including the names of those in possession of illegal guns or committing gun crimes, a location where those people may be found and a description of the guns.” Sure, what could go wrong when hiring unpaid, untrained, overzealous, anti-Second Amendment sycophants typically knowing very little about firearms to play the role of a detective, spying on and recording their neighbors?

Meanwhile, Gretchen “Lockdown” Whitmer, known for hosting the most oppressive COVID lockdowns in America while still having more deaths per capita than any neighboring Midwestern states, signed House Bill 5503, a measure passed off as an education funding bill that allocates $1 million in School Aid Funding to support an anonymous tip line for students to report firearms thought to be “improperly stored.”

The bill goes on to mandate that Michigan’s Department of Education develop materials concerning improper storage of firearms, including tip line usage, and distribute those materials to school districts across the state. The Gestapo may not pay you for your work, but you will receive free training, whether you want it or not.

As the NRA-ILA points out, language regarding the tip line was added to the bill as an amendment that was then swiftly passed by the Democrat-controlled legislature.

“The expedited pace and the silencing of opposition when the bill came up for a floor vote underscores the reality that this was a political move and another attack on gun owners,” says the NRA.

These tiplines will ultimately create a situation that will lead to wasted resources, unwarranted confrontations with law enforcement and what could amount to unconstitutional searches of homes, businesses and other private property based on vendettas and other nefarious agendas. Not only does this negatively impact the community’s relationship with authorities, but those who abuse the tip lines will undoubtedly drive wedges within communities as well, drawing lines at a time when we need to be working together to strengthen and solidify those connections.

TPTB have always been scared to the point they wet themselves that the peons possess the means to eliminate them from the equation.
It became even more scarier when reliable weaponry that can either smite from a distance, or be easily carried and concealed, was developed.
We’re going to see if this still holds basically true, or if our Supreme Justices can override the goobermint’s  fear that those in power can be help to ultimate consequences.

Perhaps the Most Concerning Comment on Vanderstock

The ATF’s rules on so-called ghost guns don’t actually stop bad guys from making their own guns. Still, those rules exist.

At least, they exist until after the Supreme Court rules on Vanderstock v. Garland.

As we’ve noted previously, though, the odds don’t look good for pro-gun folks. It seems the Court had at least some interest in keeping the rules in place, which is troubling because it seems pretty clear to me that the ATF overstepped.

However, there was one comment that bothered me more than just about anything else I saw come out of the arguments.

“Drilling a hole or two, I would think, doesn’t give the same sort of reward that you get from working on your car on the weekends… My understanding is that it’s not terribly difficult for someone to do this,” said Chief Justice John Roberts.

While it’s easy to ridicule the Chief Justice for this misguided statement, it’s important to consider his sources for the hyperbole, the ATF and the Biden administration.

“Drilling a hole or two” is a demonstrably dishonest take on the process, and I would have particularly enjoyed seeing a kit laid out in front of the Justices for a hands-on show of how “not terribly difficult” it is.

This would have been good for a few laughs.

Representing manufacturers and groups opposing the rule, Peter Patterson pointed out that building the kits is far more complicated than the administration has suggested, however, Patterson wisely remained grounded in his argument, staying with the facts and nature of the litigation, which had nothing to do with how easy or difficult a kit is to build, and everything to do with the ATF overstepping its authority.

Since the conclusion of the day’s oral arguments, the mainstream media has touted the Supreme Court’s disposition during the hearing as signaling a tendency towards the ATF and Biden administration’s arguments regarding lack of manufacturing difficulty and the potential for prohibited individuals to purchase kits and build them at home for criminal intent.

I will point out, however unnecessarily, that violent crime has been around long before 80% receiver kits, and violent criminals have never had an issue arming themselves, sometimes aided by our own government. Just ask Barack Obama and Eric Holder about Operation Fast and Furious.

All of that is absolutely true, of course. It’s a good deal more complicated than just drilling a couple of holes and calling it good, which is why the ATF’s argument regarding how “readily” it can be turned into a firearm is wrong and should be overturned.

But I’m bothered by Roberts’s statement about how it does give “the same sort of reward” that one might get from working on their car.

I wasn’t aware that was the legal threshold for our rights, whether or not a judge finds it satisfying.

Especially when I don’t find working on my car particularly rewarding. If I’m working on my car, it’s because something isn’t right and I can’t afford to take it to a mechanic. Since that’s what my son does for a living now, that’s rare, but that’s how it’s been in the past. For me, it was a task that needed to be accomplished, not something I found enjoyment in.

That’s kind of how hobbies work, though. Some people are really into DIY projects like renovating their bathroom. Others do it because they need the bathroom fixed and can’t afford to hire someone. The first group is the amateurs in the original sense of the word–those who do something for the love of it–while the others aren’t necessarily finding any sense of reward, necessarily.

Some people get a charge out of collecting stamps while others only buy them now to pay bills that don’t have an online presence for whatever reason.

Yet Roberts’s comment, while possibly meaningless, suggests that the justice might well consider whether they see this as a real hobby or not, and if they don’t because they, personally, don’t see anything fun in making one’s own firearms, we have a big problem.

Supreme Court Orders Fresh Look at Young-Adult Gun Restrictions

The US Supreme Court sidestepped a brewing gun-safety issue for now, telling a federal appeals court to reconsider a ruling that 18-to-20-year-olds have a broad constitutional right to carry a firearm.
In a two-sentence order Tuesday, the justices opted not to take up an appeal by Pennsylvania officials, instead ordering a fresh look at the issue at the lower court level. The reconsideration order cited the high court’s ruling in June upholding a federal gun ban for people under domestic-violence orders.
Pennsylvania is one of 32 states, along with the federal government, that establish 21 as the minimum age for some gun rights. The case before the high court involved a Pennsylvania law that prohibits people age 18-to-20 from openly carrying firearms during a declared state of emergency.
The Philadelphia-based 3rd US Circuit Court of Appeals blocked the law, saying in a 2-1 decision the state hadn’t shown the type of historic pedigree required under an earlier Supreme Court ruling.
The law is being challenged by two gun-rights groups and three people who were under age 21 when the suit was filed in 2020. They urged the Supreme Court to reject Pennsylvania’s appeal without ordering reconsideration, saying lower courts are generally in agreement that states can’t put special restrictions on 18-to-20-year-olds.
Pennsylvania Attorney General Michelle Henry argued that the 3rd Circuit imposed a much stricter historical test for gun laws than the Supreme Court said in the domestic-violence case was required.
The Supreme Court has steered clear of new Second Amendment disputes since its June 21 ruling. Lower courts now are grappling with bans on so-called assault weapons and large-capacity magazines, laws prohibiting gun possession by convicted felons and restrictions on where firearms can be brought.
The Pennsylvania case is Paris v. Lara, 24-93.

Maryland Group Asks Supreme Court To Explore State’s Handgun Licensing Requirements

Fresh off the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruling that Maryland’s Handgun Qualification License requirement is constitutional, plaintiffs in the case are asking the U.S. Supreme Court to take up the issue.

On September 27, plaintiffs in the case Maryland Shall Issue v. Moore filed a petition with the Supreme Court in hopes the onerous law won’t meet muster before that body.

“Just two years ago, this Court rejected the interest-balancing approach adopted by nearly every lower court, and emphatically held that the Second Amendment ‘demands a test rooted in the Second Amendment’s text, as informed by history,’” the petition states. “But certain lower courts—determined to avoid applying Bruen’s holding—are disregarding this Court’s precedents and straining the constitutional text to fit desired policy ends. That is exactly what the en banc 4th Circuit did in this case to uphold Maryland’s ahistorical and burdensome two-step licensing and registration scheme for acquisition and possession of a handgun for self-defense.”

In fact, the process in question is quite complicated. Before possessing any handgun, Maryland requires citizens to obtain a Handgun Qualification License, which isn’t an easy task. To qualify, citizens must be fingerprinted, attend a half-day training course, live fire a handgun and pass a background check—all of which takes significant time, effort and money. Once they receive their license, there are still hurdles to overcome, as another Maryland law requires a background check and seven-day wait before taking possession of a purchased handgun.

In late 2023 a three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit Court ruled that the HQL requirement unconstitutional. But on August 23, an en banc panel of the 4th Circuit issued its decision upholding the Handgun Qualification License law.

“Compliance with the HQL Requirement places significant burdens on possession and acquisition of a handgun unknown at the Founding and is an outlier even in modern times,” the plaintiffs’ petition states. “Failure to comply may result in fines, imprisonment and the permanent loss of firearm rights.”

The petition further states: “The HQL Requirement is an unconstitutional outlier that the Founders never would have tolerated. Petitioners have shown that Maryland’s novel and extreme acquisition-and-possession licensing regime burdens protected conduct. And Maryland has not met its burden to prove that the HQL Requirement—step one of its two-step licensing scheme—is consistent with historical tradition.

In the end, Maryland Shall Issue is asking the Supreme Court to consider the case using its own two-step process handed down in the Bruen case in 2022.

“This Court should grant certiorari to prevent lower courts from reading exception-upon-exception into Bruen’s standard—before that standard exists no more,” the petition concludes. “The constitution ‘demands a test rooted in the Second Amendment’s text, as informed by history,’ not tests rooted in dicta and whatever constructions of text best fit lower courts’ desired policy ends. This Court should once again say so.”

Opposing Gun Laws Is NEVER ‘Protecting the Criminals’

While it looks like the Supreme Court may well side with the Biden administration on so-called ghost guns, the debate over them is far from over. All the administration did was make it illegal to sell an unserialized receiver with all of the other parts needed to make a firearm. You can still buy a parts kid and an incomplete receiver.

It’s the principle of trying to restrict what people can and can’t do about firearms.

If you allow one restriction to stand unchallenged, someone will invariably use that to justify the next restriction. It’s why we stopped playing nice and compromising on gun issues. It was never enough for them and we were the only ones giving anything up.

Especially when criminals continued to get firearms regardless.

But an op-ed at the Las Vegas Sun tries to argue that in opposing the “ghost gun” regulations, we’re really just protecting criminals.

On the surface, the Biden rule seems like a no-brainer. Shouldn’t all of the law-abiding good guys who claim they need to be armed so they can protect themselves from bad guys be embracing policies that keep guns out of the hands of criminals?

And yet, gun-rights groups, joined by Republican lawmakers, are fiercely opposing the regulation, arguing that it’s an infringement on the rights of hobbyists and an example of executive overreach by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF).

This position reveals a glaring contradiction in the pro-gun narrative. If gun-rights extremists are truly committed to empowering “good guys with guns,” then why are they fighting to ensure that people can easily access weapons that are designed to be untraceable? Why oppose rules that help law enforcement track down dangerous criminals? The fact is these advocates are not standing up for law-abiding citizens; they are like mob lawyers fighting to protect the rights of people who want to stay outside the law.

Ghost guns have become the weapon of choice for criminals precisely because they are difficult to trace.

Yet we all know the truth: The very existence of ghost guns undermines the efforts of police to combat crime, and pro-gun advocacy groups are spending millions of dollars to make sure these weapons remain on the streets — eliminating any chance at sensible gun policy that bars felons, extremely mentally ill people and minors from acquiring guns without someone giving them a look and a little paperwork getting filed.

Now first, if the author could show me a policy that actually keeps guns out of the hands of criminals, especially if it doesn’t infringe on our rights, we might be willing to listen.

But no such policy exists.

For example, the author makes a whole thing about how these are the “weapon of choice for criminals,” a common talking point among the anti-gun crowd, and how law enforcement has recovered more than 20,000 of these (that was elsewhere in the piece, not the section quoted above). However, I’ve seen these claims before.

Breaking down the numbers previously, I found that what we’re looking at is this “weapon of choice” that criminals are flocking to wasn’t particularly common.

Yes, the raw numbers sound scary, but you need to remember that these were found at “crime scenes.” That means anywhere a crime was committed, so if they stop some random dude because he has a suspicious bulge around his beltline, that’s a crime scene.

But if we assumed each one was used in a violent crime–they weren’t, but let’s roll with it for the sake of argument–then we’re looking at something like two percent of crimes were associated with a “ghost gun.”

Just two percent.

With that put out there, let’s talk a bit about why gun rights groups and Republican allies oppose these measures.

First, it just makes things a pain for the law-abiding. While plenty of folks claim that Biden’s rule did something, it couldn’t have. All it did was prohibit kits that contained all the parts. People can still buy the incomplete receivers and the parts. They just have to click “add to cart” twice instead of just once.

While most criminals are lazy, they’re not that lazy.

But what the rule does is open the door just a bit to more restrictions. If you let this one stand, then it’ll be used to excuse the next one, and the one after that, and then the one after that.

The door opens and we get more and more federal overreach.

Plus, a lot of the issue here is that the ATF didn’t have the authority to redefine what makes something a gun versus something that isn’t despite what Congress has actually said. If we allow the executive branch to simply issue decrees as they wish, ignoring the will of the legislature whenever they so please, the legislative branch devolves into nothing but meaninglessness.

We’re not defending criminals. It’s never defending criminals.

It’s about defending ourselves, our rights, and the Constitution itself.

FPC WIN: Federal Judge Blocks New York Carry Ban

BUFFALO, N.Y. (October 10, 2024) – Today, Firearms Policy Coalition (FPC) announced that the United States District Court for the Western District of New York has granted partial summary judgment in favor of the plaintiffs in FPC’s Christian v. James lawsuit, permanently enjoining the state’s law banning guns on all publicly-open private property without express consent of the owner, and denied the state’s request for a stay of that decision. The opinion can be viewed at firearmspolicy.org/boron.

“This is yet another important victory for Second Amendment rights and another major loss for New York, authoritarian governments, and radical anti-rights organizations like Everytown and Giffords. We will continue to fight forward as we work to restore the full scope of the right to keep and bear arms throughout the United States. Hopefully Kathy Hochul is ready to write another check for legal fees,” said FPC President Brandon Combs.

Just yesterday, New York Governor Kathy Hochul said that, after the Supreme Court’s Bruen decision, the State “doubled down” on its anti-rights agenda. In a statement yesterday, she said that “[the State] came up with legislation. And we have a prohibition on concealed carry weapons in sensitive places. I personally think every place is sensitive[.]” However, today’s decision again shows that Governor Hochul couldn’t be more wrong.

“Regulation in this area is permissible only if the government demonstrates that the new enactment is consistent with the Nation’s historical tradition of sufficiently analogous regulations. New York fails that test here,” the Court said in its opinion today. “Indeed, property owners have the right to exclude. But the state may not unilaterally exercise that right and, thereby, interfere with the long-established Second Amendment rights of law-abiding citizens who seek to carry for self-defense on private property open to the public.”

Opening Arguments Begin in ‘Ghost Gun’ Challenge

While so-called ghost guns get a lot of hype in the media, the reality is that they account for only a tiny fraction of those firearms used in illegal acts. However, because they’ve grown in supposed popularity–probably because of media hysterics cluing bad guys in that these are a thing–they’re the worst thing ever.

When the Biden administration took steps to try to regulate these firearms, the usual suspects in the media and anti-gun activism celebrated it.

However, such a decree was never going to go unchallenged. Today, opening arguments begin in that case. (Arguments begin at 11:00 AM Eastern; you can watch them here.)

Among those party to the challenge is the Second Amendment Foundation, which sent a press release about today’s opening statements.

On Tuesday, Oct. 8, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in Second Amendment Foundation’s (SAF) challenge to ATF’s regulation expanding what constitutes a “firearm.”

Arguments will begin at 11 a.m. EST and will be broadcast live here.

SAF is joined in the case by Defense Distributed and Not an LLC (doing business as JSD Supply). SAF and its partners are represented by attorneys Charles R. Flores and Josh Blackman of Houston, and SAF Executive Director Adam Kraut.

In April 2022, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) published its Final Rule amending the regulatory definition of the term “firearm” to encompass precursor parts that, with enough additional manufacturing operations, would become functional firearms frames and receivers, but in their current state were non-functional objects.

In seeking to regulate these “non-firearm objects” the ATF’s Final Rule directly contradicted Congress’ definition of “firearm” set forth in the Gun Control Act of 1968. The ATF’s re-definition of “firearm” in the Final Rule establishes a practical ban on the private manufacture of firearms – a constitutionally protected tradition.

In December 2022, SAF filed to intervene in an existing lawsuit in the Northern District of Texas known as VanDerStok v. Garland. The case challenges the lawfulness of ATF’s regulatory re-definition of a “firearm” under the Administrative Procedures Act. SAF scored a major victory in the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which vacated significant portions of the Rule. The Biden Department of Justice now seeks to resurrect the rule before the Supreme Court.

For more information about the case, visit saf.org. To listen to the arguments live, click here or follow SAF’s X page for live updates.

The key takeaway is that the argument will be that the ATF exceeded it’s regulatory authority by trying to redefine what is and isn’t a firearm. This is what the ATF did with bump stocks when they opted to redefine them as machine guns. The Supreme Court ruled they had no such authority, so it’s unlikely this will be any different.

That’s bad news for the anti-gun side because the reason Biden went the executive order route and had the ATF act unilaterally was because there wasn’t a snowball’s chance in Hades that Congress was going to pass any bill trying to accomplish what the ATF tried.

Yet that’s not a valid reason to try and go around Congress like this and redefine things differently than Congress did.

Had there never been a law that specifically defined a firearm, they might could have gotten away with it. One could argue that the lack of definition would put the onus for defining what is and isn’t a gun on the ATF. The problem is that they did define it. The ATF has to work within that definition, not make up their own because they really don’t like that people do things they don’t approve of.

The Vanderstock case is likely to be another smackdown of the ATF’s overreach, much like what we saw in Cargill.

DeSantis Declares No Orders for Closing Gun Stores Ahead of Milton

If Hurricane Helene was all we had to deal with, that would have been plenty for the year. Unfortunately, now Florida is bracing for Milton, which is expected to reach category four status and then slam into the state.

With all the death and devastation hitting a part of the country that pretty much never has to worry about hurricanes, a lot of stories have gotten lost in the shuffle. We covered the situation in Okeechobee, Florida where the police chief illegally decreed that gun stores must be closed. No one stopped what they were doing because of the decree, mind you, and it wasn’t enforced–the chief says it was a mistake that shouldn’t have happened–but it was still a thing.

Gov. Ron DeSantis is taking steps to make sure that doesn’t happen again.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has issued an emergency declaration ahead of  Hurricane Milton that prohibits Emergency Management Director Kevin Guthrie from exercising his authority to suspend or limit gun sales.

The preemption of Guthrie’s authority is unprecedented and even highlighted in the news release that went out with the executive order declaring an emergency:…

Florida law allows the emergency management director to prohibit citizens from carrying guns and selling guns and ammunition during an emergency, but Guthrie has not taken such action as far as available records show.

Except that it doesn’t.

It provides for emergency management directors to prohibit the carrying and selling of firearms when there have been acts of violence or defiance of lawful authority. That simply doesn’t exist here, so no, Guthrie doesn’t actually have the authority to do so. The fact that he hasn’t doesn’t mean he won’t, and after what happened to Okeechobee, well, DeSantis is taking steps to make sure it doesn’t happen this time.

“But this is unprecedented!” the writers declare.

Sure, it’s unprecedented, but that’s because no one figured they needed to spell it out specifically before. Prior to Okeechobee, no one in Florida thought that someone would try to prohibit the lawful carry of a firearm or the sale of one in the lead-up to a hurricane. Sure, I could see them doing it during a riot or some kind of uprising, but for a storm?

Yet someone did, and DeSantis clearly wants to make sure there’s not a repeat.

Yes, officials said it was a mistake, that they didn’t mean to sign any such order and it was never enforced, and so on. That doesn’t mean someone else won’t try to do it simply because they don’t like guns.

I don’t think Guthrie would do so–he was appointed to his job by DeSantis, so, probably, he’s not exactly a gun control enthusiast–but this also shields him from criticism if something goes sideways and someone gets shot during the storm or the immediate aftermath. It’s unlikely we’ll see widespread violence or anything, but we also know how the news media gets.

No, DeSantis did the right thing and media hysterics are nothing but an attempt to try and pretend this is something that it’s not.

People need to be able to buy guns right up until the stores close because the stores’ management decides its time to close. DeSantis making sure there’s no repeat of Helene and Okeechobee is just good sense.