Category: RKBA
The Most Important Lesson of the Iran War Is to Buy Guns and Ammo
It’s remarkable how the real world always illustrates the Founders’ wisdom, graphically and undeniably. Take the current situation in Iran. It’s a country with a great history, full of intelligent people run by a bunch of backward, semi-human savages with a ridiculous apocalyptic theology that is so brutal it killed 30,000 or so of its own people a few months ago just to stay in power.
And now it’s still in power, at least over its own people, despite the United States and Israel righteously devastating its conventional military capabilities. You can sync its navy, shoot down its Air Force, and smash its missiles; the power on the ground requires contending power on the ground. Our glorious alliance with Israel – suck on that podcast dorks – cannot kill every goat molester with an AK-47 and a conviction that the more he murders, the more virgins he gets.
That job belongs to the people of Iran, and unfortunately, they don’t have the tools to do it. They are disarmed, and therefore, they are serfs, not citizens, much like the English and Australians. In Iran, the answer to the problem of securing freedom and justice is the same as it is here in America and everywhere else:
Guns.
Guns are freedom. Guns are liberty. Guns are the last bulwark – a real one, not one that enjoys watching the pool boy cavort with his wife – of freedom. Of course, it’s not actually guns that secure freedom. It’s violence. Some dumb people will tell you violence never solves anything.
The only people who can tell you violence never solves anything are people for whom the problem of violence has been solved by other people who know what the hell they’re talking about and who use violence to solve the problem of violence.
Gun Rights Group Files Brief To Rebut DOJ’s Misleading Arguments In NFA Challenge
Arguments by the Trump Administration’s Department of Justice for continuing the registration portion of the National Firearms Act (NFA) now that the tax has been eliminated have drawn the ire of a major gun-rights group.
Congress killed the $200 tax on suppressors, short-barreled rifles (SBRs), short-barreled shotguns (SBSs), and any other weapons (AOWs) when it passed President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill last summer. Gun-rights groups immediately filed a handful of lawsuits challenging the remainder of the NFA, and the DOJ is unexpectedly fighting those lawsuits, despite the administration’s promise to battle anti-Second Amendment laws.
In one of the cases, Brown v. ATF, the Second Amendment Foundation (SAF) recently filed a supplemental reply brief countering the federal government’s arguments in support of the NFA.
“This reply brief gave us the perfect opportunity to rebut the government’s arguments in support of the NFA,” Bill Sack, SAF director of legal operations, said in a news release announcing the filing. “We were encouraged the court requested targeted supplemental briefing that addressed key elements of the proper Second Amendment analysis. In our principle brief, we laid out in detail why the answer to every question posed supported our position. And now with this reply brief, we have driven home the point and dismantled each of the government’s arguments to the contrary.”
By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,
Here once the embattled farmers stood,
And fired the shot heard round the world.
− Ralph Waldo Emerson, ” Concord Hymn “
On this day, the British colonial government attempted to confiscate the firearms of the citizens of two backwater farming communities in Massachusetts.
The response was the “shot heard round the world” at the Battles of Lexington and Concord. The British officer in command of the field in Lexington and Concord, Major John Pitcairn, would be killed within two months at the Battle of Breed’s Hill (also called Bunker Hill). Felled by a shot fired by a freed slave, Peter Salem.
Exemplifying James Burgh’s earlier observation: “The possession of arms is the distinction between a freeman and a slave.” Although the English Constitution of 1689 enumerated the Rights of Englishmen to keep and bear arms, practical history has shown that we only have the Rights that we are willing to fight, and if necessary, kill for.
It is the character of the individual that society produces, not the tools that those individuals employ. It is also the character of the individuals in government who either seek to empower the individual to self defense, or seek to operantly condition society to be defenseless against aggression, that matters.
We can be a nation of Minutemen, rising to the occasion to aid our fellow man in defense, or we can be a nation of sheep, always in need of protection by government programs to provide a “sense” of safety, while providing a reality of servitude.
“Both Oligarch and Tyrant mistrust the People and therefore deprive them of their Arms” -Aristotle
Machine Guns in “Common Use”: A realistic strategy
I have some good news and some bad news. The bad news is that the United States Supreme Court is not going to hold that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear machine guns. The justices made this clear in Garland v. Cargil (2024).
In the District of Columbia v. Heller (2008) oral argument, the attorney representing the District of Columbia correctly argued that machine guns are arms protected by the Second Amendment. It was Justice Scalia who pushed back. In the view of the late justice, only arms that are in “common use” are arms protected by the Second Amendment.
The good news is that there is a strategy to bypass the 1986 de facto Federal ban on civilians acquiring machine guns, which would result in their becoming “in common use.”1
But we won’t be able to rely on the courts. We will have to come up with a political solution that will withstand the inevitable legal challenges.
There were two problems with the bill. The first problem was that the bill relied exclusively on 18 U.S.C. § 922(o)(2)(A), a Federal law that exempts “a transfer to or by, or possession by or under the authority of, the United States or any department or agency thereof or a State, or a department, agency, or political subdivision thereof…”
That argument failed recently in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in U.S. v. Kittson. You can read the decision as well as Judge Van Dyke’s dissent below.
The second problem is that West Virginia is in the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. A Circuit that has long vied with the 9th and 2nd Circuits for being the most anti-gun circuit.
The correct strategy is to rely on the Militia Clause of the Second Amendment.
District of Columbia v. Heller (2008) held that the Second Amendment protects the individual right to keep and bear arms, independent of service in a militia. All of the Second Amendment cert petitions granted since then have likewise been cases unrelated to the Militia Clause.
Instead of using the state to transfer machine guns to basically anyone via a Federal statute, one the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals has already held only applies to “government personnel,”2 simply make the transfers to members of the state militia or similar state organization, and do it first in a Circuit, such as the Fifth Circuit, where any legal challenge would face an uphill battle.
The Texas State Guard is such an organization. Unlike the National Guard, members of the Texas State Guard report only to the governor.
Members of the Texas State Guard (TXSG) are required to attend monthly drill weekends, four days of Annual Training, and emergency State Active Duty deployments when ordered.
That is an important element to defending against any legal challenge. A state that simply said every able-bodied adult who is a citizen of the state of Texas and who is between such and such an age is a member of the State militia would be hard pressed to defend its passing out or selling machine guns to the general public.
Were it up to me, machine guns would be as easy to purchase as firing reproductions of Revolutionary War muskets. But it is not up to me.
Around half of the states are “Red States,” with a combined population of about 150 million. If you want machine guns to become “in common use,” then you will have to organize and start lobbying the Red State legislatures to revitalize their state militias, and in those states like Texas, utilize the existing infrastructure.
An Alternative Strategy Recently Appeared
Speaking of Texas, a Federal lawsuit was filed on March 10th in the Northern District of Texas that claims 18 U.S.C. § 922(o) “is unconstitutional on its face and as applied to Plaintiffs because it exceeds Congress’s enumerated powers…” The case is Temple Gun Club, Inc. v. Bondi.
Given the recent Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals decision in McNutt v. Department of Justice et al., which held that the ban on the home distillation of alcohol is unconstitutional, if I were the Plaintiffs in Temple Gun Club, I would file an amended complaint.
Adding more proof to the claim that there’s literally no gun advertising that they would find acceptable, Everytown complains about a handgun ad that shows someone using it to stop a robbery: https://t.co/wOJSNDZKkj
— Rob Romano (@2Aupdates) April 17, 2026
While I ridicule the antigunners a lot, I don’t think I was ever more disgusted than when I saw how upset they were when Elisjsha Dicken stopped a mass shooting. They could barely hide their rage.
They would have preferred he wasn’t there to stop the killer, because of how that example hurts their narratives. They would have preferred more people murdered, so they could use that to push gun bans.
Everytown being angry about this HK ad, showing totally lawful self-defense and defense of others, is in that same vein.
The ad is actually extremely healthy in its message, saying that its subject could only stop a mass shooting because he chose a good gun (their gun of course, it is still an ad), got training, and stored it responsibly in a safe at home. It even shows him not shooting it very well at first, but continuing to train until he got better. And it’s an ad for a small handgun, not a scary “assault weapon.”
It’s literally the least controversial modern gun ad I’ve seen. So what the hell is Everytown’s problem? Oh right, they want to ban all guns, so NO gun advertising is ever acceptable.
By the way, ads like this do a very good thing. They send a message to would-be mass shooters that they might get smoked quickly, and their fame-seeking may thus end in humiliation. That’s a deterrent to mass shootings. So it’s a shame more people don’t see them given gun ads don’t play on TV and such.
Two More 2A Cases Make Their Supreme Court Conference Debut Tomorrow Today
Earlier today I covered why one Supreme Court-watcher is optimistic about the justices taking up bans on so-called assault weapons and large capacity magazines next term, but those aren’t the only 2A issues that will be discussed in tomorrow’s conference. There are two cases making their first appearance in the justice’s closed door meeting that could be granted cert (or denied) as early as next Monday, and both are worth taking up… and talking about.
The first case is U.S. v. Peterson; a challenge to the National Firearms Act’s restrictions on suppressors. Specifically, the attorneys for plaintiff George Peterson are asking SCOTUS to address two questions: First, whether the National Firearms Act’s taxation-and-registration scheme for covered firearms can be justified as a licensing law, and whether the National Firearms Act’s taxation-and-registration scheme violates the Second Amendment with respect to firearm suppressors.
The Trump administration waived its right to reply to the cert petition, and it’s not a great sign for the plaintiffs that not a single justice asked the DOJ to reply anyway. To date, though, Trump’s DOJ has argued that, while suppressors may be protected “arms” under the Second Amendment, the $200 tax (which has now been zeroed out by the One Beautiful Bill Act) and registration requirement (which is still in place) represent “modest” burdens on our right to keep and bear arms.
The plaintiffs have made strong arguments about why that is not the case, but they weren’t able to prevail in the fairly conservative and 2A-friendly Fifth Circuit, which treated the taxation-and-registration scheme as akin to a shall-issue-licensing law. I’ll be thrilled if I’m wrong, but my hunch is that the justices aren’t ready to wade into the thorny questions posed by the plaintiffs here. If SCOTUS grants cert to a case dealing with bans on “assault weapons” and “large capacity” magazines the odds of a cert grant in Peterson would improve, but I can’t see SCOTUS addressing the constitutionality of the NFA and its treatment of suppressors before it takes up gun and magazine bans… at least not with an outcome that gun owners will appreciate.
The other Second Amendment case making its first Friday appearance in conference is Gardner v. Maryland, which poses three questions to the Court:
1. Does Maryland’s prohibition on carrying a handgun without a state permit, as applied to an interstate traveler with a valid Virginia concealed carry permit who displayed a loaded firearm in self-defense against an assailant’s vehicular assault and physical advance, violate the Second Amendment under New York State Rifle & Pistol Ass’n v. Bruen… by lacking a historical tradition of disarming law-abiding citizens in such circumstances?
2. Did the Maryland courts’ reliance on a video showing the assailant’s calm demeanor upon police arrival, without his testimony or other witnesses to corroborate the incident, while disregarding Petitioner’s evidence of the assailant’s PIT maneuver, vehicular coercion, and physical advance, violate the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause by denying Petitioner a meaningful opportunity to present a self-defense claim?
3. Does Maryland’s refusal to recognize Petitioner’s valid Virginia concealed carry permit for interstate travel violate the Full Faith and Credit Clause, U.S. Const, art. IV, § 1, or the Firearms Owners’ Protection Act (18 U.S.C. § 926A), despite the firearm being loaded and Pennsylvania’s non-recognition of the permit at the time of the incident?
Bearing arms: Shifting views among gun owners on a foundational right
Reporter Patrik Jonsson has been writing about guns for 15 years. As the Monitor’s beat reporter in the American Southeast, Patrik has covered gun violence and gun rights; coffee shops banning firearms and stand-your-ground-law advocates using them; mass shootings and the National Rifle Association, and whether the gun itself has become a “sacred object” in America.
In this week’s magazine, he writes about a new twist in what has become one of this country’s most emotional, and debated, issues: a growing liberal embrace not just of guns themselves, but of an approach to the Second Amendment long associated with the conservative right.
“I’ve covered so many angles on the Second Amendment,” Patrik told me. “I’ve done stories about liberal gun owners, I did a story about women gun owners, I did a story about the complications of being a Black gun owner.” But Patrik started noticing something new after the killing of Alex Pretti, an intensive care nurse fatally shot by federal agents in Minnesota earlier this year.
Why We Wrote This
The Monitor’s longtime Georgia bureau chief, Patrik Jonsson, noticed a shift in thought among gun owners: a mistrust of government on the political left.
During the COVID-19 pandemic and a wave of Black Lives Matter protests, Patrik explains, a growing number and diversity of Americans started turning to firearms in hopes of defending themselves from criminals. This, according to scholars, was an expansion of what is sometimes called “Gun Culture 2.0” – a perception of guns as being primarily for self-protection rather than for hunting or military use.
(Previously, those on the left were more likely to identify with gun control advocates, who point to research showing that firearms in the home increase the risk of violence there.)
After Minnesota, though, Patrik found a growing, cross-partisan belief that guns are necessary not just to protect oneself from criminals, but also from the government.
Mr. Pretti had been carrying a licensed handgun – a fact used by some government officials to at first justify his shooting and later raised by citizens across the political spectrum worried about federal overreach.
“What happened after Alex Pretti … was this simmering sense on the left that, ‘Maybe the folks on the right were correct? What if the state falls into the wrong hands?’” Patrik told me.
“if the state falls into the wrong hands” he says
Judge Alex Kozinski –
The Second Amendment is a doomsday provision, one designed for those exceptionally rare circumstances where all other rights have failed – where the government refuses to stand for reelection and silences those who protest; where courts have lost the courage to oppose, or can find no one to enforce their decrees. However improbable these contingencies may seem today, facing them unprepared is a mistake a free people get to make only once.”
He started to look for data, he says, and found early indications that thought might be shifting.
“This is at the heart of the story – this rethinking of the Second Amendment on the left and what that means,” Patrik says.
Now, if Harmeet can begin dealing with the federal bureaucraps…
The Constitution & 2nd Amendment protect the lawful ownership of semi-automatic rifles such as the AR-15.@TheJusticeDept will aggressively defend this right, & the @CivilRights Division will sue if states refuse to comply. pic.twitter.com/QRqbc2520b
— AAGHarmeetDhillon (@AAGDhillon) April 15, 2026
Kentucky Legislature Overrides Governor’s Vetoes on Two Pro-Second Amendment Bills
Key Takeaways
- Kentucky General Assembly overrode Governor Beshear’s vetoes on two pro-Second Amendment bills, restoring liability protections and enabling concealed carry for adults aged 18-20.
- House Bill 78, the PLCAA Clarification Act, protects the firearms industry from civil lawsuits linked to criminal misuse of their products.
- House Bill 312 allows provisional concealed carry licenses for adults between 18 and 20, who can later apply for standard licenses.
- Supporters argue that the veto overrides affirm constitutional rights and combat unjust age discrimination in carrying firearms.
- The legislation signals to anti-rights advocates the need to stop blaming the firearms industry for crimes.
FRANKFORT, KY — The Kentucky General Assembly voted to override Governor Andy Beshear’s vetoes of two pro-Second Amendment bills this week, restoring liability protections for the firearms industry and opening a path for law-abiding adults between the ages of 18 and 20 to carry concealed.
The two bills — House Bill 78 and House Bill 312 — had each passed with wide legislative support before the Democratic governor sent them back. Kentucky lawmakers returned to Frankfort and voted to override both.
HB 78: Protecting the Firearms Industry from Frivolous Lawsuits
House Bill 78, known as the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms (PLCAA) Clarification Act of 2026, establishes legal protections for firearm and ammunition manufacturers, distributors, and retailers against civil lawsuits arising from the criminal or unlawful misuse of their products. The bill builds on protections already provided by the federal PLCAA, which some courts have failed to apply as Congress intended.
Kentucky’s House of Representatives voted 80 to 19 to override the veto. The Senate voted 31 to 6.
State-level PLCAA measures have become increasingly necessary. A number of antigun states have enacted laws designed to circumvent the federal PLCAA and allow the very sort of frivolous lawsuits the federal law bars. The NSSF has described this coordinated effort as a wave of lawfare aimed at financially crippling the firearms industry.
NSSF Senior Vice President and General Counsel Lawrence G. Keane addressed the governor’s reasoning directly. “Governor Beshear acknowledged when he vetoed this bill that this legislation would prevent frivolous and harassing lawsuits for violence committed by criminals,” Keane said. He added that Beshear chose to side with gun control special interest groups that want to use the courts to accomplish what they cannot accomplish through legislation.
Keane put the issue plainly. “Members of the firearm industry are no more responsible for the actions of criminals than Kentucky’s bourbon distillers are responsible for drunk driving deaths,” he said.
HB 312: Concealed Carry Licenses for Adults Ages 18 to 20
House Bill 312 authorizes the Kentucky State Police to issue provisional concealed carry licenses to adults between the ages of 18 and 20. Those who receive a provisional license can later apply for a standard license through their county sheriff or through the KSP online system. The bill passed both chambers before Gov. Beshear vetoed it.
CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb said the governor was practicing age discrimination by denying full rights of citizenship to young adults who can serve in the military, start businesses, get married, and run for office.
The Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms (CCRKBA) had called on the legislature to act after the veto. “We are both delighted and proud of the Kentucky legislators who returned to Frankfort for these important votes,” Gottlieb said.
What This Means
Gottlieb said the Kentucky override should be seen as a signal to anti-rights advocates to stop blaming an entire lawful industry for the country’s violent crime problem and to stop restricting the rights of an entire age class.
The Second Amendment is a fundamental civil right. It does not begin at age 21, and it does not end because a criminal misused a product. Kentucky’s legislature affirmed both of those principles this week. The firearms industry can do business without being punished for crimes it did not commit, and law-abiding young adults in Kentucky can now pursue their right to carry for personal protection.
We can only hope so.
Hopefully they start defending FRTs, binary triggers, and other semi automatic enhanced parts. https://t.co/HCldNrP9Dc
— Joshua Yoder (@MrJoshuaYoder) April 16, 2026
VA Ground Zero on Guns: DOJ Legal Action Threat
By Dave Workman
Editor-in-Chief
In office only four months, Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger has found herself in the middle of a gun rights battleground, and the fault lies squarely in her lap and with her Democrat colleagues in the legislature for passing a slew of gun control bills, including one which brought a promise of federal legal action: Senate Bill 749.
Spanberger faces a deadline of 11:59 p.m. tonight—one minute before Midnight—to either sign or veto the bill. A third option, as noted by WVEC News, would let the bills become law without her signature.
In a sharply-worded letter to Spanberger, Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon at the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, which includes the newly-created Second Amendment section, Spanberger was warned the DOJ “will commence litigation in the event the Commonwealth of Virginia enacts certain bills that unconstitutionally limit law-abiding Americans’ individual right to bear arms.” The letter specifically mentioned SB 749, which would “unconstitutionally” restrict the manufacture, purchase or sale of AR-15 rifles “and other semi-automatic firearms in common use.”
This was no idle threat. Dhillon’s Civil Rights Division has already taken legal action against the Virgin Island police and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department over delays in approving gun permit applications.
Two Researchers Suggest ‘New Firearms Tax Design’ To Combat ‘Gun Violence’
By Dave Workman
Writing at ProMarket, two researchers have declared it’s time for “alternative tax regimes to replace” federal excise taxes on handguns and long guns—which generate revenues to fund federal wildlife restoration programs—and doubling the taxes to “produce meaningful gains to society through a reduction in violence.”
Liberty Park Press reached out to authors Luis Armona and Adam Rosenberg, but did not recieve replies.
However, the National Shooting Sports Foundation noted that one year ago, an Op-Ed published on the NSSF website took Armona and Rosenberg to task for also pushing a gun tax proposal, leading off with this blistering observation: “Leave it to the ‘scholars’ at Harvard Kennedy School to come up with a scheme that combines the arrogance of the ‘intellectual elite,’ increasing taxes, administering gun confiscation plans and – again – purposefully conflating “public health” policies for crime control for the latest pie-in-the-sky gun control plan.”
This was back on April 4, 2025. Writer Salam Fatohi observed about their alternative tax scheme, “They just need to tax the snot out of them.”
In their new article, Armona and Rosenberg acknowledge “we know surprisingly little about how these markets operate, including how consumers make choices between the thousands of firearms available to them, how much they value these weapons, and how suppliers set prices or react to taxes. Without this information, it is impossible to know whether a tax of, say, 50%, 10%, or 0% is the “right level” to raise federal funds and reduce gun-related crimes, or what the effects of these taxes would be.”
Nowhere do they explain how y would mitigate the loss of federal aid funds for wildlife to the states, which have amounted to hundreds of millions of dollars since the Pittman-Robertson fund was enacted in 1937. Under this dedicated fund program, which is strongly supported by industry and sportsmen’s organizations, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service provides annual apportionments to the states for wildlife-related programs, which include range development and hunter education.
While the researchers push the argument that violent crime is a public health issue, NSSF’s Fatohi noted last year, “…crime isn’t a public health crisis, as much as gun control advocates want to profess it is. Crime is a law enforcement issue. There is no prescription that prevents people who have no respect for life or law to make them not want to harm their victims. There’s no pill to cure that ill-minded intent.”
He reminded readers that “Criminals, typically, don’t legally buy guns. That means they wouldn’t pay the tax. The Department of Justice (DOJ) Bureau of Justice Statistics own reports show that 90 percent of criminals convicted of crimes involving a firearm admit they obtained those firearms through illicit means. In other words, those criminals stole those firearms or bought them on the black market.”
Mark Oliva, managing director of Public Affairs for NSSF, called this new tax suggestion “a non-starter.”
He says the proposal pushes the premise “that law-abiding gun owners must subsidize (and pay an illegal poll tax) for the crimes committed by criminals.”
“I’m not aware of a tax on library cards to combat illiteracy,” Oliva said via email. “Or a tax on voting to combat election interference. The ‘right tax’ comment tells you everything. Criminals aren’t paying the tax when they illegally obtain guns. That would be forced on you and I.”
Whether the idea is a non-starter or may gain some traction, it underscores how wide the gap between common sense and nonsense, critics would argue. The gap is growing wider, and at stake is a funding mechanism which has served the nation’s wildlife programs for generations.
DOJ Warns Virginia It Will Sue Over AR-15 Ban, Gun Control Bills
For years, gun owners have watched blue-state politicians pass one unconstitutional restriction after another while the federal government mostly stood on the sidelines. That may be changing.
In a April 10, 2026, letter to Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger, Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon put the Commonwealth on formal notice: if Virginia enacts a slate of anti-gun bills now sitting on the governor’s desk, the U.S. Department of Justice Civil Rights Division is prepared to sue.
That is the federal government warning a state executive, in writing, that certain proposed gun-control measures appear to violate the Second Amendment and will trigger litigation if signed into law.
The biggest target named in the letter is SB 749, which DOJ says would force Virginia law enforcement agencies to participate in “a practice of unconstitutionally restricting the making, buying, or selling of AR-15s and many other semi-automatic firearms in common use.”
Interesting point of view.
The Virginia Democrats’ gun legislation is reactionary, not progressive
The United States is an empire, with the most powerful military in the world. It’s also one of only two nations in the world with the right to bear arms enshrined in its founding legal documents, the other being Guatemala. The Second Amendment is considered by many to be the amendment that safeguards all other rights.
Nevertheless, many people have seen the Second Amendment as harmful due to the presence of powerful firearms, such as semi-automatics, in the hands of U.S. civilians. They point to tragedies, especially mass shootings, as justification for regulating firearms.
They see the “well-regulated militia” statement as a caveat that limits what firearms we can possess, claiming that “weapons of war” shouldn’t be in the hands of civilians. They see those who believe in these so-called weapons of war being in the hands of civilians as inherently taking a normatively right-wing standpoint.
For the sake of testing this argument, we can acknowledge that the right to bear arms shouldn’t be infringed only within the context of where there’s a well-regulated militia in the context of the necessity of the security of a free state. In that case, we must also understand what follows if we investigate the premise that the state itself has refused to self-regulate. When the state refuses to self-regulate, we can come to the conclusion that the civilian populace being armed to counter the unregulated militia becomes, in a sense, the regulation of the unregulated militia.
To those who call themselves progressive and also call themselves pro-gun control or pro-gun ban, I ask you to consider your thought process. Is the U.S. government a well-regulated militia when it’s enabling Israel’s genocide in Gaza? Is it a well-regulated militia when it’s engaging in wars to further the longstanding goals of American imperialism that benefit the richest and most powerful, such as in the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the current war in Iran? Is the U.S. government a well-regulated militia when it violates Americans’ constitutional rights, prioritizes corporate interests and targets people based on race?
To me, the answer is no, in all of these cases. Nevertheless, gun-control advocates seem to believe that the government and military is more entitled than the civilian populace, which does not engage in these acts. The irony, to me, is that many within the gun-control advocacy sphere also happen to oppose at least one or more of the aforementioned operations. I join them in opposition to these actions, but I find their belief in disarming the populace to be self-defeating.
Maine: Federal Appeals Court Upholds 3-Day Waiting Period Law For Firearm Purchases
A federal appeals court has ruled that Maine’s law requiring a three-day waiting period between firearm purchases and taking possession of a gun to be constitutional.
On April 3, a three-judge panel of the Boston-based 1st Circuit Court of Appeals reversed last year’s decision by Maine’s chief federal judge that blocked enforcement of the law on Second Amendment grounds. In a nutshell, the circuit court ruled that the law is a “burden on, but not an infringement of, the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms.”
In what seems to be strained logic, the court ruled that the law regulates conduct before a person keeps and bears arms, thus not infringing upon actually keeping and bearing arms.
“We agree with the Attorney General’s view that laws regulating the purchase or acquisition of firearms do not target conduct covered by the Second Amendment’s ‘plain text,’” the court wrote in the case Beckwith v. Frey. “The Amendment’s plain text guarantees an individual’s ability to keep and bear arms, which means to have a carry guns. The Act does not address this conduct. Rather, the Act imposes a limitation in some circumstances on when a person can acquire a firearm after the person purchased it. The act thus regulates conduct that occurs before a person keeps or carries a gun.”
Of course, anti-gun supporters of the law cheered the court’s ruling as a major step for so-called “gun safety.” Continue reading “”
There Are No ‘Moderate’ Democrats When it Comes to Gun Rights.
Virginia’s Gov. Abigail Spanberger is determined to make her mark in the Old Dominion. She campaigned for office as a moderate Democrat, but Virginians are learning quickly that they’ve been hoodwinked. The reaction is astounding.
A recent poll conducted by George Mason University and The Washington Post found that Gov. Spanberger earned the highest disapproval rating from Virginians of any governor since 1994. Forty-six percent of Virginians disapprove of Gov. Spanberger’s job performance, just three months into the job. To put that into perspective, Gov. Spanberger won by 15 points in her race against former Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears. Her performance is also a glaring contrast to former Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s 53-39 job approval rating at the same point in his administration, according to Fox News.
Chief among those headwinds are two issues that the firearm industry is tracking very closely. First, Gov. Spanberger is expected to sign into law SB 749, which would unconstitutionally ban the purchase of Modern Sporting Rifles (MSRs), or the AR-15-style semiautomatic rifles — the most common rifle in America — as well as semiautomatic shotguns used for hunting and home defense and many pistols and standard capacity magazines. Gov. Spanberger is also considering a bill, HB21, that would attempt to circumvent the bipartisan Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA) to allow frivolous lawsuits against firearm industry members for the criminal misuse of firearms by remote third parties.
Add to that, Gov. Spanberger is backing a referendum effort to gerrymander the Congressional districts in Virginia that would bring a new hyper-partisan Virginia congressional delegation to Congress. If successful, it would change Virginia’s 11 Congressional districts that are currently comprised of six Democrats and five Republicans to 10 Democrats and just one Republican.
The who, what, and where of gun control
A Second Opinion is a recurring series by Haley Proctor on the Second Amendment and constitutional litigation.
My previous column examined what it means for a gun control measure to fit within “the Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.” This month I want to focus on how the court has analyzed gun regulations that limit (1) who may possess a firearm, (2) what arms people may own or carry, and (3) where they may take them.
Who may keep and bear arms?
As of writing, the court’s latest word on the Second Amendment concerns the “who” of gun control: may the government permissibly restrict the ability of certain types of people to keep and bear arms? The court provided important guidance on that question in the 2024 case of United States v. Rahimi, but significant questions remain open.
The Second Amendment secures to “the people” the right “to keep and bear Arms.” In District of Columbia v. Heller, the court held that “the people” refers “to all members of the political community, not an unspecified subset.” This means that the “plain text” contains no limitation on the right that would permit the government to deprive some category of persons of firearms without meeting its burden to show that the deprivation is consistent with the “Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.”
The court has occasionally used the phrase “law-abiding, responsible citizens” to describe “the class of ordinary citizens who undoubtedly enjoy the Second Amendment right.” Some have inferred that this phrase limits the category of people who may assert a Second Amendment right. The court’s decision in Rahimi made clear that this reading was mistaken. If the government wishes to limit the ability of any “member[ ] of the political community” to keep or bear arms – even those who break the law or might be thought to be irresponsible – it must point to a historical tradition that justifies doing so.
Rahimi recognized a historical tradition that “allows the Government to disarm individuals who present a credible threat to the physical safety of others,” “temporarily.” And it identified one group of individuals who the government may disarm consistent with that tradition: individuals presently under a restraining order issued upon a finding that the recipient poses “a credible threat to the physical safety” of another.
This term, the court has taken up the “who” question once more. The case of United States v. Hemani requires it to decide whether the same tradition permits the government to disarm individuals who unlawfully use drugs. Several additional “who” questions are in the offing.
First, despite Heller’s holding that the “people” includes “all members of the political community,” and despite the fact that 18-to-20 year-olds are undoubtedly part of the political community (and many shoulder the responsibility to bear arms for that community), some courts have continued to hold that they are not part of the “people” who enjoy a right to keep and bear arms. These courts have therefore rejected challenges to laws restricting adults’ ability to purchase or carry firearms until they reach the age of 21. There is a circuit split on this question, and the court has been holding several petitions since November. It could be that the court plans to grant, vacate, and remand these cases in light of Hemani, but given that they focus on the meaning of “people” and a different aspect of the historical regulatory tradition, it’s doubtful that Hemani will supply much guidance.