Category: RKBA

The author’s last paragraph makes a valid point. The only reason the NFA & NFRTR (the registry) was found to be legal – and by SCOTUS first in 1937 and several times later in cases that followed – was that Congress had the power to tax and the registry was ‘simply’ to confirm that the tax had been paid, or was covered under one of the very few exemptions.

Here’s the deal. Back in 1986 with the Firearms Owners Protection Act, an actual ban on a gun registry was included. 18 U.S. Code § 926 (a) (3) :

No such rule or regulation prescribed after the date of the enactment of the Firearms Owners’ Protection Act may require that records required to be maintained under this chapter or any portion of the contents of such records, be recorded at or transferred to a facility owned, managed, or controlled by the United States or any State or any political subdivision thereof, nor that any system of registration of firearms, firearms owners, or firearms transactions or dispositions be established.

What with the adjudicated reason making the NFRTR avoid the ban eliminated by law, my bet is that within weeks, if not days after the law-if passed-goes into effect, some people in several of the different court circuits will file suit that the tax free part of the NFRTR is illegal, per that

New Senate Budget Language Would Scrap Taxes on Suppressors, Short Barrel Firearms

After Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough ruled that the language repealing the taxes and registration requirements for NFA items like suppressors, short barreled firearms, and “any other weapons” could not be included in the One Big Beautiful Bill, Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) and others quickly floated an alternative: zeroing out the making and transfer taxes, while keeping the registration requirements in place.

That language has now been included in the text of the budget bill that’s slated for a preliminary procedural vote in the Senate later today (you can find it on page 491).

The new language would zero out the making and transfer taxes on suppressors, short barrel rifles and shotguns, as well as “any other weapons”, which should satisfy the demands of Second Amendment organizations NRA, GOA, SAF, FPC, American Suppressor Association, F.A.I.R. Trade Group, and the National Association of Sporting Goods Wholesalers; who released a joint statement on the reconciliation bill Friday night.

The American Suppressor Association, Gun Owners of America, Firearms Policy Coalition, Second Amendment Foundation, National Rifle Association, National Association of Sporting Goods Wholesalers, and F.A.I.R. Trade Group strongly disagree with the weaponized procedural maneuvering used by the unelected parliamentarian to block the removal of suppressors and short barreled firearms from the NFA tax scheme in the One Big Beautiful Bill.

Unless the Senate chooses to overrule her egregious decision or the Senate Majority Leader removes the existing parliamentarian, which is well within their rights, immediate action must be taken to ensure law-abiding Americans are able to exercise their Second Amendment rights without the draconian NFA tax.

Though not the full tax repeal it should have been, there is still an opportunity to use well-established precedent to lower the NFA’s unconstitutional excise tax on suppressors and short-barreled firearms to zero dollars.

Our organizations stand united on behalf of millions of law-abiding gun owners in calling on Congress to immediately make this revision. This is a critical step in our fight against the unconstitutional NFA tax scheme and for the rights of all Americans.

Democrats will undoubtably object to the new language as well, and MacDonough will have to make another ruling once the bill hits the Senate floor, but folks I’ve spoken with on the Hill and within the 2A community have expressed confidence that by limiting the language solely to taxation and leaving the registration requirements in place the parliamentarian will rule in favor of the amendment.

Some groups, including Gun Owners of America, are still calling on MacDonough to be fired or overruled by Senate Majority Leader John Thune.

Thune has repeatedly said that isn’t going to happen, and over at The Reload, Stephen Gutowski has a pretty good explainer about why the Senate Majority Leader isn’t likely to oust MacDonough, even with some Republican senators demanding she be fired.

Gutowski’s piece is behind a member’s paywall, so I’d encourage you to subscribe to The Reload and read the entire piece for yourself, but the gist of it is this line:

To many in the Senate, firing or overruling the parliamentarian during reconciliation is akin to ending the filibuster. If you can nuke the parliamentarian on one question in this process, you can nuke them on any. What goes around comes around, or so the thinking goes.

If MacDonough was fired or overruled in order to repeal the taxation and registration requirements for NFA items with just 51 votes, Republicans would be giving Democrats the precedent to expand the NFA the same way the next time they have control of the chamber. Imagine AR-15s and other semi-automatic firearms treated like machine guns, and large capacity magazines treated like suppressors, all because there were 51 Democrats willing to include that language in a budget bill.

That’s just one 2A-specific example, but there would likely be dozens of items on the Democrats’ wish list that would be enacted by disregarding the parliamentarian when they’re in charge. It’s the same rationale for keeping the filibuster in place: what goes around comes around, and any short-term advantage to destroying the filibuster or the tradition of adhering to the parliamentarian’s rulings wouldn’t be worth the long-term damage.

Thune could bend to the demands and dismiss MacDonough or decide her rulings don’t matter, but I really don’t think that’s likely. And if he did do that, we could see provisions that 2A groups don’t like get inserted back into the One Big Beautiful Bill; like the language that would require courts to impose financial bonds before issuing temporary restraining orders or preliminary injunctions against the federal government, which would cripple the ability of Second Amendment groups and individuals to file lawsuits challenging federal gun laws.

I still think MacDonough’s ruling was ridiculous given that the registration aspect of the NFA is directly tied to the taxing elements. But if the tax goes away, the same coalition that issued its statement on Friday night could always try to challenge the NFA registry in court, arguing that it’s no longer necessary or even moot once the taxes have been zeroed out. It might take a little longer, but we could see the registration requirements disappear… so long as the narrower language survives a second round of parliamentarian scrutiny.

Civil Rights, part 15: From Liberty to Tyranny

BY JOSH FLOWERS

The Second Amendment – How ‘Public Safety’ Is Used to Justify Disarmament

There are two types of governments in this world:
+ The kind that lets its citizens own guns.

x The kind that owns its citizens.

And the people who hate the Second Amendment don’t just want to ban guns.
They want to eliminate your ability to say NO.
They want to turn you from a citizen into a subject.
They want a monopoly on force — so you have no choice but to obey.

That’s why every authoritarian government in history has disarmed its population before taking total control.

Mao did it. Stalin did it. Hitler did it.
And right now, the American government is using civil rights laws and “public safety” mandates to do the same thing — one restriction at a time.

So today, we break it down:
Why the Second Amendment is non-negotiable.
How civil rights laws are being weaponized to justify gun bans.
Why “public safety” is just an excuse for state control.
How we fight back before we become a nation of defenseless subjects.

Because if you think your First Amendment rights are under attack now, just wait until you have no way to defend them.

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Be Prepared or Be a Serf

You should not live in fear, but you should live with the understanding that there are bad people out there who want you either enslaved or dead. Donald Trump’s courageous strike against the scumbag Iranian mullahs only highlighted the fact that we may very well have hundreds, if not thousands, of sleeper agents within the United States who can act on command to unleash a wave of murder the likes of which we’ve never seen. I wrote a best-selling novel about it. But that’s only one threat. Another threat is homegrown nuts, terrorists, and criminals, to the extent that they differ. And then there is the threat posed by leftists who want to rule over you forever, no matter the cost. You might be out at church, in the mall, or at your own house when it happens, and you better be prepared to deal with it all.

What I’m trying to say is you need to buy guns and ammunition.

The fact is that things are getting uglier. Our opponents are getting uglier, and not just aesthetically (although a lot of them are really unattractive). As Donald Trump racks up win after win, his enemies, both foreign and domestic, are going to get more and more desperate. Obviously, the Iranians, who have killed well into four figures of Americans over the last 50 years, will be looking for payback if their own people don’t hang them from the nearest construction crane first.

Hopefully, by the time you read this, they won’t have struck. We’ve also got, among other disaffected bands of jerks, Hamas, the Houthis, and probably the Hottentots gunning for Americans. For four years under President Biden, the border was wide open with a big flashing “Welcome” sign inviting every Third World psychopath and communist cadre into America. Some of them are sleeping in their sleeper cells. Some of them are running around our college campuses, protected by credulous district court judges who think that the Constitution requires us to put out the welcome mat for people who want us dead.

Here at home, criminals who Soros prosecutors won’t prosecute are walking the streets because these poor, justice-involved persons deserve pity for us making them into criminals with our capitalism and structural racism. Of course, were you even to smudge the line between legal and illegal, they would come down on you like Trump came down on Fordow. There are still plenty of legal aliens out there who kill Americans through drunk driving and murder. And then there are the lunatics, like the guy who thought Tim Walz commanded him to kill because Jazz Hands would be a good senator; anyone who thinks that has already won on his insanity defense.

But the people we should be more concerned about are the leftists enraged at our challenge to their political, social, and cultural supremacy and who would happily shed blood to keep it. We have an entire ruling class that is facing the prospect of losing power for good. It has never been effectively challenged like this since it came into being after World War II, except for short periods, and never so radically. The worst it has ever experienced until now is a temporary slowing of America’s decline into a socialist miasma rather than a complete reversal of the whoosh down that slippery slope. But a reversal is what it’s getting now, and they are frantic to stop us.

Look at the things they’re trying to impose on us and look at how they are not just being stopped but are being turned around. Last week, there was a major Supreme Court case that basically said, “No, there is no constitutional right to mutilate children, dummies.” They really thought they had it. If Kamala Harris had won, they would have. You would have seen the Constitution interpreted to create an affirmative right to cut your children’s bodies apart to conform to the delusions of mentally ill kids or their Munchausen mommies. But because of Trump and his appointments, that didn’t happen. And you saw the Democrats react. Every single one of them was mad about it. Why, not letting young ‘uns be mutilated was the worst thing in the history of ever. Move over, Dred Scott, because not being able to carve up the kiddies is like the Fugitive Slave Act on steroids.

Today, they’re losing across the board. Abortion. DEI. Illegal aliens. We’re not just slowing their roll; we’re rolling them back. Do you think they’ll sit still for it? Do you think they’re just going to allow everything that they’ve built, every mile they’ve trekked in their Gramscian march through the institutions, come to naught?

No, they’ll fight – and I write about it in my upcoming novel, America Apocalypse: The Second American Civil War (you can pre-order now). But the trouble is not going to start with big movements of troops across the battlefields. It’s going to be smaller, more directed actions against particular people – people like you. We had a small-scale insurgency from the late-60s to the mid-70s in this country in which hundreds of people died, and thousands of bombs were detonated by leftist, urban terrorists, mostly spoiled college brats who decided that since the working class wasn’t going to rise up, they would just start killing. Two people already tried to kill Trump. We’ve all seen the statistics that over half of Democrats are open to the idea  of murdering their political opponents. At some point, somebody’s going to pick up a gun and start trying to make that happen on a larger scale.

You don’t want to be caught short. You don’t want to be caught unprepared. It’s not fair that we have to go through our lives taking into account the fact that there are other Americans who would hurt us because we refuse to live under their boot heel, but life isn’t fair. That’s the way it is. Nothing is free, especially freedom. It isn’t going to guard itself, and you’re not always going to be able to rely on the government to protect you either logistically – when seconds count, the police are minutes away – or intentionally, like when the FBI and other law-enforcement organizations under President Eggplant made the conscious choice to allow leftist terrorists to flourish while focusing on such crimes as conservatives’ premeditated petitioning of school boards and Catholics intentionally praying. Even today, blue city cops will do nothing about illegal aliens, including ones who are even more criminal than they all are by virtue of being illegal aliens.

So, prepare. Get the equipment you need. Get the training you need, and not only about shooting guns but about understanding the legal aspects of lawful deadly force. You also need an understanding of basic emergency medical aid, like how to stop the bleeding. Talk to your family about what to do in bad situations. Talk to your neighbors about sticking together if things get ugly. You are your own first responder.

You understand why they want you to be afraid. You understand why they want you disarmed. It’s because when you are not afraid and when you are prepared to defend yourself, your family, your community, and your Constitution, they can never intimidate you. They can never take what is yours from you. And they can never rule over you.

A look at the legal thinking of the new ATF legal counsel

The Federalist Society at UVA Law’s “The Second Amendment After Bruen: The Relationship Between Originalism, History & Tradition” panel with Professor Robert Leider of Antonin Scalia Law School and Professor Mark W. Smith of The King’s College.

End to Taxes, Registration on Most NFA Items Faces a Weekend Byrd Bath

Donald Trump has said he wants to see his One Big Beautiful Bill hit the Resolute desk in the Oval Office by July 4th, and though it remains to be seen whether Republicans in the House and Senate will be able to meet that deadline, Senate Majority Leader John Thune has set an aggressive schedule in the upper chamber, with a goal of having the full Senate cast its first procedural vote on the bill by the middle of next week.

For gun owners, the biggest question is whether the language removing the tax and registration requirement on suppressors, short-barreled firearms, and “any other weapons” will survive the Senate parliamentarian’s scrutiny of the bill. Politico reports the Byrd bath, as it’s colloquially known, will begin in earnest this weekend.

Senate rule-keeper Elizabeth MacDonough is scrubbing the final draft of the megabill in a “big beautiful” Byrd bath. Her rulings on which provisions will fly under the filibuster-skirting budget reconciliation process are expected to roll in through the middle of next week, when Thune wants to schedule the first procedural vote related to the package.

Republicans are bracing for an answer to one consequential question they punted on earlier this year: whether they can use an accounting maneuver known as “current policy baseline” to make it appear that extending Trump’s 2017 tax cuts would cost nothing.

Senate Finance Republicans and Democrats will make a joint presentation to MacDonough this weekend about which provisions to keep or scrap. And there’s no shortage of GOP priorities under Byrd scrutiny — from tax cuts on certain gun silencers to a plan to raise taxes on foreign companies known as the “revenge tax.”

Other outstanding issues before the parliamentarian: whether Commerce has to tweak language to prohibit states from regulating AI over the next decade; whether Judiciary can block judges’ ability to issue preliminary injunctions; and whether Agriculture can use the megabill to pay for pieces of the stalled farm bill.

Punchbowl News reports that Democrats are planning on challenging about 60 provisions in the text offered by the Senate Finance Committee, and the language that would remove the taxation and registration requirements for most NFA items is among their their targets. Supporters of the language have expressed confidence that the measures will survive the Byrd Bath, with Rep. Andrew Clyde of Georgia telling Fox News that the “taxation and registration of firearms under the draconian NFA are inseparably linked,” and therefore should easily fit within the reconciliation guidelines.

Over at The Reload, Stephen Gutowski isn’t quite as confident. Gutowski notes that while the Senate language is more expansive than what was approved by the House, which only dealt with suppressors, it’s likely more “vulnerable to an adverse ruling from the parliamentarian” because the language from the Finance Committee doesn’t separate the elimination of the tax requirement from the provisions delisting the NFA items.

On Friday morning, Politico reported that MacDonough has given the thumbs down to several pieces of the Senate Banking Committee’s OBBB language, including measures meant to “zero out funding for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, slash some Federal Reserve employees’ pay, cut Treasury’s Office of Financial Research and dissolve the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board.” Hopefully that’s not a sign of things to come when the parliamentarian takes her red pen to the Finance Committee’s language this weekend.

In his piece, Gutowski also brings up a long-term issue with using reconciliation to remove items from the NFA. If the parliamentarian gives the green light to changing the NFA through a budget bill, there would be nothing to stop Democrats from using the same maneuver to put items onto the NFA list of restricted items, and even jack up the taxes beyond the $200 currently required. Imagine a budget bill that raises the NFA tax to $400, $600, or even $1,000, while also placing AR-15s and other semi-automatic long guns on the list of restricted firearms.

I don’t think that is reason enough for Republicans to back down and voluntarily strip these provisions from the OBBB, but it’s something to keep in mind, and it’s another reason why the various lawsuits challenging aspects of the NFA are still incredibly important. There aren’t enough votes in the Senate to fully repeal or even modify the NFA in a standalone bill, but if we can weaken the NFA through litigation it will be far more difficult, if not impossible, for Democrats to use future budget bills to raise NFA taxes or add to the list of restricted arms. If MacDonough rules the NFA language out of order, we won’t have to worry as much about Democrats using reconciliation to impose new gun controls, but the ongoing litigation will become an even more important tool for Second Amendment advocates to use against the NFA going forward.

9th Circuit Panel finds California’s 1 gun in 30 days limit, unconstitutional

Affirming the district court’s summary judgment in favor of plaintiffs, the panel held that California’s “one-guna-month” law, which prohibits most people from buying more than one firearm in a 30-day period, facially violates the Second Amendment.

Applying New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, 597 U.S. 1 (2022), the panel first asked whether the Second Amendment’s plain text covers the regulated conduct. If so, the Constitution presumptively protects that conduct.

That presumption can be overcome only if historical precedent from before, during, and even after the founding evinces a comparable tradition of regulation.

The panel held that California’s law is facially unconstitutional because the plain text of the Second Amendment protects the possession of multiple firearms and protects against meaningful constraints on the acquisition of
firearms through purchase.

Next, the panel held that California’s law is not supported by this nation’s tradition of firearms regulation. Bruen requires a “historical analogue,” not a “historical twin,” for a modern firearm regulation to pass muster. Here, the historical record does not even establish a historical cousin for California’s one-gun-a-month law.

Concurring, Judge Owens wrote separately to note that the panel’s opinion only concerns California’s “one-gun-amonth” law. It does not address other means of restricting bulk and straw purchasing of firearms, which this nation’s tradition of firearm regulation may support.

Federal Appeals Court Upholds Gun Free School Zones Law

The federal government may legally disarm at least some gun owners on or near school property.

That was the unanimous holding of a three-judge Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals panel on Monday. The panel upheld the conviction of a man charged with violating the Federal Gun Free School Zones Act by possessing an AR-15 in a vehicle he was living in 40 feet from a private catholic school. It ruled that the modern buffer zone around schools comported with historical analogues dating back nearly 700 years in England that prohibited possessing firearms in a manner that might “terrify the People.”

“The ‘why and how’ of 18 U.S.C. § 922(q)(2)(A), as applied to Allam, are ‘consistent with the principles that underpin our regulatory tradition,’” Judge Cory T. Wilson wrote in US v. Allam. “Put differently, ‘taken together,’ the historical analogues offered by the Government ‘establish that our tradition of firearm regulation supports the application of [§ 922(q)(2)(A)] to [Allam].’”

The ruling leaves intact one of the most expansive “sensitive places” restrictions for firearm possession in all of federal law. It deals a blow to Second Amendment advocates who have long felt that the law’s 1000-foot buffer zone around school property unduly infringes upon gun-carry rights. At the same time, the panel’s narrow ruling tailored to the specific fact pattern of the case may mitigate the fallout for gun-rights advocates.

The panel’s decision focused entirely on defendant Ahmed Abdalla Allam’s conduct surrounding his arrest.

Continue reading “”

The Senate did it the easy way. They deleted everything but Machineguns and Destructive Devices from the list of definitions of what a NFA “Firearm” is.

Louisiana Lawmakers Make Major Improvements to State’s Carry Laws

Louisiana’s annual legislative session has officially drawn to a close, and lawmakers have sent a number of good bills to Gov. Jeff Landry for his approval, including several measures that will bolster the state’s carry laws.

HB 407, for instance, allows non-residents to apply for a Louisiana carry license, including a lifetime permit that won’t expire unless the licensee loses their right to keep and bear arms. While non-residents 18 and older who can lawfully possess a gun can carry without a permit in most places in Louisiana, the federal Gun-Free School Zone Act contains a provision that prohibits carrying within 1,000 feet of a school unless the individual possessing the firearm is “licensed to do so by the State in which the school zone is located or a political subdivision of the State”. In other words, permitless carry doesn’t apply in that location, and even if someone possesses a permit from a state that has reciprocity with Louisiana, that still doesn’t allow them to legally carry within that particular “gun-free zone.”

SB 101 also addresses this issue by specifying that, at least under state law, any person who has a valid concealed handgun permit issued pursuant to Louisiana statute, by a state that has reciprocity with Louisiana, or a person carrying a handgun pursuant to Louisiana’s permitless carry statute, can carry within 1,000 feet of a school without committing a crime.

Given that more than half the country no longer requires a permit to carry, that language desperately needs to be revised by Congress, but until then Louisiana lawmakers have at least provided visitors with a workaround.

The bill also declares that privately-owned vo-tech schools are not considered “schools” under Louisiana state law and are not subject to the provisions of the Gun-Free School Zones Act. As we’ve previously reported, this bill seems designed to finally put an end to attempts by the city of New Orleans to carve out the French Quarter from the state’s permitless carry law by declaring a police substation in the tourist-friendly neighborhood an educational facility by hosting one or two vo-tech classes.

HB 393, meanwhile, clarifies existing state law regarding carrying at or near parades or demonstrations. While those participating in these events are still prohibited from lawfully carrying a firearm, bystanders and spectators are free to exercise their Second Amendment rights.

Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry is expected to embrace all of these pro-Second Amendment reforms, but Louisiana gun owners should still reach out to his office and encourage him to sign the bills into law. While they’re at it, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to contact the lawmakers who backed these measures to thank them for their efforts.

Congratulations to the Louisiana Shooting Association are also in order. President Dan Zelenka, the board, and individual members have done an outstanding job of bolstering the right to keep and bear arms in the Pelican State, for both residents and non-residents alike. This session shows the power that grassroots organizations can have, and the state’s gun laws will hopefully soon be even better than they already are.

North Carolina law states that when the legislature is in session, if a Governor doesn’t sign or veto a bill within 10 days, not including Sundays, it becomes law. The state’s legislature is in session until the end of July.

NC Gov. Stein signs 3 bills, waits to take action on guns or immigration

In a Friday morning event at the North Carolina Governor’s Mansion, Gov. Josh Stein hosted a bipartisan group of lawmakers and Council of State members to sign three bills into law.

Those bills overhauled who is in charge of investing state pension funds, allow licensed social workers to apply to offer services across state lines, and another that allows long-serving officers to continue working without forfeiting a “special separation allowance.”

Stein did not take any action on more controversial pieces of legislation the General Assembly sent him this week. Those include a bill letting people carry concealed weapons without a permit and a pair of immigration bills.

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The Hearing Protection Fearmongering Continues

The Hearing Protection Act should survive the Byrd Rule challenge it’s currently dealing with, in part because, as Cam noted on Wednesday, it deals with the tax portion specifically. Remove the tax, and there’s no reason to have a registry, which was just about knowing who paid the tax.

The National Firearms Act really revolves around taxes, not availability. The way those who passed the law saw it, it didn’t violate the Second Amendment because it didn’t tell anyone what they could and couldn’t have.

Yet now that suppressors are potentially being removed from the NFA, the usual suspects are losing their minds.

And they’re fearmongering like crazy about it, such as in this op-ed.

The budget bill passed by the U.S. House of Representatives and now before the Senate has rightly drawn a lot of criticism for its sharp cuts to Medicaid. But what has largely escaped the public’s attention is the part of the bill that would aid mass shooters, terrorists, and assassins by deregulating gun silencers.

Silencers on guns make it harder for ordinary civilians and police to hear the sound, see the flash, and quickly detect the location of the shooter. Thus they can serve to facilitate mass shootings.

In Virginia Beach, Virginia, in 2019, a gunman who shot and killed twelve people used a silencer. At first, those present didn’t even know that a shooting was underway. Some of them began running but didn’t know which way to go because they hadn’t heard the gunfire.

I find it amusing that the author had to go back to 2019 to find a high-profile case involving a legally purchased suppressor.

First, Virginia Beach kind of proves that their inclusion on the NFA doesn’t stop bad actors from doing bad things with legally purchased suppressors if they decide to do so.

Second, this whole thing was written by someone who learned everything they know about suppressors from television or movies. A number of suppressors don’t even lower the sound of a shot enough to justify shooting without hearing protection in some cases, and none make those shots whisper quiet. Sure, people didn’t recognize the sounds at first in Virginia Beach, but part of that was simply because they didn’t realize what they were hearing in the first place.

I also notice that the author didn’t mention the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. His alleged assassin, Luigi Mangione, allegedly used a 3D-printed suppressor that he didn’t purchase legally.

Unfortunately, legalizing silencers fits the pattern of Trump’s second term gun policy. He weakened the Brady background check system by revoking President Joe Biden’s Zero Tolerance Policy. Under it, the licenses of gun dealers could be cancelled if they failed to run background checks as required or sold guns to prohibited people. And Trump’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) would even allow “irresponsible and dangerous gun sellers who lost their licenses because of willful violations of the law to get back into business,” as the group Brady United put it. They can simply reapply.

And this is how you know this writer either doesn’t know what the heck he’s talking about or is actively lying to his readers.

The policy didn’t somehow make it possible for licenses to be revoked for breaking the law. That’s always been on the table, as well as prosecution, should a licensed dealer fail to conduct a NICS check or knowingly sell a gun to a prohibited person. That’s still something dealers face should they do such a thing.

That wasn’t Biden’s “Zero Tolerance” policy.

What his policy did was lead to licenses being revoked for things like abbreviating a county instead of spelling it out, or misunderstanding when the 72-hour waiting period for a NICS check properly starts.

So, with either such a poor understanding of what that policy did or a propensity to outright lie to his readers, why should anyone take his expertise on suppressors seriously?

There is no reason.

Suppressors aren’t commonly used in crimes, even with them being available for 3D printing these days. They add bulk to a gun and make it harder to conceal, which most bad guys prize for various reasons. They also have a finite lifespan, which means you can only get the sound suppressed so many times before it stops.

But hey, when you’re focused on fearmongering to delusional nutjobs who are predisposed to being lied to on guns, what else can you expect?

Constitutional carry bill clears NC legislature, sent to governor

The North Carolina House passed the Freedom to Carry NC Act on Wednesday afternoon along party lines, sending the permitless carry legislation to the governor’s desk.

In a 59-48 vote, the General Assembly moved one step closer to making North Carolina the 30th state to adopt constitutional carry. The bill allows individuals 18 and older to carry concealed handguns without a permit.

“This bill further ensures that Carolinians can exercise their Second Amendment rights, which include both owning and carrying firearms,” said Rep. Brian Echevarria, R-Cabarrus. “The absolute language of ‘shall not be infringed’ in our Constitution is the strongest prohibition on earth against any government action that would limit this right.”

All Democrats, as well as two Republicans, Reps. William Brisson, R-Bladen, and Ted Davis, R-New Hanover, voted against the bill.

 

Rep. Keith Kidwell, R-Beaufort, praised the bill, noting it mirrors his own bill proposal that was introduced in the House earlier this year. The Senate passed its own version and sent it to the House for approval.

“This is a very good bill,” said Kidwell. “Most of you run a bill and it goes over to the Senate and they make changes and send it back,” Kidwell said. “In this particular case, the Senate just took the bill right after I wrote it, took it over there, put their name on it, and sent it back. So I do appreciate that they enjoyed that bill that much.”

Kidwell explained that the bill would allow North Carolinians to constitutionally carry a firearm without obtaining a permit from the government to exercise their God-given right to defend themselves.

Representatives debated the bill for roughly an hour, with Democrats speaking out against the bill. Democrats pointed to various statistics, such as a Stanford study that shows permitless concealed carry states face a 13-15% violent crime increase over the next decade.

Rep. Phil Rubin, D-Wake, pointed to West Virginia as the worst example, where firearm deaths surged 26% and gun homicides rose about 48% in five years, compared to 17 prior years, after repealing permit requirements.

“I know that there are profound, strong feelings on both sides of the aisle about the best approach for guns, but we don’t have to go this far,” he said. “I think this bill does not help the people that we represent because it is dangerous. It is unnecessary and it is deeply unpopular.”

Rep. Clark shared her own story of a childhood friend dying by suicide with a legal gun and another friend who was murdered. She urged lawmakers vote down the bill, arguing that the “bill goes too far.”

Countering what he called “cherry-picked” statistics, Kidwell said 83% of states with permitless carry have homicide rates below the national average, while 84% of states have lower violent crime rates than they did prior to permitless carry.

“It’s interesting information,” Kidwell said. “Where does that come from? Not some cherry-picked group. Not some organization that was already against firearms. That comes from the FBI, the Federal Bureau of Investigation. To me, that’s pretty amazing. 84% of states have lower violent crime rates in 2022 than they did before they had permitless carry.”

While Senate Bill 50 now awaits Democratic Gov. Josh Stein’s signature, he has suggested a veto. With Stein’s expected veto, Republican leadership would need to secure a three-fifths majority in both chambers to override—a task that was easier during the last session when both chambers held supermajorities.

Senate Republicans hold a supermajority, but House Republicans are one seat short, meaning any override effort will require unified attendance and careful vote counting, as any veto override may hinge on attendance numbers.

BLUF
Either Kinzinger knows all this and is willfully trying to deceive his audience, or he’s an ignorant buffoon who thinks he’s much smarter than he really is. I won’t hazard a guess about what’s more likely, but either way folks are better off tuning out what he has to say.

I don’t have to ‘guess’. From all his prior anti-civil rights rants, Kinzinger-precisely-fits a description of a domestic enemy.

Kinzinger Delivers What Might Be the Dumbest Take on the Second Amendment Ever

I lost whatever respect I might have had for former Congressman Adam Kinzinger when he said he was open a ban on so-called assault weapons in 2022. Since his departure from Congress, Kinzinger has embraced a number of anti-gun proposals, even telling a gathering in Chicago in 2023 that ““Second Amendment people should be on the front line of gun control.” Kinzinger didn’t mean on the front lines defending against gun control. No, he means we should be advocating for “reasonable solutions to gun violence” like banning young adults from keeping and bearing arms.

As dumb as those comments were, they pale in comparison to Kinzinger’s latest invocation of the Second Amendment, which he now insists is about “guaranteeing a state a right to a militia.”

I’m not sure why Gavin Newsome doesn’t activate the rest of his army guard to prevent the president from it or force him to overrule it…. Then fight on the second amendment guaranteeing a state a right to a militia. How can a state have a militia if the president can simply…

— Adam Kinzinger (Slava Ukraini) 🇺🇸🇺🇦 (@AdamKinzinger) June 10, 2025
Since that post Kinzinger has doubled down on his hare-brained theory, both on X (where he was quickly rebuked by Charles C.W. Cooke):

This is astonishingly illiterate. See, inter alia, Article I, Section 8, Clause 15 and Article II, Section 2. Moreover, as Scalia noted, it’s precisely *because* the federal government has plenary power here that the individual rights reading of the Second Amendment (the Standard… https://t.co/dSv2vG8oPt

— Charles C. W. Cooke (@charlescwcooke) June 10, 2025
and in a post on his Substack, where he argues:

If we believe in the Second Amendment’s invocation of a state-based militia, we need to reconcile it with the uncomfortable truth that the National Guard, as currently structured, doesn’t really fit that mold. Either we redefine what we mean by “militia,” or we face the fact that state-controlled military forces don’t exist in a meaningful way when they can be federalized at will.

Kinzinger probably should have read through the Heller decision before declaring himself an expert on the intricacies of the Second Amendment. As the Supreme Court made clear, the amendment has nothing to do with guaranteeing a state a “right to a militia”. Nor does it require serving in a militia in order to keep and bear arms.

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