Don’t hold your breath as we’ll have to see what we’ve got here both with the ATF and FBI.
Now, if he appoints Brian Herrera, Blake Masters, Mark Smith or Larry Keane as his Deputy director…….

Looking at the statistics, it’s reconfirmation that being around Police -Any Law Enforcement- is very dangerous for those who have decided to defend themselves as they’re likely to shoot anyone who’s armed, simply ‘because’. Being aware of that should be taken in consideration and plans made on how to deal with it.

UPDATED: A Deep Dive into Cases Where Civilians Stopped Active Shooters. Did they accidentally shoot bystanders, get in the way of police, get their gun taken away, or create other problems? How does it compare to police who stopped these attacks?

We have previously put out our study on the FBI’s active shooting reports. If you watch entertainment television police shows, you would think something always seems to go wrong when guns are used defensively (including shooting bystanders to getting in the way of police to failing to protect the permit holder to continually having the gun stolen and use in a crime to it being used in an accidental shooting).

During the ten years from 2014 to 2023, there were 180 active shooting cases (as defined by the FBI) where a concealed handgun permit holder stopped an active shooting attack.

We decided to do a deep dive to see how many cases there were out of those 180 cases where a concealed handgun permit holder accidentally shot a bystander (one case, 0.56%), got in the way of police (zero cases, 0.0%), had the handgun taken away (one case, 0.56%), and got themselves killed (two cases, 1.1%). What was more common were cases where the permit holder was injured in saving the lives of others (44 cases, 24%). Fifty-eight of those cases were instances where a mass public shooting was likely prevented. An Excel file with the data for civilians and police is available here.

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1 Timothy 5:8
KJV
But if any provide not for his own, and specially for those of his own house, he hath denied the faith, and is worse than an infidel.

“You love your family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country. And then after that, you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world.” – VPOTUS J.D. Vance.

Safetyism Kills

Watching the meetings and town halls in Los Angeles featuring the nitwits in charge getting yelled at by enraged homeowners as the city burned was enlightening. Again and again, the ridiculous Mayor Karen Bass, an openly communist revolutionary, brought up a persistent theme: the cult of safety.

The term “safetyism” became popularized in The Coddling of the American Mind by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt. It refers to the way modern society is overprotective and overbearing, the ultimate helicopter state, which has led to excessive and even destructive regulations that don’t actually keep you safe, and which in fact may endanger you.

During President Trump’s visit to Pacific Palisades and the round table meeting he held with California’s worst supervillains, Karen Bass repeatedly admonished the angry, devastated Palisades homeowners that “the most important thing is your safety.” The homeowners were angry about the timeline they had been given by L.A. County officials. According to the bureaucrats, it would take 18 months to clear the burned-out lots. Bass insisted they would be able to start rebuilding “immediately.” When pressed on the 18-month clean-up the city was planning, she hedged with, “Well, you know that you will be able to soon. The most important thing is keeping you safe.”

President Trump countered: “Safe? They’re not safe now.”

The “safety” that Bass was fighting for was the mandatory EPA Phase 1 clean-up of their lots. A doctor named Muntu Davis with the L.A. County of Public Health issued an order forcing all homeowners to wait for the EPA to complete their hazardous waste removal before anything else can happen to the destroyed lots. This, as Mayor Bass keeps reminding everyone, is for “your safety.”

God forbid a piece of “highly toxic ash” touches your skin! God forbid a hazardous particle enters your body! Karen Bass is here to keep you safe as you sit in a cramped hotel room with your children and your dog, or on your friend’s couch.

This overreach by the L.A. County Department of Health is the same playbook they ran during the pandemic. Schools were closed, toddlers were forced to wear masks outside, and you had to show a vaccine pass to get into a restaurant for your safety. Everyone in L.A. started ending conversations with admonitions to “be safe!”

At the same time, violent riots and looting were permitted to take place. LAPD officers often stood around and watched helplessly as unmasked hordes smashed plate glass windows and cleaned out retail stores. Targets were picked clean and then set on fire. But if you tried to walk into a grocery store, you would be hounded out by angry women who screamed that you were putting their “safety” at risk.

It was all fake. A mirage. A real culture of safety would have made sure that fire departments in fire-prone areas were not short staffed. They would pre-position fire trucks in the spots of highest risk. And most importantly, they would have working fire hydrants. Across the Palisades and Altadena, where some 9,000 homes burned to the ground in the span of 12 hours, there were few working hydrants.

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Almost like the lab manufactured pathogen ‘getting loose’ wasn’t a bug, but a feature

Social Security Gets Major $205-Billion Boost After COVID Deaths

So many Americans died of COVID-19 during the pandemic that the Social Security program received a boost of $205 billion, according to a new report by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER).

Why It Matters

The new report from NBER sheds light on the way the pandemic affected the Social Security program, which is currently facing a looming insolvency crisis.

The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which President Donald Trump has put in charge of shrinking the size of the federal government, has promised to pursue a trillion dollars in cuts across many programs and departments of the federal government, with a specific focus on uncovering fraud and wasteful spending.

This operation, Trump said, will include the Social Security program, which sends benefit payments to more than 70 million Americans.

What To Know

Using data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), NBER—a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization—found that excess deaths among individuals aged 25 and older between 2020 and 2023 led to a reduction in Social Security future retirement payments of $294 billion.

Excess deaths refers to those in a given time frame over the number that might have been expected considering historic data in a so-called average year. According to the CDC, the U.S. reported over 1.7 million excess deaths between 2020 and 2023.

The reduction in future Social Security benefits caused by these excess deaths was then recalculated by NBER to $205 billion considering the consequent decrease in future payroll tax flows and higher payments to surviving spouses and children.

“Our analysis suggests a slight improvement in Social Security’s financial health due to excess deaths, driven primarily by the premature death of people who would have received retirement benefits,” reads the NBER report.

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Let’s Go Privateering! An old idea gets new enthusiasm.

Time to go a’privateering?

We’ve heard a bit about letters of marque and reprisal recently. Sen. Mike Lee has proposed bringing back letters of marque in a thread on X, suggesting them as a tool for going after Mexican drug cartels. Erik Prince, who founded Blackwater, the private security company (it’s rude to call them “mercenaries”) has also weighed in in favor of this approach. My own Congressman, Tim Burchett (R-TN) has introduced legislation allowing the President to issue letters of marque and reprisal against cartels, the Cartel Marque and Reprisal Reauthorization Act of 2025, co-sponsored with Rep. Mark Messmer, (R-IN). (The full text of the bill is here.)

This isn’t a new idea, really. Letters of marque and reprisal date back centuries; and even in this century there have been proposals to use them again, particularly after 9/11 when they were proposed, particularly by Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) as a way of going after terrorists. More recently, people have proposed “Cyber Letters of Marque and Reprisal” to go after hackers.

Is there anything to these ideas, or do they just appeal to our swashbuckling side? Let’s talk.

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May they  go into permanent vapor-lock.

Anti-Gunners Clutching Pearls Over Trump’s 2A Executive Order

The results of Attorney General Pam Bondi’s investigation into the Biden administration’s executive actions on guns and its defense of federal gn laws won’t be in for another couple of weeks, but anti-gun activists are already putting their own spin on what’s likely to emerge from her findings.

Brady’s Kris Brown spoke to to WGN-TV about the potential impact of Trump’s executive action, as well as some of the other moves we’ve seen from his administration, including the shuttering of the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention.

“There is no possible rationale for closing that office, unless what you want to do is simply ignore that gun violence is the number one killer of our kids, and to me, that is horrific because it doesn’t,” Brown claimed, adding, “Not having the office does not change that. It only worsens it.”

Brown’s comments are, of course, absolute nonsense. The biggest rationale for ending the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention is that it never really about reducing “gun violence”, but promoting gun control (and providing cushy federal jobs to anti-2A activists).

It’s silly for Brown to claim that scrapping the office means that either “gun violence” or violent crime will increase. Reported homicides were already trending down when Biden created the office in the fall of 2023, and there’s no evidence whatsoever that anything Biden did through executive actions led to a further drop in reported homicides around the country last year.

In addition to her bluster on Biden’s gun control office, Brown also tried to put her spin on the likely undoing of Biden’s executive actions on guns.

[Brown] said Biden-era reforms like background checks and restrictions on who can purchase weapons, helped to strengthen public safety. Undoing them, she said, has the potential to endanger public safety.

“We’re not a lawless nation, so there should be no reason, not to have laws that actually save lives,” Brown said. “In fact, laws like the Brady background check, which stands for a proposition that something like 97% of Americans agree with, that. If you go in to buy a firearm and you’re a convicted felon, you should be denied that firearm, right?”

Background checks on retail purchase of firearms won’t be going away as a result of Bondi’s examination of Biden’s EO’s, though we’ll hopefully see the formal rescinding of the ATF rule expanding who is “engaged in the business” of dealing firearms, which was put in place with the goal of requiring almost every gun owner who offered a single firearm from their collection for sale to obtain a federal firearms license.

Brown failed to inform WGN or its viewers that the rule in question was already in legal jeopardy before Trump’s EO, along with the other attempts by ATF and the Biden administration to bypass Congress and enact new gun control laws in the guise of regulations. The Supreme Court has already struck down the bump stock ban imposed by the Trump administration, and they’re set to issue their ruling on the agency’s regulation treating unfinished frames and receivers as fully functional firearms later this spring. Legal challenges to the ATF’s rules on pistol stabilizing braces and forced reset triggers have also been largely successful in the lower courts, but those rules will hopefully be undone by Trump and Bondi in the months ahead.

I’m sure that Brown is legitimately bothered by the likely demise of the Biden-era regulations foisted on gun owners and the firearms industry, but I suspect that what really frosts her cookies is the fact that the gun control lobby has lost its influence on the White House. Gun control groups like Brady, Everytown, and Giffords had no better friend in Washington, D.C. than Biden himself, while Trump has promised to protect our Second Amendment rights while using the DOJ to target violent offenders. The anti-gunners no longer have their perch inside the executive branch, but that’s cause for celebration, not consternation, for those of us who reject the idea that fighting “gun violence” has to stop and end with targeting lawful gun owners and our right to keep and bear arms.

Mexican President Threatens Double-Down Lawfare to Cover for Cartels

By Larry Keane

Mexico has revealed there are no limits to the depths to which it will sink to threaten America’s law-abiding firearm industry and the Second Amendment. Mexico’s government continues to run interference for the narco-terrorist drug cartels that are fueling rampant murder and corruption in their own country. It is also a damning indictment on the nascent Mexican presidency’s entanglement with drug kingpins.

Mexico’s lawyers – supported by American gun control activist and lawyer Jonathan Lowy – will appear before the U.S. Supreme Court on March 4 to argue that their frivolous lawsuit should be allowed to proceed. That case – Smith & Wesson Brands, Inc., et al., v. Estados Unidos Mexicanos – was petitioned to SCOTUS by the industry members who are being sued by Mexico. Mexico contends that U.S. firearm manufacturers are legally responsible for $10 billion in damages to compensate Mexico for costs it incurs when Mexican narco-terrorists illegally smuggle firearms into Mexico and criminally misuse them on their side of the border. Mexico is also asking a U.S. court to issue an injunction dictating how and which firearms Americans may purchase when exercising their Second Amendment rights in America. NSSF’s amicus brief filed in the case argues that Mexico’s lawsuit is prohibited by the bipartisan Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA) and lacks legal merit.

President Donald Trump, in announcing his executive order imposing a tariff on Mexican imports, said, “Mexican drug trafficking organizations have an intolerable alliance with the government of Mexico. The government of Mexico has afforded safe haven for the cartels to engage in the manufacturing and transportation of dangerous narcotics, which collectively have led to the overdose deaths of hundreds of thousands of American victims.”  President Trump issued an Executive Order the day he took office to kick start the process of designating the cartels as foreign terrorist organizations.

This week, President Trump followed up that process with Secretary of State Marco Rubio officially declaring Tren de Aragua, MS-13, the Sinaloa Cartel, the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, the United Cartels, the Gulf Cartel, the Northeast Cartel and the Michoacán Family as foreign terrorist organizations.

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BLUF
In the unlikely event Mexico’s case is not dismissed, President Sheinbaum would do well to remember that discovery in civil litigation in America goes both ways

Trump Designating Cartels Terrorists Isn’t ‘Worrisome’ To Lawful U.S. Gun Manufacturers

The assertion that U.S. firearm manufacturers ‘sell arms to criminals’ is a flat-out lie.

President Donald Trump’s State Department has officially designated several murderous drug cartels, including Tren de Aragua and MS-13, as foreign terrorist organizations. Bloomberg Opinion columnist Juan Pablo Spinetto labeled that decision “worrying” while attempting to argue against the president’s move.

Never mind the thousands of lives lost every year to drug cartel violence in both Mexico and the United States. Pay no attention to the more than 250,000 American deaths since 2018 from illegal drug use by fentanyl smuggled into the United States from Mexico across a virtually open Biden-era border. Disregard that after four years of woeful inaction by an American president barely at the steering wheel, the new Trump administration is following through with the campaign promises he made to the American people to protect them from such violence. Spinetto has other concerns.

While describing to readers why, in his determination, President Trump’s move forward to label Mexican narco-terrorist drug cartels as international terrorist organizations would be “worrisome,” Spinetto takes an uninformed and bogus potshot at the lawful and highly-regulated U.S. firearm industry.

“The proposal to treat cartels as terrorists … adds significant collateral risks: Anyone who has contacts with narcos, knowingly or not, could be accused of collaborating with terrorists, from avocado producers in Michoacán that pay to stay alive to the US gun industry that has been selling arms to criminals,” Spinetto writes. The assertion that U.S. firearm manufacturers “sell arms to criminals” is a flat-out lie.

Mexico, of course, has no Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms for its citizens and the one and only firearm retailer in the country is in the heart of Mexico City, located on a military base. Firearms legally exported from the United States to the Mexican military have gone through rigorous and thorough end-to-end security checks, attempting to ensure that American-made guns do not fall into the hands of anyone else, especially the cartels.

After all, there are documented reports of Mexican soldiers defecting to work for narco-terrorist drug cartels, bringing with them over 150,000 firearms stolen from Mexican armories. Virtually all of the firearms used by the Mexican drug cartels, on the other hand, are illicitly possessed illegal arms unlawfully smuggled into Mexico by a network of drug cartels, through theft or straight-up government corruption. These facts are well known. Spinetto knows all of this too, of course, but the facts are inconvenient for his argument.

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BLUF: (YAY!)
The departure of Hicks was bemoaned by anti-gun activist groups such as Brady who characterized the sacking as “chilling.”

30 Senators Tell ATF to Get With Trump 2A Agenda as Agency’s Top Lawyer Canned

A group of 30 Republican lawmakers on Thursday “strongly encouraged” the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives to begin scrapping Biden-era anti-gun rules.

In a five-page letter to ATF Deputy Director Marvin G. Richardson— who has been leading the agency since the recent departure of the bureau’s avowedly anti-gun Director Steve Dettelbach– the senators urged the regulator to align its policies with “President Trump’s Second Amendment priorities” as laid out in his recent Executive Order.

Specifically, the letter calls on ATF officials to work with Attorney General Pam Bondi to quickly identify and rescind policies that allow “unlawful firearms regulations” to include the agency’s “Engaged in the Business,” “Pistol Brace,” and “Ghost Gun” rules as well as its “Zero Tolerance” policy under which ATF has revoked the licenses of FFLs over minor bookkeeping violations.

The senators said, “We urge you to immediately align ATF’s rules and policies with the President’s strong support for the Second Amendment.”

Further, the GOP lawmakers took aim at the agency’s huge cache of decades-old gun dealer records, urging ATF to destroy the reportedly hundreds of millions of ATF Form 4473 firearm transaction forms and allow FFLs to also destroy such records over 20 years old. The Biden administration had issued a rule that such records had to be maintained forever, creating what many argue is the foundation of a backdoor gun registry.

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