Printer Panic: Everytown 3D Gun Summit Targets Technological Advancement

Recently, Everytown for Gun Safety hosted a 3D Printed Firearms Summit in New York City with the goal being to “build cross-sector collaboration and chart actionable strategies to stem the tide of 3D-printed firearm (3DPF) related violence.”  The gathering of gloom is seemingly a leftover from the Biden-Harris administration, which convened similar confabs of gun control absolutists. One positive note is that these kinds of anti-gun “summits” must now be funded with Everytown’s own money rather than by taxpayers through Biden’s defunct White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention.

Media hype ahead of the summit warned, “We’re at the start of a new public safety crisis and there is no time to waste,” and “3D-printed firearms are the new frontier in the fight against gun violence.” Everytown is apparently measuring this crisis by “recovery data from twenty U.S. cities submitted exclusively to Everytown” according to their Facebook post. Exclusive crime-related data given just to Everytown may raise its own kinds of red-flags to consider.

While 3D printing is a newer and developing technology, homemade firearms, or PMFs — privately made firearms — are not. Since the birth of our nation, citizens have enjoyed the right to create their own privately made firearms. A review of the basic facts on PMFs would have made for a helpful presentation at the summit.

As far as federal law is concerned, individuals can legally make firearms for personal use without a license as long as the person isn’t prohibited from possession of firearms, the firearm is detectable, and the firearm isn’t made or sold for profit. Firearms and related items that are illegal under federal and/or state law, however, are still illegal. Items that are already regulated by federal and/or state law are still regulated.

Firearms continue to be heavily regulated regardless of how they are manufactured. Articles referring to 3D printed firearms are a mishmash of terms interchanging 3D printed firearms with “ghost guns” and undetectable firearms. The National Firearms Act of 1934, the Gun Control Act of 1968, the Undetectable Firearms Act of 1988, to name just a few, continue to govern firearms produced by 3D printing.

The mere absence of a serial number does not make a gun undetectable and if 3D printers were capable of producing undetectable firearms, such guns would already be illegal to manufacture and possess anywhere in the country.

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Self-Proclaimed ‘Human Rights Defenders’ Attack Right to Keep and Bear Arms

Self-defense is a human right. In fact, I’d argue it’s the most fundamental of all our inherent rights. Without that right to protect our lives, what does it matter if we have the right to think or say what’s on our mind, or to worship (or not) as we choose?

So, anytime I see a self-described human rights activist talking about the right to keep and bear arms, I’m always curious to see if they’ll actually embrace the human right of self-defense, or pretend that it doesn’t exist.

Sadly, it seems that the group Mindbridge Center falls into the latter category. In a new post at Psychology today, the self-described human rights defenders argue that only by denormalizing gun ownership and adopting laws that make it harder, if not impossible, for people to defend themselves, can we build a safer America.

While many Americans believe gun ownership is widespread and normalized, the truth is more nuanced. Only about 30 percent of Americans own a gun, and among men, 60 percent do not own a firearm (Pew Research Center, 2024). Yet, public perception often overestimates gun prevalence due to cultural portrayals and media emphasis.

If 1-in-3 people engage in a particular activity, I’d say that’s a pretty normal activity, wouldn’t you? More importantly, the Mindbridge Center itself says on its website that human rights defenders are those “advocating for minoritized groups such as racial minorities, Indigenous people, women, LGBTQ+ individuals, or the disabled community.”

So here’s my question to Mindbridge; if advocating for minoritized groups is defending human rights, and “only” 30% of Americans own guns, then why isn’t advocating for gun owners a defense of human rights?

And a followup: if members of these minoritized groups face threats of physical violence because of who they are, do the folks at Mindbridge really believe that they’re better off disarmed and defenseless? Shouldn’t they have the ability to protect themselves from those who would do them harm? Don’t they have the right to protect their lives?

The most obvious answer is that the folks at Mindbridge don’t think so. After all, it’s clear they want to denormalize and stigmatize gun owners. As they write in their call to action::

You don’t need to be a policymaker to help shift the culture. Start by challenging the myths: Most men don’t own guns, and most Americans support regulations like background checks. Share this truth in conversations, on social media, and in community spaces. Campaigns that highlight these facts, such as billboards or digital media stating “60% of American men don’t own a gun,” can help redefine what responsible citizenship looks like.

Got that? For Mindbridge, being a “responsible citizen” means not owning a gun. Which brings up another question: why bother pushing for things like “universal” background checks if they think that gun ownership itself is a problem?

The fundamental premise of their mindset is that, unless “both structural change and cultural transformation” surrounding gun ownership takes place, it’s impossible to “build a safer future.” That ignores the fact that violent crime is dropping at record levels at the moment, and 2025 is on pace for the lowest homicide rate in more than 60 years.

We are building a safer future (and a safer present as well), and we’re doing so while robustly exercising our right to bear arms… as well as our human right to self-defense.

Gun Owners of America, Gun Owners Foundation Successful in Overturning Virginia’s Universal Background Check Law; Judge Halts Enforcement

Gun Owners of America, Gun Owners Foundation Successful in Overturning Virginia’s Universal Background Check Law; Judge Halts Enforcement

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

October 30, 2025

LYNCHBURG, VA – In a landmark decision affirming Second Amendment protections, a Virginia circuit court struck down the state’s universal background check law for private firearm sales, granting a permanent injunction that bars the law’s enforcement statewide. The ruling in Wilson, et al. v. Colonel Matthew D. Hanley, highlights fatal constitutional flaws in the statute, rendering it completely unenforceable.

The Court declared Virginia Code § 18.2-308.2:5 unconstitutional, particularly due to its discriminatory impact on law-abiding adults aged 18-20. The Court then granted our request to enjoin the administration and enforcement of the law across the entire Commonwealth of Virginia.

Erich Pratt, Senior Vice President of Gun Owners of America, issued the following statement:

“This decision vindicates the rights of all Virginians to engage in lawful private firearm transfers without unconstitutional barriers. The Act’s enforcement mechanism was fatally flawed from the start—criminalizing everyday citizens while ignoring basic constitutional principles. We’re grateful the court recognized that patchwork fixes can’t save a broken law.”

John Velleco, Executive Vice President of Gun Owners Foundation, issued the following statement:

“We are thrilled the judge struck down Virginia’s universal background check law because it was unconstitutionally blocking young adults from exercising their Second Amendment rights. This ruling upholds the true meaning of the Constitution by ensuring all law-abiding citizens can acquire firearms without arbitrary government barriers.”

The Virginia Citizens Defense League was also a plaintiff in this lawsuit, along with GOA and GOF.

GOA spokesmen are available for interviews. Gun Owners of America is a nonprofit grassroots lobbying organization dedicated to protecting the right to keep and bear arms without compromise. GOA represents over two million members and activists. For more information, visit GOA’s Press Center.

-GOA-

Halloween, has its origins in the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain, which marked the end of the harvest season and the beginning of winter.

It was believed that on this night, the veil between the living and the dead was thin, allowing spirits to return to earth.

It is said that Pope Gregory III established November 1st as ‘All Saints Day’ also called ‘All Hallows Day’ sometime in the 8th century. So, as the evening before would be ‘All Hallows Eve’ – ‘eve‘ being a contraction of evening – and even more contracted; Hallowe’en, we know how the name came to be.

Wall Street Journal’s Misrepresentation of Stand Your Ground Laws Great for Prosecutors

Stand Your Ground laws get a lot of press, and most of it is based on absolute nonsense. They repeat a lot of pathetic talking points with no bearing on reality, but we haven’t seen much lately about them.
But then the Wall Street Journal stepped up and unleashed the stupid.
It starts with their headline, proclaiming, “Six Words Every Killer Should Know: ‘I Feared for My Life, Officer’.”
In theory, it’s an exploration of the increase in justified homicides that has happened since such laws became the norm. That’s probably a worthy topic of examination, too, because how many people would have been free had some prosecuted not convinced a jury that the person who actually was afraid for their life really could have gotten away?
Because that’s all these laws do. They make it so you’re not required to retreat first before using lethal force in self-defense, and that means no one can play Monday morning quarterback and decide there was an opening in a gate behind a dumpster you totally could have used to get away.
But no, that’s not what the WSJ does. Instead, we get this crap:

“It’s easier than ever to kill someone in America and get away with it.

In 30 states, it often requires only a claim you killed while protecting yourself or others.
While Americans have long been free to use deadly force to defend themselves at home, so-called stand-your-ground laws in those 30 states extend legal protections to public places and make it difficult for prosecutors to file homicide charges against anyone who says they killed in self-defense.
The number of legally sanctioned homicides by civilians in the 30 stand-your-ground states has risen substantially in recent years, The Wall Street Journal found in an analysis of data from the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Justifiable homicides by civilians increased 59% from 2019 through 2024 in a large sample of cities and counties in those states, the Journal found, compared with a 16% rise in total homicides for the same locales.
With more guns in more hands, families are grieving loved ones lost to quick-tempered killings, often involving law-abiding civilians, with no one held accountable.
A retired Las Vegas police officer walked free after fatally shooting a retired computer network engineer during a dispute over who had the right of way in a Walmart parking lot. Both men got out of their vehicles. Both were armed. The ex-officer said the retired engineer pointed a gun at him first.
“Only two people know what happened,” said Kathleen Hoy, the dead man’s widow. “Unfortunately, my husband is dead.”
That’s the case they wanted to lead with?
I mean, sure, there are only two people who know what happened, but the fact that both men were armed suggests that there’s at least some reason to believe it’s justified.
Stand Your Ground laws don’t condone murder simply because you say you were afraid. You have to actually have a reason to be afraid.
The fact that the retired engineer in question was armed at least lends credence to the retired cop thinking his life was in danger. The fact that there wasn’t any other evidence one way or another is just how it goes sometimes.
Look, justified homicides are up, but part of that is that violent crime is also up. From the relative low of 2019, we saw a massive spike in the homicide rate in 2020 that is slowly trickling downward. With more violent crime, you have more cases where people are going to legitimately fear for their lives. Seeing an increase over such a short span is hardly shocking.
Maybe the scale of the increase is surprising, but again, how many people were really and legitimately afraid for their life before their state got a Stand Your Ground law, but went to prison because a prosecutor convinced a jury they had an avenue of retreat they totally could have made, even if the shooter didn’t think they could?
Honestly, this is trainwreck journalism. This is as biased a report as you’re going to see, and the Wall Street Journal is supposed to be more conservative than the Old Gray Lady.
This looks straight out of the New York Times’ playbook, though.

I’ve got a phone number for them: 1-800-CRY-BABY

Giffords: Increase in Defensive Gun Uses ‘Must Be Stopped’

When I covered the WSJ’s hit piece on Stand Your Ground laws on Wednesday, I wondered if the reporters had any behind-the-scenes help from gun control activists.

It’s not proof of anything, but since the story appeared online only one gun control group has promoted the story on X or Bluesky.

The premise of the WSJ story is that Stand Your Ground laws have led to a 59% increase in the number of justifiable homicides in some states between 2019 and 2024, and that the law is allowing some folks to literally get away with murder.

As we discussed yesterday, though, none of the anecdotal cases cited by WSJ in support of that premise are slam dunk examples of murders that were deemed justified as a result of SYG laws. The data set used by the paper is also suspect, since it did not include the significant number of states where Stand Your Ground exists in common law but not specifically in statute.

There are only 11 states that impose a general duty to retreat before acting in self-defense. The vast majority of states don’t require you to present your back as a target to your attacker while you try to run away; instead, they allow you to act in self-defense so long as you have a reasonable belief of imminent death or great bodily harm.

Stand Your Ground laws also aren’t really a new thing. Florida’s statute, for instance, has been in place for two decades. If the law automatically led to more unjustified shootings being deemed justifiable homicides by the courts, we would have expected to see that phenomenon occur long before 2020, but there’s no evidence that’s the case.

We saw a huge spike in violent crime in 2020, along with a big spike in new gun owners. That’s the most likely reason for an increase in justifiable homicides since then; with more crimes being committed and more people carrying for self-defense, there are more occasions when legally armed citizens will use a firearm to defend themselves. That doesn’t mean, however, that people are getting away with murder just because they tell police that they were in fear for their lives. Every time a life is taken a police investigation is going to take place, and charges may very well be filed even when there’s evidence of self-defense.

Even using the WSJ’s own flawed dataset, the percentage of homicides deemed justified in SYG states has climbed from about 2.8% in 2019 to 3.8% in 2024. We don’t know how many self-defense claims were raised in the 96.2% of homicides that were deemed murder, but we know the number isn’t “zero.” Stand Your Ground laws aren’t a “get-out-of-jail free” card for armed citizens, despite the slanted reporting from the WSJ and Gifffords’ wild suggestion that many or all of these justifiable homicides are actually murder.

Take this recent case from Stand Your Ground-Wyoming. Back on June 24 of this year a man named Kevin Hefley was shot and killed. It wasn’t until this week that the Laramie County Sheriff’s Office and the local D.A. officially deemed the shooting justified, with the sheriff’s office declaring it had “meticulously” investigated the case over the past several months despite what appears to be pretty clear evidence that the armed citizen had reason to believe his life was in danger.

Deputies responded at 4:22 p.m. that afternoon to a “disturbance” involving a shooting, says the sheriff’s office’s statement.

Earlier that day, Christine Hefley moved horses from the property she and Kevin shared to Patrick Gross’s property, “upsetting Kevin,” the statement says.

The two men had a recent history of conflict.

The sheriff’s office reports that on the morning of the shooting, Kevin Kefley threatened Gross via text message, saying, “I shoulda kicked your ass right in your own home.”

Later while Gross was parked in his own driveway, Kevin Hefley drove rapidly towards him, reportedly.

“Just prior to being rammed by Hefley, Gross shot Hefley’s radiator in an attempt to stop the vehicle,” says the statement, adding that later crash reconstruction indicated that Kevin Hefley hit Gross’s truck at 60 mph, “constituting the threat of deadly force.”

Kevin Hefley got out of his vehicle, approached Gross who was in hiw own truck, and punched him multiple times.

During the altercation, Gross shot Kevin Hefley, the statement says.

Though shot, Kevin Hefley kept attacking Gross while clinging to the driver’s door of Gross’s truck as Gross tried to drive away, the sheriff’s office reports.

Kevin Hefley kept attacking until he died of his injuries, the statement adds.

The sheriff’s office says investigators examined the scene “meticulously,” built advanced crash reconstruction analysis and analyzed evidence from phones and social media.

Kevin Hefley’s blood alcohol content was 0.143%, nearly twice the legal limit to drive, says the statement.

The statement says the Laramie County District Attorney’s Office has concluded that Gross acted in self-defense.

This is an example of the “legally sanctioned killings” that Giffords says must be stopped, which begs the question: would they have uttered a word if Hefley had managed to kill Gross by ramming into his truck at 60 mph, or by beating him to death afterwards?

Of course not. No gun would have been used, so there would be no reason for the gun control group to offer any kind of comment. It’s defensive gun uses like Gross’s they think must be stopped, not the actions of violent criminals that lead lawful gun owners to act in self-defense. I guess that shouldn’t be surprising coming from a group whose founder is working for a future with “no more guns,” but it’s a position that puts Giffords at odds with both the Constitution and common sense.

NRA announces restructuring of media department to prepare for ‘fights ahead’

EXCLUSIVE — The National Rifle Association is restructuring its media division and will streamline other parts of the organization.

The changes are aimed at “maximizing member dollars, streamlining operations, and investing in critical programs that best serve NRA members and ensure the long-term strength of the organization,” a press release from the NRA reads.

The NRA has more than 5 million members and is one of the top Second Amendment advocacy organizations in the United States.

“The NRA is listening and anticipating our members’ needs,” NRA President Bill Bachenberg told the Washington Examiner in a statement. “NRA 2.0 is re-focusing on its core missions of protecting our God-given Second Amendment rights, gun safety and training, supporting our Clubs & Associations and shooting competitions.”

Bachenberg became the NRA’s 69th president in May, replacing attorney Bob Barr. He suggested that the reorganization will make the NRA more efficient.

“We are flattening the organizational structure, redeploying staff, and exploiting technology to better manage the day-to-day activities of the Association,” Bachenberg said. “By knocking down the current vertical silos and creating cross-functional teams, there will be less duplication, stronger member services, and better communications.”

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The organization will also “merge its Membership, Marketing and Advancement Divisions into a single department,” with “new data-driven techniques to increase revenue.”

Staff will be affected by the reorganization, according to the NRA.

“These necessary changes will, unfortunately, impact staff,” the release from the NRA reads. “The NRA’s leadership did not make these decisions lightly but must realign resources to ensure America’s largest and oldest gun rights organization remains strong and ready to address the fight ahead.”

NRA CEO Doug Hamlin said a “leaner NRA” is needed so that the organization can fend off its adversaries.

“The NRA has delivered on its promise to provide a pro-gun President, Congress, and Supreme Court for our members,” Hamlin said.

“These successes have not gone unnoticed by our adversaries, who are doubling down on election spending, lawfare, and new programs to push their radical gun-grabbing agenda,” he added. “To ensure we are prepared for the fights ahead, we must create a leaner NRA that focuses on stretching every member dollar to best protect your right to keep and bear arms.”

ATF Drops CLEO Notification from Form 1 NFA Applications

The ATF just previewed a batch of housekeeping changes to Form 1 (ATF 5320.1)—the form gun owners use to make and register NFA items like SBRs and suppressors. Buried in the Federal Register notice is the big one: the agency plans to remove the Chief Law Enforcement Officer (CLEO) notification requirement for NFA registration.

The ATF’s filing also modernizes items in preparation for the upcoming changes to the NFA’s tax structure, as it will no longer collect a tax on SBRs and suppressors. It clarifies how you can pay the $200 tax for “machinegun(s) or destructive device” or $0 for “other types of firearms,” such as SBRs and suppressors.

There is also an update to accept additional types of digital signatures and let applicants attach a passport-style photo or ID copy instead of using a fixed photo box on the form. There’s also a cleanup of wording and new instructions for married couples registering as an “other legal entity.” All of that is in service of making the form easier to complete and aligning it with incoming tax changes.

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“Who are the militia? Are they not ourselves? Congress have no power to disarm the militia. Their swords and every other terrible implement of the soldier, are the birthright of an American . . . . The unlimited power of the sword is not in the hands of either the federal or state governments, but, where I trust in God it will ever remain, in the hands of the people.”
— Tench Coxe in The Pennsylvania Gazette, Feb. 20, 1788