Montana Accidentally Made Things Right on Gun-Free School Zones

I don’t think that schools should be totally gun-free zones. While I get that Bruen said that sensitive places could be gun-free, and schools are probably about as sensitive a place as you can name, I don’t think that barring lawful carry in schools for staff and parents is a winning strategy. After all, how many school shootings have we seen despite the schools having this status?

Yeah, plenty.

But the truth is that in most places, schools are as off-limits as they come. At least they are when it’s K-12 schools. Colleges are a different matter in many states, but below that level? The rules are firm.

And those rules include a “buffer zone” of sorts that prohibits the carrying of firearms around the school, regardless of most any other factor.

And Montana accidentally exposed a loophole and made things right, even if that’s not quite what they were trying to do.

Sometimes the most consequential gun control stories don’t start with a bill banning firearms. They start with lawmakers trying to expand freedom — and discovering that the Constitution doesn’t bend the way critics expect it to.

That is exactly what just happened in Montana.

In an effort to strengthen the right to carry, Montana lawmakers may have effectively erased gun-free school zones everywhere except on school property itself. Not through activism. Not through litigation designed to gut federal law. But through their own permitless carry statutes — and a federal court noticed.

The result is a ruling that has left gun-control advocates furious, school administrators uneasy, and Second Amendment supporters pointing out an inconvenient truth: when the state recognizes the right to carry as a right, federal carve-outs start to fall apart.

It all boils down to a guy who would go for a walk near a school. Sometimes, he’d carry a gun openly, and other times, it would be concealed. Local police told the school that he wasn’t breaking any state law, so they couldn’t do anything about it. The school moved kids away from the man and tried to erect visual barriers so no one would see him.

Eventually, the feds stepped in, arrested him, and saw the whole thing thrown out.

Why?

The U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that because Montana statutorily authorizes concealed carry for eligible citizens, those citizens qualify for the federal licensing exception.

In plain terms: if everyone is licensed by law, then everyone qualifies for the exemption.

The court dismissed the charges and made it clear that the outcome wasn’t an accident; it was the logical result of Montana’s legislative choices.

The ruling emphasized that Montana did not delegate licensing authority to agencies or local officials. The Legislature itself granted the authority. Congress, the court said, did not clearly prohibit states from doing that.

As a result of that ruling, though, gun-free school zones are confined exclusively to the school itself, not the area around the school.

If schools are going to be gun-free zones, this is how it should be. The idea that the area around the school is also gun-free is a major problem because, frankly, people travel by those schools all the time. They have to in order to get to where they’re going, and unless they’re licensed under state law, they may be committing a felony.

The “buffer zone” thing has always been wrong, but Montana accidentally fixed it for residents there. Instead of just saying a license isn’t needed, they licensed everyone, which had an unintended but positive effect regarding the whole school zone thing.

Maybe other states should address this via their own constitutional carry laws. Most didn’t take quite the same approach as Montana, but they could make that happen and change things once and for all.

It would be a win for gun rights, sanity, and everything else decent in the universe, and the anti-gunners would still have their allegedly gun-free schools.

Again, not that it seems to do much good.

California: Background Check Requirement for Gun Barrel Sales Takes Effect January 1, 2026

California’s narrowing of gun barrel sales to licensed dealers only and background check requirement for said sales takes effect January 1, 2026.

Breitbart News reported that Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) signed the gun barrel controls on October 10, 2025, noting that the new law “will require all gun barrel sales to be conducted by licensed firearms dealers, mandating that said dealers conduct an ‘eligibility check’ before selling a barrel.”

The language of the bill makes clear that a five dollar fee will be added to each barrel sale to cover the cost of the “eligibility check.”

California Attorney General Rob Bonta put out a press release noting that the gun barrel controls take effect January 1, 2026, noting that the new law updates the definitions of “Firearm Accessory” and “Firearm Manufacturing Machine.”

Moreover, the new controls include an “updated definition and cause of action for unlawful distribution of digital firearm manufacturing code to unlicensed individuals” and create a “new criminal offense and civil cause of action for facilitating, or causing another person to engage in, the unlawful manufacture of firearms.”

If a barrel is purchased online, the new law requires that the “seller…ship the barrel to a licensed firearms dealer in California to complete the in-person transaction and final delivery pursuant to section 33700 of the Penal Code (codified by SB 704).”

California has more gun control than any other state in the Union, yet the FBI noted that California led the nation in “active shooter incidents” 2020-2024.

Grassroots Legislative Update—December 29, 2025

By Tanya Metaksa

HAPPY NEW YEAR

What’s New—2025 Legislative Summary Part I, Legislative Sessions; The following states adjourned with no legislative action on Second Amendment laws in 2025: Georgia-April 4; Idaho-April 4; Indiana-April 24; Kentucky-March 28; Maryland-April 7; Mississippi-April 3; 2026 Pre-Legislative Action-Florida; Carry-over action-Michigan; New Jersey; North Carolina;

State Legislative 2025 Summary  (Part I, Part II next week)

The following states are still in SESSION:

Massachusetts, Michigan, New Jersey, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin

The following states adjourned with no legislative action on Second Amendment laws in 2025: Georgia: April 4; Idaho, April 4; Indiana April 24; Kentucky: March 28; Maryland: April 7; Mississippi: April 3;

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Don Keith –
Remember how shocked everyone was when Kamala Harris strangely chose quirky Tim Waltz as her VP running mate?
What if it wasn’t a strange decision at all and a calculation based on access to billions of dollars of Somali fraud money that could be funneled to her Presidential campaign or personal finances?
Nick Shirley and the FBI have uncovered what may be the largest theft of tax payer dollars in U.S. history and I predict, when we examine other states, we’ll find that this is just the tip of the iceberg.

Lysander Spooner: The Second Amendment Isn’t the Ceiling — It’s the Basement Floor

Most “pro-2A” people treat the Second Amendment as if it were the ceiling of our rights.
Lysander Spooner read it and laughed. To him it was the basement floor of a natural right that no government on earth can legitimately restrict.

Who Was Lysander Spooner?

1808–1887. Lawyer, abolitionist, individualist anarchist. A man who made the Founders look like moderates.

Spooner in His Own Words

On the natural right to arms (completely independent of any constitution):

“The right of self-defence is the first law of nature… The right to keep and bear arms is only a declaration that this natural right shall not be infringed.”
— A Letter to Charles Sumner (1860s)

On what happens when the people are disarmed:

“Those who are capable of tyranny are capable of perjury to sustain it… All restraints upon the government are inefficient, unless the people are in possession of the means of resisting it.”
— No Treason No. VI: The Constitution of No Authority (1870)

On the purpose of an armed populace:

“The right of the individual to keep and bear arms… is the great bulwark against tyranny, the only efficient security for the preservation of liberty.”
— Vices Are Not Crimes (1875, manuscript)

On the idea that citizens should be limited to “sporting” arms while government has military weapons:

“A man’s right to defend his life and liberty is as perfect against a thousand as against one… He has the same right to whatever weapons are necessary for that defense that the government has to whatever weapons it may choose to use against him.”

On every gun law ever written:

“All legislatures… that assume to enact laws forbidding or restricting the people in the exercise of their natural right to keep and bear arms, are guilty of usurpation and tyranny.”
— Direct paraphrase from multiple Spooner writings, crystallized in No Treason and his legal essays

Tucker vs. Spooner

St. George Tucker (1803):

“The several departments and officers of the governments… are bound by oath to oppose [unconstitutional acts]; for, being bound by oath to support the constitution, they must violate that oath, whenever they give their sanction… to any unconstitutional act.”

Spooner went further: the unconstitutional gun laws themselves are acts of war against the people, and armed resistance against their enforcers is morally justified.

The Spooner Standard

“If the people are to retain their liberty, they must be at least as well armed and disciplined as the government that rules over them.”
— Consistent theme across No Treason and his abolitionist writings

If you still think “reasonable regulations” are compatible with liberty, you’re closer to Everytown than you are to Lysander Spooner.

Read him.
Burn every compromise to the ground.
Own what your rulers own — in the same quantities, or more.

Because the moment you accept anything less, the experiment in liberty is already over.

 

Brown Lawyers Up After Bungled Response to Mass Shooting, Retaining Former US Attorney
Security lapses have drawn scrutiny as Brown faces mounting questions over its response to the attack

Brown University has retained former federal prosecutor Zachary Cunha as it bolsters its legal team in the aftermath of last week’s mass shooting that killed two students and wounded nine others.

“Brown works routinely with outside counsel whose expertise complements that of the University’s Office of the General Counsel. In this case, we retained Zachary Cunha, the former United States Attorney for the District of Rhode Island, to assist the University in coordinating with federal, state and local law enforcement agencies,” Brown said in a statement.

Cunha, who stepped down earlier this year as U.S. attorney for the District of Rhode Island, joined the law firm Nixon Peabody in March.

The decision to lawyer up comes after Brown faces increased scrutiny over its security policies in the wake of the shooting. Emergency sirens never sounded after the attack, and campus services took 20 minutes to send an alert out to students. Students then received a flurry of alerts that repeatedly conveyed incomplete or inaccurate information.

In recent months campus security received many complaints, including frustrations from law enforcement that security was not disclosing information surrounding bomb and shooting threats across campus. In October the school’s Security Patrolperson’s Association issued a vote of confidence in the university’s director of public safety and emergency management.

The public safety department also decided to decrease the number of field officers to make room for more administrative positions. The Patrolperson’s Association said this decision “directly contributed to an all-time low in morale and has strained the department’s ability to effectively serve the Brown University community.”

Brown could face legal issues over these lapses. At least two law firms have begun soliciting potential plaintiffs for civil lawsuits tied to the shooting, Providence Journal reported.

Anti-liberty/gun cracktivist’s
By Mike McDaniel

Some things, death and taxes among them, never change. In the same category are the specious arguments of anti-liberty/gun cracktivists. Whenever a horrific crime like a mass shooting occurs, they blame the gun and the Americans who would never commit such a crime.

They also have additional narratives they hope Americans can be tricked into believing, such as virtually every mass attack is carried out by white men, all of whom are domestic terrorist, racist, transphobic white supremacist, Ultra-MAGA, Nazi, haters determined to destroy “our democracy.”

One such cracktivist is apparently John Davenport:

Graphic: Fordham University Faculty Site. Public Domain.

Dr. Davenport tells us the idea of greater security for students and the public at large is a “fallacy,” and “would not make us much safer.” He should know.  He’s a professor of peace and justice studies, which obviously makes him an expert about peace and justice  and stuff.

Think about it for a minute. How much would it actually cost to put armed guards in every single store and restaurant, every 300 feet or so on beaches and at open air events, in every movie theater and every 200 feet at concerts, at every entrance to every building at any hospital, college, school, church, temple or mosque, at all streets junction where lots of traffic piles up – and so on?

Actually, he’s sort of right. In 2013 even the NRA was advocating armed guards in every school. The usual suspects were against that, and the idea eventually died because the costs were—and are—simply too high. The numbers aren’t exact, but there are more than 110,000 K-12 public and private schools in America.  missiongraduatenm.org/number-of-schools-in-the-us/  Putting even one, full-time armed guard in each school is prohibitively expensive, and far more than one would be necessary.

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