The beauty of the second amendment is that it will not be needed until they try to take it. -Thomas Jefferson
January 31, 2026
DOJ and ATF Overreach: Weaponizing Patent Law Against the 2A
It’s no surprise to see the federal government trample on gun rights time and again. But the latest stunt from the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) takes the cake. On January 26, 2026, the ATF filed a “Statement of Interest” in a purely civil patent infringement lawsuit between Rare Breed Triggers and Hoffman Tactical. This isn’t about crime or national security; it’s a business dispute over intellectual property. Yet here comes Uncle Sam, sticking his nose where it doesn’t belong, all in the name of “public safety.” If this doesn’t scream anti-2A overreach, I don’t know what does.
Let’s back up and break this down for those who might not be knee-deep in the gun world. Forced reset triggers, or FRTs, are engineered triggers that allow for faster semi-automatic firing by mechanically resetting the trigger after each shot. They’re not machine gunssince they require a separate trigger pull for every round, as affirmed by multiple courts. Rare Breed Triggers pioneered the FRT-15, a popular model that lets law-abiding citizens like you and me shoot fasterwithout converting semi-automatic firearms into fully-automatics. Hoffman Tactical, run by inventor Timothy Hoffman out of Tennessee, developed his own version called the Super Safety. It’s similar in concept but differs in design details. Notably, his design has been promulgated via open-source 3D-printable files that empower DIY enthusiasts to make their own.
The beef started when Rare Breed sued Hoffman in late 2025, claiming patent infringement. Rare Breed argues Hoffman’s design copies their tech too closely, while Hoffman counters that his is distinct enough and that no one owns the broad idea of forced resets. This should be a straightforward intellectual property/patent fight in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Tennessee (case number 1:25-cv-00389-CLC-CHS); No criminals, no threats to society, just two companies hashing out who gets to profit from a clever invention.
Enter the ATF, stage left. In their Statement of Interest, they declare a “strong interest in promoting the safe use of firearms by the public, and in this particular case, in discouraging unregulated manufacture of forced reset triggers that allegedly infringe Rare Breed’s patents.” They’re urging the judge to grant Rare Breed a preliminary injunction against Hoffman, effectively shutting him down. Why? Because in the DOJ’s rationale, fewer FRTs mean less “danger.” This isn’t neutral advice; it’s a blatant push to limit access to these triggers through the backdoor of patent enforcement.
To understand this meddling, we need to rewind to the ATF’s long war on FRTs. Back in 2021, the agency sent a cease-and-desist to Rare Breed, classifying the FRT-15 as a machine gun under the National Firearms Act. Rare Breed fought back, and in a landmark 2024 Supreme Court ruling in Cargill v. Garland, the justices struck down the ATF’s bump stock ban, setting a precedent that devices like FRTs aren’t machine guns. By July 2024, a Texas district court applied this to FRTs, ruling they require multiple functions per shot—not the single pull that defines a machine gun.
Undeterred, the ATF kept up the pressure, seizing triggers and dragging Rare Breed through lawsuits. But in May 2025, under the self-described “most pro-2A administration in history,” the DOJ settled. The feds dropped their cases, agreed to return seized FRTs (including those from Wide Open Triggers, a similar product), and Rare Breed resumed sales. Sounds like a win, right? Not so fast. The settlement had strings attached: Rare Breed promised not to develop FRTs for pistols and, crucially, to “enforce its patents to prevent infringement that could threaten public safety.” In other words, the ATF outsourced its infringement agenda to a private company.
Now, Rare Breed is suing not just Hoffman but several manufacturers of Super Safety designs. YouTube creators and gun forums are buzzing—some call it a betrayal, with Rare Breed torching community goodwill to appease the feds. Hoffman himself received a cease-and-desist in February 2025, pulling his files offline. And the ATF’s intervention? It’s the cherry on top, admitting in essence they’re using this civil suit to curb “unregulated manufacture.”
The ATF has no statutory authority to regulate firearm accessories like triggers in this way. They were created to enforce existing laws, not invent new ones via proxy. Patent law is for protecting innovation, not as a tool for disarmament. Whether Republicans or Democrats are in charge, the bureaucracy finds ways to chip away at our rights. Remember, this “pro-2A” admin settled with conditions that force Rare Breed to police the market, effectively creating a monopoly that limits options for Americans.
The implications are chilling. If the government can hijack private lawsuits to advance gun control, what’s next? Banning aftermarket parts through intellectual property? Ignoring the First Amendment and stifling 3D printing innovations that empower self-reliance? Hoffman’s open-source approach democratizes gun tech, putting power in the hands of the people, not corporations or the state. By backing Rare Breed, the ATF is signaling they want fewer triggers out there, period, regardless of legality.
We can’t let bureaucrats weaponize the courts. Support organizations like Gun Owners of America who broke this story, contact your reps, boycott companies that cave to government pressure, and stay vigilant. The Second Amendment isn’t negotiable; it’s our birthright.
Man killed, another critically injured in apparent self-defense shooting in St. Pete: Police
ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. – St. Petersburg police say a Friday evening shooting that left one man dead and another hospitalized with critical injuries appears to be an act of self-defense.
According to SPPD, officers responded to the 900 block of 22nd Lane South shortly after 6:30 p.m.
Investigators say Syltico Morand, 29, and another man were armed when they tried to rob two men who were also armed and sitting in a vehicle parked on 22nd Lane South. A confrontation ensued between the men and Morand and the other suspect with him were shot, SPPD said.
Police say Morand died at the scene and the 30-year-old man with him was taken to the hospital with critical injuries. Officers detained the two men that fired shots from their vehicle. Multiple firearms were recovered at the scene, according to SPPD.
SPPD says the men that were detained have not been charged at this time. Investigators believe the shooting was an act of self-defense.
Let us contemplate our forefathers, and posterity, and resolve to maintain the rights bequeathed to us from the former, for the sake of the latter. The necessity of the times, more than ever, calls for our utmost circumspection, deliberation, fortitude, and perseverance. Let us remember that if we suffer tamely a lawless attack upon our liberty, we encourage it, and involve others in our doom. It is a very serious consideration, that millions yet unborn may be the miserable sharers of the event.–Samuel Adams
JANUARY 30, 2026
The ‘Common Sense Gun Control’ Lie: How Antigun States Restrict Access to the Second Amendment.
Events in Minnesota have created some strange temporary bedfellows. An opponent of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s efforts, Alex Pretti, was shot and killed by federal officers. Because he happened to be carrying a firearm while protesting against deportations, the typical talking points coming from many politicians have completely flipped from their typical stances on guns and the Second Amendment.
On the one hand, some Trump administration officials, and later even the President himself, asserted that carrying a firearm at a protest or near law enforcement officers is illegal. Both of those claims are false in Minnesota, with the latter claim being false everywhere else, too. Whether any of this leads to a policy shift remains to be seen, though that seems unlikely. Generally speaking, the second Trump Administration has been very helpful to Second Amendment activists, particularly to those of us in antigun states like California.
But just as the President and a few members of his administration were rhetorically throwing the Second Amendment under the bus, some politicians who have long opposed gun rights suddenly express support for the right to keep and bear arms. This support, of course, is phony.
As all of this was going on, Virginia Democrats were advancing legislation to ban the gun and magazine he carried, along with many other popular firearms. Just like stray comments from President Trump likely don’t indicate any real shift in policy, neither does Democrats suddenly voicing support for the Second Amendment mean that they will be opposing further gun control laws.
The Age of Functional Illiteracy
Functional illiteracy was once a social diagnosis, not an academic one. It referred to those who could technically read but could not follow an argument, sustain attention, or extract meaning from a text. It was never a term one expected to hear applied to universities. And yet it has begun to surface with increasing regularity in conversations among faculty themselves. Literature professors now admit—quietly in offices, more openly in essays—that many students cannot manage the kind of reading their disciplines presuppose. They can recognise words; they cannot inhabit a text.
The evidence is no longer anecdotal. University libraries report historic lows in book borrowing. National literacy assessments show long-term declines in adult reading proficiency. Commentators in The Atlantic, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and The New York Times describe a generation for whom long-form reading has become almost foreign. A Victorian novel, once the ordinary fare of undergraduate study, now requires extraordinary accommodation. Even thirty pages of assigned reading can provoke anxiety, resentment, or open resistance.
It would be dishonest to ignore the role of the digital world in this transformation. Screens reward speed, fragmentation, and perpetual stimulation; sustained attention is neither required nor encouraged. But to lay the blame solely at the feet of technology is a convenient evasion. The crisis of reading within universities is not merely something that has happened to the academy. It is something the academy has, in significant measure, helped to produce.
The erosion of reading was prepared by intellectual shifts within the humanities themselves—shifts that began during the canon wars of the late twentieth century. Those battles were never only about which books should be taught. They were about whether literature possessed inherent value, whether reading required discipline, whether difficulty was formative or oppressive, and whether the humanities existed to shape students or merely to affirm them. In the decades that followed, entire traditions of reading were dismantled with remarkable confidence and astonishing speed.
The result is a moment of institutional irony. The very disciplines charged with preserving literary culture helped undermine the practices that made such culture possible. What we are witnessing now is not simply a failure of students to read, but the delayed consequence of ideas that taught generations of readers to approach texts with suspicion rather than attention, critique rather than encounter.
This essay is part of a larger project to trace that history, to explain how a war over the canon helped usher in an age in which reading itself is slipping from our grasp, and why the consequences of that war are now returning to the academy with unmistakable force.
Marco Rubio’s testimony on the Maduro op before the Senate indicates that the Trump administration very carefully awaited the right operational conditions before risking it, a process that Rubio called a “trigger operation”.
This attitude is likely to govern any action against Iran. Despite the media’s characterization of Trump as stupid and impulsive, the record reveals a decisive but exquisitely thorough command system. Given this, what might the US feasibly attempt in Iran with a reasonable prospect of success? Four types of actions are likely.
Operations to:
1. Further degrade Iran’s nuclear and missile programs through limited strikes or sanctions.
2. Disrupt IRGC command, control, and communications (C3) via cyber or targeted strikes.
3. Conduct decapitation strikes on IRGC or regime leadership.
4. Achieve full regime change or complete IRGC dissolution.
Objectives 1 and 2 have a good chance of success.
Objective 3 has a fair prospect of happening.
Objective 4 is probably out of reach in the very short run. But 1 and 2 would lay the foundation for 3 and the first triple would set up the 4th.
While there is no way to predict American action in Iran, it is likely to be cumulative and sequential with opportunistic branches.
Concealed carry holder shoots attempted robber on Chicago’s NW Side
CHICAGO – A concealed carry holder shot one of two robbery suspects early Tuesday while being confronted at gunpoint on Chicago’s Northwest Side.
What we know:
The incident happened around 2:40 a.m. near the intersection of Montana Street and Laramie Avenue in the Cragin neighborhood.
Chicago police said the 39-year-old man was getting out of his vehicle when two men approached him and one of them pulled out a gun and demanded his belongings.
Police said the victim, who is a licensed concealed-carry holder, drew his own gun and fired multiple shots, striking one of the suspects in the legs. Officers took both suspects into custody at the scene.
The wounded suspect, a 23-year-old man, was treated by paramedics with the Chicago Fire Department and taken to Illinois Masonic Medical Center where he was listed in good condition.
Area Five detectives are investigating.
Proposed WV House Bill Would Expand Castle Doctrine, Strengthen Self-Defense Protections
CHARLESTON, WV (LOOTPRESS) — A newly introduced bill in the West Virginia House of Delegates would expand the state’s Castle Doctrine laws, strengthening legal protections for people who use force — including deadly force — in self-defense.
House Bill 4878, introduced on January 28, would broaden when and where West Virginians may legally defend themselves, their homes, and others, while also shielding them from both criminal charges and civil lawsuits when force is lawfully used.
The legislation clarifies that a lawful occupant may use reasonable force, including deadly force, against an intruder or attacker inside a home or residence if they reasonably believe the intruder could cause death, serious bodily harm, or intends to commit a felony.
The bill also extends those protections beyond the walls of the home to include the curtilage — areas immediately surrounding a residence, such as yards, driveways, and porches — and removes any duty to retreat when a person is lawfully present.
“Congress may carry on the most wicked and pernicious of schemes under the dark veil of secrecy. The liberties of a people never were, nor ever will be, secure, when the transactions of their rulers may be concealed from them.”
– Patrick Henry
January 29, 2026
Know Your Gun: When you trust your life to a tool, you must know it inside and out.
We know that when we are faced with the threat of serious bodily injury or death, our focus will be on the threat. This is not so much a conscious effort as a fact that our natural survival system has taken over. For that reason, our manipulation of our defensive equipment must be practiced until its operation and deployment almost become subconscious functions. This is the main reason so many of us caution against the continual switching back and forth of that equipment—especially our daily-carry guns. While firing the defensive shot should certainly be a conscious decision, getting the gun into play should be a task that can be accomplished without thinking. To accomplish this, one really needs to know their defensive handgun.
The only negligent discharge with injuries I ever witnessed in a training class involved an older fellow who had carried a revolver in his law-enforcement career. Now, retired and working security, he had decided to carry a striker-fired pistol. The only trouble was that he had not taken the time to actually learn his new gun, and had real trouble keeping his finger off the trigger when the sights weren’t on the target. The double-action revolver trigger requires a significant amount of pressure, so this gross violation of the safety rules probably never resulted in a negative outcome for him, but that’s pure luck. With the lighter trigger of a striker-fired pistol, luck is less available. As you might guess, he shot himself in the leg while improperly reholstering his new gun.
Sometimes manufacturers make things difficult, like Smith & Wesson with its Models 39 and 59. Those were good, solid guns, but you pushed the safety up instead of down—the opposite of the single-action semi-automatics. If someone wasn’t really checked out on those, they might get a click instead of a bang or vice versa, either of which could create problems depending upon the situation.
So, it is critical for the armed citizen to totally familiarize themselves with their chosen defense gun. This means knowing how to safely load and unload the gun. It involves knowing the proper manipulation of all the various safety controls the gun might have. And, it involves knowing what the most common malfunctions might be and how to deal with them. All of these things are not going to be learned in a day, but take time and training. Once these things are learned, they must be practiced.
While the semi-automatic pistol is certainly the most popular defensive handgun, revolver shooters don’t get a free pass. Do you know how to keep your ejector rod from backing out? Do you know how to avoid having a spent cartridge get stuck under the ejector star? Finally, in the midst of a gunfight where you can only get a partial reload into your revolver, which way does the cylinder rotate? We know that Colts rotate clockwise whereas Smith & Wesson rotate counterclockwise, but what about the double-action Taurus or your Ruger SP101? You’d better find out.
Knowing the gun one carries is probably the main reason why many of the old-timers have stayed with guns of older design. It’s not that the new guns aren’t as good, it’s just that the older models are what these folks grew up with. They know them, know how they operate, know their shortcomings and know how to deal with any types of problems that might arise. That’s what knowing your gun is all about—the ability to effectively bring it into play without a lot of conscious thought.
By contrast, an old-timer of my acquaintance—a double-action revolver guy of long standing—advises that he is going to switch to a 9 mm for everyday carry. He has spent a good deal of range time and is satisfied with the function and accuracy of his new choice. Nonetheless, his next step is to attend a class at Gunsite with his new gun. All of which is part of the process of knowing your gun.
Finally, to end this piece on a lighter note, I would share this humorous—and probably apocryphal—story of a young man who just had to have a 1911. Obviously, he had never even fired one prior to his purchase. Within days, he was back in the gun store complaining that his new gun jammed. The in-house gunsmith checked it, cleaned and oiled it and reported that he hadn’t found any problem.
Sometime later, the young shooter returned, still complaining about his gun jamming. This time the gunsmith, after checking the gun, took the customer back to the shooting trap so he could witness the gun being fired. The gunsmith fired an entire magazine into the test trap and the slide locked back. “Look! It jammed again,” said the customer.
Know your defense gun. I mean really know your chosen defense gun. It is important.
Are meat eaters really more likely to live to 100 than non-meat eaters, as a recent study suggests?
People who don’t eat meat may be less likely than meat eaters to reach the age of 100, according to a recent study. But before you reconsider your plant-based diet, there’s more to these findings than meets the eye.
The research tracked over 5,000 Chinese adults aged 80 and older who participated in the Chinese Longitudinal Healthy Longevity Survey, a nationally representative study that began in 1998. By 2018, those following diets that don’t contain meat were less likely to become centenarians compared with meat eaters.
On the surface, this appears to contradict decades of research showing that plant-based diets are good for your health. Vegetarian diets, for example, have been consistently linked to lower risks of heart disease and stroke, type 2 diabetes and obesity. These benefits come partly from higher fibre intake and lower saturated fat consumption.
So what’s going on? Before drawing any firm conclusions, there are several important factors to consider.
Your body’s needs change as you age
This study focused on adults aged 80 and older, whose nutritional needs differ markedly from those of younger people. As we age, physiological changes alter both how much we eat and what nutrients we need. Energy expenditure drops, while muscle mass, bone density and appetite often decline. These shifts increase the risk of malnutrition and frailty.
Most evidence for the health benefits of diets that exclude meat comes from studies of younger adults rather than frail older populations. Some research suggests older non-meat eaters face a higher risk of fractures due to lower calcium and protein intake.
In later life, nutritional priorities shift. Rather than focusing on preventing long-term diseases, the goal becomes maintaining muscle mass, preventing weight loss and ensuring every mouthful delivers plenty of nutrients.
The study’s findings may, therefore, reflect the nutritional challenges of advanced age, rather than any inherent problems with plant-based diets. Crucially, this doesn’t diminish the well-established health benefits of these diets for younger and healthier adults.
