hawaii firearms coalition

The U.S. Government Just Asked the Supreme Court to Strike Down Hawaii’s Gun-Carry Law

Here’s what you need to know:
In a high-profile Second Amendment case (Wolford v. Lopez), the U.S. Department of Justice filed a legal brief urging the Supreme Court to review—and reverse—the Ninth Circuit’s decision that upheld Hawaii’s controversial concealed carry restriction.

What’s the law?
Hawaii makes it a crime (punishable by up to 1 year in jail) for a licensed gun owner to carry a firearm on any private property open to the public (like gas stations, stores, or restaurants) unless the property owner gives express permission, such as posting a sign.

Why is the DOJ opposing it?
According to the DOJ’s brief:
•The law inverts centuries of legal tradition, where people could carry arms unless told otherwise.
•It functionally bans public carry—turning everyday errands into legal minefields for gun owners.
•It targets gun rights, not protects property rights—especially since it exempts police, government employees, and others.
•It conflicts with NYSRPA v. Bruen (2022), where the Supreme Court ruled states cannot impose burdens on the public’s right to carry without clear historical justification.
What’s at stake?
This case could shape the future of the Second Amendment. Since Bruen, 5 states (including CA, NY, and NJ) have passed similar laws—impacting over 75 million Americans. There’s also now a conflict between federal appeals courts, making Supreme Court review more likely.

Bottom line:
The DOJ—under the TRUMP administration—is siding with gun rights advocates here, warning that Hawaii’s law “effectively nullifies” the right to carry firearms for self-defense.

This is another one of Trump’s, or his ‘advisors’ goofs. Taking a Republican out of the House, requiring a special election to replace him. Now, while both he and Matt Gaetz were replaced with other Republicans, any election always has a certain amount of risk involved, and if the demoncraps retake the House in 27, the only thing we’ll see is a continual series of impeachments of Trump, simply out of hate.

BREAKING: Waltz Out at the White House

Three weeks after inadvertently adding Atlantic reporter and long time Trump foe Jeffery Goldberg to a Signal group chat, National Security Advisor Michael Waltz and his deputy Alex Wong have reportedly been ousted from the administration. Others in the chat included Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Vice President JD Vance, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, CIA Director John Ratcliffe and more.

The Atlantic published details of the chat, which included sensitive discussions about bombing Iranian backed Houthi rebels in Yemen. Waltz admitted to accidentally adding Goldberg but maintained he didn’t know how the number ended up in his contact list.

“The world found out shortly before 2 p.m. eastern time on March 15 that the United States was bombing Houthi targets across Yemen,” Goldberg detailed. “I, however, knew two hours before the first bombs exploded that the attack might be coming. The reason I knew this is that Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, had texted me the war plan at 11:44 a.m. The plan included precise information about weapons packages, targets, and timing.”

President Donald Trump continues to stand by Secretary of Defense Hegseth and others who were in the discussion. Signal is a legal and approved way for government officials to communicate so long as the information shared is unclassified.

On Thursday morning, Waltz was still at the White House discussing the newly inked economic deal with Ukraine.

Latest Look at Gun Buying Downright Fascinating

Americans buy a lot of guns. Many of those are gun folks buying their dozenth or so firearm, but many others are new gun owners buying for the very first time. It’s a glorious thing that we can do here in the United States that many people in other places simply cannot do. Not like we can.

Sure, some people have a problem with it, but the truth is that we’re buying guns and we’re buying a lot of them.

That’s according to a new Rasmussen poll.

A recent Rasmussen survey revealed what gun dealers and manufacturers already knew, and anti-gunners didn’t like hearing: Despite a downturn in gun sales, Americans are still buying guns, and for the past five years those purchases have surpassed one million per month.

This is happening despite efforts in several states to make buying guns increasingly difficult.

According to Rasmussen, 19 percent of American adults say they, or someone in their household, bought a gun in the past year. Sixty-four percent (64%) of all American Adults say the main reason most people purchase a gun is for self-defense, the veteran polling firm revealed, which says a lot about the public confidence in the ability of law enforcement to respond quickly to violent crime.

Headline news such as the reported raid on an underground nightclub in Colorado Springs, during which more than 100 people were arrested—allegedly many of them illegal aliens—and police recovered drugs and guns, might alarm more people enough to buy a firearm….

Political persuasion plays into Rasmussen’s findings. Republicans (71%) are far more likely than Democrats (60%) to believe self-defense is the primary reason for owning a gun. Among Independents, 61 percent think personal protection is the main reason. Likewise, according to Rasmussen, Republicans are more likely to say they or someone in their household bought a gun within the last year.

On the flip side, Democrats are much more likely to think it is too easy to buy a gun, Rasmussen noted.

Nothing shocking about that by any stretch, really. I’m less than thrilled that anyone would believe it’s too easy to buy a gun in this day and age, but I’m not surprised by it, either. The fact that I can walk into a gun store right now and walk out with just about anything in the store if my pockets are deep enough, regardless of what hurdles I have to clear, will always be “too easy” to some people.

But there’s another interesting tidbit that I found interesting.

And here’s an alarming—albeit maybe not surprising—revelation in the Rasmussen survey: “A majority (54%) of government employees believe it’s too easy to buy a gun nowadays, compared to 45% of private sector workers and 40% of retirees.”

While that really doesn’t necessarily play any significant factor in anything–government workers are still just one vote each–the truth is that at least some of those folks work for the ATF.

I wouldn’t be surprised to learn this opinion was overrepresented at the ATF, either, though there’s no way to know that one way or the other.

Either way, it’s amusing.

The report also notes that The Trace has updated its estimate of guns in America to 512 million firearms.

My take on that?

Until every man, woman, and child has a few dozen guns, I won’t consider us even close to having enough.

As for what point hits “too many,” such a number does not exist.

If that fact makes some heads explode, well, so be it.

Still out of commercial power, this early Thursday morning, as is a large section of the western part of the city, as of the time of writing this. The sounds of gas generators can be heard in the neighborhood from several different direction.

May 1 is a better date for Victims of Communism Day than the available alternatives, such as November 7 (the anniversary of the Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia) and August 23 (the anniversary of the Nazi-Soviet Pact).
-Eugene Volokh

May 1, 2025

1
Don’t forget to wash your face with morning dew on May 1 for good luck. 
May Day has its roots in astronomy. Traditionally, it was the halfway point between the spring equinox and the summer solstice. This is one of the Celtic ‘cross quarter days’, which mark the midway points between the solstices and equinoxes of the year.
In the Middle Ages, the Gaelic people celebrated the festival of Beltane, which means “Day of Fire.” People created large bonfires and danced at night to celebrate.

2
Communists appropriated the day.
In 1901, The Second International Socialist Congress proclaimed that proletariat groups “energetically celebrate the advent of the eight-hour work day.” The former medieval holiday was taken over by the Soviet Union and other communist regimes and used as a propaganda tool

Slim to none posting folks for the near term. The power to most of the area is off due to damage caused by the storm front that moved through this morning and another one is on the way.
Castellum Fortis is on limited generator power and we hope that more fuel supplies can be obtained, or power restored, before tomorrow evening.

Spain experienced a nationwide power outage one week after reaching 100% “green” energy.

Across all of Portugal and Spain, people were left without power or cell service of any kind. The nations literally went dark.

Tens of millions of people had to resort to old handheld radios to figure out what was even happening. It could have been an alien invasion for all they knew!

From El Pais:

The outage suddenly set Spain back to the 19th century. Traffic lights out of service, traffic jams forming across the country, pedestrians wandering around cities without public transportation, desperate families trying to communicate with their loved ones, passengers left stranded without trains or flights, canceled medical appointments, rescues underway in subway stations and elevators, lines forming outside small shops due to supermarket closures…

I wonder what could have caused this?

For no reason at all, here’s a video of Spaniards celebrating the destruction of a nuclear power plant three years ago.

Mere low Earth orbit in a space station? It’s too bad we haven’t taken up asteroid mining yet

What’s it like to be 70 years old in space? “All those little aches and pains heal up.”

Not many people celebrate their birthday by burning a fiery arc through the atmosphere, pulling 4.4gs in freefall back to planet Earth, thudding into the ground, and emptying their stomach on the steppes of Kazakhstan.

No one has ever done it on their 70th birthday.

Perhaps this is appropriate because NASA astronaut Don Pettit is a singular individual. His birthday is April 20, and when the Soyuz spacecraft carrying him landed at dawn in Kazakhstan, the calendar had turned over to that date. John Glenn, then 77, was older when he went to space. But no one as old as Pettit had spent as long as he had in orbit, 220 days, on a mission.

On Monday, a little more than a week after returning from orbit, Pettit met with reporters at Johnson Space Center. “It’s good to be back on planet Earth,” he said. “As much as I love exploring space, going into the frontier, and making observations, you do reach a time when it’s time to come home.”

Flying in space at 70 years old

Pettit first went into space at the age of 47 for his first of three long-duration missions to the International Space Station. Since then, he has flown a shorter shuttle mission and two more space station increments. All told, he has lived in space for 590 days, the third-most all-time among NASA astronauts.

“I’ve got a few creaks and groans in my body, but basically I feel the same as I did 20 years ago, and coming back to gravity is provocative,” he said.

After every one of his missions, Pettit said the readjustment to gravity for him has been a challenge. He added that the surprising thing about spaceflight is that it’s not so much your large muscles that ache, but the smaller ones.

“A week ago, I was on station, and I was doing really heavy squats, I was doing dead lifts, I could float around with the greatest of ease, even though I had no trapeze,” he said. “I was at the peak of my game. And then you come back to Earth, and it’s like, God, I can’t even get up from the floor anymore. It’s humbling. But it isn’t about the large muscle groups. It’s about the little, tiny muscles that everybody forgets about because they’re just there and they work. When you’re in weightlessness, these muscles don’t work anymore. And they take a six-month vacation until you come back to Earth. And now, all of a sudden, they start groaning and talking to you, and it takes a while to get all these little muscles tuned back up to being an Earthling.”

In terms of aging, Pettit said, like a lot of older people, he wakes up after a night sleeping on Earth with a sore shoulder or a stiff neck. That’s just part of the process. But microgravity took some of those aches and pains away.

“I love being in space,” he said. “When you’re sleeping, you’re just floating, and your body, all those little aches and pains heal up. You feel like you’re 30 years old again and free of pain, free of everything. So I love being on orbit. It’s a great place to be for me and my physiology.”

The space station isn’t old, either

Pettit has visited the space station on all four of his spaceflights. He lived there, near the beginning of the station’s lifetime, as part of Expedition 6 in 2002. More than two decades later he said the station is operating at full capacity, delivering on its promise of robust scientific research, studies of long-duration spaceflight, and much more. Asked if he felt nostalgic about the station coming to an end in 2030—NASA plans to de-orbit the facility at that time—Pettit said the laboratory should live on.

“I’m a firm believer we don’t need to dump the space station in the ocean at 2030 if we don’t want to,” he said. “If we as a society decided to keep [the] space station, we could keep it like a B-52. I mean, how many years is it they’ve been flying? It’ll be flying close to 100 years by the time the Air Force finally retires the B-52, and it’s basically the same airframe with the same aerodynamics, but everything else is new. There’s no limit to what we can do to [the] space station, except for our will to keep refurbishing it and having the funding necessary.”

And maybe that’s because he wants to go back. Pettit did not rule out flying into space again. For now, he wants to take a few weeks to allow his body time to re-adjust to gravity. He wants to enjoy some time with his family. But soon, he knows, space will start to call to him again.

“I call it the explorer’s paradox,” he said. “When you’re back in civilization, you want to be out there wherever your wilderness happens to be; and then when you’re in your wilderness, it’s like, wow, I need to be back with my family. I think it’s probably gone on for as long as humanity has had people who go off into the wilderness. When the flight docs say I’m ready to go back, I’m ready to do it. And I know John Glenn flew at age 76, something like that, and I’m only 70, so I’ve got a few more good years left. I could see getting another flight or two in before I’m ready to hang up my rocket nozzles.”

This is the way it’s been in Europe for quite a while. Major parts of a gun are serialized, and restricted. You can see this on Glocks and other European made guns where the serial number is on the frame, slide and barrel. Just like for ammo, if the tyrant demoncraps in California do happen to pass such a crap-for-brains law,  people who are interested enough will simply cross the state line to buy.

Beyond ‘Ghost Guns’: California Democrats Push Background Checks for Gun Barrels

California Democrats are pushing legislation to require background checks for gun barrel purchases, effectively taking the “ghost gun” regulatory push to its logical conclusion.

The bill, Senate Bill 704, is sponsored by state Sen. Jesse Arreguín (D).

SB 704 singles out firearm barrels among the many other parts of firearm, requiring a background check for any replacement barrel or aftermarket barrel upgrade purchase:

Commencing on July 1, 2026, this bill would, except as specified, prohibit the sale or transfer of a firearm barrel, as defined, unless the transaction is completed in person by a licensed firearms dealer. The bill would require the licensed firearms dealer to conduct a background check of the purchaser or transferee and to record specified information pertaining to the transaction, including the date of the sale or transfer.

Moreover, SB 704 specifically outlines how the costs of performing background checks for barrels must be handled, making clear that the legislation literally creates “a new crime,” albeit a misdemeanor, in the state California.

Gun rights proponents have long warned that the Democrats’ use of terminology like “ghost guns”–and the resulting regulation of said “guns”–would lead to background checks for aftermarket firearm parts. State Sen. Arreguín’s legislation is doing just that.

Additionally, the National Association for Gun Rights (NAGR) warns that with a background check, SB 704 would end online barrel sales via the requirement for face-to-face transactions.

NAGR said, “We have warned that this was always the end goal. Target the secondary market — driving up the cost of repairing and maintaining firearms in an effort to win through attrition. The ultimate objective is a complete ban on online sales.”

Reform Minded Board Members Sweep NRA Officer Elections

At the NRA Annual Meetings last weekend I interviewed then-First Vice President Bill Bachenberg for the Bearing Arms’ Cam & Co podcast. During our conversation Bachenberg talked extensively about the reforms he’d like to see implemented within the group, starting with a president who knows a thing or two about running a business.

The NRA, for all its work as an advocacy, litigation, legislative, educational, and training organization, is a non-profit corporation, and Bachenberg believes someone with business acumen and a background in running successful companies is critical in restoring both faith and financial soundness to the organization.

Bachenberg spoke openly about his plan to challenge incumbent president Bob Barr for election, along with a reform-minded slate of additional officers: then-2nd Vice President Mark Vaughn, and Rocky Marshall, who’s been a longtime advocate for increased accountability and transparency.

Though officers are elected annually, traditionally they serve two-year terms, so this was a challenge to a sitting president, and was widely seen as a contest between those who are willing to acknowledge past failings within NRA leadership and those who still want to defend Wayne LaPierre and the misspending from other top executives, or at least refuse to truly acknowledge them.

Well, the 76 board members voted for new officers today, and it was a clean sweep for the reformers. From the NRA Public Affairs office:

Today, the Board of Directors of the National Rifle Association of America (NRA), elected Bill Bachenberg of Pennsylvania as President of the NRA and Doug Hamlin as NRA Executive Vice President & CEO. The meeting of the Board of Directors followed the 154th NRA Annual Meetings & Exhibits where over 70,000 NRA members, their families, and supporters of the Second Amendment gathered at the Georgia World Congress Center in Atlanta, Georgia to check out the latest guns, gear, and accessories from over 600 exhibitors.

“I am deeply honored to be entrusted by my colleagues on the Board to serve as President of the NRA,” said Bill Bachenberg, NRA President. “We are at a pivotal point in our Association’s history as we work to reach out to new members, build upon the trust of existing members, and provide the gold-standard programs that American gun owners expect. As the Nation’s oldest civil rights organization, the NRA plays a critical role in protecting and advancing freedom in America.”

The NRA Board of Directors also elected Mark Vaughan of Oklahoma as NRA First Vice President and Rocky Marshall of Texas as NRA Second Vice President.

“As we conclude a very successful NRA Annual Meeting in Atlanta, I know one thing for sure: NRA’s best days are ahead of us,” said Doug Hamlin, NRA Executive Vice President & CEO. “This Association is moving forward, full speed ahead, to support the shooting sports, train new gun owners, and defend the sacred right to self-defense. I thank the dedicated staff of the NRA who work day and night on behalf of NRA’s millions of members and America’s more than 100 million firearms owners.”

Following Mr. Hamlin’s reelection, he reappointed John Commerford as the Executive Director of the NRA Institute for Legislative Action (NRA-ILA) and Josh Savani as the Executive Director of NRA General Operations.

The Board of Directors also reelected Sonya B. Rowling as NRA Treasurer, Robert Mensinger as NRA Chief Compliance Officer, and John C. Frazer as NRA Secretary.

The 2026 NRA Annual Meetings & Exhibits will take place in Houston, Texas, from April 17-19, 2026.

Frazer’s retention as NRA Secretary is a bit of a surprise, not only because he was part of the old regime but because he was implicated in Letitia James’ lawsuit against the NRA (a jury held that he made false statements but did not cause financial harm to the organization and should not be held liable for damages). Whatever their reasons, enough reformers felt comfortable with Frazer in his current role that he was re-elected.

Today’s election results are a clear sign that the Wayne LaPierre days of the NRA are, for better or worse, over. The fact that former NRA-ILA Executive Director Chris Cox, who resigned after being placed on administrative leave by LaPierre during the NRA’s meltdown in 2019, was warmly welcomed at an event celebrating the Institute for Legislative Action’s 50th anniversary was another telling indication that Wayne LaPierre’s influence over the NRA and its leadership is on the wane, if not wiped out completely.

For several years a growing number of NRA members and board members have been advocating for making some big changes to the organization; not in terms of its mission, but its ability to succeed in that mission. There is a recognition that trust needs to be rebuilt, that the institutional arrogance of the past should no longer exist, if it was ever justified to begin with.

The NRA’s been knocked down a peg, and it wasn’t only because of Letitia James’ attempt to dissolve the organization and rob millions of members of their community. To pretend that isn’t the case only hurts the organization. Denial isn’t an option, and it wasn’t just the reformers who won today. I’d say the realists won too.

I’ve said along along that the Second Amendment community needs a strong NRA, and (casting all journalistic neutrality aside and speaking as a Benefactor Life Member) I’m thrilled that the reform slate swept the elections.

I believe this is the moment that many disgruntled and reform-minded NRA members have been working (or at least waiting) for, and after speaking with multiple board members and NRA leadership Doug Hamlin, John Commerford, and Josh Savani, I can honestly say in my more than 20 years of connections with the organization I’ve never seen the sense of energy and purpose that I witnessed in Atlanta.

I’m not saying the NRA is all the way back, but I’m optimistic that the efforts to rebuild and reform that led to today’s election results will now be able to kick into overdrive, and I’m excited to see what comes next.