Wesley Hunt  ImageIt’s amazing how quickly the gatekeepers of culture decide what’s acceptable.

In June, every logo becomes a rainbow. Every stadium, every jersey, every broadcast gets a political message.

But put a Bible verse on your cap? Suddenly that’s “controversial.”

Put an American slogan front and center? Suddenly that’s “divisive.”

The NFL had no problem painting political movements in the end zone. Major League Baseball has no problem turning every June into a month-long corporate activism campaign.

Yet the moment someone wants to celebrate faith, patriotism, or traditional values, we’re told those things don’t belong in sports.

Funny how the people preaching inclusion always seem to have a very specific list of viewpoints they’re willing to include.

If rainbow logos belong in sports, then so do Bible verses.

If political messages belong in sports, then so do messages celebrating faith, family, and country.

The double standard isn’t subtle anymore. EVERYONE sees it.

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What a graphic example for “Carry Spare Ammo, People!”

Massachusetts Gun Laws Interfered With Armed Citizen’s Response to Mass Shooting

If Massachusetts gun laws worked as advertised, a convicted felon never would have been able to get his hands on a banned firearm and open fire on motorists driving down Cambridge’s busy Memorial Drive last month.

As we all saw, those laws failed to stop a prohibited person from accessing a prohibited firearm. They did, however, impede the armed citizen who helped put an end to the shooting alongside a Massachusetts state trooper.

How many times have we heard anti-gunners proclaim that “nobody needs 20 rounds to shoot a deer” or some such nonsense?

The reality is that when faced with a threat to human life, we need as many rounds as it takes to neutralize that threat. In Massachusetts, though, you get ten rounds per magazine at best.

Tyler Brown, the man accused of the shooting spree on Memorial Drive, allegedly fired about 60 rounds from the BCI Defense Model FF-15 he illegally possessed. The armed citizen who helped stop that shooting spree had just eight rounds for his Glock handgun.

“The witness is an experienced firearm ower with a license to carry, as he is an ex-Marine and used to be a firearm instructor,” the criminal complaint says.

The civilian said he saw a man with a long rifle, which he believeed looked like an AK-47, on foot in front of his vehicle. The civilian had a Glock 9mm pistol in a safe in the backseat of his vehicle, and retrieved it while covering himself. The former Marine said he fired all eight rounds from his gun and then moved to a tree for cover, telling other people to get back. he said he heard sirens, so he put his gun on the ground away from him.

The civilian said he heard two different calibers of gunfire going off, which he believed to be coming from a trooper and the suspect. He heard the shooter yelling something, but did not remember what is was, and he said the shooter eventually fell to the ground. Troopers rendered medical aid, and Brown was taken to Beth Israel Hospital.

As Swearer noted in a follow-up post on X, “once again the lesson is that while most incidents of armed self-defense don’t (strictly speaking) *require* the victim to fire more than 10 rounds, when the outliers occur, they are precisely the types of armed confrontations in which more than 10 rounds can make all the difference between life or death.”

Anti-gun activists can argue all they want that the “average” defensive gun use requires less than ten rounds, but they can’t guarantee that any of us will ever face an “average” situation where we need to use our firearm to protect ourselves or others. Most of us won’t ever pull the trigger of one of our guns in self-defense, but some of us will find ourselves in a situation where ten rounds simply isn’t enough.

That was the case in Cambridge, Massachusetts last month. Thankfully, the state trooper (who is exempt from the state’s ban on “large capacity” magazines) was able to return fire as well, and the two individuals shooting back at the assailant were able to stop his random attack. We can’t count on a cop rushing in to save the day, though… and in Massachusetts you can’t count on having a magazine large enough to help you survive an encounter with a violent predator who ignored the state’s restrictive gun laws and armed himself anyway.

“Stupid, Stupid, Stupid”: Justice Department Memo Further Tarnishes Record of Merrick Garland

Internal emails were uncovered recently that cast a new, negative light on Attorney General Merrick Garland’s record in targeting parents over school board controversies. The communications show that various Justice officials raised alarms over the effort pushed by Democratic allies and the National Association for School Boards. Career officials condemned the Biden Administration proposal by objecting that “If they do this, they might as well rename the damn thing the Anti-MAGA Task Force.”

As parents organized against COVID and woke policies being implemented by school boards, Democratic allies and the National Association for School Boards called upon the Biden Administration to crack down. Garland agreed and implemented a plan detailed in an October 2021 memo to treat these parents as engaged in potential “domestic terrorism.”

There was public outrage, but Garland defended the action, declaring “The obligation of the Justice Department is to protect the American people against violence and threats of violence and that particularly includes public officials.”

As the outcry grew, the Biden Administration was forced into a retreat and an apology:

“On behalf of NSBA, we regret and apologize for the letter. There was no justification for some of the language included in the letter. We should have had a better process in place to allow for consultation on a communication of this significance. We apologize also for the strain and stress this situation has caused you and your organizations.”

We now know that rank-and-file officials opposed the effort, but decided to go forward anyway. The Justice Department in October 2021 issued a memo to coordinate a response to what it described as an “increase in harassment, intimidation and threats of violence against school board members, teachers and workers in our nation’s public schools” by parents.

Continue reading “”

Virginia Gun Ban Lawsuit Argues Banned Arms Are Militia Arms

While four Second Amendment-based cases challenging Virginia’s semiautomatic gun and magazine ban are on hold pending a decision by a three-judge panel on whether they should be consolidated, another case, taking a different approach, is still “scheduled to be argued next Wednesday, June 17th at 9am,” Counsel for Plaintiffs Kenneth T. Cuccinelli stated in a June 10 “Non-client specific case update” email.

The Curtis v. Katz complaint, filed in the Circuit Court of the County of Spotsylvania, asks for declaratory judgment and injunctive relief against SB 749 / HB 217 because  the “ban provisions of the Act  violate the militia clause of Article I, Section 13 of the Constitution of Virginia.”

That’s where the important difference from the other challenges comes in:

“Plaintiffs challenge these prohibitions solely under the militia clause of Article I, Section 13 of the Constitution of Virginia. They do not rest their case on the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution, nor on the individual right to keep and bear arms also embodied in Article I, Section 13.

Their argument is simpler and more fundamental: the militia clause guarantees the existence of a “well regulated militia, composed of the body of the people, trained to arms.” That guarantee is self-executing.

It necessarily presupposes that the body of the people may acquire and possess the arms with which they must be trained. The General Assembly cannot, consistent with that guarantee, prohibit the body of the people from acquiring the very weapons with which they must be prepared to serve as that militia.”

Simply put, as noted in the Statement of Facts, “The weapons banned by the act are the arms of the citizen militia.”

Along with the update email came a welcome bonus.

“The Commonwealth Attorney Defendant in our case, Ryan Mehaffey, filed a blockbuster brief in our case arguing that WE should get our preliminary injunction,” Cuccinelli informed. “It’s a good piece of work and a very pleasant surprise.  I’ve attached it for your reading pleasure (merged in the embed below).

While Mehaffey was named in the complaint because he is the Commonwealth’s Attorney of Spotsylvania County, it should be noted he is one of the brave Virginia prosecutors who has gone on record saying he will not enforce the ban. (While his brief is, indeed, “a good piece of work” his contention that “a sawed off shotgun is not protected because it does not have some reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia” is historically arguable, as is what some of us might see as overreliance on limiting small arms to those that “are lawfully in common use today,” which suggests bans on machineguns and limiting developing technologies to the standing army would be consistent with Founding intent instead of potentially rendering the Second Amendment moot. That said, the brunt of Mehaffey’s brief is outstanding and educational.)

“I will let you all know if I hear anything about consolidation or our case schedule,” Cuccinelli advised his email recipients. “If you don’t hear from me, that means we’re still on the schedule above.”

Panic Setting In As Administration Moves to Bolster Americans’ Gun Rights Advance.

In the last 17 months, the Trump administration has delivered win after win for the nation’s most ardent gun-rights advocacy groups, chipping away at dozens of federal regulations. While many of these efforts target regulations from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives — the law enforcement agency within the Justice Department tasked with regulating the nation’s millions of firearms — the administration’s work stretches across the executive branch.

Supporters of tighter gun restrictions have pilloried the Trump administration, saying officials are acting recklessly and could endanger the public with a wholesale rollback of regulations. But gun rights advocates who portrayed the Biden administration as trampling on the Second Amendment have praised the current administration’s actions as a needed corrective.

Trump vowed on the campaign trail to be a pro-Second Amendment president and pledged that, under his leadership, “no one will lay a finger on your firearms.” He said he would roll back Biden-era ATF regulations and received the backing of the big gun rights groups.

Critics, however, have said that the Trump’s administration’s push to unwind gun regulations contradicts the president’s tough-on-crime political agenda. And, they say, the efforts could make it easier for potentially dangerous people to access firearms. …

[ATF general counsel Robert] Leider has been working on the regulations for more than a year. The plan had been to announce them July 4, 2025, at an Independence Day celebration, The Post previously reported.

But [Acting Attorney General Todd] Blanche has said the proposed changes took longer than expected to complete because lawyers had to scrupulously review them to ensure they passed legal muster. Justice Department officials expect them to face court challenges.

Because the Trump administration is making these changes through the regulatory process — and not by legislation passed in Congress and signed into law — the next administration could reinstate the scrapped rules. The goal, Justice Department officials said, is to ensure that the regulations do not run afoul of laws so that they can remain intact.

“We were very careful on how we did the rules,” Leider said. “Congress has decided that certain people cannot be trusted with firearms. ATF has to enforce those congressional judgments. It is not the agency’s job to amend Congress’s criteria in an effort to predict who will become violent.”

— Perry Stein in Inside the Trump administration’s rapid rollback of gun regulations

Congressional Candidate Brandon Herrera to Address GRPC in September

The Gun Rights Policy Conference (GRPC) planning committee has announced that Second Amendment advocate and Congressional candidate Brandon Herrera will address the crowd at this year’s event.

Co-hosted by the Second Amendment Foundation (SAF) and the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms (CCRKBA), the 41st annual GRPC is scheduled for Sept. 25 – 27 in Dallas at the Westin Dallas Fort Worth Airport hotel.

After pursuing studies in pre-law, Herrera started a small business in firearms manufacturing. Using his lifelong passion for firearms, he built his business, as well as a large social media following, accumulating over half a billion views using entertainment to promote firearm safety and Second Amendment advocacy. Herrera has become a leader in the industry and continues to work with pro-freedom groups both in the Second Amendment and America First communities and is an advocate for our military and veterans.

In addition to Herrera, other GRPC speakers include:

  • Robert Cekada, Director of the ATF
  • Robert Leider, ATF Chief Counsel, Office of Chief Counsel
  • Jared Yanis, host of Guns & Gadgets YouTube channel
  • Joseph Greenlee, Director of the Office of Litigation Counsel at the National Rifle Association Institute for Legislative Action
  • Kenyon Gleason, president of National Association of Sporting Goods Wholesalers
  • Shermichael Singleton, political consultant, television anchor, CNN analyst
  • Jeff Folloder, Executive Director, NFA Trade and Collectors Association
  • Chris Boeck, General Counsel and Chief Legal Officer at Silencer Shop
  • Fernando Nava, Second Amendment advocate and owner of Rusty Wheel Ranch
  • Cam Edwards, editor of BearingArms.com and host of Cam & Company podcast
  • John Petrolino, writer, firearms instructor, and author of Decoding Firearms: An Easy to Read Guide on Basic Gun Safety & Use
  • And many more!

The full GRPC agenda is guaranteed to be packed with leading 2A experts, legal minds, and grassroots advocates – all working together to protect and strengthen our Second Amendment rights. In addition to GRPC, registrants also have the unique opportunity to take part in AMM-Con, Friday’s pre-conference event. Scheduled for Friday, Sept. 25, AMM-Con is a gathering of some of the top Second Amendment media who provide educational presentations about all things related to 2A media.

Visit SAF.org/grpc for registration and hotel information.

West Virginia Carry Reforms Improve 2A Rights for Young Adults

When it comes to the right to keep and bear arms, West Virginia is by far the best Virginia. While Democrats in Richmond have imposed more than a dozen anti-gun measures on residents this year, the GOP-dominated legislature in Charleston continues to advance Second Amendment rights. As of last Friday, adults under the age of 21 can now lawfully carry without the need for a permit, making West Virginia a true Constitutional Carry state.

House Bill 4106 sailed through the legislature, passing the House on an 85-8 vote and the Senate 31-3. Still, the legislation had some critics during a public hearing earlier this year.

During a Senate Judiciary Committee meeting in March, Dr. Jim McJunkin said firearms are the leading cause of death for children and adolescents in the United States. He said expanding permitless carry to younger adults creates concerns because of impulsive behavior, risk-taking and the potential for substance abuse.

Supporters of the bill argued that it applies to law-abiding adults and could help people protect themselves.

Art Thomm of the West Virginia Citizens Defense League told lawmakers that similar concerns have been raised during previous debates on the issue, but said the legislation applies to adults who follow the law.

McJunkin’s statistic is only accurate if you ignore every death of a child under the age of 1 and expand the definition of adolescent to include adults 18 and 19-years-old. In fact, as the Washington Post(!) reported last year, traffic fatalities are the leading cause of death for children between the ages of 1 and 15, not firearms.

Does that actually bolster McJunkin’s argument that young adults are too impulsive to exercise their Second Amendment rights? I don’t think so. Less than 1% of the population of adults under the age of 21 are going to be the victims or perpetrators of “gun violence,” and to me it makes no sense to strip away the Second Amendment rights of 100% of young adults in an attempt to reduce harm among 1% of them.

Targeted enforcement and educational efforts aimed at those young adults would be a much smarter option, in my opinion. I’d like to see West Virginia sheriffs offer free basic gun safety courses for new gun owners, including adults under 21. West Virginia is also a campus carry state, so offering those courses on the campuses of the state’s colleges and universities would be a good idea as well.

I’m not opposed to firearms training at all, but I don’t think that any right should come with a training mandate. Give these young adults (and other new gun owners) options to get educated and trained on the basics of responsible gun ownership and carrying, and many of them will take advantage of those opportunities. And in West Virginia, a fair number of these young adults have grown up in gun-owning households. They’ve been taught gun safety and responsible gun ownership from an early age, so they’re not just picking up a gun and deciding to carry it while remaining totally ignorant of the basic rules of gun handling.

HB 4106 is a big step forward, and one that’s all the more important given the regression in 2A rights taking place in neighboring Virginia. I applaud the West Virginia legislature and Gov. Patrick Morrisey for strengthening the right to keep and bear arms in the Volunteer State, and I hope that other states will soon follow their example.

U.S. District Judge Vacates the Biden ATF ‘Engaged in the Business’ Rule

U.S. District Judge Vacates the Biden ATF ‘Engaged in the Business’ Rule

Biden ATF’s “Engaged in the Business” rule was vacated Friday by U.S. District Court Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk in a case brought by Gun Owners of America.

Kacsmaryk noted that Gun Owners of America and their fellow plaintiffs “succeeded on the merits of their claims, brought under the Administrative Procedure Act, against the challenged Final Rule: Definition of ‘Engaged in the Business’ as a Dealer in Firearms.”

He noted, “The Final Rule is therefore VACATED.”

Moreover, Kacsmaryk ruled that the ATF “may not apply the Final Rule to anyone–including individuals and organizations who are parties to…[the GOA’s] case.”

On May 14, 2023, Breitbart News reported that former President Biden asked Attorney General Merrick Garland to act where Congress had not and take the U.S. “as close as possible” to universal background checks. The ‘Engaged in the Business Rule,’ challenged in the aforementioned lawsuit by GOA, was the result.

That rule is now vacated.

Safe and sound at home again, let the waters roar, Jack.
Don’t forget yer old shipmate, faldee raldee raldee rye-eye-doe!