July Gun Sales Up, NICS tops 1 Million Each of Last 60 Months in a Row

All signs point to Americans continuing to reach for their wallets when it comes to practicing the right to keep and bear arms

Last month was the fifth highest July on record in terms of federal background checks for likely over-the-counter gun transfers since the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System was established over 20 years ago.

The unadjusted figure of 2,021,235 checks conducted through NICS last month is 1.7 percent higher than the unadjusted FBI NICS figure of 1,987,650 in July 2023.

Crunching the numbers for last month by the National Shooting Sports Foundation to remove gun permit checks and rechecks, the adjusted figure stands at 1,064,790, which is a 4-percent bump compared to the July 2023 NSSF-adjusted NICS figure of 1,023,903.

But perhaps the biggest piece of news when looking at last month’s NICS figures is that July 2024 marks the 60th consecutive month – five solid years – that has exceeded 1 million adjusted background checks in a single month.

And with America headed into a contentious election cycle where one side is on record advocating strict gun control and the other is kind of dialing it in when it comes to gun rights, you can likely expect those figures to keep on climbing.

Courts Attacking Second Amendment Right to Legally Acquire Firearms

There’s an interesting – if not devious – trend emerging in some Second Amendment cases. The first step of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Bruen test is to ask whether the conduct at issue is covered by the text of the Second Amendment which protects a pre-existing “right to keep and bear arms.”  Some lower courts in purporting to apply the Bruen test are upholding gun control laws by holding that you do not have a Second Amendment right to buy a firearm.

That’s intellectually dishonest, to say the least. The ability to freely approach the gun counter to legally purchase a firearm is paramount to exercising the Second Amendment rights to keep and bear arms. There is no “keeping” of firearms if there is no legal right to lawfully acquire those same firearms. The ramifications of this flawed legal reasoning are self-evident. The government could simply ban the buying (and selling) of firearms and therefore eviscerate the Second Amendment all without infringing upon the right.

Right to Buy

The most recent example comes from New Mexico, where a federal district court judge refused to preliminarily enjoin the state’s seven-day waiting period for purchasing a firearm. There were several serious concerns with this decision, including the judge’s determination that the lengthy waiting period doesn’t constrain the rights to keep and bear arms. The judge contended that the waiting period only minimally burdens the “ancillary right to acquire firearms.”

That might come as news to an individual facing imminent threat to their safety or even their life. A woman who is the victim of domestic violence who considers purchasing a firearm to protect herself and her family could argue that the state’s seven-day waiting period is a seven-day ban on her ability to lawfully keep and bear arms when she knows there’s a threat to her life.

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Court Hands SAF, FPC Another 2A Victory for Maryland Citizens

A federal court in Maryland has handed a victory to the Second Amendment Foundation (SAF) and its partners in a challenge of the state law restricting carry in certain locations. The court declared three provisions in the statute to be unconstitutional. The case is known as Novotny v. Moore.

Chief U.S. District Judge George L. Russell III for the District of Maryland, a Barack Obama appointee, issued the 13-page ruling and a separate order granting summary judgment enjoining the state from enforcing provisions in the law which restrict the carrying of firearms in: (1) locations selling alcohol for onsite-consumption, (2) private buildings or property without the owner’s consent, and (3) within 1,000 feet of a public demonstration.

“We are pleased that the court found Maryland’s draconian ‘anti-carry’ rule to be unconstitutional,” says SAF Executive Director Adam Kraut. “Such a provision flies in the face of this nation’s history and tradition. Of course, we will examine the court’s opinion and weigh our options for appeal to continue to challenge other provisions we believe are unconstitutional.”

SAF is joined by Maryland Shall Issue, the Firearms Policy Coalition and three private citizens, all of whom possess “wear and carry permits,” including Susan Burke of Reisterstown, Esther Rossberg of Baltimore and Katherine Novotny of Aberdeen, for whom the lawsuit is named. They are represented by attorneys David H. Thompson and Peter A. Patterson at Cooper & Kirk in Washington, D.C., Mark W. Pennak at Maryland Shall Issue in Baltimore and Matthew Larosiere from Lake Worth, Fla. The case was consolidated with a similar case known as Kipke v. Moore.

“We’re delighted by the court’s decision,” said SAF founder and Executive Vice President Alan M. Gottlieb. “This is just one more step in SAF’s ongoing effort to win firearms freedom, one lawsuit at a time.”

Kansas church’s attendance doubles after ‘blessing’ congregation with firearms
4 guns, including AR-15, raffled off to members in June/July

LENEXA, Kan. — A few weeks ago, a Facebook post from a Kansas City-area church caught my eye. And judging by the reaction to the post, it caught a lot of yours, too.

River Church Kansas City meets at the corner of 79th and Quivira in Lenexa. For Father’s Day, the church gave an AR-15 rifle to one of its members.

The church posted photos of the gun and the raffle winner online, and thousands of people reacted.

Then, to celebrate the Fourth of July, church leaders gave away three more guns.

I sat down with the pastor to hear how he thinks guns and church go together.

‘A gun is a blessing’

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KSHB 41
River Church had fewer than 100 members when it gave away the first gun in June, but the Facebook post garnered almost 2,500 comments and close to 2,000 shares.

The idea came from the church’s young pastor, Christopher Zehner.

“I was thinking about Father’s Day because we’ve got a lot of men in the church, they like to shoot guns,” Zehner told me when I sat with him in his church’s auditorium. “I thought, ‘Let’s give away a gun to the church and let some of the men get involved, and let’s make it a big, fun event.’”

But I had the same question as many Facebook commenters — how is a gun a blessing?

“A gun is a blessing because here in America, we have what’s called the Second Amendment, and we’re free Americans,” Zehner told me. “We have the right to bear arms.”

“Why make it such a focal point of intersection between proud American, Constitution supporting and teaching Jesus Christ?” I asked.

“We make that connection because Christ gives us freedom, and so, as Christ has given us freedom on the inside, Americans are free as well, so it correlates,” Zehner said. “We love this nation because God is the one that authored it.”

Giveaway reaction

The reaction on Facebook was overwhelmingly negative.

Comments included:

  • “Nothing says faith over fear, like worshipping firearms.”
  • “A church that upholds the constitution of the USA. Just like Jesus intended.”
  • “People are leaving the church like never before, and you all wonder why.”

Zehner didn’t read all the comments, but he got the gist.
“A gun in itself is not bad,” said Zehner, who is a gun owner. “It’s the person behind the gun that has a bad heart is what’s bad. I wanted people to know that there’s still a young generation like myself that still stands for what this country was founded on.”

The strong Facebook reaction was part of the reason Zehner and other church leaders decided to do it again.

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Harris Wanted to Use Illegal Registry to Harass Gun Owners and Confiscate Firearms.

Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris once threatened to use databases of gun owners to send police to their homes to confiscate firearms.

Ms. Harris described her gun control stance in August 2019 at a Democratic presidential primary forum that took place shortly after two deadly mass shootings in California and Texas.

She said she was “prepared to take executive action” to implement comprehensive background checks, crack down on gun dealers and ban the import of so-called assault weapons.

Ms. Harris said she knew how to enforce tough gun laws because as California attorney general she allowed police to “knock on the doors of people” on a state list of prohibited gun owners and people deemed a danger to themselves and others.

“We sent law enforcement out to take those guns because we have to deal with this on all levels.”

— Kerry Pickett in Harris backed using ‘lists’ of gun owners to send police door-to-door to seize firearms

Note to NRA: This Isn’t How You Get That ‘Homecoming’ You Want

A couple of weeks ago, the NRA’s Doug Hamlin called for a “homecoming.” He wanted gun rights advocates to return to the new and improved NRA. Wayne LaPierre is out and things are returning to normal there.

I get where he’s coming from and while I believe that if the NRA disappeared tomorrow, someone would step in to fill the void, the truth of the matter is that it’ll take longer for that to happen than I’d like and during that time, our right to keep and bear arms could be severely damaged. So we need something that void now and rebuilding the NRA is probably much faster than hoping someone else steps in quickly.

I want Hamlin to get that homecoming.

However, if that’s the goal, this isn’t exactly a winning strategy.

We love our guns here in the Great Land. Alaska is in the top five states with the highest per-capita gun ownership; as I’m fond of pointing out, up here in the valley, even the hippies have guns, and know how to use them. Most of us aren’t overly concerned about human predators, although that can happen; most Alaskans keep guns to put food on the table and to occasionally fend off a big hairy beast.

But we also know that the Second Amendment has nothing to do with hunting or fending off big toothy critters. Therefore it comes as something of a surprise to see the National Rifle Association endorsing Alaska’s Democrat at-large Representative Mary Peltola for reelection. (Full disclosure: My wife and I are both Life Members of the NRA and have been since the mid-90s.)

Peltola is Alaska’s sole representative and an advocate for the Second Amendment. On her campaign website, she said she owns 176 long guns and dares “someone to tread on Alaskan freedoms.”

In a statement to The Hill, she said she campaigned in 2022 on a “pro-freedom platform” and continues that to this day.

“Guns are an integral part of Alaska’s culture and our subsistence lifestyles,” Peltola said. “Alaskan gun [owners] are the strongest proponents for responsible gun ownership. We pass down our knowledge and skills to our children.”

Peltola argued that the endorsement may help the country understand Alaskan culture and see “the importance of the Second Amendment in communities.”

Except, that’s not what Mary said only a couple of years ago. From the Great Land, Must Read Alaska’s Suzanne Downing had this to say:

Just two years ago, the NRA rated Peltola with a “D.” Now, an endorsement? What has changed? Even the Gun Owners of America has rated Peltola with an “F.”
Peltola wants gun control measures, such as universal background checks, waiting periods, and gun storage laws.

According to The Washington Post in 2022, “During her campaign, Peltola said she wants a national law protecting abortion rights and favors some gun-control measures, such as universal background checks.” (Azi Paybarah, “Who Is Mary Peltola, The First Alaska Native In Congress?”)

On a questionnaire for the Anchorage Daily News, Peltola supported universal background checks and waiting periods for gun purchases.

Well, this is awkward.

Had the NRA not graded her a “D” just a couple of years earlier, it would be easy to say they were unaware of her anti-gun tendencies. Instead, they clearly knew she wasn’t exactly a champion of the right to keep and bear arms. Someone at the organization did, and one would assume that if nothing else, records were kept.

And yet, here we are.

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Somebody got an earful.

Defense secretary abruptly revokes plea deal with alleged 9/11 mastermind KSM, co-conspirators

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin abruptly revoked a plea deal for the alleged mastermind of the September 11, 2001, terror attacks and his co-conspirators, and he relieved the overseer in charge after years of effort to reach an agreement to bring the cases to a close.

In a surprise memo quietly released Friday night, Austin said the responsibility for such a significant decision “should rest with me.” Only two days earlier, the Pentagon announced that it had reached a plea deal with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, more commonly known as KSM, and two other defendants – Walid Bin ‘Attash, and Hawsawi – accused of plotting the attacks.

The memo, addressed to Susan Escallier, the convening authority for military commissions who runs the military courts at Guantanamo Bay, said the defense secretary would immediately withdraw her authority in the cases and “reserve such authority to (himself).”

Austin said that he was withdrawing from the three pre-trial agreements, which had taken the death penalty off the table for the three men.

Prosecutors in the case had been discussing the possibility of a plea deal for more than two years, which would have avoided a lengthy trial complicated by questions over the admissibility of evidence obtained during torture.

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Courts Attacking Second Amendment Right to Legally Acquire Firearms

There’s an interesting – if not devious – trend emerging in some Second Amendment cases. The first step of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Bruen test is to ask whether the conduct at issue is covered by the text of the Second Amendment which protects a pre-existing “right to keep and bear arms.”  Some lower courts in purporting to apply the Bruen test are upholding gun control laws by holding that you do not have a Second Amendment right to buy a firearm.

That’s intellectually dishonest, to say the least. The ability to freely approach the gun counter to legally purchase a firearm is paramount to exercising the Second Amendment rights to keep and bear arms. There is no “keeping” of firearms if there is no legal right to lawfully acquire those same firearms. The ramifications of this flawed legal reasoning are self-evident. The government could simply ban the buying (and selling) of firearms and therefore eviscerate the Second Amendment all without infringing upon the right.

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BLUF
If you can give an innocent explanation for the mountain of evidence that this was allowed to happen, I really want to hear it, because a plot to get Trump killed is the worst-case scenario. I really don’t want to believe it.

Right now I believe it. Please prove me wrong.

Director Rowe Personally Crippled Trump’s Secret Service Team

The tap dancing, lies, and coverup of the Trump assassination attempt by the Secret Service, FBI, and now the mainstream media is so far beyond bureaucratic ass-covering that it’s hard to conclude that the events in Butler were not desired.

I still maintain that it is unlikely in the extreme that anybody inside the government recruited Crooks to take his shots at Trump because it seems so implausible that any sane person would recruit an untrained kid to do the deed, but it is now clear to me that the top levels of the Secret Service and Homeland Security wanted Trump in danger.

For weeks, I wanted to believe that massive incompetence led to the events in Butler. I really did because the alternative didn’t bear thinking of. I thought the lawfare campaign was banana republic stuff, but assassination? That is Putin-level evil.

But consider the facts: the security “breakdowns” were so massive and implausible when combined that any large police force could have done a better job than the most elite protection unit in the world. The shooter was identified, tracked, photographed, filmed on the roof, the Secret Service was warned multiple times, the shooter was in the line of sight of the snipers, and Trump was trotted out onto the stage and kept there as the shooter was lining up his shot in full view of the Secret Service snipers.

None of that is disputable.

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Now We Know Exactly How Israel Assassinated Hamas Chief, and I’m Laughing Inappropriately

Sometimes you have to go with your gut instincts, and I wish I’d stuck with mine yesterday.

Wednesday morning it was my happy duty to report on the assassination of Hamas political chief Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran, Iran, the night before. “My first thought was that a Mossad assassination team had snuck in, done some dirty work that needed doing, and then snuck back out,” is what my gut assured me had happened. But then reports came in that Haniyeh had been killed in a precision airstrike. But no.

“Never trust first reports.” I’m going to write that on a blackboard 100 times later today — and not for the first time, either.

If you weren’t familiar with Haniyeh or missed yesterday’s column, he was usually presented as the “moderate” face of Hamas because our press seems to be largely made up of willing dupes and terrorist sympathizers. They would never put it that way, of course. In their minds, they’re just on the side of “the oppressed.” In Haniyeh’s case, he was oppressed to the tune of an estimated three billion dollars he’d skimmed off of Western relief funds for the Arabs of Gaza.

Haniyeh has been on the State Department’s Specially Designated Global Terrorists list since 2018 for his “close links with Hamas’ military wing” and for his support of “armed struggle, including against civilians.” The State Department report also said, “He has reportedly been involved in terrorist attacks against Israeli citizens.” Even the International Criminal Court, often useless in the extreme, sought an arrest warrant for Haniyeh earlier this year for “war crimes and crimes against humanity including murder, rape, torture and taking hostages,” involving the Hamas Oct. 7 terror invasion of Israel.

So don’t be fooled. Haniyeh finally got it as good as he’d spent his foul existence giving it.

Israel has been going hard after Hamas leadership since Oct. 7 and an airstrike in April — possibly with Haniyeh in mind — killed three of his sons who were then praised as martyrs. Haniyeh is also now being praised as a martyr by his vicious former hosts in Tehran.

“At the appropriate time and place, we will have a suitable response,” Mohammed Baqer Qalibaf, Speaker of the Iranian Parliament said at Haniyeh’s memorial on Wednesday. “It is hard for us that our guest died a martyr’s death. We will avenge the blood of the martyr Haniyeh, who was the voice of the oppressed Palestinian people.”

Now then, about that martyrdom…

Haniyeh had been staying at a “heavily guarded complex” in Tehran, according to the New York Times — an official state guesthouse “run and protected by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.” Nevertheless, Israel was able to

  • Ascertain which room Haniyeh used during his stays there.
  • Slip a remote-detonated bomb under his mattress.
  • Ascertain when Haniyeh was back in Tehran.
  • Make bomb go boom while Haniyeh slept.

This is all according to local sources who spoke to the Times with the usual protection of anonymity.

As martyrdoms go, Haniyeh’s was delightfully ignominious — in no small part due to Israeli operational genius, plus serious failures on the part of Iranian intelligence and the dreaded Revolutionary Guard. I shouldn’t laugh, but I just can’t help it.

Iran has vowed to strike directly at Israel in retaliation, so please consider this a developing story

Homeowner shoots man who attacked him in Mandeville area

A Mandeville [Louisiana] area homeowner shot a man who tried to attack him during an encounter outside his home, authorities said. The man who was shot will be booked on multiple counts when he is released from the hospital.

The St. Tammany Parish Sheriff’s Office said the shooting Monday morning was an act of self-defense by a homeowner who feared for his safety.

The Sheriff’s Office identified the man who was shot as Careyunius Smith of the Slidell area and said he was in stable condition, recovering at a hospital from a gunshot wound to the abdomen Thursday.

Deputies responded to a report of a shooting at a home in the 1200 block of Dove Park Road just after 9 a.m. Monday. The Sheriff’s Office said in a news release that Smith had been trespassing on the property and had attacked one of the homeowners who confronted him.

That homeowner yelled for help and the Sheriff’s Office said another owner of the home came to their aid. The second homeowner tried to get Smith to stop his attack, but he would not. The second homeowner retreated, then returned with a gun, the Sheriff’s Office said.

When Smith charged the homeowner with the gun, he fired, hitting Smith in the abdomen, authorities said.

Both homeowners then called 911. An ambulance transported Smith to the hospital.

When he is released from the hospital, Smith will be booked into the St. Tammany Parish Jail on counts of criminal trespassing, attempted simple kidnapping, simple battery and simple assault, the Sheriff’s Office said.