“The evildoers responsible for my husband’s assassination have no idea what they have done. If you thought that my husband’s mission was powerful before, you have no idea. You have no idea what you have just unleashed across this entire country.” – Erika Kirk

Smith & Wesson Announces Grand Opening of World-Class Training Academy

Smith & Wesson Brands, Inc. (NASDAQ Global Select: SWBI), a leader in firearm manufacturing and design, announces today the grand opening of the new Smith & Wesson Academy.

At Smith & Wesson, our mission extends beyond the production of premium firearms – we are committed to empowering those who carry them. Continuing the esteemed legacies of both the former Smith & Wesson Academy and the Shooting Sports Center in Springfield, MA, which collectively were operational for decades between 1969 to 2017, the newly established Academy serves as a vital resource that reinforces our continued dedication to self-defense training, firearm proficiency, and firearm safety.

Situated on the 236-acre headquarters campus in Maryville, Tennessee, this state-of-the-art facility serves as a premier training destination, featuring pistol and carbine ranges, a multi-purpose flex range, a 300-yard rifle range, and a two-story immersive shoot house. The Academy’s design also incorporates classrooms, a fitness center, and offices that will house a team of world-class experts leading the training programs. Starting this weekend, a registration portal will be available on the Smith & Wesson Academy website for a variety of training courses focused on pistol, carbine, and rifle platforms. These courses will range from introductory skills and safety to advanced techniques.

The Smith & Wesson Academy team will be led by renowned instructor Mark “Coch” Cochiolo. Mark is a retired U.S. Navy Chief Warrant Officer with over three decades of service in Naval Special Warfare. Throughout his distinguished military career, he has operated in a range of elite roles, including special warfare operator, breacher, weapons instructor, training officer, and operational tester. Mark completed four SEAL deployments to the Western Pacific and served eight years with the Navy’s premier counterterrorism unit, where he conducted operations across Eastern Europe and the Middle East. His final assignment placed him in a senior leadership role as Chief Warrant Officer responsible for training and combat systems with Naval Special Warfare Unit Three (NSWU-3). Following his retirement from active duty, Mark transitioned to instruction, applying his operational expertise to train the next generations of Navy SEALs. As a contract instructor for Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL (BUD/S) training, he developed curriculum and trained more than 4,000 SEAL candidates in marksmanship and tactical weapons handling. Recognized for his precision, discipline, and leadership, Mark remains an influential figure in the special operations community.

“My decision to partner with Smith & Wesson stems not only from their strong alignment with my values but also from my personal experience carrying a Smith & Wesson for the past 30 years. Throughout my career, I have worked with a variety of firearm platforms, and I am grateful for the opportunity to leverage that experience in developing effective curriculum at the Academy, helping as many individuals become proficient with their firearms as possible. Smith & Wesson produces dependable, quality firearms – at the Academy, we’ll teach you how to use them,” said Mark “Coch” Cochiolo, Director, Smith & Wesson Academy.

Homeowner shoots, kills intruder in apparent self-defense in Pierce County

PIERCE COUNTY, Wash. — A homeowner shot and killed an intruder early Sunday morning in what appears to be a case of self-defense, according to the Pierce County Sheriff’s Office.

The incident occurred around 1:45 a.m. when the homeowner called 911 to report the shooting.

Deputies arrived at the scene to find a 36-year-old man with a single gunshot wound on the back porch. Despite attempts to save his life, the man was pronounced dead.

Prior to the shooting, the suspect was captured on multiple homeowners’ security cameras walking around various properties in the area.

The 51-year-old homeowner has been cooperative with authorities, and no arrests have been made as the investigation continues.

Detectives and forensic teams are actively working at the scene to gather more information.

Curiosity is the essence of human existence. ‘Who are we? Where are we? Where do we come from? Where are we going?’… I don’t know. I don’t have any answers to those questions. I don’t know what’s over there around the corner. But I want to find out. -Eugene Cernan

Well, I had murderous minded Leftists figured out a long time ago.

Nic Carter

My less online conservative friends have abruptly awakened this week to the reality that their political opponents are not mere sparring partners in a congenial game of democracy but would celebrate their deaths and those of everyone they love.
That’s why “it feels like something is different now.” They have realized the left is playing for keeps and sees them as subhuman monsters. Watching otherwise pleasant leftist friends or family or colleagues celebrating Kirk’s death on main with their real names attached. It’ll change you.

Chris Murphy: School Shootings Aren’t Common Enough for Armed Guards

Whenever there’s a high-profile shooting, such as what happened at Annunciation Catholic Schools, we start hearing about how common these have become, with manufactured numbers that drive the total up, all designed to scare people into supporting gun control.

The answer from our side is armed school staff or, at a minimum, armed guards in schools.

Now, there’s no question about which side of this debate Sen. Chris Murphy falls. He’s a noted gun grabber and he’s always looking for a gun control angle. We all know it.

But it seems that even he knows that he’s been running a line of BS for years.

On Wednesday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “All In,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) stated that he opposed armed guards in schools because he thinks it creates “irrational” fear in children and “you are still more likely in this country to be killed by a falling object than you are in a mass shooting.” But there is an “underlying story about the easy access of guns. And if we just were more careful about who has access to powerful weapons in this country, we would have less need to board up a lot of our public settings.”

Wait, so these are super rare events that we shouldn’t stress to the point of putting armed guards in schools because it’ll instill fear in children–spoiler: school resource officers are common enough that we’d know if it did, and it doesn’t–but we should totally trample our right to keep and bear arms because of something rarer than being killed by a sack of potatos falling out of the sky and killing someone?

Am I tracking this right?

But the doublespeak continued, with Murphy saying, “As much as this has now become an epidemic, you are still more likely in this country to be killed by a falling object than you are in a mass shooting. There [are] far too many mass shootings.”

It’s not an epidemic if it’s rare. The two things contradict one another, at least as the public sees it.

So either it’s an epidemic and we simply have to do something, or you’re more likely to have something fall on you and kill you than to be shot and die in a mass shooting. It’s one or the other.

Let’s not forget that Murphy argues an armed guard in an elementary school is akin to a boarded-up encampment. Yes, he actually said that, too. People in the United States grow up with armed guards and armed police in a lot of places. There’s a cop at the local movie theater every weekend night, for example. No one blinks. No one feels unsafe. Most of the time, he’s telling loud teenagers to shut up or get out, so that’s what people accept is his purpose, even if they know he’s the guy who will respond if bullets start flying.

Murphy is so terrified of guns that even carefully vetted individuals in a position of security can’t be trusted with them. He talks about being a little more careful about who can get “powerful weapons” in this country, but the truth is that his version of careful would be to prohibit literally everyone.

He can’t even see safety in off-duty cops, after all.

But let’s remember that no matter what Murphy says going forward, he knows these are rare. He knows these make scary headlines, but are the exception rather than the rule.

He’s just trying not to let a good crisis go to waste, all so he can destroy your right to keep and bear arms.

The Supreme Court in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette

The very purpose of a Bill of Rights was to withdraw certain subjects from the vicissitudes of political controversy, to place them beyond the reach of majorities and officials, and to establish them as legal principles to be applied by the courts. One’s right to life, liberty, and property, to free speech, a free press, freedom of worship and assembly, and other fundamental rights may not be submitted to vote; they depend on the outcome of no elections.

OMG! Gun Rights Absolutists Are Working to Tear Down the NFA! And They’re Making Progress! OMG!

By Dan Zimmerman

With the political winds blowing in its favor, the GOA began drafting language some time last year to remove suppressors and short-barreled long guns from the NFA. After sharing the proposal with a few industry leaders, they worked with sympathetic Republican lawmakers to wedge it into the budget reconciliation bill – Andrew Clyde on the House side, and Roger Marshall, Mike Crapo and Steve Daines in the Senate.

“We had the language and we had key members of Congress to introduce it,” [Luis] Valdes, the GOA spokesman, said. “We’ve been looking at challenging the NFA since GOA first came into existence 50 years ago. The NFA is clearly unconstitutional.”

The move came at a hospitable time, with Trump urging Congress to use the budget reconciliation process to pass his “big, beautiful” bill, spurring a flurry of hasty lawmaking.

Still, the NFA proposal touched off weeks of high-stakes wrangling. The version passed by the House only removed the tax on suppressors – an easy sell to moderate Republicans, but which the GOA viewed as far too watered-down. The Senate version included a full repeal of silencers and short-barreled long guns from the NFA, only for the Senate parliamentarian, Elizabeth MacDonough, to find that the proposal violated the “Byrd rule” that bars extraneous measures from consideration during budget reconciliation. The GOA responded with a national alert calling to “fire the anti-gun parliamentarian now!”

The final version of the sweeping budget bill left intact the NFA’s registration requirements, which include some extra paperwork and fingerprint submission, but dropped the tax on suppressors, short-barreled rifles and short-barreled shotguns to $0. The changes left machine gun restrictions untouched.

It was a remarkably swift reversal of key provisions of one of America’s bedrock gun laws. But instead of declaring victory, when Trump signed the budget bill into law on 4 July, the GOA immediately filed what it called a “big, beautiful lawsuit” seeking to overturn the NFA restrictions on suppressors and short-barreled long guns entirely.

Within a month, 15 Republican-led states had joined as plaintiffs. On 1 August, the Firearms Policy Coalition, another gun rights group, filed a similar lawsuit, joined by the NRA. What had seemed like an outlandish position only a few months earlier was suddenly becoming the conservative political consensus.

— Roque Planas in Inside the gun absolutists’ bold plot to repeal one of America’s strongest firearms laws