In a separate opinion, justice Kenneth Lee accused California of misleading residents in smaller counties — where the open-carry ban does not apply — about how they can lawfully carry firearms. “Our constitutional rights,” Lee wrote, “should not hinge on a Where’s Waldo quiz,” The Hill reported.
The two religious kibbutzim near Gaza are Sa'ad and Alumim. Sa'ad did not suffer a single death or kidnapping. Hamas terrorists did not enter Sa'ad even though it was less than a mile from Kfar Aza, where Hamas killed 54 civilians and kidnapped 20 others. Twenty-six IDF soldiers were killed trying to liberate Kfar Aza.
In Alumim, the town's armed security prevented Hamas from killing or kidnapping any Israelis. Hamas then targeted the Thai workers in the fields, killing 22 of them and kidnapping four. It is reasonable to assume that Sa'ad had armed security similar to Alumim, and thus, Hamas decided not to attack. //
In conclusion, gun laws that allow for personal gun ownership with fewer restrictions certainly help residents protect their families and homes from an attack. However, if the residents do not believe in purchasing firearms, then those laws are meaningless. Thus, even if Israel had allowed all of its civilians to purchase and carry guns without a permit, it is unlikely that it would have prevented the atrocities of October 7 due to the demographics that Hamas targeted that day. In short, many politically conservative Israelis hope their leftist counterparts wake up one day and understand the need to protect themselves without relying on the IDF or the police. Even after October 7, it remains to be seen whether that will be the case.
At the heart of the issue, at least in the case itself, is that Montana's permitless carry law basically says that everyone who isn't expressly forbidden from carrying a gun is considered licensed, and the federal law says people with licenses can carry in the buffer area around a school. The Biden administration argued that no, the licensing had to be explicit--something the law doesn't seem to actually state, for the record--and so he was in violation of federal law.
Metcalf's defense is that he literally had no reason to believe any such thing, which is fair.
However, a bigger issue is the existence of this area outside of the school grounds themselves.
See, the federal law doesn't account for permitless carry as most states have it, nor does it account for things like reciprocity. You have to be licensed in that state in order to just walk past a school on the sidewalk, which is a problem.
This is something most people are going to be unaware of when traveling, for one thing, just as they're not going to be aware of where all the schools in a given city might be. Just following Google Maps could land you a felony charge, simply because Google didn't know you needed to be so many feet away from a school because you're lawfully carrying a firearm.
It's ridiculous. //
California Curmudgeon
7 hours ago
Wasn’t he also within his own yard when he was arrested? Living within 1000 feet of a school should not override your rights.
Rooftop Koreans: An example advocating for the importance of citizen ownership of firearms
Rooftop Koreans or Roof Koreans refer to the Korean American business owners and residents who armed themselves and took to the rooftops of local businesses to defend themselves during the 1992 Los Angeles riots.
If the bill survives in the Senate and the provision isn't removed through reconciliation between the versions passed by each chamber, firearm suppressors, commonly referred to as "silencers," would be deregulated, and the $200 federal excise tax would be scrapped.
Removing suppressors from the requirements under the National Firearms Act would be a significant win for gun rights and hearing protection advocates.
Second Amendment advocates argue that suppressors are designed to protect hearing, not silence gunshots.
A castle doctrine is a self-defense law that states that a person’s home (sometimes also a place of work or vehicle) is a place that grants one protection and immunity from prosecution in certain circumstances to use force or deadly force to defend oneself against an intruder. There is no duty to retreat from the situation in one’s home (or workplace or vehicle if applicable) before using force, but there may be a duty to retreat in a public place.
The United States has two different self-defense laws. The “Stand Your Ground” Law states that there is no duty to retreat from the situation before using deadly force and is not limited to one’s home, place of work, or vehicle. The “Duty to Retreat” Law states that one cannot harm another in self-defense when it is possible to retreat from a threatening situation to a place of safety. In all duty-to-retreat states, the duty to retreat does not apply when the defender is in their own home. States may have both a Castle Doctrine and a Stand Your Ground variation, such as Iowa.
An Oklahoma law now makes it legally clear you can point or intimidate an individual with a weapon if you are defending your home, private property, or business.
Governor Kevin Stitt signed House Bill 2818 on Thursday, which went into effect immediately. Oklahoma already has “stand your ground” laws when it comes to protecting your life, but language in the bill now expands to your property as well. //
Every year, armed citizens prevent crimes and shootings, sometimes even by simply brandishing their weapons. Several studies have shown that armed citizens actually have a better record of resolution in shooting incidents than police officers, and in every state that keeps records, armed citizens have a lower rate of "bad" shoots or injuries in shooting events than police officers. Not to mention that self-defense is a basic, natural right, and firearms are the most effective way to defend oneself.
As of this writing, there are 45 states that have some form or another of "Castle Doctrine" laws, and 18 "Stand Your Ground states", with a fair amount (obviously) of overlap. Twenty-nine states are now "Constitutional Carry" states, in which citizens may carry, concealed, any firearm they may legally own.
The Trump administration's Justice Department, as part of the settlement of a lawsuit by the National Association for Gun Rights, is reversing a policy from the first Trump administration. The new policy will allow the sale of forced-reset trigger devices. These devices, while allowing a rifle or handgun to fire rapidly, do not alter the actual operation of the gun in any way; it still requires one actuation of the trigger to fire one and only one round.
And, as we might expect, the legacy media doesn't report this accurately. //
The Trump administration has not legalized machine guns, and we must note, actual machine guns are still legal for law-abiding citizens to own, if they are willing to invest the considerable costs and leap through a few government hoops that have been in place since 1934.
These devices do not alter the operation of a weapon. Any semi-auto rifle or handgun with one of these attached functions, as it was designed: One shot per trigger pull.
Honestly, this is pretty much the definition of futile. Look at how Mayor Adams worded this, and it comes out looking even worse than a 911 call. You can hit the button "immediately," and I'll concede it has the advantage of not having to visibly pick up a phone. Like a silent alarm button, it can presumably be placed somewhere where it can be activated surreptitiously. But when it's activated, if you've gone through the correct implied process to give the police access to your store cameras - and if you have store cameras - then you get to wait for officers to bring up the camera feed on a monitor, to take a look at what's going on, and then to decide what (if any) response is warranted.
I've got a better idea, Mayor Adams: Stop making it virtually impossible for the law-abiding residents of New York City to arm themselves for their own protection and the protection of their property. Make being a robber or looter a dangerous business. An armed man can face down a thug; an unarmed man can only be a victim. At least give them a chance to resist; right now, they have none, and this panic button boondoggle just drips impotence. No thug will be afraid of being caught by a panic button. //
One of my personal heroes, Colonel Jeff Cooper, once famously said:
If violent crime is to be curbed, it is only the intended victim who can do it. The felon does not fear the police, and he fears neither judge nor jury. Therefore what he must be taught to fear is his victim.
Breaking911 @Breaking911
·
NEW: After latest mass shooting, Pres. Trump is asked if he would support any new gun control legislation
"The gun doesn't do the shooting, the people do," Trump said. "I have an obligation to protect the Second Amendment."
5:47 PM · Apr 17, 2025 //
SESummers
13 hours ago
A better answer: "Yes, the gun control laws in this country need to change. 'Gun Free Zones' need to be made illegal, and constitutional carry implemented nationwide. That way, these crazy leftist monsters doing most of these mass shootings will get their birth certificates revoked before they can pull the trigger a second time, long before the cops would get there."
Dr. John R. Lott, Jr. from the Crime Prevention Research Center and Dr. Carlisle E. Moody, Professor of Economics, Emeritus from College of William and Mary, aggregated the data. Their paper, “Do Armed Civilians Stop Active Shooters More Effectively Than Uniformed Police?” was released on April 3. //
“The first takeaway is, assuming our count is complete, that armed citizens have stopped more active shooter incidents than the police have, although the difference is not significantly different from zero,” Lott and Moody noted. “Also, armed citizens do not appear to interfere with the police or blunder so badly as to get their weapon taken away by the shooter or kill the wrong person.” //
This study by Lott and Moody has uncovered several important developments. Holistically, they found that a civilian response is more effective than uniformed police officers when it comes to stopping mass shooting events. That being said, the pair is quick to point out that the “result isn’t a criticism of law enforcement, it simply reflects the tactical realities they face.” They cite the high visibility of uniformed officers making them more of a target.
https://download.ssrn.com/2025/4/4/5205768.pdf.
Larry Arnold
19 hours ago
“The first takeaway is, assuming our count is complete, that armed citizens have stopped more active shooter incidents than the police have, although the difference is not significantly different from zero,”
Unless the study corrected for anti-gun laws, given that most mass shootings happen in "Gun-Free Zones" where civilians are prohibited from being armed, the finding is significant. Civilians are stopping as many mass shootings in the small subset of places where they are allowed to carry as the police are everywhere. //
SecondOpinionz Frontierjeanne
11 hours ago
A shooter is ready to attack the prey or the uniformed 'enemy'.
A shooter falls apart (psychologically) when the prey defend themselves.
In George Orwell’s prescient novel, 1984, the slogan of the Party is
Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.
The idea is both simple and profound. By eradicating and reinventing history, it is possible to completely reframe reality for future generations. This is routinely done by leftwing academics searching for penumbras and emanations of the US Constitution. //
Salon runs one of these epic falsehoods titled Sorry, NRA: The U.S. was actually founded on gun control. //
This is simply nutbaggery. Madison’s draft amendment is only intended to protect Quakers and Mennonites from being compelled to provide military service. It’s pretty simple.
Ed-squared also turn the logic of the Second Amendment upon its head. If the Founders had, indeed, harbored fear of an armed populace then they went to great lengths to hide it. Take a look at the militia laws extant in the colonies at the signing of the Constitution.
Connecticut required every male over sixteen to keep a musket, powder and shot.
Virginia declared that all free men were required to possess a musket, four pounds of lead and one pound of powder. If a free man was not financially able to afford a weapon, the county had to provide one.
New York dictated a fine of five shillings to any male, sixteen to sixty, who could not arm himself.
Similar statutes are in all colonies. The clear intent of these laws is not that they link firearms ownership to militia membership, rather they are aimed at people who don’t have firearms in order to ensure the colony has a militia. Think of these laws in the same way that you’s think of laws requiring kids to be immunized before they can go to school. The laws aren’t aimed at people who voluntarily immunize and the purpose isn’t to further public education. Rather mandatory immunizations are on the books as a way of coercing people who would not immunize voluntarily. //
A free and an independent people are a direct threat to the progressive experiment. The only way they will achieve that goal is to lie and lie relentlessly and shamelessly until they control the past. We can’t allow that to happen.
On Thursday, Gov. Jared Polis signed a law that bans the production and most sales of semi-automatic firearms with detachable magazines. That means the gun control measure not only covers semi-automatic rifles like the AR-15 (which would be bad enough on its own) but also makes essentially all modern-day handguns illegal as well. //
To say this is blatantly unconstitutional is an understatement. The Supreme Court ruled in District of Columbia vs. Heller that firearms in common use are protected under the Second Amendment for "traditionally lawful purposes." That includes self-defense. Semi-automatic handguns and rifles with detachable magazines are the most commonly used guns in the United States. It's not even a question that this gun control law runs afoul of Supreme Court precedent. That means that Polis signed something that he has to know is illegal, making this move all the more insidious.
The stakes here could not be higher. If Colorado gets away with this, you can kiss the Second Amendment goodbye. If a state gets away with largely banning semi-automatic handguns, it can get away with banning any type of firearm. This is the most radical gun control legislation to ever be signed, and it must be fiercely opposed. //
FortCourage
2 hours ago edited
This would be a perfect case for AG Bondi’s DOJ to show us they’re serious about the 2nd Amendment. File a federal lawsuit against the State of Colorado for violating of the 2nd Amendment. And push it up the chain until it gets to SCOTUS.
On Wednesday, the Supreme Court handed down its long-awaited ruling in Bondi v. Vanderstok, upholding the Biden administration’s 2022 rule that allows the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) to regulate so-called “ghost guns.” But while headlines may frame this as a Second Amendment loss, that’s not the real story here.
The real story is this: the administrative state just scored another narrow, but important, win—and once again, it did so not through an act of Congress, but through bureaucratic interpretation.
Let’s walk through what actually happened. //
This case was a challenge to the ATF’s rule under the Administrative Procedure Act (APA)—a law meant to prevent executive agencies from exceeding their statutory authority. //
This may sound reasonable on paper—especially given concerns over untraceable firearms—but it opens the door to something much more troubling: the broadening of executive power through regulation rather than legislation.
Congress never passed a law banning or regulating ghost guns. Instead, the ATF reinterpreted existing law to give itself that authority. And the Supreme Court just signed off on that approach.
That’s the real concern here. Not the regulation itself, but the process. //
In a blistering dissent, Justice Clarence Thomas warned that the Court was effectively rewriting the statute to allow the executive branch to regulate products Congress never intended to regulate. He pointed out that the Gun Control Act only allows the ATF to regulate certain gun parts, not any part or unfinished frame that might one day become part of a gun.
He also noted that the logic behind the majority’s ruling could eventually be used to justify classifying AR-15 receivers as “machineguns” under the National Firearms Act—an outcome that would have massive legal implications for millions of gun owners nationwide.
More than a dozen law enforcement agencies have stopped reselling their used guns or pledged to reconsider the practice after an investigation by The Trace, CBS News, and Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting.
The investigation, published last year, revealed that more than 52,000 former police guns had resurfaced in robberies, domestic violence incidents, homicides, and other crimes between 2006 and 2022. Many of those guns found their way into civilian hands after agencies traded them to retailers for discounts on new equipment or resold them to their own officers. //
Let's understand that more than 52,000 incidents sounds like a lot, but when you look at it over that timeframe, you're looking at roughly 3,200 firearms per year--and this is assuming these are actually crime guns, because departments trace a lot of guns that aren't used in crimes.
When you think of the fact that each year there are nearly 20,000 murders involving a firearm, 222,000 or so armed robberies, 76,000 non-fatal shootings, and so many more cases where a shot isn't fired but some other crime is committed with a firearm, you can see that we're looking at hundreds of thousands of incidents annually.
Those don't come close to touching the number of defensive gun uses, of course, but that's not what this is about. This is about that out of more than 300,000 incidents--and we don't really know how many more than that--incidents, roughly 3,200 involved a firearm that previously belonged to law enforcement. That's about 1 percent at most.
You’d never know it from watching television, but civilians stop more active shooters than police and do so with fewer mistakes, according to new research from the Crime Prevention Research Center, where I serve as president. In non-gun-free zones, where civilians are legally able to carry guns, concealed carry permit holders stopped 51.5 percent of active shootings, compared to 44.6 percent stopped by police, CPRC found in a deep dive into active shooter scenarios between 2014 and 2023.
Not only do permit holders succeed in stopping active shooters at a higher rate, but law enforcement officers face significantly greater risks when intervening. Our research found police were nearly six times more likely to be killed and 17 percent more likely to be wounded than armed civilians.
Those numbers paint a fuller picture than the FBI’s crime statistics, which fail to include many of the defensive gun uses my organization has cataloged. But the problem with the FBI’s crime statistics isn’t just the errors in their reported data — they also fail to address useful questions, like how concealed handgun permit holders compare to law enforcement. Kash Patel and Dan Bongino face a major challenge in reforming how the data is collected and reported at the FBI. //
These findings highlight a reality that is often ignored: responsible gun owners save lives. Concealed handgun permit holders aren’t reckless vigilantes, but they are law-abiding citizens who step up in moments of crisis when seconds matter and police are minutes away.
I’d like to add that obstacles making silencer ownership difficult and more arduous are also an assault on the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). //
cite case studies demonstrating that tinnitus has been found to increase the risk of suicide as it causes emotional stress that can be extreme, bringing on anxiety, depression, or sleep disorders.
Every year, I would get some ATF agent with an IQ barely equivalent to his shoe size to grin as if about to profoundly put me in my place before saying, “Well, you don’t have to shoot guns,” to which I would always respond, “Neither does anyone need to be able to dine in at every restaurant in the city, but they still need to provide ramps and wheelchair access.” //
“Suppressors are a vital tool for responsible gun owners that protect hearing, enhance safety, and reduce firearm noise—but thanks to Hollywood and federal overreach, they’ve been unfairly vilified… Law-abiding Americans shouldn’t have to endure months of red tape and pay an additional tax just to access a safety accessory. The SHUSH Act puts an end to this unnecessary bureaucratic red tape, eliminates the federal tax, and prevents state overreach by treating suppressors like any other firearm accessory,” says Congressman Cloud. //
First, even if it could make the shot itself perfectly silent, most ammunition is supersonic. It's going to break the sound barrier as it flies through the air. Sonic booms are a real thing, folks, and you can't just make that go away in something that fast with no throttle control. Subsonic ammo does exist, of course, but that means giving up power in many cases unless you use some particular rounds. Most of them, however, aren't subsonic as designed. //
But as a safety device, it works. It works well.
It reduces the sound of the shot enough that you're not going to have quite as much issue. In many cases, you still need hearing protection, but not universally so. Even when you do need it, though, the sound is still lessened to such a degree that others in the general area of your range or your property won't have their own peace and quiet disturbed. //
Pat Hines
2 days ago
It's bill number H.R. 850.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/850/text
Data from PEW Research shows that rifles of all kinds–including those Democrats label “assault weapons”–accounted for only four percent of U.S. gun murders in 2023.
PEW gathered data via FBI and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports, which showed there were 17,927 gun murders in the United States in 2023. Of those murders, 13,529, or 53 percent, were committed with handguns.
Four percent of the U.S. gun murders were committed with rifles and one percent were committed with shotguns. //
knives are used twice as often to kill as rifles in 2021 and 3.5 times more in 2020. //
These kinds of weapons aren't the threat many like to claim. They're not even essential for mass killers to rack up high body counts, as the Virginia Tech killing amply demonstrates.
But they are useful for enabling a population to fight back against a tyrannical government or a foreign invader, which is the whole point of the Second Amendment in the first place.
The dispute originated in Mexico's suing seven major U.S. gun makers and one gun wholesaler for billions of dollars in damages caused by the gun violence in Mexico's drug trade. Mexico is also demanding changes in the way guns are sold in the United States so Mexican narcotrafficantes can't acquire them. None of this is to say that Mexico doesn't have a gun violence, or more accurately, a rule-of-law problem. Mexico has one gun store but has a firearm homicide rate of 16.87 per 100,000. The US has nearly 78,000 licensed gun sellers and a firearm homicide rate of 5.9 per 100,000. So the problem isn't access to guns. //
The case was very significant for two reasons. It is the first major test of the 2005 Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act that largely indemnifies gun manufacturers and resellers from lawsuits as long as they follow applicable laws and regulations. If the Supreme Court doesn't uphold the immunity claims in this case, American gun rights will disappear because manufacturers and firearms dealers will be sued into oblivion. The second reason the case is important is that Mexico's theory could be applied to any product that has the potential to be misused. Liquor distillers could be held liable for drunk-driving deaths.
Loki
4 hours ago edited
I learned these from a self-defense legal protection group (Right to Bear):
- Call 911, do not admit to anything, when the operator tells you to hold the line, hang up and do not answer: you are being recorded.
- Immediately call your lawyer
- Do not answer any questions without a lawyer present
Example: I am a victim of a home invasion, the intruder has been subdued - do NOT say anything about your actions.
The money quote is: You have a right to remain silent, but very few are capable of doing so.