School president cites study finding guns don’t increase crime to oppose campus carry.

UPDATED – President Elizabeth Chilton’s opposition to campus carry included a study that found no link to increased crime

New Hampshire lawmakers should vote down campus carry because some people might feel less safe, according to a university president.

Editor’s note: The article has been updated to show the legislation is dead.

Legislators were considering House Bill 1793, which would prohibit public universities from regulating guns on campus and establish a commission to study campus carry. The bill officially died last Thursday, however.

According to a student government survey cited by The New Hampshire, a majority of respondents said they would be less likely to attend UNH if campus carry were allowed. In response to the perceived campus climate, the student senate passed a resolution opposing the bill.

President Elizabeth Chilton also took an institutional stance against the law, sending out both a campuswide message and testifying to the state senate judiciary committee. She (pictured) submitted testimony along with Don Birx, president of Keene State College and Plymouth State University, and Mark Collopy, the police chief for UNH.

They said “research from states that have adopted campus carry has found increased fear of crime, lower perceptions of campus safety, and reduced confidence in campus police.”

But neither study found a link to actual crime and campus carry.

Continue reading “”

Eric S. Raymond

Ken Paxton’s victory in Texas has, I think, interesting implications for the national political scene.

Coming on top of a string of similar events, this is very bad news for anybody who wants to think MAGA is declining in influence or Trump is a spent force.

I’m not MAGA – I’m too libertarian and insufficiently populist to fit – so I can analyze this without my wishes interfering with my vision.

There have been a lot of very determined attempts to fragment the MAGA base and attempt to drive a wedge between them and the Trumpster. I see this on X and other social media – lots of indignant blithering about Israel and the Iran war that seems very light on substance and very heavy on attempting to fracture the Republican coalition.

I don’t think it’s working. Tonight is evidence that Trump’s endorsement matters, and the base is not kindly disposed towards any Republican pol who’s perceived as not being on his team.

Perform your strategic calculations accordingly.

Teenager hospitalized in downtown Des Moines shooting

DES MOINES, Iowa —
A teenager is in critical condition after a shooting near the Pappajohn Sculpture Park late Friday night.

Police were called to the area of 14th Street and Grand Avenue shortly after 11 p.m. Friday after multiple 911 callers reported hearing gunfire and said a person was down.

When officers arrived, they found a 17-year-old suffering from gunshot wounds on 14th Street just north of Grand Avenue, according to a news release from the Des Moines Police Department.

Officers began lifesaving measures, including CPR, before Des Moines Fire Department EMS crews arrived and transported the victim to UnityPoint Health – Methodist Medical Center. Police said the male remains hospitalized in critical condition.

Police say the 17-year-old was part of a group of people that committed an armed robbery of a 22-year-old man who was parked in his car. Investigators say the 17-year-old stole a handgun from the 22-year-old. The 22-year-old then grabbed a second handgun and shots were fired back and forth, which is when the 17-year-old was shot.

Officers detained the 22-year-old shooter, but later released him without criminal charges.

Police have not yet released the identities of those involved.

Backstabbing gungrabber Cornyn beaten in the Texas Primary Runoff Election by Paxton. The “Curse of the Gunnies” still works.

In Texas runoff, Ken Paxton beats Sen. John Cornyn for GOP US Senate nomination

PLANO, Texas (AP) — Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton won the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate on Tuesday, easily defeating four-term Sen. John Cornyn in the latest contest where President Donald Trump sought to oust an incumbent he saw as not sufficiently loyal.

Trump endorsed Paxton last week, calling him a “true MAGA warrior.” Paxton’s victory in Tuesday’s runoff makes Cornyn — who was first elected to the Senate in 2002 — the first Republican senator from Texas to lose the party’s nomination for reelection.

Cheers rang through the ballroom at Paxton’s election night party when the race was called, as the stage filled with supporters holding Paxton campaign signs.

Paxton took the stage to chants of “Ken, Ken, Ken,” and he quickly gave credit to Trump.

“When everyone in Washington told him to abandon me and abandon the people of Texas, he didn’t listen,” Paxton said. “President Trump is the leader of our party, and his endorsement is the most powerful force in politics.”

Cornyn’s loss followed primaries this month where Trump successfully backed challengers to Republican incumbents in Louisiana, Kentucky and Indiana, a sign of his enduring influence among primary voters. He has sought to punish Republicans he feels aren’t supportive enough of his agenda.

In stark contrast to Paxton’s celebrations, Cornyn gave a short concession speech tinged with emotion to a room of only reporters.

“Tonight we’ve come up short,” Cornyn said, adding that he’d support Paxton in the general election. “I’ve always supported the Republican ticket and I intend to do so again.”

Cornyn said in 2023 as Trump was running to return to the White House that his time “has passed him by,” a statement that came back to bite him. He also was an early critic of Trump’s plan for a border wall between the U.S. and Mexico — a project he now supports.

Cornyn’s campaign and allied groups spent roughly $109 million on advertising for the March 3 primary and Tuesday’s runoff. He had the backing of Senate GOP leaders who said he would be the stronger general election candidate against Democratic nominee state Rep. James Talarico in November.

Democrats see Talarico as a rare opportunity to win a statewide race in Texas, which isn’t lost on Paxton.

“Without a shadow of a doubt, I will be the Democrats’ number one target in November,” he said in his victory speech, along with an attack on Talarico.

Tuesday’s runoffs also will decide Democratic U.S. House nominees for districts in Dallas and Houston that overwhelmingly support Democrats, and a San Antonio-area seat the party wants to flip.

The primary was long and costly

Cornyn led Paxton in the March primary but failed to win a majority. That was after Cornyn and his supporters waged a monthslong ad campaign, mostly attacking Paxton over ethical and personal questions. The two-term attorney general was acquitted on corruption charges in a 2023 impeachment trial, where allegations of extramarital affairs surfaced. Paxton’s wife filed for divorce last year, citing “biblical grounds.”

The alliance of pro-Cornyn groups continued its attack, outspending Paxton’s campaign and two allied super PACs $16.5 million to $5.9 million since March 3, according to the ad-tracking firm AdImpact.

Trump promised to endorse immediately after the primary but didn’t act until after early voting began last week.

“Ken Paxton has gone through a lot, in many cases, very unfairly, but he is a Fighter, and knows how to win,” Trump wrote in a social media post endorsing him.

David Jacobson, a retired 70-year-old Dallas-area resident, said Trump’s endorsement was a factor in his decision to back Paxton on Tuesday. While Cornyn has for the most part been a strong Trump supporter, Jacobson generally thinks most politicians have remained in office too long.

“Maybe it’s time for a change,” he said after voting near Dallas.

Linda Williams said she voted for Cornyn, calling him “the lesser of two evils.” She thinks Cornyn has a better chance to beat Talarico this fall.

“Because Paxton is a crook,” Williams said after voting in Plano, outside Dallas.

Trump snubbed Cornyn amid retribution campaign

Trump, in his endorsement, poked at Cornyn, saying he “was not supportive of me when times were tough” and that “John was very late in backing me.”

Cornyn said Tuesday on Fox News Radio’s “The Brian Kilmeade Show” that the president’s ire was misplaced. There are “grifters,” he said, “claiming that I am opposed to the president’s agenda, and I think that’s caused some confusion with the president himself. But I’ve been supportive.”

Some GOP strategists have argued that a Paxton nomination would cost millions of dollars more to promote in the fall, when money could be spent defending Republican seats in more competitive states. Democrats need to gain a net of four seats to take the majority. Cornyn had the support of Senate GOP leaders.

Democrats also will choose US House nominees

Newly elected Rep. Christian Menefee defeated veteran Rep. Al Green in Texas’ 18th District, dispatching a longtime House incumbent who was one of Trump’s most outspoken critics. The Republican-led Texas Legislature redrew the district when it approved a new House map last year. The new map led to a runoff between incumbents and marks the end of a dizzying series of elections in the Houston area.

Former Rep. Colin Allred and U.S. Rep. Julie Johnson are competing in the Dallas-area 33rd District. Johnson was elected to the seat in 2024, the year Allred lost his U.S. Senate challenge to Republican Sen. Ted Cruz. Allred was running for Senate again this cycle but dropped his bid and instead is looking to return to the House.

Near San Antonio, Democratic leaders are trying to prevent Maureen Galindo, who has expressed antisemitic views, from winning the party’s runoff with Johnny Garcia. While Texas lawmakers redrew the 35th District to help Republicans, Democrats view it as within reach and don’t want Galindo’s past comments to impede them.

Is ATF’s ‘Sporting Purposes’ Test A Dead Infringement Walking?

One of the oldest regulations that has impacted the ability of law-abiding gun owners to purchase firearms of their choice could be off the books soon.

During an April 29 press conference announcing that three major regulations imposed by the Biden administration were slated to be axed, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said that the Justice Department was also reviewing the “sporting purposes” test regulations initially implemented by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) under the Gun Control Act of 1968. For about 20 years, the regulation was primarily used to restrict handgun imports through the so-called “factoring criteria” outlined on Form 4590 before it was used to target modern semiautomatic rifles that anti-Second Amendment groups labeled as “assault weapons” following a 1989 mass shooting in Stockton, California.

“ATF is studying right now to determine which rifles are generally recognized as particularly suitable for sporting purposes,” Blanche said during the press conference. “That’s going to be an ongoing effort over the next several months and we’re going to see that through.”

In 1989, the ATF ultimately blocked the importation of semiautomatic rifles that bore a superficial resemblance to military-issue assault rifles like the AK-47, FN FAL, Heckler and Koch G3 and the Steyr AUG. Nine years later, in 1998, the agency tightened the ban to include rifles capable of accepting standard magazines used in the military-issue rifles and their semi-automatic-only clones.

Anti-Second Amendment agitators and organizations often use the term “assault weapons” in order to gain support for banning semi-automatic firearms with features that give them a cosmetic similarity to firearms capable of fully-automatic operation. Fully-automatic firearms are already heavily regulated under the National Firearms Act of 1934.

However, that test may not be around for long in light of the Supreme Court’s Second Amendment jurisprudence. In 2008, 40 years after the “sporting purposes” test was used to restrict firearms imports, the high court issued its ruling in Heller v. District of Columbia, in which it declared that self-defense is a lawful purpose for owning a firearm.

“The inherent right of self-defense has been central to the Second Amendment right,” former Associate Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in the majority opinion. “The handgun ban amounts to a prohibition of an entire class of ‘arms’ that is overwhelmingly chosen by American society for that lawful purpose.”

The Supreme Court has since struck down other laws on Second Amendment grounds in McDonald v. Chicago and New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen.

Constitutional attorney Stephen Halbrook, one of the foremost Second Amendment scholars, told the Daily Caller News Foundation that those rulings could be a death knell for the “sporting purposes” test, which was used to ban the importation of modern semiautomatic rifles in the late 1980s and 1990s.

“Limitation of the import of firearms to those the government decides are particularly suitable for or readily adaptable to sporting purposes violates the Second Amendment,” Halbrook said. “In 1989 and again in 1998, the government arbitrarily decided that firearms previously considered sporting were no longer sporting.”

Halbrook also outlined how the ban could be taken down via litigation.

“A licensed importer would apply to ATF to import several specific semiauto rifles and include documents in support demonstrating that they are (per Heller) in common use for lawful purposes, including self-defense,” Halbrook told the DCNF. “After the permit is denied, the importer and persons wishing to purchase the rifles would be plaintiffs in a civil suit claiming denial of Second Amendment rights.”

ATF and the Justice Department did not respond to requests for comment from the DCNF.

Matt Van Swol

Everything about the Left is fake.

Once you understand it, everything make sense.

>Eat the rich… from your mansion

>Save the planet… from your private jet

>Everyone is racist… while you fund the racism.

>Billionaires are evil… unless you fund our candidates.

>Words are violence… but my violence is actually speech

>Wrong pronouns are assault… but burning a courthouse in a protest is mostly peaceful

>We love immigrants… unless you send them to Martha’s Vineyard then we call ICE too

>Democracy is sacred… unless we lose, then it was stolen by Russia, misinformation, or Elon

>Diversity is our strength… unless you’re a Black conservative, then you’re a race traitor who needs to be destroyed

>Tax the wealthy… while your foundation, your trust, and your three LLCs are structured specifically to avoid paying a dime of it

>Capitalism is oppression… posted from an iPhone, on a platform worth a trillion dollars, while wearing merch sold through the your merch store linked in your bio

It’s all fake, it’s all performative and should be endlessly mocked into oblivion.

Give them zero comfort.

The doctrine is always designed so the cost lands on someone else.

The cashier pays for your protest. The suburban parents pays for your sanctuary city. The trade school kid pays for your student loan forgiveness. The taxpayer pays for your foundation’s tax shelter. The working mom pays for your gas stove ban. The factory town pays for your Green New Deal. The girl on the swim team pays for your pronouns. The cop’s widow pays for your bail reform.

It’s a massive, evil, cost-transfer operation that pretends the evil they are pushing, is moral.

…and it’s just evil

Indiana Republicans Snuffed Out Gary’s 26-Year Legal Battle Against Gunmakers

The Indiana Supreme Court ruled that Gary’s historic lawsuit must be dismissed. The decision comes after the state legislature retroactively barred city governments from suing gun manufacturers.

After a tumultuous 26-year journey through Indiana’s court system, the city of Gary’s historic lawsuit against the country’s largest gun manufacturers has come to an anticlimactic close.

On May 21, the Indiana Supreme Court ruled that it would not hear an appeal from Gary, whose lawyers had argued that a state law aimed at ending the lawsuit was unconstitutional. The ruling means the city’s case is effectively over, with no opportunity for appeal.

Anti-Gun Activist Calls for End to U.S. Firearms Production

The gun control lobby has done a pretty good job of masking its true intentions behind a veneer of “gun safety.” Even though advocates like Gabby Giffords have proclaimed at times that the goal is “no more guns,” folks like Brady’s Kris Brown regularly claim that they’re not opposed to gun ownership but are just in favor of a few “reasonable, common sense gun regulations.”

Every now and then, though, an anti-2A activist tells the truth about what they’re really after. I have to thank Californian Seth Sandronsky for his candor at the lefty website Counterpunch, where he says that while he supports gun control efforts, they don’t go far enough.

Gun production is where the focus belongs, economically and politically. There is no market with politics.

… Politically, the pro-war two-party system is the main obstacle to a ban on gun production. It’s a morbid symptom of the system of legalized bribery (campaign donations) from the gun lobby (e.g., National Rifle Association, Gun Owners of America, Second Amendment Foundation). This political economy makes corporations and the wealthy richer via their tight control of the local, state and federal governments.

Now, I’d say that politically, the main obstacle to a ban on gun production is the Constitution, not the two-party system, especially since one party is all in favor of curbing access to guns. And while Comrade Sandronsky is upset with campaign donations from pro-2A groups like NRA, GOA, and SAF, he completely ignores the fact that the gun control lobby has donated even more money to anti-gun Democrats in recent years.

Sandronsky insists that the gun lobby “calls the shots, economically, politically and thus socially, at the workplace and away from it.”  As much as I’d love for that to the case, it’s just not true. If it were, the NFA would be repealed, the Supreme Court would have struck down bans on so-called assault weapons and large capacity magazines years ago, and most “gun-free zones” would be at thing of the past.

The rulers, a demographic minority, have two parties that represent their interests, and it’s time for the majority to have theirs. Demanding a ban on gun production could open the door to that end. The political obstacles are formidable, but what is the alternative if the status quo keeps raising the body count of gun deaths?

It amuses me to no end that Sandronsky believes there’s virtually no difference between Republicans and Democrats when it comes to our Second Amendment rights. It’s true that no Democrat I’m aware of has come out and demanded an end to firearms production in the United States, but that’s because the idea is so nutty that it would do more harm than good to the gun control movement.

Remember a couple of years ago when anti-gun activists tried to hold a huge rally at the state capitol in Denver, Colorado to demand Gov. Jared Polis sign an executive order halting all gun sales in the state? Sarai Rao predicted tens of thousands of women would descend on the statehouse to ““use the power of white women to repeal the Second Amendment.”

Instead, about 1,000 anti-gun activists showed up, but the leadership of virtually every gun control organization stayed far away. Rao’s protest was a complete flop, because as much as the anti-gun leadership of these groups might want to wipe the Constitution clean of the right to keep and bear arms, they understand that it’s not even remotely feasible to do so right now.

What they’re really angling for is a Democrat-controlled Congress that would pack the Supreme Court full of anti-gun justices willing to overturn Heller and declare there is no right to keep and bear arms in the Constitution, merely a collective right to join a militia, and one that’s been mooted with the creation of the National Guard more than a century ago. If Democrats are ever successful in that endeavor we might see legislation to ban gun ownership outright, but with huge majorities of Americans expressing their support for the Second Amendment to one degree or another, that would be political poison for Democrats.

Sandronsky reminds me of those nutjobs who excuse away the horrors of collectivism by claiming that “real” Communism has never been tried. Their idealism has crossed over into idiocy, and their utopian vision of the future is cartoonishly simplistic. I’m not worried about Sandronsky’s big idea catching on. What really concerns me is the incrementalist approach of the gun control movement, which is willing to take what it can get at the moment, knowing it will always come back for more.

Watch her face first with the sound off