It is interesting to hear certain kinds of people insist that the citizen cannot fight the government. This would have been news to the men of Lexington and Concord, as well as the Mujahedeen in Afghanistan.
The citizen most certainly can fight the government, and usually wins when he tries.
Organized national armies are useful primarily for fighting against other organized national armies. When they try to fight against the people, they find themselves at a very serious disadvantage.
If you will just look around at the state of the world today, you will see that the guerillero has the upper hand.
Irregulars usually defeat regulars, providing they have the will. Such fighting is horrible to contemplate, but will continue to dominate brute strength.
-Jeff Cooper

What becoming an American taught me about liberty

Growing up in Australia, I lived in what most people would call a “free” society. But it wasn’t until I moved to the United States and embraced the U.S. Constitution that my entire worldview transformed. I realized that back home, freedom was treated as a privilege carefully defined by the government. In America, the Second Amendment taught me a profound truth: we are born free.

Today, as a firearms instructor and the Northeast Regional Director — and former New Hampshire State Director — of Women for Gun Rights, I live by a simple creed proudly stamped on my adopted home state’s license plates: Live Free or Die.

To me, the motto means embracing personal responsibility and never surrendering the agency that belongs to free people. The U.S. Constitution, which is now my Constitution, does not create those rights — it recognizes them and establishes a government whose powers are limited so those rights may endure.

I am now one of millions of American women who choose to live prepared, not scared. Many of us volunteer our time to defend this civil right. Yet for years, well-funded gun control organizations have tried to convince the public — and women in particular — that passing more restrictions is the only way to keep our children and communities safe.

These groups often claim to speak for all women and all families. But those of us working alongside women in our communities know the rhetoric does not match reality.

Now, hard data has finally caught up to what we’ve known all along.

A national survey commissioned by the Crime Prevention Research Center and conducted this year validates what Second Amendment advocates have long argued: the public rejects the gun control premise. When asked what would do the most to reduce violent crime, voters overwhelmingly favored holding criminals accountable over passing new restrictions.

Thirty-one percent of respondents chose enforcing existing laws as the best way to lower crime rates, while more than 30% favored arresting and prosecuting violent and repeat offenders. Only 30% supported passing new firearm-related legislation. Combined, enforcement-focused solutions outperformed new gun-control measures by more than 30 percentage points.

The message from the American people to their legislators is remarkably simple: hold violent criminals accountable, stop treating law-abiding citizens like the problem, and trust ordinary people pursuing their own happiness.

Crucially, the Center’s survey shatters the myth that women universally support disarmament. Substantial numbers of female voters favored enforcing existing laws over passing new restrictions.

Among women, the data highlights a growing trend. Instead of looking to politicians or an unreliable government for a false sense of security, women are increasingly choosing self-reliance. Nationally, concealed carry continues to grow among women, reflecting a profound cultural shift.

According to the survey, 20% of voters report possessing a concealed carry permit, and nearly 30% report carrying a firearm at least occasionally. More importantly, the number of Americans carrying concealed firearms increased by more than 5% in just over a year. Carrying a firearm for protection is no longer exceptional — it has become part of the American mainstream.

In New Hampshire, we understand the value of removing unnecessary obstacles to liberty. We are consistently recognized as one of the safest states in the nation while respecting the right of law-abiding citizens to carry without first asking government permission. A culture that values
So what concerns me in the Live Free or Die state is not death itself, but the slow erosion of personal agency — the quiet cultural shift that teaches us to look first to the government, rather than to ourselves, for our safety, our well-being and ultimately our freedom.

The right to self-defense is not a bureaucratic luxury. It is an inherent human right.

Coming from a country that chose a different path, I can tell you that restrictions do not deter violent offenders. They only disarm the vulnerable. Australia continues to grapple with violence against women and violent home invasions despite some of the world’s strictest firearms laws. While these challenges are not unique to Australia, America remains exceptional in one important respect: it trusts ordinary, law-abiding citizens with access to an equalizing force.

That is true empowerment.

The Center’s survey suggests Americans are waking up to this reality. They don’t want more laws that turn peaceful citizens into criminals. They want safety, accountability and the freedom to protect what they love. They want to live free.

When I first arrived in America, I thought freedom was something carefully defined by the government. Becoming an American taught me something far more profound: we are born free. Liberty is our birthright. The Constitution did not give us that birthright — it recognizes it and establishes a government whose powers are limited so that liberty may endure.

Yet liberty is more than a birthright. It comes with a solemn civic responsibility. As a naturalized American citizen, I swore an oath to honor and defend it. That responsibility belongs to all of us: not only to preserve liberty for ourselves, but to pass it intact to the Americans who will one day inherit it.

Westwood Square shooter was acting in self-defense, HPD says

HATTIESBURG, Miss. (WDAM) – No charges are being filed at this time following an overnight shooting that left one injured. The incident occurred in the Westwood Square shopping complex, near the Walk-On’s Sports Bistreaux parking lot.

Hattiesburg police responded to a report of shots fired around 9:56 p.m. on Tuesday. Officers confirmed the shooting using on-site evidence.

According to HPD, a person suffering from a non-life-threatening gunshot wound arrived at a local hospital shortly after the shooting.

Officers spoke with an individual who remained at the scene, who admitted to firing the shots after being assaulted during an altercation.

HPD said the person stayed on the scene and cooperated with investigators.

At this stage of the investigation, detectives believe that the shooter was acting in self-defense. No charges have been filed, but the investigation remains ongoing.

BLUF
Nearly two decades after recognizing a constitutional right to arms, the Supreme Court is beginning to address lingering questions about its contours. Control-happy politicians probably will not like the answers.

Supreme Court Begins Answering Lingering Questions About Constitutional Constraints on Gun Control

After upholding the Second Amendment rights of drug users and carry permit holders, the justices will address the constitutionality of “assault weapon” bans.

Over the course of 12 days last month, the Supreme Court upheld the gun rights of cannabis consumers, rejected Hawaii’s default rule against firearms on private property open to the public, and agreed to address the constitutionality of “assault weapon” bans. That flurry of Second Amendment activity underlines the point that supposedly sensible gun regulations are not necessarily consistent with the right to arms as it was historically understood.

When Congress enacted the Gun Control Act in 1968, legislators took it for granted that an “unlawful user” of marijuana, depressants, stimulants, or narcotics should not be allowed to own a gun. They reaffirmed that judgment in 1986, changing the wording to encompass unlawful users of “any controlled substance.”

Although the latter law was dubbed the Firearms Owners’ Protection Act, it obviously did not protect gun owners with a taste for politically disfavored intoxicants, or even gun owners who dared to use medications prescribed for friends or relatives. It treated all those people as felons.

That policy, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled on June 18, is unconstitutional unless there is evidence that a particular drug user’s gun possession would pose a danger to himself or others. It rejected the Trump administration’s attempt to prosecute a Texas cannabis consumer who owned a pistol, saying the government may not strip people of their Second Amendment rights simply because they are marijuana users.

The justices reached that conclusion based on “this Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation”—the lodestar of the Court’s Second Amendment jurisprudence. Applying the same test a week later, six justices said Hawaii had violated the Second Amendment by making it illegal for carry-permit holders to bring guns into a private business without the owner’s explicit permission.

As Hawaii presented it, that presumptive gun ban merely aimed to protect preexisting property rights. But as Justice Samuel Alito noted in the majority opinion, Hawaii’s law “departs sharply from the standard common-law rule on access to private property held open to the public.”

Under that rule, “everyone, including those lawfully carrying firearms, may enter unless expressly prohibited from doing so,” Alito wrote. “By contrast, under the new Hawaii law, no one carrying a firearm may enter without the property owner’s express authorization.”

That switch, Alito noted, imposed “severe restrictions on the daily activities” of residents with carry permits. Nor was that effect incidental, since Hawaii was attempting an end run around the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision recognizing a constitutional right to carry handguns in public for self-defense.

Five days after it overturned Hawaii’s law, the Court agreed to hear a pair of cases involving bans on widely owned rifles that politicians tendentiously describe as “assault weapons.” A dozen states, beginning with California in 1989, have enacted such laws, which hinge on arbitrarily prohibited features such as folding stocks, pistol grips, and barrel shrouds.

The rifles targeted by these laws are rarely used by criminals but commonly used by law-abiding Americans, who own more than 30 million of them. The latter point is constitutionally relevant because the Supreme Court has said the Second Amendment applies to “bearable arms” that are “in common use” for “lawful purposes like self-defense.”

The long-simmering question posed by these cases is whether the Second Amendment guarantees “the right to possess AR-15 platform and similar semiautomatic rifles.” If so, other restrictions on the arms Americans are allowed to buy, such as magazine limits and California’s handgun specifications, may be vulnerable to constitutional challenges.

The decided cases also have potentially broad implications. If drug use, by itself, does not justify disarming someone, what about a nonviolent felony conviction? And if Hawaii’s broad restriction on public gun possession was unconstitutional, the far-reaching, location-specific bans imposed by states such as California and New York likewise seem legally dubious.

Nearly two decades after recognizing a constitutional right to arms, the Supreme Court is beginning to address lingering questions about its contours. Control-happy politicians probably will not like the answers.

No Other Constitutional Right Is Policed Like the Second Amendment

The Bill of Rights protects speech, religion, the press, assembly, due process, privacy, and the right to keep and bear arms.

Only one of those rights has an entire federal agency built around regulating, restricting, investigating, and prosecuting the tools necessary to exercise it.

The Second Amendment.

That agency is the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
There is no federal Bureau of Speech.
No federal Bureau of Religion.
No federal Bureau of Press and Assembly.

No federal agency licenses newspapers before they publish, inspects churches for recordkeeping violations, registers printing presses, or forces Americans to pay a tax before exercising a First Amendment right.

But when it comes to the Second Amendment, Washington has built exactly that kind of bureaucracy.

Other Rights Are Abused by Bureaucrats. The Second Amendment Is Policed by Them.  

Federal agencies have abused power against other constitutional rights, too.

The FBI and DOJ have targeted speech, political activity, and religious Americans.

The NSA has raised Fourth Amendment concerns through surveillance.

DHS and TSA have expanded federal search power in the name of security.

The IRS has been accused of politically selective enforcement.

Those abuses are real.

But they are not the same as having an entire agency whose firearms mission is aimed directly at the people, businesses, products, paperwork, and transactions tied to one constitutional right.

The ATF does not merely investigate violent criminals who misuse firearms.

It regulates firearm dealers.
It inspects Federal Firearms Licensees.
It polices paperwork.
It interprets federal gun laws.
It issues rules affecting lawful gun owners.
It decides whether products used by peaceable Americans are legal today and criminal tomorrow.

Other agencies violate constitutional rights when they overreach, but the ATF’s firearms mission is overreach by design.

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What a Coincidence: Another ‘Mentally Ill’ Muslim Goes on a Stabbing Spree in France

This time it was in Clermont-Ferrand, a pleasant, or formerly pleasant, city of around 150,000 people in central France. But it is a story that has played out many, many times before, and likely will many more times before people, after who knows what calamities, finally cast off the ridiculous fantasies of this Age of Absurdity.

Breitbart reported Sunday that “a Sudanese migrant was shot and then arrested by police after allegedly going on a stabbing spree in the French city of Clermont-Ferrand on Sunday, leaving at least three people wounded.”

It seems that this grateful refugee, who is 34 years old, “is alleged to have stabbed a neighbour at around 2:30 pm local time, before going on to attack other pedestrians. When police arrived on the scene, the man reportedly ‘charged at a police officer with his knife.’”

The charge, however, was not successful: “After seeing his colleague come under attack, a fellow officer on the scene shot the alleged knifeman, first in the arm, and then in the abdomen and side as the attacker continued to come towards him.”

This Sudanese migrant’s behavior is entirely in accord with the repeated calls from the Islamic State and al-Qaeda for individual Muslims to mount “lone wolf” attacks against innocent civilians in the West. The Islamic State issued this call back in Sept. 2014:

So O muwahhid, do not let this battle pass you by wherever you may be. You must strike the soldiers, patrons, and troops of the tawaghit. Strike their police, security, and intelligence members, as well as their treacherous agents. Destroy their beds. Embitter their lives for them and busy them with themselves. If you can kill a disbelieving American or European — especially the spiteful and filthy French — or an Australian, or a Canadian, or any other disbeliever from the disbelievers waging war, including the citizens of the countries that entered into a coalition against the Islamic State, then rely upon Allah, and kill him in any manner or way however it may be….If you are not able to find an IED or a bullet, then single out the disbelieving American, Frenchman, or any of their allies. Smash his head with a rock, or slaughter him with a knife, or run him over with your car, or throw him down from a high place, or choke him, or poison him….

So this fellow attacked several of the “spiteful and filthy French” with a knife. He didn’t manage to “slaughter” any of them, but that was not for want of trying.

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They’re still bureaucrap

NYT Sounds The Alarm on the ‘Drastic Retrenchment’ Going On at ATF.

Proponents of the changes [to ATF rules] point out that some of the reversals would return regulations to what they were only a few years ago, before President Joseph R. Biden took office. After a series of deadly mass shootings, Mr. Biden signed into law gun control measures, ending nearly three decades of gridlock over whether and how to regulate firearms.

The divisiveness illustrates the complicated landscape for gun policy.

“With the Biden regulations that we got and put in place, we advanced the ball,” said Kris Brown, the president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, one of the country’s biggest gun control organizations.

But the Trump administration’s approach “takes us back 100 years,” she said. “It’s really decimating A.T.F.’s ability to regulate this industry.”

A White House official said the administration’s policies reflected Mr. Trump’s commitment to ensuring that Americans could exercise their Second Amendment rights, accusing the Biden administration of bypassing Congress and using the regulatory process to restrict gun rights. …

Since his first run for office, Mr. Trump has positioned himself as an ardent supporter of gun rights. In the run-up to the 2024 election, he vowed to be “the best friend gun owners have ever had in the White House.” Days after being inaugurated, he signed an executive order instructing the attorney general to scrutinize what he described as “ongoing infringements of the Second Amendment rights of our citizens.”

— Aishvarya Kavi in Trump Administration Rolls Back Dozens of Gun Regulations

 

Why We Need National Reciprocity, At a Minimum

National reciprocity legislation is now something we know the Trump administration is working on. While it’s not the ideal situation–national constitutional carry would be so much better–it’s far better than the status quo. As it stands, a permit in one state might be recognized in another, or it might not. You have to navigate the insane patchwork of laws, all to exercise a constitutionally protected right.

But if you have a driver’s license in Minnesota, you can drive anywhere in the United States. Your license is accepted everywhere, even though driving is considered a privilege and the right to keep and bear arms is a right.

Yeah, someone try to make that make sense.

Writing at Real Clear Politics, John Lott makes the case for national reciprocity.

Much of the gun-control debate centers on hypothetical risks. With reciprocity, however, we don’t have to speculate. With 21.5 million concealed handgun permit holders in the United States, we already know how they behave. In addition, most Americans already benefit from reciprocity. The average state recognizes permits from 30 other states, allowing permit holders to travel legally with their firearms.

Last year, when House Judiciary Committee passed national reciprocity along party lines, Democrats also opposed legislation that would allow current and retired law enforcement officers with at least ten years of service to carry firearms in facilities open to the public – including schools – while traveling across the country. Given their fear that allowing experienced current or retired law enforcement officers to carry would endanger public safety, it comes as no surprise that they also oppose allowing civilians to carry across state lines.

Congressional opponents of reciprocity warned that permit holders would commit crimes but cited no evidence to support that claim. The facts point in the opposite direction. Concealed handgun permit holders are extraordinarily law-abiding. States revoke their permits for firearm-related violations at rates measured in thousandths – or even ten-thousandths – of one percent. Police officers rarely commit firearm crimes, yet permit holders lose their permits for firearm offenses at only about one-twelfth the rate that police are convicted of firearm related crimes.

This is the typical anti-gun playbook. They treat unlawful gun carriers and permit holders as the exact same, even while pretending they understand the difference.

In their mind, the paranoia they accuse us of takes hold and rather than differentiate between good guys and bad guys, they see us all as bad guys in waiting.. They claim to be able to tell the difference, but this is a case of “deeds not words” applying. Their deeds tell a different story.

Permit holders are the most law-abiding people in the country. That’s been shown by years of data, also. It’s not some flash in the pan, but a trend that dates back a ways, likely to the day the first carry permit was issued.

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Man shot after arguing with, shooting at another man, police say

ATLANTA — A man is recovering in a hospital before being taken to jail for a shooting incident in northwest Atlanta on Friday.

Officers responded to 859 Oak St. NW around 11:20 a.m. after receiving calls about a person shot. When they arrived, they found a 38-year-old Brandon Harper suffering from a gunshot wound and another man at the scene.

The person who shot Harper was quickly detained, according to police, and Harper was taken to a local hospital.

Investigations later determined that there was a verbal dispute between Harper and the man. Police said Harper was the aggressor and fired multiple shots at the detained man.

The uninjured man returned fire in self-defense, striking Harper twice.

Police also determined that Harper is a convicted felon and was wanted on multiple outstanding charges. He was charged in connection with this incident and will be transported to the Fulton County Jail after being discharged from the hospital.

The other man involved, whose identity was not released, will not face any charges.