I have pinned this post to the top of my blog. It is to remind people of what many of our opponents want. Alison Aires wants a tyrannical government. They want summary execution for private possession of firearms.
This is why we have a Bill of Rights. This is why I created Boomershoot.
My post Relationship Tragedies Created by Social Expectations resulted in many comments that were not easily answered in a few sentences so created this blog post.
Clarifying questions:
To the best of your knowledge, what sort of women in terms of socio-economic status and attractiveness are into poly, and the same for men? (either citable stats or anecdotal is fine, noted accordingly)How often do poly-interested women want to bang low and mid socioeconomic men or average to ugly men?
On average, to the best of your knowledge, how many kids do the average poly person have?
I have not had much contact with people identifying as poly. My post was about Ethical Non-Monogamy (ENM in the literature and frequently in Internet Discussions). Polyamorous culture is a subset of ENM. I do not know any polyamorous couples well enough to know if they have children or the types of men the women are interested in.
With the broader term of ENM, I have a few data points.
Since in “ENM” “ethical” is stipulated but not defined when for many “ENM” is an oxymoron, for the purposes of this reply I’ll call it “consensual promiscuousness dressed up in polite linguistic attire.”
I probably should have used the phrase Consensual Non-Monogamy (CNM).
Rolf then goes on with what, at best, can be called a reasonable hypothesis that he presents as factual without any good evidence. His assertions are not supported by what little contact I have with this world, what I read, or what AI’s I query on the topic (see below) have to say. These people trend up on the socio-economic scale and but trend egalitarian and trend only a little low in fertility.
Some books I have read on the topic and highly recommend:
The Gilmartin Report includes interviews with the children of swinger couples. One would think that if they were traumatized or otherwise felt their family environment was harmful it would have reported it.
Sex at Dawn looks at evolutionarily close relatives of humans, some primitive human tribes, and even some fairly modern cultures which regard sexual monogamy as abnormal.
Insatiable Wives is mind warping. There is a subculture of swingers where the men encourage their wives to have sex with other men. They don’t necessarily want to have sex with other women and get highly aroused watching, and/or hearing about, their wives having sex with other men. This book is a scholarly look at that subculture.
In real life, one woman I know posed nude for her husband so he could post the pictures of her on reddit. She also reported she and her husband did not have sex more than once a month and then the attempt frequently failed. She also reported he would get excited about posting another nude of her or getting lots of comments from men about the posted pictures. but that excitement did not transfer to interest in sex with her. I suspected he was building up to having his wife have sex with other men. I gave her this book. Not too long after that he lost interest in posting the pictures. Their sex life remains poor. I don’t really get this. Neither does his wife.
This magazine article from 2019 reports exactly what I heard from a woman in the late 1990s who found sex clubs to be her answer:
The problem is not that they are functionally unable to have sex, or to have orgasms. Or frequency. It’s that the sex they’re having isn’t what she wants,” Gotzis told me in a recent phone conversation. And like other straight women he sees, “she’s confused and demoralized by it. She thinks there’s something wrong with her.”
A court actually ruled on this very topic:
Group sex between consenting adults is neither prostitution nor a threat to society, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled on Wednesday, dismissing arguments that the sometimes raucous activities of so-called “swingers” clubs were dangerous.
Speaking of courts… Justice Scalia had something to say about sex parties:
I even take the position that sexual orgies eliminate social tensions and ought to be encouraged.
First hand reports:
I was driving around late one night and turned around in a motel parking lot. These two truck drivers asked me to have coffee with them … it was the first time I ever had sex with two men at the same time. It was like being plugged into an electric circuit — I knew then I could never be in a sexually monogamous relationship again.
started dating new person for first time in like 4 years and i forgot how friggin good sex is in the beginning right after the initial ‘getting to learn bodies’ hump
Aella @Aella_Girl
Posted on X August 23, 2026
Grok has some information on the topic (follow this link for the same text as below with sources):
The short version: visible poly communities look more educated and White than the country as a whole; representative surveys of who has actually done poly or broader ethical non-monogamy look much more ordinary on income and race. There is almost no published data on attractiveness. There is no study that answers “how often poly women want low-SES or unattractive men.” Fertility numbers for “the average poly person” do not exist; the pieces we have point toward fewer children than average, not more.
Polyamory is a subset of ethically non-monogamous (ENM / CNM) practice. The two answers therefore overlap a lot. Where they differ, I note it.
1. Socioeconomic status and attractiveness
What the data actually say about SES
There are two kinds of samples, and they disagree.
Community / convenience samples (Loving More 2012, older ethnography, people who show up at poly events or take poly-branded surveys):
- High education is common. In the 2012 Loving More survey (~3,500 self-identified poly people), 35% had a bachelor’s and 27% a graduate degree, versus much lower shares in the general U.S. adult population at the time.
- Older writeups described poly and swinging scenes as middle / upper-middle class on education and income, and heavily White.
That is who is visible and easy to survey, not necessarily who does it.
More representative or larger comparison samples tell a different story:
- Haupert et al. (2017), two large U.S. samples of singles: lifetime CNM was not associated with education, income, race, religion, region, or politics. Men and sexual minorities were more likely to report it.
- Moors, Gesselman & Garcia (2021), U.S. Census-quota sample of ~3,400 singles: ~11% had ever been in a polyamorous relationship; ~17% wanted to. No differences by income, race, politics, religion, or region. Men and people with lower education were more likely to have done it. Sexual minorities, men, and younger adults wanted it more.
- Balzarini et al. (2019), large online comparison (not a probability sample): people in poly relationships were more likely to earn under $40k than monogamous respondents, more often divorced, and far more often bisexual / pansexual / non-binary. Education and race differences were small.
- Slate’s 2024 summary of later work (~15,000 participants across studies): CNM is not consistently tied to income, education, or being White. Current poly samples sometimes even lean lower income.
So: the stereotype “poly = rich, White, highly educated coastal professionals” is mostly a description of the organized scene and early research samples. Population-style surveys of behavior find CNM and even poly experience spread across income and education, with men overrepresented and (in one poly-specific study) a small tilt toward less education among people who have actually tried it.
Women vs men on SES of participants:
- Men report more desire and more past engagement than women in representative work.
- Community poly surveys sometimes have more women than men among respondents; that is recruitment, not a census of practitioners.
Attractiveness
There is no serious published dataset that scores physical attractiveness of poly vs monogamous people. Anything you hear about “hot people in poly” or “poly is for people who can’t get a monogamous partner” is anecdote or selection into photos and events.
What does exist:
- A 2026 mate-preference study of monogamous vs polyamorous people found both groups most often wanted two “well-rounded” partners (kindness, intelligence, attractiveness, etc.). Monogamous men were more likely than monogamous women to prioritize “good in bed + attractive” for at least one partner. Among poly participants that gender gap shrank; both sexes still valued attractiveness, and women still weighted kindness highly. Status was not the top trait.
- Ordinary mating-market findings still apply unless proven otherwise: women, on average, are pickier than men about status and resources; men are pickier about looks; both sexes prefer attractive partners; people usually pair with others near their own attractiveness band.
Anecdotal (clearly labeled): In urban poly scenes, women—especially bisexual women—often report more inbound interest than comparable monogamous dating. That is about volume of options, not proof that the women in those scenes are unusually attractive or that they date down.
2. How often do poly-interested women want low/mid-SES or average-to-ugly men?
No study measures this. There is no paper that asks poly-identified women how often they pursue low-SES or below-average-looking men.
What we can say without inventing data:
- Female mate preferences do not appear to flip just because the relationship style is non-monogamous. Women still, on average, care more than men about a partner’s resources, status, and “well-roundedness.” Attractiveness still matters to both sexes.
- More options usually raise, not lower, selectivity. If poly-interested women have more suitors (a common field report), they have less reason to accept men they would reject in monogamy.
- “Unicorn hunting” and similar complaints in the scene are about couples seeking a specific extra woman, not about women flooding toward low-status men.
- Mid-SES men are a large share of the population; some of them will be partners in any large dating pool. That is not the same as a preference for low status or low attractiveness.
Best honest answer: Rarely as a preference. Some sexual/romantic pairings with mid-SES or average-looking men obviously happen, as they do everywhere. There is no evidence that poly-interested women systematically want low-SES or unattractive men, and general sex-difference research plus the one poly preference study point the other way.
Anecdote from the commentariat (not science): heterosexual men in open/poly arrangements often discover that their female partner gets more attention than they do. That is consistent with women remaining selective, not with women “banging down.”
3. How many kids does the average poly person have?
Unknown. There is no representative fertility figure.
What exists:
- Eli Sheff’s longitudinal work (since 1996) follows poly families that already have children—by design, not a random poly sample. Those kids, in her interviews, often look emotionally healthy and benefit from extra adults; the sample is small, selected, and not a fertility census.
- A Canadian poly survey cited in later work: about 23% of respondents lived full-time with at least one child 18 or under. That is household composition among people who answered a poly survey, not completed fertility.
- Poly-identified samples skew urban, delayed family formation, high rates of bisexuality/queerness, and (in community samples) high education—all traits linked to lower completed fertility in rich countries.
- Broader research on unrestricted sociosexuality in WEIRD populations often finds a negative within-country association with number of children, especially for women.
Best estimate, labeled as such: the average self-identified poly person almost certainly has fewer children than the average same-age monogamous person, with a large childfree share and many one-child households among those who parent. Poly families that choose kids look more like 1–3 children with extra adults around, not high fertility. Nobody has published “mean number of children = X.”
Same questions with “ethically non-monogamous” instead of “poly”
ENM / CNM is the bigger bucket: open relationships, swinging, polyamory, “monogamish,” etc.
SES and attractiveness (ENM)
This is where the representative data are strongest.
- Lifetime CNM in U.S. singles: about 1 in 5. Current CNM among adults is often estimated around 4–5%, depending on definition and year.
- Haupert et al. and related reviews: no reliable link to income, education, race, religion, politics, or region. Consistent correlates: male sex and LGB+ identity.
- National Survey of Sexual Health and Behavior-style work on open relationships: men and gay/lesbian/bisexual people overrepresented; income and education not significant predictors.
- Swinging, as a distinct ENM style, in older studies looked more middle-aged, White, and middle/upper-middle class than poly community samples—but those too were convenience samples.
Attractiveness: still unmeasured. Swinging scenes are often described anecdotally as more “couples who already matched on conventional attractiveness,” but that is scene ethnography, not a rating study.
Women vs men: men report more CNM experience across studies. That does not mean ENM women are a different SES/attractiveness class; it means more men say yes to the behavior.
How often do ENM-interested women want low/mid-SES or average-to-ugly men?
Same as poly, with even less reason to expect a special preference: not as a pattern that research has found. Swinging is often couple-driven and looks-matched. Open relationships among heterosexuals still run on ordinary female selectivity. Bisexual women are overrepresented in ENM and expand the partner pool, which again tends to increase choice, not force dating down.
Kids among ENM people
Still no average. Lifetime CNM includes many people who were non-monogamous in a college or early-adult window and later had ordinary monogamous families. Current ENM parents exist in meaningful numbers (Alarie 2024 and related family research), but ENM as a whole is not a high-fertility subculture. Expect at or below general-population fertility for people who stay ENM through prime childbearing years; higher than “poly-identified and childfree by ideology,” lower than religious monogamous groups.
Caveats worth putting on the blog
- “Poly” in a probability survey (“have you had a committed romantic/sexual relationship with more than one person at once?”) is not the same as “I live in a polycule and go to munches.”
- Almost all of this is U.S./Western. Other countries will differ.
- Attractiveness and “who women will sleep with” are the weakest parts of the evidence. Anyone claiming a precise percentage is guessing.
- SES of visible poly and SES of people who have ever tried CNM are different facts. Both can be true at once.
Seattle’s socialist mayor may be subject to a recall:
Two people in Seattle have filed a recall charge against Mayor Katie Wilson, alleging she has “neglected her legal duty to maintain public safety and peace.”
The recall comes amid a slew of city controversies, the latest being the continued fallout from the deadly Bite of Seattle shooting, and the forced resignation of Police Chief Shon Barnes.
Melinda Jacobson and Dale Osterud filed the paperwork with the King County Elections Office on Tuesday, Aug. 11, alleging that Wilson is “derelict in her duties for public safety” of the City of Seattle.
What’s in the recall charge?
The recall charge points to five specific events: the forced resignation of then-Police Chief Shon Barnes, shootings and sex trafficking in the North Aurora neighborhood, crime and drug use in the Chinatown International District, crime in Belltown and the deactivation of CCTV cameras for police use around the city.
Dig deeper
The filing outlines safety issues across several Seattle areas, including North Aurora, Chinatown International District, Belltown and Third Avenue.
Letting socialists gain power is a disaster. The sooner they kick her to the curb, the better. But with a spirit of full disclosure, I don’t have a lot of confidence Seattle will be able to rid themselves of her until the next normal election.
That last line mentions Third Avene. That is also known in our house and on this blob as Mug Me Street. Part of the time I worked in downtown Seattle my office building was bounded on two sides by Third and Fourth Avenues. The difference between the two streets was amazing. I do not recall ever not seeing at least one police officer near the office exit to Third Avenue. And frequently there would be a canine unit there as well. Your hair would stand on end as you walked out the door, and you knew something was not right there. The street was dirty with lots of people sitting or lying on the sidewalk. Many of the people were dirty and with tattered clothes. On the Fourth Avenue side there was a park, with normal people and shops everywhere you looked.
Apparently, Wilson was able to make an intolerable situation even worse.
Genome language models operate in a broadly similar way to large language models (LLMs) except that they predict genetic code instead of written text, having been trained on the genomes of other viruses and bacteria, as well as more complex organisms such as plants and animals.
The two models in question were told to generate complete genomes for a viable bacteriophage — a type of virus able to infect and replicate itself inside bacteria, destroying them from the inside.
…
The researchers then synthesised new DNA molecules using those designs and inserted them into E. coli bacteria, before waiting to see if viable bacteriophages would emerge.
Shortly afterwards, 16 of the Petri dishes in which the bacteria were growing began to show clear spots, as the viruses began to attack and replicate themselves inside the E. coli, demonstrating their viability.
Andrew Thorpe
August 6, 2026
Stanford researchers create viruses not found in nature using genomes designed by artificial intelligence
See also AI-designed viral genomes | Science and AI Is Learning to Write Genetic Code – Schneier on Security. In part, Schneier says:
That’s a positive use of a synthetic virus. We can all imagine the negative uses.
Wow! That is such an understatement. The negative uses could be extinction level. Skynet could win without any need to develop time travel, terminators, or even firing a shot.
Even without a threat of something like Skynet just imagine the “right” set of people reading Rainbow Six as a How To book instead of entertainment or a warning. An underground bunker in Idaho would, at best, only delay the inevitable.
That sounds reasonable. I am good with how they are spending the money I donate to them.
I have never seen a single week in medicine like the one we just lived through.
In the span of a few days, four separate scientific breakthroughs landed. The stock market treated them as four unrelated stories and sent a handful of biotech companies soaring. But that’s the shallow read. Look closer and they are not four stories at all. They are four faces of the same story — the biggest shift in medicine since the discovery of antibiotics.Medicine is becoming programmable. Individualized. Written for one human being instead of the average of millions.
Afshine Emrani MD FACC @afshineemrani
Posted on X August 22, 2026
Here are some of the details:
Start with the old world, so you can feel what’s ending.
For the entire history of medicine, we have treated the average patient. The average dose on the label. The average risk from the population study. The average tumor, the average cholesterol, the average heart. We took what worked for the middle of the bell curve and applied it to you, and then adjusted by trial and error when you didn’t respond like the average.
But you are not average. Your cancer, if you get one, will carry a set of mutations no other cancer on Earth has ever had. Your heart disease is driven by your specific genes, your specific biology. The one-size-fits-all model was never a choice we made — it was a limitation we couldn’t escape, because we lacked the tools to read and write biology at the level of the individual.
…
Here’s the old reality for high-risk melanoma. Surgeons remove the tumor, and then we tell the patient: “We got what we could see. Now take Keytruda, and we hope the microscopic cells left behind don’t come roaring back.” And too often, they came back — in the lungs, the liver, the brain.
Now here’s what just changed. Scientists take that removed tumor, sequence its DNA, and compare it letter by letter to the patient’s healthy DNA. The differences — the mutations unique to that cancer — produce abnormal proteins called neoantigens that exist essentially nowhere else in the body. An algorithm picks up to 34 of the best targets. Those get encoded into a custom mRNA vaccine, manufactured for that one person, that teaches their immune system to hunt any cell wearing those markers. In the 1,137-patient Phase 3 trial, the vaccine plus Keytruda beat Keytruda alone — less recurrence, less spread to distant organs. It’s the first time in the history of medicine an mRNA cancer therapy has won a Phase 3, and trials in lung, bladder, and kidney cancer are already running.
…
A company called Scribe just went public with an experimental one-time treatment aimed at the single biggest killer of human beings on the planet: heart disease. Not a new pill to add to your seven others. A one-and-done.
Here’s the elegance of it. You may have heard of CRISPR as “gene editing” — molecular scissors that cut DNA. That’s powerful but scary, because cutting DNA is permanent and mistakes can’t be undone. Scribe’s approach does not cut your DNA. Instead it uses a disabled version of CRISPR to place a chemical “off switch” — an epigenetic mark — on a single gene called PCSK9. PCSK9 is one of the master controllers of bad cholesterol. Silence it, and LDL plummets. And because the DNA sequence itself is never altered, the effect is designed to be reversible if it ever needed to be.
There is more. But you get the idea.
I like living in the future.
@Emma_S_Brown @GabbyGiffords you need a new comms guy. We’ve broke this one and need a new plaything.
BadGunControlTakes @guncontroltakes
Posted on X August 20, 2026
It is entertaining to see them squirm and indirectly admit they don’t just want “common sense gun laws”, but total bans. All the while seeing their legal framework, their life’s work in some cases, collapsing like a house of cards.
I am thinking there are probably more productive things to do. Sure, entertainment and a high moral are important. But don’t get stuck on it. Certainly, a case can be made to take people to the range and to get friendly legislators and executive branch politicians into office.
Other areas of potential value include getting good media coverage of the shooting sports. Kid’s programs, Boy/Girl Scout shooting events, local shooter participating in regional, national and international events, etc.
Why does monogamy work for some people but not for others? Research suggests that it might have something to do with the way our brains are ‘wired.’
Consider a study in which 20 heterosexual men underwent brain scans while looking at different types of images. Some of the images were sexual, depicting couples engaged in penile-vaginal intercourse. Others were romantic, showing clothed men and women engaged in non-sexual intimacy. Yet others were neutral, depicting nature scenes or imagery of people engaged in non-romantic and non-sexual activities.
Half of the men were “highly monogamous.” They’d never had a sexually open relationship, nor had they committed infidelity. They also reported having a lower than average number of lifetime sexual partners and said they rarely fantasized about anyone other than their relationship partner.
The other half were “highly non-monogamous.” These men reported having had experience with both sexually open relationships and infidelity. They reported a greater than average number of sex partners in their lifetime and said they had a preference for having multiple partners at the same time.
The results showed that, regardless of relationship orientation, men showed substantial activation of the brain’s reward pathways when exposed to sexual images. Put another way, and not surprisingly, pretty much everyone found the sexual images to be rewarding.
By contrast, monogamous men (relative to non-monogamous men) showed substantially greater activation of the brain’s reward system in response to romantic images. The areas of the brain that were active while monogamous men were viewing romantic images were largely the same as the ones activated when they viewed sexual images.
Put another way, monogamous men processed romantic and sexual images in a similar way—and found both types to be very rewarding.
For non-monogamous men, however, they seemed to be processing romantic images in a somewhat different way. Unlike the monogamous men who just showed a general reward response to the romantic images, non-monogamous men had brain regions active that were involved in higher-order cognitive processing, suggesting that they were studying and thinking about those images.
These findings suggest the possibility that different people might be predisposed to different styles of mating based on the way their brains are ‘wired.’ In other words, perhaps tendencies toward monogamy vs. non-monogamy are rooted in brain structure.
Justin Lehmiller
August 11, 2026
Are Our Brains ‘Wired’ For Monogamy Or Non-Monogamy? – Sex and Psychology
Later in the article Lehmiller ponders whether similar findings will be discovered in women.
I don’t know about the brain activity, but I have talked to enough women to know that some have absolutely no interest in nonmonogamy and others have absolutely no interest in monogamy. One woman told me that after being married for about two years she could not stand being monogamous and divorced “a really nice guy”. She discovered sex clubs and felt “at home” for the first time. After a few years she married and tried to be monogamous again. Again, she divorced after a couple years and was back at the sex clubs. The last I heard from her, when she was in her late 50’s, she was trying monogamy again. I had to roll my eyes. How many times did she need to learn that lesson?
One woman I knew from work many years ago, wanted me to take some nude pictures of her (I knew her from working on the company newsletter together when I did most of the photography). My wife was fine with it and I took the pictures. I asked what the pictures were for. One of her boyfriends wanted them. She wanted me to keep it quiet though. Here husband didn’t know. She volunteered that she had enough boyfriends on the side for her on basketball them. She tried to get her husband into swinging (this was in the early 1980’s). She was his one and only sex partner and had zero interest in anyone else.
Both of these are very sad cases. I blame social expectations creating these tragedies. Had non-monogamous marriage options been socially acceptable, people could have figured out how they were wired before getting into a mismatched relationship.
A federal appeals court threw out on Friday a lawsuit by California and the Giffords gun control advocacy group claiming that a Biden administration-era rule to curtail the production of illegal, largely untraceable “ghost guns” was not strict enough.
Reversing a lower court ruling, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco voted 3-0 that California and Giffords did not show the rule’s treatment of partially completed receivers, or frames, for AR-15 type semi-automatic rifles caused them harm.
Jonathan Stempel
August 21, 2026
US appeals court throws out California, Giffords ‘ghost guns’ challenge
Interestingly, the decision was 3-0. Two of those judges were Biden appointees.
How many decisions went in our favor this week?
I don’t think I will ever get tired of winning. Prove me wrong.
Purchasing a firearm should be exactly the same as purchasing a set of kitchen cutlery. You should be able to order a full auto Ma Deuce through Amazon and have it same day shipped to your house.
Robb Allen @ItsRobbAllen
Posted on X August 6, 2026
Agreed.
Their uninterrupted, continual, and severe, abject failures absolutely must be a cloak of greatest weight from which they, and their fellow travelers, cannot escape the burden thereof; mere “casting out” from successful society must never be the sanctuary of relief they crave, the many examples of their failures must be the constant, painful reminders of placing any amount of trust in their beliefs, to them and especially and foremost, to us.
“Remember the Alamo” is still heard in Texas; “Never forget what Liberals did to us” must persist at least as long.
Francisco
August 17, 2026
Comment to Insightfully Horrifying and Hilarious
Q: Who says you should not carry a grudge?
A: Those who intend to injure you again.
A federal court in Texas has ruled that the Biden-era Frame and Receiver Rule is unconstitutional for two separate reasons: it violates the Second Amendment, and it is too vague to satisfy the Fifth Amendment’s due process protections.
The court declared the rule unconstitutional as applied to all SAF members, and issued a permanent injunction protecting Defense Distributed and current and future Second Amendment Foundation members as it relates to the specific gun kits involved in the case.
In plain English: SAF members are now expressly protected from enforcement of this rule specifically involving these specific products under the court’s order.
The government may still appeal the decision or ask the court to put the injunction on hold while an appeal moves forward. We are also seeking additional guidance from the government about exactly how the injunction will work in practice.
For now, this is another significant legal victory for SAF and its members and another example of why SAF membership matters.
Read the full court opinion here: https://saf.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Defense-Distributed-opinion-8.19.26.pdf
SAF @2AFDN
Posted on X August 18, 2026
From the same post:
Notice the rate of legal victories we are having? These are indicative of Nearing Structure Collapse.
I don’t think I will ever get tired of winning. Prove me wrong. Give your favorite gun owner rights group money to broaden the front in this war.
It’s hard not to smile or even giggle a little bit when you see how badly President Donald Trump is scaring the country’s paid anti-gun community, especially when you combine the President’s efforts with those of the United States Supreme Court.
No one is feeling this pro-gun heat more than the youngsters working at the Trace, the propaganda arm of former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg’s gun control empire, who want the public to believe it’s an actual newsroom comprised of actual journalists—a fiction they’ll go to great lengths to maintain.
The Trace kids are extremely busy trying to stop this Second Amendment tidal wave that’s washing across the entire country. They realize that they’re losing, so they’re rabidly coming up with new ideas to counter our coming freedom—and some of their ideas are absolutely crazy.
Two Tracers just released this tome: “New Jersey Just Lost Its Assault Weapons Ban. Here’s Why That Matters for the Rest of the Country.”
The story’s last line is bedeviling. It’s not a quote or taken from any report. It’s completely attributable to the story’s two anti-gun authors:
“If the Supreme Court strikes down assault weapons bans nationwide next year, states could try other strategies, including putting semiautomatic rifles behind a permitting process,” they actually wrote.
Can you actually imagine that?
The highest court in the country says you can legally possess ARs in every state and U.S. Territory, but then some blue state suddenly requires you to obtain a state permit—regardless of the Supreme Court decision?
Do they think that might actually work?
It’s a Second Amendment right, right?
It would be like requiring state permits before allowing someone to read a book or scour the internet, which are rights guaranteed by the First Amendment.
The Trace is redefining desperation.
I’m picturing five-gallon pails of Zoloft, Prozac and Xanax scattered throughout their newsroom, each with a “help yourself” label.
Lee Williams
July 24, 2026
‘And Do You Have a Permit for your AR, Sir?’
To be fair, yes, I do believe there will be states who try to use a permitting process for firearms. Some states are and have been for many years, requiring permits to purchase handguns and many require permits to purchase any firearm. Some examples which already have permit requirements for AR-15s: Minnesota, Connecticut, Hawaii, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, and D.C. (yes, I know, not a state).
Although it is far from a sure thing it could be that SCOTUS will address the permitting issue in the “assault weapon” ban cases next year, they might. However, I suspect it will be 2028 before we get rid of the permit to purchase requirements.
Normally, we have thought outward based on the rules of reason: the law of noncontradiction, modus ponens, Occam’s razor, etc. Not so for the socialist. Based on Bloch, the socialist thinks from utopia backward. Reality is made to conform to the utopian ideal, not the ideal to reality. As the root of all things, all man needs to do is make the necessary changes to bring utopia about.
Thus, the facts of failure do not matter because, as Kolakowski explains, “‘facts’ have no ontological meaning [to the Marxists] and may be ignored without hesitation: what matters are the premonitions of the anticipating fancy.” Simply put, the socialist puts feelings over facts. If there is sufficient belief, it can be so.
Connor Appelboom
August 6, 2026
Why are socialists unfazed by their abysmal historical record?
This QOTD was specifically to trigger Kathy Jackson (of Cornered Cat fame) “favorite feature” of my blog. She said, “My favorite feature is when you quote the anti-gun folks. Equal parts hilarious and horrifying.”
While this is broader that an anti-gun quote, it is certainly congruent with what appears to be their line of thinking. And while I think it is mostly horrifying, I can see more than a little humor in it.
There is more from the article that particularly resonated with me but needs some more background:
If man is the master of both reality and his own nature, then everything is subject to the collective conscience. If enough people believe and try hard enough, the socialist paradise can be achieved. Past failures merely indicate a lack of one or both.
Back in the mid 1980s to the mid 1990s I subscribed to a magazine called, Skeptical Inquirer. For a few years I even purchased a subscription for the local King County Library in Kirkland Washington a few hundred feet from where I lived.
The magazine still exists. but I expect most people just read it online. Probably the article which stuck with me the most was The Hundredth Monkey Phenomenon from the Summer 1985 issue. This phenomenon is also called the Hundredth monkey effect – Wikipedia. The gist of it (from Wikipedia):
The hundredth monkey effect is an esoteric idea claiming that a new behavior or idea is spread rapidly by unexplained means from one group to all related groups once a critical number of members of one group exhibit the new behavior or acknowledge the new idea. The behavior was said to propagate even to groups that are physically separated and have no apparent means of communicating with each other.
That describes the socialist (and to a certain extent the anti-gun people) mindset as explained by Appelboom above.
Both involve the notion that sufficient collective belief or adoption can override ordinary constraints of evidence, transmission, or human limitation:
- In the monkey story, once critical mass is reached, the idea/behavior “jumps” independently of normal learning or contact.
- In the article’s diagnosis of socialist thinking, once enough people share the utopian conviction (and the will to remake human nature), reality itself is expected to conform; historical counter-evidence becomes secondary or dismissible.
In both cases the mechanism is quasi-mystical or consciousness-based rather than strictly empirical or institutional: belief/numbers generate a transformative threshold that ordinary causal processes cannot explain or resist. The article’s emphasis on “if there is sufficient belief, it can be so” and “if enough people believe and try hard enough, the socialist paradise can be achieved” maps closely onto the critical-mass logic of the hundredth-monkey claim.
Of course the domains differ (political ideology vs. a primatology anecdote turned meme), and the article is making a critical philosophical point while the monkey story was more New Age folklore. But the underlying intuition—that a tipping point of shared conviction can magically dissolve stubborn facts or barriers—is recognizably the same.
I find this both horrifying and hilarious.
Prepare appropriately.
Posted on X by JD Heeler @MoonLitLynx87:
This is probably a little overstated. But I think we are still on track for my vision of seeing machine gun competitions in high schools by 2032 being realized.
As a liberal it’s galling that those on my side remain obsessed with disarming during the most dangerous powder keg of a political environment we’ve seen perhaps since the civil war. Masked government goons are kidnapping people, killing citizens in broad day with no consequences and running concentration camps. The military is on our streets but these idiots want us even more vulnerable and defenseless.
stonkyvolatile_9010
August 15, 2026
Comment to The Guns Affected by the New Texas Firearm Ruling – Newsweek
I will let pass the collection of assertions I disagree with.
I agree there are a great number of people on his side who irrationally claim we have a Fascist government with Nazi’s everywhere and simultaneously demand private citizens owning guns should be at least register and be severely limited in their selection of arms if not completely disarmed by that same government.
There is no way I can make sense of this other than they are doing the prep work for when they regain power and want to implement their own version of the Final Solution. That is also consistent with the dehumanization of the political right. While one might be able to find kernels of half-truths in their claims, it totally blown out of proportion and almost unrecognizable in reality.
But, as I frequently say, it is irrational to expect people to be rational. Rationality is just a thin veneer over the emotional kaleidoscope of the human brain.
Prepare appropriately.
You shouldn’t need a private briefing to notice what millions of Americans could see with their own eyes.
…
Pelosi says she wasn’t told about Biden’s decline. Apparently watching him in public wasn’t enough.
The Atlas Society
August 13, 2026
This says more about Pelosi than it does about Biden or anyone else. People, including me, were saying Biden had dementia during his 2020 campaign. Either she is lying and/or she has her own mental health problems.
Via email:
We have some very good news. We just won an important victory against the NFA registration scheme. In Jensen v. ATF, CCRKBA stood as a named plaintiff in a case funded by our sister organization, the Second Amendment Foundation. A federal judge ruled that key registration requirements for now-untaxed NFA firearms are unconstitutional. But here’s the part I really want you to know about. The Jensen injunction reaches CCRKBA members across the country, current and future. You’re a CCRKBA member. That means you’re among the members covered by this injunction. That’s a pretty good example of why membership matters. CCRKBA stood in this fight. SAF provided the resources to make it possible. Together, we won. For a limited time, we’re giving you the opportunity to become a member of both organizations. Make a gift of $25 or more, and we’ll add membership in the Second Amendment Foundation to your existing CCRKBA membership. Why add SAF? Because SAF membership can matter when we win in court, too. SAF recently won its challenge to the federal government’s Post Office carry ban, and that nationwide protection covers current and future SAF members. And going forward, SAF membership puts you in a position to potentially benefit when SAF wins future injunctions or other court-ordered relief that extends specifically to its members. So right now, your CCRKBA membership puts you among the members covered by Jensen, and your SAF membership puts you among the members covered by the Post Office carry victory. For a limited time, $25 makes you a member of BOTH. ADD YOUR SAF MEMBERSHIP FOR $25 But I hope you’ll consider doing more than $25 if you’re able. You’re already seeing what membership can mean when we win. Now I’m asking you to help us win the next one. SAF has two more NFA challenges moving through the courts right now: Brown v. ATF and Roberts v. ATF. And here’s my challenge to you. You no longer have to pay that $200 NFA tax. If you’re able, put some or all of that $200 tax savings behind the legal fight instead. Your first $25 adds your SAF membership. If you can make it $50, $100, $225, $500, or more, you’re giving SAF more resources to keep these NFA cases moving. If $225 works for you, that’s fantastic. If it doesn’t, give whatever you’re comfortable with. Every gift helps. We broke through in Jensen. Now we have an opportunity to build on it, and I don’t want to waste that opportunity. Membership puts you in a position to benefit from the victories. Your additional support helps us win them. For more than 90 years, the federal government collected that $200 NFA tax. Now you don’t have to pay it. If you’re able, I’d love to see you put those savings behind the fight instead. You’re already standing with us at CCRKBA. For a limited time, stand with SAF, too, and help us keep pushing. ADD SAF + FUEL THE NEXT NFA FIGHT $25 | $50 | $100 | $225 | $500 | OTHER Thank you for your support, Andrew Gottlieb Executive Director Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms P.S. You’re already among the CCRKBA members covered by the Jensen injunction. For a limited time, your gift of $25 or more adds SAF membership, too, putting you among the current and future SAF members covered by the Post Office carry victory and positioning you for potential member-specific relief in future SAF wins. If you’re able, consider putting some or all of your $200 NFA tax savings behind the next fight. If $225 isn’t right for you, give whatever you’re comfortable with. Every gift helps us keep pushing. Do you like the newsletter? Share it! Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms 12500 NE 10th Pl Bellevue, WA 98005 |
The hundreds of homes recently destroyed by the big fire in Spokane gave Northwest Safe the opportunity to treat the event as a real-world test. Not just which safes are best, but where to put the in your home, how to add additional protection, and where your most valuable items should be in the safe. Good stuff:
Via email from Rolf.
We had two other wins yesterday with Justice Department Says You Can Carry for Self-Defense in a Post Office, and the Postal Service Ban Cannot Be Enforced – USA Carry and Feds settle lawsuit with LA County Sheriff’s Department over concealed firearm permits.
In other news… Via Firearms Policy Coalition @gunpolicy:
I don’t think I will ever get tired of winning. Prove me wrong.
Move over, high-speed rail! California’s central transportation planners have a new idea for connecting the state’s major population centers of Los Angeles and San Francisco: high-speed buses!
Here’s the Bay Area’s ABC7 News‘ report on Caltrans’ concept for having passengers ride at up to 140 miles per hour between the two cities:
In the case of Caltrans’s new high-speed bus transportation concept, they may well be repeating the farce that The Onion wrote sixteen years earlier.
And you thought Hollywood had no new ideas.
Craig Eyermann
August 11, 2026
<snort>
California has spent about $15 billion so far on the high-speed rail system. Zero miles of actual track has been laid. It has completed about 80 miles of guideway (concrete viaducts, bridges, embankments). The distance between the phase one end points of San Francisco -> Los Angles -> Anaheim is 494 miles. The currently projected cost is $126–231 billion, depending upon scope.
I have some serious questions about the feasibility of 140 MPH buses which are safe and fuel efficient. The physics of a 150 MPH train are much different than that of a bus. With a difference of 70 MPH between such a bus and the cars the buses would require their own road. Even then it would be a nightmare to create those roads. Here is what Copilot says about the two mountain passes planned for the rail system:
1. Pacheco Pass (Diablo Range)
Location: Between Gilroy and Los Banos Purpose: Connects the Bay Area to the Central Valley Challenges:
- Steep terrain requiring long tunnels and viaducts
- Seismic faults
- Sensitive environmental areas (reservoirs, wildlife corridors)
- Complex geotechnical conditions
This segment is expected to include tunnels up to ~13 miles long, making it one of the most expensive parts of the northern half of the route.
2. Tehachapi Mountains (Tehachapi Pass)
Location: Between Bakersfield and Palmdale Purpose: Connects the Central Valley to Southern California Challenges:
- Extremely rugged terrain
- Multiple active seismic faults
- Long tunnels and tall viaducts
- Curvature constraints for 200+ mph trains
This segment is even more complex than Pacheco Pass. The alignment requires dozens of miles of tunnels and viaducts, making it one of the most expensive rail engineering projects in U.S. history.
Not only that, no 140 MPH bus exists. If it did exist it could not use the existing freeway, not even the area between the current opposite lanes. This is because the curves are too tight. There are a host of other issues. It would be more of a rubber‑tired train and require dedicated infrastructure.
The physical shape would have to be much different. Here is what one of Japan’s high-speed trains looks like:
Last March Barb and I were on one of these going over 170 MPH:
Very cool. But it was on level land and with Japanese almost obsessive attention to detail.
California cannot get a train line built and the think they can create some brand-new technology that is going to function with far less than ideal ground conditions? These are not rational people. These are people who are out of touch with reality. To them, feelings are just as valid as numbers and the laws of physics. Perhaps even more so, because I don’t think they understand numbers.