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.
With Democrats winning control of both chambers of Congress, Brady celebrated what it described as “gun violence prevention majorities” and called for action. The problem with that claim is there’s no evidence to show that’s what voters wanted.
An October Pew Research Center survey found that 84 percent of registered voters considered the economy very important to their congressional vote. The future of democracy followed at 73 percent, healthcare at 68 percent and education at 62 percent.
Gun policy (as a broad category) ranked 10th among 16 issues surveyed, with 45 percent calling it very important. That was down from 57 percent in a comparable October 2022 survey.
The contrast was particularly revealing among voters supporting Democrat congressional candidates. Just 40 percent considered gun control very important, compared with 88 percent for the economy and 82 percent for healthcare.
An NPR/PBS News/Marist poll reinforced those priorities. Asked to identify their most pressing election issue, 34 percent of likely voters selected the cost of living and 33 percent chose preserving democracy.
And when registered voters were asked whether protecting gun ownership rights or passing stricter gun control laws should take priority, the results were closely divided. Of those surveyed, 46 percent favored protecting gun ownership rights and 49 percent favored stricter laws.
Those findings complicate Brady’s assertion that election results demonstrate a broad, bipartisan demand for its policy agenda.
…
Brady’s blustering about a gun control mandate is not much more than hot air. The available polling establishes a more complicated picture of the electorate than a single-issue mandate. Election victories establish who will govern. They do not, by themselves, establish why Americans voted or which firearm restrictions they want enacted.
I found the “preserving democracy” result interesting. What this means to me is that anti-Trump propaganda for the last ten years has some deep roots now. I suspect the primary motivation of voters was to register their displeasure with President Trump. I do not believe it was motivated by a strong desire to severely infringe upon the rights of gun owners.
Successful politicians do not spit into the political wind. They do frequent private polling and know what issues earn and which lose points in the polls. Do you remember what Michigan U.S. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed said in April 2023? As pointed out by Keane in the article I pulled the QOTD from:
Democrat Abdul El-Sayed defeated former Republican U.S. Rep. Mike Rogers for Michigan’s open U.S. Senate seat. His campaign focused heavily on healthcare, affordability and corporate influence.
The video was subsequently removed from public view. When the remarks resurfaced, El-Sayed’s spokesperson said he respected the Second Amendment. Yet when asked in August whether he still favored replacing the constitutional protection, El-Sayed instead argued that more Americans were concerned about seeing a doctor than owning a firearm.
El-Sayed apparently realized the elimination of the 2nd Amendment was very toxic to the voters. If he wants to remain in power (of course he does; he is drawn to power, or he would not run for public office), he will not give his future opponents talking points that will cost him votes. And you can be sure other politicians learned a lesson from the firestorm El-Sayed created.
The columns are types of Registered Voters (RV’s). In the three right columns are how the Democrat voters answered on the issues which were important to them in 2022 and in 2026 and the difference between those two years. The importance of “Gun Policy” to Democratic voters dropped 22 percentage points in four years. It ranks 10th of 16 issues among all registered voters as well as Democratic voters. Gun policy mattered more to Republican voters (54%) than to Democratic voters (40%), so a mandate for new restrictions is hard to read from this poll.
The politicians know this, and I believe that is why guns were not a major campaign issue this year. A mandate needs voters who put the issue first, and the polling says they didn’t.
Fifty-six percent of Americans say laws covering the sale of firearms should be made more strict, 27% say they should be kept as they are, and 15% want them made less strict. Support for stricter laws has edged down from last year’s 60% but matches the 2023 and 2024 readings. It remains well below the 78% high recorded in 1990, when Gallup first asked this question.
The 15% of Americans who favor less strict gun laws is a new high, one percentage point above the previous high in 2014 and three points higher than last year.
My spin on it is that, while their spin is technically correct, the number of people who really “get it” is at a clear all-time high: 15% now want less strict laws. Gun law reform is needed. The existing laws are unconstitutional as well as being of no use in reducing violent crime. Gun laws gotta go!
Assuming the poll is accurate, they have a majority in support of more gun control. But what the poll is not telling anyone is that when people are given the details of what the existing law is and what the proposed laws are, support evaporates. “Close the gun show loophole!”, they cry and they can get support — until the details are revealed.
Keep coming out of the closet, be a good “ambassador” for gun owners, and take new shooters to the range. We can keep the trend going, and the trend is our friend.
We would like to offer the Democrats a different idea: Dare the Republicans to try and stop them.
Democrats should not limit themselves to what Republicans might or might not support. Instead, they should fight to advance a maximalist agenda and force Republicans to go on the record blocking or obstructing limits on corporate power.
What I find most interesting is the policy list. The authors want limits on corporate power and data centers and aggressive climate action, and they cite polling and candidates favoring Medicare for All or a public option, higher taxes on millionaires, a $15 minimum wage, and stopping war.
Guns are not mentioned. And guns were not really an issue in most of the campaigns.
Why is this? Where is their gun control agenda?
I suspect they know it is not an issue that clearly helps them win swing voters. In other words, they know being labeled a gun grabber is not good for advancing their ambitions for increasing their political power. And I suspect they love power more than the destruction of gun owner rights. Yes, guns are an impediment to their desire for power. But being voted out of office is a greater impediment.
There certainly are true believers who cannot imagine good, sane people opposing gun control, and some states will pass new restrictions. Democrats now hold full control in Arizona, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, and Virginia has already passed an assault weapons ban. But I suspect the state legislatures will not go for a massive wave of restrictions on gun owners. And I think the courts will support gun owners far more than they have in the past. Just look at the fact that SCOTUS ruled 6-3 against Hawaii’s carry restrictions and 9-0 against prosecuting Hemani. And look at these cases (assembled by Claude):
2026
Knife Rights, Inc. v. Blanche (5th Cir., Oct. 21, 2026). A three-judge panel held that Section 1242 of the Federal Switchblade Act violates the Second Amendment. It’s a knife case, not a firearm case. The case was sent back to the district court, and DOJ may seek review.
Association of New Jersey Rifle & Pistol Clubs v. Attorney General New Jersey (3rd Cir. en banc, July 17, 2026). The court ruled 10-5 that New Jersey’s ban on semiautomatic rifles like the AR-15 and on magazines over 10 rounds is unconstitutional.
Baird v. Bonta (9th Cir., Jan. 2, 2026). A divided panel held California’s open-carry ban in counties over 200,000 people unconstitutional.
Late 2025
United States v. Cockerham (5th Cir., Dec. 17, 2025). The court held the federal felon-in-possession law unconstitutional as applied to a man whose only felony was failing to pay child support. The Supreme Court left the ruling in place.
Earlier but still relevant
Reese v. ATF (5th Cir., 2025). The court held the federal ban on dealers selling handguns to 18-to-20-year-olds unconstitutional, and DOJ declined to seek Supreme Court review. NRA-ILA reported in September that DOJ has declared the ban unconstitutional.
Nguyen v. Bonta (9th Cir., June 20, 2025). The court struck down California’s one-gun-a-month law, and the mandate issued Aug. 14, 2025.
Worth v. Harrington. The Supreme Court denied review, leaving in place an Eighth Circuit decision that restored carry rights for 18-to-20-year-olds in Minnesota.
The Supreme Court will also decide the AR-15 ban cases by next June. That is a lot of momentum for the gun grabbers to push back against.
Agreed, not every court agrees with the Third Circuit: The Seventh Circuit upheld Illinois’s ban a week earlier. But not only is the current judicial state, but judicial trend is better than it has been in the last 100 years. That must be taken into account by the gun grabbers. For example, DOJ has already sued Virginia over its new ban.
In what might run against the consensus opinion, I think Tuesday’s results are bad news for those hoping the Democratic Party will rejuvenate itself by embracing the “abundance agenda.”
…
None of this is to argue that policy debates about permitting reform, zoning liberalization, and other items on the abundance agenda are going to stop in the new Congress or in states with new Democratic governments. But the abundance agenda didn’t get a huge boost from Tuesday’s elections either.
As a way for market-curious liberal wonks to organize their thoughts and direct their activism, the idea of abundance can do a lot of work. But Tuesday’s elections are evidence against the notion that the abundance agenda is the code needed to crack America’s politics and fix all its problems.
The abundance the wonks want comes from letting markets work. The abundance others promise comes from taking it from someone else.
The socialists and communists promise people free stuff. Abundance for everyone, they say, if you just vote for them (or support their violent revolution). The promise comes packaged in slogans that amount to “feast on the carcasses of the rich” or literally “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”
The leaders, of course, don’t really care about the abundance-for-everyone part. They want the power, and with the power they will take more than their share of the “abundance.” What the “useful idiots” don’t understand is that abundance grows fastest where there are free markets and free minds. In contrast, socialist and communist systems cannot coexist with free markets and free minds.
It is ironic that what the useful idiots want is most easily achieved under the very system they fervently oppose. That is what makes them useful to the tyrants and simultaneously demonstrates their idiocy.
Andrews has rebutted the allegations from both Graham and Trump that she wants to take away guns and has instead focused on gun deaths as a public health issue for children.
“My platform to address the public health crisis of gun violence does not infringe on the Second Amendment,” Andrews said. “I support the Second Amendment, law-abiding citizens’ rights to own firearms, but I know we need to do something about this public health crisis.”
In addition to background checks and safe storage rules, Andrews says she supports “banning weapons of war from our streets,” including AR-style rifles.
She supports the Second Amendment and wants to ban weapons. One might claim she is stupid. But I think it is deliberate deception. The gun control nuts have a long history of lies and deception. And Andrews took money and received special training from these evil people:
Andrews joined the South Carolina chapter of the anti-gun violence group Moms Demand Action in 2018 shortly after the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, that killed 17 and injured 17 others.
She later went through a political candidate training program from the anti-gun group Everytown for Gun Safety, and the political action committee for the organization donated $500,000 to her campaign in August.
Andrews also reported in her candidate financial disclosures receiving more than $130,000 from Everytown in 2024 and 2025. Part of her work for the organization involved producing “gun violence prevention in medical education and media appearances.”
She will see SCOTUS rule that AR-style rifles are protected before legislation banning them can be passed and signed into law. I hope she sheds tears over that. As I will continue to use Liberal Tears to lubricate my guns.
I think you’re gonna see gun owners are going out and buying, you know, more firearms. They’re gonna be worried about restrictions on their right to purchase those firearms. And you’re gonna see a lot of new people come into it as well, where ‘hey, you know, I don’t own one now, but now it looks scary that I might not be able to, so I’m gonna go try and get it now.
The hosts of the I’ve Had It podcast faced backlash online this week after cracking up over an X post reading, “We’re digging up Charlie Kirk and doing it again” following Democrats winning majorities in the House and Senate in the midterm elections.
The women both laughed hard for nearly 30 seconds as Welch said, “No comment on that.”
Kirk was assassinated in September 2025 during an event at a university campus in Utah.
Their true colors are showing. There is another telling component to this story. When they got some backlash for their misbehavior a part of their response was:
Whatever our political differences, there is nothing funny about gun violence. We’ve long supported common-sense gun safety reform.
To that end, we’ve made a donation to Everytown for Gun Safety, the largest gun violence prevention organization in America.
I would not be surprised if these same people and their followers would have a similar reaction to President Trump, anyone in his administration, or 100s of thousands of “MAGA maggots” being murdered.
You think there isn’t that much they have in common? Let me introduce you to someone who lived through Mao’s Cultural Revolution:
What this witch wished for actually happened in China—especially during Mao’s Cultural Revolution.
Red Guards dug up the graves of people labeled enemies of the state and desecrated their remains.
They attacked the tomb of Confucius and dug up thousands of graves belonging to… https://t.co/SAlHwbAsIR
There is a reason why Hitler, Mao, and Stalin were able to murder 10s of millions of people. The people who opening support murder directly and/or indirectly encourage the people doing the killing. Such people are in nearly every society.
Their push for more gun control is in perfect alignment with the desire to commit mass murder.
I gave the underground bunker plans to Claude and asked it to estimate the concreted used in various portions of the house. Here are its estimates:
Roughly 775,000 lb of concrete (about 390 tons) in the whole structure. That splits into about 370,000 lb in the shell, 300,000 lb in the floor and footings, and 110,000 lb in the retaining walls. These are estimates measured from the plans and the retaining wall table, not as-built figures.
Since I’m talking about the concrete, I might as well report on the compressive strength of the shell concrete. The plans called for 4,000 PSI. The shotcrete guy asked the concrete supplier for 5,000 PSI. The supplier mixed it a little stronger to make sure he met the requirement. The sample I took in for testing tested as:
133% of required. I paid for a lot more than what I really needed. <heavy sigh>
I rationalize it by telling myself that had it come in under the specified numbers it was not like it could be easily torn out and redone. The forms and rebar alone took a crew of three to five several weeks to build. So, better safely overbuilt than being forever concerned about it caving in.
Those inclined to believe promises of “free, free, free everything” might consider their proximity to so many unfulfilled Soviet rights, and question the reality of what these latest apparatchiks are pledging.
They might? No, they will not consider that. People find it very easy to believe what they want to believe.
Just remember, there is no such thing as a free lunch. Someone always pays.
But please disregard my nitpicking. Just borrow the title of the article and use it as a one liner when people start talking about free healthcare/childcare/money/housing/whatever.
For two decades, Tehran’s line on the bomb never changed. It does now. The New York Times reported Tuesday that a growing chorus of Iranian officials, lawmakers, and clerics is openly calling for the Islamic Republic to build nuclear weapons.
A few years ago, that sentence would have been unthinkable.
Friday prayer leaders are preaching it.
Rally crowds are chanting it. Sitting members of parliament are posting it on social media.
In the western city of Kuhdasht, a prayer leader named Ali Sepahvand called for atomic arms last week while worshippers chanted that nuclear deterrence was Iran’s “inalienable right.”
Lawmaker Mahmoud Nabavian wrote that after paying the price of war and sanctions, it was time to walk away from the Non-Proliferation Treaty and change the country’s nuclear doctrine.
Another lawmaker, Abolfazl Aboutorabi, went further and called for an actual bomb. Cleric Mohammad Javad Haj Ali Akbari used his Friday sermon to describe a doctrine change as a “national demand.”
I was actually a little confused by this because I was under the impression I still needed to resolve a couple of issues. They were just explanation type things, not physical changes I had to make. Even though I had the certificate I wanted to make sure they were actually setting and the county couldn’t come back to me and cause some problems. So, last weekend I sent the building inspector an email with the explanations. Only one of them is something I want to share with the public. The back story is the building inspector did not see any exhaust vents in the bathrooms. This was my response:
The ventilation unit supplies fresh air for most rooms in the house and has exhaust vents in both bathrooms and the laundry room. See the attached picture of the vent in the guest bathroom. It is difficult to see without a stool or ladder. The white cylinder-shaped object on the middle right is a motion/occupancy sensor. I have attached a graph showing the time and state of the ventilation system during a typical occupied period. The ventilation is scheduled by the house computer. There is a baseline goal of six hours of ventilation per day. The computer looks at the weather forecast and schedules the time for that which pushes the house temperature in the correct direction or at least moves it least in the wrong direction. There are numerous overrides as well. The overrides of most interest to you are for high CO2 levels and for bathroom occupancy. When a bathroom becomes occupied, a ventilation override occurs. This override continues until 10 minutes after the bathroom is unoccupied.
Below, are three images. A single image sent to the building inspector. The blog software wants to change the resolution to something unusable, so I broke into these three pieces:
The inspector wrote back Monday morning saying everything was in order and wrapped up with:
This project has been so magnificent to be a part of and you have been so wonderful to work with. Thank you!
Uhh… I’ll accept it, but that is not something I ever imagined hearing from a building inspector.
After the 2024 verdict, the left’s operating system shifted from “resist” to “reclaim by any means short of open civil war, and then some.” A midterm flip in one chamber hands them the scalpel. Both chambers hands them the guillotine. What follows is not normal opposition. It is the institutionalization of grievance, the weaponization of procedure, and the elevation of pathological rage into the architecture of the state.
This is not speculation. It is pattern recognition.
The same neural circuitry that produced the 2019…2020 impeachment theater, the Russiagate industrial complex, and the administrative state as a permanent veto will simply scale. Democrats do not metabolize electoral loss as information. They metabolize it as injury. And injured narcissistic systems do not seek equilibrium. They seek dominance restoration through humiliation of the other.
I can see that. That certainly fits with the 2016 election outcome.
On Wednesday I heard someone say, “With both houses I hope they do something.” What would you like them to do, I asked. The answer was immediate, “Impeach him.”
The question of firearm policy deserves better than slogans from either side. There are genuine costs associated with firearms. There are genuine benefits. Some can be measured reasonably well. Others are much less visible in government administrative records. Some empirical questions will probably remain disputed for a long time.
But one methodological principle should not be controversial: If you are going to conduct a social cost-benefit analysis, you have to count both costs and benefits.
Do not count the criminal shooting and ignore the defensive display. Do not count the completed homicide and ignore the crime that never occurred. Do not count every misuse of a firearm while assuming every lawful possession has zero social value. And do not confuse disagreement over the precise magnitude of a benefit with evidence that the benefit does not exist.
Twelve years after I first wrote about the social utility of firearms, I would frame the issue somewhat differently. The evidence has become richer. Some of the arguments have become more complicated. And some claims deserve more caution than I gave them then.
But the fundamental point has held up remarkably well:
A society cannot intelligently decide what firearms cost while refusing to ask what they are worth.
But, of course, the gun control nuts will not discuss the topic in a fair manner. Lies and deception are a critical portion of their agenda. But pointing this out will encourage some people to think about it more carefully.
There is a final problem with treating gun policy as a conventional public-health cost-benefit exercise. The Constitution does not make the Second Amendment contingent on winning that exercise.
In District of Columbia v. Heller, Justice Scalia acknowledged the serious problem of handgun violence and the arguments supporting handgun prohibition. But the Court then said something that often disappears from today’s gun-policy debate:
“The enshrinement of constitutional rights necessarily takes certain policy choices off the table.”
The Court did not say that social consequences are irrelevant to policymakers. It said that an enumerated right limits what government may do in response to them.
Bruen made the point even more explicit. Courts are not supposed to decide Second Amendment cases by making contemporary judgments about the “costs and benefits of firearms restrictions.” The Second Amendment itself reflects a judgment made by the people who adopted it.
That distinction matters enormously. I believe the social benefits of lawful firearm ownership are substantial and routinely underestimated. But the constitutional right does not disappear if a future academic study claims otherwise.
Free speech is not protected because economists have proved that offensive speech produces a positive net social return. The Fourth Amendment does not depend on demonstrating that warrants maximize public welfare. And the Second Amendment does not survive only so long as gun owners can win an actuarial debate.
Recent peer-reviewed research finds that right-to-carry concealed handgun laws reduce violent crime by about 5%, while constitutional carry laws reduce it by more than 15%.
