Quote of the Day
What this third circuit opinion shows is that there are very few gun laws that are safe from being struck down right now.
Adam Winkler
Law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles
July 18, 2026
Federal court strikes down New Jersey ban on assault rifles and large-capacity magazines
I’ve been quoting Winkler since 2008 (see also here). I would never call him a friend to the gun rights movement. But he is mostly accurate, if you ignore what some people might say are lies by omissions, in his observations.
That he says, “there very few guns laws that are safe”, is an admission from the other side that a structural collapse in our opposition is in sight. This is other evidence of this too:
Via Kostas Moros @MorosKostas:
I think a lot of folks on the left see this like I saw the gay marriage issue: Regardless of how one might feel about it, it was a losing issue for R’s. And it is better that the debate on it just be disposed of for good. Many folks on the left know 2A is a losing issue for them. And the longer they drag it on, the more active we get about it. Being anti-2a is an anchor around their necks.
Of course, that is not the universally accepted take:
Via Lord O’ Valinor 🆗 @Lord0fValinor:
Because they want the guns to violently overthrow the government and give us communism
That’s plausible. But I don’t think that is the way to bet.
That last comment is actually fairly plausible, because the left’s “gun bans” have never been about banning all guns; it always has been about disarming anyone who isn’t “our people”. The canonical example is NYC, where the ordinary people were disarmed, but friends of the powerful like the publisher of the New York Times of course had no problem getting a license to carry.
And normal applicants for an LTC needing to show proficiency in a live-fire test (I wouldn’t be surprised if the well-connected are exempted), but NYPD officers famously being unable to hit the broad side of a barn … from inside the structure.
The difference? LTC applicants’ guns are “your guns” and automatically suspect, while NYPD officers’ guns are “their guns” and automatically okay.
The Left has never been “anti-gun,” they’re “anti-your-gun.”
Gun control has been a strategic loser for the Left WHEN THE RIGHT GAVE VOTERS AN ALTERNATIVE.
Up until the early years of the third millennium, eventual confiscation seemed to be the future. It was not popular with the American people; in fact, just saying, “I support gun control” in public could get your ass kicked. But the national Republican party was consistently holding the Second Amendment out as a means of getting votes, and then knifing gun owners in the back.
It wasn’t until gun owners took matters into their own hands that they started winning on specific issues, as opposed to winning empty election victories.
And there are still some elected Republicans who are hoping for a chance to abandon the 2A. The most recent to come out of the gun control closet, John Cornyn, is soon to be a former senator.
RE: John Cornyn, et al.
As others have pointed out: With Republicans like these, who needs Democrats?
In seriousness, though, I’m very glad the voting base was able to turn out in the primary and boot him. That is the way to get rid of RINOs. Second-best would be to vote in Democrats to replace them; if the RINOs are going to abandon the 2A and support immigration amnesty, what’s the functional difference between them and the Dems, really? At least the Dems are honest about their policy preferences and (metaphorically) stab you in the front instead of the back, and we can hopefully get better GOP candidates next term.
“I think a lot of folks on the left see this like I saw the gay marriage issue: Regardless of how one might feel about it, it was a losing issue for R’s. ”
Only because they made actively bad arguments.
Even then, it was imposed by the courts (over the clear and obvious verbiage in the Constitution and the clear and obvious intentions of those who wrote the Constitution) since it couldn’t pass even in the most liberal places. It had to be imposed because it couldn’t pass.
The case before SCOTUS was dumb and poorly argued, and even then, the arguments in the “winning” ruling were all over the page, with big emotional pieces over legal arguments.
“The gay marriage issue: Regardless of how one might feel about it, it was a losing issue for R’s. ”
This might be the case, now, but gay marriage and abortion have both predominately been “forced” upon society by judges, not commonly instituted by legislatures or ballot propositions.
Without court actions conditioning acceptance I suspect neither would ever have been legalized.
You do remember there were 16 states that affirmatively legalized same-sex marriage through state legislation, state court rulings, or direct popular vote, right?
It was nothing like how constitutional carry has been legalized by more than half the states, but it was a non-trivial number.
Yes, after judges had “softened” up the opposition.
In 2008 in California, yes, California, a gay marriage proposition was defeated.
Even Obama claimed to be against it in 2008, because, at that time, the public hadn’t been properly conditioned.
They will never give up. It is a religious issue. They have essentially unlimited money. They can lose court cases forever and come back again.
A LOT of their “unlimited money” was in the form of government grants to “charities” who then laundered that money to lobbying and lawsuit groups. It was never unlimited money, it was just OUR money. Taxpayer money was being funneled to congressional bribes, lobbyists, and “sue-and-settle” activism.
Why do you think they’re screaming so loudly about the curtailing of grants and fraud?
Exactly. And in the meantime, they keep the right fighting this constantly, rather than on other extremely important things, like mass immigration (both legal and illegal), compromised elections, exporting jobs, debt, ever-expanding government, and a host of other things that have transformed our country for the worse. Drawing out a losing battle that distracts your enemy from the real goal is a setback, an acceptable cost of maintaining power, not a loss they really care about (beyond a handful of true believers).
How many other things could we have done that were more productive / protective if we didn’t constantly have to spend your time, money, and focus on this battlefield? It almost worked, too.
Michael Bloomberg and George Soros have joined the chat.
Eliminate government grants. It might have been a good thing in the beginning, but the Big Government guys (read: Democrat Party) have gamed the system to finance themselves. All in all, grants are a net negative.
If that were true we would still have the Federal AWB and worse, CCW followed by constitutional carry would not have spread across the land, etc.
The moment you ascribe infinite agency to the enemy you reveal yourself to be either a coward or a traitor. Either way it’s time to pull you off the lines and start having some uncomfortable conversations.
“They can lose court cases forever and come back again.”
His description of “unlimited” money is certainly overstatement, but I’m not sure this is – there is no particular end point for them, as it is, functionally, a “religious issue”.
There is a limit as to how much they can have going at any one moment, of course, or how much money they can spend in any given year, etc, but the source of their money is not, generally, being harmed by how much they spend inside those (very large) limits.
Like a military force made up of zealots, they make an assault, win or lose, and then prepare for the next action. For the core group, there is no morale to lose, and their funding largely just… continues, almost no matter the outcome.
And since this isn’t *actually* a military campaign, there are no losses, save from age or disease, so they can (and do) just keep coming back, time after time after time.
The victories we have are *in spite* of those conditions, and focusing too much on the conditions can be demoralizing, certainly, but pretending those aren’t the conditions is also problematic for several reasons.
A religious issue, *which they have been losing on consistently for three decades now*. It is one thing to try to predict the future and fail, but this model of the world can’t even successfully predict the past. It fails the most basic possible test.
Because it is a religious issue for them they are forced to spend resources defending indefensible positions which could have gone to something else.
Because it is a religious issue for them and they keep losing they have been reduced to trying to fortify their existing territory and ignoring reality in ever more ludicrous ways, most recently by trying to ban all manufacturing of any sort.
Leftist gun control enthusiasts are self-creating their demand for gun control. Leftists control most urban minority districts. Their control subverts the very things that support community stability. Their policies discourage forming stable families, education services are dreadful and there is a lack of family wage jobs. The effect is a voter base dependent on civic handouts. And a side effect of the leftist’s control is social mayhem and gun violence. It is this leftist decades long urban social system has that produced the nation’s gun violence. Laws restricting private gun ownership is not the answer, correcting the left’s mistreatment of minority communities, for votes, is.
How about not “comparing it” to anything but the 2d Amendment itself? No need for other social issues. Simply stay with the issue at hand.
And that issue, after deades of foot-dragging by liberal Judges has become a problem for them; one that the 3rd Circuit no less, had to finally recognize.
Forget about the comparative noise, and stay steady with the probative reality; that the decades-long “try” has failed.
Thus, focus on clearing the residual brush of that which is attempted to be continued, and all lingerers seeking to salvage same.
That having been said, keep a future eye on laser/beam weapons, and their generally accepted argument to come…