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.
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.
“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.
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.
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.