…then apply it to incentives to commit crime. Disarming everyone will only make committing crime safer and will increase crime and anti-social behavior. Make everyone carry condition 1, and we’ll reduce ADs and NDs as well.
Mike H. September 6, 2026
Via email from Mike.
The following are the primary points of the Instagram post:
From the CIA Teams discussion at work after I shared a link sent to me by Paul K. (slightly edited):
Joe: I have not read all of it yet, but there are some “interesting” projections on AI here: AI 2027.
I want an underground bunker in Idaho.
Sean: (my manager): Got room for more?
Joe: Sorry, all full and then some. I have three children, two step children, their spouses, and five grandchildren.
Sean: What if I can provide valuable skills?
Joe: Two son-laws are army combat vets. One is a world class (#5 or #6) shooter. Stepdaughter is a world class machine learning expert. Stepson and one daughter are top notch computer programmers. The IQ range of the kids and step kids ranges from 125 to at least 155. My brothers are farmers two miles away with non-computerized farming equipment, fully equipped metal and wood shops. One daughter has an accounting degree. There are two art majors in the mix.
We have more guns than we can count. Probably 50,000 rounds of ammunition. Equipment to assemble two to three thousand rounds per hour (given the components).
What are you bringing? We could use someone with high level medical training.
At this point if you haven’t been planning and working on it for several years and the predictions come true you probably are too late.
I’m not convinced the predictions are likely to come true. Historically, there have been many, many predictions of doom. While there have been lots of disruptions of “normal” life, things always resolved into something pretty good. The examples include industrial revolution, nuclear weapon proliferation, nuclear winter, global cooling and more recently global warming. Women’s liberation and the birth control pill were used to predict social catastrophe. Before that, women being allows to vote was predicted to be catastrophic. Even the Internet and video games were predicted to be disruptors of society.
Read the books from the 1960’s and 1970’s such as Silent Spring (I was convinced when I read it but later found out that many of the references were fake and/or severely distorted) and Future Shock (required reading for an engineering class in college, I did not find it believable and was very annoyed with the movie version). They were very popular in their time but dismal failures at predicting the future.
Fear sells and spreads far better than predicting increasing or even maintaining our current comfort level. Looking at the probabilities of propagation, you are far more likely to see doom predictions than the utopia predictions. But the long-term historical trend lines by far favor the utopian vision.
That said, the way you want to bet is not necessary on what is most likely to occur. If you cannot afford to lose the bet but betting in the direction you likely have a moderate outcome in nearly all situations you should give serious consideration to betting on the lower odds outcome.
Quantum mechanics presents a view of reality in which we inhabit many worlds at once. As the political scientist Alexander Wendt has put it in Quantum Mind and Social Science, we are “walking wave functions,” which “collapse” at decisive moments, when everyone is forced to accept the same reality, but in a way that reconfigures each person’s view of how the past was and the future will be. Niels Bohr introduced the word “incommensurability,” which Thomas Kuhn popularized, to characterize the kind of “coherence” involved here. For example, Galileo could imagine living in both a geocentric and a heliocentric world, until his telescopic observations convinced him of the latter. At that moment, he started living exclusively in the heliocentric world and proceeded so much in that way that he eventually faced a Papal Inquisition.
We tend to think we live in a shared reality, with differences in how we experience the world attributed to differences in perspective. But according to philosopher and founder of social epistemology, Steve Fuller, this is a radical mistake. Breakthroughs in neuroscience, quantum mechanics, and AI show that we don’t have different perspectives on the same reality. We inhabit different realities altogether.
I’m not complete sold on this but I’m willing to say I find very little to disagree with him on this topic. And using this framework as a model for human behavior could be very useful. I’ll have to think on this some more.
One of the first thoughts that come to mind is how gun owners versus gun grabber’s view firearms.
Gun owners tend to think of them as defensive tools used to protect innocent lives and their property. Government confiscation of firearms is viewed as enabling enslavement and/or genocide.
Gun grabbers tend think of firearms as tools of criminals to commit violent crime. Government confiscation of firearms is viewed as reducing violent crime and even reducing the number of criminals. There is no downside to gun confiscation if the ignorant, stupid, deplorables would just turn their guns in without a fuss.
These two groups live in irreconcilable realities and live their lives immersed in them without significant discomfort or desire to challenge their beliefs.
The Founders were not naïve children. They built checks because they assumed men were not angels. Then parties formed anyway, captured the machinery, and taught each generation that the other color is the existential threat.
That teaching is the product. The product sells.
You think you chose a side. A side chose a use for you.
For as much as I’ve mellowed on the libertarian shit, I’m starting to regret as a younger man I didn’t just put all my money into gold and machine guns.
I usually avoid quoting long posts in their entirety. I’m making an exception for this because there is stuff here that I was unaware of. Independently any one of these would just be a speed bump for the next anti-gunowner administration. Together, combined with what is coming down the road in the next few years, this is closer to a brick wall.
The second Trump Administration has thus far exceeded all expectations when it comes to its nearly unprecedented defense of the Second Amendment. While Trump’s first term gave us hugely important wins on judicial appointments at SCOTUS and the lower courts, that was just about all we got. This term is much different. We are still getting good judicial picks, but are also making so much more progress beyond that baseline. This has been the first time any Department of Justice has meaningfully championed the Second Amendment since the days of the Freedmen’s Bureau during Reconstruction.
Given that, I thought it made sense to maintain a list summarizing the Trump Administration’s actions related to gun rights. I will do my best to keep this updated. If you can think of important things I missed, list them in the comments below.
LAST UPDATED: September 4, 2026.
General News
1. President Trump issues an executive order to defend the Second Amendment and directing further action.
5. US concedes inUS v. Petersonthat suppressors enjoy some degree of Second Amendment protection and may not be totally banned (an important concession to be used in states with total bans).
6. “Big Beautiful Bill” zeroes the tax on suppressors and SBRs, though registration requirement remains(Update: enjoined for now, at least as to members of the Plaintiffs orgs in two cases). ATF manages the application surge smoothly.
7. Department of Veterans Affairs ceases reporting Veterans to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System as “prohibited persons” only because they need help from a fiduciary in managing their VA benefits.
13. A number of judges have been confirmed to the lower courts, including Emil Bove and Jennifer Mascott in the Third Circuit, both of whom played a role in securing the first circuit court win on “assault weapon” and magazine bans.
14. After losing NFA consolidated cases ofSilencer Shop v. ATFandJensen v. ATF, DOJ decides against seeking to stay the District Court injunction, meaning the registration requirements are unenforceable against the Plaintiffs in the case. But questions remain as of August 13, 2026, including whether DOJ will appeal.
🚨 BREAKING: I’ve received confirmation from the Trump Administration that the DOJ will NOT appeal our historic court victory against the NFA.
THANK YOU, PRESIDENT TRUMP and Attorney General Blanche, for delivering the most significant Second Amendment win in OVER 90 YEARS!
15. In an Office of the Legal Counsel Opinion, DOJ concludes that Section 930(d)(3) of title 18, U.S. Code, permits the lawful carrying of constitutionally protected firearms in post offices that are generally open to the public. (This follows SAF’s win on the issue inFPC, et al. v. Bondi).
16. Tate Adamiak, George Peterson, and others convicted of constitutionally questionable gun-related crimes pardoned.
Tate Adamiak endured what amounts to political persecution. His convictions under the Biden administration were premised on major factual misrepresentations by the government and had significant constitutional infirmities, as we recently argued in an amicus brief in his favor.… pic.twitter.com/dtv3GBbDn2
— National Association for Gun Rights (@gunrights) September 4, 2026
Civil Rights Lawsuits
1. Sued Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department over its years-long wait times for carry permits. They cited SAF’s lawsuit in their initial pattern-or-practice investigation too.
In its amended complaint against Washington DC's "assault weapon" ban, the US DOJ has now added a claim that the District's total ban on suppressors is also unconstitutional. pic.twitter.com/diptits9Zv
1. Massive rights restoration process being implemented, with Final Rule published on August 17, 2026. While imperfect (SAF submitted a comment letter, and the final rule addressed some of our concerns), it’s probably the biggest step forward on this front we have yet to see.
2. ATF rule proposed to tighten up the definition of “unlawful user of a controlled substance.” This will help plenty of casual drug users, as well as people who the government can’t prove are anything but casual users.
2. They have also filed amicus briefs in the 3rd and 7th Circuit AWB/mag ban cases, calling such bans unconstitutional. Harmeet Dhillon participated in oral arguments in the 7th Circuit.
1. Their ongoing defense of the NFA.Update as of August 12, 2026: According to Rep. Clyde, DOJ will no longer defend the NFA’s registration requirements. Many questions to be answered, however, and it’s not clear currently if they will simply not seek a stay, or not appeal at all.
2. They also defend other laws too like the Gun free School Zones Act, even as applied to those walking around their own front yard or only just slightly off of it.
3. No pardon/commutation (at least not yet) for guys likeAdamiak andHoover. This one is disappointing because President Trump has not been shy about issuing other pardons and commutations. Preposterous someone like George Santos gets released while Adamiak sits in jail.
September 4, 2026 update: Adamiak and some others have been pardoned. Hoover has not been yet, though.
4. Scope of relief issue. Relief should not be limited to only those who are members of the association at the time a lawsuit was filed, as the government now argues. That would break the whole point of associational standing and force us to do costly class actions instead. Fortunately, it seems DOJ has backed off of this extreme position, albeit with some pressure from the courts.
5. RushingHemaniand its bad facts to the front of the line of marijuana cases (though this one ended up working out for us with a great ruling from SCOTUS inHemani).
7. Benson betrayal: DOJ (Jeannine Pirro) files brief urging DC Court of Appeals to grant rehearing en banc. This is another one that seems to have ended up OK, thanks to the Third Circuit giving us a circuit split anyway. But it was still a needless error.
California’s state legislature employs some of the busiest and most creative anti-gun staffers in the world, who operate in an atmosphere of nearly complete permissiveness.
Whatever lunacy these well-schooled goons propose has an extremely high likelihood of becoming state law, especially if it targets guns or shaves a chunk off of the Second Amendment protections enjoyed by free people living in free states.
Want to buy a Glock?
Sorry, it’s not one of the handguns California’s “experts” approved for personal purchase.
Need an AR?
Sorry, all you can have is a bastardized amalgamation of AR parts that won’t accept mags or function like normal ARs do for normal people in normal states.
These well-paid legislative dullards are the reason why California’s anti-gun laws migrate east and become laws in other deep blue states.
Some of those laws have already been blocked by the courts (such as the default “no guns unless posted” law). Many of more of those laws are headed for the trash bin of history next spring when SCOTUS declares AR-15 bans are unconstitutional. I expect the restrictions on suppressors and Glocks will also fall within a year or two.
California gun owners still have a long path ahead to just get parity with nearby freer states. But there are more and more court case guiding the way. The big question is, “Will the ‘well-schooled goons’ described above ever be prosecuted?” That is probably the only thing that will completely stop them.
Russell Phagan has never met a shooting sport rule he didn’t want to push. From building out the Brutality match series with InRangeTV, to founding FAST (Firearms Action Shooting Trials) as its own standalone series, to his day job as Director of KE Arms, he’s spent two decades finding the edge of what a “practical” gun match can look like — and now he’s found a new one. FAST’s newest division is Auto-Rifle: full-auto and forced-reset-trigger rifles, competing on the same stages as everyone else, for the first time in a mainstream two-gun series. The division debuts at FAST-ID in Parma, Idaho, this October, presented by X-Tech Tactical, with Red Right Hand sponsoring a dedicated Auto-Rifle stage where every competitor — regardless of division — gets to run a belt-fed gun. Russell returns to break down why FAST is willing to build rules around FRTs when most series won’t.
I had not thought of bending the criteria of my vision a little by calling a forced reset trigger a machine gun. It’s tempting but I think I will keep pushing for the real thing.
As it is within a one-day drive of my underground bunker I might attend some time to observe the format and think if something like that could be used or adapted in a high school competition.
When the ATF talks about a “new era of reform,” the language sounds modest: transparency, accountability, and partnership with the firearms industry. That framing comes straight from the agency, which says it is reducing unnecessary burdens on lawful businesses and gun owners while grounding its actions in clear statutory authority. According to ATF, the goal is a system that is more collaborative and less adversarial.
But the practical effect is much bigger than the branding suggests. In April 2026, DOJ and ATF announced 34 proposed and final rulemaking actions after a broad regulatory review ordered under President Donald Trump’s February 7, 2025 executive order on Second Amendment rights. California Attorney General Rob Bonta called that package the largest such rollout the agency had ever introduced at one time.
That matters because regulatory systems are rarely dismantled in one sweep. They are usually loosened piece by piece: an approval requirement here, a notice mandate there, a narrower definition in one section, a lighter paperwork standard in another. The cumulative result can be a very different enforcement landscape even when the underlying statutes remain on the books.
We spent fifty years fighting a gun registry. They built one anyway, and they didn’t need a single new law to do it.
There are now more than 120,000 automated license plate cameras across 5,000 American communities. They photograph every single vehicle that passes. Plate, time, location, and the stickers on your truck.
So nobody has to build a list of gun owners. They just search the gun store. The range. The gun show parking lot. The road home.
A registry only ever knew that you bought a gun. This knows how often you shoot, which range you shoot at, and whose truck was parked next to yours when you there.
They also violate my Jews in the Attic Test. And if you want to get some bipartisan support mention how they can be used to catch women who travel across state lines to get abortions.
I could see suppressed launchers for green-tip 5.56 becoming popular.
Our research shows firearm owners are more likely to adopt safe and secure storage practices when they can choose from a range of devices that meet their needs, such as biometric safes for quick access or cable locks for hunting rifles.
Remember, safe storage saves lives. Every gun, every time.
It used to be John Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions was fighting for more gun bans, carry restrictions, and more oppressive red-flag laws. It makes me smile to see their front line has been pushed back to wistful thinking of mandatory safe storage.
Because the right to carry is a federally recognized right, a state government cannot force someone to give up their right to keep and bear arms just because they crossed a state line. The Constitution doesn’t know state lines, and neither do our rights. Permits available on paper, but nearly impossible to maintain in practice, do not meet the clearly articulated demands of the Second Amendment. We are optimistic the Court will agree and fully restore the Second Amendment rights of non-residents who wish to travel and spend time in Massachusetts.
With the state’s motion to dismiss rejected, the case will now proceed through the federal court system for further arguments on the merits of the licensing requirements.
SAF is initiating the next skirmish against the forces of evil. I donate to them monthly and wish them well.
This is a not-insignificant reason we have generationally lost the war on guns on America. In the anti-police peak-woke era, many criminal justice reformers turned against gun control. That hasn’t really reversed in these circles.
Gun culture has fully won.
The argument of the NRA is gun control-libs are fools, because they don’t understand there’re many legitimate reasons why Americans have a right to own guns, without restrictions.
Once you have public defenders in progressive cities making the exact same argument, we’ve lost.
Jeremy Wilcox @jwilcox79 Posted on X August 29 here and here.
I would not say we have fully won. I would say that we are on the offense on all fronts and a win is ours for the taking. There are still lots of ways to lose if we get some really bad luck or we make a major error.
My biggest concern is pushing the Overton Window too fast and the pearl-clutchers are able to gain some traction with people who have not been moving forward with our progress.
We really need to get mainstream culture to move with our Overton Window. Take a newbie to the range. Bring up your recent gun competition experiences when someone at work asks about your weekend. Maybe consider wearing NRA, SAF, CCRKBA, JPFO (bumper sticker with “All in favor of gun control raise your right hand” with an image of Hitler), GOA (includes socks!), and/or FPC (some particularly bold and entertaining stuff), branded clothing, use a branded mug, or put their bumper stickers on your vehicle.
Fidel Castro was a murderous communist dictator. His legacy is not heroic. It is a legacy of firing squads, political prisoners, censorship, religious persecution, stolen property, poverty, rationing, and the forced exile of millions of Cubans.
No one can lecture me about socialism or communism. Many of us, including me, fled Fidel Castro’s murderous, narco-trafficking, socialist and communist dictatorship. We did not learn about that ideology from books or political speeches. We lived it, suffered under it, and know exactly where it leads.
Today is the centenary of Fidel Castro, and the Democratic Socialists of America recognize the historic significance of both this day and the man. Fidel was an organizer, a fighter, and endures as a stalwart symbol of anti-imperialist struggle and self-determination for the Global South. DSA has a long history of solidarity with the Cuban people, their revolution, and their self-determination. We choose this historic day to recommit ourselves to acting in solidarity with the Cuban people and to starkly opposing Marco Rubio’s genocidal war against the Cuban people and US imperialism writ large.
A case can be made that the DSA knows their policies are a glossy sales brochure for a product they know is, at best, a lemon. But they aspire to be in control of the stolen property, rationing, censorship, and firing squads.
British right-wing political commentator Milo Yiannopoulos has been deported from the United States after being detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
Yiannopoulos, 41, a former editor of Breitbart News and onetime political aide to rapper Kanye West, was deported on Friday, according to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
Yiannopoulos, “an illegal alien from the United Kingdom” had been sent “back to his home country”, a DHS spokesperson said in a statement given to the BBC.
The self-styled provocateur has called himself the “most fabulous supervillain on the internet”. His critics call him a purveyor of hate speech.
Yiannopoulos, who grew up in Kent in the south of England, was arrested on 27 August after arriving at Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport.
He flew into the US in May 2019 and “chose to overstay his welcome in violation of our nation’s laws”, the DHS said.
Milo appears to be having a really bad day. It was self-inflicted so I don’t have much sympathy for him.
I found him to be entertaining. But I expect he will not be in the mood to entertain for a while.
The above really got my attention because just a few days ago John Schussler said:
We have a white nationalist in the white house (ironic) who’s very very interested in getting the non-white people out and thus making the immigration process, including asylum, as difficult as possible. For the non-white people, anyway, white south africans get a free pass.
Removing people here illegally is removing people here illegally. Their race doesn’t matter to almost anyone on the right. They are here illegally, so they need to be removed.
But John appeared to be unconvinced. Milo is a just a single data point in contradiction to John’s assertion, but it is a significant point because of Milo’s celebrity status.
I would definitely advocate for that from ground, up, like abolishing [the Constitution], rewriting it, including people’s voices that haven’t been included on there as well. I would probably also rewrite all the oppressive amendments that are in there targeting marginalized individuals.
Abolishing the constitution, then rewriting the amendments? “Oppressive amendments” which are “targeting marginalized individuals?” Impressive! That is more of a word salad than even Kamala Harris serves up.
Background:
Fox News Digital spoke with attendees and activists at Friday’s March on Washington who voiced support for systemic political change, from sweeping reforms to bringing socialist policies to their hometowns as DSA-backed candidates notch primary victories ahead of the midterms.
…
“March on Washington 2026: Defend the Vote” was held Friday at the Lincoln Memorial held on the 63rd anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington, organized by Rev. Al Sharpton’s National Action Network.
Fox News Digital spoke with a handful of attendees, asking whether they would support abolishing and rewriting the Constitution and whether DSA policies are good for the direction of America — questions that drew support from some of those interviewed.
I have to believe Fox News chose the most “interesting” sound bites. If that were representative of the median political awareness of the “activists” I would be impressed if they are able to able to use public transportation without assistance. Still, it is disturbing that people who are politically active are so out of touch with reality.
I’ve mentioned this before, but it is worth repeating, I’m reminded of something my counselor told me (paraphrasing), “People with personality disorders have a strong drive to control other people. They have so much chaos in their own minds that it feels good to control others.”
One could argue that other countries such as in Western Europe people get along just fine without ordinary people carrying guns. You might even be able to get away with saying that. But that is only because there several million victims of the Nazis who are not available to protest to that assertion.
I always understood why the Second Amendment was constitutionally protected.
What I never really understood was why people called it a natural right.
Then I moved from New York to Florida.
I didn’t own a gun yet.
One afternoon I was loading things into the trunk of my car outside a HomeGoods when a man approached me.
“Excuse me.”
He must have thought he’d startled me, because he immediately added, “Don’t worry. I’m not going to get close.”
I laughed.
“I’m a New Yorker. I’m used to close. How can I help you?”
He started telling me that he needed money for gas.
At some point while he was talking, I got into my car.
And sitting there, with the conversation still unfolding, I suddenly realized something:
He didn’t know whether I had a gun.
Not somewhere at home.
Not hypothetically.
For all he knew, I could have had one right there in the car, tucked under the steering wheel or within reach.
I didn’t.
But he couldn’t know that.
Schrödinger’s gun.
And in that instant, before I even knew whether his story was true, something changed in the space between us.
I thought about New York.
I thought about my friend who had been murdered in his own apartment during a burglary gone wrong.
Would those men have gone into his apartment if they had believed he might be armed?
I don’t know.
I thought about the time I was mugged at gunpoint, with a gun pressed against my temple.
Would that man have approached me with the same confidence if he had believed there was even a possibility that I could defend myself?
I don’t know that either.
But sitting there in that Florida parking lot, listening to this stranger talk, I suddenly understood deterrence in a way I never had before.
Not as military theory.
Not as constitutional law.
As something intimate.
My body. My life. The few feet between one person and another.
For years I had thought about guns primarily as objects: who had one, who shouldn’t have one, what laws should govern them.
Suddenly I understood the question from the other direction.
What changes when another person cannot simply assume that I am defenseless?
I felt taller.
Not because I had a gun.
I didn’t.
But because, for the first time, I understood that someone approaching me could not automatically assume that being physically stronger meant having power over me.
There was uncertainty.
There was a boundary around my body that had to be taken seriously.
Then his story began to fall apart.
I told him I didn’t have cash, but offered to help another way. I could put some gas in his car.
He took off.
So apparently, yes, it was a scam.
But by then I had already understood something much larger than the scam.
The phrase natural right finally made sense to me.
The Constitution had not given me ownership of my body.
It had not given me my life.
It had not invented my right to protect either one.
Those things came first.
What I understood that afternoon was the thing underneath them.
I had once been completely helpless while another human being held a gun against my temple.
Years later, without a gun in my possession at all, I understood what it meant for the person approaching me not to know whether I was helpless.
That uncertainty changed the space between us.
And that was the moment I finally understood the natural right behind the Second Amendment:
My life is mine, and the right to defend it has to exist before anyone gives me permission to do so.
In 1948, a 32-year-old at Bell Labs published a paper nobody fully understood.
Engineers found it too mathematical. Mathematicians found it too engineering-focused. One prominent mathematician reviewed it negatively.
That paper – “A Mathematical Theory of Communication”, became the founding document of the digital age.
The man was Claude Shannon. Father of Information Theory.
At 21, he wrote the most important master’s thesis of the 20th century.
Working at MIT on an early mechanical computer, Shannon noticed its relay switches had exactly two states – open or closed. He had just taken a philosophy course introducing Boolean algebra, which also operated on two values: true and false.
Nobody had ever connected these two things.
His 1937 thesis proved that Boolean algebra and electrical circuits are mathematically identical, and that any logical operation could be built from simple switches.
Howard Gardner called it “possibly the most important, and also the most famous, master’s thesis of the century.”
Every digital computer ever built traces back to this insight.
At 29, he proved that perfect encryption exists.
…
Claude, the AI model, is named after Claude Shannon, the mathematician who laid the foundation for the digital world we rely on today.
