This important judgment means that people must maintain their Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms when they cross California’s border. Just as people are free to speak or worship in states they don’t reside in, this win makes clear they are likewise free to bear arms for lawful purposes throughout the United States. Unlike Louisiana, which recently repealed their unconstitutional residency requirement following an FPC legal challenge, California’s commitment to tyranny forced us to take this case to a final judgment. FPC will continue to eliminate unconstitutional residency requirements and other bans so that people can exercise their rights when, where, and how they choose.
At the end of April, I posted about the preliminary injunction in the case. This is the final judgement. Of course, the state may appeal it. Historically, the odds of the 9th circuit siding with the 2nd Amendment are almost exactly zero.
California has 14 days to file a notice of appeal in the case. Today is the 14th day. Check here to see what they decide.
I am still undecided, but I am leaning towards abolishing them one at a time rather than combining them then trying to abolish the conglomerate. The reason being that while there are votes to be had from across the aisle for the abolishment of the DEA, I think there are more votes to be lost by people strongly opposed to legalized recreational drugs. Abolish what we can, when we can, then look for an opportunity to get rid of other agencies when the time is right.
Gun Owners of America is alarmed, warning such a merger would enable even greater anti-liberty/gun mischief, such as:
*The combined agency would have three times the ATF budget *Four times current ATF tactical (SWAT-like) units *More than 10,000 new employees *Reduced oversight and accountability
The DOJ’s dangerous proposal would consolidate the ATF and DEA into an authoritarian “super-agency” with the combined powers to wage the failed war on drugs and enforce unconstitutional federal gun control laws against all Americans, not just violent criminals and drug cartels. By merging the ATF’s firearms enforcement authority into the DEA, the DOJ is effectively equating peaceable American gun owners with drug cartels, turning millions of law-abiding citizens—as well as their constitutionally protected weapons—into co-equal targets of a militarized federal enforcement regime.
It’s hard to know who is right in this case. There’s no question the ATF has all too often abused its power, serving as an anti-gun enforcer for anti-liberty/gunners rather than a professional, non-partisan law enforcement agency. Too often their enforcement targets have been gun dealers who made innocent paperwork errors, or Americans with no criminal intent charged with made-up crimes. Some in Congress continue to want to entirely abolish the ATF, an idea that could arguably strengthen individual liberty.
It’s also hard to imagine how the legally mandated tasks of both agencies might be combined in a way that would make either more efficient or less costly.
Guns being stolen from cars is a problem…one created by failed government policies and anti-gun corporate rules that coerce responsible gun owners into leaving firearms in vehicles.
The government creates the problem, complains about it, then demands more control.
The framed picture below was given to me a long time ago. I don’t even remember who gave it to me. It probably was one of my children. The packaging has suffered some damage, but the idea is still valid:
— Firearms Policy Coalition (@gunpolicy) July 12, 2025
If you like the disrespect of anti-gun people and rough language follow the FPC on X and donate money. They do good work even if their public presence does not have the politeness and polish of the older pro-gun organizations. Or… perhaps because of it.
Congress should never have shifted responsibility to the courts to strike down the archaic National Firearms Act of 1934. Now GOA will do what Republicans would not: continue the fight to repeal the NFA.
I understand the sentiment. I don’t even disagree. But a court victory is more permanent than a legislative victory. It is more costly in both time and money. But it does have advantages.
There has been talk of combining the ATF into the DEA. Gun rights groups are opposed to this (see also here). I’m not entirely convinced it is a bad idea. But that could be a bias of mine.
You see, I am of the opinion that the DEA should be abolished. Where in the constitution does it say the Feds have the authority to regulate recreational drugs? How many billions have they spend on the failed war on drugs? And if you don’t think it has actually failed, here are some things to consider:
The DEA was established in 1973, and tracking heroin street prices over the decades reveals some fascinating—and troubling—trends. Here’s a summary of the data I found:
📈 Heroin Street Price Trends (1973–2011)
The DEA’s Heroin Domestic Monitor Program began collecting consistent data in 1979, focusing on price per milligram of pure heroin. Here’s a snapshot of key years:
Year
Avg. Price per mg Pure Heroin
Notes
1982
~$3.90
Very low purity (~7%)
1992
~$1.50
Purity increased to ~28%
2007
~$0.81
Mexican heroin purity ~33%
2011
~$1.35
Mexican heroin purity dropped to ~17%
These prices reflect retail-level purchases made by DEA agents in major U.S. cities.
🧪 Purity vs. Price
As purity increased, price per mg of pure heroin dropped—making heroin more potent and affordable.
By the 2000s, heroin from Mexico and South America dominated the U.S. market, with regional differences in purity and price.
📉 Long-Term Trend
From the early 1980s to the early 2000s:
Price per pure mg dropped significantly
Purity rose, peaking in some cities at over 60%
This made heroin more dangerous and accessible, contributing to rising overdose rates
Since its founding in 1973, the DEA’s budget has grown dramatically—from $75 million in its first year to over $3.4 billion in recent years2.
💰 Estimated Total DEA Spending (1973–2023)
Using historical budget data from DEA.gov, here’s a rough cumulative estimate:
1973–1980: ~$1.4 billion
1981–1990: ~$2.7 billion
1991–2000: ~$13.2 billion
2001–2010: ~$22.6 billion
2011–2020: ~$28.6 billion
2021–2023: ~$9.5 billion
🧮 Grand Total Estimate: ~$78 billion
These figures are approximations based on annual appropriations and may not include all supplemental or off-budget expenditures.
📊 Spending Highlights
The DEA’s budget has consistently increased, especially during periods of heightened drug enforcement focus (e.g., crack epidemic, opioid crisis).
In 2023, the DEA requested $3.1 billion, a 6.3% increase over the previous year.
The agency now operates in 93 foreign offices across 69 countries, reflecting its global reach.
So… if the war on drugs was effective you would think the price would go up and the purity would go down. That is pretty much a well-known economic law, right? But that is not what happened. It seems to me that either the war on drugs was ineffective and the price and purity changes were unrelated, or the DEA somehow contributed to the lower prices and increased purity.
Either way we are faced with the fact that the war on drugs has either failed or it is not about making it more difficult for people to obtain recreational drugs. Perhaps it is more about acquiring power as in the famous Ayn Rand quote from Atlas Shrugged.
In my mind, combing the ATF and DEA sort of makes sense because we might be able to get more support from those opposed to the war on drugs who might be opposed to reducing gun regulations.
NSSF®, The Firearm Industry Trade Association, has confirmed with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) that the Demand 2 Program is ending. That program, begun in February of 2000 during the antigun Clinton administration, required federal firearms licensees (FFLs) that have 25 or more firearms traced back to them subsequent to the recovery at a crime scene and the time from retail sale to trace is three years or less (what ATF calls “time-to-crime”). NSSF has been critical of the misuse of this protected firearm trace data to attempt to “name-and-shame” firearm retailers for crimes in which they had no involvement.
If you spend about three seconds thinking about this program, you realize that large retailers could have a very low rate of guns showing up at a crime scenes but frequently trip the threshold for getting a less than friendly visit from the ATF. And at the same time someone who sells eight guns a year and they all end up at crime scenes would not get “the visit.”
As is almost always the case with anti-gun advocates and politicians, it is never about crime reduction. It is about raising the cost, in money and time, of gun sales and ownership.
This infringement program has been in place for more than 25 years. It is long past the time the criminals involved should have been prosecuted. That probably will never happen in this case, but at least the program is winding down.
An initiative spearheaded by the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms (CCRKBA) and the New Jersey Firearms Owners Syndicate (NJFOS), with the robust backing of the National Rifle Association Institute for Legislative Action (NRA-ILA), has seen Englishtown, New Jersey, pass a resolution to refund the municipal portion of permit to carry fees to applicants.
This success marks the beginning of a concerted effort by the three organizations to replicate the refund resolution across the entire Garden State.
At the heart of this movement are New Jersey’s current permit-to-carry fees, which stand at $200. A significant $150 of this fee goes directly to the local municipality.
Critics argue that a negligible amount of these funds actually covers the administrative costs of issuing permits, strongly suggesting the fee is “strictly punitive in nature” and designed to discourage citizens from exercising their Second Amendment rights.
The NFA is nothing more than a tax scheme which has imposed an unconstitutional burden on Americans since 1934. The registration of these items was only justified as the means to ensure taxes on them had been paid. With the One Big, Beautiful Bill zeroing out the tax for silencers and short barreled firearms, the registration scheme serves no other purpose than to create an unlawful barrier to keep people from exercising their Second Amendment rights. Our intention with this new lawsuit is to completely remove these barriers.
SAF has been fighting for more than 50 years to remove unnecessary burdens to our constitutional freedoms, and we welcome the opportunity to fight for the further dismantling of the NFA in court. The reforms in the One Big, Beautiful Bill represent the biggest blow to the NFA since its inception, and we fully support its complete repeal. Just like we’ve done for more than five decades, SAF will continue to fight so all Americans can have the freedom to exercise their Second Amendment rights for generations to come.
Celebrate and then do what you can to continue the fight for the freedom promised by the 2nd Amendment. I, with the help of my employer, donate thousands of dollars each year to FPC and SAF.
This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to dismantle one of the most abusive federal gun control laws on the books. With the tax struck down by Congress, the rest of the NFA is standing on air.
It was appropriate that the bill was signed on July 4th.
Once we get rid of the registration, fingerprints, and extended background check aspects for the suppressors, short-barreled rifles, and short-barreled shotguns we will have created a very powerful legal weapon. The precedents established will make the elimination of restrictions on machine guns obvious and achievable.
The Declaration of Causes of Taking Up Arms of July 6, 1775, drafted by Thomas Jefferson and John Dickinson and passed by the Continental Congress, protested Gage’s seizure of arms as follows: The inhabitants of Boston being confined within that town by the General their Governor, and having, in order to procure their dismission, entered into a treaty with him, it was stipulated that the said inhabitants having deposited their arms with their own magistrates, should have liberty to depart, taking with them their other effects. They accordingly delivered up their arms, but in open violation of honor, in defiance of the obligation of treaties, which even savage nations esteem sacred, the Governor ordered the arms deposited as aforesaid, that they might be preserved for their owners, to be seized by a body of soldiers; detained the greatest part of the inhabitants in the town, and compelled the few who were permitted to retire, to leave their most valuable effects behind.
A Virginia gentleman wrote to a friend in Scotland on Sept. 1, 1775: “We are all in arms, exercising and training old and young to the use of the gun. No person goes abroad without his sword, or gun, or pistols.”
After the British army abandoned Boston on March 17, 1776, the selectmen returned and discovered that the surrendered arms that had been stored in Faneuil Hall were damaged or destroyed. What was left was sold as replacement parts and scrap.
Gage’s confiscation and destruction of their arms contributed to the Americans’ historical mistrust of government control of their firearms. His promise that surrendered firearms would be returned to their owners was a lie. The longstanding American aversion to firearm registration that continues today is rooted in the historical experience that it will lead to confiscation.
According to a Gallup poll taken the year after NCCH’s founding (1975), when asked “Do you think there should or should not be a law that would ban the possession of handguns, except by the police and other authorized persons?,” 41 percent of Americans stated that there should be. Asking the same question in 2018, only 28 percent of those polled supported such a measure.
After 45 years of failure to achieve their goal, a more introspective group might consider that there may be a defect in their ideas rather than their marketing. However, history suggests that it is only a matter of time before “Brady” undergoes yet another name change. They should spare themselves the consulting fees. Continuing the trend of creating ever more concise names, the group should further truncate “Brady” to just “Y.” As in: Why does this decrepit handgun prohibition organization still exist?
Y indeed? That was in 2019. It has now been over 50 years of mostly failure, lies, and more lies.
Their founding goal was to ban all handgun possession except for a few exceptions. They have failed after trying for over fifty years. And they have even lost ground with public carry now being (mostly) acknowledged as a constitutionally protected right in all 50 states.
The ban on commercial pistol sales to 18-to-20-year-olds will likely go unenforced in parts of the country following a Trump Administration decision not to further pursue one case against it.
On Friday, the Department of Justice (DOJ) quietly allowed a deadline to file an appeal with the Supreme Court in the case Reese v. ATF to pass. As a result, a unanimous January decision from the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals–which covers Texas, Mississippi, and Louisiana–will stand. The panel held that a combination of federal statutes banning licensed firearm dealers from selling pistols to young adults violates the Second Amendment.
I suspect progun groups will appeal the Fourth Circuit decision and SCOTUS will probably accept the request for cert. This will probably result in a resolution by June of 2026.
What I want to know is how will the 4473’s be handled until SCOTUS resolves the issue? Will there be a special “Fifth Circuit” 4473? Will the DOJ announce they will decline to prosecute until the circuit split is resolved?
Our latest legal briefs again argued that because AB 2571 implicates core First Amendment rights, any restrictions must survive strict scrutiny and be narrowly tailored—something the court appeared to accept. There were some powerful moments at the argument, especially when the state’s attorney argued trying to defend Assembly Bill 2571, a law that bans advertising firearms to youth shooters. The Ninth Circuit panel was notably and vocally skeptical of the state’s lawyer’s arguments, pressing hard on the state’s efforts to carve out exceptions to the current injunction that blocks the law from taking effect so that most advertisements could still be banned. The state’s efforts seem to have failed, but we won’t know for sure until the Ninth Circuit issues its ruling.
Let me rephrase this. Supposed I handed you $1 Million dollars in cash to hold and keep safe for me every Monday through Friday from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. And the place where you work and keep this treasure safe is public property — or at least open to the public. The building is not built like a bank or courthouse. It has no armed guards at all doors or other elevated security — other than a sign warning people about bringing weapons on to the property. Bad people know these facts.
Now let me add that 20 to 25 other people also hand you $1 Million dollars in cash as well, under the same conditions. Which means every Monday through Friday, from 8 to 3, you are holding and taking care of $25 Million. This is your job, you have promised to return the money, safely, to all the people every day at 3 p.m.
The brainwashed teacher’s sign is additional essential context:
🙄 Let me rephrase this. Supposed I handed you $1 Million dollars in cash to hold and keep safe for me every Monday through Friday from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. And the place where you work and keep this treasure safe is public property — or at least open to the public. The building is… pic.twitter.com/1zKCDANalH
In the National Instant background Check System (NICS) data, it appears most of the denials are false positives. Hard data on the errors found in the NICS system are not available. John has pointed out there are very few prosecutions of people who have been denied by the NICS system compared to the number of those denied. John stated NICS denials are often based on the phonetic spelling of the last name. The denials are not done with high levels of certainty. Because many people in the same ethnic group have similar sounding names, and because Blacks and Hispanics have much higher rates of felony convictions than Whites or Asians, it is likely Black and Hispanic people are denied from purchasing firearms in the NICS system at a much higher rates than people who are not Black or Hispanic.
In October of 2020, John Lott was appointed as a senior adviser for research and statistics at the Office of Justice Programs. This was the second time he had worked for the government in D.C. When John got to DC, John went to the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) and proposed a study of the NICS denials including data on race and sex. The BJS thought it was a great idea.
The the BJS sent the request for data to the FBI. went through the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS). The BJS thought the idea of analyzing the NICS data was very good. When the Bureau of Justice Statistics contacted the FBI, The FBI responded, claiming there was no way we can get this done before January 20th. In any case, we are sure the Biden Administration will not be interested. After more emails and calls, the FBI response was: we just can’t think of any reason why anyone would want to break down this data by race and sex.
John responded: You guys break down everything by race and sex. What’s the big deal with this?
The BJS tells the FBI, it is not your decision to make. We decide what to look at and study. Your job is to collect and give us the data. The FBI refuses and the BJS persists. Finally, the FBI says the BJS will have to submit a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.
…
The AG, Bill Barr, orders the FBI to stop mucking around and send the data to the BJS.
…
The FBI dithers and delays. After a couple of weeks, the BJS receives the data, but something is wrong with it. It does not make any sense. The BJS complains, and the FBI apologizes, says they do not understand what went wrong. There are more delays, then the FBI sends another batch of data, which still doesn’t make an sense. This sequence happens a couple more times. The last time the FBI sends data which does not make sense is on January 19, 2021. Then the Biden administration takes power.
In a sharp and unanimous 3-0 decision, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has struck down California’s controversial “one-gun-a-month” law. This law, which limited law-abiding residents to purchasing just one firearm every 30 days, was found to violate the Second Amendment. The case, Nguyen v. Bonta, has now set a powerful precedent in favor of gun rights and against what the court called “meaningful constraints” on constitutionally protected conduct.
MTHead frequently asserts communism and/or socialism and/or gun control are crimes against humanity. He is not wrong. But the cancer metaphor resonates more with me. Collectivism, in all its forms, starts out small but grows and metastasizes. It is more than just its nature. It creates societal problems, and it always demands more control to fix the problems it directly or indirectly created.
Almost as a side note… I asked Copilot to explain the difference between an analogy and a metaphor to make sure I was using the correct word here. That resulting in a short chat and Copilot offered to contribute to this blog post. Here is its suggestion:
Quote of the Day – Saturday
> “Collectivism is cancer.” > —Firearms Policy Coalition via X
This is not an analogy. It’s a metaphor—brutal, condensed, and surgical. Cancer isn’t merely unpleasant; it hijacks the healthy systems of the body and redirects them toward uncontrolled destruction. That’s precisely the charge being leveled here: that collectivism corrodes the moral immune system of individual rights.
Ayn Rand’s words, featured in the image, drive the point deeper: “The smallest minority on earth is the individual.” The meme unpacks the metaphor into a worldview—one where individual autonomy is not just precious, but sacred, and any system that subsumes it becomes existentially malignant.
Whether you find that view compelling or inflammatory, it’s a vivid reminder: how we frame ideas matters. A well-placed metaphor can do more in five words than a dissertation in fifty pages.
