Greener Pastures

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On Dec. 1, 2025, Washington reported 706,046 active CPLs. On April 1, that number had plummeted to 696,015. The alarming decline has been explained by many gun owners, saying they’ve either left Washington for more Second Amendment-friendly environs in Idaho, Texas, Oklahoma and elsewhere, while others have decided to carry without a CPL because they refuse to pay the state to exercise their right to bear arms, which is specifically protected by both the state and federal constitutions.

Dave Workman
April 3, 2026
Wash. CPL Numbers Decline; Gun Owners Flee, Others Refuse to Renew – TheGunMag

I think the Washington state gun laws will be straightened out by the Federal courts in less than five years. But the taxes and crime situation will probably continue to deteriorate. So, with that in mind I am working on an escape plan. I can’t leave right now because I need to save up money for retirement. Underground bunkers in Idaho are expensive.

The underground bunker be completed soon (only a few more days of work). I will then start counting the days until I can retire and have the option to leave Washington state as well.

Are you thinking of fleeing the tyranny of your state too? I’m giving free tours of my underground bunk to people attending Boomershoot this year (the first weekend of May). It would give you something to think about…

Free Speech and Guns

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Brits surrendered their firearms in 1997.

Less than 30 years later, they’re being arrested for Facebook posts.

That’s not “safety.” That’s the speed of tyranny once a government knows its citizens can’t push back.

When people are disarmed, the state no longer fears the people. And when governments have zero fear of the people, they do whatever the hell they want.

Stacy is Right @PoliticalStacy
Posted on X, April 4, 2026

From later in the same thread:

Possession and Carry on Military Bases

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SAF fully supports Secretary Hegseth’s decision to enable our service members to be able to carry personal firearms on military bases, with any denials requiring a written explanation. SAF believes any “gun-free zones” are constitutionally questionable, and also create soft targets that are enticing to criminals and others bent on violence.

The fact that military bases, of all places, have been under such restrictions has long been perplexing to us. Serving your country should not require the wholesale abandonment of the Second Amendment right of armed self-defense. It’s excellent to hear that this dangerous policy is finally changing.

SAF @2AFDN
Posted on X, April 2, 2026

Listen to it straight from the “horse’s mouth”:

My inclination is that service members should not have to ask permission to bring personal firearms on base and carry when off duty, but I would be willing to listen to an argument in opposition to that assertion. Perhaps some military bases have reasonable justifications for such a policy.

Cry Harder

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Your “horrifying if you believe in the First Amendment” drivel is the exact cognitive blind spot these cells exploit…weaponizing free speech as a get-out-of-consequences card for those who piss on it with bullets and bombs.

Brandenburg v. Ohio carved it out decades ago:

protected speech stops cold at incitement to imminent lawless action that actually happens. They didn’t just talk; they executed.

The Constitution doesn’t shield arsonists, shooters, or terror enablers any more than it shields Al-Qaeda sympathizers handing out bomb manuals.

This verdict isn’t chilling dissent; it’s lethal accountability, the kind that deters the next cell of ideologically poisoned fuckwits from turning public facilities into kill zones.

So spare me your performative horror, you fucking idiot.

The jury saw the pathology for what it was. The FBI built the case on it. And the law cut them down.

Cry harder, sweetheart.

LHGrey™️ @grey4626
Posted on X, March 14, 2026

This was in response to:

It is interesting this person believes the First Amendment protects the destruction of government property and shooting a police officer with an AR-15. They must have crap for brains. With that broad of scope for the First Amendment, just imagine what the Second Amendment must protect. Why, it must protect the use of artillery dropping HE on the U.S. Capital or some such thing.

They Went too Far

It is surprising how fast things turned around:

At work, in January 2025, the DEI thing went away as if someone had flipped a switch.

The “progressives” went too far and they are paying a huge price.

I just hope the gun rights groups do not go too far. We still have a way to go before we get to a neutral position. I think the way to determine that is if the force of government is being used against individuals. For example:

  • You must get firearms training whether you plan to own or gun or not.
  • You must purchase a gun.
  • You must carry a gun.

Even subsidies for gun ownership or training may be too far.

I can see a case being made for all of the above with the framing of a well-regulated militia. But I caution going that far until there is a super majority of gun owners in the country.

Lead Ammunition Concerns

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Pacelle posits that lead was banned from products, including paint and gasoline, because of its toxicity.

He adds, “It’s time to restrict hunters from dispersing this toxic metal across millions of acres of New York’s landscapes, poisoning wildlife and putting themselves and their families at risk from ingesting of lead-infused wild-game meat.”

But this is all a lie. What he’s not saying is that he’s talking about entirely different kinds and uses of lead. Traditional ammunition uses non-soluble lead. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) does not consider expended ammunition, even at shooting ranges, to be a problem of “dispersing toxic metal.”

Nephi Cole
March 24, 2026
Latest Anti-Lead Ammo Attack Isn’t About Ammo at All • NSSF

That is good to know. I sometimes worry about all the lead we put into the ground at Boomershoot. It is right next to cropland. We sometimes put lime in boxes behind the targets to reduce the soil acidity. This will prevent the lead from leaching into the ground and the water. But still, without expensive testing how do we know if we have done enough or we are overdoing it?

Your Membership Isn’t Just a Card

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In September 2025, Judge Reed O’Connor declared the federal post office carry ban unconstitutional. The government failed to persuade the court that a historical tradition of such bans existed, because there wasn’t one in over 200 years. The ban didn’t even exist until 1972.

The DOJ responded by asking the court to narrow the injunction to limit protection to specific named individuals and anyone who was a SAF member at the time the lawsuit was first filed, leaving everyone who joined after that date unprotected. Their position: yes, the law is unconstitutional, but we still want to enforce it against as many people as possible.

The court rejected that argument. The injunction stands for all SAF members, present and future.

Your membership isn’t just a card. It’s a federal court order standing between you and an unconstitutional law.

Dana Wilson
Director of Development / Major Gifts Officer
Second Amendment Foundation
Via email March 24, 2026

I believe SAF does really good work. I became a life member many years ago and have been donating over $1,000/year for at least a decade. If you are not already a member and want to join you can do that here. It is more than just a legal pass to carry in the U.S. Post Office, it is funding the slap down of anti-gunners all over the country.

Another Data Point Against Socialists

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We have a great place for agriculture. We have the right climate and soils, but our cost of doing business is so much higher. The problem is Olympia. They just don’t understand agriculture — how we have to compete against other states and other countries.

Vander Kooy
March 17, 2026
What’s the matter with Washington? | Capital Press

I can not tell you how many people in the last couple of months have told me they have to leave Washington State. Today someone told me he and his wife were looking for a new place to live. The currently living in Lewiston Idaho. His wife found a nice home in Clarkston, Washington just across the river from Idaho where he has his own business. He pointed out to his wife what the business tax rate in Washington and that was enough to kill the Clarkston house without going into all the gun issues.

Washington State Democrats are full blown socialists, and some even wear that badge with pride. Socialism always kills businesses, they take your guns, and sometimes then murder their citizens, too. Don’t give socialists your support or your tax dollars. Move out of socialist states.

6G Mobile Communication Systems

5G phones have settled into common use and now 6G is on the drawing boards. So, what will be in the 6G feature set?

Read about it here: The 6G vision: Fewer dead zones, smarter networks, and built-in ‘radar’.

This looks to a scary feature:

One of the planned new features in 6G is called Integrated Sensing and Communication, or ISAC.

“It’s the big talking point that’s getting the most attention right now. ISAC means that we will no longer see the mobile network as just a way to transport data. Instead, radio waves will be transformed into a sensor, a kind of radar. The network can ‘see’ and measure distance, speed, and movement with centimeter precision without the devices needing GPS or cameras. This opens doors for everything from traffic monitoring to fall detection in healthcare,” says Mikael Gidlund, professor at Mid Sweden University.

The idea that all mobile phone masts could be able to sense their physical surroundings and detect presence or movement may sound like science fiction — and also like a nightmare from a privacy perspective. This is something Mikael Gidlund is well aware of.

“This is one of the most important technical challenges that must be solved for the technology to gain acceptance. The goal is to design the system according to the principle of ‘privacy by design.’ ISAC works like a radar, not a camera. It works with anonymous point clouds rather than biometric data. We can see that someone has fallen and needs help, but not who it is. By allowing data processing to take place locally in the mast and building technical barriers to identification directly into the standard, we can actually increase privacy by replacing cameras in sensitive environments. Anonymization is not an option — it is a technical prerequisite for trust.

They are saying some of the right words and phrases. But if they have centimeter resolution, it probably means this tech will enable the detection of people who carry guns. If they can tell if someone has fallen, they can tell if two or a group of people are having sex.

I find it telling they enumerate some potential benefits, but then lump all the downside into “privacy.” And just because they don’t know who someone is, if they can detect a person who as fallen, then I’m almost certain they can track an individual person. And if they can be tracked, privacy just disappeared.

As a first step, what needs to be done is to enumerate all the ways this technology could be abused and apply “privacy by design” to those use cases. My intuition tells me there will not be much left in the benefits category once they have eliminated the potential for abuse.

Alternate Motive for Gun Grabbing?

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According to Daniel Fritter of the Canadian firearm magazine Calibre, as of early 2026 the amount spent on the gun grab program is CAD$779.8 million, an amount that exceeds the original estimated cost by more than 300 percent.

Fritter refers to government sources showing that “the current known, documented cost to the taxpayer” per gun surrendered or confiscated is approximately CAD$25,000, with the “undocumented cost being even higher” because the “costs accrued by more than a dozen partner agencies” involved haven’t been included.

To place that per-gun price tag into context, Public Safety Canada has advised that it intends to pay out an average of CAD$1,800 per gun, making the gun grab’s administrative cost per firearm significantly over CAD$20,000…and likely more.

However, the few people who participated in the federal government’s initial rollout of the program for individual gun owners in November were reportedly paid far less, around CAD$700 per gun, increasing the already astonishing imbalance between the cost of administration and compensation. Nothing has been publicly released about the make, model and compensation paid for each confiscated gun collected then and whether these were truly the “weapons of war” that the Liberals used to justify the gun grab. The government “released records that were almost entirely blacked out” in response to a freedom of information request.

Canada’s gun owners have overwhelmingly rejected the gun grab: “somewhere between just 1.6 and 6 percent of newly prohibited firearms in circulation have been declared,” states Fritter. An increasing number of jurisdictions have taken the “ten-foot barge pole” approach to participation, too.

NRA ILA
March 16, 2026
Canada’s Spending More Than $20,000 in Administrative Costs Per Confiscated Gun in Its Bloated ‘Compensation’ Scheme – Shooting News Weekly

With such an incredibly high “administrative cost” per gun confiscated you have to wonder if the primary purpose is to fill the pockets of the criminal politicians.

In any case, with less than 6% of the guns being turned over you have to give Canadian gun owners some credit for the risks they are taking. I wish them luck.

Mistakes we Both Make

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The mistake pro-2A people make is that we assume that if only we could explain how none of their proposed “solutions” would prevent crime they would stop trying to ban guns.

They fucking HATE you. They want you disarmed so that you can’t tell them “No.”

They must be defeated

Sean D Sorrentino @SorrentinoSean
Posted on X, March 16, 2026

This was in response to:

I have nothing to add.

Is Your Opinion Irrelevant?

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If you don’t own a rifle, your opinion is mostly irrelevant.

Devon Eriksen @Devon_Eriksen_
Posted on X, August 14, 2024

There is a surprising amount of truth in this. This is particularly true in the political arena.

Think About this Another Way

The U.S. and Israel have decapitated Iran and probably are working on the neck and shoulders of the religious leadership. The apparent thinking is that Iran will soon run out of people volunteering to be leaders or change their evil ways.

That makes sense. At least at first thought it does. Let’s run through a little thought experiment I have had a few times with some close friends a decade or two ago.

Imagine an alternate timeline where SCOTUS came up with different result in the Heller decision and things went downhill from there. Today, in this alternate timeline, U.S. gun owners realize all they have left is the 100 million guns and a few billion rounds of ammo they had hidden before everything else was confiscated. They still have the firepower and now the motivation to remove the tyrants and restore liberty and the true meaning of the U.S. constitution.

In a coordinated attack, with the help of insiders during the state of the Union address, they take out POTUS, all his cabinet, the VP, and the Speaker of the House. They then make it known that everyone who voted for the unconstitutional (in the eyes of the gun owners) laws must be removed from office and replaced with constitutionally friendly politicians. If not, minds will continue to see the light in the most literal sense.

What would the response be? Would the remaining anti-gun politicians go into hiding or give up power? Or would they double (and/or triple) down?

I believe that the smart money, in the best-case scenario, says, “That’s an interesting question.” The more likely result is a police state and mass killings of innocent people.

What are your thoughts on what to expect in this alternate U.S. timeline and what that might tell us about what the Iran response will be?

Run Away! Run Away!

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I was invited to do a panel at La Verne University on Bruen.

State Senator Portantino, who pushed a ton of CA gun control bills, was also set to appear. I told them I was happy to do it, but didn’t want my presence to cause their higher profile invitees to drop out and ruin their event. They were confident they wouldn’t, so I agreed.

Portantino dropped out last minute, appearing only for a few minutes on Zoom and taking no questions. Another gun control professor also dropped out. So it was just me, a pro gun prof, and a middle of the road guy.

I torched Portantino as a coward and rebutted every point he asserted.

Antigunners are, generally, cowards.

Kostas Moros @MorosKostas
Posted on X, March 6, 2026

I’m not certain I call it cowardice if you know you will get slaughtered and cause damage to your cause in the process.

There is a lot of evidence to support the claim this behavior is common. They know they cannot win on legal, principle, or practical grounds. They can only win on lies, deception, and emotional manipulation. They are evil.

Ages of Mass Shooters

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Mass shooters in the U.S. range in age from 11 to 72. Twenty-year-olds committed more mass shootings and injured more people than any other age group from 1966 to 2024.

Twenty-eight-year-olds committed more mass shootings than any other age group, but the deadliest mass shooting in history was committed by a 64-year-old man. Therefore, there is no apparent direct link between the number of victims and the perpetrator’s age.

Cassandra McBride
March 6, 2026
Average Age of Mass Shooters in the U.S. (Updated 2026)

Note that in the first sentence “Twenty-year-olds” refers to people in their twenties, not just people who are 20 years old.

There is more to the story at the link if you are interested. But the bottom line for my intended use is that prohibiting people between 18 and 20 (inclusive) years old from purchasing a gun is not justified from a practical standpoint of reducing mass shootings even if such a ban could pass constitutional or philosophical barriers.

Rationalization of a Poor Situation

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Beyond the links to sexual satisfaction and positive emotional reactions, research indicates more complicated findings surrounding women’s feelings about orgasm. When women are asked directly about the role orgasm plays in their lives, women often explicitly state that they do not care whether or not they orgasm. However, indirectly, another story emerges. Women who orgasm are much more satisfied with encounters than those who do not. Indeed, women are five times more likely to enjoy a sexual encounter if they orgasmed during the experience. In sum, orgasm is strongly related to sexual satisfaction, even though women indicate it is not important for them.

A great deal of this incoherence may be explained when considering expectations and the importance women attribute to their own orgasms. Regarding orgasms as relevant for one’s sexual well-being was found to be one of the strongest predictors of orgasm frequency. So, in turn, the relationship may be simple: if I experience orgasm then I expect orgasm, and if I expect orgasm, it becomes more relevant for my sexual satisfaction, desire and pleasure. This implies that orgasms are not irrelevant for female sexual well-being, but rather the lower frequency of their occurrence may lead women to alter their expectations, and say that they are fully satisfied even if they orgasm “only” 60% of the time.

Marie-Feline Dienberg, Tanja Oschatz, Jennifer L. Piemonte & Verena Klein
August 17, 2023
Women’s Orgasm and Its Relationship with Sexual Satisfaction and Well-being | Current Sexual Health Reports | Springer Nature Link

Via Peri-orgasmic phenomena: Why some laugh, cry during climaxing (side note from my own related survey: one woman told me her nose itches uncontrollably after she has an orgasm. Another woman said the “Oh god!” cries were uncontrollable because “It feels so good I think I’m going to die.”).

For me, most of the paper was “blah, blah, blah <nothing really new, did you need to write a paper on this?>.” But the information above was new and interesting to me. But it does make sense from a broader psychological perspective.

People rationalize their situation. People without much money will tell themselves and others, “Money can’t buy happiness/love/etc.” Or, the old adage, “I felt sorry for myself when I did not have shoes until I met a man with no feet.” Or the ancient Aesop’s tale of the fox and the grapes.

And closer to my usual topics, people deprived of their inalienable right to keep and bear arms will claim they are safer without guns in the hands of private citizens, discounting or oblivious to the many genocides of unarmed citizens.

Words to Remember

If we were the problem, you would know about it.

Gun Control Failure in Iran

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Iranian civilians certainly have a legitimate need to arm themselves. It is difficult to understand the horrors they face under the current Islamic regime. They can be arrested, jailed and tortured on mere suspicion. Their security forces can shoot them dead on the street for no reason without any fear of a legal response.

While a $440 Turkish-made Colt .45 doesn’t provide the firepower required to save its owner from dozens of Iranian security forces armed with AKs, at least it offers the owner the ability to take a few with them.

Lee Williams
March 5, 2026
Gun control in Iran was failing even before our first strike – Second Amendment Foundation

Imagine a world in which the Iranian people had all the firearms they wanted before the 1979 revolution. Even if the Shah had not seen the light and implemented needed reforms before the citizens took up arms to persuade him, having arms after the revolution would have enabled “second thoughts” on the nature of the revolution.

And, of course, having them now would make the removal of the current leadership much easier.

Sure, as pointed out by Williams, the black market is supplying a few arms to the oppressed citizens. But having plentiful ammo and especially open training and practice opportunities is vital to having the skills to confidently put those tools to work.

Great News

Via CCRKBA HAILS D.C. APPEALS COURT RULING STRIKING DISTRICT MAG BAN | Citizens Committee For The Right To Keep And Bear Arms:

Benson v US et al 23-CV-0541 FINAL.pdf

We reverse and vacate Benson’s convictions for possession of a “large capacity ammunition feeding device,” possession of an unregistered firearm, carrying a pistol without a license, and unlawful possession of ammunition.

One has to wonder if the anti-gunners will appeal this decision to SCOTUS as they did the Heller decision. It would make me laugh if they did.

This is great news in a number of ways. The obvious is the win for standard capacity magazines at the appeals court level. But an even bigger reason to celebrate is the circuit split it creates. This pretty much assures SCOTUS will accept an appeal from someone.

An AI Robot with a Gun

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“Don’t tread on me” doesn’t mean much when the thing doing the treading is an AI in a robot with a gun. There was a time when conservatives wouldn’t dream of ceding this kind of power to the government, but clearly the era of small, controllable government is no longer of concern to them.

John Schussler
February 25, 2026
Via email, regarding US military leaders pressure Anthropic to bend Claude safeguards | US military | The Guardian

I’m not convinced this is entirely true. As long as individuals have access to AIs and guns the match up is probably not all that much more one-sided that the situation is now. Imagine a small AI drone trained to target one (or a dozen) person or a particular license plate. Image recognition is very good these days you know. It could fly at 30 or 40 MPH and scan thousands of people and/or cars before returning to base to recharge or deliver an IED to the intended target. Give them some communication capability to signal their teammates when they find their target. Release dozens of them to search the area operations of the tyrant who turned the AI enabled robot loose on their political enemies. Defense against this sort of thing is a tough problem to solve.

And since the primary purpose of government is supposed to be the protection of individual rights the military is going to need AI to do its job against foreign enemies which will have AI enabled weapons. The question, of course, is how to keep Skynet from getting more than a smile on its face?

We live in interesting times.

And, although I do not consider myself a “conservative” I do always advocate for a smaller government. But the military should never be abolished as opposed to 95% of the rest of our federal government which should fade away into nothingness.