MAGA Report Cards — Gun Safety

Brandon Herrera Compared Women's Weight to Whales, Elephants and Nuclear Bombs. He Wants the Seat a Congressman Quit During a Sexual Misconduct Investigation.

Wed, 09 Sep 2026 17:06:37 +0000

For years, Brandon Herrera made a running joke out of how much women weigh. He put it in his videos, on his podcast appearances, and on stage at a campaign rally.

Cold War nuclear bombs, he told his audience in 2023, weighed "approximately four times as much as the average Austin feminist." In a 2024 video he compared the weight of "angry blue-haired" feminists to killer whales and elephants. This summer he said that when "a blue hair on the news says that a semi-automatic AR-15 is an assault rifle, she is both fat and wrong."

Those are three of the many examples CNN published on September 9, 2026, after reviewing the videos, podcasts and social media posts of the gun YouTuber known online as "The AK Guy" — the man Republicans have nominated for an open congressional seat in South and West Texas.

Herrera's answer, given to CNN in a statement, is that they were jokes.

What he actually said

Herrera has more than 4 million subscribers on YouTube. The material CNN reviewed spans at least seven years, and the same bit comes back over and over.

At a March 2024 rally in San Antonio with former Rep. Matt Gaetz, Herrera told the crowd that the amount of fentanyl needed to kill everyone on the planet weighed about the same as "26 Austin feminists."
In a 2023 video he said a gun range dummy's empty head was "full of mush — much like the average Austin feminist."
In a video where he shot bottles of ranch dressing and rubbed it on his arm, he said it would "make me irresistible to the fat b*tches."
On a podcast he said "there's no ugly women in Norway" because "the Vikings didn't take the ugly ones," then said that is why women in Siberia "are built like f*cking refrigerators."
In a 2019 video he said he wore a wedding ring, despite not being married, as "thot repellant" — using a crude term for a promiscuous woman. In another he shouted "be gone, thot" at a picture of a cartoonishly sexualized young model inside a gun safe, adding that "she's probably got diseases I can't pronounce."
He told his audience he had named one of his guns after the adult film star Stormy Daniels, "because it's been through so much hell and abuse and we've run the shit out of it to just abuse it thoroughly." Months later he bragged that his team had buried the gun, blown it up, and been "an asshole" to it — still using her name.

He also went after women who work on gun violence. He mocked members of Moms Demand Action as not attractive enough, and used a sexual slur to describe the children of the group's founder, Shannon Watts. We wrote about that one when it resurfaced in July, along with the three Texas Republicans in Congress who walked away from a reporter rather than answer for it.

The seat he is running for

This is not a random open seat.

Texas's 23rd came open because Rep. Tony Gonzales resigned in April, in the middle of a House Ethics Committee investigation into whether he "engaged in sexual misconduct towards an individual employed in his congressional office." Gonzales had admitted on the radio to an affair with a woman who worked for him, after calling the rumors "completely untruthful" four months earlier. The staffer died in 2025. We laid out the whole sequence, including how long House leadership let it sit, in our piece on Mike Johnson's two standards.

So the district's last representative left over how he treated a woman who worked for him. The party's replacement built an audience partly on rating women's bodies. And the Democrat he faces in November, Katy Padilla Stout, is a woman — a former teacher and attorney.

The expert CNN asked

CNN showed its findings to Cynthia Miller-Idriss, who runs the Polarization & Extremism Research & Innovation Lab at American University. The lab studies how hate and extremism spread, and has a research track on gendered violence.

She said comparing women to animals is a "way to put women in their place, to diminish their power, their authority, to belittle or degrade." She added: "If you're referred to as an animal, you're not actually even fully human, right?"

Pointing to her lab's research, she told CNN that spreading misogynistic statements can feed extremists who are willing to commit real violence.

"I think if we want a safer society overall, we should also be worried about candidates like this who help normalize things that we know are reliable predictors of political violence."

His response was to attack his opponent's client

Herrera did not apologize. He called the remarks jokes, and then went after Stout's legal work.

CNN reported that Stout represented a father last year who was trying to restore his parental rights after a domestic abuse allegation. Herrera's statement to CNN put it this way:

"It's disappointing that CNN would allow someone to allege that jokes about feminism lead to violence when Stout is fighting to return children to the parent convicted of abusing them."

Read that carefully. Herrera says "convicted." CNN described an allegation. And Stout's campaign told CNN she did not pick the client at all — she was appointed by the court to handle the appeal, and her "ethical obligation was to represent her client." Her campaign added that "there is simply no comparison to the career Katy has dedicated to serving children and families, and the career Brandon Herrera has made mocking them."

That is a court-appointed lawyer doing the job a judge assigned her. Herrera turned it into an accusation, and upgraded an allegation to a conviction while he was at it.

Shannon Watts, who has been on the receiving end of Herrera's posts for years, told CNN the online abuse she faces from both sides of the aisle is "worse than it's ever been."

"When I started Moms Demand Action, I had no idea I would receive threats of death and sexual violence. What I noticed right away was the attacks on me were much different than men who supported gun safety. It was obviously very gendered and misogynistic."

Republican leaders knew, and backed him anyway

Herrera's record was public well before CNN went looking.

Trump endorsed Herrera on Truth Social, writing that "Brandon is strongly supported by many Highly Respected MAGA Warriors in Texas" and promising voters that "HE WILL NEVER LET YOU DOWN!" Speaker Mike Johnson rallied with him in San Antonio this summer — after spending 2024 helping fund the campaign against him. We covered that reversal in August.

Even now, some Republicans will not go along. The Republican Jewish Coalition, which in 2024 announced a $400,000 ad buy for his primary opponent and called him "a goose-stepping extremist who pals around with online Nazis," told Politico it "has a longstanding policy of speaking out against those who traffic in Nazi ideology, and this is another case."

Herrera expects the videos to keep coming up, and argues voters will weigh other things more heavily. "For better or worse, my entire life is on the internet. So, I am an open book in that regard," he told the Los Angeles Times, arguing people will vote on guns and the border instead.

He may be wrong about that. Trump carried this district by 15 points in 2024, and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee still put it on its target list last month and sent money to Stout — because of him.

What the job actually decides

The videos are why people are talking about this race. The votes are what would change lives in it.

Herrera campaigns on Trump's endorsement, and the last section of his issues page is headed "Standing with President Trump." Trump's agenda has already hit the 23rd District:

Trump's budget bill cut Medicaid. Counting those cuts and the pandemic-era Affordable Care Act subsidies that expired alongside them, the Joint Economic Committee's House minority puts more than 41,000 people in TX-23 on track to lose health coverage by 2034.
The same bill made the largest cut to food assistance in history. More than 31,000 households in TX-23 used SNAP to buy groceries in 2024.

What the record shows

CNN found years of videos, posts and podcasts in which the Republican nominee in Texas's 23rd District compared women's weight to nuclear bombs, killer whales and elephants, called a woman on the news "both fat and wrong," and used sexual slurs against a gun safety advocate and her children. He called it comedy and answered by accusing his opponent — a court-appointed lawyer — of returning children to an abuser, saying "convicted" where CNN reported an allegation. He is running for a seat that came open because the last congressman to hold it resigned during a sexual misconduct investigation, and Trump and Speaker Johnson are backing him.

Source

This post is based on CNN's September 9, 2026 review of Brandon Herrera's videos, social media and podcasts by Allison Gordon, with Morgan Leason contributing, and on the San Antonio Current's contemporaneous report, linked above. Photo of Brandon Herrera in Somerset, Texas, February 26, by Brenda Bazán/AP.

Sixty-Three House Republicans Told the Supreme Court the AR-15 Deserves Protection Because It Is a Military Weapon

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 06:53:08 +0000

On September 4, 2026, sixty-three Republican members of the U.S. House signed their names to a legal brief asking the Supreme Court to strike down bans on AR-15-style rifles.

The argument they signed is the part worth reading twice.

For years, the case against banning these rifles has been that they are ordinary — sporting guns, hunting guns, nothing special. This brief argues close to the opposite. It tells the justices that an AR-15's resemblance to a soldier's rifle is a reason the Constitution protects it.

The brief was led by Andrew Clyde, who represents Georgia's 9th District and owns two gun stores. It was written by the American Center for Law & Justice and filed in Viramontes v. Cook County and Grant v. Higgins, the two cases the Supreme Court agreed on June 30 to hear together. They are the first cases in which the Court has ever taken up whether assault weapons bans are constitutional.

What the brief actually argues

The core claim is that lower courts have the test backwards.

Judges upholding these bans have pointed to a rifle's battlefield qualities — its design for combat, its resemblance to the military's M-16 — as the reason a state may restrict it. The brief says that reasoning inverts the Second Amendment. In its words, military usefulness "is, if anything, an indication that an arm lies within the Amendment's guarantee, not outside it."

It goes further. The brief describes AR-15-platform rifles as "the modern lineal descendants of the standard infantry arm the Militia Act of 1792 required citizens to keep," and says they "remain the basic individual weapon of light infantry forces."

So the argument is not that the AR-15 is a sporting rifle that happens to look scary. The argument is that it is the standard infantry weapon of our time, and that this is precisely why Congress and the states may not ban it.

Clyde put the political version more simply. "'Shall not be infringed' is not a suggestion, regardless of the firearm in question," he said. He called the bans "blatantly unconstitutional."

Who signed it

Sixty-three House Republicans put their names in the appendix. Fifty-seven of them have a report card on this site. Those fifty-seven are below, with the districts the brief gives:

Alabama: Barry Moore (AL-01)
Alaska: Nick Begich (AK-AL)
Arizona: Eli Crane (AZ-02), Paul Gosar (AZ-09)
California: Tom McClintock (CA-05)
Colorado: Lauren Boebert (CO-04)
Florida: Randy Fine (FL-06), Anna Paulina Luna (FL-13), John Rutherford (FL-05)
Georgia: Andrew Clyde (GA-09), Mike Collins (GA-10), Brian Jack (GA-03), Rich McCormick (GA-07)
Idaho: Russ Fulcher (ID-01)
Illinois: Mary Miller (IL-15)
Indiana: Jim Baird (IN-04), Erin Houchin (IN-09), Jefferson Shreve (IN-06)
Kansas: Tracey Mann (KS-01)
Louisiana: Clay Higgins (LA-03)
Maryland: Andy Harris (MD-01)
Mississippi: Michael Guest (MS-03)
Missouri: Eric Burlison (MO-07), Bob Onder (MO-03)
Montana: Troy Downing (MT-02)
Nebraska: Adrian Smith (NE-03)
New York: Claudia Tenney (NY-24)
North Carolina: Chuck Edwards (NC-11), Pat Harrigan (NC-10), Mark Harris (NC-08), Addison McDowell (NC-06)
North Dakota: Julie Fedorchak (ND-AL)
Ohio: Warren Davidson (OH-08), Michael Rulli (OH-06), David Taylor (OH-02)
Oklahoma: Josh Brecheen (OK-02), Kevin Hern (OK-01)
Pennsylvania: Scott Perry (PA-10), Guy Reschenthaler (PA-14)
South Carolina: Sheri Biggs (SC-03), Russell Fry (SC-07), Ralph Norman (SC-05)
Tennessee: Tim Burchett (TN-02), Scott DesJarlais (TN-04), Chuck Fleischmann (TN-03), Diana Harshbarger (TN-01), John Rose (TN-06)
Texas: Brian Babin (TX-36), Michael Cloud (TX-27), Brandon Gill (TX-26), Keith Self (TX-03), Beth Van Duyne (TX-24)
Virginia: Ben Cline (VA-06), Morgan Griffith (VA-09), John McGuire (VA-05)
West Virginia: Riley Moore (WV-02)
Wisconsin: Derrick Van Orden (WI-03)

Some of these names carry their own history

Illinois banned assault weapons statewide in January 2023, six months after a gunman fired on a Fourth of July parade in Highland Park with an AR-15-style rifle. Mary Miller, who signed this brief, represents Illinois. The Cook County ordinance now before the Supreme Court came first, and the Second Amendment Foundation, which brought both cases, describes it as the precursor to the nearly identical statewide law.

Jefferson Shreve ran for mayor of Indianapolis in 2023 on banning assault weapon sales, and the NRA gave him an F for it. He signed this brief. We wrote about that reversal when he cosponsored national concealed carry on his first day in Congress.

Tim Burchett signed. After a shooter killed three nine-year-olds and three adults at the Covenant School in his own state, Burchett was asked what could be done to protect children. He said that he and his wife homeschool their daughter.

Barry Moore signed. He is the member who wrote a bill to designate the AR-15 as the official national gun of the United States.

Andrew Clyde signed and led it. He owns two gun stores in Georgia, and he has separately asked the federal government to destroy the firearms records police use to trace guns recovered at crime scenes.

Clyde also recently led a letter asking the attorney general not to appeal a ruling that threw out the registration rules for silencers and short-barreled rifles. Thirty-three of the members who signed that letter have report cards here too.

Why the argument matters beyond this case

Courts do not just decide who wins. They decide what test applies next time.

If the Supreme Court adopts the reasoning in this brief — that a weapon's fitness for infantry combat weighs toward constitutional protection — the effect reaches past the AR-15. Every future restriction on a militarily useful firearm would have to survive a standard under which military usefulness is a point in the gun's favor.

The brief is careful to say the Second Amendment "does not protect every weapon merely because it is militarily useful." But the direction it pushes is unmistakable, and the members who signed it are asking the Court to push that way.

AR-15-style rifles were used at Sandy Hook, at Parkland, at Uvalde and at Highland Park. CBS News has called it the weapon of choice for mass shooters. The signers are telling the highest court in the country that the rifle's design for war is an argument for keeping it on the shelves.

What the filing shows

Sixty-three House Republicans, fifty-seven of whom this site tracks, signed a brief on September 4 asking the Supreme Court to hold that a rifle's usefulness as an infantry weapon counts in favor of protecting it. Among the signers are a member who wrote a bill making the AR-15 the national gun, a member who campaigned on banning assault weapons three years ago, a member who answered a school massacre in his own state by saying he homeschools his daughter, and the Georgia gun-store owner who organized the filing.

Source

Reporting by the North Gwinnett Voice, which published the full brief. Every quotation and every name above was taken from that filing.

The Super PAC Backing Michael Whatley Told a Grieving Father His Ad Was About Gun Violence. It Was an Attack Ad That Falsely Blames Roy Cooper for His Son's Murder.

Tue, 01 Sep 2026 07:10:51 +0000

Shemar Hayes was 23 years old and playing college football when he was murdered in Charlotte in March 2024. His father, Ronald Hayes, has spent the two and a half years since trying to turn that into something — he wrote a book about it, and he talks publicly about gun violence.

A video crew asked him to tell that story on camera. He agreed. He says he was told it was an independent group making an ad about gun violence.

It was not. It was a political attack ad against Roy Cooper, the Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate seat Michael Whatley is running for.

"I have already been swindled into an ad that was about politics, which I don't want to be about," Hayes told NC Newsline on Monday.

The ad has been viewed more than 25 million times on YouTube. It is part of a $17 million advertising campaign against Cooper, paid for by the Senate Leadership Fund — the super PAC aligned with Senate Republican leadership, working to put Whatley in the Senate.

The claim at the center of the ad is false

The ad implies that Cooper let Shemar Hayes' killer out of prison early, as part of a COVID-era legal settlement.

Tyzavian Smith, the man convicted of killing Shemar, was 18 years old at the time of the murder. He was not in prison. He had no prior adult record. There was no early release, because there was nothing to be released from.

That is not a matter of interpretation or emphasis. The ad's premise requires a man to have been let out of prison who had never been in one.

The father found out by watching television

Hayes said he called the ad's makers after he saw it.

"Once I saw the commercial, I called [the ad makers] back and I asked them again, and they stated again that they are independent. I told them that I felt that this was deceiving, it was conniving and it was sneaky how they used me and my family to get out their word."

He is a Democrat who says he has voted for Cooper in the past, and he now gets stopped in the street by people asking whether he's a Democrat or a Republican.

"The commercial looks as if I'm trying to sway North Carolinians from voting the way that they want to vote, and that wasn't my agenda. I wanted to let the community know about gun violence and about my son being murdered."

The crew filmed him talking about his book, Living Through Loss: A Journey of Healing and Hope, and took photographs of it. None of that made the ad.

"That was not their agenda. They could care less than a damn about me and my books."

Gun violence survivors' advocates want it off the air

North Carolinians Against Gun Violence, a statewide group, called on television stations across the state to pull the ad.

"Losing a child is every parent's worst nightmare," said executive director Becky Ceartas. "Every survivor of gun violence deserves to be treated with respect and care if they decide to relive the most horrible day of their lives by telling you their story."

"Our organization works with survivors of gun violence throughout the state, and we have witnessed how hard and traumatic it is for them to tell their stories. It requires an immense amount of trust and faith that the person you are sharing this deeply personal experience with will treat it with dignity and respect."

There is a bitter irony in what Hayes actually believes. He blames his son's death on gun laws he considers too weak to keep firearms away from people who will use them to hurt someone. The campaign that used his grief spent $17 million attacking Cooper, and put none of it toward the thing Hayes actually wanted to talk about.

This is not the only killing the same super PAC has used against Cooper

The Senate Leadership Fund has done a version of this more than once, for the same candidate, in the same race.

In August, Popular Information found that a site calling itself "The North Carolinian" — presenting as "Independent Journalism for North Carolina" — is fully controlled by the Senate Leadership Fund. Its unbylined article, published on August 21 — sixteen days after the Hayes ad went up — blamed Cooper for a killing, and never mentioned that the killing happened in South Carolina.

Two stories, two grieving families, two claims that fall apart the moment anyone checks the facts. Both paid for by the same super PAC, both aimed at the same opponent, both in service of the same candidate.

Whatley knows exactly how this works

Whatley is not a political novice who happens to be the accidental beneficiary of outside spending he doesn't understand. He ran the Republican National Committee — as recently as July 2025 he was giving interviews as "RNC chair", laying out the party's strategy for these midterms — and before that he chaired the North Carolina Republican Party. Running the party's political operation was his job.

NC Newsline could not reach the Senate Leadership Fund for comment.

Hayes, for his part, says he plans to talk to Cooper — to tell him the harm wasn't intended.

"I want to turn this tragedy into something beautiful that can possibly make a change. I want my son's name to be able to be used to make this change."

What the record shows

A super PAC spending $17 million to elect Michael Whatley to the Senate filmed a father talking about his murdered son, told him the ad was about gun violence, and used it to blame Roy Cooper for the killing. The man convicted of that murder was 18, had never been in prison, and had no prior adult record, so the ad's central claim cannot be true. The ad has been viewed more than 25 million times on YouTube. It is not the only killing the same super PAC has attached to Cooper on Whatley's behalf, and another one happened in a different state.

Sources

NC father at center of US Senate ad says he was 'swindled' by GOP political operatives — NC Newsline, August 31, 2026, by Greg Childress.

Robin Adams Cheeley: 'Deceitful, conniving and sneaky.' Anti-Cooper ad featuring grieving Black father twists facts — Greensboro News & Record, August 26, 2026.

Republicans Spent Millions Calling Brandon Herrera Too Extreme for Congress. Now Mike Johnson Is Raising Money for Him.

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 07:58:13 +0000

Standing in a San Antonio barbecue joint last month, the Speaker of the House told Texas voters they had a clear choice: the "common sense" of the Republican nominee, or the "crazy" positions of his Democratic opponent.

The Republican nominee was Brandon Herrera. And until very recently, the people calling him crazy were Republicans.

The New York Times reported this week on how the party got from there to here. It is a short trip, and nothing about Herrera's record moved.

What Republicans said about him when it was convenient

Herrera, 30, is a YouTuber with more than four million subscribers who built his following on gun reviews and inflammatory jokes. He ran in 2024 against the district's Republican incumbent, Tony Gonzales, and ran again this cycle.

Both times, the party's leadership was against him. In 2024 the leadership roster formally endorsed Gonzales, with Mike Johnson raising money for him in San Antonio that April. This cycle Johnson and President Trump were behind Gonzales again — in January a lawyer for Trump sent Herrera a cease-and-desist letter over a mailer edited to make it look as though the president was posing with him.

Gonzales and his allies spent millions making the case, and the material they used was Herrera's own video archive:

A joke that a Nazi-era submachine gun was "the original ghetto blaster" and "Hitler's street sweeper."
A joke making light of veterans who die by suicide. The Republican Jewish Coalition spent millions in 2024 amplifying that one. Its ad said: "Fools like Brandon Herrera who mock veterans do not belong in Congress or Texas."

His Democratic opponent has since added to the pile, circulating a video of Herrera showing off his ownership of a 1939 English edition of Mein Kampf, along with clips of him joking about Nazi atrocities against Jews. Herrera says the book is part of a historical collection and vehemently denies being antisemitic.

Then Gonzales was forced out — first out of the race, then out of Congress — over a sexual misconduct scandal. And, as the Times puts it, top Republicans quickly closed ranks around Herrera.

That is the entire explanation. Not a retraction, not new information, not an apology. A vacancy.

We documented the same instinct in how Johnson handled the Gonzales scandal itself: a Speaker who calls himself a "zealous guardian of due process" telling reporters it wasn't "time" to discuss a resignation, while rank-and-file Republicans said out loud what he wouldn't.

The timing of Johnson's trip to San Antonio

Here is the detail that makes the reversal hard to explain away.

Johnson headlined a fundraiser for Herrera at Republican congressional campaign headquarters in Washington on July 22, with the committee's chairman, Richard Hudson, co-hosting. In the days that followed, another video surfaced: Herrera, in July 2022, using crude sexualized language to insult Shannon Watts, who founded Moms Demand Action after the Sandy Hook school shooting.

We wrote about what he actually said and about Texas Republicans walking away from reporters rather than answer for it. That post is from July 28. Two days later, Johnson stood next to Herrera in San Antonio and called the district critical to holding the Republican majority.

So this was not a case of the leadership not knowing. The video was in the news that week. Johnson went anyway.

He is not apologizing, and he says so plainly

Asked about the remarks, Herrera told the Times he wouldn't use that language as a candidate, but that he is not sorry:

"I know the difference between the way that you speak in a comedy performance, so to speak, and the way that you speak in a political environment."

And on his critics:

"What they're going to do is they're going to pretend jokes are policy, and they're going to purposely pretend that they don't know the difference."

He also told the Times that the only people who have ever cared about the videos are "either in the media or in D.C."

That last claim is worth testing against the map.

The district includes Uvalde

Texas's 23rd District stretches from San Antonio to El Paso along the border. It contains Uvalde, where 19 children and two teachers were murdered at Robb Elementary School in 2022.

Herrera's position, per the Times, is that he opposes all new restrictions on firearms — including red flag laws, the specific measure designed to take guns from people who have signaled they intend to hurt someone.

His Democratic opponent, Katy Padilla Stout, says she decided to run specifically to stop a gun influencer from representing Uvalde. Her family hunts and owns guns; she supports age and mental health checks.

At a gathering of left-leaning women in the northern hills of San Antonio, she paused before recounting Herrera's remarks about Watts to check that children were out of earshot.

"That is not the type of person you want making decisions for you and your children."

A candidate who jokes about Nazi weapons and mocks veteran suicide, who opposes every new gun restriction, running to represent the town where a gunman killed 19 children in their classroom — that is not a media obsession. That is the job description colliding with the résumé.

Nobody has represented the district since April

There is one more piece of this the Times surfaces, and it belongs to a third Republican.

The seat has been empty since April. Governor Greg Abbott has not called a special election to fill the remainder of Gonzales's term, and his spokesman declined to explain the reasoning.

Padilla Stout's read on it:

"Why wouldn't you call a special election? Because you're scared you're going to lose."

Whatever the motive, the effect is fixed: for months, everyone in this stretch of the Texas border has had no vote in the House at all — and no one to call about a VA claim, a Social Security check, or a Medicaid denial. The party that spent millions arguing Herrera was unfit has been content to leave the seat vacant rather than risk it.

What actually changed

Line the two positions up.

While Gonzales was still running: Johnson endorses Gonzales and raises money for him in San Antonio in 2024, then opposes Herrera again this year. Trump endorses Gonzales too, and his lawyer tells Herrera to stop putting the president's picture on his mail. A Republican group buys millions in ads saying Herrera does not belong in Congress because he mocks veterans.

Once the seat came open: Johnson headlines Herrera's Washington fundraiser, stands beside him in San Antonio days after another video surfaces, and describes him as the "common sense" choice.

Between those two moments, Herrera did not withdraw a single joke. He has said explicitly that he won't. The one thing that changed is that the Republican majority is narrow and this seat is red by 15 points.

That is the whole standard. Not what a candidate said about veterans, or Hitler's weapons, or the mothers of murdered children — just whether the party needs the vote. Herrera understood the arithmetic better than his critics did, and said so:

"After a brutal primary on all sides," he told reporters in San Antonio, "the focus has to be bringing the party together."

It worked. That's the part worth remembering in November.

Sources

The New York Times, "Nazi Jokes and Vulgar Insults: The Edgy Gun Influencer Embraced by the G.O.P." by Bayliss Wagner (August 16, 2026). Photo by Jordan Vonderhaar for The New York Times.
Yahoo News, "Mike Johnson to Fundraise for Candidate Who Joked About Killing Older People" by J.D. Wolf (July 16, 2026).
FOX San Antonio, "Mike Johnson Addresses Border Wall in Big Bend, VA Concerns in San Antonio" by Yami Virgin (July 30, 2026).
The Texas Tribune, "Trump lawyer sends cease-and-desist letter to Brandon Herrera over use of president’s image in campaign ad" by Gabby Birenbaum (February 12, 2026).
The Texas Tribune, "U.S. Rep. Tony Gonzales prevails in primary runoff over gun influencer Brandon Herrera" (May 29, 2024).

More Than 40 Republicans Just Asked the Attorney General Not to Defend a 92-Year-Old Gun Law in Court

Thu, 13 Aug 2026 10:07:38 +0000

Since 1934, if you wanted to buy a silencer, a short-barreled rifle, or a sawed-off shotgun in America, you had to register it with the federal government. Fingerprints. Paperwork. A background check. A $200 tax stamp. That law — the National Firearms Act — was written during the gangster era for exactly the categories of weapon Congress decided were too dangerous to sell over a counter like a scope or a sling.

On August 5, 2026, a federal judge in Texas threw the registration requirement out.

Six days later, more than 40 congressional Republicans wrote to the Attorney General asking him not to fight it.

What the judge did

U.S. District Judge James Hendrix ruled that the National Firearms Act's registration scheme can no longer be enforced against suppressors, short-barreled rifles, and short-barreled shotguns. He wrote the order to reach only the parties to the case — two consolidated lawsuits whose plaintiffs include fifteen states, Gun Owners of America, the NRA's Texas affiliate and a set of manufacturers and retailers, plus those companies' current and future customers — and held it for a week so the government could appeal.

His reasoning turned on something Congress itself did. The NFA has always been justified as a tax law — the registration and paperwork were legal because they helped collect the $200 tax. In Trump's 2025 budget bill, Republicans set that tax to zero for these three categories. Hendrix concluded that when the tax went away, the constitutional basis for the paperwork went with it.

"No longer can the challenged NFA provisions be justified — as they have been for nearly 90 years — under Congress's taxing power."

Adam Skaggs, chief counsel at the Giffords Law Center, described what was actually lost: "That process effectively functioned as a heightened background check for NFA weapons, and that process is no longer enforceable."

So Republicans zeroed out the tax in a budget bill. A judge then used the missing tax to strike down the background check. And now the same members of Congress are writing to make sure nobody appeals.

What the letter asks for

On August 11, 2026, Senator Steve Daines and Andrew Clyde sent a letter to Attorney General Todd Blanche with three requests:

Don't appeal. They ask DOJ "to decline any appeal of the court's decision."
Apply it to everyone, right now. Apply the ruling "nationwide to all persons, regardless of whether they are formally covered by the court's injunction."
Make it permanent. Start rulemaking "to rescind or amend the challenged NFA regulations as to untaxed firearms," and don't wait for that process to finish before changing enforcement practice.

Read that first item again. These are members of Congress asking the government's own lawyer to stop defending a federal statute in court.

That's not a policy disagreement. Congress has a way to repeal a law: pass a bill. They've tried — Michael Cloud has a bill to strike silencers from the National Firearms Act entirely and void state silencer taxes and registration rules on top. It hasn't passed. So the ask here is for the executive branch to deliver by non-enforcement what the legislative branch couldn't deliver by vote.

The man who led it sells the products

Andrew Clyde owns two gun stores — Clyde Armory, which by his own account "currently operates two brick-and-mortar locations in Georgia."

That is not an insinuation; it's his business. And it's the second time this month he's asked a federal agency to unwind gun rules that touch what he sells. On August 5 — the very day the Texas ruling came down — Clyde led a separate letter asking the ATF to start destroying firearm transaction records, the records police use to trace guns recovered at crime scenes.

Destroy the trace records. Skip the appeal on registration. Two letters, six days apart, from a sitting congressman who runs gun shops.

Who signed

Thirty-three of the signers have a report card on this site.

In the Senate: Roger Marshall joined Daines, along with John Barrasso, John Cornyn, Mike Crapo, Mike Lee, and Cynthia Lummis.

In the House, the signers include Brian Babin, Sheri Biggs, Andy Biggs, Lauren Boebert, Josh Brecheen, Tim Burchett, Eric Burlison, Kat Cammack, Ben Cline, Michael Cloud, Mike Collins, Eli Crane, Warren Davidson, Scott DesJarlais, Morgan Griffith, Clay Higgins, Richard Hudson, Mary Miller, Riley Moore, Ralph Norman, Jimmy Patronis, Scott Perry, Derek Schmidt, Austin Scott, Keith Self, Pete Sessions, Victoria Spartz, Claudia Tenney, Derrick Van Orden, Randy Weber, and Bruce Westerman.

Some of these names should look familiar. Jimmy Patronis filed what gun media called the first bill ever written to fully repeal America's machine gun ban — the single sentence of federal law that also makes Glock switches illegal. Michael Cloud wants silencers treated like accessories. Clyde wants the trace records gone.

This letter is where those separate efforts converge on one target.

What registration was actually doing

Gun-rights groups describe suppressors as hearing protection. The Giffords Law Center's research says the hearing math doesn't work: a gunshot exceeds 140 decibels, the most effective silencers cut about 28 decibels, and ordinary dual ear protection cuts 40 to 50.

What silencers do reliably is make gunfire harder to recognize and harder to locate.

In 2023 alone, the ATF recovered and traced more than 400 silencers from crime scenes.
When a gunman opened fire in Virginia Beach in 2019 with a silenced .45-caliber handgun, survivors said they thought they heard a nail gun — so they didn't evacuate.
Three months before the 2023 Lewiston, Maine mass shooting, the gunman tried to buy a silencer and was denied. On the federal form required to complete the transfer he checked the box saying he had been committed to a mental institution, and the store's staff read it and refused to hand the silencer over.

That last one is the whole argument in a single fact. The paperwork worked. It stopped a sale to a man who went on to commit a mass shooting three months later. That paperwork — the NFA's registration and application requirements — is what this letter asks the Justice Department to stop enforcing.

The pattern

Every step of this happened in public and each step looked small on its own.

A tax rate set to zero, buried in a budget bill. A district court ruling in one Texas courthouse. A letter on Senate letterhead.

Put together, they make a 92-year-old federal registration requirement unenforceable for three categories of weapon — for the plaintiffs now, and for everyone if the Justice Department does what the letter asks — without a single floor vote to repeal it, and with a request that the government decline to defend the law on appeal so no higher court ever reviews the question.

If you live in one of these members' districts, they signed their name to that.

Source

"Daines, Clyde Lead Letter Urging DOJ to Protect Second Amendment Rights, Apply Ruling Nationwide", Office of Sen. Steve Daines, August 11, 2026, including the full signatory list. Ruling coverage: Associated Press, "Texas Judge Strikes Down Law Regulating Firearm Suppressors and Some Guns", August 10, 2026.

Gabby Giffords's Group Endorsed Chris Smith Twice. Its Endorsement Page Is Still Up. His Gun Safety Record Isn't.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 17:28:26 +0000

Go to the website of Giffords — the gun safety organization founded by former Rep. Gabby Giffords, who was shot in the head at a constituent event in 2011 — and you can still read their endorsement of a New Jersey Republican.

"Congressman Smith's voting record reveals his tireless commitment to enacting bipartisan gun safety legislation. He was an original cosponsor of H.R. 8, the 2019 House-passed universal background checks bill."

That was 2020. The Republican is Chris Smith, who has represented New Jersey's 4th District since 1981.

Here is the thing worth knowing about that endorsement: every word of it was true when they wrote it. Smith really was one of the very few Republicans who broke with the gun lobby, and he did it when it cost him something. That's what makes this post different from the usual story about a politician who never cared in the first place.

Then it stopped. Not with a speech, not with a press release explaining a change of heart. It just stopped, and nobody outside the district noticed.

The record Giffords was praising was real

This part is not spin, and it deserves to be said plainly.

December 2017. The House voted on national concealed-carry reciprocity — a bill that would have forced New Jersey to honor carry permits issued by states with far weaker screening. It passed 231–198. Only 14 Republicans in the entire House voted no, and Smith was one of them.

January 2019. Smith signed on as an original cosponsor of H.R. 8, the Bipartisan Background Checks Act, on January 8 — five days into the new Congress.

February 27, 2019. H.R. 8 came to the floor. Smith voted yes. Eight Republicans did.

March 1, 2021. New Congress, same bill. Smith signed on as an original cosponsor again.

March 11, 2021. He voted yes again. Again, eight Republicans.

Giffords endorsed him in 2018 and again in 2020. Defending both endorsements that fall, while campaigning for a New Jersey Democrat, Mark Kelly — Giffords's husband, now a U.S. senator — put it simply: "We're a bipartisan organization and both those guys have supported our legislation and have opposed the legislation of the National Rifle Association."

That's the record. Everything in it stops on March 11, 2021.

Fifteen months later, the no votes started

The gap between Smith's last gun safety vote and his first stretch of votes against it is fifteen months. Then, in a single summer, he voted against every bill the House put in front of him that would have restricted a gun.

June 8, 2022. Two weeks after a gunman killed 19 children and two teachers in Uvalde, the House passed the Protecting Our Kids Act — raising the purchase age for semi-automatic rifles to 21 and banning large-capacity magazines. Five Republicans voted yes. Smith voted no.

June 24, 2022. The Bipartisan Safer Communities Act — the first significant federal gun law in nearly thirty years, negotiated by senators of both parties, signed by the president. It cleared the House with 14 Republican votes (the bill rode on S. 2938, which is why the clerk's page still carries the courthouse-naming description it started life as). Fourteen Republicans said yes. Smith was not one of them.

Read those two numbers together. In 2017 Smith was one of 14 Republicans willing to defy the gun lobby. In 2022 there were again 14 Republicans willing to defy the gun lobby — and this time he was on the other side of the line.

July 29, 2022. The Assault Weapons Ban, 217–213. Two Republicans voted yes. Smith voted no, one of 208 Republicans against it.

June 13, 2023. He voted to overturn the ATF's pistol-brace rule — a resolution that would have restored the ability to turn a pistol into what functions as a short-barreled rifle without registering it.

July 2025. He voted for Trump's budget bill, which cut the federal transfer and manufacturing tax on gun silencers and short-barreled rifles from $200 to $0. That ninety-two-year-old deterrent hit zero on January 1, 2026.

The bill he wrote his name on twice, now missing his name

The cleanest measure of the change isn't a vote at all. It's a signature he stopped giving.

The background-check bill Giffords specifically credited him for has been reintroduced in every Congress since. Smith has not cosponsored it once:

118th Congress (2023), H.R. 715 — introduced by a Republican, Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, and picked up 209 cosponsors, every single one a Democrat. The two-time original cosponsor stayed off it.
119th Congress (2025), H.R. 18 — 214 cosponsors, and this time two Republicans did sign: Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania and Mike Lawler of New York.

That second one matters most. The excuse that a Republican simply can't put his name on this bill anymore collapses the moment two Republicans do. Smith knows the bill — he helped write his name onto the top of it twice. He has served in the House for 45 years and does not need to be told how a cosponsor sheet works. He just doesn't sign it.

To be fair about where he actually stands: Smith has not flipped all the way. He is not a cosponsor of H.R. 38, the concealed-carry reciprocity bill he voted against in 2017 — the current version has 189 cosponsors and he isn't among them. That bill is now so aggressive that the nation's largest police union came out against it, warning that it strips officers of the power to verify whether someone carrying a gun is legally allowed to.

So this isn't a conversion. It's an abdication. He didn't join the other side; he stopped showing up on his own.

What it costs New Jersey

New Jersey has one of the lowest gun death rates in the country — 4.0 deaths per 100,000 people. That is not luck or geography. It is the direct result of laws the state fought to pass, and it is exactly what national concealed-carry reciprocity would override: a federal law forcing New Jersey to accept permits from states that require no class, no live-fire test, and no sheriff's sign-off.

Smith understood that in 2017. He said so with a vote that put him in a group of 14 in a chamber of 433.

His constituents cannot ask him what changed. Asked in 2025 when he had last held a town hall, his own staff could recall only one, in 1992 — thirty-four years ago, a drought so complete that voters in NJ-04 built a website just to ask where he is. There is no forum in the district where someone whose family survived a shooting can stand up and ask the man who once voted with them why he stopped.

A record you abandon isn't a record

Most Republicans in Congress have never done a single thing for gun safety, so there's nothing for them to walk away from. Smith is a harder case in the way that Brian Mast is a harder case — Mast begged Trump to pause AR-15 sales after Parkland and then voted against every gun bill including the assault weapons ban he'd demanded. Both men had standing. Both spent it.

The difference with Smith is the paperwork. Giffords, an organization founded by a woman who was shot in the head while meeting constituents, publicly staked its bipartisan credibility on him — twice — and the endorsement page praising his "tireless commitment" is still live on their website today, five years and a full reversal later.

Chris Smith proved he was capable of casting the hard vote. He did it in 2017, in 2019, and in 2021. Then in 2022 he stopped, and he has not signed the bill that made him an exception in the first place since.

Voters in New Jersey's 4th District aren't being asked to believe he could never stand up to the gun lobby. They have the receipts showing he could. They're being asked why he quit.

Source

Giffords, Chris Smith endorsement (2020), and Insider NJ, Smith Scores Gabby Giffords Organization Endorsement (July 17, 2020). Vote records from the Office of the Clerk of the U.S. House and cosponsor lists from Congress.gov. Photo: official House portrait via Wikimedia Commons.

Gabe Evans Was a Cop for Over a Decade. Six Days Into Congress, He Signed On to the Gun Bill Police Unions Are Begging Congress to Kill.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 14:45:31 +0000

Gabe Evans spent more than a decade as a police officer with the Arvada Police Department before he ran for Congress. It is in every version of his biography, and he uses it constantly. He was a cop.

On January 9, 2025 — six days after he was sworn in — Evans put his name on H.R. 38, the Constitutional Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act.

The two largest police organizations in the United States have asked Congress to reject that bill.

What the cops actually said

In November 2025, the National Fraternal Order of Police and the International Association of Chiefs of Police — which by their own account "collectively represent a majority of rank-and-file officers and police executives" — sent Congress a joint call to action against H.R. 38.

Their objections were not abstract. As Breitbart reported on the letter, the groups warned the bill "exempts any person with a valid photographic identification from state or local firearms law who asserts that they are lawfully carrying a firearm under the laws of their own state of residence." An officer who stops someone would have no way to check.

And then the part that should matter most to a former patrol officer:

"The bill goes further and provides that any person 'who is deprived of any right, privilege, or immunity' may sue a law enforcement officer, who would not be afforded qualified immunity."

Qualified immunity is the doctrine that keeps an officer from being personally sued for a judgment call made in the field. H.R. 38 never uses the phrase; what it does is create a new right to sue "any other person" who deprives someone of the rights it grants. The two organizations read that and told Congress the bill "seems to cancel any qualified immunity for the officer," leaving their members in legal and physical danger: "Any action the officer may take in reaction to the knowledge that the person they have encountered is armed could place that officer in very real legal peril."

This is not new territory for the bill, either. When an earlier version came up, 473 law enforcement agencies from 39 states signed a letter opposing it. Their reasoning was the same then. That letter said there is "currently no system to verify the validity of concealed carry permits across state lines, which means that law enforcement could not confirm whether an individual is carrying a weapon legally." The 2025 call to action puts it the same way: officers "would be expected to interpret and apply laws from all 50 states in real time."

H.R. 38 was reported out of committee and placed on the House calendar on October 3, 2025. Evans's name is still on it.

What it would do to Colorado

Colorado requires a background check and a handgun training course before a sheriff will issue a concealed carry permit. H.R. 38 makes that optional in practice: anyone eligible to carry in their home state can carry here, including people from states that require no permit, no training, and no check at all.

Emma Brown, executive director of Giffords, put it bluntly at a Denver public safety roundtable in May 2026: Evans is "trying to let tourists carry concealed weapons with no training and without ever passing a background check."

"He's actively pushing a deadly agenda that makes it harder and more dangerous for law enforcement officers to do their jobs," Brown said. "As a former member of law enforcement, you would think he'd do better."

The roundtable was opened by Colorado State Sen. Tom Sullivan, whose son Alex was one of the 12 people murdered in the 2012 Aurora theater shooting. Sullivan has spent the years since at the state Capitol passing gun laws. His assessment of his congressman:

"Here in this district, with Gabe Evans, we are not getting that partnership. … We need someone who listens to the people who have been impacted on a day-to-day basis, to hear from them, and do something about it. He made it very clear where his priorities are when he cosponsored the Constitutional Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act."

About 15.3 out of every 100,000 Coloradans died from a gun-related injury in 2024 — 961 people, a rate 19.5% above the national one.

Guns in the classroom

Evans's record on this predates Congress.

Running for the Colorado state House in 2022, he posted on Facebook that "Large numbers of educators WANT to protect their classrooms by carrying concealed. They should be allowed, encouraged, provided resources, and trained!"

Once he got to the legislature, he went after the permit system itself. In 2023 he cosponsored HCR23-1003, a proposed amendment to the Colorado constitution that would have written concealed carry into the state bill of rights "in any area of Colorado except areas prohibited by state law." The list of places the legislature would still have been allowed to keep guns out of was three items long: federal gun-free zones, K-12 school grounds, and public buildings that screen every person at every entrance. Nothing else. It was postponed indefinitely in committee.

This is Colorado — Columbine, the Aurora theater, the Boulder King Soopers, Club Q. The answer Evans arrived at was more guns, carried by more people, in more places, with less checking.

He knows exactly who he's crossing

Plenty of members of Congress cosponsor H.R. 38 without ever having worn a badge. Evans is different, and he trades on the difference. His campaign is built on the Arvada patrol car and the Black Hawk cockpit.

That's what makes the January 9 signature worth pointing at. The Fraternal Order of Police is not a gun control group. The International Association of Chiefs of Police is not a gun control group. They are the organizations that speak for the job Evans used to do, and they told Congress this bill would get officers hurt and get officers sued.

He signed it anyway, in his first week.

Evans has been consistent about one thing across every issue: when his district's interests and his party's demands point in different directions, he goes with the party and hopes nobody reads the roll call. He did it on Medicaid, telling Colorado his vote wouldn't hurt anyone's health care while nurses named 12 hospitals at risk. He is doing it now on a 1,200-bed ICE detention center on his district's edge, where his office declined to discuss the issue at all.

On guns, he isn't even hiding it. He just expects the badge to cover for him.

Source

GIFFORDS, Rep. Pettersen and local officials call out Gabe Evans extreme record on gun safety — GIFFORDS, May 2, 2026, and Gun Control Advocates Criticize Evans for Past Calls to Arm Teachers — Colorado Times Recorder. Photo: Colorado Times Recorder.

Derek Schmidt Wrote the Gun Industry a Bill That Throws Out Every Gun-Violence Lawsuit Against It — Including the Ones Already Filed

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 14:33:17 +0000

On June 11, 2026, Derek Schmidt introduced a bill in the U.S. House. He gave it a name that sounds like it's about greedy lawyers: the Stopping Harmful and Outrageous Torts Act. The short version is the SHOT Act.

Read what the bill actually says and it is not about lawyers. It is about the families.

What Section 2 writes into the law is one sentence long. Any lawsuit over the criminal or unlawful misuse of a gun that is sitting in a courtroom on the day this bill becomes law "shall be immediately dismissed by the court in which the action was brought or is currently pending."

Not reviewed. Not argued. Not decided on the facts. Dismissed.

Five days after he filed it, the firearms industry's own trade group — the National Shooting Sports Foundation — put out a press release welcoming it. That is who this bill is for. They didn't have to guess.

What the law does now, and what Schmidt wants it to do

Congress already gave gun makers a shield. In 2005, it passed the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, which blocks most lawsuits against firearms companies when someone criminally misuses their product. It is a level of protection Congress has never given any other industry.

The 2005 law left a handful of narrow doors open. You can still sue if a dealer knowingly handed a gun to someone who was obviously going to hurt people. You can still sue over a broken product. You can still sue if the company knowingly broke a law about how guns are marketed or sold.

Those doors are how the Sandy Hook families got their day in court. Using Connecticut's consumer protection law, they reached a record $73 million settlement with the maker of the rifle used in that school shooting. Eleven states — New York, Delaware, New Jersey, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Illinois, Washington, Maryland, Connecticut, and Virginia — have passed their own gun industry accountability laws.

Schmidt's bill closes those doors and bricks up the wall.

It kills the cases already filed. Section 2, quoted above. Whatever stage a case is in — discovery, trial, appeal — it ends.

It erases the state laws. Section 5 of the bill adds a new preemption section saying the federal shield "expressly preempt[s] any State and local laws" that let people sue gun makers over the criminal misuse of a gun. Those are the exact 11 state laws NSSF names in its release.

It narrows the broken-product exception. Since 2005 the law has said that if a gun goes off because someone committed a crime with it, that criminal act "shall be considered the sole proximate cause" of the death — even if the gun itself was defective. Schmidt tightens the exception around that sentence: the gun now has to have been "being lawfully used," and the shooter's act no longer has to have "constituted a criminal offense," only to meet "the elements of" one.

It covers more than guns. The bill widens the definition of a protected product to include magazines, clips, optics, and "other products intended to be included in, attached to, or used while attached to" a firearm.

It covers more than companies. The definition of a "seller" is rewritten to include "any owner or employee of the seller," and the definition of a manufacturer is amended to add "any owner and employee of such person." Individual people, personally shielded.

It shields the trade group that endorsed it. The 2005 law already covered trade associations, and every new protection here carries them along — the removal-and-dismissal procedure, the attorney's-fees clause, the ban on foreign governments suing, the preemption of state law. Each one names "a manufacturer or seller of a qualified product, or a trade association." NSSF is a trade association.

And it makes grieving families pay. Section 4 adds this: "A defendant who prevails in asserting the immunity granted in this Act shall be entitled to reasonable attorney's fees and court costs." Sue a gun company, lose on immunity, and you write a check to the gun company's lawyers. Two states, Arkansas and Indiana, already do that to their own residents. Schmidt would do it to all of us.

The industry didn't need the help

Here's the part that makes the "frivolous lawsuits" framing hard to take seriously: the gun industry is winning.

In June 2025, the Supreme Court threw out the government of Mexico's lawsuit against Smith & Wesson and six other manufacturers. The vote was 9-0, in an opinion written by Justice Kagan — every liberal and every conservative on the Court agreed the existing shield already covered the companies.

Schmidt's bill goes further anyway. It adds a flat ban: "No foreign state or government may bring a civil action" against a gun maker at all, and none of the law's exceptions "may be asserted by any foreign state or government in any Federal or State court." The Supreme Court decided that case unanimously. Schmidt wants the courthouse door welded shut so nobody can even knock.

NSSF's general counsel, Lawrence Keane, described the suits Schmidt is killing as "lawfare" backed by "gun control activists, antigun politicians and large 'white shoe' law firms." He did not mention the plaintiffs. The plaintiffs are cities, state attorneys general, and people who lost somebody.

Kansans are being shot, and their congressman is protecting the manufacturers

Schmidt represents Kansas's 2nd District. About 15.2 out of every 100,000 Kansans die from gun-related injuries every year — roughly 446 people, a rate 18.7% higher than the national rate.

Not one line of the SHOT Act does anything for those 446 people or their families. Every line of it does something for the companies.

This is consistent, at least. Schmidt holds an A+ rating from the NRA, the highest score the group gives out, and he earned it over a career of opposing gun safety measures. What's new here is that he isn't just voting the industry's way. He's the one holding the pen.

The same bill, over and over, for whoever is getting sued

Schmidt sits on the House Judiciary Committee — the committee his bill was referred to, and the committee where this particular move has become routine.

In June, that committee advanced a bill by another Republican that would dismiss roughly 500 already-filed lawsuits by workers dying of silicosis from cutting engineered stone countertops. Same structure: immunity for the manufacturer, retroactive dismissal of pending cases. Earlier this month we wrote up a Wyoming Republican's bill to kill the lawsuits communities file against oil companies over climate damage. Same structure again.

Different industry each time. Same sentence buried in the text: the cases already filed go away.

There's an old idea in this country that if a company hurts you, you can stand in front of a jury of your neighbors and make it prove otherwise. That's the thing being repealed here, one industry at a time. Schmidt spent 12 years as Kansas Attorney General — a job that exists to bring cases on behalf of people who can't bring their own. His exception for law enforcement lawsuits covers "the Attorney General" enforcing federal gun statutes. The state laws that let a state's own attorney general sue? Section 5 preempts those.

He knows exactly what he's taking away. He used to hold it.

Source

NSSF Welcomes House Companion SHOT Act Introduction to End Frivolous Public Nuisance Lawsuits — National Shooting Sports Foundation, June 16, 2026. Bill text: H.R. 9298, 119th Congress. Photo: Official portrait, 119th Congress, via Wikimedia Commons.

Steve Scalise Has Now Been Shot At Twice. He Takes More Gun Money Than Any Other House Member on Record.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 12:48:28 +0000

On the night of April 25, 2026, Steve Scalise was inside the ballroom of the Washington Hilton when the gunshots started.

A man had charged the security checkpoint at the White House Correspondents' Dinner carrying two firearms. Secret Service agents rushed toward the president and vice president. Waitstaff dove for cover.

Scalise had been here before.

"Some bad memories started coming back," he told NOTUS.

Nine years earlier, in June 2017, a gunman opened fire on the Republican congressional baseball practice in Alexandria, Virginia. A bullet went through Scalise's hip and shattered his pelvis. He nearly died. It took months of surgeries and rehab before he could walk again.

Two shootings. Nine years apart. Both times, he was in the room.

What he said the first time

Four months after he was shot — and two days after a gunman killed 59 people in Las Vegas — Fox News's Martha MacCallum asked Scalise whether nearly dying had changed how he thought about guns.

His answer:

"I think it's fortified it."

He added that Congress shouldn't be "promoting our political agenda" at a moment like that, and that the focus belonged on victims and law enforcement.

The Hill noted in that same piece that Scalise's own congressional website advertised his A+ rating from the National Rifle Association, and that the bills he backed would make it easier to buy guns across state lines and force every state to honor other states' concealed-carry permits.

There's a comparison the reporting made at the time and it still lands. Gabby Giffords was shot in the head at a constituent event in 2011. She spent the years after it building an organization to change gun laws. Scalise was shot in 2017 and spent the years after it voting to loosen them.

What he actually did

This isn't about words. Look at the votes.

Six months after he was shot, on December 6, 2017, the House passed the Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act, 231 to 198. It would force every state to recognize concealed-carry permits issued by every other state — including states with the loosest standards in the country. Scalise voted yes. (It's the same bill Richard Hudson is still pushing today, over the objections of the Fraternal Order of Police.)

March 11, 2021 — the House passed the Bipartisan Background Checks Act, 227 to 203, requiring a background check on essentially every gun sale, including private and online sales. Scalise voted no.

June 24, 2022 — one month after Uvalde, the House gave final approval to the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, 234 to 193. The law was the first significant federal gun safety measure in nearly thirty years — money for school mental health, an incentive for state red-flag laws, tougher background checks for buyers under 21, and a narrowing of the "boyfriend loophole." Fourteen House Republicans voted for it.

Scalise, then the second-ranking Republican in the House, voted no. He also voted against even letting the bill come to the floor.

July 29, 2022 — the House passed an assault weapons ban, 217 to 213. Scalise voted no.

Nobody in the history of the House has taken more

OpenSecrets tracks money from gun rights groups — their PACs, and the people who work for them — to members of Congress from 1990 through 2024. Among all U.S. Representatives across all those years, the number one recipient is Steve Scalise, at $871,215.

Not the top ten. Number one. More than Paul Ryan, more than Kevin McCarthy, more than Jim Jordan, more than anyone else in the data.

That's not a coincidence of longevity. It's a relationship. And he isn't just casting his own vote — as House Majority Leader he is the man who decides what legislation reaches the floor. Every background-check bill, every red-flag bill, every magazine limit that dies without a vote dies at a desk he controls.

Louisiana pays for this

Scalise represents Louisiana's 1st District. Louisiana loses about 22.9 people per 100,000 to gun-related injuries — one of the highest rates in the country, more than a thousand Louisianians a year. His constituents do not get a security detail.

And in his own account of the April shooting, given days after it happened, guns never come up. He talks about his security detail. He talks about grabbing Rep. Jared Moskowitz on the way to the exit. He talks about calling his wife. He praises law enforcement: "It's a special calling to be a law enforcement officer."

All of that is true and none of it is a policy. The Capitol Police officers who saved his life in 2017, and the agents who cleared that ballroom in 2026, are the people we send toward the gunfire after the gun is already in the room. Scalise's entire legislative record is about making sure nothing stops it from getting there.

He is not alone in this — we've written about the Republicans with the worst records on guns, and it's a long list. But no one else on it has been shot, been shot at again, and cashed nearly $900,000 in gun-lobby money in between.

Twice now, Steve Scalise has been close enough to hear the shots. Twice he has come out the other side and gone back to work protecting the industry that puts the guns there.

We deserve better.

Source

Reese Gorman, Correspondents' Dinner shooting brought back 'bad memories' for Scalise — NOTUS, published by Verite News, April 28, 2026. Photo via Verite News.

The Gun Industry Named Ben Cline Its Legislator of the Year. The Award Citation Is a Receipt.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 12:35:00 +0000

Most of the time, figuring out who a member of Congress actually works for takes digging. You pull the donor records. You match them against the votes. You read the bills nobody covered.

Every so often, someone just tells you.

On April 14, 2026, the National Shooting Sports Foundation — the trade association for the companies that make and sell guns and ammunition in this country — named Ben Cline its 2025 Legislator of the Year.

This is not a gun-owners' group. It is not a hunting club. NSSF is the industry. Its members are manufacturers, distributors and retailers, and its job is to make selling firearms easier and more profitable. When that organization picks one member of Congress out of 435 and calls him its legislator of the year, the citation it publishes is worth reading closely — because it is a list, in the industry's own words, of what he did for them.

Here is what NSSF senior vice president Lawrence G. Keane said:

"The list of legislative achievements by Congressman Cline to support the firearm industry is remarkable."

He's right. Let's go through it.

Achievement one: he helped delete the silencer tax

Since 1934, buying a gun silencer in America has meant paying a $200 federal tax stamp, registering the item, and submitting fingerprints. That law — the National Firearms Act — was written during the gangster era to put the most dangerous categories of weapon and accessory on a federal ledger.

Trump's budget bill wiped out the tax.

Buried inside the same enormous bill that cut Medicaid and food assistance was a provision zeroing out the $200 stamp for silencers, short-barreled rifles and short-barreled shotguns. It took effect January 1, 2026. The items still have to be registered — but the fee that had stood since 1934 is now zero.

NSSF credits Cline with helping get it in there, and does not leave the result to the imagination:

"Rep. Cline also served a key role in securing the historic win in the One Big Beautiful Bill zeroing out the NFA tax, which has resulted in tens of thousands of new suppressor applicants."

Tens of thousands of new applicants. That is the industry counting its winnings.

Achievement two: he leads the bill to pull silencers out of federal law entirely

Cline is the sponsor of H.R. 404, the Hearing Protection Act, which he introduced on January 15, 2025. NSSF praised him for taking the bill over after its previous sponsor retired and growing its cosponsor list; it now sits at 127 cosponsors.

The name sounds like a workplace-safety measure. Read the bill text and four things stand out:

Strikes silencers out of the National Firearms Act by removing "any silencer" from the law's definition of a firearm — which takes the whole 1934 framework off them.
Wipes the slate for anyone who already has one: they are "treated as meeting any registration and licensing requirements."
Overrides the states. Section 4 is headed "Preemption of certain State laws in relation to firearm silencers," and says any state marking, recordkeeping or registration requirement "shall have no force or effect."
Orders the records destroyed. Within 365 days of enactment, the Attorney General must destroy the existing silencer registrations.

That last one is not deregulation. It is erasure — taking a registry that exists and burning it. We've seen this move before: Andrew Clyde is pressing the ATF to destroy gun transaction records older than 20 years, and Michael Cloud's SHUSH Act strikes silencers out of the same 1934 law and preempts state law in nearly identical words — though even that bill stops short of ordering the existing records destroyed. Cline's goes further.

Cline talks constantly about federal overreach. He is a Freedom Caucus member. But when a state looks at silencers and writes its own rule, his bill reaches into that state from Washington and cancels it.

Achievement three: during the longest shutdown in American history, he wrote a bill about gun paperwork

This is the part that should stay with you.

The federal government shut down on October 1, 2025, and stayed shut for 43 days — the longest shutdown in U.S. history. Federal workers went unpaid. And on November 1, SNAP ran out of money for roughly 42 million Americans, with states scrambling to figure out how to feed people.

About 817,500 Virginians rely on SNAP every month. One in six Virginia children faces hunger.

On October 31, 2025 — day 31 of that shutdown — Cline introduced H.R. 5874, the Firearm Access During Shutdowns Act.

What it does: it takes federal gun functions — the background check system, the ATF's enforcement-programs office that processes silencer paperwork, and the offices that approve firearm export licenses — and declares them, by statute, to relate to

"an emergency involving the safety of human life or the protection of property"

so that the employees doing that work keep working through any future shutdown as "excepted employees."

Read that again. In the middle of a shutdown where food assistance was about to lapse for 42 million people, the bill Cline filed would write into federal law that processing silencer forms and approving gun exports counts as a life-safety emergency.

He did not stop at the bill. NSSF credits him with leading 29 colleagues in a letter pressing the ATF to keep processing National Firearms Act forms while the government was closed.

H.R. 5874 was referred to committee and went nowhere. But 54 members signed on, and the point isn't whether it passed. The point is what a member of Congress reaches for when the government stops and his constituents start calling. Cline reached for the gun forms.

What the industry pays him

The relationship is not one-directional.

NSSF's political action committee has given Cline's campaign money in every election cycle since 2020 — $28,500 in all, according to his own filings with the Federal Election Commission. The most recent check, for $3,000, is dated March 31, 2026.

The award came two weeks later.

NSSF also notes that Cline earned an "A+" on its 2024 congressional report card and made its inaugural "Dean's List" with a 100% record on the bills the industry cared about. A perfect score. Not one vote where he weighed the industry's ask against something else and came down the other way.

His report card here lists the same trade association among his top funders, alongside the Freedom Caucus Fund and Altria.

What it costs Virginia

Virginia has 12.8 gun deaths per 100,000 people — about 1,200 Virginians a year.

That is roughly three people a day, every day, in the state Cline represents. He sits on the Appropriations Committee, which decides where federal money actually goes, and he has been in Congress since 2019. In seven years he has had the power to move real money at that number.

Instead, the bills with his name on them run the other way: take silencers off the federal registry, destroy the records, override the states that said no, zero out the tax, and keep the export licenses moving when everything else in Washington stops.

The hearing-damage argument in his bill's title is real as far as it goes. Gunfire is loud. But hearing protection costs about thirty dollars at any sporting goods store. It does not require deleting a 92-year-old federal registry, and it does not require burning the records of who owns what.

The tell

Politicians usually work hard to look like they answer to their constituents. What makes this story unusual is that we don't have to guess.

The gun industry evaluated its options in Congress, picked Ben Cline, and published its reasoning. Every item on that list is something he did. Not one of them is something Virginians asked him for.

Source

National Shooting Sports Foundation, "NSSF Honors U.S. Rep. Ben Cline as 2025 Legislator of the Year", April 14, 2026. Photo: NSSF.

Carlos Gimenez Was One of Eight Republicans Who Voted for Universal Background Checks. Then Uvalde Happened, and He Voted No on Every Gun Bill That Followed.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 12:34:59 +0000

Most Republicans in Congress have never cast a single vote for a gun safety law, so when they vote no there's nothing to explain. Carlos Gimenez is a harder case, because he did vote yes once — and he was proud of it, and he put out a press release saying so.

Then 19 children and two teachers were murdered at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, and he voted against every gun bill the House put on the floor in response.

March 2021: one of eight

On March 11, 2021, the House passed the Bipartisan Background Checks Act, which would have required a background check on essentially every gun sale, including private ones. It passed 227 to 203.

Exactly eight House Republicans voted yes. Gimenez was one of them. So were two of his fellow Florida Republicans, Vern Buchanan and Maria Elvira Salazar.

He didn't hide it. That same day his office put out a statement explaining the vote in his own words:

"As a responsible gun owner, I know firsthand the importance of upholding the 2nd amendment. That is why I support measures that safeguard transfers between close family members and short-term gun loans among hunters and sport shooters.

"Today, I voted for the Bipartisan Background Checks Act to close a loophole exploited by dangerous criminals to side-step the system and illegally obtain firearms. This simple fix helps promote safe, sensible, and responsible gun ownership. I will never support proposals to curb legal ownership of firearms or make it burdensome for ordinary individuals from partaking in their 2nd amendment rights. For that reason, I voted against H.R. 1446."

A "simple fix." "Safe, sensible, and responsible."

Everytown for Gun Safety put out a release thanking him. The people quoted in it were Maria José and Fred Wright of Florida — lifelong Republicans whose son Jerry was murdered at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando in 2016.

"We are very grateful to Rep. Gimenez for voting for H.R. 8 and showing he prioritizes the safety of his constituents."

May 2022: Uvalde

On May 24, 2022, a gunman walked into Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, and killed 19 children and two teachers.

The House responded by putting bill after bill on the floor. Here is how the congressman who called background checks a "simple fix" voted on each of the gun bills.

The Protecting Our Kids Act — raised the minimum age to buy a semiautomatic rifle from 18 to 21, banned high-capacity magazines, and required safe storage. Passed the House 223 to 204 on June 8, 2022.

Gimenez: No.

The Federal Extreme Risk Protection Order Act — a federal red flag law, letting a court temporarily take guns from someone found to be a danger to themselves or others. Passed the House on June 9, 2022. Only five Republicans voted yes.

Gimenez: No.

The Bipartisan Safer Communities Act — the one that actually became law. It toughened background checks for buyers under 21, closed the "boyfriend loophole" that let convicted domestic abusers keep their guns, and funded state red flag laws. It cleared the House 234 to 193 on June 24, 2022, with 14 Republicans voting yes.

Gimenez: No.

The Assault Weapons Ban — passed the House 217 to 213 on July 29, 2022.

Gimenez: No.

Four bills. Four no votes — including a no on the narrowest one of the four, the bipartisan compromise that fourteen of his fellow House Republicans supported and that became federal law.

Look at what that means side by side. The bill Gimenez voted yes on in 2021 was broader than the one he voted no on in 2022. Universal background checks on every sale is a much bigger step than tightening checks for buyers under 21. He was for the big version before Uvalde and against the small version after it.

And then he went further

The next year he didn't just decline to add gun laws — he voted to take one away.

On June 13, 2023, the House voted to overturn the ATF's rule regulating pistols fitted with "stabilizing braces," an attachment that lets a handgun be shouldered and fired like a short rifle. It was a near party-line rollback: 217 Republicans voted for it and only two voted against.

Gimenez voted yes.

What he has never done is explain it

There is no press release on his site walking through why the "simple fix" stopped being simple. No statement reconciling March 2021 with June 2022. He put out a release when the vote was easy to defend and said nothing at all when it wasn't.

What did happen in between is worth knowing. On May 10, 2022 — two weeks before Uvalde, and four weeks before the first of the House votes — a pro-Trump group called the America First Political Committee named Gimenez its "top target for removal from Congress" in that August's Republican primary. Its list of grievances named the background-check vote itself — "RINO Gimenez voted with Nancy Pelosi on Anti-Second Amendment legislation HR-8, making it more difficult for law-abiding citizens to purchase, own, carry, and use a firearm" — alongside his vote for the January 6 investigation and his other breaks with the party.

He was, in other words, being publicly hunted as a RINO in a primary that was ten weeks away when the first of those bills hit the floor and under four weeks away when the last one did.

What it costs Florida

Florida loses about 3,200 people to gun violence every year — roughly nine every day. This is the state of Pulse and Parkland. The parents Everytown put in front of a microphone to thank Gimenez in 2021 were Florida Republicans burying a son murdered in a nightclub in their own state.

He is also not the only Florida Republican who said the right thing about guns once and then couldn't be found when the votes came. Brian Mast — who carried an M4 in the Army, lost both legs to a roadside bomb in Afghanistan, and personally knew one of the 17 people murdered at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School — publicly asked for a pause on AR-15 sales after Parkland, then voted against every one of these same bills and scrubbed the whole episode off his campaign website. In Ohio, Mike Turner promised a magazine limit two days after nine people were shot dead in his own district, then voted to strip one out of a bill.

The pattern is always the same. The promise comes when the country is watching. The vote comes months later, when it isn't.

Sources

Roll call 75, March 11, 2021 — Bipartisan Background Checks Act, Office of the Clerk, U.S. House of Representatives
Gimenez Statement on Background Check Legislation, March 11, 2021 (archived)
Everytown Applauds Rep. Gimenez for Voting for Legislation to Require Background Checks on all Gun Sales, March 16, 2021
House clears bipartisan gun violence reduction measure — Roll Call, June 24, 2022

Nine People Died in Mike Turner's District. He Promised a Magazine Limit. Then He Voted to Strip One Out of a Bill.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 08:28:20 +0000

At about 1 a.m. on Sunday, August 4, 2019, a man in body armor opened fire on Fifth Street in Dayton's Oregon District. Police killed him in 32 seconds. In those 32 seconds he murdered nine people and injured at least 27.

Mike Turner's daughter Jessica was there. She and a friend had just crossed Fifth Street and were about to walk into a restaurant when the shooting started. She ran into Tumbleweed Connection, across from Ned Peppers Bar, hit the floor with everyone else, and got out the back door.

Turner told WHIO: "She called me as she was fleeing and said they didn't know how many shooters there were, whether or not the area was safe. So they were going to keep going. And so it was almost an hour before we got real information and an understanding that the shooter had been killed and the situation was now safe."

Two days later, Turner did something almost no House Republican had done after a mass shooting.

August 6, 2019: the promise

He put out a press release. Its title was: "TURNER Supports Restricting Military Style Weapon Sales, Magazine Limits, & Red Flag Legislation."

Here is what he wrote:

"I strongly support the Second Amendment, but we must prevent mentally unstable people from terrorizing our communities with military style weapons. I will support legislation that prevents the sale of military style weapons to civilians, a magazine limit, and red flag legislation. The carnage these military style weapons are able to produce when available to the wrong people is intolerable. We must pass red flag legislation to quickly identify people who are dangerous and remove their ability to harm others. Too often after mass shootings, we hear there were early warning signs that were ignored."

He explained why the magazine limit mattered, using the shooting in his own district as the example:

"This weekend, a shooter wearing body armor opened fire in downtown Dayton with a weapon he had modified to be able to hold 100 rounds of ammunition."

And he closed:

"This tragedy must become a catalyst for a broader national conversation about what we can do to stop these mass shootings."

Three specific commitments, in his own words, on his own letterhead: military-style weapon sales, a magazine limit, red flag legislation.

It was national news. Here was a Republican congressman whose child had run for her life, saying out loud that the guns were the problem.

That press release is no longer on his House website — the page returns "Page Not Found." It survives in the Internet Archive.

June 8, 2022: the magazine limit

Nearly three years later the House took up the Protecting Our Kids Act. Under the rule for the bill, members voted separately on whether to keep each of its titles.

Title VI was called "Keep Americans Safe." It is the magazine limit — it defined a "large capacity ammunition feeding device" as anything holding more than 10 rounds, and banned it.

This was the exact thing Turner had promised. It was aimed at the exact problem he had described: a weapon modified to hold 100 rounds.

Turner voted to strike it out of the bill. The title survived 220 to 207, with Turner in the 207.

He also voted to strike Title IV, the safe-storage requirement, and then voted against the whole bill on final passage, which passed 223 to 204.

June 9, 2022: the red flag law

The next day the House voted on H.R. 2377, the Federal Extreme Risk Protection Order Act. That is a red flag law: it lets a court temporarily take firearms from someone shown to be a danger to themselves or others.

Turner in 2019: "We must pass red flag legislation to quickly identify people who are dangerous and remove their ability to harm others."

Turner in 2022: no. The bill passed 224 to 202 without him.

July 29, 2022: the military-style weapons ban

Seven weeks after that, the House voted on H.R. 1808, the Assault Weapons Ban — legislation preventing the sale of military-style weapons to civilians, which is the first thing on Turner's 2019 list, phrased almost identically.

Turner voted no. It passed anyway, 217 to 213, by four votes.

He had also, the year before, voted against the Bipartisan Background Checks Act.

Being fair about the one he did vote for

Turner is not a total no. On June 24, 2022, he was one of 14 House Republicans who voted for the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, the modest package that actually became law after Uvalde. It passed 234 to 193.

That vote matters, and it's worth saying so. It also makes the rest of the record harder to explain, not easier.

The Safer Communities Act does not ban military-style weapons. It does not limit magazine size. It funds state red flag programs but does not create a federal one. In other words, Turner voted for the bill that contained none of the three things he promised, and voted against every bill that contained any of them.

He didn't lose a close call on principle. He supported the version that asked nothing of the gun industry and opposed the versions that did.

What the record actually shows

Put it side by side.

What Turner promised, August 6, 2019	What Turner did
"legislation that prevents the sale of military style weapons to civilians"	Voted no on the Assault Weapons Ban, July 29, 2022
"a magazine limit"	Voted to strip the magazine limit out of a bill, June 8, 2022
"red flag legislation"	Voted no on the Federal Extreme Risk Protection Order Act, June 9, 2022

This is a pattern, not a Turner invention. Brian Mast wrote a New York Times op-ed after Parkland saying he supported barring future purchases of assault weapons, then voted against the assault weapons ban and scrubbed the position from his campaign site. The promise comes in the week the country is watching. The vote comes three years later, when it isn't.

Nine names

The picture at the top of this post is from the vigil in the Oregon District: nine floral hearts, each with a name card. The nine were Megan Betts, Monica Brickhouse, Nicholas Cumer, Derrick Fudge, Thomas McNichols, Lois Oglesby, Saeed Saleh, Logan Turner and Beatrice Warren-Curtis.

Turner said their deaths "must become a catalyst." He was right. He just wasn't willing to be the catalyst himself when the roll was called, and the roll was called four times.

There is no forum in which a Dayton voter can ask him about this. Turner has not held a public town hall in the nine years his constituents have been asking for one, and he has not said whether he'll debate his opponent before November 3.

Sources

Turner's August 6, 2019 statement is preserved at the Internet Archive: TURNER Supports Restricting Military Style Weapon Sales, Magazine Limits, & Red Flag Legislation. His daughter's account was reported by WHIO. Every vote above links to the official roll call at the Office of the Clerk of the U.S. House. Photo: vigil for the 2019 Dayton shooting victims, via Wikimedia Commons.

Trent Kelly Spent 15 Years Prosecuting Crime in North Mississippi. Twice in Congress He Voted Against the Violence Against Women Act.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 08:19:00 +0000

Before he went to Washington, Trent Kelly prosecuted crime in north Mississippi. By his own official biography, he served as Tupelo City Prosecutor and as forfeiture attorney for the North Mississippi Narcotics Unit, and then, right up until he was elected to Congress, as district attorney for the 1st Circuit Judicial District — Lee, Pontotoc, Alcorn, Monroe, Itawamba, Prentiss and Tishomingo counties — "managing all felony cases."

If you run felony cases in Mississippi, you handle domestic violence. And the federal money that helps you handle it — the training, the victim advocates, the rural enforcement grants — comes from one law.

The Violence Against Women Act.

Kelly has voted against reauthorizing it twice.

The votes

April 4, 2019. The House took up the Violence Against Women Reauthorization Act. It passed 263 to 158. Thirty-three Republicans voted yes. Kelly voted no.

March 17, 2021. The House took it up again. It passed 244 to 172. Twenty-nine Republicans voted yes. Kelly voted no again.

These aren't obscure procedural votes buried in a spending package. Both were straight up-or-down votes on final passage of a bill named the Violence Against Women Reauthorization Act.

What VAWA actually pays for

VAWA is not a slogan. It's a grant program, and the biggest piece of it is aimed squarely at people who do the job Kelly used to do.

The Congressional Research Service's breakdown of the 2021 bill lists the programs it reauthorized. The largest is the STOP program — Services, Training, Officers, and Prosecutors — funded at $215 million in fiscal 2021. Other line items that year:

$47 million for civil legal assistance for victims
$45 million for rural domestic violence enforcement
$41 million for sexual assault services

Rural domestic violence enforcement. That is a line item written for districts like Mississippi's 1st.

What it looks like in Mississippi

The National Coalition Against Domestic Violence publishes a fact sheet for Mississippi. The numbers:

39.7% of Mississippi women and 31.7% of Mississippi men experience intimate partner physical violence, intimate partner sexual violence, and/or intimate partner stalking in their lifetimes.
On a single day in 2019, Mississippi domestic violence programs served 354 adults and children — and 57 requests for help went unmet for lack of resources.
Mississippi does not release intimate partner homicide data to the public.
As of December 31, 2019, Mississippi had submitted no domestic violence misdemeanor or protective order records to the federal background check index.

That last one deserves a second read. Those are the records a federal background check searches to catch a domestic abuser. Mississippi had submitted none of them.

The reason 172 Republicans voted no

The contested part of the 2021 bill wasn't the shelters or the legal aid. It was the guns.

Federal law already barred people convicted of domestic violence from owning firearms — if they had been married to, lived with, or had a child with the victim. If the abuser was a boyfriend or an ex-boyfriend, the ban didn't apply. That gap has a name: the boyfriend loophole.

The 2021 bill closed it. Per the CRS summary, it extended the firearm prohibition to dating partners and former dating partners, added people convicted of misdemeanor stalking, and covered protective orders issued under state, tribal, and territorial law.

The National Rifle Association came out against the bill's gun provisions. Jason Ouimet, executive director of the NRA's lobbying arm, told Newsweek:

"The NRA did not oppose VAWA for its first 25 years. And today, we only oppose the gun control provisions contained within."

He accused Nancy Pelosi and anti-gun lawmakers of putting those provisions into the bill in 2019 "to pit pro-gun lawmakers against it so that they can falsely and maliciously claim these lawmakers don't care about women."

One hundred seventy-two House Republicans then voted no. Kelly was one of them.

The NCADV fact sheet has the number that makes this concrete: an abuser's access to a firearm increases the risk of intimate partner femicide at least five-fold. When a gun has been used in the most severe abuse incident, the risk goes up 41-fold.

He didn't have to vote this way

Twenty-nine House Republicans voted yes in 2021. Thirty-three voted yes in 2019. This was not a case where a Republican had no room to move.

A paper in his district noticed. Ahead of the 2022 primary, Commercial Dispatch columnist Slim Smith went through Kelly's record and added this vote to the list: "For good measure, Kelly also voted against restoring the Violence Against Women Act, which had lapsed in 2018." Smith's framing was that there are moments when party loyalty and constituents' welfare point in opposite directions, and this was one:

"I have no issue with either Guest or Kelly voting with their party on most legislation. But there are instances where both have made party loyalty a higher priority than the welfare of the people they were elected to represent."

The part that's hard to explain

Plenty of members of Congress vote with the gun lobby every time. That's a position, and voters can judge it.

But a former district attorney knows something a lobbyist doesn't. He knows what a domestic violence file looks like. He knows which victims come back and which ones don't. He knows what happens in the weeks after a woman leaves — which is when the danger spikes, and which is exactly the window the boyfriend loophole leaves open.

He voted no anyway. Twice.

We've written before about how his votes land on Mississippi families — he also voted against capping insulin at $35 a month in a state where 348,000 adults have diabetes — and about what Mississippi's whole Republican delegation is costing the state.

Fifteen years as a prosecutor. Two votes against the law that funds prosecutors who handle these cases.

Source

Slim Smith, "Slimantics: Guest, Kelly have consistently voted against constituents' best interests," The Commercial Dispatch.

Michael Cloud's Bill Would Pull Gun Silencers Out of Federal Law Entirely — and Void Every State Silencer Tax and Registration Rule Too

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 07:59:24 +0000

Since 1934, gun silencers have been regulated under the National Firearms Act — the law Congress passed during the gangster era to keep the most dangerous categories of weapon and accessory tracked. Buying one means registration, a federal tax stamp, fingerprints, and a wait.

Michael Cloud wants that gone.

On January 31, 2025, Cloud introduced H.R. 850, which he named the Silencers Help Us Save Hearing Act — the SHUSH Act. Its stated purpose, in the first line of the bill: "To provide that silencers be treated the same as firearms accessories."

Not "streamline." Not "reduce the wait." The same as a scope or a sling.

What the bill actually does

Four things, and they build on each other.

One: it strikes silencers out of the National Firearms Act. The bill amends Section 5845(a) of the tax code by removing the clause listing "any silencer." Once that word is out of the definition, the entire NFA framework — the registry, the transfer tax, the federal paperwork — stops applying.

Two: it wipes the slate for people who already have one. Anyone acquiring or possessing a silencer under ordinary gun law "shall be treated as meeting any registration and licensing requirements of the National Firearms Act."

Three — and this is the part that ought to get attention — it reaches into state law. The bill's fourth section is headed "Preemption of certain State laws in relation to firearm silencers." It amends Section 927 of the federal criminal code — the provision that says federal gun law is not meant to displace state gun law — so that any state or local rule which, as a condition of lawfully making, transferring, using, possessing or transporting a silencer, "imposes a tax on any such conduct, or a marking, recordkeeping or registration requirement with respect to the firearm silencer, shall have no force or effect."

That has a real target. Giffords counts eight states and the District of Columbia that ban silencers outright, and says that list "does not include the large number of other states that have laws on the books that only ban those silencers not registered in accordance with the federal laws." Those are state registration rules, and Cloud's bill is written to strip them out from Washington.

Four: it takes silencers out of the Gun Control Act as well. Section 5 is headed "Silencers and mufflers not to be Federally regulated." It strikes silencers from the definition of "firearm" in Section 921(a) of the federal criminal code, deletes the definition of "firearm silencer" altogether, and removes the sentencing enhancements in Section 924 that currently impose a 30-year mandatory minimum — and life on a second conviction — when a gun used in a violent crime or a drug crime is equipped with one.

That is worth sitting with, because Cloud is the congressman who talks constantly about federal overreach and states' rights. He is a Freedom Caucus member. He put his name on a bill to abolish federal agencies on a timer because Washington has too much power over everyone else.

Unless a state has a gun law he doesn't like. Then Washington's power is exactly the right size.

The company it keeps

The SHUSH Act's original cosponsors are Andy Ogles, Clay Higgins, Paul Gosar, Andy Harris, Lauren Boebert and Mary Miller.

That is not a coincidental group. It is a working caucus, and Cloud shows up on the other side of the transaction too. When Boebert introduced her bill to repeal the 1927 law that keeps handguns out of the U.S. mail, Cloud was one of three original cosponsors.

So in the same Congress, the same member is:

Leading the bill to take silencers out of the federal firearms registry and void the state rules that track them, and
Cosponsoring the bill to let handguns be shipped through the Postal Service again.

Neither of those is about hunting or home defense. They are about dismantling specific, long-standing federal restrictions — one from 1934, one from 1927 — that have been in place longer than almost anyone alive.

What this costs Texas

4,390 Texans died from gun-related injuries in 2024.

That's about twelve people a day, every day, in Cloud's state.

The response from the man who represents the Coastal Bend is a bill to make one class of firearm equipment harder to trace, and a cosponsorship on another to make guns easier to move anonymously through the mail.

The hearing-protection argument in the bill's name is real as far as it goes — gunfire is loud, and ear damage is a genuine thing. But hearing protection already exists and costs $30 at any sporting goods store. It does not require deleting a 92-year-old federal registry, it does not require voiding the state laws that lean on that registry, and it does not require deleting a 30-year mandatory minimum for using a silenced gun in a violent crime.

What he isn't doing

Here's the part to hold onto. Cloud sits on the Appropriations Committee, which decides where federal money actually goes, and he has been in Congress since 2018. In that time he has had the ability to move real money and real policy toward the thing killing 4,390 Texans a year.

Instead, the gun bills he has introduced himself run the other direction: H.R. 2039, the Protecting the Right to Keep and Bear Arms Act; H.R. 563, the No Retaining Every Gun In a System That Restricts Your Rights Act; and the SHUSH Act.

Three bills of his own to loosen. None to help.

Sources

Bill text of H.R. 850, the SHUSH Act, introduced January 31, 2025, via the Government Publishing Office. Existing federal law at 18 U.S.C. 927 and 18 U.S.C. 924, via the Office of the Law Revision Counsel. State silencer laws from the Giffords Law Center. Texas gun death data from USAFacts. Photo: Official congressional portrait.

Threats and Assaults on Park Rangers More Than Doubled in the Year Before the Pandemic. Rudy Yakym Wrote a Bill to Put Guns Inside Their Buildings.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 19:14:38 +0000

On July 16, 2026, Rudy Yakym introduced H.R. 9719, the Federal Lands Lawful Carry Act, with Texas Rep. Pat Fallon. It went to the Judiciary Committee. Three cosponsors had signed on by the time this was published.

The bill would let people carry firearms inside buildings on federal lands — visitor centers, ranger stations, and the other public facilities run by the National Park Service and other federal land agencies, plus U.S. Army Corps of Engineers facilities.

Yakym's case for it:

"Hoosiers who can lawfully carry shouldn't lose that right when they step into a federal park building."

Fallon's was broader: "Americans' Second Amendment rights are under assault, and we in Congress must do all we can to ensure that they retain their God given right to bear arms."

The bill is endorsed by the National Rifle Association, Gun Owners of America, and the Second Amendment Foundation.

What the law actually is right now

It's worth being precise, because the framing of this bill depends on you not knowing the current rule.

You can already carry a gun in a national park. That changed in 2010. As the Park Service explains it, people who can lawfully possess firearms under federal and state law may possess them in the park. Trails, campgrounds, overlooks, roads — all of it.

The single remaining restriction is buildings. Under 18 U.S.C. § 930, a firearm can't be carried into a federal facility, and every one of those buildings is posted with the same sign:

"Federal law prohibits the possession of a firearm or other dangerous weapon in this Federal facility unless specifically authorized."

Within the park system, "federal facility" means the staffed buildings: government offices, visitor centers, ranger stations, fee collection buildings, maintenance facilities. Rooms with employees in them.

So the "right" Yakym describes as being lost isn't the right to carry in a national park. It's already there. What his bill changes is the last few hundred square feet — the room with the ranger behind the desk.

Who is in that room

This is where the bill stops being abstract.

A 2022 report by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, covered by E&E News, documented what has been happening to that workforce:

228 threats and assaults on NPS law enforcement personnel in 2019 — more than double the 94 recorded the year before
Violent crimes in the parks up from 60 in 2014 to 293 in 2019
Permanent law enforcement rangers down 15% between 2005 and 2021; seasonal rangers down 30%
U.S. Park Police at a nearly 50-year staffing low

PEER's director summed it up: "The thin green line of park law enforcement rangers is being stretched to the breaking point."

Those are the people Yakym's bill affects. Not hikers on a trail — hikers on a trail can already carry. The staff standing at a counter, in a building with no metal detector and no armed security, telling visitors that the campsite is full, that the permit is denied, that the fee is due, that they have to leave.

Fewer of them than there were. More assaults on the ones who remain. And a bill to remove the one place their building is legally off-limits to a firearm.

The bill's real audience

The tell is who wrote the argument.

In March 2026, months before Yakym filed his bill, the Second Amendment Foundation — one of the three groups endorsing it — sued to strike down the very same statute, 18 U.S.C. § 930(a), as applied to Park Service facilities. Their complaint, filed with the Firearms Policy Coalition, argues it is unconstitutional to make someone disarm to walk into a visitor center and pick up a camping permit.

SAF's founder Alan Gottlieb was explicit about the broader target:

"These so-called 'sensitive places' restrictions across the country are nothing more than an attempt by idealogues to circumvent the Supreme Court's ruling in Bruen."

Yakym's bill is the legislative version of that lawsuit. If the court won't do it, Congress does it instead — and the sponsor gets endorsements from all three of the groups pushing both tracks.

His record on this isn't new

This fits a pattern that predates the parks bill.

In September 2023, Yakym was an original cosponsor of H.R. 5561, a bill "to prohibit the President and the Secretary of Health and Human Services from declaring certain emergencies or disasters for the purpose of imposing gun control" — barring the President and the Health Secretary from declaring an emergency, a pandemic among them, for the purpose of imposing gun control, and barring any federally declared disaster from being used to prohibit guns, ammunition or magazines.

Meanwhile, in the state he represents: Indiana has about 17.2 gun deaths per 100,000 people — 34% above the national average, roughly 1,200 Hoosiers a year.

Yakym has not introduced a bill about that number. He has introduced one about visitor center doors.

He's not alone in this session

The 119th Congress has produced a run of bills that take the last remaining restricted spaces and open them.

In Colorado, Jeff Crank wrote a bill to make it easier to bring personal guns onto military bases — the opposite of what the Pentagon's own suicide-prevention committee recommended, in a service where two-thirds of active-duty suicides involve a firearm. In North Carolina, Richard Hudson's national concealed carry bill drew a plea from the Fraternal Order of Police to kill it, because it strips officers of the power to check a permit. In Texas, Ken Paxton spent two years suing to put guns back into the State Fair after a shooting there injured three people, and lost to an all-Republican court.

Every one of these takes the same shape: find a place where guns are still restricted, and argue that the restriction is the anomaly.

The question nobody gets to ask him

If a constituent thought the ranger at the front desk of a visitor center should not have to wonder who's armed, there isn't much they can do about it.

Yakym has not held a public town hall. When hundreds of people rallied outside his Mishawaka office in March 2025 asking for one, he put out a statement about the protest saying his office would "not allow our efforts to be derailed by individuals whose sole intention is to disrupt and create chaos." What he offers instead is staff-run "mobile office hours," and his own office says those "are not town halls."

The NRA got a say in this bill. Gun Owners of America got a say. The Second Amendment Foundation got a say.

The rangers didn't. Neither did we.

We deserve better.

Source

GOP lawmakers want to allow guns in federal park buildings — E&E News by POLITICO, July 2026, and Congressmen Yakym, Fallon introduce bill to end Federal Ban on Firearms in Federal Park Buildings — GIANT fm. Bill status from congress.gov. Ranger staffing and assault figures from Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, as reported by E&E News. Photo: official congressional portrait.

Jefferson Shreve Ran on Banning Assault Weapons. On Day One in Congress He Cosponsored National Concealed Carry.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 16:43:14 +0000

In July 2023, running for mayor of Indianapolis, Jefferson Shreve stood up and proposed three gun laws.

Ban assault weapons in Indianapolis. Restore the requirement for a permit to carry a concealed handgun there. Raise the minimum age to buy any firearm to 21.

That was his public safety plan — three changes he said he would ask the Republican supermajority at the Statehouse to let the city make, announced as Indianapolis reached 100 criminal homicides for the year. He was the Republican in the race. His opponent's campaign manager, Blake Hesch, said the speech showed Shreve was "willing to do or say anything to get elected."

Eighteen months later, on January 3, 2025 — his very first day as a member of Congress — Shreve signed on as an original cosponsor of the Constitutional Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act, the bill that would force every state to honor concealed carry permission from every other state, including the states that require no permit at all.

Same man. Opposite position. Eighteen months apart.

The NRA saw it coming and said so out loud

You don't usually get gun groups fact-checking Republicans. This one did.

Before the May 2024 primary in Indiana's 6th District, the NRA's Political Victory Fund emailed its members in that district with a warning about Shreve. He was, it said, suggesting in campaign ads that he had an "A" rating from the group.

That was false. His actual grade was an F.

The email laid out why: the year before, it said, Shreve had proposed banning certain firearms, raising the minimum purchase age to 21, and calling for a repeal of Indiana's constitutional carry law. And then the line that has aged into a prophecy:

"Jefferson Shreve has yet to publicly renounce his support for these gun control proposals and has demonstrated that he cannot be trusted to protect your Second Amendment rights in Congress."

The NRA's complaint was that he couldn't be trusted to stay bought. That is not our argument. Our argument is simpler: a man who reversed his most publicized position the moment the electorate changed will reverse anything.

He spent $13.5 million losing the first race

The 2023 mayoral run wasn't a shoestring effort he could later disown. Shreve, who sold his Storage Express self-storage company to Extra Space Storage for $590 million in 2022, put $13.5 million of his own money into that campaign — 93% of everything it raised, in the most expensive mayoral election in Indianapolis history.

He bought enough television time to make sure every voter in Marion County knew where he stood on guns. Then he lost anyway, and Joe Hogsett won a third term.

The next year he ran in a safe Republican district instead — and the positions went with the district.

What he actually signed

H.R. 38 is not a small bill, and it's not symbolic. It says a person who can legally carry a concealed handgun in their home state may carry it in any other state, whatever that state's own permit rules require.

Gun Owners of America counts 29 states with permitless or "constitutional" carry. In those states, "permitted" means "an adult who bought a gun" — no class, no live-fire test, no sheriff's review. Indiana is one of them, because of the 2022 law Shreve campaigned on rolling back in Indianapolis.

The nation's largest police union has been asking Congress to kill this bill, because it also strips officers of a workable way to check whether the person in front of them is carrying legally.

H.R. 38 has never reached the floor, so Shreve has never had to cast a vote on it. He put his name on it before he had unpacked his office.

The pattern is the point

There are two honest ways to change your mind in public. You can say you were wrong, and explain what changed. Or you can stick with the unpopular position and lose.

Shreve did neither. He never publicly renounced the 2023 plan — the NRA said so at the time, and we found no statement since. He simply stopped mentioning it, moved to a district where the old position was a liability, and took the opposite one on day one.

That's why this matters beyond guns. The question every voter in Indiana's 6th District should be asking is not "what does Jefferson Shreve believe about the Second Amendment?" It's "what would Jefferson Shreve have to believe for his current district to keep electing him?" — because on the available evidence, that's the same question.

Ask him what he'd do if the district changed again. Then check the ads.

Source

The NRA Political Victory Fund's 2024 alert to Indiana 6th District members, and the Indianapolis Business Journal's July 13, 2023 report on Shreve's crime plan. Photo: official congressional portrait.

Richard Hudson's Signature Bill Would Override North Carolina's Gun Permit Law. The Fraternal Order of Police Is Begging Congress to Kill It.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 16:37:23 +0000

North Carolina makes you earn a concealed carry permit. You have to be 21. You have to have lived here 30 days. You have to complete an approved firearms safety course that includes actually firing the handgun and covers state law on deadly force. And your county sheriff has to sign off — and is required by law to say no if you're a fugitive, under felony indictment, or in a long list of other categories.

Richard Hudson has spent eleven years trying to make all of that unenforceable against anyone from out of state.

His bill is H.R. 38, the Constitutional Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act. He introduced this version on the first day of the current Congress with more than 120 cosponsors — it's now up to 189. The House Judiciary Committee approved it 18–9 in March 2025, and it has been sitting on the House calendar since October 3, 2025, waiting for a floor vote that could come at any time.

And the biggest organization of rank-and-file police officers in America is trying to stop it.

What the bill actually does

Congress's own summary is not subtle. H.R. 38 "preempts most state and local laws related to concealed carry" and creates a private right of action — a lawsuit — for anyone adversely affected by interference with the carrying right it creates.

In practice, two things happen:

A permit from any state works in every state. Not just states with comparable standards — any state.
A resident of a state with no permit requirement at all can carry here without one. Gun Owners of America counts 29 states with permitless or "constitutional" carry in its own statement praising Hudson's bill.

So a visitor from a permitless state can carry a concealed handgun through downtown Fayetteville without ever taking the safety class, without ever firing the gun in front of an instructor, and without a North Carolina sheriff ever looking at their name. The North Carolinian standing next to them had to do all three.

Everytown for Gun Safety's objection, as MS NOW summarized it, is that the bill could let many people carry concealed weapons without passing a background check, going through safety training, or having any experience handling a gun. That's not a stretch of the text. That's the text.

The police union that endorsed Trump is fighting Hudson's bill

On November 17, 2025, the National Fraternal Order of Police — the largest police union in the country, and an openly pro-Trump one — issued a joint call to action with the International Association of Chiefs of Police urging Congress to reject H.R. 38.

Their objection isn't about the Second Amendment. It's about what the bill does to officers on a traffic stop:

"The legislation exempts any person with a valid photographic identification from state or local firearms law who asserts that they are lawfully carrying a firearm under the laws of their own state of residence. This is problematic, but the most concerning provision of H.R. 38 is that it prohibits law enforcement officers from making any arrest or detaining a suspect for any violation of state or local law pertaining to the possession, transportation, or carriage of a firearm."

The two groups also warned that this "makes it impossible for an officer to conduct any investigation with respect to ascertaining if the person is in fact compliant with the firearms law in their state of residence," and that "officers would be expected to interpret and apply laws from all 50 states in real time, without reliable means to verify an individual's eligibility to carry concealed weapons."

Read that again. A driver produces a photo ID and says he's allowed to carry back home, and the officer has to take his word for it — and can be sued if he doesn't.

Gun Owners of America's response to the country's biggest police union was to accuse it of betrayal. "Fraternal Order of Police betrays the Second Amendment by opposing H.R. 38," the group posted the next day.

Hudson's answer to the police has been to keep going. "I will not stop fighting to get this legislation signed into law," he said when he introduced it.

The people who wanted this bill have paid him for it

Hudson's report card lays out where his money comes from, and guns are near the top of it. The National Rifle Association has given him $39,650 — one of his largest single sources, and it is not a mystery what it bought. When he introduced H.R. 38, NRA-ILA executive director John Commerford put out a statement thanking him by name: "NRA applauds and thanks Rep. Hudson for his longstanding and unwavering leadership in the fight for right-to-carry reciprocity."

Gun Owners of America called the bill "the greatest legislative victory for the gun rights movement in a century."

Overall, only 3% of Hudson's campaign money comes from small grassroots donors, and he ranks 343rd out of 440 House members in grassroots funding. He is funded by organizations, and he legislates for them.

Josh Horwitz, co-director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions, described national reciprocity to The Trace as "the absolute prize" for Republicans. Hudson is the man carrying it.

This has been his project since 2015

Hudson first filed it as H.R. 986 in February 2015. The House actually passed a version once, on December 6, 2017, by a vote of 231–198. The Senate never took it up, and it died.

He has reintroduced it in every Congress since. What's different now is that Republicans control the House, the Senate, and the White House, and Trump has said he'd sign it. This is the closest the bill has ever been to becoming law — which is exactly why the police unions moved when they did.

Hudson isn't alone in North Carolina, either. His colleague Pat Harrigan filed a bill in April 2026 that would override every state's carry laws for special operations veterans — and, unlike the retired-police law it copies, waives the yearly requalification. Two members from the same state, both writing bills whose effect is to move the decision about who may carry a concealed gun in North Carolina out of North Carolina.

What it means where he lives

North Carolina loses about 1,800 people a year to gun violence — a rate 27 percent above the national average. Hudson's district includes Fort Bragg, part of Fayetteville, and all of Hoke, Moore, Randolph, and Alamance counties. The sheriffs in those counties are the officials whose sign-off H.R. 38 makes irrelevant for everyone driving in from out of state, and their deputies are the ones the FOP says would lose the authority to check.

Hudson has been in Congress since 2013 — thirteen years. In that time the single piece of legislation most associated with his name is one that takes a safety decision away from North Carolina sheriffs, hands it to whichever state has the loosest rules in the country, and lets the gun owner sue the cop who questions it.

The NRA thanked him for it. The police are asking Congress to stop him.

Source

Concealed carry 'reciprocity' law splits MAGA gun and law enforcement groups — Ja'han Jones, MS NOW, November 21, 2025. The FOP and IACP joint call to action is available from the Fraternal Order of Police.

Two-Thirds of Active-Duty Suicides Involve a Firearm. Jeff Crank Wrote a Bill to Make It Easier to Bring Guns onto Base.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 14:43:22 +0000

In 2023, the Pentagon's own suicide-prevention committee looked at why so many service members were killing themselves and came back with a number that framed everything else.

66% of active-duty suicides involve a firearm. For reservists it's 72%. For the National Guard, 78%.

Those figures come from the Defense Department's Suicide Prevention and Response Independent Review Committee, which delivered its findings on February 24, 2023. Its recommendations followed directly from them: a seven-day waiting period on any firearm bought on Defense Department property and a four-day wait on ammunition, raising the minimum age for buying either to 25, and restricting privately owned firearms in barracks and dorms.

One of its members, Dr. Craig Bryan, put the goal to reporters as simply as it can be put: "the motive behind this really is to, in essence, slow down access to firearms."

On May 7, 2026, Jeff Crank introduced a bill to speed it up.

What the Bill Does

Crank's Armed Forces Carry Rights Protection Act of 2026 (H.R. 8680) amends the 2016 defense authorization law, which currently tells the Secretary of Defense to set up a process for deciding when a service member may carry a personal firearm on an installation.

Crank's bill adds this:

"there shall be a rebuttable presumption in favor of authorizing a member to carry a firearm owned by such member while the member — (1) is on the installation, center, or facility; and (2) is not performing duty at such installation, center, or facility."

And if a commander says no, the bill requires the denial to be "in writing" with "an objective, clearly describable, and individualized basis."

Flip that around and read it from a base commander's chair. Today, if you have concerns about a soldier carrying a personal weapon, you decline. Under Crank's bill, the default is yes, and saying no means putting your reasoning about a specific individual on paper — a document that soldier can then contest, and that will exist forever if you're wrong in either direction.

The bill doesn't ban commanders from saying no. It makes saying no cost something, every single time, in a system where the safest calls are often the quiet ones.

He Is Making a Temporary Policy Permanent

The bill didn't come out of nowhere. On April 2, 2026, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth issued a memo telling base commanders to allow personal firearms on installations "with the presumption that it is necessary for personal protection," with denials required in writing.

Before that, service members generally could not carry personal weapons on base without permission from a senior commander, and firearms were stored securely — typically checked out only for hunting or an authorized range.

A memo can be reversed by the next Secretary of Defense. A statute can't. Crank's bill takes Hegseth's month-old directive and welds it into permanent law.

Tanya Schardt, senior counsel at the gun violence prevention group Brady, noted that most active-duty service members who die by suicide do so with a weapon they own personally, not one military-issued, and argued that there would "undoubtedly be an increase in gun suicide and other gun violence."

He Sits on the Subcommittee That Handles This

Crank isn't a bystander to military suicide policy. He serves on the House Armed Services Committee, and specifically on its Subcommittee on Military Personnel — the panel whose published jurisdiction covers military health care and "Morale, Welfare and Recreation."

That's the subcommittee where the Pentagon's suicide report lands. It's where the recommendations either become law or don't.

Three years after the Defense Department's own experts recommended slowing access to firearms on base, the bill this member of that subcommittee chose to write does the reverse.

What This Means at Home

Crank represents Colorado Springs, a military town. The Pikes Peak region is home to roughly 45,000 active-duty, Guard, and Reserve members plus about 90,000 veterans and retirees, and the aerospace and defense sector makes up more than 40% of the local economy.

Those are the people this bill is about. The 66% figure isn't a national abstraction to CO-05 — it's a description of the risk profile of tens of thousands of Crank's own constituents.

Colorado already has a gun death rate of about 15.3 per 100,000 people, 19.5% above the national rate — 961 Coloradans died from gun-related injuries in 2024.

Why "Slow It Down" Is the Whole Strategy

The reason the Pentagon's committee focused on waiting periods and storage instead of counseling alone is that suicide is often a decision made in a very short window. Put time and a locked container between the impulse and the weapon, and a meaningful share of people never reach the second step.

That's not a political theory. It's why the Defense Department's own review — produced by outside experts the Pentagon brought in specifically to solve this problem — put access to firearms at the center of the answer.

You can support the Second Amendment and still think a barracks at 2 a.m. is a place where the default should be "secure the weapon." Those aren't in tension. Storage rules on a military installation aren't gun confiscation; they're the same logic as taking someone's keys.

Crank's bill sets the default the other way, permanently, and tells the officer who wants to intervene to write up his reasons first.

The Question He Won't Take in Person

If a Gold Star parent in Colorado Springs wanted to ask Crank why he wrote this bill, they'd have to find him first.

Crank held his first town hall online rather than in a room with constituents. "Why do they want to have an in-person town hall meeting?" he said on a Zoom call from the Capitol that morning. "So they can stand there and wave a cane in my face like Al Green did last night and steal the show? I'm not interested in doing that. I'm interested in having a civil discussion about the issues and taking questions from constituents." When Colorado Springs residents held one anyway, they set a cardboard cutout of him on the stage.

The families who would have the most to say about this bill are exactly the ones who never get the microphone.

Sources

The text of H.R. 8680, the Armed Forces Carry Rights Protection Act of 2026; the final report of the Suicide Prevention and Response Independent Review Committee, February 24, 2023; and CBS News, "Slowing down access to firearms could prevent more suicides in the military, panel finds".

Jimmy Patronis Filed the First Bill Ever to Fully Repeal America's Machine Gun Ban

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 14:15:33 +0000

On Friday, May 22, 2026 — right before Congress left town for the Memorial Day recess — Jimmy Patronis introduced a bill to legalize new machine guns.

That is not a characterization. It is what the bill does. H.R. 9009, the "Firearm Freedom Act of 2026," is about as short as a bill gets. It strikes one subsection out of the federal criminal code: 18 U.S.C. § 922(o). The prohibition in it is a single sentence.

"Except as provided in paragraph (2), it shall be unlawful for any person to transfer or possess a machinegun."

Delete that subsection and the flat federal ban on new machine guns is gone.

Gun media noticed immediately. Guns.com ran it under the headline "New Bill Would Make Machine Guns 'Legal' Again." As that story put it, this is the first time anyone in Congress has introduced legislation to remove the ban entirely. Not narrow it. Not carve an exception into it. Remove it.

Patronis has been in Congress since April 2025. This is what he chose to be first at.

What the 1986 law actually did

The subsection Patronis wants deleted is called the Hughes Amendment. It was added to the Firearm Owners' Protection Act of 1986, and it did two things: it closed the federal machine gun registry, and it made it a crime for a regular person to own a machine gun built after May 19, 1986.

It did not confiscate anything. Machine guns already registered before that date stayed legal to own, buy, and sell — the law exempts "any lawful transfer or lawful possession of a machinegun that was lawfully possessed before the date this subsection takes effect." That closed pool is why the surviving guns are so expensive; Guns.com notes that even entry-level ones now run past $10,000 at auction.

So here is the honest version of the problem Patronis says he is solving: a small number of collectors would like to buy machine guns more cheaply. That's it. That's the constituency.

Forty years is a long time for a law to sit on the books without anyone in Congress trying to erase it. Patronis erased it in a bill short enough to read in a minute, filed on a Friday before a holiday weekend.

The part nobody in the press release mentions

Section 922(o) is not just about tripod-mounted belt-fed guns in collectors' safes. Under federal law, a machine gun conversion device — an auto sear, a "lightning link," the little square block people call a Glock switch — is itself legally a machine gun. The statutory definition covers "any part designed and intended solely and exclusively, or combination of parts designed and intended, for use in converting a weapon into a machinegun." The part alone counts, whether or not it is attached to anything.

Which means 922(o) — the subsection H.R. 9009 deletes — is the provision that makes possessing a switch a federal crime.

Those devices are the fastest-growing weapon problem in American policing. Between 2019 and 2023, law enforcement recovered 11,088 machine gun conversion devices — 5,816 of them in 2023 alone, a 784% increase across those five years, according to the ATF's national trafficking assessment. A pistol with a switch on it fires at roughly 1,200 rounds a minute. That is an entire magazine gone before a person can finish a sentence.

Repealing 922(o) would not, by itself, put machine guns on the counter at a sporting goods store. H.R. 9009 touches that one subsection and nothing else, so the National Firearms Act rules that sit elsewhere in the code — registration, a tax stamp, a federal background check — would still apply. What the bill removes is the flat prohibition that currently makes a newly made machine gun contraband no matter what paperwork anyone files, and it reopens a registry that has been closed since Ronald Reagan was president. The sentence police and prosecutors rely on to charge someone caught with a switch would simply not be there anymore.

Patronis's office did not address any of that. His statement was about Washington:

"For years, Washington bureaucrats and the radical Left have tried to chip away at the constitutional rights of hardworking Americans. The Firearm Freedom Act sends a clear message that we will defend the Constitution, stand up for law-abiding gun owners, and protect the freedoms that make America exceptional. I'll never back down from fighting for the Second Amendment."

Gun Owners of America endorsed the bill the same week, calling it "one of the most important Second Amendment bills introduced in a generation." Nine other House Republicans have signed on as cosponsors. It sits in the House Judiciary Committee.

Six weeks later, he collected the police endorsements

Patronis filed H.R. 9009 on May 22. On July 6, his campaign announced that all four sheriffs in Florida's 1st Congressional District had endorsed his re-election — Escambia, Santa Rosa, Okaloosa and Walton counties. Escambia County Sheriff Chip Simmons praised his "unwavering commitment to public safety." Patronis called the sheriffs "among the very best in the nation."

Nobody in that announcement mentioned the machine gun bill. The sheriffs whose deputies would be the ones walking up to cars in Pensacola and Fort Walton Beach were endorsing the congressman who had spent the spring trying to delete the statute that keeps newly built automatic weapons off those streets.

Patronis faces two Republican primary opponents on August 18. The bill and the endorsements both landed in the run-up to it.

This is a pattern, not a one-off

Florida loses about 3,200 people to gun violence every year. Patronis's answer to that, in his first full year in office, was a bill to make more guns legal.

It is the record the gun lobby grades him for. The NRA gave him an "A+" when he ran for state CFO in 2022, and its Political Victory Fund now rates him "A" and endorses him in the 1st District.

He is also not alone in Congress right now. In late July, another Republican introduced a bill to repeal the 78-year-old federal ban on mailing handguns. A week later, a gun store owner in the House led nearly 30 Republicans in demanding the ATF start destroying the firearm records police use to trace guns found at crime scenes. Different bills, same project: take the federal gun laws that have been on the books for decades and pull them out one at a time. We've written before about the Republicans with the worst records on guns, and the through-line is always the same — the people asking for these changes are not the people who get shot.

What this is really about

Nothing in the bill, the press release, or the endorsement announcements points to a problem in Escambia, Santa Rosa, Okaloosa or Walton County that a post-1986 machine gun would solve. What there is, is a freshman congressman three months out from a primary, looking for the loudest possible thing to file to prove he is the most pro-gun Republican on the ballot.

He found it. He filed a bill to erase the sentence that makes a Glock switch a crime.

We deserve a representative who spends his first year in Congress on the 3,200 Floridians a year we bury, not on the price of machine guns at auction. We deserve better.

Source

New Bill Would Make Machine Guns 'Legal' Again — Paul Peterson, Guns.com, May 26, 2026. Bill text and cosponsor list from Congress.gov. Photo: official U.S. House portrait, 119th Congress.

Lauren Boebert's New Bill Would Repeal the 78-Year-Old Law That Keeps Handguns Out of the Mail

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 07:36:00 +0000

On July 30, 2026, Lauren Boebert introduced a bill with a friendly name and a very specific effect.

H.R. 9979, the "Freedom to Ship Act," runs five pages. Most of it is about shipping companies. The last line is the part worth reading. Section 2(c) of the bill says:

"Section 1715 of chapter 83 of title 18, United States Code (and the item relating to such section in the analysis of such chapter), is repealed."

That is a citation, not an argument, so here is what it means.

18 U.S.C. § 1715 is titled "Firearms as nonmailable; regulations." It says: "Pistols, revolvers, and other firearms capable of being concealed on the person are nonmailable and shall not be deposited in or carried by the mails or delivered by any officer or employee of the Postal Service." It carves out exceptions for police, the military, government watchmen, and gun manufacturers and dealers shipping to one another. And it says anyone who knowingly puts a handgun in the mail "shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than two years, or both."

That section has been on the books since 1948, and the ban it carried forward dates to 1927 — Boebert's own press release puts it at "nearly 100 years." Her bill deletes it — the ban and the penalty both.

She said so herself. Announcing the bill on X, Boebert wrote that her legislation "protects privacy, holds companies accountable and restores the ability to mail handguns through USPS."

Three other Republicans put their names on it as original cosponsors: Sheri Biggs of South Carolina, Michael Cloud of Texas, and Clay Higgins of Louisiana.

The other half: making it illegal for UPS to say no

The rest of the bill is aimed at private shipping companies.

It adds a new section to federal transportation law, "Interference with lawful transportation of arms." Under it, a motor carrier — UPS, FedEx, a freight company — may not "interfere" with a gun shipment, and the bill gives four specific examples of what that includes:

Declining to carry it. A carrier that says "we don't ship firearms" is in violation.
Imposing conditions beyond what federal gun law already requires, where they restrict the owner's ability to transfer or dispose of the gun.
Charging more for a gun than for another package of similar size, weight and hazard class.
Requiring the shipper's consent to disclose information as a condition of taking the shipment.

A fifth item sweeps in "any other like conduct" with the same effect.

The penalty is civil: $10,000 to the federal government for every violation, plus a private lawsuit from the shipper for "all compensatory and consequential damages."

Sit with that for a second. This is a bill that tells private companies they are legally forbidden from declining a category of business, on pain of a $10,000 federal fine per package and open-ended civil liability. From the party that says the federal government should not tell businesses what to sell or who to serve.

The rationale Boebert gave is that under the Biden administration, some carriers made licensed gun dealers sign take-it-or-leave-it contracts. Her remedy is not to give dealers more bargaining power. It is to remove the companies' ability to decide at all.

What Boebert is not working on

Colorado has about 15.3 gun deaths per 100,000 people — 19.5% higher than the national average. Roughly 1,000 Coloradans die from gun violence every year. That is a plane crash a month, in her own state.

Boebert has been in Congress since 2021. Here is her record when the House actually voted on gun policy:

She voted against the Bipartisan Background Checks Act, which would have required a background check on nearly all gun sales.
She voted against the Enhanced Background Checks Act, which would have closed the loophole that let the Charleston church shooter buy his gun.
She voted against the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act — the first significant federal gun safety law in nearly 30 years, passed after Uvalde.

Against all three. And the bill she chose to write herself, in the summer of an election year, makes it easier to put a handgun in a mailbox.

This is not an isolated priority. It is what this group of Republicans does with their legislative time. Rep. Andrew Clyde, who owns two gun stores, spent this month demanding the ATF destroy the firearm transaction records police use to trace guns found at crime scenes. Rep. Barry Moore wrote a bill to make the AR-15 the national gun of the United States.

"Criminals still shipped guns through the mail"

The gun-media coverage of Boebert's bill is worth quoting, because it makes the argument more plainly than she does.

Writing at Bearing Arms, Tom Knighton argued the ban never worked anyway: "criminals still shipped guns through the mail if they wanted to. They just lied about what they were shipping, and there's no way the USPS can check every single box."

That is the case for repeal: the law is broken because people break it. It is not an argument anyone makes about laws they like.

Knighton also framed the timing honestly. He wrote that "Having a Republican-controlled U.S. House of Representatives and U.S. Senate allows pro-freedom lawmakers the leeway to introduce Second Amendment-friendly legislation that will actually be considered and likely voted on."

In other words: this is not a message bill. They think it can pass.

Where it stands

H.R. 9979 was referred to the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee and the House Judiciary Committee on the day it was introduced. It has four Republican names on it and no Democrats.

Boebert co-chairs the Congressional Second Amendment Caucus. Repealing the mail ban is the kind of thing that caucus exists to do. The question for voters in Colorado's 4th District — and in the districts represented by Biggs, Cloud and Higgins — is whether that is what they sent someone to Washington for.

Source

Boebert Introduces Bill to Protect Right to Ship Guns — Bearing Arms, August 8, 2026. Photo: AP Photo/David Zalubowski.
Bill text and cosponsors: H.R. 9979 as introduced, 119th Congress.

After Parkland, Brian Mast Begged Trump to Pause AR-15 Sales. Four Years Later He Voted Against the Assault Weapons Ban.

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 15:26:14 +0000

Most politicians who fail us on guns never promised anything in the first place. Brian Mast is a harder case, because he did promise — loudly, in the country's biggest newspaper, with more standing to speak than almost anyone else in Congress.

Mast carried an M4 in the Army for years. He lost both legs to a roadside bomb in Afghanistan. And a coach he knew personally was among the 17 people murdered at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, on February 14, 2018.

Nine days later, he published an op-ed in The New York Times under a headline that made news around the country: "I'm Republican. I Appreciate Assault Weapons. And I Support a Ban."

What He Actually Promised

This wasn't a vague call for "doing something." Mast was specific, and we don't have to take anyone's word for what he wrote — his own congressional office quoted the op-ed in a press release:

"I cannot support the primary weapon I used to defend our people being used to kill children I swore to defend…. Therefore, I support the following: defining what constitutes an assault or tactical firearm and not allowing them for future purchase — just as we already prohibit the purchase of fully automatic firearms. The exact definition of assault weapon will need to be determined. But we should all be able to agree that the civilian version of the very deadly weapon that the Army issued to me should certainly qualify. I would not support any version of a ban that results in confiscating existing legally owned firearms."

Two days after that, on CBS's Face the Nation, he went further and asked the president to act immediately:

"For me personally, it pains me to know that I went out there willing to defend my country — willing to give everything — with almost the exact same weapon that is used to go out there, and unfortunately, kill children here in Parkland… Let's put a pause right now."

He wanted a temporary ban on AR-15 purchases modeled on Trump's travel ban, while Congress worked out a permanent definition.

Then he backed it with legislation. On February 27, 2018, Mast announced he had cosponsored five bipartisan bills, including:

H.R. 4240, expanding background checks to all commercial firearm sales, including gun shows
H.R. 3999, banning bump stocks
A bill repealing the Dickey Amendment so the CDC could research gun violence
The STOP School Violence Act and the Mental Health in Schools Act

"We must unite to save lives," he said in that release. "As Members of Congress, we weren't sent to Washington to do what's easy — we were sent here to take action, even when the conversation is difficult and the odds look long."

Then He Voted No on All of It

February 27, 2019. The House voted on H.R. 8, the Bipartisan Background Checks Act — the same universal background check policy Mast had cosponsored. He voted yes. He was one of only eight Republicans who did. It passed 240 to 190. So far, so good.

March 11, 2021. The identical bill came back. Eight Republicans voted yes again. Mast was not one of them — he voted no. The bill itself hadn't changed. He had.

June 8, 2022. Two weeks after Uvalde, the House passed the Protecting Our Kids Act. Mast voted no.

June 24, 2022. The Bipartisan Safer Communities Act — the first significant federal gun law in decades, negotiated by senators from both parties, signed by the president. Mast voted no.

July 29, 2022. The House voted on H.R. 1808, the Assault Weapons Ban — the exact policy of Mast's own op-ed, prohibiting future sales without confiscating anything anyone already owned, which was precisely the line he had drawn four years earlier.

He voted no.

The bill passed the House anyway, 217 to 213. Only two Republicans voted for it. The man who wrote "I'm Republican. I Appreciate Assault Weapons. And I Support a Ban" was not one of them.

And Then He Erased It

Here is the part that tells you it wasn't a change of heart he's proud of.

Go to Brian Mast's campaign website today and read his Second Amendment page. There is no op-ed. No Parkland. No assault weapons ban. No background checks. Nothing about the coach he knew. What's there instead:

"That's why during my time in Congress I've helped pass legislation to protect the 2nd Amendment rights of concealed carry permit holders, and I have opposed efforts by Nancy Pelosi and her allies to erode the 2nd Amendment by giving unelected bureaucrats more control over firearm laws in the United States."

The page reads as though February 2018 never happened.

Why This One Is Worse

Politicians change positions. Sometimes that's growth, and sometimes it's new evidence. Neither applies here.

Nothing new was learned between 2018 and 2022 about what an AR-15 does to a child's body. Mast already knew — better than his colleagues, better than most people alive. That was the entire premise of his op-ed: I have carried this weapon, I know exactly what it does, and that is why I'm telling you.

What changed was the political weather. The Parkland moment passed, the primary electorate did not move, and the position that had made him briefly famous became a liability. So he voted it away, one roll call at a time, and then took it off his website.

Mast is now the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, one of the most powerful members of Congress. He is asking Florida's 21st District for a sixth term. His constituents in Stuart, Jupiter and Port St. Lucie were told, by a man who had bled for the country, that he would not let the weapon he carried keep killing their kids.

He said it. He wrote it down. Then he voted the other way five times and hoped nobody would check.

We deserve better.

Source

Mast to POTUS: Implement Temporary Ban on AR-15 Purchases Immediately — Office of Rep. Brian Mast, February 25, 2018.

Asked How to Protect Kids Like His Daughter After the Covenant Shooting, Tim Burchett Said: 'Well, We Homeschool Her.'

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 10:46:38 +0000

On March 27, 2023, a shooter walked into The Covenant School in Nashville and killed six people. Three of them were nine years old.

The next day, reporters asked Tim Burchett — who represents Tennessee's 2nd District, in the same state — what Congress would do about it.

"It's a horrible, horrible situation, and we're not going to fix it. Criminals are gonna be criminals."

A reporter followed up. Were there steps lawmakers could take to protect children — children like his own daughter?

"Well, we homeschool her."

That exchange was reported by NBC News on March 29, 2023.

He doubled down the next day

This wasn't a stray remark in a hallway scrum that he later walked back. He was asked about it again and stood behind it:

"If you want to legislate evil, it's just not going to happen. We need a real revival in this country. Let's call on our Christian ministers and our people of faith."

"If you think Washington is going to fix this problem, you're wrong. They're not going to fix this problem. They are the problem."

Asked whether it bothered him that other countries don't have America's level of gun violence, he answered:

"Other countries don't have our freedom either. It's the United States of America."

That is his stated position: this is not a thing government can address, and anyone who thinks otherwise misunderstands the nature of evil.

Except he had already voted on it

Here is the problem with "we're not going to fix it." Nine months before Covenant, Congress tried — and Burchett voted no.

After Uvalde, where 19 children and two teachers were killed, Congress passed the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act — the first federal gun legislation in nearly 30 years. As NBC noted at the time, it was "the first movement on the issue in years."

The House cleared it on June 24, 2022 by 234-193. Burchett voted Nay. (The roll call is filed under S. 2938's original title, a Florida courthouse naming bill — the Senate used it as the legislative vehicle.)

Two days earlier, the House had passed the Active Shooter Alert Act — a bill to build an emergency alert system, like an Amber Alert, so people near an active shooting get warned. It didn't restrict a single firearm. Burchett voted Nay on that too.

So "we're not going to fix it" is not a description of what Congress is capable of. It's a description of how he votes.

And he does legislate — when he wants to

The clearest test of whether Burchett actually believes Washington can't protect people arrived in July 2026.

He introduced H.R. 9800, the Protection Against Mass Surveillance Act, which would bar federal agencies from buying, operating or accessing automated license-plate readers like Flock Safety cameras, require them to delete collected data within 30 days, and block that data from being used as evidence.

His pitch, to WVLT:

"Americans should never choose between safety and liberty."

"We gotta ban these dadgum things."

There is a real civil-liberties argument for that bill. That isn't the point. The point is the contrast in what he thinks legislation can accomplish.

A camera on a pole in Knoxville: fixable by federal statute, urgently, with a bill of his own authorship.

A shooter in an elementary school in his own state: "we're not going to fix it," "if you want to legislate evil, it's just not going to happen," call a minister.

He is not a man who believes Congress is powerless. He is a man who has decided which dangers are worth using that power on.

What it costs Tennessee

Tennessee has the 9th highest gun death rate in the country — about 19.8 per 100,000 people, roughly 55% above the national average. Around 1,400 Tennesseans die from gun violence every year. The Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions keeps the state's numbers here.

Fourteen hundred a year is not an act of God. It is a number that other states, with other laws, do not have.

Burchett's answer to those families is that the government they pay for isn't going to help, and that if they're worried about their own kids they can do what he did.

Most families in Tennessee's 2nd District cannot homeschool their children. They have jobs. That is the whole reason public schools exist. "We homeschool her" is not policy advice — it's a member of Congress explaining that he has personally opted out of a risk he won't lift a finger to reduce for anyone else.

He won't hear it in person, either

In April 2025, about 250 people organized their own town hall in downtown Knoxville to put questions to Burchett. He didn't attend. Someone set up cardboard cutouts of him holding a sign: "Sorry ... I'm out of the office today."

Tennessee is not short of parents who would like five minutes with him about this.

We deserve better.

Source

Ryan Nobles, Kyle Stewart, Scott Wong and Rose Horowitch, "Tennessee Rep. Burchett says of school shootings: 'We're not gonna fix it,'" NBC News, March 29, 2023. Roll calls from the Office of the Clerk of the U.S. House. Photo: NBC News.

Ken Paxton Spent Two Years Suing to Put Guns Back at the State Fair. An All-Republican Court Just Told Him No — Again.

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 08:26:35 +0000

In 2023, a shooting at the State Fair of Texas injured three people. The nonprofit that runs the fair responded by banning guns.

Ken Paxton sued them for it. He has now lost at every level of the Texas court system.

On Thursday, August 6, the three justices of the 15th Court of Appeals — an all-Republican court — unanimously affirmed a lower court's rejection of his case. The opinion is short and blunt about why he was wrong:

"It does not apply to private entities such as the State Fair."

The state law Paxton was invoking bars local governments from restricting guns in most public spaces. The State Fair of Texas is a private nonprofit. That's the whole ruling.

He lost this argument three separate times

This wasn't one bad day in court. It's a losing streak:

2024 — The Texas Supreme Court denied his emergency filing to block the fair's policy.
2025 — A Dallas County district court granted the city of Dallas and the State Fair summary judgment and dismissed the case outright.
2026 — The 15th Court of Appeals affirmed that dismissal, unanimously.

Three courts. Zero wins. All of it public money and staff time from the office of the Texas Attorney General.

The State Fair says it's pleased with the ruling and that the policy is "the correct decision" to protect attendees' safety. The Dallas Morning News reported last month that guns will again be banned at this year's fair, which opens in about a month.

Paxton's office didn't respond to requests for comment.

The part that makes this indefensible

Here is the fact that turns a bad lawsuit into something worse.

In 2016, Ken Paxton's own office issued a formal legal opinion saying that private nonprofits can ban firearms on government-leased land, so long as the government entity "has no control over the decision to post such notice." Later that same year, his office applied that reasoning to let the Fort Worth Zoo post gun-ban signs on city-owned property.

That is exactly the situation at the State Fair. Fair Park is owned by Dallas and leased to the private nonprofit that runs the fair. Dallas has consistently said it plays no role in making or overseeing the fair's gun policy — a point the appeals court nodded at in its ruling.

So when Paxton sued in August 2024, city and fair officials pointed out that his case contradicted his own opinion.

Weeks later, Paxton withdrew the 2016 opinion.

The attorney general's website said it was withdrawn "pending issuance" of a new opinion answering Republican lawmakers' questions about whether the fair was operating jointly with the city. An official in Paxton's office told Dallas officials that any reliance on the 2016 opinion was "misplaced," and offered no explanation of why. A spokesperson declined to comment on the withdrawal.

Sum it up plainly. The state's top lawyer issued a legal opinion. He sued someone for following it. When they pointed that out, he deleted the opinion.

An all-Republican appeals court has now told him his 2016 self had it right.

Who this was for

Dozens of Texas House Republicans pushed back on the fair's policy, arguing the ban makes the event "less safe." Paxton sued shortly after.

The fair adopted the ban because someone opened fire at it and three people were hurt. Millions of Texans go to the State Fair, many of them with kids. The private organization responsible for their safety made a call about its own property.

Paxton spent two years of the state's legal resources trying to override that call — not to protect a Texan from the government, but to force a private nonprofit to admit guns onto its grounds against its will.

For an office that talks constantly about government overreach, that's a strange definition of freedom: the state compelling a private group to change its own safety rules.

He's asking for a promotion

None of this is retrospective. Paxton is the Republican nominee for the United States Senate — a nomination Texas Republicans handed him on top of a record we laid out at the time.

The State Fair suit is a small case, and that's what makes it clarifying. There was no principle at stake that he hadn't already resolved himself in 2016. There was no victim of government overreach. There was a private nonprofit reacting to a shooting at its own event, and an attorney general who decided that was worth two years and three courtrooms.

He lost all three. The guns still won't be at the fair. And the opinion he withdrew to make the argument possible is still gone.

Source

Alex Nguyen, "Appeals court rejects Attorney General Ken Paxton's effort to overturn Texas State Fair gun ban," The Texas Tribune, August 6, 2026. Earlier reporting by Jasper Scherer. Photo: Shelby Tauber for The Texas Tribune.

Pat Harrigan Sells Guns. His New Bill Overrides Every State's Carry Laws — and Waives the Training Check.

Sat, 08 Aug 2026 14:43:00 +0000

On April 16, 2026, Pat Harrigan introduced H.R. 8332, the Special Operations Forces Concealed Carry Act.

Here is what it does. It takes the federal law that lets retired police officers carry a concealed handgun anywhere in the country — 18 U.S.C. 926C — and adds a new category of people to it: current and former special operations troops at pay grade E-5 and above. Army Special Forces, the 75th Ranger Regiment, Delta Force, Navy SEALs, and more.

Once you qualify, the authority is permanent and it is nationwide. Whatever your state decided about who may carry a hidden gun in public, and under what conditions, no longer applies to you.

Stars and Stripes described the effect plainly when it covered the bill on May 5: it would grant nationwide concealed-carry privileges, "effectively overriding state-level restrictions that can differ significantly from one jurisdiction to another."

Harrigan says the bill is modest:

"This legislation extends that same framework to both serving and veteran special operators. It doesn't create new rights or add new carve-outs."

That is not accurate about his own bill. Read it.

The part he left out

The law Harrigan is copying does not just hand retired officers a permanent right and walk away. It requires them to prove, every single year, that they can still shoot.

A retired officer carrying under that law has to hold a current annual firearms qualification certification, and must have it in their possession along with their photo ID whenever they're carrying. Miss the yearly requalification and the authority lapses.

Harrigan's bill deletes that requirement for his new category. This is not an interpretation — it is a section heading in the bill text:

"(1) No annual certification — An individual authorized to carry under this section as a qualified special operator shall not be subject to the annual firearms qualification requirement of subsection (d)(2)(B)."

And a few lines later:

"(D) No separate certification — No separate certification of firearms training is required for a qualified special operator."

So: a soldier who qualified Expert at 24 and left the Army at 26 would carry a concealed firearm in all fifty states at 60, at 70, at 80, having never been asked to demonstrate anything again. A retired police officer doing the same thing has to pass a test this year and every year.

That is the opposite of "the same framework." It is the framework with the safety check removed.

He isn't a bystander to the gun business. He's in it.

Most members of Congress who write gun bills are doing favors for an industry. Harrigan is the industry.

He co-owns the firearms companies ZRODelta, UnBrandedAR, and US Optics — businesses that make and sell handguns, rifles, optics and shooting accessories. We laid this out when we ranked the worst members of Congress on guns: he is not a politician who takes gun-lobby money, he is a manufacturer who got elected.

A federal law that expands who may carry a concealed handgun in every state, permanently, with no recurring training requirement, is a law that expands the market for concealed-carry handguns, holsters and optics. Harrigan's companies sell those. He wrote the bill.

There is a reason we have rules about this kind of thing. Which brings up the other part of his record.

In 2022, when Harrigan first ran for Congress as the owner of a gun manufacturer, he did not file the financial disclosure form the law required of him. WFAE reported that all sitting House members must file, along with candidates who have raised more than $5,000 — and Harrigan had raised nearly $340,000 by that June. The forms were due in May. He hadn't filed by late September, and couldn't be reached for comment.

The disclosure is the document that would have told voters exactly which gun companies he owned before they voted on whether to send him to Congress to write gun laws.

Who this lands on

North Carolina's 10th District is not exempt from what happens when guns are easier to carry and harder to track. Harrigan represents a state where gun violence kills roughly 1,800 people a year — a rate 27% higher than the national average.

And notice which way the preemption runs. If your state legislature decided that carrying a concealed handgun should require a permit, a background check, and a periodic demonstration that you can safely handle the weapon, this bill tells your state that its decision doesn't count for the people it covers. Not because those people are dangerous — most aren't — but because a member of Congress who profits from firearm sales decided your state's rules were an inconvenience.

Special operators earned enormous respect. Nobody disputes that. But respect is not a reason to write a law with a training exemption that the model law, written for police, deliberately does not have. If the argument is that these veterans are the best-trained shooters in America, then the annual check is a formality they'd pass easily — and there is no reason to strike it from the bill.

Unless the point was never the training.

Harrigan has been in Congress since January 2025. He is on the ballot again in November.

We deserve better.

Sources

Bill would let special forces members carry concealed firearms nationwide, bypassing state gun limits — Linda F. Hersey, Stars and Stripes, May 5, 2026.
H.R. 8332, Special Operations Forces Concealed Carry Act — full text, 119th Congress.

Ninety Minutes After the Highland Park Massacre, Darren Bailey Said 'Let's Move On and Let's Celebrate.' Six Months Later He Sued to Undo the Gun Law It Produced.

Fri, 07 Aug 2026 17:51:00 +0000

At 10:14 a.m. on July 4, 2022, a gunman opened fire on the Independence Day parade in Highland Park, Illinois. He fired more than 70 rounds from a rooftop. Seven people were killed and more than 40 wounded.

At 11:44 a.m. — ninety minutes later, with the shooter still at large and families still searching for each other — Darren Bailey went live on Facebook to his 111,000 followers.

Here is what he said:

"The shooter is still at large, so let's pray for justice to prevail, and then let's move on and let's celebrate — celebrate the independence of this nation."

The suspect was not arrested for roughly six more hours.

"Let's move on"

Read the sequence again, because the timing is the story.

Bailey was a state senator running for governor. He was in Skokie, about eight miles from the shooting, surrounded by around 20 supporters. The attack had happened an hour and a half earlier. Nobody knew where the shooter was. Parents in Highland Park were calling hospitals.

His instruction to Illinois was to pray briefly and then move on to the celebration.

The apology that followed was conditional. Through a spokesperson, Bailey said he was sorry "if in any way we diminished the pain being felt across our state today" — the construction people use when they'd prefer not to concede the thing happened. The same statement worked in an attempt to shift blame to Gov. JB Pritzker.

Then he went to court

Six months after Highland Park, Illinois banned assault weapons and high-capacity magazines. The law is called the Protect Illinois Communities Act. It was passed because of what happened at that parade.

Bailey led a challenge to it filed in White County, arguing the ban violates the Illinois Constitution. He is also a plaintiff in a second suit brought by the same attorney, alongside more than a thousand other plaintiffs and 70 firearm dealers.

So the record reads: a mass shooting in his own state, an instruction to move on, and then a lawsuit against the law the state passed in response.

That is a coherent position — Bailey believes the ban is unconstitutional, and plenty of Illinoisans agree with him. What it is not is the position of someone who thinks Highland Park demanded any change at all. His answer to the deadliest kind of day Illinois has is that the mistake was the gun law.

What he's running on now

Bailey's 2026 campaign is pitched on affordability. His running mate, Cook County GOP chairman Aaron Del Mar, told WBEZ in July that they're "talking about core services" and are "not talking about abortion, we're not talking about transgender issues."

Guns didn't make that list of things they're not talking about — and in May, at a Christian conference in Decatur, Bailey said: "Anyone who knows me knows there's no one here more pro-life or more pro Second Amendment than I."

That's the same two-track campaign we documented when his running mate called abortion a "sin against God" at a Springfield rally three weeks after telling public radio that claims they'd restrict abortion were "a flat-out lie." The affordability message is for the general audience. The rest is for the rooms where the base is.

Illinois voters are entitled to weigh the 2022 version of Bailey, because he has not disavowed any of it. He apologized for calling Chicago a "hellhole." He has not stepped back from Highland Park, and he is still a plaintiff against the assault weapons ban.

Why it matters

A governor of Illinois signs or vetoes gun legislation, directs the state police, and decides how vigorously the state defends its own laws in court.

Bailey is asking for that job while suing to strike down the state's assault weapons ban. If he wins, the person who chooses whether Illinois keeps defending the Protect Illinois Communities Act is one of the people currently trying to kill it.

Seven people were murdered at a parade in Highland Park. Their families are still here.

Illinoisans deserve a governor whose first instinct after a massacre isn't "move on." We deserve better.

Source

Mitchell Armentrout, "Illinois GOP gov candidate Darren Bailey tells people to 'move on' after Highland Park shooting" — Chicago Sun-Times, July 2022. Photo via Chicago Sun-Times.

Barry Moore Wrote a Bill to Make the AR-15 America's Official National Gun

Fri, 07 Aug 2026 16:45:00 +0000

Every state gets to pick official symbols. A state bird. A state flower. It's the kind of bill legislators pass when they want a nice photo and nothing is at stake.

Barry Moore had a different idea. In February 2023, he introduced a bill in Congress to give the United States something it had never had: an official national gun.

Not just any gun. The AR-15.

What the bill actually said

The bill was H.R. 1095, the "AR-15 National Gun Act". Moore introduced it on February 17, 2023. In the statement of constitutional authority he filed with the bill, he described its purpose in one sentence:

"This bill declares AR-15 style rifles chambered in .223 Remington or 5.56x45 NATO to be the National Gun of the United States."

That's it. That was the whole bill. It did not lower the price of a single thing, fund a single hospital, or protect a single right that anyone was actually losing. It was a symbol — and Moore chose his symbol carefully.

He rolled it out days later at a gun store in Troy, Alabama, and explained the reasoning on social media:

"The #SecondAmendment is as American a right as freedom of speech, religion, & the press. Today I unveiled my bill to make the AR-15 the National Gun of America. We must send a message that we will meet every attack on any of our constitutional rights."

At the store, he went further, telling the crowd: "The anti-Second Amendment group won't stop until they take away all your firearms… One rule to remember: any government that would take away one right would take away them all."

The rifle he wanted to honor

Nine months before Moore filed that bill, a gunman armed with an AR-15-style rifle walked into Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, on May 24, 2022, and fired 142 rounds of hollow-point bullets "designed to inflict maximum bodily harm." He killed 19 children and two teachers. It was the deadliest school shooting in Texas history and the second-deadliest in the country's.

Barry Moore's response to a country that had just watched that was to propose making the weapon a national emblem.

And he didn't pick a quiet moment to do it. When he introduced the bill, Newsweek noted that 2023 had already seen more mass shootings than there had been days in the year, and that nearly 50,000 Americans had lost their lives to gun violence in 2021 alone.

Who signed on with him

A bill like this tells you who a politician wants to be seen standing next to. Four members of Congress cosponsored the AR-15 National Gun Act:

Rep. Andrew Clyde of Georgia
Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado
Rep. George Santos of New York
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia

That is the company Moore chose to keep on the one bill he called a message to the country.

And he stuck with it. Ten months later, when the House voted on a resolution "providing for the expulsion of Representative George Santos," it passed 311–114 — and Barry Moore voted no (Roll Call 691, December 1, 2023). Even with 311 of his colleagues voting the other way, Moore wanted Santos to stay.

It went nowhere — and that's the point

The AR-15 National Gun Act was referred to the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability on the day it was introduced, and that is the last thing that ever happened to it. No hearing. No markup. No vote. It died. Moore never reintroduced it in the following Congress.

So it accomplished nothing — which means we should be honest about what it was for. It was for attention. It was a press conference at a gun store and a post on social media. Moore had a limited number of bills he could put his name on, and he spent one of them on this.

Alabama is not a state with a gun surplus problem to celebrate

Here is what was happening in Alabama while its congressman was writing symbolism bills.

Alabama has the fifth-highest rate of gun violence in the nation — 213.6 shooting incidents per 100,000 residents from 2014 to 2024, roughly 83% higher than the national average, with 10,522 shooting incidents over that period. Those are our neighbors, our kids, and our emergency rooms.

Nationally, 125 Americans are killed with guns every day and more than 200 more are shot and wounded. We wrote about the Republicans with the worst records on guns — the ones who keep choosing the gun lobby over their own constituents. Moore's bill is the same instinct, just with the pretense stripped away. There's no policy argument to have with it. It doesn't do anything. It just announces whose side he's on.

He's asking for a promotion

Moore is now the Republican nominee for Alabama's open U.S. Senate seat, having won the June 2026 runoff with about 56 percent of the vote. A senator has six years and far more power than a House member to shape what does and doesn't get a vote.

Before Alabama hands him that, it's fair to look at what he did with the power he already had. In a state with the fifth-worst gun violence rate in America, he used it to try to put the AR-15 on the same list as the bald eagle.

Alabama families burying people shot with these weapons did not need a national symbol. They needed a congressman who took the problem seriously. We deserve better.

Sources

AR-15 National Gun Act, H.R. 1095 (118th Congress) — sponsor, cosponsors, and full legislative history
GOP Rep. Barry Moore Wants AR-15 as "National Gun of America" — Newsweek, February 21, 2023

Andrew Clyde Owns Two Gun Stores. He's Asking the Government to Destroy the Records Police Use to Solve Shootings.

Fri, 07 Aug 2026 09:45:00 +0000

On August 5, 2026, Andrew Clyde sent a letter to the head of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives with a simple request: start destroying gun records.

Not stop collecting them. Destroy the ones you already have.

Clyde led nearly 30 House Republicans in asking ATF Director Robert Cekada to cap how long firearm transaction records can be kept at 20 years, wipe out everything older than that, and "immediately destroy any recordings" of records the agency has already digitized.

Clyde owns two gun stores.

What the records actually are

When you buy a gun from a licensed dealer, you fill out a Form 4473. The dealer keeps it. If the dealer goes out of business, federal law requires them to send those forms to the ATF's National Tracing Center in West Virginia within 30 days.

That's it. That's the "registry."

Here's what those forms are for. When police recover a gun at a crime scene, they call the Tracing Center with a serial number. Tracing Center staff work backward — manufacturer, distributor, dealer — until they find the 4473 that shows who first bought that gun. The center processed more than 360,000 trace requests in fiscal year 2014 and has handled hundreds of thousands a year since.

Clyde's letter calls this "an illegal gun registry." But a registry is exactly what federal law already prohibits, and has for decades. 18 U.S.C. § 926(a) bars "a system of registration of firearms, firearm owners and firearm transactions," and appropriations bills going back to 1979 have blocked the ATF from spending money "consolidating or centralizing" dealer records.

That's why the Tracing Center still works the way it does — staff physically searching an archive that can't be sorted by name, because the law says it can't be. The thing Clyde says is illegal is the thing the law already forbids. What actually exists is a filing cabinet the ATF is not allowed to index.

What his request would cost

The ATF proposed in May that Form 4473s be kept for 20 or 30 years by the dealer, plus up to 30 more by the ATF — a maximum of 60 years total. Clyde wants that cut to 20 years, total, from the date of sale, with everything older destroyed.

Guns last a lot longer than 20 years.

A rifle sold in 2003 and used in a shooting in 2027 would, under Clyde's rule, have no traceable paper trail at all. The record that connects it to its first buyer would be gone — shredded on purpose, by request of Congress. Every cold case involving an older weapon gets colder. Every trafficking investigation that depends on finding the straw purchaser hits a wall.

In Clyde's own state, about 2,000 Georgians die from gun violence every year — a rate of 17.6 deaths per 100,000 people, roughly 37% higher than the national average. Georgia police departments use the Tracing Center. Clyde is asking Washington to take a tool away from them.

He is not a neutral party here

This is the part that doesn't get said enough.

Andrew Clyde is a federal firearms dealer. He owns Clyde Armory, which by his own account operates two brick-and-mortar locations in Georgia. The records he's asking the ATF to destroy are the same category of records his own business is required to generate and keep. The agency he's writing to is the agency that regulates him.

And he sits on the House Appropriations Committee — the committee that writes the funding riders that constrain what the ATF is allowed to do with those records in the first place.

This is not the first time. Clyde was the member who first requested the gun provision in the House version of the One Big Beautiful Bill — language stripping silencers out of the National Firearms Act, the 1930s law that keeps the most dangerous weapons registered and subject to an extra background check. That version didn't survive the Senate. What Trump signed instead cut the federal transfer and manufacturing tax on suppressors from $200 to $0 — a tax cut for the product category a gun-store owner in Congress sells.

He was also one of only four cosponsors of the "AR-15 National Gun Act", a bill to declare the AR-15 style rifle the official "National Gun of the United States."

Who pays him

One of Clyde's campaign donors is Daniel Defense — the Georgia rifle manufacturer that made one of the two rifles the Uvalde gunman bought days before he killed 19 schoolchildren and two teachers.

A gun manufacturer gives money to a gun-store owner who sits on the Appropriations Committee, and that member spends his time loosening the rules on the gun industry and asking the ATF to burn its paperwork. You don't have to squint to see the shape of it.

"Privately and free from federal government infringement"

Clyde's letter argues that "gun owners should be able to exercise their Second Amendment rights privately and free from federal government infringement," and that the ATF's records "jeopardize" that.

Set that against what the records do. Nobody's Second Amendment rights are infringed by a Form 4473 sitting in a warehouse in Martinsburg, West Virginia. No gun is confiscated. No purchase is blocked. Nothing happens to that piece of paper at all — unless a police officer somewhere picks up a gun off the ground next to a body and needs to know where it came from.

That's the only moment these records ever get touched. And that's the moment Clyde wants to make impossible.

He is a Georgia congressman in a state where 2,000 people a year are killed with guns, asking the federal government to make those killings harder to solve, on behalf of an industry that pays him and that he personally profits from.

Source

97.5 Glory FM, "Clyde urges ATF to limit firearm record retention, destroy 'illegal' gun registry" (photo: WGTJ). The letter and Clyde's full statement are posted by his office.

Brad Little Called Idaho One of the Safest Places in America. Three Days Later, Three People Were Shot Dead at an In-N-Out.

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 10:05:00 +0000

On Wednesday, July 29, Idaho Gov. Brad Little put out a press release about the state's latest crime numbers. It opened like this:

"Idaho continues to be one of the safest places to live, work, and raise a family."

On Saturday, August 1, at 2:29 in the afternoon, a 24-year-old man named Chad Williams opened fire at an In-N-Out Burger in Twin Falls. Three people were killed and seven were injured. An off-duty Idaho State Police trooper and an armed civilian confronted him and drove him from the scene. He died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Little's response was a post asking Idahoans to "join me in keeping the Twin Falls community in your prayers."

The timing is ugly. But timing is not the real problem here, and treating it as a gotcha lets Little off easy. The real problem is that his safety claim was built on a measurement that was never going to catch this — and that his own record on guns runs directly against it.

What that crime report actually counts

The Idaho State Police report Little was celebrating showed declines in property crime, violent crime, and nearly every major category. That's real, and it's good news.

But a police crime report counts crimes reported to police. That is not the same thing as counting how Idahoans die.

Here is what gets missed. In 2024, an estimated 331 people in Idaho died from gun-related injuries — about 15.9 per 100,000 people, a rate 24% higher than the country as a whole.

And 86.4% of those deaths were suicides.

Suicide isn't a crime. It doesn't show up in a crime report. So a governor can hold up a falling crime chart and say Idaho is one of the safest places in America while the single largest cause of gun death in his state sits entirely outside the data he's citing.

That's not a technicality. It's the difference between "fewer people are being robbed" and "your family is safe."

The law he signed after a sixth-grader shot up a middle school

In May 2021, a sixth-grade girl pulled a handgun out of her backpack at Rigby Middle School in eastern Idaho and fired multiple rounds. Two students and a custodian were injured. A teacher disarmed her.

Less than a week later, Brad Little signed Senate Bill 1205.

That law bars every government entity in Idaho — every city, every county, every agency — from enforcing federal orders, laws, or rules on firearms and ammunition that the state considers in conflict with the Idaho Constitution. The Associated Press described it at the time as aimed at thwarting a half-dozen executive actions intended to reduce gun violence.

Among the things it was designed to keep out of Idaho:

Cracking down on untraceable "ghost guns"
Regulating pistol-stabilizing braces
Red flag laws — the kind that let a family go to a judge and temporarily take firearms away from a relative in crisis

Read that last one again next to the number above. 86.4% of Idaho gun deaths are suicides. Red flag laws exist almost entirely for that situation: someone in crisis, a family that sees it coming, and a legal way to put distance between that person and a gun for a few weeks.

Little signed a law making sure Idaho would not enforce them. He did it days after children were shot at school.

The NRA noticed. Its Political Victory Fund endorsed him for reelection in 2022 and gave him an A+ rating.

"Thoughts and prayers" is not a policy

After Twin Falls, Little asked for prayers and told people to avoid the area and follow law enforcement. Both are reasonable things for a governor to say in the first hours of a mass shooting.

The question is what comes after the first hours.

Idaho has had no serious movement on red flag laws, on secure storage requirements, on waiting periods, on anything that addresses the 86% of gun deaths that are suicides. What Idaho has instead is a statute forbidding its own government from helping enforce federal firearms rules, signed by this governor.

You cannot claim credit for public safety and simultaneously insist that the leading way people in your state die by gun is nobody's business.

The rest of the record

The gun law isn't an outlier. Little's report card documents a pattern of the same instinct applied elsewhere: signing one of the country's most extreme abortion bans, which drove doctors out of Idaho; signing a book-banning law aimed at libraries; making Idaho the only state to execute people by firing squad; cheering on DOGE while federal jobs and services in Idaho were cut.

The common thread is a governor who is very comfortable telling Idahoans they're safe and very uncomfortable doing anything that might upset the people who fund his campaigns.

Three families in Twin Falls buried someone this week. Seven more people are recovering. They live in what their governor called, three days earlier, one of the safest places in America to raise a family.

We deserve better.

If you or someone you know is struggling, the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline is available 24/7 by calling or texting 988.

Sources

Gov. Little's July 29, 2026 press release, "Gov. Little comments on another year of decreased crime in Idaho"; ABC News on the August 1 Twin Falls shooting; USAFacts on Idaho gun deaths; Associated Press on Senate Bill 1205.

Brandon Herrera Called a Child a "C*m Trophy" to Insult Moms Fighting Gun Violence

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 10:38:00 +0000

Brandon Herrera is the Republican running for Congress in Texas's 23rd District, endorsed by President Trump. Here is how he talks about mothers who speak up about gun violence:

"Being a mother doesn't make your opinion any more or less valid. Just because you let somebody creampie you doesn't mean I have to give a shit about political opinions."

"The fact that you kept your c*m trophy doesn't make you any less wrong about the dumb shit that you say."

The "c*m trophy" he's referring to is a child.

He was attacking Shannon Watts, the founder of Moms Demand Action — the gun violence prevention group started after the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting. The remarks come from a January 2023 video Herrera posted, and they resurfaced this month as he runs for Congress.

And it wasn't a one-time slip

This isn't a single ugly line from years ago. Herrera has gone back to the same well repeatedly.

In a 2026 YouTube video, he said Moms Demand Action was "not a MILF dating site," and joked that the mothers in the group were only "M's" — a crude way of saying he didn't find them attractive enough. That's a candidate for the United States Congress rating the appearance of women who organize against school shootings.

The reporting notes several other things about Herrera that surfaced along with it: jokes about killing older people, a video recreating the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., an appearance in a Sons of Confederate Veterans recruitment video, and boasting about owning a copy of Mein Kampf.

This site already covered his jokes about killing the elderly — and his refusal to apologize for them.

Texas Republicans ran away rather than answer

Here's the part that says the most about the party backing him.

On July 23, 2026, a reporter tried asking Texas Republican members of Congress a simple question about their party's candidate and his remarks about Shannon Watts. Raw Story documented what happened:

Rep. Chip Roy said "I gotta go" and walked off before the reporter could finish the question.
Ronny Jackson refused to answer and headed up the Capitol steps.
Rep. Troy Nehls looked like he might respond — then threw up his hands and turned away when the remark was repeated.

Three sitting members of Congress, all from Texas, none willing to say a single word about a candidate their party is trying to send to Washington from their own state.

If Herrera's comments were defensible, one of them would have defended them. If they were indefensible, one of them could have said so. Instead they ran.

That's not a small thing. Refusing to answer for the people you're helping elect is how this stuff keeps happening.

Why the target matters

It matters a lot that the group Herrera picked was Moms Demand Action.

Herrera built his following as a gun YouTuber. Moms Demand Action was founded in response to the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, and its members are overwhelmingly parents who got involved after gun violence touched their community.

Herrera's response to those parents isn't an argument about the Second Amendment. It's a sexual insult about how their children were conceived.

That's the choice he made — not once, in a bad moment, but as a recurring bit for an audience.

What he'd actually do in office

The vulgarity gets the clicks, but the votes are what would change people's lives. Herrera campaigns on Trump's endorsement, and the last section of his issues page is headed "Standing with President Trump" — and that agenda has already hit TX-23 hard:

Trump's budget bill cut health care for 17 million Americans, including nearly 12 million Medicaid recipients. More than 41,000 people in TX-23 were at risk of losing their coverage.
The same bill made the largest cut to food assistance in history — $187 billion. More than 31,000 households in TX-23 relied on SNAP to buy groceries in 2024.

You can see the full record on Brandon Herrera's report card.

The bottom line

A candidate for Congress called a child a "c*m trophy" to insult mothers organizing against gun violence, mocked those mothers' looks on YouTube this year, and has never apologized for any of it.

His party's response was to endorse him and then sprint away from reporters.

The people of Texas's 23rd District deserve a representative who can talk about guns, or health care, or groceries, without talking like this.

Source

This post is based on reporting from MeidasTouch and Raw Story. Photo via Comic Sands.

What Alaska's Republicans in Congress Are Costing You

Sun, 19 Jul 2026 21:56:17 +0000

Alaska is one of the hardest places in America to get a doctor, a hot meal in winter, or a reliable weather forecast before a deadly storm. On the measures we track — health, crime, food security, and more — Alaska ranks 37th out of 50. That's the ground Alaskans are already standing on.

Then Washington made it worse. The budget law that Republicans passed in 2025 cuts Medicaid, cuts food aid, and hands the savings to the wealthiest Americans as tax breaks. Alaska has exactly two Republicans in Congress — Senator Dan Sullivan and Representative Nick Begich — and both of them voted for it. Here's what that vote is costing you.

Medicaid: billions gone, thousands dropped

Alaska stands to lose an estimated $1.5–$2.5 billion in federal Medicaid funds over the next decade — an 11% cut. In a state where rural hospitals already run on the edge and villages can be hundreds of miles from the nearest clinic, that means fewer doctors, more strain on the hospitals that are left, and worse outcomes for families who already struggle to get care.

More than 9,000 Alaskans are projected to lose Medicaid coverage just because of the law's new work-reporting requirements, according to a report prepared for the Alaska Department of Health. And around 24,000 more Alaskans will see their health insurance costs jump 125% — an average increase of $1,836 a year.

That's not a spreadsheet line. That's a parent in Bethel or Kotzebue deciding whether they can afford to stay covered. Dan Sullivan and Nick Begich voted for the law that does it.

Food aid, in a state where 1 in 5 kids goes hungry

Here in Alaska, 1 in 5 kids faces hunger, and about 64,600 Alaskans receive SNAP benefits every month to put food on the table. Alaska is also one of the most expensive places in the country to buy groceries — a gallon of milk in a rural village can cost several times what it does in the Lower 48.

The same budget law both members backed slashes SNAP and shifts new costs onto the state. When you make it harder to qualify for food aid in a place where a bag of groceries already costs a fortune, the people who go without are kids, seniors, and working families.

DOGE bragged about the cuts. Alaska's fisheries and forecasts paid.

DOGE claims it "saved" Alaska more than $280 million — but look at what that number actually meant on the water and in the sky. Mass firings and budget cuts at NOAA reduced the services used to manage Alaska's fisheries — the backbone of the state's economy and the livelihood of thousands of Alaskans.

Worse, the cuts gutted weather data collection. When a deadly storm slammed western Alaska in October 2025, a lack of weather data caused by Trump's budget cuts degraded the forecast that villages depend on to get out of harm's way. On top of that, federal firings hit Alaska especially hard, and the state saw 67,000 layoffs in 2025.

Real jobs, real fish counts, and real storm warnings — traded away so Washington could brag about a savings number. Neither Sullivan nor Begich slowed any of it down.

Public safety, in the state with the highest violent crime rate

Alaska has the highest violent crime rate in the country, and it sits near the top for both its murder rate and its rate of firearm deaths. Alaskans need more support to keep their communities safe — more resources for law enforcement, mental health care, and prevention.

Instead, the same delegation that voted to cut Medicaid — which pays for much of the state's mental health and addiction treatment — keeps voting against the tools that could actually bring these numbers down. You can't say you're tough on crime while defunding the services that prevent it.

Who voted for this

These are the two members of Congress representing Alaska who voted for the budget law behind the Medicaid and SNAP cuts, and who stood by while DOGE tore through the state:

Dan Sullivan — United States Senator
Nick Begich — United States Representative

In 2026, Alaskans get to decide whether that's the representation they want. The numbers are already on the wall. The only question left is who answers for them — and whether Alaska sends back the same two people who voted to make it harder to see a doctor, feed a kid, and get a storm warning in time.

Compare Alaska to Other States →