Cool F/X

09/04/2026

Patrick “Tate” Adamiak has been pardoned by President Trump. A severe injustice has finally been corrected.

Few people outside the fi****ms community understand how thoroughly the ATF was weaponized against gun owners and fi****ms businesses under the Biden administration. Tate’s prosecution was one of the most egregious examples of the abuses of government power committed during those years.

This is extraordinary news.

President Trump pardoned Patrick “Tate” Adamiak and several others Friday.

09/04/2026

This is exactly what happens when the government comes to believe that it has a monopoly on force. To avoid failing at what government almost always assumes is its highest priority, preserving its own authority, it must disarm the individual. Otherwise, the individual retains power independent of the state. And we can’t have that, can we?

Government has a legitimate role in making and enforcing laws, but legitimate authority to use force is not the same as exclusive authority over all protective force. The latter reduces the citizen from a sovereign participant in government to a dependent subject of it.

The Second Amendment does not grant the individual permission to possess defensive power. It recognizes that the individual already possesses it, and denies the government the authority to take it away. It reflects the principle that citizens have a responsibility to protect themselves, their communities, and ultimately the state itself, not simply to depend upon the state for protection.

That's part of what makes the United States so unique. Yet we have gradually been lulled into believing that the government is responsible for our safety and that our ability to defend ourselves exists only with its permission. The constitutional order recognizes precisely the opposite.

The world is not black and white. But government almost invariably resolves every gray area in favor of expanding its own power. That is exactly why constitutional restraints must be stated and defended as clearly as possible.

Montgomery County officials are trying to prevent houses of worship from making their own security decisions.

08/31/2026

If you care about protecting the Second Amendment but aren’t familiar with the Joyce Foundation and its influence on gun-control policy and advocacy, this is worth watching:

Learn more about the Joyce Foundation’s effort to take away your ri...

08/02/2026

Before the "assault fi***rm" law took effect on July 1, Virginians rushed to purchase the fi****ms and magazines that the state intended to prohibit. NSSF-adjusted background checks increased from 36,217 in June 2025 to 123,699 in June 2026. That was a 241% increase, meaning the number more than tripled.

Then lawful transfers largely stopped while the ban was in effect. When the statewide injunction took effect on July 21, they immediately resumed.

The policy didn't eliminate demand. It accelerated purchases before the deadline, disrupted lawful commerce, harmed small businesses and then compressed renewed demand into the final 11 days of July.

Whatever its intended purpose, its practical result was more fi***rm purchases, more uncertainty and more litigation. That's policy failure by any reasonable measure.

Virginia gun sales surge to record highs as a controversial MSR ban takes effect. Discover the eye-popping background check numbers and legal chaos.

07/25/2026

Dr. John Lott’s latest research provides some badly needed context for the way murder is discussed in the United States.

In 2024, just 2% of U.S. counties accounted for 54% of all murders. The highest 5% accounted for 71%.

At the other end of the spectrum, 53% of American counties had no murders at all. Altogether, 69% of counties had either zero or one murder. Those counties accounted for only 3% of the national total.

The concentration continues even within high-crime counties. In Los Angeles County, for example, just 10% of ZIP codes accounted for 41% of murders, while 30% accounted for 82%.

Politicians and the media routinely talk about “gun violence” as though it were a broadly distributed national condition requiring restrictions on everyone. It isn’t. Murder is overwhelmingly concentrated in a relatively small number of urban counties. And, within those, in an even smaller number of neighborhoods and streets.

The counties in Lott’s highest 2% do contain 30% of the population, so population size explains part of their ranking. But those same counties account for 54% of the murders. The disparity is real and substantial.

This research doesn’t tell us that there is one simple cause behind every high-crime area. It does tell us that blanket restrictions imposed on millions of peaceable Americans (most living in places with very little murder) are poorly targeted responses to a highly localized problem.

Effective policy begins by accurately defining the problem. John Lott and the Crime Prevention Research Center continue to do valuable work putting data ahead of rhetoric.

Read the research:

We have continued our reports on how very concentrated murders are in the United States. Our newest report is available here.

07/24/2026

My first Substack article:

A review of public IRS filings reveals that Everytown's financial support comes primarily from a small number of wealthy donors rather than a broad base of grassroots contributions.

07/23/2026

Larry Keane pulls no punches in this article, and some readers may find the word “communism” provocative. But before dismissing it as rhetoric, read what the Democratic Socialists of America says in its own 2026 program.

The DSA calls for drafting a new constitution and creating a “democratic socialist republic.” It proposes replacing the President and Supreme Court with bodies subordinate to Congress, abolishing the Senate, and placing the largest corporations and essential industries under public ownership.

That isn’t merely a proposal for higher taxes or a larger welfare state. It is a proposal to replace our existing constitutional order and fundamentally transform private ownership and the American economy.

For gun owners and those of us in the lawful fi****ms industry, the danger is especially clear. The Second Amendment, separation of powers, private property, and limited government all stand in the way of that vision.

You don’t have to accept every word of Keane’s analysis. Read the article, read the DSA’s own program, and decide for yourself what is actually being proposed.

There’s a dark mood creeping into American politics that has even the most die-hard gun control politicians worried. Democrats, typically (but not always) aligned with gun control, are facing the prospect of their political party turning their gaze to complete control. Enter the Democratic Sociali...

07/20/2026

Weapons bans are malum prohibitum laws. They criminalize conduct because the government has prohibited it, not because the conduct is inherently evil.

The traditional malum in se offenses, such as murder, assault, robbery, and theft, already punish people for harming others. Gun control laws increasingly punish people not for what they have done, but for what the government fears they might do.

That is why this week’s Third Circuit decision is so significant. Several concurring judges were appointed by President Biden, yet they also recognized how easily malum prohibitum laws can be exploited by prosecutors to railroad otherwise peaceful defendants.

Lavrentiy Beria, Stalin’s secret police chief, is commonly credited with saying, “Show me the man, and I’ll show you the crime.” A government with enough laws can make a criminal out of almost anyone.

For every new law enacted, two existing laws should be repealed. We do not suffer from a shortage of criminal statutes. We suffer from too many ways for the government to turn ordinary citizens into criminals.

This week, hundreds of thousands of New Jerseyans enjoyed a freedom that state law had banned for decades.

07/11/2026

Everytown for Gun Safety describes itself as a "grassroots" organization. But when you look at its publicly available financial filings, a different picture emerges. The Support Fund's IRS filings show that the overwhelming majority of its funding comes from a handful of very large donors, not from large numbers of small-dollar contributors. The Action Fund does not publicly disclose donor concentration, so the third graph is an estimate based on the Support Fund's documented distribution pattern. Judge for yourself, but if an organization relies primarily on a small number of wealthy benefactors to fund its operations, is "grassroots" really the best description?

07/10/2026

This is what happens when activist judges ignore the fundamental principles enshrined in the US Constitution:

(July 9, 2026) — Fi****ms Policy Coalition (FPC) President Brandon Combs issued the following statement responding to the Seventh Circuit’s opinion in FPC’s Harrel v. Raoul lawsuit (consolidated with Barnett v. Raoul and others) challenging the Illinois Protect Illinois Communities Act (PICA) bans on so-called “assault weapons” and “large-capacity” magazines. The district court declared the bans unconstitutional following extensive briefing, presentation of evidence, and a trial, but the Seventh Circuit reversed that ruling today:

“Today’s decision is exactly what we’ve come to expect from courts desperately contorting themselves to keep failed gun-control theories alive. While the opinion is unquestionably atrocious in both its legal reasoning and moral foundation, the good news is that today’s opinion is not the future of Second Amendment jurisprudence but the death rattle of the failed gun-control era—the last gasp of a dying authoritarian legal movement that has spent years engaging in judicial jiggery-pokery, inventing exceptions, rewriting history, misrepresenting reality, and treating the Second Amendment like a second-class right.

Just days ago, the Supreme Court granted review in FPC’s Viramontes v. Cook County case, which squarely presents the issue these lower courts keep working so hard to avoid. That grant of certiorari was not an accident. It is a recognition that the confusion and open defiance in the lower courts—exemplified yet again by today’s Seventh Circuit decision—cannot and must not continue.

The Constitution does not permit governments to outlaw these fi****ms and magazines, full stop. Nor does it allow judges to substitute their personal policy preferences for the scope of the right the Constitution enshrined, or to ignore the test the Supreme Court has repeatedly required. The Supreme Court now has the opportunity to restore order to a body of law that some lower courts have treated as optional. When it does, opinions like this will serve as little more than historical reminders of how far some courts were willing to go to deny Americans the exercise of a fundamental constitutional right.

For years, anti-rights governments have benefited from some judges willing to do whatever it took to preserve their unconstitutional and immoral bans. They’ve won some battles along the way. But we are going to win the war.

FPC is going to achieve our Current Mission: to restore the essential right to keep and bear arms throughout the United States. We will continue to Fight Forward until every unconstitutional arms ban falls and the Second Amendment is treated like every other constitutional guarantee—not as a suggestion, but as the supreme law of the land.”

Fi****ms Policy Coalition (FPC) President Brandon Combs issued the following statement responding to the Seventh Circuit’s opinion in FPC’s Harrel v. Raoul lawsuit (consolidated with Barnett v. Raoul and others) challenging the Illinois Protect Illinois Communities Act (PICA) bans on so-called ....