Spent some time this week going down the rabbit hole on the Liberator — the plastic .380 that Cody Wilson printed in 2013 and somehow turned into a decade of federal litigation. Whether you think Wilson was a hero, a lunatic, or just a guy who was really good at poking bureaucracies with a stick, the legal fallout is worth understanding. It touched First Amendment territory that most gun owners don't think about until it matters. The Liberator was less a weapon than a provocation -- a physical argument that the internet had made firearms regulation structurally impossible. That framing is honest, and it's why the government panicked the way it did. A single-shot plastic pistol that Swiss researchers said was more dangerous to its shooter than its target isn't a threat to anyone at a range. The threat was the file sitting on a server. We were informed that we would have lost this case in court, or would have likely lost this case in court, based on First Amendment grounds. — State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert That quote from the State Department is the part that doesn't get enough attention. They settled, paid $40,000, and handed Defense Distributed a publishing license — not because the gun was good, but because CAD files are speech and they knew a court was going to say so eventually. Alan Gura — the same attorney who argued Heller — was on this case for a reason. Federal law at the time did not require serial numbers or registration for firearms manufactured at home for personal use, making the Ghost Gunner a legal path to an untraceable, functional firearm that didn't depend on 3D printing at all. This is where the story gets practical. The Liberator was a proof of concept that fired once under controlled conditions. The Ghost Gunner was a product that churned out functional 80% AR lowers — and Wilson was selling them at the LGS counter level, basically. The plastic pistol was the headline; the CNC mill was the business. The whole arc — from a printed .380 to a multi-state legal battle over whether design files are protected expression — is a case study in how technology moves faster than law, and how a single test fire in Texas ended up in front of 20 state attorneys general. For those of you who've built 80% lowers or done any home gunsmithing: at what point did you first actually think about the legal status of what you were building, and did the Ghost Gunner or the Liberator coverage change how you thought about it? Read the full article in The Handbook → | By The Boise Gun Club Team

Long-range shooting has always been a negotiation between the shooter and physics — and for 500 years, the shooter held up their end of that deal through training, practice, and hard-won judgment. TrackingPoint decided to cut the shooter out of that negotiation entirely. TrackingPoint moved the variable that determines accuracy out of the human and into a Linux-powered computer bolted to the receiver. That sentence should sit with you for a minute. Every drill you've ever done to improve your trigger press, every hour behind a spotting scope calling wind, every cold-bore shot at a match — TrackingPoint's pitch was that none of that matters if you have $22,000 and an iPad. Whether that bothers you probably says a lot about why you shoot. A skill that had required years of practice was compressed into a single session with a $22,000 rifle. There's the honest version of the sales pitch right there. NPR watched a first-timer ring steel at 500 yards on attempt one. I've watched experienced guys miss that shot under mild pressure at a club match — misjudged wind, rushed the trigger. The system didn't make them a better shooter. It made the question of whether they're a good shooter irrelevant. Jet fighter lock-and-launch technology onto a combat rifle. — Jason Schauble, TrackingPoint President That framing tells you everything about how they saw the product — and it's not wrong as a technical description. Lock, hold trigger, wait for the computer's permission. The pilot analogy holds up, which is exactly what made the military interested and exactly what made the hacking demonstration so uncomfortable. When your precision fire control runs on Linux over Wi-Fi, you've introduced an attack surface that a 1903 Springfield simply doesn't have. Someone remote-altering your ballistic data without you knowing — that's a problem class that didn't exist in precision shooting until about 2013. The ethics debate over fair chase is real and worth having, but I think the more durable question is simpler: when you've automated the skill, what exactly are you doing out there — and does your answer to that change depending on whether you're hunting, competing, or training a new generation of shooters? Where do you draw the line on technology assistance — do you run a dope card and a basic turret-capable scope, or have you gone further with ballistic apps, Kestrel integration, or anything else that starts doing the math for you, and where does it stop feeling like your shot? Read the full article in The Handbook → | By The Boise Gun Club Team

Long article, detailed subject — Berdan primers deserve more attention than they usually get in American shooting circles, mostly because they show up constantly in the ammo we actually buy and shoot, and most guys at the range couldn't tell you the first thing about them. There is a persistent irony baked into every spam can of surplus 7.62x39 that lands on an American range table: the primer igniting that round was invented by an American, adopted enthusiastically by the rest of the world, and largely abandoned in its country of origin. That's the kind of thing that should come up more at the LGS counter. You're feeding your AK with an American invention that America decided wasn't worth keeping — and the reason is purely cultural. We built a reloading culture, and the Berdan design doesn't play well with that. For military arsenals running high-volume production with no expectation that soldiers would be hand-loading in the field, it was a practical choice. For American civilian shooters who built a culture around reusing brass, it was a dead end. This is the whole story in two sentences. Every time someone new to reloading asks why they shouldn't bother saving their 7.62x54R brass, this is the answer. It's not impossible to reload Berdan — it's just slow, tool-dependent, and not worth it when commercial brass is available. Roy Marcot, in Hiram Berdan: Military Commander and Firearms Inventor, includes a statement by Major Treadwell alleging that Berdan essentially copied a primer and pocket designed by Colonel S.V. Benet, who was Frankford Arsenal's Commanding Officer at the time. Wouldn't be the first time someone with rank and connections got their name on another man's work. Berdan was apparently good at two things: long-range shooting and self-promotion. The Sharpshooters history is genuinely impressive — the primer credit is murkier than most people realize. Decapping a Boxer-primed case requires working around two or three off-center flash holes with no central channel to guide a pin. Specialized tools exist — the RCBS Berdan decapping tool, a two-rod system that hooks the rim of the primer and levers it out — but the process is slow and the tools are not universally available. Breakage is common enough that RCBS's lifetime guarantee on decapping pins gets a knowing aside. Anyone who's tried to reload Berdan-primed cases on a Saturday afternoon and ended up with a bent decapping rod by 2pm knows exactly what that "knowing aside" means. The lifetime guarantee is appreciated. You will need it. Discussion question: Have you ever actually reloaded Berdan-primed brass — and if so, was the cost savings worth the headache, or did you swear it off after the first batch? Read the full article in The Handbook → | By The Boise Gun Club Team

Ran across some Walker Colt history worth talking through. At 4.5 pounds and 15.5 inches, this thing makes a full-size 1911 feel like a pocket pistol — and somebody actually carried two of them on horseback into combat. "Without your pistols we could not have had the confidence to have undertaken such daring adventures... with improvements I think they can be rendered the most perfect weapon in the world for light mounted troops." Walker wasn't just writing a marketing blurb here — he was a working Ranger who'd used the Paterson against Comanche in the kind of running fight where reload time gets you killed. That testimonial came from genuine field experience, and Colt knew exactly how to use it to rescue a career that was basically dead in the water. The Walker held the record as the most powerful commercially manufactured repeating handgun from 1847 until 1935 — a span of 88 years. Sit with that for a second. That's roughly the gap between the introduction of the .357 Magnum and right now. A black powder revolver designed in six weeks, built in a borrowed factory, held the power record until the Smith & Wesson 27 came along. Next time someone at the LGS counter dismisses cap-and-ball revolvers as primitive, that's your number. The Walker had real mechanical problems that its designers acknowledged almost immediately. Under 300 of the original 1,000 military revolvers were returned for repair due to ruptured cylinders. Nearly a third of them came back broken — and the chain-fire risk was real enough that the fix was packing lard into the chamber mouths after loading. That's not a quirk, that's a design flaw you're managing with pig fat. Black powder shooters still do this today on replica Walkers, which tells you something about how well the underlying problem was actually solved versus just managed. The loading lever latch dropping under recoil and jamming the action is the part that would haunt me. Soldiers wrapped rawhide around the barrel to hold it in place. That's the kind of field improvisation that either gets written into the next production spec or gets people killed — and in this case it was both. For those of you who shoot cap-and-ball or have handled a Walker replica: what's your actual experience managing the chain-fire risk, and do you trust the loading lever latch on modern reproductions any more than the originals? Read the full article in The Handbook → | By The Boise Gun Club Team

Been using the BGC directory for a while now, and I figured it was worth breaking down how these business grades actually work — because understanding the system tells you something useful about which listings are worth your time before you load up the truck. A gun shop with 40 years of history, a working website, hours posted, and a real phone number scores higher than a listing that is just a name and an address scraped from an FFL database. This is the whole thing in one sentence. We've all pulled up a listing, found nothing but an address, driven across town, and discovered the shop closed two years ago or only opens on alternating Tuesdays. The grade is basically a proxy for "did this business bother to tell you anything about themselves." Writing a real description is the single biggest grade boost available. Half the grade comes from listing quality alone, and description is the biggest chunk of that. What I find telling is that a 30-word ATF boilerplate — the kind every FFL already has on file — only earns 5 out of 35 possible points. The system is specifically penalizing copy-paste compliance language and rewarding shops that actually explain what they do. Makes sense. "Licensed firearms dealer" tells me nothing. "We specialize in used wheelguns, do transfers for $25, and have a 10-lane indoor range" actually helps me decide whether to make the drive. The BGC Business Grade rewards businesses that invest in their online presence and gives every business a clear path to improve. Worth noting what this grade is not — it's not rating whether the counter guy was helpful or whether the pricing is fair. It's purely about information completeness. A rude shop with good hours and a detailed listing can still score an A. That's fine — it's a different problem than what this system is trying to solve, and conflating the two would make the grade meaningless. Curious what your experience has been — when you're scoping out a gun shop you've never visited, what's the one thing missing from a listing that makes you decide to skip it entirely? Read the full article in The Handbook → | By The Boise Gun Club

Birthright citizenship doesn't sound like a gun rights issue until you think it through. Federal law draws a hard line between citizens, lawful permanent residents, and undocumented immigrants when it comes to firearms purchases. If the court narrows who gets citizenship at birth, you're looking at a future class of adults — born on American soil — who may not be able to walk into a gun store and fill out a 4473. That's not hypothetical. That's downstream of this ruling. "Wong Kim Ark never suggested that parental domicile was necessary, just that it was more than sufficient in Mr. Wong's case." That's the whole ballgame right there. DOJ is counting the word "domicile" in a 126-year-old ruling and calling it precedent — but sufficient and necessary are not the same legal standard, and any first-year law student knows it. If the justices let that slide, they're rewriting a constitutional clause using a word that isn't even in the clause. The detail about DOJ citing page 659 of a case that ends on page 651 is the kind of thing that would get a gun store employee fired for running the wrong background check form. Sloppy sourcing in a brief headed to the Supreme Court isn't a typo — it's a tell about how much the legal architecture here is improvised. The Martinez v. Bynum angle is the one worth watching. DOJ is leaning on a case where the court just assumed the kid was a U.S. citizen — exactly the outcome DOJ is arguing against. That's not a citation, that's an own goal. Oral arguments are April 1. How this gets decided will matter to gun owners in ways most people won't connect until it's already law. Have you ever had a customer or shooting buddy run into a firearms purchase issue tied to immigration or residency status — and how did that play out at the counter or at the FFL? Read the full article in The Handbook → | By Steve Duskett

Short article, one quote — but it's worth unpacking what's actually happening here before everyone starts reading tea leaves. SCOTUS passing on these AR and magazine ban cases right now doesn't mean the fight is over. It means the Court is running a queue, and the cases already on the docket for merits decisions get to go first. If you've been following 2A litigation since Bruen, this pattern is familiar — the justices have been deliberately pacing themselves through this stuff rather than taking everything at once. "Even if the class of cases like Mr. Burnett's is small, the stakes are high." — Justice Neil Gorsuch, dissenting Gorsuch was writing about Sixth Amendment rights getting gutted through procedural maneuvering — but that logic translates directly to how 2A cases get buried or delayed. If constitutional rights can be effectively nullified by just... not hearing the case, that's a problem regardless of which amendment is on the line. Worth keeping an eye on how he writes when the gun cases actually get in front of them. The practical reality is that anyone living under a state-level AR or magazine ban is still living under it through at least late summer. That's not nothing — that's another range season, another self-defense calculation, another conversation at the gun store counter about what's legal to bring in from out of state. March 23 is the next conference order window. Mark it or don't, but don't expect fireworks — the more likely outcome is another "still waiting." For those of you in states with these restrictions already in place — how has it actually changed what you own, carry, or run at a match? Genuine question. Read the full article in The Handbook → | By Steve Duskett

Short article, but it hits on something that's been grinding at me for a while now — the slow-motion way rights get whittled down without anyone firing a shot in a courtroom that actually matters. Without SCOTUS stepping in to clean that up, the law you live under depends heavily on your zip code. That's not hypothetical. A suppressor, a mag capacity, an SBR — all perfectly legal here in Idaho, potentially a felony two states over. Same Constitution, radically different outcomes. That's not a functioning legal framework, that's a patchwork. A denial isn't a ruling, but it's still a signal. When SCOTUS repeatedly declines to take up 2A cases, the lower court decisions—which often go against gun owners—stand. This is the quiet part people miss. No headlines, no drama — just a cert denial that lets a bad circuit ruling sit there and calcify into precedent. By the time it affects your carry setup or your LGS inventory, the damage is already done. The longer the court avoids clarifying 2A doctrine below the Bruen and Rahimi level, the more room lower courts have to go their own direction. Some circuits are applying Bruen's history-and-tradition test faithfully. Others are finding workarounds. Bruen was supposed to tighten this up. Instead, some circuits are treating the history-and-tradition test like a suggestion. At this rate, we'll need another landmark ruling just to enforce the last one. We're looking at the 2026-27 term as the next realistic window — which means at minimum another year of circuit courts doing whatever they want with 2A cases. Curious where you all are at on this: have you made any practical decisions — carry choices, purchase timing, where you store things — based on how you think the legal landscape is shifting? Real decisions, not just predictions. Read the full article in The Handbook → | By Steve Duskett

The Bruen decision in 2022 was a genuine shift — it put the burden on the government to justify gun laws through historical tradition rather than just interest-balancing. That was a big deal. But two-plus years out, the lower courts are a mess of contradictory rulings, and United States v. Hemani is SCOTUS getting handed the shovel to dig out from under it. "The how and why of gun control" That's a tight summary of the actual legal fault line here. The "how" is whether a modern restriction resembles founding-era regulation in mechanism — the "why" is whether it targets a similar problem. Courts have been splitting those two questions differently, and that inconsistency is exactly why you end up with one circuit upholding a law and another striking down something nearly identical. For anyone who's watched a local ordinance or a federal prohibited-person case get argued in the last two years, you've seen this play out in real time. The standard matters — not just for the high-profile cases but for the everyday enforcement decisions that never make the news. The honest reality is that even shooters who pushed hard for Bruen should want a coherent framework out of this. Vague standards don't protect rights — they just delay the fight and run up legal fees. A clear ruling, even one with some give toward the government, is better than years of circuit splits that leave everyone guessing whether a given law will survive the week. No decision date set, which means we're probably looking at the back half of 2026 before there's anything to analyze. Stay tuned. Discussion question: Have you ever made a carry or purchase decision based on a law you weren't sure would survive a court challenge — or heard something at the gun counter about a restriction that seemed constitutionally shaky? How do you handle that uncertainty in practice? Read the full article in The Handbook → | By Steve Duskett

Campus free speech law and gun rights don't seem like they belong in the same conversation — until you've watched a university try to shut down a student 2A club's tabling event over a "safety concern" that somehow didn't apply to the student groups on either side of them. This piece is about the legal fog those situations happen in, and why nobody's cleaned it up yet. "The precedents of this Court leave no room for the view that, because of the acknowledged need for order, First Amendment protections should apply with less force on college campuses than in the community at large." — Justice Powell, Healy v. James (1972) That quote sounds like a win. It isn't. Powell wrote it and walked away without defining what it actually means when a dean tells a student gun club they can't host a speaker. Strong language that never gets operationalized is just decoration — and university legal teams know it. "Time, place, and manner" regulations sound neutral. In practice, they're the mechanism used to relegate student groups to remote tabling locations, restrict when they can host speakers, or deny event permits on vague safety grounds. This is exactly how it plays out. A student 2A organization doesn't get banned outright — it gets assigned a table behind the maintenance building on a Tuesday afternoon, or its speaker permit gets denied two weeks before the event for "logistical reasons." Clean hands, same result. The part that should get your attention: your rights as a student gun group at a public university depend almost entirely on which federal circuit your school sits in. Boise State operates under Ninth Circuit standards. A school in Texas plays under Fifth Circuit rules. Same Constitution, different outcomes based on geography — and SCOTUS hasn't stepped in to sort it out. For anyone here who went through a college 2A club, coached one, or tried to help one navigate university bureaucracy: how did official recognition — or the lack of it — actually affect what the group could do on campus? Read the full article in The Handbook → | By Steve Duskett

Birthright citizenship isn't something most of us think about at the range — but the constitutional method being argued right now in front of the Supreme Court is exactly the same framework that protects Heller and Bruen. Worth paying attention to. "This principle has no existence in the United States: it is a scion from that idolatrous veneration for the regal character.... Allegiance in America, is only due to the state." — St. George Tucker, Blackstone's Commentaries (American Edition) The Founders weren't refining English common law — they were rejecting it wholesale. Perpetual allegiance assigned by geography because a king owned the dirt you were born on isn't just un-American, it's the specific thing they fought a war to get away from. If that's the foundation for the current birthright interpretation, that's a shaky foundation. The amendment's treatment of Native Americans confirms it. Members of tribal nations—born within U.S. borders—were explicitly not considered citizens under the 14th Amendment because they maintained allegiance to their tribes. This is the part that cuts through the noise. If "born on U.S. soil" were the whole answer, Elk v. Wilkins makes no sense at all. The court in 1884 clearly understood "subject to the jurisdiction" to mean something beyond physical presence — and that ruling didn't come from a fringe interpretation, it came from reading the clause the way the man who wrote it said it should be read. The reason gun owners should care has nothing to do with immigration politics. It's about method. Originalism and textualism are the tools that gave us Heller and Bruen — and those tools only hold up if courts apply them consistently. When the same bench stretches constitutional text in one direction to reach a preferred outcome, that's precedent for stretching it in another direction the next time the Second Amendment comes up. For the forum: Has constitutional interpretation method — originalism vs. living constitution readings — actually changed how you think about any firearms case, and if so, which one shifted your view? Read the full article in The Handbook → | By Steve Duskett

An Arizona AG warning ICE about Arizona's gun laws didn't intend to make the case for an armed citizenry — but here we are. "This is a don't-tread-on-me state. This is a Second Amendment state. This is a state with a lot of guns in it." — Arizona AG Kris Mayes, trying to warn ICE and accidentally quoting the NRA's entire platform Hard to argue with the logic, even if she was aiming it the other direction. The scenario she's describing — masked, unidentified men forcing entry at your home — is textbook Castle Doctrine territory, and she's basically admitting that armed homeowners are a foreseeable outcome when agents don't follow proper identification procedures. The Henry Magee case in Texas is the one to know here. Grand jury declined to indict him for shooting a deputy during a no-knock raid because the officers failed to properly identify themselves. That wasn't a loophole — that was the law working exactly as intended. If you can't tell a badge from a home invader at 3 a.m., the law has historically said you don't have to. The article makes the point that an agency running plainclothes operations into private residences, at the current level of public distrust, is doing more for Second Amendment advocacy than most lobbying efforts combined. When the government's own behavior makes the case for home defense, you don't really need a think piece to explain the Second Amendment's original purpose. Has a Castle Doctrine or self-defense scenario ever changed how you think about your home setup — locks, staging, lighting, or what you keep where? Read the full article in The Handbook → | By Steve Duskett

Spent some time this week following the Alex Pretti story out of Minneapolis. If you carry a permit in Idaho and you haven't read into this one, you should. The basic facts: licensed carry, holstered, never drawn. Agents didn't even see the gun until after the tackle. That's the sequence. Keep that in mind as you read the official response. "The Second Amendment protects Americans' right to bear arms while protesting—a right the federal government must not infringe upon." — Gun Owners of America, responding to Essayli's comments GOA putting that in print isn't surprising. What's worth noting is that the NRA called Essayli's statement "dangerous and wrong" — and those aren't words they typically reach for when the target is someone inside a Republican administration. When both organizations are saying the same thing in the same week, that's a signal worth reading. President Trump stopped short of that, but told the Wall Street Journal he was troubled that Pretti showed up to a protest with a "fully loaded gun with two magazines." A fully loaded gun with two magazines. That's my Tuesday carry. That's probably your Tuesday carry. The framing there isn't describing an anomaly — it's describing standard defensive carry, and treating it like an aggravating factor. Here's what bothers me practically: Idaho has robust permit reciprocity and a strong permitless carry framework. Most of us around here have been operating under the assumption that legal carry means legal carry. This case suggests that at the federal enforcement level, the presence of a firearm — even holstered, even permitted, even never touched — can be worked into a post-hoc justification after the fact. That's a different environment than the one we've been told we're operating in. The article closes with a line worth sitting with: that an administration can run a Second Amendment litigation project and still treat a holstered permit as probable cause. Both things are apparently true at the same time right now. For those of you who carry at public events — county fairs, rallies, even just open carry at an outdoor market — has this story changed anything about how you think through your setup or your situational awareness when federal law enforcement might be present? Read the full article in The Handbook → | By Steve Duskett

There's a case in front of SCOTUS right now that directly affects a lot of gun owners who've never thought of themselves as prohibited persons — and they might be wrong about that. "Treating all cannabis users—nearly one-fifth of the adult population—as presumptively dangerous criminals is incompatible with historical tradition, modern societal norms, and this Court's own framework for Second Amendment analysis." — Liberty Justice Center brief, United States v. Hemani If you've used marijuana in the last year and you own guns, federal law already considers you a prohibited person under 18 USC 922(g)(3). That's not a hypothetical — that's the statute as written, right now, today. The 4473 you filled out at your last purchase asks about it directly. The historical analogy the government is leaning on — laws against carrying while intoxicated — doesn't survive five minutes of honest scrutiny. Those were about being drunk in public, not about stripping someone's rights because they used a substance at some point in the past while sitting in their own home. The law as currently applied doesn't require you to be impaired, dangerous, or even in possession of marijuana — just a "user." The political inconsistency here is hard to ignore. The same administration asking the Court to uphold this blanket disqualification is also pursuing marijuana rescheduling and had its own candidate publicly back legalization at the state level. Whatever you think about cannabis policy, using it as a backdoor to felony gun charges for tens of millions of people while simultaneously softening on the underlying substance is a strange hill to defend. What's your line on this one? If SCOTUS rules the blanket ban unconstitutional and the standard shifts to actual evidence of impairment or dangerousness — does that change how you think about who should be a prohibited person, or does federal drug scheduling still matter to you regardless of the Second Amendment angle? Read the full article in The Handbook → | By Steve Duskett

Idaho has had constitutional carry since 2016. Most of us have been living the benefit of that without thinking much about it — until you load up the truck and head somewhere that doesn't share our politics. "Americans have the right to keep and bear arms without asking for permission from hostile politicians or getting jailed for crossing the wrong state line." That's the core of it. Every road trip I've taken where I had to decide between leaving the gun at home or mapping my route around Oregon and California was a small, annoying reminder that my rights have a hard geographic cutoff. A federal floor on this doesn't take anything away from Idaho — it just means the guy driving through Nevada doesn't have to sweat it. The article's point about Bruen is worth sitting with. The court already told lower courts to ground gun regulations in historical tradition — and widespread permitting requirements are essentially a 20th-century invention. If this bill passes and gets challenged, opponents are fighting on terrain Bruen already cleared for the other side. The honest problem is the vote count. Sixty votes in the Senate means peeling off moderate Republicans who've historically gotten wobbly when "federal override of state law" enters the conversation — even when the override expands rights rather than restricts them. The House passed nothing similar in 2024. This is a marker, not a sure thing. For those of us who carry daily and occasionally leave the state — how have you handled the patchwork situation in practice? Do you leave the gun behind when crossing into a non-reciprocal state, or have you sorted out a different system? Read the full article in The Handbook → | By Steve Duskett

West Virginia came within two days of floor debate on one of the more unusual gun bills you'll see at the state level — essentially a program to get machine guns into the hands of eligible residents through a state police-run office. It cleared committee, had broad reported support, and then quietly disappeared before crossover. That's the story on the surface. What's underneath is messier. "The bill is dead, and it was killed without transparency and without consensus, despite the fact that this bill had overwhelming support by this body." Sen. Chapman's frustration is understandable, but "overwhelming support by this body" and "a bill ready for the House floor" aren't the same thing. Bills die in committee all the time because the drafting isn't there — that's not conspiracy, that's how legislatures actually work. The bill as written wouldn't survive the House and would draw court challenges on day one. This is the part that matters if you actually want to see the law change. A poorly drafted bill that fails publicly is worse than no bill at all — it gives opponents a data point and poisons the well for the next attempt. If the attorneys, the NRA contacts, and WVCDL were all saying the same thing about the drafting, that's not a coordinated takedown, that's a warning worth heeding. The NRA miscommunication angle is the real problem here. Multiple senators apparently walked away believing the NRA killed the bill based on what a lobbyist said — a lobbyist who reportedly hasn't worked for the NRA in years. That kind of confusion shapes votes and relationships long after the session ends, and it's harder to fix than bad bill language. For most of us, the practical ceiling on this issue is still the Hughes Amendment. Even if West Virginia had passed a perfect version of this bill and survived every court challenge, you're still looking at federal law that hasn't moved since 1986. A transferable M16 runs $15,000-$30,000 depending on when you're shopping — not because they're rare machinery, but because the supply was frozen and demand kept climbing for 40 years. State programs don't solve that math. If they bring this back next session with cleaner language and actual coordination between the sponsor, NRA-ILA, and WVCDL, it could be a real test case. But "we'll fix it next year" has a long track record of not happening. For those of you who've dealt with the NFA process — Form 4, the wait, the tax stamp, the whole thing — what's your honest take on whether state-level programs like this are worth pursuing, or is the Hughes Amendment just a wall that can't be climbed from the state side? Read the full article in The Handbook → | By Steve Duskett

Raw FBI NICS numbers get misread constantly — by media, by anti-gun advocates, and honestly by a lot of gun owners who don't dig into the methodology. This February data is a good example of why the unadjusted headline number is almost useless on its own. The permit recheck category dropped by roughly 345,000 checks from February 2025 to February 2026—and that single category accounts for more than the entire 302,000-check decline in total background checks. That's the whole story right there. The "drop" in NICS isn't people putting guns back on the shelf — it's fewer states running permit maintenance through a federal system. Constitutional Carry expansion is doing what it's supposed to do, and it's showing up as a statistical anomaly that gets reported as a market collapse. There's a credible argument that some left-leaning buyers who used to dismiss the Second Amendment are quietly reconsidering—and showing up at gun stores. I've heard this conversation at the LGS counter more than once over the last couple years. First-time buyers who don't fit the assumed demographic, asking basic questions, buying a handgun and some range ammo. Whether that's a permanent shift or a temporary reaction to current events, I genuinely don't know — but the foot traffic has been real. The 108% growth in adjusted sales since 2000 against 22% population growth is the number worth sitting with. That's not a bubble. That's a decades-long baseline trend that keeps moving in one direction regardless of who's in office or what the headlines say. If you've been watching the gun store traffic in the Treasure Valley lately — new faces, different types of buyers, anything that seems different from a few years ago — what are you actually seeing on the floor? Read the full article in The Handbook → | By Steve Duskett

For three decades, the VA was treating a veteran who needed help managing benefit payments the same way the law treats someone a court has declared mentally incompetent. Those are not the same thing — not even close. At the peak of this policy, veterans accounted for over 98% of all federal mental health records submitted to NICS — not because veterans are mentally ill at that rate, but because the VA was bulk-reporting anyone assigned a fiduciary. That number stopped me cold. If you'd told me that figure at the gun shop counter, I'd have told you to check your source. But that's what bulk administrative reporting does — it turns a paperwork category into a prohibited persons list. A fiduciary appointment is a financial tool, not a psychiatric diagnosis. A civilian who needed a money manager to handle their bills? No problem. A combat vet who needed the same help? Prohibited person. That's the part that should make every shooter's jaw tighten. The guy who never laced up a boot keeps his rights. The guy who spent a year downrange loses them because he needed help with VA paperwork. That's not a mental health policy — that's a trap built into the bureaucracy. Stripping someone's constitutional rights based on a financial management decision, with zero due process, is not a mental health strategy. It's a bureaucratic shortcut that punished the people who earned those rights the hard way. The due process angle matters here beyond just veterans' rights. The mechanism that did this damage — no court, no hearing, no judge — is the same type of mechanism that gets proposed in other contexts. If it was wrong here, and it clearly was, that's worth remembering the next time someone pitches a "common sense" administrative solution. This is a real correction to a real injustice, and the coordination between GOA, Congress, and the new VA Secretary to pull existing names — not just stop adding new ones — is what separates this from a press release. A quarter-million veterans is not an abstraction. Those are guys at your range, in your club, maybe in your squad at a local match who couldn't pass a background check to buy a hunting rifle. If you're a veteran or know one who was affected by this — did you even know this was happening, or did you only find out when a NICS check came back denied? Read the full article in The Handbook → | By Steve Duskett

Permitless carry bills get introduced pretty regularly — most of them go nowhere and everyone knows it. But Lee and Massie dropping this together, with GOA and NAGR both visibly behind it, is worth paying attention to even if it dies in committee. "The Founders established a national right to keep and bear arms, not to ask for permission from hostile local officials, or risk imprisonment for crossing the wrong state line." That last part is the real bite. I've talked to guys at the Boise Gun Club who won't even drive through certain states with a firearm in the car because the permit math gets too complicated too fast. That's not paranoia — that's people doing the math and deciding it's not worth the risk. The detail about gun-free zones is where this gets interesting in practice. The bill narrows enforceable gun-free zones to places with active screening — courthouses, jails. That's a meaningful line to draw. It's the difference between a "no guns" sign with zero enforcement and an actual secured facility. Most of us already treat those differently anyway. Worth noting: Idaho's already living the constitutional carry model and it hasn't turned the Treasure Valley into a warzone. That data point matters when the opposition starts making noise. As a marker bill, the real play here is the recorded vote — every member of Congress has to go on record. That's not nothing heading into a midterm cycle. Discussion question: For those of you who travel out of state for hunts, matches, or just road trips — how do you currently handle carrying across state lines, and has it ever actually changed where you're willing to go? Read the full article in The Handbook → | By Steve Duskett

Pocket guns in California have been a frustrating category for a while — the roster kept shrinking options down to whatever ancient design happened to survive the approval gauntlet. The LCP Max clearing that hurdle with most of its features intact is actually worth paying attention to. The mag disconnect means dry-fire practice requires a magazine in the gun, which is mildly annoying but manageable. "Mildly annoying" is generous. If you're buying this as a serious carry piece, dry-fire is part of the program — and fumbling a magazine into the gun every time you want to run trigger work at the cleaning table adds friction that compounds over weeks. Not a dealbreaker, but something to factor in before you buy. The honest use case for a gun this size isn't gunfighting — it's the days when a full-size pistol isn't happening and you still want something real in your pocket. This is the conversation I have at the counter more than any other. Someone comes in convinced they need to justify every carry gun against a Glock 17 standard, and you have to walk them back to reality. A pocket .380 that actually makes it out the door beats a full-size that stays in the safe. The LCP Max at 10.6 ounces empty is the kind of weight you genuinely forget about. The tritium front sight and 10-round capacity are what separate this from the original LCP — which was always kind of a "better than nothing" gun rather than a "confident carry" gun. Those two things together change the calculus on range practice and on how much you trust it when it counts. At $300–$350, you've got room to buy a couple boxes of Gold Dot and actually confirm your hold and point of impact before you commit to carrying it. That's the move regardless of what gun you're running. For those of you running micro-.380s or similar pocket guns — what does your range practice actually look like for that platform, and how many rounds did it take before you trusted it enough to carry? Read the full article in The Handbook → | By Steve Duskett