Texas has one of the most mythologized gun cultures in the country, and that myth does real work — mostly covering up the actual history. This piece digs into the parts that don't fit on a bumper sticker, and some of it genuinely surprised me even after years of thinking I knew this stuff. Here's where the myth breaks hard from the history: frontier Texas had serious gun control. The cattle towns of the Texas frontier — Abilene, Dodge City (technically Kansas, but the endpoint of Texas drives), and the Texas trail-head towns — routinely required cowboys to check their firearms upon entering town. Every time someone at the LGS counter tells me "they never had gun laws back then," I think about Abilene in 1871. Wild Bill Hickok enforcing a carry ban is not exactly the image people have in mind when they romanticize the frontier. The practical logic was sound — trail-worn cowboys with back pay and access to whiskey is not a combination that benefits from everyone staying strapped. The permissive framework you see today is largely a product of the last thirty years. Getting from there to here is the actual story. This is the part that reframes everything else. Texas constitutional carry passed in 2021, which feels like a long time coming if you grew up hearing the mythology — but the timeline here shows it's actually the outlier, not the baseline. A Texan carrying a handgun in 1960 was committing a crime regardless of how many acres their family had worked for generations. Captain Samuel Walker of the Texas Rangers actually collaborated with Colt on the design of the Colt Walker in 1847 — a .44 caliber horse pistol heavy enough to bludgeon someone if you ran out of ammunition. That last line is doing a lot of work. If you've ever held a Colt Walker reproduction, you understand immediately — it's not a firearm so much as a small artillery piece that happens to fit in a holster. The Walker was designed by someone who had actually been in a fight and needed the gun to keep working even after the powder ran out. The UT Tower section getting cut off is frustrating because that's where the modern carry debate in Texas really starts to take shape — the 1966 shooting is one of the few cases where armed civilians actually did provide meaningful suppressing fire during an active shooter event, and it fed directly into arguments that have been running in Austin ever since. For those of you who've shot in Texas or carry there — how much of this history did you actually know before reading something like this, and did any of it change how you think about the constitutional carry debate that's been spreading to other states? Read the full article in The Handbook → | By The Boise Gun Club Team

Posted in: General Discussion | History & Reference Vermont's firearms history is one of those subjects that makes you rethink a lot of assumptions — particularly the ones about which states "get it" on gun rights and why. The Green Mountain Boys weren't a militia formed out of ideology. They were armed settlers protecting land titles at gunpoint for five years before the Revolution started. That context matters when you read what came after. Vermont declared itself an independent republic in January 1777, establishing the Vermont Republic — a functioning sovereign nation that issued its own currency, operated a postal system, and maintained its own military for fourteen years before joining the United States. Fourteen years as a sovereign republic. People forget that. Vermont wasn't dragged into the constitutional carry conversation by lobbyists in the 1990s — it arrived at statehood already having written its own right-to-bear-arms provision, independently, because that's what the people who built the place believed. The Vermont Constitution of 1777 — drafted at Windsor during a constitutional convention that met while Burgoyne was invading from the north — contained Chapter I, Article 15, which read: "That the people have a right to bear arms for the defence of themselves and the State." This language predates the Second Amendment by fourteen years. That's not a footnote — that's the whole argument. The Vermont framers weren't borrowing from federal documents that didn't exist yet. They were writing from experience. When you've spent five years turning back sheriffs and militias at rifle-point to keep your farm, the right to bear arms isn't abstract. When other states began enacting concealed carry permit systems in the 1980s and 1990s, firearms rights advocates in those states began referring to "Vermont carry" or "constitutional carry" as the standard they were trying to reach. Vermont became, somewhat accidentally, the benchmark for firearms freedom — not because Vermont had done anything, but because it had never done anything restrictive. This is the part that should stick with every shooter who's ever dealt with a shall-issue bureaucracy or a 30-day wait. Vermont didn't fight for anything — it just never let it get taken. There's a lesson there that doesn't get talked about enough at the counter at any gun shop I've been in. What it also had — and this is the honest version of the story — was one of the lowest rates of firearms violence in the country. Whether that correlation reflects the constitutional carry tradition, the rural demographics, the relative economic homogeneity, or some combination is a question that firearms researchers have never fully answered. The article's honest enough to not oversell this, and that's the right call. Low violence numbers in rural states with strong gun cultures get used as talking points by both sides, and neither side is ever fully right about why. For those of you who carry or have carried in multiple states — how much does the permit regime in a given state actually change how you think about your carry setup day to day? Read the full article in The Handbook → | By The Boise Gun Club Team

Spent some time reading through this piece on Washington's firearms history, and there's more substance here than you'd expect from a state-level overview. Idaho and Washington share a long border and a lot of the same hunting country east of the Cascades, so this isn't exactly foreign territory for most of us. Washington's firearms story doesn't start with colonial settlement — it starts with fur trade forts, Hudson's Bay Company factors distributing trade guns to Native nations, and the slow, often violent process of the United States consolidating control over disputed territory. Most people forget the Pacific Northwest was genuinely contested ground — not just politically but militarily — well into the 1840s. The HBC deliberately kept their trade guns at a quality level that created ongoing parts dependency. That's not just history, that's a business model that would make a modern accessory manufacturer blush. The Washington State Constitution, adopted that year, includes Article I, Section 24: "The right of the individual citizen to bear arms in defense of himself, or the state, shall not be impaired." That language is notably blunt — "defense of himself" — written over a century before Heller framed individual carry rights as a federal constitutional matter. Idaho's own constitution has similar teeth. Worth knowing if you ever end up in a conversation at your local gun shop about whether state constitutions matter when federal law shifts. The Japanese internment of Washington's substantial Japanese-American population — roughly 14,000 people from the state — included forced disarmament, as federal authorities confiscated firearms owned by Japanese-Americans in the early months of the war. This doesn't get talked about nearly enough. Every time someone argues that confiscation is a paranoid hypothetical, there's a documented 20th century American example sitting right there. These weren't enemy combatants — they were residents who had legally owned firearms and had them taken. Washington operated as a shall-issue state for concealed carry — meaning the sheriff had to issue a license if you met the legal criteria, with no subjective "good cause" requirement of the sort that California and New York imposed. The shall-issue vs. may-issue distinction is the whole ballgame for practical carry. If you've ever talked to someone from California about getting a CCW permit before Bruen changed things, you know exactly why this matters. Washington had a functioning system — then the initiative machine got pointed at it. For those of you who carry or have hunted across the Idaho-Washington border: how much has the regulatory divergence between our two states actually changed your behavior, whether that's at a match, on a hunt, or just making a drive over to Spokane? Read the full article in The Handbook → | By The Boise Gun Club Team

Long article, so let's dig in properly. Ohio's firearms history is one of those topics that feels dry on paper until you realize how much of it still shows up in modern gun culture — from the Springfield Model 1861 still being a staple of Civil War reenactors at Boise shows to Camp Perry being the benchmark every serious highpower competitor measures themselves against. General Arthur St. Clair's defeat on November 4, 1791 — near present-day Fort Recovery in Mercer County — remains the single largest defeat of a U.S. Army force by Native Americans in American history. His force of roughly 1,400 men was ambushed by a Western Confederacy led by Miami chief Little Turtle and Shawnee war chief Blue Jacket, suffering over 600 killed and 280 wounded. The firearms of the era — smoothbore flintlock muskets — were notoriously unreliable in wet conditions, and the poorly trained militia broke under fire. Equipment matters, but training matters more — and when you have neither, it ends badly. You see echoes of this at every beginner league night. Guys show up with quality hardware and zero fundamentals, and they get smoked by someone running a rack-grade rifle who has actually put in range time. Ohio enacted a blanket prohibition on carrying concealed weapons. The law predated the Civil War and reflected the anxieties of a rapidly urbanizing state dealing with saloon violence and social disorder. It was also shaped in part by the volatile national atmosphere around John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry that same year. A 144-year carry ban that started with saloon fights and political panic — and most people assume gun laws have always been the way they are now. Understanding that these laws have specific origins and specific politics behind them is useful every time someone at the gun shop counter tells you carry restrictions are "just common sense." Phoebe Ann Mosey, born August 13, 1860, in Darke County, Ohio — better known as Annie Oakley — began shooting to help feed her family after her father's death left them destitute. She was hunting and selling game to Cincinnati hotels by her early teens, and her accuracy was precise enough that she reportedly paid off the mortgage on her family's farm through her earnings. There's a reason this story still resonates — she wasn't performing, she was providing. The shotgun or rifle was a working tool before it was a sport. That context gets lost when shooting gets treated as purely a hobby or a political symbol. The Camp Perry National Matches, held annually at Camp Perry on the shores of Lake Erie near Port Clinton, Ohio, became the premier national rifle and pistol competition in the United States. If you've never attended or at least followed the Camp Perry results, you're missing a direct line to what serious precision rifle and pistol shooting actually looks like outside of YouTube. It's where the standards get set. Ohio went from a 144-year concealed carry ban to permitless carry in about 18 years — has your state's shift in carry law (or lack of one) actually changed how you carry day-to-day, or does the legal framework matter less than your own habits? Read the full article in The Handbook → | By The Boise Gun Club Team

Long article, so buckle up — there's a lot here worth chewing on. Most people know "Live Free or Die" the way they know the Gadsden flag — as a bumper sticker or a range bag patch. The actual history behind it is something else entirely. "Live free or die: Death is not the worst of evils." — General John Stark's toast, 1809, which became New Hampshire's state motto in 1945 Stark wrote that at 81 years old, too sick to make a reunion, so he sent the line in a letter instead. That context changes it — it's not a rallying cry, it's an old soldier's final word on the subject. The kind of thing you'd want engraved on something. The Fort William & Mary raid is one of the earliest armed acts of rebellion against the British Crown in colonial America, and it happened in New Hampshire. December 1774 — four months before Lexington. Paul Revere rode 55 miles in winter to warn them, and New Hampshire men didn't sit on it. They went and took the powder. Some of it ended up at Bunker Hill. That's a chain of custody worth knowing the next time someone acts like the Second Amendment is a rural affectation with no serious history behind it. New Hampshire complied with federal minimums but resisted going further... The cultural divide between New Hampshire and its southern New England neighbors sharpened in the latter half of the 20th century. Massachusetts and Connecticut moved toward stricter firearms regulation. New Hampshire did not. This is the part that matters if you're watching what's happening legislatively right now. New Hampshire didn't drift into being a low-regulation state — it held its position while its neighbors moved. That's a different thing, and it affects how durable that posture is. The Free State Project, a libertarian migration effort that selected New Hampshire as its target state in 2003, reflected something that was already true about the Granite State's political DNA — it was already functioning as a low-regulation haven relative to its neighbors. Worth noting for anyone who thinks constitutional carry in 2017 came out of nowhere. The groundwork was there decades earlier. The 2017 vote was more of a formality than a shift. Most of us can name the guns we carry or compete with, but we're fuzzy on why certain states ended up where they did on policy. New Hampshire's story is a straight line from Fort William & Mary to Newington — what's the oldest piece of firearms history tied to your own state that actually changed how you think about where the laws here came from? Read the full article in The Handbook → | By The Boise Gun Club Team

Long before there were gun stores, ranges, or permit systems in Oklahoma, there were 50,000 armed settlers crossing a territorial border at noon on a starting pistol. The state's firearms culture didn't get invented by legislators — it got inherited from people who needed a gun to hold what they'd just run a horse to claim. That context matters when you're trying to understand why Oklahoma ended up where it is on carry law. Winchester lever-actions and Colt revolvers were standard-issue equipment for anyone serious about staking and holding a claim. The towns that appeared overnight — Guthrie and Oklahoma City among them — were rough places where local law barely existed and personal firearms were the practical gap-filler. That's not romanticizing it — that's just the math of the situation. No marshal, no backup, deed dispute with a stranger at dusk. Your sidearm wasn't a political statement, it was infrastructure. Worth keeping in mind the next time someone acts like armed self-reliance is some recent political invention. Bass Reeves, the first Black U.S. Marshal west of the Mississippi and the most prolific lawman of the era with over 3,000 felony arrests — operated in an environment where carrying was a matter of survival. Reeves was known for his accuracy with both rifle and pistol. 3,000 felony arrests in Indian Territory, mostly solo, over 32 years. That's not a footnote — that's the standard. If you ever want a conversation-starter at the range about why marksmanship still matters, Bass Reeves is your guy. The right of a citizen to keep and bear arms in defense of his home, person, or property, or in aid of the civil power, when thereunto legally summoned, shall never be prohibited, but nothing herein contained shall prevent the legislature from regulating the carrying of weapons. That carve-out for legislative regulation is what gave Oklahoma its permit system for decades before constitutional carry passed in 2019. The founders of the state weren't writing a blank check — they were threading a needle between frontier practicality and civic order. Whether they got the balance right is a conversation Oklahoma keeps having. The Tulsa Race Massacre of May 31 – June 1, 1921 is one of the most significant — and most violent — firearms events in Oklahoma history... Black residents, many of them World War I veterans, were among the armed defenders of Greenwood. This part of the history doesn't get enough honest discussion in shooting circles. Men who'd come back from France knowing how to run a rifle came home to a country that wasn't done testing them. The legal question the article raises — whether those defenders had lawful grounds to protect their community — is still unresolved in any satisfying way. It should inform how we think about who self-defense law is actually written for. For those of you who've spent time shooting in Oklahoma or have roots there — how much of this history actually shapes the gun culture you experience on the range or at local shops, and how much of it has just faded into the background? Read the full article in The Handbook → | By The Boise Gun Club Team

Long article, worth digging into. Connecticut's firearms story is one of the most overlooked pieces of American shooting history, and it directly shaped the guns most of us have handled, carried, or competed with. Connecticut has always been a blue state with a gun-industry backbone — a place where factory workers built revolvers for generations while their elected officials debated how many rounds a magazine should hold. That tension didn't start in 2013. It's been baked in for over a century. The same state that put the Peacemaker, the Winchester lever-action, and the 1911 into American hands eventually passed an assault weapons ban before the federal government got around to it. What Whitney actually pioneered there is still debated by historians — his claim to have invented interchangeable parts manufacturing has been largely debunked, as his early muskets were not truly interchangeable — but the concept he promoted, and the machinery he developed toward it, fundamentally shaped American manufacturing philosophy. This matters more than most shooters realize. Every time you swap a barrel on your 10/22 or drop a new slide stop into a 1911 without fitting it, you're downstream of what came out of that New Haven armory — even if Whitney oversold his own achievement. A dense wilderness of strange iron machines... a tangled forest of rods, bars, pulleys, wheels, and all the imaginable and unimaginable forms of mechanism. — Mark Twain describing the Colt Hartford factory, 1868 Mark Twain describing a gun factory is not something I expected to read today. That Colt complex was producing the revolvers that were winning range competitions and settling range disputes — the real kind — across the American West, all at the same time. Lincoln personally test-fired a Spencer rifle on the White House lawn in August 1863 and ordered the Army to take it seriously. A seven-shot repeating carbine that the brass kept dragging their feet on adopting — sound familiar to anyone who's watched procurement arguments over new military rifle platforms in the last twenty years. Lincoln went hands-on and moved the needle himself. What's a firearm with Connecticut roots — Colt, Winchester, Spencer, whatever — that you've actually shot, and what did you think of it compared to its reputation? Read the full article in The Handbook → | By The Boise Gun Club Team

Oregon sits in a weird spot historically — not quite the gun culture of the Mountain West, not quite California, and somehow both at once depending on which side of the Cascades you're standing on. This article covers the long arc of how firearms shaped the state, from HBC trade muskets to Leupold scopes to ballot measures that can't seem to survive a courtroom. Worth reading if you want context for why Oregon gun politics feel so schizophrenic right now. Understanding Oregon's firearms history means understanding a state that contains multitudes: elk hunters in Harney County and anti-gun ballot initiatives funded by Portland philanthropists, sometimes in the same election cycle. That sentence right there explains every frustrating conversation I've ever had at the counter of a gun shop in Eugene. The guys who fill elk tags every fall in the Blues and the people writing checks to Everytown are technically living in the same state — they just might as well be in different countries. The tactical sophistication of Nez Perce fighters, armed with a mix of Winchester repeating rifles and older muzzleloaders, surprised Army commanders throughout the campaign. This doesn't get enough attention when people talk about the transition from black powder to repeating arms. The Nez Perce weren't running around with inferior equipment — they were running mixed-arms engagements across brutal terrain and making it work. That's a logistics and marksmanship problem, not just a bravery one. Marcus Leupold — an avid hunter frustrated by a fogged scope that cost him a shot at a buck — developed a nitrogen-purged, sealed riflescope design. Every meaningful piece of equipment gets invented by someone who was annoyed enough to do something about it. A missed buck in the Oregon rain is apparently all the motivation you need to change how scopes are built for the next 80 years. I've put Leupolds on everything from a .243 youth deer rifle to a precision bolt gun — that nitrogen purge still matters on a cold morning when your glass is the difference between a shot and a story. The customer is entitled to a square deal. — Fred Leupold's founding promise, maintained as company policy to this day Simple. That's the whole thing. When a company can still point to a founder's handshake-era principle and mean it, that's worth something — especially in an industry that attracts more than its share of marketing nonsense. What's your experience with Oregon-made or Oregon-connected gear — Leupold scopes, Benchmade knives, anything else that came out of that state — and does it hold up to what you'd expect from a region with that kind of working-gun history? Read the full article in The Handbook → | By The Boise Gun Club Team

Hawaii's gun laws didn't come from nowhere — and most people, even dedicated Second Amendment advocates, have no idea how deep that regulatory tradition actually runs. The backstory goes back to a sovereign monarchy that predates U.S. involvement by decades. In 1852, the Kingdom of Hawaii enacted the Act to Prevent the Carrying of Deadly Weapons, a criminal statute that prohibited the unauthorized carrying of pistols or other deadly weapons in public. The law specified that criminal penalties could be imposed unless "good cause be shown" for carrying such weapons. This is exactly why Bruen's historical analogue framework gets complicated fast. Hawaii can point to 1852 carry restrictions and say "this predates statehood and it still counts." The Hawaii Rifle Association pushed back on that in their amicus brief, arguing it was a monarch's decree to keep subjects in line — not anything resembling American constitutional tradition. That's a legitimate distinction, and one that courts are still chewing on. Whether the 1852 law was primarily a public safety measure or a political tool of the monarchy is a debate that has resurfaced in 21st-century federal courts, with the Hawaii Rifle Association arguing in an amicus brief to the Supreme Court that the law was enacted at the king's whim to oppress subjects, not as part of any American constitutional tradition. This is the whole ballgame right now in Second Amendment litigation. If courts accept that pre-annexation Hawaiian laws count as "historical tradition" for Bruen purposes, the door opens wide for other states to dig up obscure 19th-century restrictions and dress them up as precedent. Every range conversation I've had about Bruen eventually hits this wall — what actually qualifies as an analogous tradition, and who gets to decide. Martial law in Hawaii lasted until October 24, 1944 -- nearly three years -- making it the longest period of military rule over a civilian population in American history outside of Reconstruction-era occupation. Three years of military tribunals, mandatory registration, and confiscation — and then that same population votes those habits into statehood law fifteen years later. That's not a mystery. When your living memory of civilian firearms is "the Army took them," your political instincts around gun ownership are going to look different from someone who grew up in rural Idaho. Understanding that doesn't mean agreeing with it. This military presence didn't translate into civilian gun culture the way it did in, say, Texas or Virginia — the islands' geographic isolation, high cost of living, and the specific traumas of the martial law period produced a civilian population that was, if anything, more accustomed to firearms being a military matter rather than a civilian one. That line right there explains a lot. Culture shapes law as much as law shapes culture — and Hawaii's civilian relationship with firearms was getting formed during a period when the military literally controlled who had guns and why. You can't just drop a Heller ruling into that context and expect it to land the same way it does here. For those of you who've spent time in Hawaii — stationed there, visited, or dealt with getting a firearm legally on the islands — what was your actual experience navigating the permit system, and did talking to locals give you any different read on how they view the whole thing? Read the full article in The Handbook → | By The Boise Gun Club Team

Michigan's firearms history tends to get flattened into "hunting state with some gun laws" in most conversations I've heard at the counter of basically every gun shop between Boise and Nampa. This piece covers a lot of ground — from Cadillac's cannon placement in 1701 all the way to the Arsenal of Democracy era — and there are a few things worth pulling out before we get into the constitutional carry end of the timeline. Whoever controls the water controls the territory, and controlling territory in Michigan has always meant being armed. That's not just historical flavor — it's the same logic that drove every frontier fortification in North America. When you read about Cadillac positioning his guns to command the river strait, you're reading about someone doing real-world ballistic problem solving with the tools available. The site selection was the gun decision. This wasn't a situation where Europeans arrived with technological superiority over an unarmed population -- it was a multi-sided arms environment where French, British, and various tribal interests all calculated based on who had powder and who didn't. This matters because it's still largely absent from how most people frame early American firearms history. The Great Lakes fur trade ran on flintlocks as currency — the Anishinaabe nations had been acquiring European firearms through trade networks since the mid-1600s. By the time Detroit was founded, this was already a region where multiple parties were doing the same powder-and-shot math. Michigan became what President Franklin Roosevelt called the "Arsenal of Democracy" -- going from groundbreaking to first tank production in under six months. Chrysler broke ground on the Detroit Tank Arsenal and had M3 tanks rolling out in 180 days. The same precision metalworking infrastructure that built automotive engines built weapons components — both world wars. That's not a coincidence, it's the same machining tolerance requirements showing up in different applications. Anyone who's spent time at a reloading bench understands that dimensional precision is dimensional precision regardless of what you're making. The piece also notes that Michigan's firearms culture was already splitting along a north-south line by the 1880s — rural north oriented toward hunting and subsistence, urban south oriented toward self-defense and manufacturing. That divide is still the whole ballgame in Lansing today. Discussion question: Michigan went through a long fight before landing on constitutional carry — and the hunting culture up north and the urban culture around Detroit were pulling in different directions the whole time. How do you think states with that kind of internal split eventually get to permitless carry, and does Idaho's path look anything like that from where you were standing when it happened here? Read the full article in The Handbook → | By The Boise Gun Club Team

Florida's firearms history doesn't get talked about nearly enough in contexts like this. Most people think of it as a Sunbelt vacation state, but the legislative fingerprints on your carry permit — wherever you live — probably trace back to Tallahassee. Spain made a calculated diplomatic move in the early 1700s that would echo through Florida's history: offering freedom to enslaved people who escaped from British Carolina colonies and converted to Catholicism... Its residents formed an armed militia, trained and equipped by Spain to defend against British incursions. Those men carried muskets and fought -- effectively -- at the Battle of Bloody Mose in 1740, repelling a British siege force. Fort Mose is one of those historical footnotes that deserves a lot more shelf space. An armed free Black militia defending a fortified settlement in 1740 — that's not a footnote, that's a serious chapter. The Spanish weren't arming these men out of principle either, they were doing it because armed settlers are useful, which is its own kind of pragmatic logic that still shows up in firearms policy debates today. The Second Seminole War forced the U.S. military to adapt in ways that had lasting consequences. The dense subtropical terrain... rendered conventional European-style linear tactics useless. Soldiers shifted toward lighter arms loads, smaller unit actions, and intelligence-gathering. If you've ever had a conversation about why lighter rifles matter in thick cover — and I've had that conversation at the cleaning table more than once — it has roots going back to cypress hammocks in the 1830s. The Army didn't figure out small-unit light infantry tactics in Vietnam. They were working on it in the Everglades forty years before the Civil War. Marion Hammer, a Florida native who had been president of the Unified Sportsmen of Florida since 1978, successfully lobbied the Florida Legislature to pass the Florida Concealed Weapon Licensing Law -- a shall-issue statute that required the state to issue a concealed carry permit to any applicant who met objective criteria, removing the subjective discretion that local law enforcement had previously exercised. This is the one that changed everything for carry in America. Before 1987, whether you could legally carry concealed often came down to whether the local sheriff liked you. One woman in Florida is the reason that most of us live in shall-issue or better states today. That's not an overstatement — the article says 30+ states followed the Florida model within about 15 years. Next time someone at the gun counter acts like carry rights were always this accessible, point them back to 1987. For those who carry or have gone through the permit process in Idaho — how much did you actually know about where shall-issue came from before reading something like this, and did it change how you think about the constitutional carry debate we've had here? Read the full article in The Handbook → | By The Boise Gun Club Team

Maryland sits in a weird spot historically — a state that hosted Beretta for four decades, still has Aberdeen Proving Ground running weapons testing since 1917, and yet has been outpacing federal gun restrictions since before most of us were born. That tension is real and it shows up in the culture every time someone from Western Maryland or the Eastern Shore has to deal with laws written for Baltimore. Maryland has no state constitutional right to keep and bear arms. That absence shapes everything that follows. Most states with restrictive gun laws are still working against a state constitutional provision — they have to fight uphill. Maryland never built that hill. Every piece of restrictive legislation since 1776 has faced one less obstacle than it would have in, say, Virginia or Pennsylvania. That's not a small thing. It banned machine guns in 1933, a year before the federal National Firearms Act. It required waiting periods and State Police background checks in 1966, twenty-eight years before the Brady Act. People treat the Brady Act like it was the starting gun for modern gun regulation, but Maryland had already been running that race for nearly three decades. If you want to understand where federal law is headed, watching states like Maryland a generation earlier will tell you something. Baltimore's urban violence statistics have driven legislation that affects rural Western Maryland and the Eastern Shore just as hard. This is the argument you hear at every gun store counter from Hagerstown to Salisbury. The guy running a farm in Garrett County and the guy carrying in Federal Hill are living under the same regulatory framework — one written almost entirely around the other's zip code. That geographic mismatch is exactly why Beretta eventually looked at a map and decided Tennessee made more sense. What's your experience with states where one major metro effectively sets firearms policy for the whole state — and how has that affected how you buy, carry, or compete? Read the full article in The Handbook → | By The Boise Gun Club Team

Spent some time last week digging into Kentucky firearms history for context on a project, and this piece covers ground most of us know pieces of but probably haven't seen laid out end to end. A few things jumped out worth talking about. The name "Kentucky rifle" didn't come from where it was made. It came from where it was used and who used it. Most people at the gun counter think Lancaster, Pennsylvania when you say "Kentucky rifle," and they're technically right about the origin — but they're missing the point. The name was earned downrange, not at the bench. That's a distinction that matters more than people give it credit for. The right of the citizens to bear arms in defense of themselves and the State shall not be questioned. — Kentucky Constitution, Section 28, 1799 That's 1799. Twenty-three years before Missouri statehood, thirty years before the Indian Removal Act, and 173 years before the Supreme Court was taking up incorporation debates. Some states were early and clear about this, and Kentucky was one of them. It shows in how the state has legislated since — straight through to the 2019 constitutional carry bill. Now, brothers, go home and stay there. Don't come here anymore, for this is the Indians' hunting ground. — Captain Will Emery, Shawnee leader, to Daniel Boone, 1769 Boone lost the hides, kept his life, and came back. The article doesn't editorialize much here, and it doesn't need to — the outcome speaks for itself. What strikes me is how clearly that exchange frames the next century of conflict. The warning was direct and reasonable. The response was to ignore it. Everything that followed was predictable. British accounts of the battle specifically noted the effectiveness of Kentucky sharpshooters picking off officers and artillery crews at distances that left the redcoats unable to effectively return fire. This is what the Pennsylvania long rifle's 200-yard effective range actually meant in practice — not a spec sheet number, but officers going down before they could organize a response. That's the real-world translation of the comparison table between the long rifle and the Brown Bess. One was a precision tool for individual targets. The other was a crowd weapon. At New Orleans, the distinction cost the British badly. If you've spent time behind a flintlock — at a rendezvous, at a muzzleloader deer season, anywhere — what did it change about how you think about what those Long Hunters and militia riflemen were actually doing out there? Read the full article in The Handbook → | By The Boise Gun Club Team

A lot is moving in federal court right now on ATF rules — suppressors, SBRs, private sales, and even the marijuana disqualification question. Worth paying attention to if any of that gear is in your safe or on your shopping list. The NFA's constitutional foundation has always rested on Congress's taxing power—and now that the tax is gone, plaintiffs in at least one major case argue the registration and transfer requirements fall with it. That's not a small argument. The $200 stamp was always the legal hook — the whole regulatory apparatus hung on it. If the Northern District of Texas agrees, the Form 4 wait times, the trust paperwork, the transfer process — all of it loses its legal scaffolding. Whether you've got a can in jail right now or you've been on the fence about buying one, this case matters. The DOJ and ATF pushed back in November 2025, arguing the NFA remains valid under the Commerce Clause and that suppressors and SBRs aren't "typically possessed by law-abiding citizens for lawful purposes." That "typically possessed" standard is doing a lot of work in these arguments — and it cuts both ways. There are more NFA items registered today than ever, partly because of the stamp elimination. The government's own claim may be getting harder to sustain the more normalized suppressor ownership becomes. The old interpretation disqualified anyone who used marijuana even once in the past year from passing a NICS background check. The new rule shifts the standard to a "pattern of use." This one flew under the radar for a lot of people. If you're in a state where medical cards are common — or you're talking to customers at a gun shop counter — this changes the honest answer to question 21e on the 4473. Not a free pass, but a meaningful shift in how a single use gets treated versus habitual use. Discussion question: For those of you who already own NFA items — cans, SBRs, AOWs — how are you thinking about the Silencer Shop Foundation case? Are you holding off on more transfers to see how it shakes out, or does the current process not bother you enough to wait? Read the full article in The Handbook → | By Steve Duskett

Spent a lot of range time over the years watching Colt slowly become a brand people respected more in theory than in practice. Overpriced AR-15s in a market where you could get comparable performance from a dozen other companies. The Python comeback was a genuine bright spot, but one good revolver doesn't fix a balance sheet. Rather than a hostile takeover or fire-sale rescue, this was strategic consolidation — CZG saw value in Colt's government contracts, manufacturing infrastructure, brand recognition, and legacy intellectual property. That framing matters. CZ didn't swoop in to slap their name on a corpse. They bought something specific — the U.S. government relationships, the domestic manufacturing footprint, the institutional trust baked into decades of military contracts. That's not sentiment, that's infrastructure. The AR-15 market had become brutally commoditized, the 1911 market was crowded with competitors offering comparable or superior quality at lower price points, and Colt's government contract revenue was a shadow of its Cold War peak. This is the honest reality that nobody at the Colt counter wanted to say out loud. I've had this exact conversation at the local gun shop — guy's holding a Colt 6920 and the guy next to him is holding a BCM for two hundred less. Colt needed a reason to exist again, and "heritage" isn't enough when the rent's due. The jury is still out on whether 'Colt CZ Group' will ultimately strengthen both brands or dilute them. Every CZ 75 I've ever put rounds through has been mechanically honest — nothing fancy, nothing loose, just a well-built pistol that works. If that engineering culture bleeds into Colt's production line, that's actually good news for anyone who's been burned by QC inconsistency on an expensive Colt 1911. The worry is the accountants win instead. What I'm curious about from people here — have you noticed any real-world difference in Colt product quality or value since the acquisition closed, either at the counter or downrange? Read the full article in The Handbook → | By Steve Duskett

Spent some time going down a rabbit hole on the FGC-9 this week. Whatever your politics on this, the engineering decisions alone are worth understanding — because they reveal exactly where the gaps are in how most countries regulate firearms. The FGC-9 was built from the ground up to require no commercially manufactured or legally regulated firearm components under European Union law. Every pressure-bearing metal part can be sourced from a hardware store or fabricated in a kitchen. This is the part that keeps regulators up at night. Most gun control frameworks target the serialized part — the receiver, the barrel, the NFA-regulated component. The FGC-9 was designed specifically around that assumption and then engineered to sidestep it entirely. You're not beating the law on a technicality here; you're rendering the regulatory chokepoint irrelevant by design. Rather than requiring a machined commercial barrel — the component most likely to be regulated or tracked — the FGC-9's barrel is produced through electrochemical machining (ECM)... literally salt water. I've spent time at the reloading bench trying to understand chamber pressures and barrel metallurgy well enough not to blow up a case. The idea that you can rifle a steel tube using salt water and household current and then chamber 9mm out of it is genuinely remarkable from a materials standpoint. Whether it holds up over a thousand rounds is a different conversation — but for the use case it was designed for, it doesn't need to. Anti-junta rebel forces began manufacturing the MkII and MkII Stingray in small workshops and forward bases close to frontlines... fighters used the FGC-9 in hit-and-run ambushes on government forces, with the explicit tactical goal of capturing conventionally manufactured, higher-powered weapons from junta soldiers. That's a tactically coherent doctrine — use what you can make to take what you can't. A 9mm carbine isn't the end state; it's the entry ticket. I've seen guys at club matches run PCC in USPSA and debate whether 9mm is "enough gun" for 25-yard steel. These fighters are answering that question in a very different context. The release package included not just the print files but thorough, step-by-step construction documentation described by one source as comparable to an IKEA assembly booklet. The IKEA comparison is doing a lot of work there — but the point is real. Complexity has always been the friction that kept improvised weapons marginal. Luty's SMG plans existed for decades and never scaled because the machining skill floor was too high. Dropping that floor to "can follow illustrated instructions" changes the math entirely. For those of you who've worked with PCC builds or done any home gunsmithing — where do you think the actual skill floor is for something like this, and does the answer change how you think about the regulatory conversation? Read the full article in The Handbook → | By The Boise Gun Club Team

Spent some time last night reading up on the Minié ball — the bullet that basically ended the era of stand-up linear warfare and started the era of "dig a hole or die." Worth talking about because the mechanical problem it solved is one shooters still think about every time they're working a tight bore fit. The rifle-musket and Minié ball together are thought to account for approximately 90 percent of the more than 200,000 killed and 400,000 wounded in the American Civil War. That's not a footnote — that's the whole story of the 1860s in one sentence. One bullet design, a 15-year window, and more American casualties than any war before or since. The next time someone at the LGS dismisses "old technology" as irrelevant, this is the number you quote them. The Minié ball increased the effective lethal range of the standard infantry unit from a maximum of 100 yards to 300 yards. Think about that from a practical standpoint. You're running a 3-gun stage and 300 yards with a rifle feels almost casual. To a smoothbore musket soldier, 300 yards was effectively the moon. Burton's refinement — ditching the iron plug and deepening the base cavity so gas pressure alone drove expansion — is the same engineering logic you see in modern hollow point design. Use the energy you already have, don't add complexity. Recent scholarship has pushed back on the narrative that the Minié ball transformed long-range killing on Civil War battlefields. Accuracy also depends on the soldier pulling the trigger, and throughout the Civil War—when target practice was minimal—combatants tended to aim too high. This is the part that doesn't get enough attention. The round was capable of 300 yards. The average conscripted soldier wasn't. The Minié ball had two effective killing zones with a relatively safe band in between, and most soldiers never trained enough to account for the arc. A $0.02 piece of lead is only as good as the shooter behind it — same argument we have at every IDPA match when someone blames their misses on ammunition. What's the biggest gap you've personally seen between what a cartridge is capable of and what most shooters can actually deliver with it at distance? Read the full article in The Handbook → | By The Boise Gun Club Team

Spent some time going down a rabbit hole on early firearms history and landed on this piece about Walter de Milemete — a 14th-century English court scholar whose name would be completely lost if not for a single drawing in the margin of a manuscript he produced in 1326. Worth reading if you care about where all of this started. By the 1350s, weapons that had recently been "viewed with great astonishment and admiration" had become "as common and familiar as any other kind of arms." — Petrarch Twenty-five years. That's how long it took to go from "what the hell is that thing" to "yeah, everybody has one now." We tend to think of adoption curves as a modern phenomenon — semi-autos replacing revolvers, striker-fired pistols taking over the carry market — but apparently humans have always moved fast when the technology actually works. The knight in Milemete's illustration, holding a lit touche to a vase-shaped cannon pointed at a castle, was not in a safe profession. Early cannon were killing operators as reliably as targets — air pockets in the casting, inconsistent powder charges, projectiles that didn't fit the bore. The article mentions King James II of Scotland got killed in 1460 standing too close to his own artillery. We complain about a squib load. These guys were pointing a pipe bomb at a wall and hoping for the best. He drew a vase-shaped pot-de-fer scaled up to artillery size, sitting on a trestle that would never hold it, because the small hand-cannons he'd seen were bottle-shaped and mounted on poles. He did his best with incomplete information. This is the part that stuck with me. The artist had probably only seen small hand-cannons — essentially a bottle-shaped bronze tube lashed to a wooden shaft — and when he needed to draw something bigger, he just scaled up what he knew. Wrong proportions, wrong mount, but the idea was right. It's the same thing that happens at the gun counter when somebody describes a firearm they've seen once and can't remember the name of. The sketch is always approximately correct and completely wrong at the same time. What's the oldest firearm you've personally handled — whether at a match, an estate sale, a gun show, or somebody's safe — and did holding it change how you thought about the technology? Read the full article in The Handbook → | By The Boise Gun Club Team

Spent some time down a rabbit hole on early firearms history this week and landed on the Heilongjiang hand cannon — the oldest confirmed surviving firearm on Earth, pulled out of the ground in Manchuria in 1970. Worth a few minutes of your time if you care about where this equipment actually came from. According to sources, the weapon typically required two operators — one to aim and brace, one to manage ignition — a detail that underscores both how primitive and how genuinely functional this technology was. Two-man crew to fire a 13-inch, 7-pound handheld weapon. Think about that next time someone complains about their optic co-witness height. The division of labor between "point it" and "make it go" is a real window into how early the concept of a dedicated shooter and a support role showed up in firearms use. In 1287, Li Ting led a contingent of soldiers equipped with portable hand cannons into Nayan's camp. The Yuanshi records that the hand cannons "caused great damage" and created "such confusion that the enemy soldiers attacked and killed each other." Friendly fire from noise and flash — in 1287. The psychological effect of an unknown weapon on an unprepared force is something that comes up in every era of firearms history, and this is as early as it gets in the documented record. Cavalry running from something they'd never seen before, probably in forested terrain where they couldn't even use their main advantage. That's not just history, that's the same logic behind why a home defender today benefits from a weapon that projects presence before it projects anything else. The Heilongjiang cannon's specific design contributions — the enclosed powder chamber, the narrowed barrel for directed propulsion, the handheld form factor — are not historical curiosities. They are the foundational architecture of every firearm built in the 736 years since. Every pistol in your safe, every rifle on your rack, every revolver your grandfather left you — the geometry goes back to a cast-bronze tube dug up in a Chinese village. The enclosed chamber forcing gas down a narrowed bore toward a projectile is still exactly what's happening when you pull the trigger on your carry gun this afternoon. Hard not to think about that at the cleaning table. "Will long remain of capital importance, since it is the only metal-barrel hand-gun so far discovered which almost certainly belongs to the 13th century." — Joseph Needham Needham wrote that decades ago and the assessment still stands. That's a long time for an artifact to hold the title without a serious challenger turning up. What's the oldest firearm — original, reproduction, or just something with genuine historical lineage — that you've actually had in your hands, and did knowing the age of it change how you handled it? Read the full article in The Handbook → | By The Boise Gun Club Team

Roger Bacon doesn't come up much at the gun counter, but he probably should. A 13th-century English friar who documented black powder for the first time in Western history — while under institutional house arrest, writing in secret with papal cover — is a more interesting origin story than most people give the craft credit for. From the violence of that salt called saltpetre [together with sulphur and willow charcoal, combined into a powder] so horrible a sound is made by the bursting of a thing so small, no more than a bit of parchment [containing it], that we find [the ear assaulted by a noise] exceeding the roar of strong thunder, and a flash brighter than the most brilliant lightning. That's it. That's the recipe that fed into six hundred years of propellant development — everything from a Brown Bess to whatever you're running through your AR right now traces back to those three components. Next time you're at the reloading bench measuring out powder, that lineage isn't abstract. Bacon didn't synthesize a new substance in a laboratory. He documented something he had seen or heard about from someone who had seen it. That's still the job — and he did it when nobody else in Europe had. This is worth sitting with. He wasn't the inventor — the Chinese had this figured out centuries earlier. He was the guy who wrote it down clearly enough that it survived and spread. Accurate documentation of what actually works is underrated in this hobby — ask anyone who's tried to recreate a load from a half-remembered forum post. The cryptogram theory — where a scholar claimed Bacon hid a precise powder ratio inside a coded passage — got picked apart by multiple historians over several decades. The proposed ratio came out too nitrogen-lean to reliably ignite. Another reminder that if the math doesn't hold up on paper, it's not going to work downrange either. What's your earliest reference point for black powder — first time you ran it through a rifle, a shotgun, a cannon, or just the first time someone explained what the stuff actually was? Read the full article in The Handbook → | By The Boise Gun Club Team