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Guns & the Second Amendment blog
Before you drive across state lines with a gun, run this checklistFederal safe passage protects a lawful gun owner only if every condition in 18 U.S.C. 926A is met, and this checklist walks through each one.The new gun owner's questions answered, from training to travel to willsEleven practical questions a first-year gun owner actually asks, answered with the federal rules and a pointer to where your state's rules differ.How to buy your first firearm lawfully from the counter to the carBuying a gun lawfully is a fixed sequence of steps, and knowing each one is the best protection against a federal felony by accident.Four self-defense scenarios and where the law draws the line on eachFour labelled hypotheticals show how imminence, reasonableness, proportionality and retreat decide real cases, and what to do in the minutes afterward.Castle doctrine, duty to retreat and stand your ground in plain EnglishSelf-defense law asks four questions in every state, and the three famous labels only change how the last one is answered.What the 1994 assault weapons ban said and why it was allowed to expireThe 1994 ban regulated guns by their cosmetic features instead of how they work, which made it hard to defend, easy to evade, and easy to let lapse.How the 1986 Firearm Owners Protection Act passed with a machine gun banThe biggest gun-rights law of the twentieth century carried a rider its backers never wanted, and the dated record shows how that happened.Heller, McDonald and Bruen Explain How Judges Now Read the Second AmendmentThis is about method, not gun policy: how courts moved from militia-only readings to an individual right and then to a text, history and tradition test.Inside the Gun Control Act of 1968 and the rules you still follow todayMost of what happens at a gun counter was written in 1968, after three assassinations. What the Act did, what it replaced, and what Congress refused to pass.Why the National Firearms Act of 1934 taxed guns instead of banning themCongress wanted to curb machine guns but doubted it could ban them, so it reached for the taxing power. Gangland, a $200 stamp, Sonzinsky, Miller and Heller.The registry question hiding inside every universal background check billGun owners fear the paper trail, not the check. Can a check on private sales be enforced without recording who owns what? History, steelman, narrower path.What a federal background check covers, and what it never didHow the Brady Act and NICS work, who is barred from buying a gun, and the gaps the debate is really about: private sales, missing records, the three-day rule.What the ATF is, what it can do and why gun owners distrust itWhat the ATF is, what it can do, the limits Congress set in 1986, the record behind gun owners' suspicion, and the case for and against folding it away.Garland v. Cargill and why an agency cannot rewrite a law by redefining a wordThe ATF reversed itself on bump stocks and changed what the law meant without a vote. The Supreme Court said no, and every administration should listen.Red-flag laws are only as good as their due process protectionsThe case for extreme risk protection orders at full strength, then the due process questions every statute has to answer before conservatives should support it.A home storage plan that keeps kids out and keeps you readyA step-by-step plan for storing firearms at home so children cannot get to them and you can still reach one fast, without waiting on a government mandate.The four rules of gun safety and the reason behind each oneFour habits that work together so one mistake never becomes a tragedy, with the reason behind each, the usual ways people break them, and range manners.Seven myths about hunters, guns and the wildlife they pay to protectSeven common claims about hunters and wildlife, from who wiped out the game to who owns the deer, tested against the historical and legal record.The 1937 tax that gun owners backed and that rebuilt America's wildlifeThe Pittman-Robertson Act of 1937 is a user-pays success: an excise tax on guns and ammunition that sportsmen asked for and that funds state wildlife agencies.Four ways a state can regulate carrying a gun, side by sideNo-issue, may-issue, shall-issue and permitless carry compared in one table: who decides, what standard applies, and what the citizen must do.Why your carry permit works in some states and fails in othersA carry permit is a state document, and no federal rule makes another state honor it. How reciprocity works and the arguments for and against a national rule.Bruen and Rahimi explained, the history test every gun law now facesSince Bruen, courts ask whether a gun law fits the nation's tradition of firearm regulation, and Rahimi showed what that test does and does not demand.How McDonald v. Chicago carried the Second Amendment to every stateHeller covered only Washington, D.C. The real fight was whether the Bill of Rights binds states and cities, and the answer starts after the Civil War.Why Heller got it right and the 'militia only' reading falls apartThe Stevens dissent in Heller at full strength, answered point by point: why the individual-right reading is the right one.Why the Founders wrote the Second Amendment after Lexington and ConcordThe amendment grew from lived experience: a Crown that went after colonists' powder and arms, and a generation raised to distrust standing armies.What the Second Amendment says, read one clause at a timeTwenty-seven words, read the way a lawyer reads them: prefatory clause, operative clause, and what the key phrases meant in 1791.