Second Amendment Wins Big: A Conversation With the NRA

It's a good time to be a Second Amendment advocate. We've had some significant wins in the Supreme Court and lower courts lately. Constitutional carry laws, which allow carrying a concealed firearm by the law-abiding citizenry without the need for government permission, are now in place in 29 states. Assault weapon bans, in the post-Bruen world, are increasingly looked on askance by the courts.

Those of us who have been active in the movement for some time remember darker times; in the wake of the idiotic 1994 "assault weapon" ban, we were worried; there was talk from the anti-Second Amendment crowd of going after handguns next, and there were murmurings about "sniper rifles" that had a lot of us looking with concern at our scoped, bolt-action hunting rifles; I remember actually hearing a would-be gun-grabber nut proclaiming that nobody needed a rifle accurate to 300 yards.

Those days are gone. And what's more, we have a pretty gun-friendly president, now, too. I recently had the chance to have a conversation about all this with the National Rifle Association's (NRA) Director of Public Affairs, Justin Davis. Full disclosure: My wife and I have both been NRA Life Members for over 30 years.

You can listen to that entire conversation here:

Here are a few key excerpts: First, President Trump's comments on national concealed carry.

Ward Clark: Recently, President Trump talked to the employees of the Mack Truck Company, and one of the comments he made, and it seemed like kind of an aside, was that he was working on what he called nationwide concealed carry. Now, that could mean one of two things. It could mean nationwide CCW reciprocity, or it could mean some kind of constitutional carry scheme for the entire country. Do you have any insights on which of those President Trump may have been talking about?
Justin Davis: Yeah, absolutely. When we're talking about national right to carry, we're talking about H.R. 38, which is concealed carry reciprocity. President Bill Bachenberg was with President Trump that day. They had a discussion about it. Of course, President Trump has talked about this before from the Oval Office. He signaled that they've been working on it and the White House's interest in passing such legislation.

This would indeed be a critical piece of legislation. Right now, the country is a patchwork of laws on this, which would seem to fly in the place of the principle of full faith and credit; it seems intuitive that each state should, just as they recognize every state's driver's licenses, also should recognize concealed-carry permits. Here in Alaska, we have constitutional carry, but the state also has a process for obtaining a permit for travel to the other 49 states; not all of those states recognize Alaska's permit. That's not how these things should work.

DOJ Opens New Front in Second Amendment Fight Against California

We also discussed the recent Fifth Circuit ruling on surpressors:

Ward Clark: Another thing that came up recently, the Fifth Circuit made a very interesting ruling on suppressors. I recently had the opportunity to shoot a couple of suppressed big game rifles, a 7mm PRC, and so forth. And the difference that it makes on a rifle is impressive. But these things are still tightly regulated. Can you explain that Fifth Circuit finding to us a little bit?
Justin Davis: Yeah, of course, we've worked incredibly hard to make sure we're dismantling the NFA. I mean, obviously, earlier this year, we passed the one big beautiful bill, which took out the actual financial tax stamp, which allowed us to open the door for several lawsuits that we filed in federal court to say the NFA is unconstitutional. Now, the response to that has been Democrats and progressive politicians across the country were beholden to the Bloomberg groups to try to swing that pendulum back. So whether it's saying that, you know, Americans don't have the right to suppressors, which really a suppressor at its core is a safety device, right? It's to protect your hearing, it's making sure we're, you know, muzzle flash, exhaust, everything else going away.

Listen to the entire conversation, by all means.

It's a good time to be a Second Amendment advocate. And the NRA, we might note, remains the 800-pound, pro-Second Amendment gorilla in this fight. They have recently come through some unfortunate internal issues, but they seem to have come out the other side to resume working to ensure our rights. When anti-gun politicians start yapping about the "gun lobby," it's always the NRA they mention first. As long as that's the case, the NRA deserves our support.

Editor’s Note: The radical Left will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.

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