Free Republic

The federal case against Gabriel Metcalf in Billings, Montana, under the federal Gun Free School Zone Act of 1990 (GFSZ), has been resolved in Metcalf’s favor. In a split decision, the three-judge panel on the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has ordered the case remanded to the district court and has ordered the case dismissed. From the Summary by Judge VanDyke (purchased on PACER account): The panel reversed the district court’s order denying Gabriel Cowan Metcalf’s motion to dismiss an indictment charging him with possessing firearms within 1,000 feet of a school in violation of the Gun-Free School...

WICHITA COUNTY (KFDX/KJTL) — Six women who were arraigned on federal charges related to the shooting of an Alvarado police officer at an ICE detention center on July 4, 2025, were being held in the Wichita County Jail on Tuesday. Jail records show that the following inmates were booked into the Wichita County Law Enforcement Center on Tuesday, Sept. 23, 2025, all of whom are currently in custody on a federal hold: Savanna Batten, of Joshua Joy Gibson, of Dallas Maricela Rueda, of Fort Worth Elizabeth Soto, of Fort Worth Lynette Sharp, of Watauga Rebecca Morgan, of Dallas Federal...

Open carry of handguns as of September 10, 2025 The number of states that ban the open carry of firearms has again been reduced to five. Before 2022, it was four, but New Jersey criminalized open carry, even with a permit, in 2022. New Jersey permit requirements and processes for obtaining a permit are being challenged in the courts. Connecticut banned open carry in 2023, making six states that generally banned open carry. Open carry with a permit is allowed in some rural parts of California. The California ban is being challenged in the Ninth Circuit.On September 10, 2025, Florida’s...

Last week, the city of Sacramento spent $2.6 million to retain the services of controversial AI technology that tracks the location of gunfire, an expense that other cities across the nation have rejected. “We believe that ShotSpotter is a crucial piece of (technology)… and we’re seeing a positive result from the use of these dollars,” said Zachary Bales, deputy chief of the Sacramento Police Department, at the city council meeting where the contract was approved.

Türkiye Today reports that continued excavations at the site of Cavustepe Castle revealed a remarkable cache of projectiles ready for use by Urartian soldiers around 2,700 years ago. The recent investigation focused on a storage facility and area known as the "upper fortress." As the team began removing layers of sediment from within one structure, they uncovered a collection of egg-sized slingshots. Some had been gathered from a nearby riverbed, while others had been made from clay. While individual slingstones have sometimes been discovered at other Urartian sites, Van Yuzuncu Yil University archaeologist Rafet Cavusoglu said, this find is exceptional...

The bill to restore silencers/suppressors to legal status in Guam was introduced by William A. Parkinson on January 15, 2025. Senator Parkinson is a Democrat in Guam. Nine of the fifteen senators in Guam are Republicans. Ten votes are needed in the Guam legislature to override a governor’s veto. If all 9 Republican senators in the Guam legislature vote for the bill with Senator Parkinson, they could override Governor Guerrero’s veto. That is what happened on July 31, 2025. The legislature had previously passed legislation to restore legal status for suppressors/silencers in 2021, but Governor Guerrero had vetoed the bill....

I have been trying to visit the website keepandbeararms.com. It has been available for years. I was able to obtain an image of the site which showed today's date, but I cannot actually connect with the website itself. One resource, isitdownrightnow.com told me it had been down for more than a week, but I remember seeing it last week. My suspicion is some browsers can see it and others cannot. Please report if you can bring it up or not.

A US Jewish security group said in a Tuesday report that if synagogues allow firearms inside their doors for security, the weapons should only be permitted in an organized, structured program, with strict oversight and coordination with law enforcement. The Secure Community Network (SCN), a leading Jewish security group in North America, released the report, titled “Weapons at Worship,” amid an increase in antisemitism and security fears among US Jewish communities. Synagogues and other Jewish groups have employed a range of security measures in response, from volunteer guards to krav maga training. Some Jews have pushed for more firearms for...

On July 18, 2025, the Delaware State Sportsmen’s Association and the Bridgeville Rifle and Pistol Club sued the Delaware Department of Safety and the Delaware Superintendent of State Police. The lawsuit challenged a law passed in 2022, which made the possession and purchase of certain firearms by anyone between the ages of 18 and 21 illegal.The lawsuit was heard in the Superior Court for the State of Delaware by Judge Reneta L. Green-Streett. On August 29, 2025, Judge Green-Streett granted the plaintiffs Motion for Summary Judgement and denied the Defendants’ Cross-Motion for Summary Judgement.In this opinion, 18–20 year olds are...

On August 22, 2025, a three-judge panel of the Gibson County Chancery Court in Tennessee struck down two Tennessee statutes as unconstitutional under both the Second Amendment and the Tennessee state Constitution. The two statutes were Tenn. Code Ann. § 39-17-1307 and Tenn. Code Ann. § 39-17-1311. Tenn. Code Ann. § 39-17-1307A person commits an offense who carries, with the intent to go armed, a firearm or a club.Tenn. Code Ann. § 39-17-1311It is an offense for any person to possess or carry, whether openly or concealed, with the intent to go armed, any weapon prohibited by § 39-17-1302(a), not...

Jeff had this earlier today, but it’s a long time coming for some groups. The Justice Department is mulling banning gun ownership for those who identify as transgender. It goes beyond the horrific mass shooting at Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis that occurred on August 27, where two kids were shot and killed, with another 17 injured. Since 2020, 40 percent of mass shooters, or would-be mass shooters, have been identified as transgender or suspected of being one. If those clamoring for government to “do something,” this is a good first step: A DOJ source told the Daily Wire that...

On July 1, 2025, United States District Court Judge Cathy Ann Bencivengo granted summary judgment to Firearms Policy Coalition members to obtain California Concealed Carry Permits. Judge Bencivengo ordered the Plaintiffs and Defendant to submit proposed orders within 30 days. From the order: For the above reasons, the Court grants Plaintiffs’ motion for summary judgment as to their facial challenge pursuant to the Second/Fourteenth Amendment and denies the request for relief pursuant to the Privileges and Immunities Clause. The parties are ORDERED to meet and confer and submit a proposed order for an injunction consistent with this order within 30...

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) is pushing a repeal of the Gun-Free School Zones Act (1990) in order to make it easier for law-abiding teachers, faculty, and others, to be armed to fend off would-be attackers on school campuses. The Gun-Free School Zones Act was put in place by President George H.W. Bush (R), barring the possession of a firearm in a “school zone” and thereby creating myriad gun-free soft targets in places filled with defenseless children, teachers, and school staff. Massie wants to see the Gun-Free School Zones Act repealed as a way of removing the soft target moniker from...

Armed civilians taking on active shooters: The Bureau’s numbers are off – by a lot.The Federal Bureau of Investigation has a lot to answer for, and, no doubt, the current leadership has its work cut out, depoliticizing the country’s supposedly premier law enforcement agency. The latest skeleton to fall out of the closet concerns how the Bureau has been vastly undercounting the number of cases of defensive gun use by armed Americans. The only reason for deliberately doing such a thing would have been orders coming down from Justice Department top brass – or from the White House – to...

The recent federal takeover of Washington, D.C., appears to have had the intended effect of improving public safety, and the Trump administration is now on a roll, working not only to clean up the streets but to make private gun ownership great again in America's capital. One major step the administration has taken is to make the process of applying for concealed-carry permits easier. According to a recent report from Fox News Digital, Trump's Making D.C. Safe and Beautiful Task Force is doing just that. Trump established the task force — comprising members of the Departments of the Interior, Homeland...

Orest Schur will serve over half a century in jail. Schur was a 27-year-old sergeant in the U.S. Space Force when the incident happened in July 2023. He and his wife lived in Aurora, Colorado, where he worked as a signals intelligence analyst at Buckley Space Force Base. Before transferring to the Space Force, Schur served two tours in Afghanistan with the U.S. Army, earning 14 service medals in the process. On July 5, 2023 around 11 p.m., he woke up to the sound of the alarm on his wife's Hyundai Elantra. He grabbed his pistol and went outside, where...

And another one gone, another one gone, another one bites the dust! The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has laid waste to California’s ridiculous “one-gun-per-month” law in yet another victory for gun rights. The law, passed in 2019, prohibited individuals from purchasing more than one handgun or semi-automatic rifle within a 30-day period. The court had declared that the law violated the Second Amendment because the state “has not demonstrated that the one-gun-per-month law is consistent with the Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.” The historical test was established by the Supreme Court’s 2022 ruling in New York Rifle &...

A facial challenge to the federal requirement for registration and paying a tax in order to possess short-barreled rifles has made its way to the Supreme Court. A facial challenge is a direct challenge to the statute, claiming the statute itself is unconstitutional.The case of Jamond M. Rush v. United States started in February 2022 in the Southern District of Illinois. Rush was charged with being a felon in possession of a firearm, an Anderson Manufacturing AR-15 .223 rifle. The court suppressed the original charge.A superseding indictment, substituting a new charge for the old charge, was issued on August 16,...

In Atlanta, during coverage of the NRA Annual Meeting in 2025, this correspondent had an interesting conversation with the manager of my motel. The motel was chosen for a low price and a reasonably close location to the Georgia World Congress Center in downtown Atlanta.This correspondent has always pursued frugality as a virtue. Frugality can be taken too far. This correspondent may have been close to the edge in choosing a cut-rate motel a few miles from the city center in Atlanta. After registering with the NRA Annual Meeting and picking up press credentials for the event, it was a...

I think these are very good arguments to debunk the left wing lies trying to deny us our Constitutional rights. To set the stage, let’s just look at basic civics: the purpose of any amendment is because something is off limits to being changed through legislation. We should then be able to point to something that was rendered off limits to being changed through legislation due to the ratification of the 2nd Amendment. The anti gun groups focus exclusively on 2 parts of the 2nd Amendment, “Well Regulated”, and “Militia”. Their arguments are boil down to 2 things, “Well Regulated”...