2026 Is a Rough Year to Be an Anti-Gunner So Far

For a while, gun control seemed almost inevitable. In the aftermath of multiple mass shootings, including the horrors of the Las Vegas Route 91 massacre, it was pretty damn hard to convince anyone who wasn’t already pro-gun that gun control was a bad idea. People were upset, they were scared, and they wanted something done.

Luckily, things settled down without too much damage. Yes, there was a bump stock ban, but it was an administrative ban versus the legislative one that was working its way through Congress and was likely to pass. That one would have gone much farther and seriously impacted even aftermarket triggers.

And now, it’s gone.

The world settled down, and then the courts got involved, and really, things aren’t great for anti-gunners.

Gun-control groups have been on a losing streak in court this summer, highlighted by the Supreme Court’s decision in Wolford v. Lopez.

The most recent defeat came when a United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit shot down a suit against Texas filed by Everytown for Gun Safety trying to make it easier to prohibit concealed carry in private businesses. The legal losses over the last six weeks have been punctuated by the Supreme Court’s June 25 ruling in Wolford v. Lopez, which struck down a Hawaiian law that barred concealed carry on private property without the express permission of the owner.

A week prior to the Wolford ruling, the Supreme Court pared back the federal government’s ability to prosecute marijuana users for firearms possession in Hemani v. United States in a unanimous decision.

In the Wolford opinion, Associate Justice Samuel Alito skewered the Hawaii Supreme Court’s invocation of the “spirit of Aloha” to ignore the Second Amendment.

In and amongst the Supreme Court wins, the Third Circuit threw out New Jersey’s ban on so-called assault weapons, and Virginia’s gun control push got brought up short by the courts before it could even go into effect.

Whether anti-gunners like it or not, the Second Amendment is here to stay. That includes the current judicial standard where not only is history, text, and tradition considered, but gun control laws are essentially to be presumed unconstitutional and where the state has to prove otherwise. That last part is a wrinkle from Wolford, but it’s an important one. The onus is on the state rather than the other way around, as it’s been for decades.

So long intermediate and even strict scrutiny.

Here’s the thing, though. We shouldn’t have to rely on the courts to do this. The courts should be the last hope, not the best hope. Court fights have their place, particularly when challenging longstanding gun control laws, but Virginia’s never should have come to that. The vampire rule never should have come to that.

We need to win in these legislatures. We need to flip anti-gun states. Sure, California and Massachusetts might be lost causes, but we cannot just shrug off the effort anyway.

The reason is that we know the anti-gun Democrats aren’t shy about trying to change the rules when they’re losing. They’ve already talked about packing the courts more than once, and if they get half a chance, you’d better believe they’ll try it.

Because of that, the only way to keep our right to keep and bear arms safe is to remove the desire for anyone to infringe upon it. That’s going to take work, and we may never see it, but there’s still something good about planting trees whose shade we’ll never sit beneath.

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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