Gun Rights Policy Conference

Day One: First Impressions

First! My friend, Glenn Reynolds, was honored by SAF as a Defender of the Constitution. That was cool to hear. And, as we all know, he most definitely deserves this.

Well, I just finished my first day of my first time attending this conference. And it was definitely a day spent on gun rights. I was not sure what to expect at all, but got much more than I hoped for. It was a dense, information filled day. The content today really broke down into two different groups. One was attorneys telling us how things are going with various court cases and litigation. The other was people talking about the future looks like, how to get better, and what comes next.

Both groupings were very interesting, with a ton of information to absorb. I have pages of notes I need to re-read and think about and then write probably 3 or 4 posts covering different pieces of the conference, my impressions of the Second Amendment Foundation, and what all of this means.

Meanwhile, two speakers that I really enjoyed were Mark W. Smith of the Four Boxes Diner and John Lott of the Crime Prevention Research Center. A few thoughts I garnered from each.

Mark Smith tackled a current Supreme Court case and the future of the 2A

Mark Smith speaking at GRPC

The US v. Rahimi case was the topic of Mark’s talk. That case will be in front of the Supreme Court and Mark talked about why it is there and what it means. Basically, Merrick Garland did everything possible to get it there. And the reason is that Garland wants to use Rahimi to gut Bruen. Basically, Garland is posing a Hobson’s choice to the Court. Either they follow Bruen methodology and overturn the portion of Federal law that prevents someone with an active restraining order from purchasing or possessing a firearm, or they leave all that in place by carving out exceptions in the Bruen methodology of text and tradition of the Constitution. Mark thinks there are a couple different ways for the Court to get through this without handing Garland a victory. I think he’s right.

John Lott, of course, talked to us about numbers and statistics.

John Lott speaking at GRPC

Dr. Lott pointed out that in the hundreds of schools in 22 states that allow teachers to be armed, there has not been even one mass murder school shooting in a school that had armed teachers. There’s an obvious and clear lesson here. Arm the school faculty. You can get far more information on this and many other topics at Crime Prevention Research Center.

And no conference would be complete without SWAG ….. and this one had SWAG for days. Here’s what was on the table when I sat down.

GRPC had a bunch of SWAG for attendees

And, in case you are wondering, after reading my post on Traveling With Firearms …. yes, I am carrying.

Final thought for today. This conference is great. Much better than NRA.