Buckeye Firearms Association

Congress must rein in ATF's billion-record gun archive after Qilin breach

SHummel — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 10:00:00 +0000

by John Crump, AmmoLand

For 30 years, the same story has repeated itself inside the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives: Congress bars the agency from building anything that looks like a national gun registry, ATF quietly builds something that comes close anyway, and it takes an outside audit, sometimes a decade or more later, to catch it.

A review of a Government Accountability Office (GAO) audit, ATF’s own internal technical manuals released under the Freedom of Information Act, and a 2022 report from Gun Owners of America lays out just how close, and just how poorly secured, ATF’s records empire has become. To be fair to the agency, most of the specific security holes exposed over the years have since been fixed. But several still exist, and the ones that remain go to the heart of whether ATF’s records can be trusted at all.

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The numbers alone should stop every gun owner in their tracks. ATF’s Out-of-Business Records Imaging System, known as OBRIS, held roughly 297 million images as of 2016. By November 2021, according to ATF’s own letter to Congress, that number had ballooned to 920,664,765 records, with 865,787,086 already digitized. It has since grown past a billion records, according to new figures detailed in a separate report. That is not a filing cabinet. That is one of the largest repositories of firearm-owner-linked personal data anywhere in the federal government, and it keeps growing.

Then ATF was hacked

This report was largely finished when the story took an unplanned turn. On Aug. 26, 2026, the Russian-speaking ransomware gang Qilin, a rebrand of the older Agenda ransomware operation with more than 2,200 claimed victims, posted ATF to its dark-web leak site, claiming to have broken into the agency’s systems. ATF confirmed the breach within hours. The Department of Justice designated it a “major incident,” the classification that triggers mandatory notification to Congress.

ATF’s line, delivered through Chief of Public Affairs Tanya Roman, was reassuring on its face. The compromised system was standalone and tied to the agency’s CALEA infrastructure, used to handle court-authorized communications intercepts in criminal cases. According to ATF, it was not connected to any other ATF systems, including case management, laboratory, or eForms systems, and there was no indication the incident had affected the ATF enterprise network or any other ATF system. In plain terms: not the same database at the center of this report. As of late September, ATF has not said it has any indication that gun-purchase records, Forms 4473, or the OBRIS out-of-business repository were touched.

That reassurance held for five days. On Aug. 31, Qilin’s ransom countdown expired, and the gang briefly posted roughly 6.3 gigabytes of files before pulling them back down, plenty of time for reporters to see what was inside. According to CNN and other outlets, the trove included the names of criminal investigation targets, phone numbers, IP addresses, iCloud data, and Cellebrite phone-extraction dumps. It was drawn from cases involving armed robbery, arson, explosives, and homicide, with a heavy concentration of files traced to ATF’s Houston Field Division. By Monday, Sept. 1, ATF’s public posture had softened from denial to agnosticism: the agency said it “cannot confirm the authenticity, nature, or scope” of what Qilin published. Nearly a month later, it has offered no fuller accounting.

No one has yet produced evidence that OBRIS itself, the over-a-billion-record repository at the center of this report, was part of what Qilin took, and this report won’t claim otherwise. But watch the shape of ATF’s defense: a “standalone” system, walled off, nothing to see here. That is the identical assurance ATF has given gun owners for a decade about OBRIS’s disabled name-search feature, a policy promise, not a demonstrated architectural fact.

Texas Gun Rights president Chris McNutt said in the days after the breach that gun owners are entitled to a full accounting, both of what was compromised and of what the federal government keeps on them in the first place. His group put the broader principle more bluntly: “The government cannot lose information it never collected in the first place.” Gun owners are now being asked to trust that the database holding a record of nearly every firearm ever sold by a defunct dealer is walled off any better than the system Qilin just walked into.

Registry built on trust ATF hasn’t earned

Congress has tried to head this off for decades. The Firearms Owners’ Protection Act (FOPA) bars any new rule that would create a “system of registration of firearms, firearms owners, or firearms transactions.” A separate appropriations rider, renewed every year since 1978 and made permanent in 2012, bars ATF from spending a dime to “consolidate or centralize” dealer records. And a third rider specifically forbids ATF from retrieving out-of-business records “by name or personal identification code.”

ATF’s defense has always been the same: the records aren’t searchable by name, so it isn’t a registry. The Congressional Research Service repeats that position, describing the digitized records as images that optical character recognition can’t read and that can be pulled only to complete a firearm trace. But that describes how ATF says it uses the system, not what the system can do. The FOIA production obtained under request 2020-0802 tells a more complicated story. ATF’s scanning and content-management software for building OBRIS comes from IBML and OpenText, as documented in ATF’s own vendor manuals and work instructions. Those commercial platforms include optical character recognition, intelligent handwriting recognition, and full-text search. The documents don’t settle one question: whether ATF’s licensed installation includes those features, or whether they were left out or stripped away. ATF has never publicly answered it. The record does show that name search is turned off in the interface. Nothing in ATF’s own paperwork shows the capability was ever removed at the database level, or that it was never there to begin with. Gun owners are being asked to accept that uncertainty on faith. A policy is not a wall. A policy is a setting, and settings can be changed.

Caught red-handed — twice

This isn’t speculation. GAO’s 2016 report, titled bluntly “ATF Did Not Always Comply with the Appropriations Act Restriction,” found that ATF had spent sixteen years, from 2000 to 2016, pooling out-of-business dealer records from its Access 2000 program onto a single server at the National Tracing Center, in direct violation of the anti-consolidation law. ATF’s own Chief Counsel had separately determined in 2009 that a program called the “Southwest Border Weapons of Choice” initiative illegally collected non-investigative dealer inventory data for two years running. It took ATF until March 2016, six and a half years after its own lawyers flagged the violation, to actually delete the data.

GAO went further: because ATF had no lawful appropriation to do any of this, the violation also triggered the Antideficiency Act, a law that requires an agency head to report the violation immediately to the President, Congress, and the Comptroller General. GAO found no evidence that the report was ever filed. Nobody was held accountable. The data just sat there until an audit forced its hand.

Bug that let agents see what policy said they couldn’t

Perhaps the most alarming finding in the 2016 report has nothing to do with policy at all; it’s a straightforward technical failure. ATF’s Firearm Recovery Notification Program is supposed to shield purchaser and dealer identities from agents who don’t need them. But when the eTrace 4.0 system rolled out in 2009, it shipped with a global print function that let any agent with basic access print up to 500 full purchaser records in a single batch — names included. ATF knew about the defect before the system ever went live. By the time GAO published its report seven years later, it still hadn’t been fixed, and ATF admitted it kept no audit logs showing whether, or how many times, agents used that loophole to pull data they were never supposed to see.

To ATF’s credit, it has since closed that hole. The print defect has been fixed, and the system now keeps an audit log of who accesses what.

But notice what the fix doesn’t do. An audit log only records what happens after it is switched on. For the years the loophole sat open, there is no record, and there never will be. ATF cannot tell anyone whether that gap was ever exploited, by whom, or how many purchaser names walked out the door. The agency shipped a privacy safeguard broken, knew it was broken, left it broken for years, and fixed it only after an outside auditor put it in writing. That is the pattern this report keeps finding: ATF fixes problems after they are exposed, rather than preventing them.

Paper records stacked to the ceiling

It isn’t just the software. As of 2016, roughly 8,060 boxes of unscanned paper dealer records were piled up at the National Tracing Center in Martinsburg, West Virginia, nearing a 10,000-box limit that GSA itself warned could put the building’s floor at risk of structural failure. Overflow records ended up stored in outdoor shipping containers.

The digital side has improved, but only halfway. Records are now encrypted once they are inside ATF’s system. Getting them there is another story. Dealers can still email their records to ATF, and ATF still accepts them unencrypted. There is no requirement to encrypt the file and no secure upload portal. A closing dealer’s entire customer history, with names, addresses, and Social Security numbers, can still cross the open internet like a grocery list, and be protected only after it arrives.

That gap is ATF’s to close. Federal law requires dealers who go out of business to turn their records over to ATF. If the government is going to require dealers to hand over a lifetime of customer data, it must give them a secure way to do it. That means an encrypted upload system built for the job, with unencrypted email no longer accepted. Encrypting records after they arrive does nothing to protect them on the way in, and the way in is where they are most exposed.

The mission keeps creeping

Even the boundary of what counts as an “out-of-business” record has proven elastic. Gun Owners of America’s May 2022 report, built substantially on the same FOIA release, documents that ATF has, through internal rulings and standing orders rather than any actual rulemaking, “strongly recommended” that active, still-operating dealers voluntarily ship records older than 20 years into the same Out-of-Business Records Repository, years before those dealers ever close their doors.

Fifty-two members of Congress raised nearly the exact same concern with the ATF in November 2021, citing the 2016 GAO report by name. ATF’s written answer brushed it off as old news about “a discrete situation.”

History suggests otherwise: an unreviewed data-collection program, run by internal memo instead of law, is precisely the pattern that produced ATF’s last two confirmed violations.

Not just ATF, but Justice Department pattern

ATF is not an outlier. Over the past four years, the DEA, the U.S. Marshals Service, and the FBI have all had sensitive systems breached. Each of them, like ATF, answers to the Department of Justice, and the details read like a dress rehearsal for what just happened to ATF.

DEA, 2022

In May 2022, intruders used a local police officer’s stolen credentials to enter the DEA’s EPIC System Portal. EPIC is a DEA-led, multi-agency intelligence center, and ATF is part of it: a 2017 DOJ inspector general report documented ATF analysts working in its Firearms and Explosives Intelligence Unit and recorded 1,609 ATF queries of EPIC’s Law Enforcement Inquiries and Alerts system in fiscal 2015, most commonly for firearms investigations. At the time of that review, LEIA searched 18 law enforcement databases, including DOJ systems. The criminal complaint says Sagar Singh entered the portal with a stolen username and password and shared them with Nicholas Ceraolo; it also says some linked databases required separate credentials they did not have. KrebsOnSecurity reported that screenshots showed options to look up firearms and other property, and that a source said the login prompted for no second authentication factor. The public record does not establish that the intruders retrieved firearm-ownership records. What it does establish is troubling enough: criminals entered an intelligence portal used by an ATF-staffed center and exploited information from it to threaten victims. Both men later pleaded guilty and were sentenced to prison.

U.S. Marshals Service, 2023

In February 2023, the Marshals Service discovered a “ransomware and data exfiltration event” that affected a “stand-alone” system. According to the agency, the affected system held law enforcement sensitive information, including returns from legal process, administrative information, and personal data on subjects of Marshals investigations, third parties, and certain employees. The hacked network belonged to a secretive unit called the Technical Operations Group, which provides surveillance capabilities to track fugitives. Officials determined that it constituted a major incident. The stolen files didn’t stay put: the data was put up for sale in March 2023 on a Russian-speaking hacking forum, and it resurfaced on the Hunters International ransomware gang’s leak site in 2024. It wasn’t the agency’s first failure, either. In a December 2019 incident, the Marshals accidentally exposed the details of over 387,000 former and current inmates, including names, dates of birth, home addresses, and Social Security numbers.

A “stand-alone” system. Surveillance data. A “major incident.” Three years before ATF, the Marshals Service used nearly the same words, and the data still ended up for sale on a Russian forum.

FBI wiretap network, 2026

This year the FBI itself was hit, in one of its most sensitive systems. An inquiry into abnormal activity on the network the bureau uses to manage wiretaps and other surveillance work opened on February 17. The affected system contains data from electronic surveillance and personal identification information on subjects of bureau investigations, and senior Justice Department officials determined on March 23 that the intrusion was a “major incident.” The attackers got in through a vendor ISP connected to the FBI’s network, and the Wall Street Journal reported that investigators suspect Chinese government-affiliated hackers.

FBI personnel data, September 2026

Only last week, the extortion group ShinyHunters claimed it had breached the FBI’s online jobs portal and stolen information on almost all FBI agents and job applicants. The FBI confirmed on September 26 that it is dealing with a “cybersecurity incident.” Journalists who reviewed a sample of 5,000 records found names, home addresses, phone numbers, dates of birth, and Social Security numbers, with some records including spouse and emergency contact details. The group’s price isn’t even money. ShinyHunters says it is holding the data while demanding the FBI withdraw a statement the bureau issued about the group in May.

The CALEA thread

Look closely, and a common target emerges: surveillance infrastructure. ATF’s breached system was its CALEA intercept system. The FBI’s breached network manages wiretaps. And in 2024, China’s Salt Typhoon campaign compromised the networks of at least nine major U.S. telecommunications carriers and reportedly accessed the lawful intercept systems used by U.S. law enforcement. The systems Washington built to watch suspects have become the doorway foreign hackers and criminal gangs use to watch Washington.

The lesson for gun owners is straightforward. “Standalone” is not a guarantee, and a “major incident” designation comes after the damage, not before it. If the FBI, the nation’s lead cyber agency, cannot keep its own wiretap network and personnel files out of hostile hands, there is no reason to trust ATF’s over-a-billion-record, out-of-business repository as any safer.

The door that’s open right now. The threat isn’t just in the past. This past weekend, Citrix confirmed that two critical NetScaler remote code execution vulnerabilities are being exploited in attacks. NetScaler appliances are the gateways many organizations use for VPN access, load balancing, and user authentication, which makes them the front door to a network. Attackers exploited these flaws as zero-days before any fix existed. The first one lets an unauthenticated attacker run any command they want on the appliance, and it affects every NetScaler ADC and Gateway deployment, including those running the default configuration.

The warning signs came before the fix. Starting September 26, suppliers and security teams told NetScaler administrators to shut down their appliances after a private warning from the Dutch National Cyber Security Center. NetScaler is common enough across the federal government that CISA ordered every federal civilian agency to secure its vulnerable appliances by Sept. 30. CISA also warned agencies that suspect a compromise to preserve forensic evidence before patching, because updating can erase the traces an attacker left behind. In other words, patching closes the door but doesn’t tell you whether someone already walked through it.

It isn’t a one-off, either. This is at least the third actively exploited NetScaler flaw since August. In late August, CISA gave federal agencies three days to fix another NetScaler vulnerability that attackers were already exploiting to plant web shells. Shadowserver counts more than 23,000 NetScaler instances exposed to the internet.

But the point stands. The same commercial gateway products sit at the edge of agency after agency, and every newly exploited flaw is a race between federal IT staff and attackers. Every system holding firearm-owner data sits behind a gateway like this one. How fast those gateways get patched, and whether anyone checks for intruders before patching, can decide whether a billion records stay walled off or end up on a Russian-language leak site.

DOJ’s job, not just ATF’s

Every public statement about the Qilin breach so far has come from one office: ATF’s Chief of Public Affairs. That’s worth pausing on, because ATF doesn’t actually own its cybersecurity. Under the Federal Information Security Modernization Act (44 U.S.C. Chapter 35), the legal duty to protect an agency’s information systems sits with the head of the parent department, not the component bureau. ATF is a component of the Department of Justice. For information security policy, system authorization, and incident response, ATF answers up to DOJ’s Justice Management Division and the Office of the Chief Information Officer housed inside it, the office that is supposed to set the rules ATF’s IT staff follow and certify whether a system like the one Qilin broke into was secure enough to be plugged in at all.

That chain of responsibility matters for a second reason: “major incident” isn’t editorial color; it’s a legal trigger. Under OMB Memorandum M-25-04 and 44 U.S.C. § 3554(b)(7)(C)(iii)(III), an agency that designates a breach a major incident has seven days to notify the authorizing and appropriations committees of both chambers of Congress, plus, where personal data is involved, the House Committees on Oversight, Homeland Security, and Science, and the Senate Committees on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, Commerce, and Judiciary, and to loop in its own Inspector General. That clock is a department-level obligation. Coverage of the breach describes ATF as coordinating with DOJ on the response, but none of it quotes an independent DOJ statement, only ATF’s public affairs office speaking for both.

There’s a reason to wonder whether DOJ is the reassuring voice gun owners should want here. A 2024 DOJ Inspector General audit of JMD’s own information security program, the same office chartered to set the security bar for ATF and every other component, found weaknesses in four of the nine FISMA domain areas it tested, plus a gap tied to a congressional letter on telework security vulnerabilities. That’s the department’s central cybersecurity apparatus failing its own checkup, years before Qilin got near ATF’s servers. Meanwhile, the public list of OIG reports on ATF runs to 121 and counting, heavy on firearms-trace management, dealer inspections, and recordkeeping, but nothing in that list resembles a dedicated audit of the bureau’s network security or FISMA compliance. ATF’s paper trail has been picked for over 30 years. Whether its digital perimeter has ever been tested with the same rigor is, on the public record, an open question.

There’s a reason to wonder whether DOJ is the reassuring voice gun owners should want here. The DOJ Inspector General’s most recent audit of JMD’s own information security program covered fiscal 2024. JMD is the office chartered to set the security bar for ATF and every other component, and the audit found weaknesses in two of the nine FISMA domain areas it tested, plus a vulnerability left unresolved from the year before. That’s the department’s central cybersecurity apparatus falling short on its own checkup, two years before Qilin got near ATF’s servers. Meanwhile, the public list of OIG reports on ATF runs to 121 and counting, heavy on firearms-trace management, dealer inspections, and recordkeeping, but nothing in that list resembles a dedicated audit of the bureau’s network security or FISMA compliance. ATF’s paper trail has been picked apart for over 30 years. Whether its digital perimeter has ever been tested with the same rigor is, on the public record, an open question.

What needs to happen now

Until late August, none of the sources reviewed for this report documented a proven external hack of ATF’s firearms database, and this piece still won’t claim that OBRIS itself has been breached. But the Qilin incident proves the underlying fear isn’t hypothetical. ATF’s systems can be broken into. The agency’s first instinct is to insist the damage is contained to a walled-off corner. And the public is left to take that on faith until a leak site forces a fuller accounting. The same pattern has now played out at the FBI, the U.S. Marshals Service, and the DEA. This is not one agency’s bad luck. It is a Justice Department problem.

ATF deserves credit where it has earned it. When GAO auditors came in, the agency accepted the findings rather than fighting them, and it has addressed several concerns honestly. The eTrace print loophole has been closed, and the system now logs who accesses purchaser records. Dealer records are encrypted once they reach ATF’s system. ATF deleted the illegally consolidated Access 2000 data and the Southwest Border inventory data. The current ATF has also been open with AmmoLand News, answering questions directly instead of hiding behind boilerplate.

So let’s be clear about what this report is and isn’t saying. Today’s ATF is not the problem. The problem is the ATF that comes after it. Administrations change, and directors change with them. A future president hostile to gun owners would inherit everything described in this report. That includes a repository with over a billion records, built on software with full-text and handwriting search already installed. Name-search is blocked by a setting, not by the architecture. Record intake has expanded by internal memo rather than by rulemaking. The whole system rests on the agency’s promise that it will never be used as a registry. Those safeguards can be undone by the people in charge. A hostile ATF wouldn’t need to build a registry. It would only need to switch one on.

To be fair, ATF didn’t invent this repository on its own. Federal law, 18 U.S.C. § 923(g)(4), requires a dealer who goes out of business to turn their records over to the government, and ATF is the agency that has to receive them. That’s exactly why this can’t be left to ATF alone. The agency can make the system more secure, but only Congress can decide whether a billion records need to sit in one federal building at all. Technical and legal fixes have to happen together.

That’s why the time to act is now, while the agency is cooperative and the fixes can be made in good faith rather than forced in a fight. Protections that depend on who holds office aren’t protections. They must be built into the system and written into law, so no future administration can quietly reverse them, and no outside hacker can exploit them. Congress should demand answers on seven fronts:

Full disclosure of the Qilin breach. ATF and DOJ should say exactly what Qilin obtained, and whether any technical pathway ever connected the compromised CALEA system to OBRIS, A2K, or eTrace. “Standalone” should be demonstrated, not asserted.
An independent technical audit of name-search. Someone outside ATF should confirm that name-search is disabled at the database level, not just switched off in a menu. A setting that can be turned off can be turned back on.
A secure, encrypted upload system for dealer records. If the law requires dealers to surrender a lifetime of customer records, ATF must give them a secure way to do it. It should stop accepting unencrypted emailed records, so dealer data is protected in transit and not only after it arrives.
A public accounting of access. ATF should disclose who has access to a database now with more than a billion records, and what background standard they had to meet to get it.
A hard stop on records expansion outside rulemaking. ATF should stop quietly expanding what records it accepts, including its push for active dealers to send in records older than 20 years, outside the rulemaking process the law actually requires.
A department-wide security review. The DOJ Inspector General should conduct a dedicated FISMA audit of ATF’s own network, and a broader review of why DOJ components keep losing sensitive data from systems described as “standalone.” That review should cover the Marshals in 2023, the FBI’s wiretap network and personnel data in 2026, and now ATF.
Revisit the law that created the repository. Congress wrote the out-of-business records requirement, and Congress can change it. At minimum, it should decide whether decades-old records with no connection to any trace need to be kept forever, or whether they can be purged after a set period. It should also weigh whether records have to be centralized in a single federal repository at all. Tracing can work without the government holding a permanent, near-complete archive of who bought what. Every record that isn’t collected is a record no future administration can misuse, and no hacker can steal.

Thirty years of audits have produced the same conclusion every time: ATF says the records aren’t a registry, and then an outside auditor finds a program, a server, or a software bug that says otherwise. Today’s ATF has accepted those findings, fixed a number of them, and been more transparent than many of its predecessors. But that is exactly why this is the moment to finish the job. A database of more than a billion records will outlast any director and any president. The question isn’t whether gun owners can trust this ATF. It’s whether they can trust every ATF that comes after it, under every administration yet to be elected. The only safe answer is a system that doesn’t require that trust at all, one that can’t be switched on as a registry and can’t be broken into by the next Qilin. Congress has a cooperative agency and a narrow window. It should use both.

Republished with permission from AmmoLand.

NRA urges SCOTUS to hear challenge to lifetime ban on gun ownership by nonviolent felons

SHummel — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 10:00:00 +0000

by NRA-ILA

The National Rifle Association, joined by the Firearms Policy Coalition and Second Amendment Foundation, filed an amicus brief Oct. 1, urging the U.S. Supreme Court to hear a challenge to the federal lifetime prohibition on firearms possession by nonviolent felons.

A firearm regulation is unconstitutional under the Supreme Court’s Second Amendment test unless the government proves that it is consistent with America’s historical tradition of firearm regulation. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit, however, has never applied the Supreme Court’s test to the federal prohibition on firearm possession by felons and precludes any challenge to the law — regardless of the nature of the offense or how long ago it occurred.

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The amicus brief urges the Supreme Court to grant certiorari and reiterate that every firearm regulation must be subject to its test for Second Amendment challenges. It also provides an extensive historical analysis of firearm prohibitions from colonial America through the nineteenth century.

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The brief emphasizes that America’s historical tradition of firearm regulation allows for the disarmament of dangerous persons — disaffected persons who pose a threat to the government and persons with a proven proclivity for violence. But there is no historical tradition of disarming peaceable citizens. Rather, historically, peaceable citizens — including nonviolent felons — were expressly permitted and often required to keep and bear arms.

‘GunTubers’ face new squeeze as YouTube further tightens firearm content rules

SHummel — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 10:00:00 +0000

by Jenn Jacques, NSSF

Gun control advocates appear to have succeeded in pushing YouTube to change its policies to restrict firearm-related content and tighten its rules governing manufacturer-supported videos. Is it just a coincidence? The implications extend beyond whether “GunTubers” can publish a product review. They reach the increasingly consequential question of when independent firearm coverage becomes corporate advertising.

A “report” published Sept. 16, titled Loaded Content: How the firearms industry supports “guntubers” who endanger public safety, from The Smoking Gun, a not-so-independent “newsroom arm” of the Michael Bloomberg-funded Everytown for Gun Safety Support Fund, portrays firearm-focused YouTube creators as an “industry-funded marketing network” and calls for tighter enforcement of the platform’s firearm-content rules. At the very same moment, YouTube updated its branded-content policy to prohibit content featuring firearms or ammunition when a creator receives something of value from a brand partner.

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The timing is striking. The report acknowledges that YouTube changed its policy while the report was being written. Whether Everytown influenced that decision is unknown at this time. Any effort to suppress First Amendment speech, especially pertaining to Second Amendment-protected activities, should trouble all freedom-loving Americans. What is clear, however, is that the new restriction targets the manufacturers’ relationships on which the report builds much of its case against “GunTubers.”

And this move comes just as antigun groups — aided by big law firms — are using the court system to demand information from pro-gun content creators about their relationships with manufacturers. Those requests seek information about the relationships between “GunTubers” and manufacturers in an effort to establish a convoluted basis for legal liability rooted in “marketing” and “advertising” claims for the third-party, criminal misuse of lawful products.

Product access isn't editorial control

The report suggests some sort of nefarious link between sponsorships, products supplied for review and creator partnerships as evidence of an industry-directed marketing operation. Yet those arrangements are not interchangeable and treating them as such ignores how independent product coverage works.

A creator may purchase a firearm, borrow one for testing, receive a sample or enter a paid sponsorship agreement. Each arrangement raises different questions about disclosure and editorial independence. Providing access to a product does not establish that its manufacturer dictated the review. And in reality, plenty of product reviews aren’t necessarily positive for a particular manufacturer.

Credible firearm coverage requires firsthand testing, technical knowledge by the reviewer and the freedom to report a product’s shortcomings as readily as its strengths. Content creators are already required to disclose if they were paid or received a product from a manufacturer. But viewers also deserve product reviews judged on their substance rather than being dismissed because a commercial relationship exists. That distinction becomes critical when a platform treats the relationship itself as grounds for restricting otherwise permissible content.

YouTube’s disclosure dilemma

YouTube defines branded content as “material influenced by a brand partner in exchange for something of value, including payment, free products or sponsorships.” Creators must identify qualifying content through the platform’s paid-promotion declaration. Its updated policy prohibits branded content featuring firearms or ammunition, with the restriction applying to the entire video rather than only its sponsored portion.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC), meanwhile, requires creators to disclose material brand connections in endorsements when those relationships are not reasonably expected by viewers. Free products and other benefits may trigger that obligation even when a creator believes the review is unbiased.

A firearm content creator now faces a Hobson’s choice: Disclose a material relationship as FTC guidance requires, most likely rendering the video prohibited under YouTube’s branded-content policy because it features a firearm or ammunition.

The policy also leaves consequential questions unanswered. How will YouTube distinguish a temporary product loan from a free product? When does manufacturer access influence content? Could an unrelated sponsorship place an entire firearm review within the prohibition?

For creators who invest in products, ammunition, testing and production before a video is published, those distinctions determine more than disclosure language. They may determine whether the video can appear on YouTube at all.

When 'advertising' becomes a legal question

The boundary between independent coverage and manufacturer-directed promotion is also drawing attention in legal challenges seeking to hold manufacturers liable for the third-party criminal misuse of their products based on “marketing” and “advertising” claims.

Attorney and firearm reviewer James Reeves says he received a third-party subpoena in the Roberts v. Smith & Wesson Brands, Inc., litigation stemming from the 2022 Highland Park, Ill., murders. Some of the plaintiffs are represented by the legal arm of (with the help of the big antigun law firm Paul Weiss). Reeves is not a defendant, and he is not alone, as dozens of content creators have received similar requests. According to reporting on the subpoena, plaintiffs are seeking records concerning his Smith & Wesson content and manufacturer relationships. The request reportedly defines advertising broadly enough to encompass unpaid social media content.

That distinction matters under the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA), which generally bars certain lawsuits seeking to hold lawful and highly-regulated firearm manufacturers and sellers responsible for harm caused by the criminal or unlawful misuse of their products. One exception permits claims involving a manufacturer or seller that knowingly violated a state or federal statute applicable to a product’s sale or marketing when that violation proximately caused the alleged harm.

As plaintiffs continue to push these advertising and marketing theories, courts will have to grapple with important questions, such as whether a creator’s review becomes corporate advertising merely because a manufacturer supplied the firearm. YouTube’s policy and the Highland Park litigation involve separate questions. The common thread is the growing significance of how relationships between firearm manufacturers and independent creators are defined, as well as Everytown’s efforts to establish a nefarious link between the two.

The stakes for firearm media

Social media platforms have restricted content from competitive shooters, firearm educators and other lawful voices. NSSF previously highlighted actions involving Paralympic medalist McKenna Geer, USA Shooting athletes, the West Point Rifle Team, and popular firearm education channel Hickok45.

The problem is real enough that NSSF held a webinar earlier this year specifically addressing how firearm retailers, ranges and manufacturers can navigate shifting social media rules that can result in content being demonetized, struck or removed.

YouTube already restricts content facilitating firearm sales and certain manufacturing or modification instructions. Enforcing rules against prohibited conduct is one thing. Treating a lawful product review as impermissible because of a disclosed manufacturer relationship is another.

The timing of YouTube’s policy change and the report from The Smoking Gun — an online so-called “newsroom” that is “committed to exposing the gun industry’s role in our gun violence epidemic today through news stories, in-depth research, profiles on firearm manufacturers and suppliers, data, and more” — warrants scrutiny, including Everytown’s role, to say the least. The immediate consequences need no speculation: Creators face greater uncertainty over how to disclose commercial relationships; manufacturers face new questions about providing products for evaluation; and viewers risk losing access to beneficial and quality independent product coverage.

Transparency should clarify who paid for or supplied a product. It should not erase the distinction between a candid review and an advertisement.

Republished with permission from NSSF.

Early in-person and mail-in voting begins TODAY, Oct. 6

drieck — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 10:00:00 +0000

It is important that gun owners know which federal- and state-level candidates will protect and defend their right to bear arms before casting a vote. Click here to see our grades and endorsements in this election.

At the forefront is the race between Republicans Vivek Ramaswamy/Rob McColley and Democrats Amy Acton/David Pepper for Ohio governor/lieutenant governor. Ramaswamy and McColley have vowed publicly and often to protect, defend, and advance gun rights. Acton, on the other hand, has the endorsement of Everytown For Gun Safety and Moms Demand Action.

To see a sample ballot specifically for you in your county, including all candidates and issues, visit the Ohio SOS' Sample Ballot webpage.

Other information about the 2026 General Election:

Remember this case? New Hampshire school district admits unlawful vehicle search violated student's rights

SHummel — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 10:00:00 +0000

by Second Amendment Foundation

Second Amendment Foundation (SAF) secured a major win Sept. 16 in Harrington v. Crawford after school district officials admitted the search of plaintiff Jack Harrington’s vehicle violated his Fourth Amendment rights.

In October last year, SAF filed the case after Harrington’s vehicle was searched on Hillsboro-Deering High School grounds solely on the basis of school officials learning that Harrington lawfully owned a firearm in his personal life. Harrington owns a handgun which he sometimes carries with him in his truck — in full compliance with all federal and New Hampshire state laws — but never brought the gun to school, which he knew was prohibited. Upon learning that Harrington lawfully owned a firearm, however, he was subjected to interrogation and his vehicle being searched without his consent. No firearm was found during the illegal search as it was safely stored at his home, nowhere near the school campus.

2026 general election: Be ready to vote for gun rights as early voting nears

“Maintaining safety on school grounds is a laudable goal,” said SAF executive director Adam Kraut. “But the Constitution demands that school officials have, at minimum, reasonable suspicion to search a student’s property. Critically, choosing to exercise one’s Second Amendment rights cannot be interpreted as a waiver of your rights under the Fourth Amendment, nor can it create reasonable suspicion of a crime. We’re pleased the school district here has admitted their errors and reinforced that the fundamental rights of their students will be respected.”

As noted in the original complaint, “…after the Interrogation in which Jack repeatedly refused to consent to a search and after Jack’s parents were contacted by phone and similarly refused to consent to a search, Defendants searched the Subject Vehicle anyway, finding no firearm.”

“Publicly acknowledging that you’re a gun owner does not justify endless harassment or subject you to invasive searches,” said Alan M. Gottlieb, SAF founder and executive vice president. “The overwhelming majority of gun owners are law-abiding peaceable people for their entire lives. Simply choosing to exercise your rights under the Second Amendment does not imply that you may do something criminal with a firearm and does not create reasonable suspicion that a crime has been committed. If that were the case, then lawful gun owners like Mr. Harrington would not just be subject to search of their property on one day — but every day — unless and until they prove that they have sold their constitutionally protected property to the satisfaction of school officials. The Constitution prevents precisely that outcome and worked exactly as designed in this case.”

Republished with permission from Second Amendment Foundation.

Register for Protecting Houses of Worship Nov. 14 in Medina

SHummel — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 10:00:00 +0000

Does your organization have a security team ready to go and are they prepared to counter an active killing event? This Protecting Houses of Worship training event Nov. 14 is designed as an intro to help identify security needs as well as organizational and team training standards. Training will include the history of active killing events, including current tragedies, as well as medical training, tactics, and Active Killer Response scenarios.

This Saturday seminar, scheduled for 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. at Cornerstone Chapel, 3939 Granger Road in Medina, is sponsored by Buckeye Firearms Association and will include the history of active killing events, including current tragedies, as well as medical training, tactics, and Active Killer Response scenarios. SIGN UP HERE!

Only 60 spots are available.

A previous "Protecting Houses of Worship" training session brought together community members, church leaders, and safety volunteers with a shared mission: to safeguard places of worship while preserving their welcoming environment.

Students left the program not only with new skills but also with a deep appreciation for the training team.

One participant remarked, “The instructors were top-notch. The different types of sessions/scenarios and getting everybody to participate worked quite well. I learned a great deal. Look forward to doing it again.”

Another student praised the program’s structure. “Very satisfied with the presentation and the way the team worked together. Very well organized. Great job.”

Read other comments here.

For more information, call BFA administrative assistant Angela Armstrong at 614-715-4867.

Sign up for the seminar here.

WATCH: Vivek Ramaswamy shares views on hunting, fishing, conservation

drieck — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:00:00 +0000

Vivek Ramaswamy recently sat down for an interview with Rack Junkies. He talked about the constitutional right to hunt and fish, Ohio’s open fields doctrine and warrantless searches on private property, DEI policies inside game agencies, conservation funding, his personal moral beliefs about hunting and fishing, and why hunters should trust him to follow through on the promises he makes.

The host said that he has asked Amy Acton on the program, but has received no response. So it appears she's ducking this interview just like she's ducking a debate with Ramaswamy. Apparently she doesn't want you to know what she thinks about gun rights, hunting, or other topics.

Everytown hunting for credibility

SHummel — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 10:00:00 +0000

by NRA-ILA

The irony is nothing short of comedy. Multiple outlets are having a field day with the Michael Bloomberg-backed Everytown for Gun Safety organization, which has spent years and millions of dollars supporting extreme restrictions on lawful gun ownership, now purporting to offer hunter education courses. The very same group that continues to dedicate resources to treating gun ownership as a disease in need of a cure wants to expand their ‘firearm safety’ courses to hunting while positioning themselves as authorities on teaching people how to exercise the very rights they work so hard to eliminate.

It’s particularly ironic as Everytown strongly criticizes the National Rifle Association (NRA), the preeminent organization that has spent generations doing the work they now embrace as so important. The camouflage might be new, but the anti-gun agenda has not changed and never will.

2026 general election: Be ready to vote for gun rights as early voting nears

Long before Everytown suddenly discovered hunter education, NRA was building the foundation on which modern hunter education rests. In 1949, the NRA worked with the state of New York to develop the nation's first statewide hunter education program and its curriculum. The NRA hunter safety handbook was subsequently adopted and is used across the country today for firearm instruction, youth programs, and NRA’s free online hunter education course. which is accepted as fulfilling hunting training requirements in numerous states.

Just as Everytown’s instructors are vaguely credentialed, so is the inspiration for its hunter safety training grounded in a singular and predictably vague “study.” In the study, researchers claimed that more people were killed by gunfire in the first week of deer hunting season than any other week of the calendar year. However, the “researchers” used as a single source the Gun Violence Archive (GVA), not any kind of hunter-incident based dataset.

The GVA has long been challenged as an unreliable tool with improper methodology, particularly because it relies heavily on media reports rather than any uniform government reporting system. In this particular study, it appears their outcome encompasses any shooting occurring in selected counties around hunting season rather than only those directly related to hunting.

The authors also appear to run their analysis excluding those tagged as hunting-related accidents and report that the results were nearly identical. Among the many other limitations of this “study” is the lack of distinction between incidents involving handguns and long guns, even though the latter are overwhelmingly the sorts of firearms used for hunting.

In the end, the study found nothing noteworthy to do with hunting or hunters, and certainly nothing that makes Everytown somehow especially suited to suddenly start lecturing hunters on their peculiar brand of “gun safety.” That surprises exactly no one. It is the same scenario as when Everytown first began offering firearm training, as NRA-ILA reported on last year HERE and HERE.

You can't spend years treating lawful gun ownership as a problem and then put on a blaze orange vest and pretend that you're a trusted voice of America's hunting tradition. A friendly and responsible word for the anti-gun crowd suddenly discovering hunter education: for your own safety, check out NRA’s wide variety of training opportunities at NRA Education and Training.

The NRA has been teaching Americans firearm safety, marksmanship, and responsible firearm handling for more than 150 years backed by established training programs and instructors more than proud to list their full names and relevant resumes.

So before reinventing yourselves as outdoor people, consider not making firearm training a political stunt or rebranding exercise. Firearms training of any kind is to be taken seriously.

Defensive firearms class slated Oct. 17 in Brookville

SHummel — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 10:00:00 +0000

If you're looking to improve your defensive shooting skills in a structured, practical training environment, this defensive firearms class offers a full day of hands-on instruction designed for beginner, intermediate, and advanced shooters.

The class, sponsored by Buckeye Firearms Association, will be held from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 17, at Mushin Safety & Security Training, 10288 Amity Road, Brookville.

This is not a high-volume shooting class. Instead, the emphasis is on responsible firearms use, threat recognition, speed, accuracy, and confidence through deliberate instruction and structured drills.

Crawl, walk, run

The class follows a crawl, walk, run training model, allowing students to develop skills progressively and work at an appropriate pace for their experience level. Whether you're establishing a solid foundation or looking to refine skills you've already developed, the class provides an opportunity to learn and improve.

What you'll learn

Topics include the following:

Safe firearm handling and manipulation
Drawing from the holster, where appropriate
Improving speed and accuracy
Efficient target engagement
Shooting under realistic time constraints
Building confidence through structured drills

What to bring

Students should arrive prepared for a full day of live-fire training. Required equipment includes the following:

Modern defensive pistol
At least two magazines
Magazine pouch
Sturdy gun belt designed to support a firearm, holster and accessories
Strong-side holster — IWB, OWB or appendix
300 rounds of ammunition
Electronic hearing protection
Eye protection
Weather-appropriate clothing and boots
Appropriate concealment clothing
Billed hat or ball cap
Lunch, snacks and plenty of hydration
Notepad and pen

No off-body carry is permitted. Shoulder, cross-draw, middle-of-back, and push button release Serpa holsters are not permitted. Holsters must allow the student to safely holster the firearm using the dominant hand only and may not be collapsible cloth-style holsters or some leather holsters.

What students are saying

“First of all I can't remember having that much fun. You guys put on an awesome program,” one student said.

Another returning student shared, "I had a wonderful time (even though I did get completely soaked as did most of the others) but, like you said, we did dry out later in the day. I want you to relay to Forrest that he is the absolute best firearms instructor I have ever had. I have trained with Forrest at 3 different sessions and he makes learning fun because he always injects humor into his teachings. I always learn something new from him."

Register today and take your training to the next level.

Uber driver shoots armed attacker outside restaurant

SHummel — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 10:00:00 +0000

by Rob Morse, SlowFacts

I’ve met several people who were delivery drivers. You probably know some, too. Going to sketchy areas late at night is dangerous. I would have thought that picking up a delivery at a restaurant in the middle of the afternoon would be safe. I was wrong. A delivery driver in Florida faced an armed man and defended himself. Here is the rest of the story.

The delivery driver pulled into a parking place at about 3:45 p.m. The driver exited his vehicle and walked inside the restaurant to pick up an order. A stranger followed the driver inside. The driver picked up the order and left. The stranger followed the driver. Once the driver was outside, the stranger pushed the delivery driver from behind. The driver fell down. I assume the driver dropped his bag of food. When the driver rolled over, he saw a man standing over him and threatening him with a knife in his hands.

2026 general election: Be ready to vote for gun rights as early voting nears

The delivery driver was armed. It appears that he presented his handgun while he was still on the ground. He shot his attacker one time. The attacker retreated, so the defender stopped shooting. The attacker went back into the restaurant and asked for help. Someone in the store called 911 and also applied first aid to the gunshot wound in the attacker’s chest. The attacker was flown to a hospital. The injuries were later called ‘non-life-threatening’.

The defender remained at the scene. He was interviewed by the police. Witnesses saw a knife in the attacker’s hands when the attacker left the restaurant.
The defender recognized a lethal threat. The defender was at a position of disadvantage since he was lying on his back and the attacker was standing over him. The threat was also immediate and unavoidable. The Uber driver used lethal force to defend himself until the threat stopped. During his interview, the police took the defender’s firearm.

The attacker had a second knife in his pocket. The attacker, Christopher Harris, faces charges of attempted aggravated battery with a deadly weapon. He also faces charges of felony battery based on a prior battery conviction. Harris was booked into jail. This latest attack seemed to be over a parking place.

Uber makes public statements claiming that their drivers and their customers may not go armed. This driver saved his life because he was armed on the job. In contrast, we all park our cars.

Rob Morse writes about gun rights at his SlowFacts blog and hosts the Self Defense Gun Stories Podcast and co-hosts the Polite Society podcast.