Viramontes, Grant, And The Amicus Stampede
On December 2, 2026, the Supreme Court will hear Viramontes v. Cook County, No. 25-238, consolidated with Grant v. Higgins, No. 25-566. The question is not subtle: whether the Second and Fourteenth Amendments guarantee the right to possess AR-15 platform and similar evil black rifles. These make up the body of the the most popular rifle platforms in the US, if not the world. That is the rifle every suburban commando dad, every rancher, every combat veteran and every cop with a patrol carbine already knows how to run. Cook County and Connecticut want it treated like a MIRV on a Trident D5 submarine launched ballistic missile (guess what, we have a right to keep and bear those, too!). The Court is about to tell them to sit down and shut their whore mouths.
The merits briefing window for supporting amici slammed shut on September 4. What landed on the docket is not a polite little stack of form letters. It is a flood. Kostas Moros over at the Second Amendment Foundation has been live-cataloging the pile on X like a man watching a warehouse door come off the hinges, and if you have not been following this jurisprudential genius, you suck at life.
We start with the part that makes Everytown’s interns spill their benzo-laced oat milk. Law enforcement showed up with their briefs. On the correct side, for once!
The National Sheriffs’ Association and the Western States Sheriffs’ Association filed on August 31 in support of Viramontes and Grant. Their point is the one every honest cop already knows and every gun-control press release pretends not to: deputies cannot be everywhere. Response times run from a few minutes to half an hour depending on manpower and geography. A home invasion is over in seconds. The first responder is the person standing in the hallway with whatever the State has not banned yet. Their brief puts it in language even a Seventh Circuit panel should be able to sound out: “Any ban of an entire class of arms that is currently overwhelmingly chosen by Americans for self-defense violates the Second Amendment right to bear arms.”
That is sheriffs saying the quiet part out loud. Antigunners have spent thirty years waving around police union quotes like they were holy relics. The relics just filed against them.
Then California’s own cops piled on. The Peace Officers Research Association of California, the California Association of Highway Patrolmen, and John Lott’s Crime Prevention Research Center filed on September 4 in support of the petitioners. PORAC represents more than 89,000 California law-enforcement and public-safety professionals. That is the largest statewide association in the country, and it just told the Supreme Court that continuing these bans does not make officers safer. It makes the job harder. For every ban, cops have to go out and enforce it. Some people holding these weapons aren't going to go down peaceably just because some overfed loser in the Governor's Mansion decided to coffin-surf.
Officers choose AR-platform carbines when they get to pick the tool. Citizens facing the same problem with less training, less notice, and no backup are supposed to make do with a featureless abortion of an AR and a stern look, if that. The brief walks the Court through the research the other side keeps hoping nobody will read: state “assault weapon” bans do not outperform the expired 1994 federal ban, which itself had no discernible effect on the homicide rates.
Moros flagged that one with the energy of a man who has made this his life's work. Newsom and Bonta are going to double down on their drug addictions - and good!
Gun Owners of America and Gun Owners Foundation dropped their own brief the same day, joined by Gun Owners of California, a stack of state-level groups, and industry names including B&T USA, Century Arms, CANIK USA, and Fostech. Read it. The thesis is not complicated. Magazine-fed semiautomatic rifles with the furniture Cook County finds icky are in common use. While the common-use metric is being debated on whether it truly should be a 2A qualifier, for now, the scene is going to take that route, given it is the most likely to help merit positive results. Besides, you know it's going to work when two foreign-owned brands jump on board.
The Second Amendment Foundation is not just filing fan mail. SAF is a plaintiff. On August 28, SAF and its partners filed the opening merits brief in the consolidated cases. That is the document the Court needs to see. If you want the clean version of why these bans die under Heller and Bruen, start there and then bounce through Moros’s running digest of the rest of the pile: NRA and the American Suppressor Association, Cato, NSSF, more than two dozen states led by Tennessee and Kansas, a House Republican brief led by Georgia’s own Andrew Clyde, senators, state legislators, and enough state rifle associations to fill a Miami superclub.
And if that wasn't enough, the Department of Justice walked in. What?
On September 4, Solicitor General D. John Sauer (nice name!) filed the Brief for the United States as Amicus Curiae in Support of Petitioners. Read that caption again. The United States of America. In support of Cutberto Viramontes. Against Cook County’s ban. Against Connecticut’s ban. That is not a courtesy filing. That is the federal government telling the Supreme Court that the most popular rifles in the country are arms protected by the Second Amendment. The federal government itself is taking the stance we have the right to AR-15s, and other modern rifle platforms as well.
If you have been around this fight long enough, you remember a version of the DOJ that treated AR-15s like they were the Death Star in man-portable form. Calling them "assault weapons" was like a magic word that turned Heller off. That version just got replaced, on letterhead, in a case set for argument in December. Courts notice who the United States stands with. Justices notice. Law clerks notice. Cook County’s lawyers definitely noticed. Gun-grabbers noticed, even in their drug-addled haze.
This is as close as you get to a weather report for next year’s opinion. Nobody with a functioning prefrontal cortex should be taking a victory lap today, of course. But when sheriffs, California peace officers, GOA, SAF, two dozen states, and the Solicitor General of the United States are all pointing at the same take, you are not looking at a coin flip. You are looking at a Court that has been handed every tool it needs to put hardware bans into the dustbin of history, and then toss a match on top of the trash.
Careful SCOTUS, you might have to post guards around the dustbin - Everytown's staff might just show up to snort the ashes while in the throes of withdrawal.
Trump's Pardon Pen
Then last Friday happened.
President Trump signed a slate of clemency grants that included a cluster of Second Amendment cases the last administration treated like they were as a result of terror attacks. The names you need to know are Patrick “Tate” Adamiak, George Peterson, Shane Cox, Jeremy Kettler, and Russell Fincher.
Starting with Tate, because Tate is the one that should have ended careers at ATF.
Patrick “Tate” Adamiak was an active-duty Navy E-6, a master-at-arms, accepted to BUD/S, aka the Navy SEALs. He collected military memorabilia and sold parts and replicas. He has said he never sold a complete firearm that required an FFL. Someone with the intellect to qualify for SEALs training isn't going to muck about with potential NFA violations. In April 2022, Biden’s ATF raided him in Virginia Beach off a paid informant story about some NFA violations. What they actually built the case around included two inert RPG launchers — holes drilled in the receivers, guts stripped, welds in the proper places — the same class of dead display pieces you can still buy today off of any number of websites, no questions asked, no forms to fill out. They're inert pieces of metal, wood and plastic. You could maybe club someone with it, but that's about it.
That was not good enough for the conviction factory. ATF’s “expert” did what every honest person would call fabricating false evidence. He added parts from real RPGs sourced from government inventories until the inert tubes would fire a single subcaliber 7.62x39mm training round. What he did was essentially the equivalent of brewing up some methamphetamine in a government lab in order to convict someone who merely possessed a packet of Sudafed - if that!
Then he declared them destructive devices. A credulous and ill-informed jury handed down the conviction the government demanded. A judge handed Tate twenty years. Twenty. Years. For literal toys the government had to rebuild in a lab to make scary.
Lee Williams and SAF’s Investigative Journalism Project spent more than sixty stories documenting the mess. Six members of Congress asked for clemency. Even the current ATF director has publicly described a sentence in that range as out of line with comparable cases. On September 4, the President ended it. Full pardon. Effective immediately. Tate still had sixteen years left. He is going home. He wants a burrito.
That is not mercy for a borderline case. That is the Commander in Chief looking at a Biden-era show trial and finally hitting Command-Z.
George Peterson is the suppressor test case the Fifth Circuit tried to bury. Peterson was an FFL running a small home-based shop in Jefferson Parish, Louisiana. ATF hit the house in 2022 hard, masked agents pointing rifles at kids, the whole sad bit. The original probable-cause laundry list mostly evaporated. What stuck was a homemade, unserialized suppressor in a bedroom safe — a milled solvent-trap kit that had been fired on a .22 for varmints and snakes. As an FFL he may have had a layer of defensibility for this malum prohibitum mess, but the government of course did not bring it up. He pleaded guilty, reserved his rights on the constitutional issue, and got twenty-four months plus three years of supervised release. The Fifth Circuit then produced the opinion 2A lawyers are still grinding their teeth over: suppressors are “accessories,” not Arms. SCOTUS denied cert in April. Trump pardoned him anyway.
Shane Cox and Jeremy Kettler are the Kansas pair, and if you have been in this fight since the mid-2010s you already know the punchline. Kansas passed the Second Amendment Protection Act in 2013. The statute says firearms, accessories including silencers, and ammunition manufactured and kept inside Kansas are governed by Kansas law, which has no prohibitions against silencer ownership. Cox stamped “Made in Kansas” on what he built, handed customers copies of the statute, collected sales tax, and sold silencers out of Tough Guys in Chanute. Kettler, an Iraq and Afghanistan veteran, bought one and posted a video. Federal prosecutors indicted them anyway. A jury convicted Cox on multiple NFA counts and Kettler on one count of possessing an unregistered silencer. The judge, to his limited credit, gave them probation instead of a cage. The felony still stripped their gun rights. The Kansas Senate has been begging a president to fix it since the first Trump term, and on Friday, Trump pardoned the duo. However, the lingering issue here is that the State of Kansas is supposed to protect it's residents against this sort of federal aggression, but failed to do so.
Pastor Russell Richard Fincher is the one the Sunday-school crowd needs to hear about, because the Biden regime acted like they busted a cartel kingpin while busting a small-town Southern Baptist preacher. Fincher holds a pastoral-studies degree from Oklahoma Baptist University and a master’s in biblical studies from Liberty University. In the real world that meant he was a small-town Baptist minister in the Kiamichi Mountains, a high-school history teacher around Talihina, a Little League coach, and a kitchen-table FFL running Triple G Firearms out of a shed behind his house in Tuskahoma, Oklahoma — population about 151 souls.
He got the license in 2020 after ATF itself told him that if he kept doing gun-show business he needed the paper. Then Biden’s zero-tolerance era arrived, inspectors dinged him for clerical nonsense on a 4473, and on June 16, 2023, a dozen agents in tactical gear poured out of seven vehicles with AR-15s while he and his 13-year-old son were packing for the Tulsa gun show. They cuffed him on his own deck in front of the boy, physically assaulted him until he “voluntarily” signed away the FFL — they had the forms ready in triplicate — and hauled off more than fifty of his personal guns, including a mint pre-ban Polytech underfolder. On the way out they told him to warn every other local FFL they were coming for them next.
The federal case they finally hung on him was sixty rounds of Sig Sauer .40 S&W sold to a confidential informant they said he had reason to believe was a felon. Oklahoma does not even require a background check to sell ammunition. He pleaded guilty in May 2024, drew three years of probation, lost the teaching job, and became a felon over a box of pistol ammo. State Rep. JJ Humphrey, a former cop, spent a year calling it one of the most unjust ATF abuses he had seen in three decades, and petitioned the Trump White House to intervene. Friday, the President did. If you sit in a pew anywhere between Sparks and southeastern Georgia and you still think this was about public safety, you were not paying attention. They made an example out of a Baptist pastor so the rest of the Christian gun-owning population would get the hint. The pardon is the message of justice coming back the other way. See Lee Williams’s original raid writeup and the Eastern District of Oklahoma’s own sentencing release if you want it in the government’s words.
Sit with the suppressor half of that list for a minute. The President of the United States just pardoned men whose entire “crime” was possessing or making an unregistered silencer. That is not a vibes-based press release. That is the executive branch saying these prosecutions were a misuse of federal power. Pair it with Jensen v. ATF, the Northern District of Texas case consolidated with Silencer Shop Foundation v. ATF. On August 5, Judge James Wesley Hendrix held that once Congress zeroed the making and transfer taxes on suppressors, short-barreled rifles, short-barreled shotguns, and AOWs, the leftover registration scheme lost its constitutional footing. The seven-day stay expired August 13. The government did not seek an emergency stay. As of this writing, it has not appealed. The sixty-day clock runs to October 5. Until somebody at Main Justice files a notice, the injunction is live for the covered plaintiffs, members, and customers.
A pardon for unregistered-silencer convictions plus a district-court knockout of the registration scheme that the Department has so far declined to sprint toward the Fifth Circuit to save is not ambiguous. It is the government climbing down from the NFA’s suppressor hill. Second Amendment Radicals should treat that as the signal it is, not as an invitation to get cute with advice-column hypotheticals. Talk to a lawyer who actually does this work before you do anything irreversible. Then smile at the direction of travel.
Larry Vickers Walks
While that was landing, Larry Allen Vickers’s case finally came off the calendar.
If you have ever run an HK416, or it's semi-auto cousin, the MR556, watched a Vickers Tactical video, handled a Vickers sling, or read a Vickers Guide, you already know the résumé. Twenty years in Army Special Operations, the last fifteen in 1st SFOD-Delta. Operation Acid Gambit in Panama. Desert Storm. Instructor for more new Delta shooters than just about anybody of that era. After he hung up the uniform, he became one of the few people Heckler & Koch actually listened to. He was the Army-side point man when Delta and HK built the 416 — short-stroke piston, M4 controls, the carbine that went to the rest of JSOC, to DEVGRU, and eventually into the compound in Abbottabad. He will tell you that himself. He should. That rifle is one of the few industry stories that is not marketing copy.
The criminal case was the ugly side of victimless crime legislation rearing it's head. As if there's a "pretty" side? In October 2023, Vickers pleaded guilty in the District of Maryland to conspiracy to interfere with government functions and violate federal firearms law, and to conspiracy to violate IEEPA and the Ukraine-/Russia-related sanctions regime tied to JSC Kalashnikov Concern. The government’s theory on the guns side was the “law letter” racket: Form 6 importations and demonstration samples supposedly destined for tiny departments that were never going to buy strange foreign rifles, with some of the hardware ending up in personal collections. On the sanctions side, the pitch was an “American Kalashnikov” project that was not supposed to be happening with a sanctioned Russian manufacturer.
He was staring at a five-year max on the firearms conspiracy and a twenty-year max on the sanctions conspiracy. On September 3, 2026, Judge Julie R. Rubin sentenced him to one year of probation on each count of the superseding information, concurrent, a $500 fine, and a $200 special assessment. The original indictment counts were dismissed. That is not “got away with it.” It is also not twenty-five years. For a high-profile guilty plea that the Biden DOJ billed as a machinegun-and-sanctions conspiracy, probation is a light landing.
A federal felony even with probation as a penalty still puts him in 922(g) prohibited-possessor territory. Completing probation does not magically get him off of the NICS index. What it does do is put him in position to petition. The Trump DOJ has actually stood up the 18 U.S.C. § 925(c) restoration process again after a thirty-year appropriations freeze, and it now runs through the Office of the Pardon Attorney instead of ATF. A man who just drew probation instead of a cell is exactly the kind of file that process was rebuilt to look at. Whether that petition succeeds is for a later chapter. The fact that the chapter exists at all is new.
Vickers is not Tate. Tate got framed with a science-fair RPG-looking toy. Vickers pleaded to a paperwork-and-sanctions conspiracy. Those are different moral universes and you should not mash them together just because both involve ATF letterhead. What they share is the temperature of the room. A few years ago this is the kind of case that ends with a perch in a federal camp and a press release about “illegal machineguns", "assault weapons", "gun safety" and probably a quote from some random Everytown menstrual blowhard about "the children". This month it ended with probation and a path to ask for the rights back.
What This Week Actually Means
Put the three threads on the same table.
The Solicitor General of the United States filed against assault-weapons bans in the cases that will decide whether AR-15s are protected Arms. Sheriffs and California peace officers told the Court that those bans make policing exponentially more dangerous, not better. GOA, SAF, the states, and a small army of amici built the record. The President pardoned men the last ATF used as examples, including men whose entire offense was an unregistered fancy muffler. The Department has, so far, left Jensen standing. A famous Delta gun guy who pleaded guilty walked with probation and a path to get his business back on track.
That is not a random news cycle. That is an executive branch signaling, in the three languages it actually speaks — Supreme Court briefs, clemency warrants, and charging decisions — that the Second Amendment is no longer the amendment they hide behind the plants when company comes over.
Is it permanent? No. A later administration can try to stuff the genie back in the bottle. October 5 is still on the calendar for Jensen. December 2 is still on the calendar for Viramontes. Oral arguments can get weird. Opinions can get weirder. Anybody selling you a guaranteed 9-0 decision in SCOTUS is drawing ragebait.
But direction of travel matters. For four years the operating theory in parts of DOJ and ATF was that if they squinted hard enough at a solvent trap, an inert launcher, or a Kansas statute, they could turn a regular guy (and dogs) into a headline or an obituary. Friday’s pardons are the President calling that theory what it was - nonsense. The United States brief in Viramontes is the Solicitor General declining to pretend an AR-15 is a machine gun with extra steps. Jensen sitting un-appealed is the Department declining to die on the $0-tax registry hill. Vickers drawing probation is a sentencing court reading the room. Could it be Trump playing some late-season midterm electioneering? Of course it is. It probably is. But when it comes to 2A, you don't look a gift horse in the mouth. Trump wants the GOP to grab every little niche advantage it can going into November, and it's a spinning-plates act on the big issues like Iran - not so much with 2A where you are either with us, or against us.
And yes, it is difficult not to notice the timing relative to Bondi’s exit. Her shop built some of the institutional plumbing — the 2A task force talk, the Civil Rights Division experiments — and then spent a suspicious amount of energy defending the NFA like it was still 1934 and the tax stamp still meant something. The 2A world spent a year yelling that you cannot be the most pro-gun Attorney General in history and the last line of defense for a dead tax (and the author of Florida's Red Flag laws) at the same time. Then she was sent off to the private sector, Blanche took the wheel, Sauer put the United States on Viramontes’s side, the pardon pen came out on Labor Day weekend, and the NFA injunction was left swinging in the Texas wind.
Correlation is not always causation. Sometimes the raccoon just leaves when you stop feeding it.
Second Amendment Radicals already know the rest of the assignment. Do not outsource your security to a non-binding response time. Do not outsource your rights to a mood in Washington. Read the briefs. Support the people who filed them. Remember Tate’s name the next time an ATF “expert” wants to build a gimcrack gun in a lab and claim you did it. And when December 2 gets here, watch the Court. The cops already told them the truth. The Solicitor General already picked a side. The pardon files are already signed. The Court has their signal.
note: I wrote this with the aid of Grok. Let me know what you think. With Grok I can output faster, but it may not seem like "me" as much. Without Grok, you get "me" but slower.
Get Yourself A Gun And Learn It
This is a firearms blog, so we're going to recommend guns. Of course don't forget other things like medical, comms, doing your Area Study, and so on. There's better sources than RGG on those topics, but for firepower, we have you covered.
Ideally you'll at least want either a basic rifle, i.e. an AR-15, or a pistol, i.e. a GLOCK 19, to start. Both are exceedingly common firearms with plenty of accessories, spare parts, training, and support. However, in some restricted areas, both an AR and a GLOCK are hard to get easily, and you may have to settle for a shotgun for quickly arming yourself. It beats a sharp stick. Note, the in-house counsel wants to remind you that we're talking the legal acquisition of guns here. We're still working on abolishing gun control, and we don't want you in jail. Unfortunately you'll have to play ball in this regard. But anyways, here are some basic suggestions for getting armed.
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| Radical Firearms RF00028 AR-15 | $469 | Buy Now! |
| GLOCK 19 Gen6 9mm Pistol | $620 | Buy Now! |
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Learn how to make guns, as well.
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