By Dave Workman
Editor-in-Chief
Every year has ups and downs, gains and losses, and so it has been with 2025.
A major win came from the U.S. Supreme Court in early June, when the justices voted unanimously to throw out the lawsuit filed by Mexico—and cheered by the gun prohibition lobby and its allies in Congress—against U.S. firearms manufacturers. The ruling was cheered by gun rights organizations including the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, National Rifle Association and National Shooting Sports Foundation. CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb summed it up: “This lawsuit was yet another attempt, this time by a foreign government, to financially drain American firearms manufacturers. It collided with the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, which the CCRKBA was instrumental in helping get passed in 2005, during the second Bush administration. Congress wisely adopted the PLCAA to prevent this kind of junk legal action.”
Democrats in Congress and state legislatures may continue pushing their gun prohibition ideology, but 2025 is ending with embarrassing headlines in Minnesota about massive fraud, and it may spread to other states, and now HUD reportedly is uncovering “billions of dollars” in “questionable payments” under the Biden administration, according to Fox News. If this scandal grows, it may keep the party of gun prohibition too busy in the New Year to stay focused on Second Amendment erosion.
The past year has been one of loss, on an emotional level. The firearms community bade farewell to some big names in 2025, and a list of publications which were considered by some to be the “gold standard” of firearms journalism.
On March 10, handgunning legend John Taffin, an extraordinarily gifted writer and author passed away. A writer whose name became synonymous with both GUNS and American Handgunner magazines, Taffin was a connoisseur of big bore handguns, and something of an authority on the late Elmer Keith, who had been considered the father of long-range handgun shooting.
June saw the passing of veteran gun writer Wiley Clapp, whose byline graced the pages of several different periodicals over his long career. His knowledge and entertaining writing style pleased readers, and his background in the Marine Corps and in law enforcement added the quality of a fellow who knew what he was talking about.
Just over a week later, also in June, John Brewster “J.B.” Hodgdon passed away only six months after he had “fully retired” from the Hodgdon Powder Company. A lifelong resident of Kansas, J.B. and his late brother Bob constituted the second generation of leadership at Hodgdon, where he began working in his youth.
Then in September, yet another giant in the industry and broader shooting fraternity, Bob Nosler, “left the range.” The second generation head of the Nosler bullet company, founded by his father, John Nosler, Bob was widely regarded as one of the nicest fellows in the industry. An accomplished big game hunter and former member of the National Rifle Association Board of Directors, Nosler oversaw the expansion of his company into firearms and ammunition manufacturing.
And just before the year comes to an end, the NRA announced the passing of NRA Museums Director E. Philip “Phil” Schreier III, whose firearms knowledge seemed to know no boundaries.
Two of the most popular firearms periodicals ever closed their print editions. American Handgunner and GUNS magazine still post articles online, but the printed magazines have stopped rolling off the presses. Over the years, both publications earned the respect and loyalty of readers across the country for insight, entertainment, incredible photography, reloading savvy, firearms and self-defense, gun tests and evaluations, and so much more.
Colliding with Facts
Earlier this month, in an Op-Ed published ion TGM and elsewhere, NSSF Senior Vice President and General Counsel Larry Keane lowered the boom on the Giffords gun control group’s “Gun Law Scorecard,” which has claimed for years that states with the strictest gun laws are the safest. Keane explained how the group essentially juggles the data.
Earlier in the year, one of Joe Biden’s last pieces of foolishness was revealed when Willie Frank Peterson, 52, ended up back behind bars two months after Biden commuted his prison sentence on Jan. 17. Peterson was doing time for conspiracy to distribute cocaine, having been imprisoned in September 2023. However, he was arrested in Alabama and charged with two counts of unlawful possession of a controlled substance, one count of marijuana possession, possession of “drug paraphernalia” and “three firearms-related offenses.
Sharing some embarrassment in the leniency department was former Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, when a man to whom he had granted clemency in 2019 landed in jail for allegedly having more than 2,200 grams of powder cocaine, 14.7 grams of rock cocaine and 556 grams of fentanyl in his home when authorities, acting with a warrant, searched the residence. The suspect, identified as Percy Levy, 54, also allegedly had a stolen firearm in his possession. Inslee is an avowed anti-gunner.
In October, anti-gun Democrat Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey had some egg on her face when one of her aides was arrested on drug and gun charges. To the state’s credit, the suspect—identified as LaMar Cook, deputy director of Healey’s Western Massachusetts office—was immediately fired. Healey has spent a career, as attorney general and now governor, eroding the gun rights of Massachusetts citizens.
West Coast gun prohibitionists got a dose of reality when a three-judge panel of the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals issued a unanimous ruling overturning California’s one-gun-per-month law in June. Anti-gunners in Oregon and Washington have had their eyes on such legislation, but this ruling could nail the coffin shut on that scheme.
When New Jersey lawmakers tried to get cute with gun laws by passing legislation making it prohibitively expensive for citizens to obtain gun permits, CCRKBA, the NRA Institute for Legislative Action and New Jersey Firearms Owners Syndicate swung into action. They put together a proposal, now adopted by more than a dozen local municipalities, to refund the local government share of the permit application fee to individual applicants. The state law set the fee at $200, of which $150 goes to local governments. But permit applicants are getting refunds, thanks to the work of the gun groups.
The dust still hasn’t settled in the gun control debate following the Dec. 14 terrorist attack in Australia, where strict gun control laws have been virtually idolized by U.S. anti-gunners who seem to constantly forget the Second Amendment is this country’s constitutional cornerstone. In this country, there can be no “mandatory gun buyback” effort, and after the Bondi Beach slaughter by a father-son team using registered guns, and the deadly shooting at Rhode Island’s Brown University on the same weekend—in a state with strict gun control policies—remarks by CCRKBA’s Alan Gottlieb put the issue in its proper perspective.
“If anything,” Gottlieb said at the time, “this trio of tragedies underscores the fact that it is the evil in some people, not the instrument they use, which is ultimately to blame. Look at the facts. Rhode Island has very strong gun control laws already on the books, and murder has always been against the law, but that didn’t prevent Saturday’s violence. And let’s not overlook the fact that Brown University is a gun-free zone.
“Australia adopted some of the strictest gun control laws in the world following the 1996 Port Arthur mass shooting,” he continued, “but that did not prevent the father-son terrorist attack at Bondi Beach on Sunday. Yet the first thing Prime Minister Anthony Albanese wants to do is add further restrictions, including a limit on the number of firearms Australian citizens may own. Sadly, Australia does not allow its citizens to carry firearms for personal protection, and we saw the result of that foolishness on the Sunday evening news.”
