Sean A. Brady spends time unpacking the big court case wrapping up next door in Illinois – Barnett v. Raoul – an “assault weapons ban” and much worse… Listen in to understand the case and the impact. We’ve had a case of our own – Monroe County v. IFC – that was a wild ride as many of you should remember. Also, as a born and raised California boy, he’s got a special understanding of Kamala Harris. Listen in and enjoy!
The 2024 IFC-PAC State Legislative Endorsements are the focus for this week’s blog. With the election in just over 30 days, and early voting in Iowa starting October 16th, we will skip the news this week. I’m sorry that as a bi-partisan organization, unlike in years past, we do not have a single Democrat Party member or candidate that has earned our support.
*To also see NRA Ratings, click on this link to the IFC-PAC website.
| NAME | CHAMBER | DISTRICT | INCUMBENT | PARTY | IFC-PAC ENDORSEMENT |
| Tim Kraayenbrink | Senate | 4 | Yes | R | Yes |
| Jason Schultz | Senate | 6 | Yes | R | Yes |
| Mark Costello | Senate | 8 | Yes | R | Yes |
| Dan Dawson | Senate | 10 | Yes | R | Yes |
| Amy Sinclair | Senate | 12 | Yes | R | Yes |
| Mark Hanson | Senate | 14 | No | R | Yes |
| Mike Pike | Senate | 20 | No | R | Yes |
| Brad Zaun | Senate | 22 | Yes | R | Yes |
| Jesse Green | Senate | 24 | Yes | R | Yes |
| Kara Warme | Senate | 26 | No | R | Yes |
| Dennis Guth | Senate | 28 | Yes | R | Yes |
| Doug Campbell | Senate | 30 | No | R | Yes |
| Mike Klimesh | Senate | 32 | Yes | R | Yes |
| Dan Zumbach | Senate | 34 | Yes | R | Yes |
| Dave Sires | Senate | 38 | No | R | Yes |
| Charlie McClintock | Senate | 42 | Yes | R | Yes |
| Adrian Dickey | Senate | 44 | Yes | R | Yes |
| Dawn Driscoll | Senate | 46 | Yes | R | Yes |
| Mark Lofgren | Senate | 48 | Yes | R | Yes |
| Jeff Reichman | Senate | 50 | Yes | R | Yes |
| Robert Henderson | House | 2 | Yes | R | Yes |
| Thomas Jeneary | House | 3 | Yes | R | Yes |
| Skyler Wheeler | House | 4 | Yes | R | Yes |
| Zachary Dieken | House | 5 | Yes | R | Yes |
| Megan Jones | House | 6 | Yes | R | Yes |
| Ann Meyer | House | 8 | Yes | R | Yes |
| Henry Stone | House | 9 | Yes | R | Yes |
| John Wills | House | 10 | Yes | R | Yes |
| Craig Williams | House | 11 | No | R | Yes |
| Steven Holt | House | 12 | Yes | R | Yes |
| Jacob Bossman | House | 14 | Yes | R | Yes |
| Matt Windschitl | House | 15 | Yes | R | Yes |
| David Sieck | House | 16 | Yes | R | Yes |
| Devon Wood | House | 17 | Yes | R | Yes |
| Thomas Moore | House | 18 | Yes | R | Yes |
| Brent Siegrist | House | 19 | Yes | R | Yes |
| Brooke Boden | House | 21 | Yes | R | Yes |
| Samantha Fett | House | 22 | No | R | Yes |
| Ray Sorensen | House | 23 | Yes | R | Yes |
| Sam Wengryn | House | 24 | No | R | Yes |
| Hans Wilz | House | 25 | Yes | R | Yes |
| Austin Harris | House | 26 | Yes | R | Yes |
| Oliver Bardwell | House | 27 | No | R | Yes |
| David Young | House | 28 | Yes | R | Yes |
| Barb McCulla | House | 37 | Yes | R | Yes |
| John Dunwell | House | 38 | Yes | R | Yes |
| Bill Gustoff | House | 40 | Yes | R | Yes |
| Ryan Weldon | House | 41 | No | R | Yes |
| Eddie Andrews | House | 43 | Yes | R | Yes |
| Dan Gehlback | House | 46 | Yes | R | Yes |
| Carter Nordman | House | 47 | Yes | R | Yes |
| Brett Barker | House | 51 | No | R | Yes |
| Dean Fisher | House | 53 | Yes | R | Yes |
| Joshua Meggers | House | 54 | Yes | R | Yes |
| Shannon Latham | House | 55 | Yes | R | Yes |
| Mark Thompson | House | 56 | Yes | R | Yes |
| Pat Grassley | House | 57 | Yes | R | Yes |
| Charley Thomson | House | 58 | Yes | R | Yes |
| Jane Bloomingdale | House | 60 | Yes | R | Yes |
| Michael Bergan | House | 63 | Yes | R | Yes |
| Jason Gearhart | House | 64 | No | R | Yes |
| Shannon Lundgren | House | 65 | Yes | R | Yes |
| Steven Bradley | House | 66 | Yes | R | Yes |
| Craig Johnson | House | 67 | Yes | R | Yes |
| Chad Ingels | House | 68 | Yes | R | Yes |
| Tom Determann | House | 69 | Yes | R | Yes |
| Jennifer Smith | House | 72 | No | R | Yes |
| Derek Wulf | House | 76 | Yes | R | Yes |
| Bobby Kaufmann | House | 82 | Yes | R | Yes |
| Cindy Golding | House | 83 | Yes | R | Yes |
| Thomas Gerhold | House | 84 | Yes | R | Yes |
| Jeff Shipley | House | 87 | Yes | R | Yes |
| Helena Hayes | House | 88 | Yes | R | Yes |
| Heather Hora | House | 92 | Yes | R | Yes |
| Taylor Collins | House | 95 | Yes | R | Yes |
| Mark Cisneros | House | 96 | Yes | R | Yes |
| Martin Graber | House | 100 | Yes | R | Yes |
Look into your county and city officials’ records and stances on 2A issues and vote accordingly. They are the party’s farm teams. We encourage you to bank your vote early this year so that the candidates can concentrate their efforts on those who have not yet voted.
Please stay Ready at All Times, and help us defend all of Iowa’s rights by donating to IFC-PAC today. Those small recurring monthly donations of $10, $25, or $100 make a huge difference in our ability to get the message of freedom out there.
Shoot Straight, Speak The Truth, and Never Surrender Our Liberties.
Dave Funk
Member, Board of Directors
Iowa Firearms Coalition
No Madam Vice-President, you can’t just do that — together with other musings from this week. Here we go folks! Hold onto your hats. Remember Joe Biden’s dumb-ass statement years ago that ‘Jill should just point the shotgun out the back door and fire a shot off if she feels threatened’? Well, that statement has just been topped by Heel’s-up-Harris!
The Babylon Bee ran a parody piece this week entitled “Oprah Releases Moving 1-Hour Special On Dangers Of Alcohol Abuse”. The Bee parody highlighted Heel’s-Up’s actual (botched) one-hour interview with The Oprah. During that interview, the sitting Vice-President stated, “If somebody breaks into my house, they’re getting shot,”. Without getting into the finer details about self-defense use of force, Castle Doctrine, or Stand Your Ground laws here, most adults understand that there are limits to the use of deadly force in our society. You would think a former prosecutor would.
It’s pretty clear that the VP just made the argument that she, like most Americans, has guns for self-defense. The old German word Zeitgeist comes to mind. Its meaning is the general intellectual, moral, and cultural climate of an era. When both Harris and her totalitarian governor running mate are, or claim to be, gun owners, it becomes much harder to argue that the rest of us minions should not be. Kudos to Mark W. Smith at The Four Boxes Diner for this Zeitgeist reference.
AmmoLand.com senior editor F. Reihl wrote a great piece this week about recent history. He wondered aloud how things may have come out differently if Blacks in both East St. Louis and Tulsa had been armed during the race riots of 1917 and 1921. To quote Reihl’s opening paragraph:
The federal trial challenging Illinois’ gun and magazine ban took a poignant turn as U.S. District Judge Stephen McGlynn reflected on the tragic history of racial violence, questioning how events like the 1917 East St. Louis race riots and the 1921 Tulsa massacre might have unfolded differently if Black victims had access to the types of firearms now banned under the state’s Protect Illinois Communities Act.
I’d encourage you to read the entire article referenced above. It is about the litigation surrounding the 2023 law in Illinois that:
Based on current case law (Heller & Bruen), the Illinois law is clearly unconstitutional. Never forget that gun control in America has its racist roots in the post-Civil War Jim Crow South and the Democratic Party (whose military arm was the KKK). But then, world history is rife with examples of racism being the motivation for a monopoly on power by every despotic government.
You have heard me say before that we cannot survive as a nation with these loony toons dangerous
quacks in power. Now Governor “Tampon Tim” Waltz of Minnesota, agrees with me: He said at a rally the other day; “We can’t afford four more years of this!”
As Donald J Trump said as he stood up after he was shot: “Fight, Fight, Fight”.
Please stay Ready at All Times, and help us defend all of Iowa’s rights by donating to IFC-PAC today. Those small recurring monthly donations of $10, $25, or $100 make a huge difference in our ability to get the message of freedom out there.
Shoot Straight, Speak The Truth, and Never Surrender Our Liberties.
Dave Funk
Member, Board of Directors
Iowa Firearms Coalition
Kamala Harris lies during the debate – and it reached new lows. Like many Americans, I watched the Presidential Debate last week. I’m not going to get into the whole event here. But, I do want to touch on two major lies that should disqualify anyone for life in public office, let alone the Office of the President of the United States.
This claim is a clear case of gaslighting. I have previously covered how the FBI has under-reported crime, during the last 3.5 years of the Biden Administration. Dr. John Lott published a piece last week debunking that lie. From Dr. Lott:
“It’s no accident that violent crime is near a record 50-year low,” President Biden claimed.
In fact, the opposite is true: between 2016 and 2020, violent crime fell by 17% under Trump and soared by 43% under Biden between 2020 and 2022. Even if you take the starting period for Biden as 2019 because the numbers may have been artificially depressed during COVID, violent crime rose by 12%. Using 2019 as the end-point for Trump would imply a 6.6% increase over 2016, about half the increase under Biden. The problem is people don’t understand the difference between the number of crimes reported to police and the total number of crimes. However, as we have pointed out, there are problems with the FBI’s measure of reported crimes (see here, here, and here).
There are two measures of crime. The FBI’s NIBRS counts the number of crimes reported to police yearly. The Bureau of Justice Statistics uses its National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) to ask about 240,000 people each year whether they have been victims of crime, to measure reported and unreported crime. Since 2020, these two measures have been highly negatively correlated. The FBI has been finding fewer instances of crime, but people are simultaneously answering in greater numbers that they have been victims.”
As a Reserve Police Officer here in Iowa, I’m well familiar with the FBI’s NIBRS crime reporting system. I can also tell you that not all jurisdictions use it, or even uniformly report crime. Guess what? The greatest number of places that do not report, are Democrat-controlled cities and states like New York and Chicago among many others. When it’s this easy to point out the lies of the left, how can you ever trust the liberals?
Heels-Up Harris stated during the debates: 
“As of today, there is not one member of the United States military who is in active duty in a combat zone, in any war zone around the world for the first time this century.”
Well, someone should tell the DOD payroll department to start withholding income taxes from the thousands of US Military people in combat zones around the world.
But the best fact check of all came from this small group of troops watching the debate last Tuesday night and this video says it all:
https://x.com/bonchieredstate/status/1834921553982607522
We cannot survive as a nation with these loony toons dangerous quacks in power. Please get out and help pro-freedom candidates across Iowa and America today!
Please stay Ready at All Times, and help us defend all of Iowa’s rights by donating to IFC-PAC today. Those small recurring monthly donations of $10, $25, or $100 make a huge difference in our ability to get the message of freedom out there.
Shoot Straight, Speak The Truth, and Never Surrender Our Liberties.
Dave Funk
Member, Board of Directors
BATNA — and are illegals part of the people as defined by the US Constitution? Let’s touch on these two issues in this week’s 2A blog.
Mr. Tom H. Hastings, is the director of PeaceVoice, and the coordinator of conflict resolution BA/BS degree programs and certificates at Portland State University. He recently wrote a ridiculous article in the Lockport Journal:
“…So, back to gun control vs. gun rights. My choice of BATNA would be, ‘Look, gun rights people, we want to negotiate common sense regulations with you. However, literally every time we pass such measures at the local or state level, you work to overcome the will of the people by challenging those commonsense measures in court, with your lawsuits, and it’s all based on the Second Amendment.
No other country has anything like the Second Amendment and other countries that have dealt with this issue have passed commonsense restrictions, such as the assault weapon ban in Australia virtually immediately after a mass shooting there.
So we have a best alternative to a negotiated agreement. Our BATNA is that we are going to stop all other gun control work and focus all our resources on a campaign to repeal the Second Amendment. We have a template for that; the amendment outlawing alcoholic beverages was passed and a decade later that Amendment was repealed. We are either going to get your commitment to allow our democratically produced local and state laws honored or we will end our negotiations and begin a massive campaign to overturn the Second Amendment’…”
As written in the 1990’s book “Getting To Yes”, BATNA is the “best alternative to a negotiated agreement”. Well, when dealing with the dangerous quacks like Mr. Hastings on the anti-gun left, it’s readily apparent that they have not thought through where they are going with their demand to repeal the Second Amendment and disarm the American people. Even if somehow the Second Amendment was repealed, it does not remove your right to defend your life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness.
Dangerous Quacks are just like Hamas in Gaza: you can’t negotiate with people who want you dead. To soyboy Mr. Hasting’s I say; “Come and Take Them”.
The simple answer is NO! Mark W. Smith over at the Four Boxes Diner gives a great explanation of a case out of the US 5th Circuit Court of Appeals clearly explaining this issue and referenced not just the Heller and Bruen cases, but also the Verdugo case. 
A burglar does not become a part of your family by simply breaking into your home and sitting on the living room couch. It’s the same with illegals presently in our country. You can watch Mr. Smith’s explanation in this short YouTube video here.
We as 2A advocates need to fight like hell this election season to ensure “Heels-Up” Harris and valor-stealing Walz do not get elected to the White House come November.
Please stay Ready at All Times, and help us defend all of Iowa’s rights by donating to IFC-PAC today. Those small recurring monthly donations of $10, $25, or $100 make a huge difference in our ability to get the message of freedom out there.
Shoot Straight, Speak The Truth, and Never Surrender Our Liberties.
Dave Funk
Member, Board of Directors
Iowa Firearms Coalition
Yes, you do need standard capacity magazines and not artificially low limits (like those shown above). You cannot count on only needing five or ten rounds. If you watched the news last week, two stories should provide all of the proof you need to slap back the anti-self-defense dangerous quacks.
First out of Aurora, Colorado is a video of armed Venezuelan gang members taking over multiple apartment complexes. This is exactly why Americans need modern sporting rifles:
https://www.foxnews.com/video/6361171704112
And, there is this incredible video out of Staten Island, for years considered the safest Borough in New York City. The video illustrates why you need a pistol with at least 15 rounds in its magazine.
I’ll cite two experts for you, with advice on these attacks. The first is Massad Ayoob who I have studied under multiple times. Under the doctrine of disparate force as explained by Mass here, when you’re outnumbered or facing younger, stronger, and violent felons, lethal force is a legal option.
John Farnam over at AmmoLand.com cites these three lessons:
1) The “illusion of safety”
THE ILLUSION OF SAFETY
This vicious, unprovoked attack took place in the middle of a sunny day, in a “gun-free” school zone, and within a quiet residential area.
Reputation and symbolism (e.g., “safety zones”)
protect no one!
2) “When you leave them alone, they’ll leave you alone” represents a self-deceptive fantasy!These vicious, murderous [possibly illegal-alien] gangs know no limits, do not fear the “authorities,” have no compunction about randomly maiming/murdering anyone they choose, and respect no boundaries (particularly symbolic ones).
Too many honest, decent, productive citizens believe their personal respectability should, and does, magically protect them from harm.
Nonsense, as we see!
3) “Retreat, and they’ll let you go.”
More nonsense!
This victim did his best to disengage and run away. The gang overtook him, chased him down, and physically attacked him, in unison.
Unless you want to be totally defenseless like many in the blue states currently are, we need to boot out the Obama/Biden/Harris regime. We, as 2A advocates, need to fight like hell this election season to ensure “Heels-Up” Harris and valor-stealing Walz do not get elected to the White House come November.
Please stay Ready at All Times, and help us defend all of Iowa’s rights by donating to IFC-PAC today. Those small recurring monthly donations of $10, $25, or $100 make a huge difference in our ability to get the message of freedom out there.
Shoot Straight, Speak The Truth, and Never Surrender Our Liberties.
Dave Funk
Member, Board of Directors
Iowa Firearms Coalition
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