Articles by Herschel Smith

This happens because people don’t get out around feral animals. This could even be remedied by taking your children to farms and ranches.

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Citigroup on Tuesday ended a seven-year-old policy restricting how it provides banking services to firearm manufacturers, sellers and resellers.

The bank launched the policy in March 2018 after a teenage gunman killed 17 people and injured more than a dozen in a mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, on Feb. 14 that year.

Citi said at the time that it would require clients to “adhere to these best practices: (1) they don’t sell firearms to someone who hasn’t passed a background check, (2) they restrict the sale of firearms for individuals under 21 years of age, and (3) they don’t sell bump stocks or high-capacity magazines.”

The bank’s policy applied only to its business clients, ranging from small businesses to Fortune 500-sized companies. It did not restrict how Citi’s personal banking customers used their cards. Citi says it provides banking services to more than 19,000 companies globally.

“As a society, we all know that something needs to change. And as a company, we feel we must do our part,” Citigroup Executive Vice President of Enterprise Services and Public Affairs Ed Skyler said in 2018.

But Skyler says things have changed. “The policy was intended to promote the adoption of best sales practices as prudent risk management and didn’t address the manufacturing of firearms,” he wrote Tuesday in a blog post announcing that Citi “will no longer have a specific policy as it relates to firearms.”

Operation choke point, it was called. And it’s illegal because it interferes with interstate commerce.

When the government creates a banking system and essentially forces everyone to use it for business, and then encourages that system to exclude certain actors, it’s also immoral.

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Federal authorities in Detroit on Tuesday announced charges against a Chinese scholar at the University of Michigan and her boyfriend, a scientific researcher, for allegedly conspiring to smuggle a dangerous biological pathogen into the U.S.—a pathogen capable of damaging agricultural crops and causing illness in humans and livestock.

University of Michigan scholar Yunqing Jian, 33, and her boyfriend, Zunyong Liu, 34, both Chinese citizens, were charged in a criminal complaint with conspiracy, smuggling goods into the U.S., making false statements, and visa fraud, interim Detroit U.S. Attorney Jerome F. Gorgon Jr. announced.

According to the criminal complaint, Jian received Chinese government funding to work on the dangerous pathogen in China. A pathogen is a microorganism or biological agent that can cause disease or illness.

In this case, the pathogen is a fungus called Fusarium graminearum, which can cause “head blight,” a disease that affects wheat, barley, maize, and rice. It is responsible for billions of dollars in economic losses worldwide each year, according to a press release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office. The toxins produced by Fusarium graminearum can also cause vomiting, liver damage, and reproductive defects in humans and livestock.

The criminal complaint alleges that Jian’s boyfriend, Liu, works at a Chinese university where he conducts research on the same pathogen. Authorities allege that he initially lied but later admitted to smuggling Fusarium graminearum into the U.S. through Detroit Metropolitan Airport on July 27, 2024, with the intent of conducting research on it at the University of Michigan laboratory where Jian had been working since 2023.

An FBI affidavit filed Tuesday stated that Liu was interviewed at the airport by Customs and Border Patrol agents, and eventually admitted materials found in his backpack were different strains of the pathogen Fusarium graminearum. He also admitted that he intended to use the U-M lab to conduct research with the biological materials found in his backpack.

Oftentimes, you don’t get to choose your enemies or when you fight them.

In today’s orders list.

A right trampled and ignored – even laughed at.

@dcodrea @Stambo2A @2Aupdates @GunOwners @gunpolicy @2ARenaissance

SCOTUS orders list today. Snope v. Brown denied certiorari.

Cowards and traitors to the constitution, except for Thomas.

— CaptainsJournal (@BrutusMaximus50) June 2, 2025

James asked some hard questions about the settlement, and this is a good video to help you understand what happened.

On the one hand, I understand the position taken by Lawrence. If you’ve invested millions of dollars in R&D, and then lost many more millions in legal costs, it matters to you and your employees what happens. You must ensure that you recoup costs.

On the other hand, they are just taking an awful beating in the comments. I mean, they are getting spanked to the point of blisters that they left Hoffman Super Safety behind. I know there have been some legal wranglings between then, but I also believe that the super safety is a much different design and was around long before RBT.

In any case, suffice it to say that this issue is probably not dead, especially as it pertains to a new administration that may not be as friendly.

We’ve covered it many times before. But here’s a good update on the financial cost of the feral hog problem.

As Congress advances reconciliation negotiations several conservation and animal health programs remain in limbo — including feral swine management initiatives left out of the most recent farm bill extension. At the same time, updated data from the National Feral Swine Damage Management Program (NFSDMP) and the National Wildlife Research Center (NWRC) offers the most comprehensive economic assessment of the significant costs feral hogs impose on U.S. crop and livestock production.

This Market Intel highlights findings from the most comprehensive research to date on feral hog damage, which these new estimates put at over $1.6 billion in annual agricultural losses across just 13 states — covering impacts to livestock, pastureland and six major crops. These updated figures extend far beyond traditional crop losses, capturing broader economic consequences such as land-use changes, infrastructure damage and control costs.

I’ve said before that I don’t believe that government control programs are neither necessary nor effective. Those programs usually focus on catch and entrapment programs run by people who stand to make money by doing it, with the usual wildlife biologist from a local university who will tell you that hunting them scatters the sounder and makes the problem worse.

Feral hogs came to the US with European settlers, and have been on the landscape ever since. They’re the exact same species that humans keep in captivity for meat consumption. But NC Wildlife Biologist Falyn Owens says they’ve spread in the wild a lot more since the 1950s.

“A big part of it is also the intentional transportation and release of pigs for hunting purposes. Pigs being brought from one place to a completely different place so that people have an opportunity to recreationally hunt feral swine,” Owens said.

And that’s a big problem, they say, because hogs are terrible for the environment and farmers alike. They eat everything, chase off other animals, and carry diseases that infect livestock and humans.

“Feral pigs, cause a lot of ecological damage and monetary damage for farmers,” Owens said. “But at the same time, in order to hunt pigs, there have to be pigs there to begin with. So there’s an incentive to have pigs on the landscape in order to hunt them.”

And once they’re on the landscape, it’s challenging to remove them. The Federal government started a USDA program to control feral swine in 2014: Randy Pulley is one of its employees, and he is, more or less, at war with feral hogs in rural North Carolina.

“Hog trapping is it takes a lot of patience, because we don’t want to educate them,” he explained. “Don’t want to catch half the group and educate the other half.”

Educate them, as in unintentionally teach the remaining hogs how to avoid capture. Yes, hogs are that smart.

Pulley uses corral traps on farmers’ properties: big circular cages with guillotine doors. There’s a camera watching them and his phone alerts him whenever something comes near — and he has a dozen or more he monitors each night.

“Say you got 10 pigs, seven go in, but three won’t go won’t go in. They’re just hanging around the outside. You don’t want to drop the door then,” he explained. “What you want to do is keep re-baiting. Keep re-baiting. Maybe put a little bit of corn outside the door, because your goal is to get all 10 in one swipe. So none are educated. Because once you drop that door and a pig outside sees that — they’re very smart. He’s gonna, he’s gonna learn that — it’s ingrained in his mind. You’ll never catch him in a trap again.”

When that door falls, the entire sounder — that’s what a family group of pigs is called — starts sprinting around the corral. Some are even strong enough to lift an edge of the cage, though Pulley said he’d never seen one escape from a trap that way.

Biologists say trapping is the most effective way to take out feral hogs: you can kill the entire group in one go. But Pulley said you need a lot of tools in your toolbox to do the job, particularly because hogs don’t care about the bait in traps during the growing season. Not to mention the educated hogs.

“I have some properties where corral traps, I know they don’t work anymore. I can’t even use a corral trap on that property, because they — the hogs leave. Pigs leave. So you have to adjust some properties. They’re harassed so much using traps. It’s not even a question. It’s just, you know, take them out via firearm,” he said.

Moreover, there aren’t enough trappers or traps to handle the population now. We’ve far exceeded that point in the U.S.

If you want the hogs alive and running loose in order to charge hunters, you’re probably making the problem worse. If you hold the hogs in a hunting preserve, that’s fine. But if your focus is on eradication to save farming, hunting is necessary. Hogs will be around as long as we want them to be around. Otherwise, it’s time to grab your rifle and go hunting.

But be careful. If they are runners they will flee. If they bay up, the boars have tusks that can gore you, and if they hit your femoral artery you’ll probably bleed to death in the bush very quickly. Take sidearms as well as rifles, and be prepared to use all of them.

You see those spots of feral hog populations in the north (North Dakota and Michigan)? They are now acclimated to the cold. They are virtually everywhere now, and the sounders from the north will expand southward and the sounders in the south will expand northward.

For what it’s worth, I have found rounds as small as 6mm ARC effective, but you have to nail them right behind the ear. I’d rather use a .444 Marlin or 45-70.

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Here’s a YT short on the Marlin .444, although I have to say that my .444 doesn’t have problematic feeding like his seems to. Maybe it’s a “Remlin,” although I don’t know if they ever made one after Remington took over.

The Marlin .444 is an absolutely awesome cartridge.

The 30-30 is still a great hunting rifle.

Savage is now making lever action guns, but a quick visit to their web site shows that it’s available only up to 22 WMR.

Via David Codrea, this report.

Officers from the Alabama Department of Conservation and Natural Resources (DCNR) routinely trespass onto private land—without consent, a warrant, or any reason to suspect a hunting violation has occurred—to conduct exploratory searches. They ignore fences, gates, and “no trespassing” signs, treating private land like public property. And all of this is purportedly authorized by an Alabama statute.

The open fields doctrine is an end run around the fourth amendment and everybody knows it. Alabama doesn’t look so hot here, and I continue to be disappointed in that state.

In Pennsylvania too. And in many other states.

David Codrea.

This is where our “gun rights leaders” may have painted us into a corner, by seizing on the criteria of being “in common use at the time” as the standard to determine if a gun ban violates the Second Amendment. It was never intended as a popularity contest.

Since no innovation ever begins “in common use,” a government with the power to do so can ban all new weapon developments from those they would rule, retaining them exclusively for itself. Remember the core purpose of the Second Amendment. To argue the Founders thought sending an outmatched yeomanry to their slaughter would be “necessary to the security of a free State” is insane.

I know that David has had problems with it when Mark Smith uses the “in common use” argument, and properly so, although Mark would say that we need to win the fights we can when we can and tackle the next one using another scheme, or something along those lines.

I wish there was another way to argue this, and in fact, David has suggested it. The government knew that the yeomanry had “weapons of war” and always has and never had a problem with it. I agree, and have pointed out the obvious, to wit, the notion that the founders would have wanted their fellow freedom fighters limited by weapon is ridiculous. Since the founders were the ones who were alive at the time of the BoR, they certainly wouldn’t have read the 2A that way.

I have also pointed out before that Heller – the genesis of the in common use argument – was a weak ruling. This hasn’t won me any friends over the years, but I stand by my position. Citing David Williams, Indiana University Maurer School of Law …

Heller offers a Second Amendment cleaned up so that it can safely be brought into the homes of affluent Washington suburbanites who would never dream of resistance-they have too much sunk into the system–but who might own a gun to protect themselves from the private dangers that, they believe, stalk around their doors at night. Scalia commonly touts his own judicial courage, his willingness to read the Constitution as it stands and let the chips fall where they may. But Heller is noteworthy for its cowardice.

Those are strong words, but he’s right on with every one of them.