First, Last, Next: Adam Kraut of the Second Amendment Foundation

Adam Kraut sat down with us at SHOT Show 2026 for an awesome conversation about gun laws, firearms policy, and his work to protect the Second Amendment. Adam is a lawyer, a lifelong shooter, and the Executive Director of the Second Amendment Foundation. We covered the cases SAF is actively fighting, walked through Heller, McDonald, and Bruen in plain English, talked about the post-Big Beautiful Bill litigation around the $0 NFA tax stamp and short-barreled rifles, and got into the lighter stuff too: a tie-dye Glock and two lunatic German Shorthaired Pointers.

The Fight: What SAF Is Working on Right Now

Adam laid out the three biggest issue areas in Second Amendment litigation today.

What arms are protected. Assault-weapons bans and magazine-capacity bans. Who is protected. The 18-to-20-year-old cases are the headline issue, plus several prohibited-person challenges. Where you can carry. All of the post-Bruen sensitive-places litigation working through the courts.

For the suppressor community specifically: after the Big Beautiful Bill dropped the NFA tax stamp to $0, SAF has two active lawsuits challenging the continued inclusion of short-barreled rifles in the NFA, including Silencer Shop and Silencer Shop Foundation’s lawsuit.

Adam’s Prediction for What Comes Next

If the Supreme Court takes an assault-weapons case and rules these are constitutionally protected arms, expect blue states to pivot the way Colorado did when its flat ban looked vulnerable. The move will be permit-to-purchase schemes, training mandates, fingerprinting, fees, and delays. Adam put it at roughly 98 percent chance.

That pattern should look familiar. It is the same playbook that followed Bruen: the Court said you have a right to carry in public, and states responded by declaring nearly everywhere a sensitive place.

Adam Kraut Explaining Bruen

Adam walked through the modern Second Amendment cases in plain English. This is the kind of segment listeners will want to send to their friends. To talk about Bruen you need a little background on other big Second Amendment cases.

Heller (2008). The world of modern Second Amendment litigation really begins here. In 2008, the Supreme Court said it is an individual right, untethered from militia service, and that you have a right to keep arms in the home. It also touched on bearing arms in public, and it established the test that lower courts were supposed to apply when a Second Amendment challenge came in front of them. Because Heller was brought against the District of Columbia, it was a federal case, which meant it did not yet bind the states.

McDonald v. Chicago (2010). Two years later, the Court incorporated the Second Amendment against the states through the 14th Amendment. In plain English: if a state or a city violates the Second Amendment, you can now sue them for it. The right applies across the entire country, not just to the federal government.

Caetano v. Massachusetts (2016). A few years after that, the Court handled a case about stun guns and held that electronic arms are protected too, even though they obviously did not exist at the founding.

Bruen (2022). Then came Bruen, brought against New York, deciding whether you could carry firearms outside the home. The Supreme Court said yes, there is a right to bear arms in public, and it reiterated the test it had laid out in Heller. The catch is what happened between Heller and Bruen: the lower courts more or less invented their own framework, a tiered scrutiny and interest-balancing approach that almost always landed in favor of the government. Bruen slapped that down and made the actual test clear: text of the Second Amendment as informed by the nation’s history and tradition. If the conduct being regulated falls within the words of the Second Amendment, the government has to point to a historical analog for its restriction. Not an exact duplicate, but something genuinely analogous. That single change reopened the entire field of Second Amendment litigation.

First Gun: Remington 870 Express Magnum, 20 Gauge

Adam bought it when he turned 18, from a Dick’s Sporting Goods. As he put it on the show, this was before Dick’s made a different call on firearms. He hid it under his bed. His brother ratted him out. His parents told him to get rid of it. He didn’t. He still has it today.

Adam grew up in a house that wasn’t gun-friendly. He learned to shoot at 12 in Boy Scouts at Camp Horseshoe on a bolt-action Marlin with peep sights, and from that point the grin never left his face. The next year he tried a 12-gauge shotgun, terrified of the kick, and learned two things from the trap-thrower: the kick wasn’t bad, and you have to actually aim.

The bigger story is what happened next. Over about ten years, Adam’s parents went from anti-gun to his dad now carrying daily and being a full supporter of AR-15s and standard-capacity magazines. Adam called it an educational thing. A reminder that the long game on Second Amendment advocacy is family by family.

Last Gun: Glock 19 (Gen 5)

Bought used, shipped to Danger Close for work, then tie-dyed by a buddy. It is his carry gun. He has been carrying it for eight years. Topped with an Aimpoint ACRO P-2 and a SureFire X300U on the bottom.

His buddy Eli also tie-dyed a Glock 17L and a KitchenAid stand mixer. Check out the video for pictures.

Next Gun: Honestly, Nothing Urgent

Adam’s answer is the most relatable thing in the episode. He has plenty of guns, but he only really shoots four of them: his carry Glock 19, a Glock 45 he runs in night matches, an AR that gets used 99 percent of the time, and a Beretta A-300 he takes bird hunting with his German Shorthaired Pointers.

The dogs are characters. One is a velociraptor-grade counter surfer who, as a puppy, pushed a chair to the kitchen table, climbed up, traversed to the breakfast bar, grabbed a loaf of bread, and got off on the other side. The other one finds birds, then walks away looking for the next one before retrieving the first. The two of them are also Adam’s best pitch for running a can: if you do anything with your companion, your best friend, suppressors make it great. Not just because it is a better experience, but because you get to do more, longer, better with them.

If pressed, he would like an SR-25 eventually. A .308 semi-auto with some real distance. He’s not in a hurry.

Where he is really spending mental energy is night vision. He runs DTNVS dual tubes with L3 tubes, takes night classes, and sits on the board of a range that hosts night shoots for up to 30 people. Most of his shooting at this point is at night, which is awesome. His PSA to anyone gatekeeping themselves on night vision: stop. The spec-sheet flexes almost none of it matters in actual use.

Why This Matters: The Work Adam Is Doing for Gun Owners

The throughline of the episode is that the rights our kids and grandkids will inherit are being decided right now, in courtrooms, by a small group of people working cases most gun owners will never hear about until they win or lose. Adam and SAF are squarely in that fight.

Defining what arms are protected by fighting assault-weapons and magazine-capacity bans. Defining who is protected by pushing back on age-based and prohibited-person restrictions. Defining where you can carry by challenging the wave of post-Bruen sensitive-places laws. Working to roll back the NFA with two active suits challenging short-barreled rifles, following the $0 tax stamp. Playing the next move by preparing for the post-victory pivot from outright bans to permit-to-purchase regimes.

The way Adam does it matters too. He fights, but he fights in a way that gets people to listen, talk, and change their minds.

Final Shot

“Be good. Do good.”

Thanks to Adam for the time and for everything he does to protect the things we care about.