North Carolina’s unemployment system hemorrhaged $47.2 million in fraudulent payments while Roy Cooper held the governor’s mansion, and the state auditor’s report makes clear that the safeguards were either absent or ignored. The money flowed to ineligible recipients—including illegal aliens—during the height of pandemic-era expansions that Cooper championed, and only a sliver has been clawed back. That same administration simultaneously pushed aggressive gun-control measures, from red-flag laws to magazine restrictions, while the very bureaucracy tasked with protecting taxpayer dollars was busy writing checks to people who had no legal right to them. The contrast is stark: Cooper’s team could not—or would not—verify basic eligibility for unemployment benefits, yet expected law-abiding gun owners to submit to new layers of bureaucratic scrutiny every time they exercised a constitutional right.

For the 2A community the lesson is straightforward. When government proves incapable of running even a straightforward benefits program without massive leakage, it has zero credibility demanding still more control over firearms. Every dollar lost to fraud is a dollar that could have funded enforcement against real criminals rather than new paperwork hurdles for legal owners. Cooper’s Senate bid now rests on voters forgetting that his watch produced both fiscal negligence and anti-gun activism; the auditor’s numbers make that amnesia harder to sustain. If North Carolinians want competent stewardship of public resources and consistent respect for constitutional rights, the choice between an administration defined by waste and one committed to both fiscal discipline and the Second Amendment could not be clearer.