Anonymous Web Angel(GFZ)

It could be worse, anticipation…

One of the issues that we have in the Second Amendment community, is that infringers cluster. Nobody in Texas is passing bills like Illinois’ PICA, but California and New York did.

These cases get challenged and then flow up the court system to the circuit courts.

When the case finally arrives at the Supreme Court, we are begging for the Supreme Court to grant cert.

But cert is only granted to a limited number of cases per term. The court wants to choose cases that will answer the most issues.

One of the way of knowing that there are issues, is when there is a conflict between circuit courts, called a circuit split.

The way it works is that when somebody in Illinois requests cert saying “sensitive places bans are unconstitutional” the state argues that all the circuit agree. The fact that Texas isn’t as enlightened as Illinois is not relevant. We know that the Fifth Circuit will agree with the 9th, 7th, 2nd, 4th and 3rd.

The People’s argument holds just as much weight. It is just an opinion until there are actual differences.

What this means is that only the infringing states with rogue inferior courts have hard the question of “sensitive places”.

But there is good news for us. There is a sensitive place where we are forbidden from exercising our Second Amendment protected rights. The Post Office.

The FPC, SAF and two people, Pate, and Mandry have filed suit in the Northern District of Texas, Fort Worth Division challenging 18 U.S.C. §930(a) and 39 C.F.R. §232.1(l) which bars firearm carry and storage on property under the control of the Postal Service.

There is a good probability that this case will move more rapidly than others, with the state losing. Once it gets to the Supreme Court, they will be dealing with a circuit split.

The case is [xCite item=”TAK6TRGI” pos=0]

I’ve been working with computers since July 5th, 1976. On that day, I walked into a computer store, the first in the state, and asked for a chance to work with computers.

The owner sat me down at a PolySci z80 computer, loaded BASIC on to it from cassette tape, then told me to have fun with it. He and his partner were having a discussion about me over at the side. I wondered over and asked them how to find the integer value of a number. They gave me the function.

A few minutes later, I had a stream of numbers floating up the screen. I had written my first computer program, a prime number sieve.

This was the first time I had sat down at a computer. It was the first time I had heard of BASIC. It was the first time I had written a computer program.

It worked.

I spent the next few years working with them. Biking, then when I got my license, driving the 5 miles to work every day. I headed off to University to study Computer Science.

The “microcomputers” I learned on were the 8080/z80 and the 6502. When I got to my first Computer Science course, I had to learn to use the punch card machines. Then feed the cards through the reader, wait for the “main frame” to process my job, after which the big printers would spit out my program and results, to be filed for me to pick up.

Whereas the microcomputers could run one program at a time for exactly one person, the owner of the hardware (person controlling the hardware), this main frame could run many programs at the same time. Each program belonged to a different person.

This computer was so powerful, it had multiple CPUs and even had auxiliary processors to help things move faster.

We had one big computer doing the work of many smaller computers. There were no personal computers in the computer science program. When they were finally introduced, they were used as “smart terminals”.

My point in this, is that we made one big computer to do the work of many smaller computers. We gave that one big computer extra as many extras as it could handle.

It had washing machine sized disk drives that held a stack of platters you could take out in a special container. I don’t remember how much they held, but it was likely measured in Megabytes.

When I left to work for the Army, we again had one big computer that many people logged into and did work. The first time I wrote a program on that Cray X/MP I was sure the computer was broken.

After you finish writing your program, you need to compile it. The command to do that is cc test.c Where test.c is the name of the file holding your code.

After the computer compiles your program, it then links your object with system libraries to create a file holding an executable program.

The Cray was so fast that it had finished the compile/link process between the time I pressed “enter” and the time the cursor had scrolled to the next line. I thought it had failed. It hadn’t. It was just that fast.

For the next 15 years, the team I was working with was attempting to create better and better “super computers” by clustering smaller computers together to form distributed parallel processors.

At the same time, we were working with new disk technology, RAID. With RAID, you could combine multiple disk drives to create a larger logical disk drive.

There were three primary technologies involved.

1. Mirrors. Exactly two drives hold exact copies of each other. These increase read performance and redundancy. A single disk failure does not cause the drive to fail, as the copy is good to go.
2. Striping. This takes two or more physical drives and treats them as if each drive contained a “stripe” of the logical drive. This could be used to make logical drives that were larger than any physical drive available.
3. Striping with parity. This takes three or more drives. When a block of data is written, it is written across all but one of the physical drives. The remaining drive holds the parity of each block.

We normally refer to “Striping with Parity” as RAID. In this mode, you can lose any one drive of the array and the remaining drives can be used to reconstruct the missing data.

This means that if you are using a RAID with 7 drives, you are get 6/7 of your disk space available to use.

All of this is very good.

Now we come to the problem, this large drive is attached to exactly one machine. That machine has to share it before other machines can use it, over the network.

You can find these for sale as Network Attached Storage, or NAS.

Mirroring and RAID have a limitation of the drives have to be nearly the same size. If you have 6 1T drives, the last drive has to be a 1T drive as well.

This means you are stuck. If you want to “upgrade” a RAID, you have to create a new RAID with the new drives, transfer all the data to the new drives, then decommission the old drive. Simply put, this is a painful process and not easy. I might have room for 6 drives in the case, I don’t have room for 6 more drives.

The file system which, in my opinion, did the best at this is ZFS. ZFS combined the low level mirroring, striping, and RAID with an actual file system. It was easy to use and had many great characteristics.

Friday, I had 4 ZFS pools of devices on two different computers. Total disk space exceeding 25 TB. The issue was that half of that space wasn’t usable by me. I wanted something that met my requirements of good redundancy and good file sharing and great stability.

I decided to use ceph.

With Ceph, you set up a replication policy. This policy tells ceph how many copies are needed and how distant they need to be from each other.

Consider a ceph cluster with 5 nodes, each node holds 2 Block Storage Devices (osd). If the policy simply has a replication policy of “have 2 copies”. Both copies might be on the same node. If that node fails, you lose your data, until the node is back up.

If you set your policy so that you require 2 copies and those copies are required to be on different nodes, your cluster doesn’t lose access to the data, even if one node goes down.

Ceph is even more powerful than that. It has a hierarchy of groups. Root, datacenter, room, row, pod, PDU, rack, chassis, and host.

A PDU is a power distribution unit. With this level of grouping, you could easily say: I want three copies. I should be able to survive any room in the data center going dark and not lose access to my data.

So where does this put me?

In a stupid place. I had 2 primary home nodes. Those nodes were configured to have one virtual node each, for a total of 4 nodes. This allowed a replication policy of 3 copies. No two on the same OSD. There must be a copy on a different host.

The problem with this, is that I am now burning three times as much space. There are ways with ceph to reduce this, I’ve not done it yet.

Using 3 times as much space meant that I couldn’t move the data I needed to free up the ZFS drives to use else where.

I was recently gifted a computer. That computer now has 4 drives in it. 3 TB, 12 TB, and 12 TB. In 30 minutes, I added 24 TB of space to the cluster, and a new node. I will add two more nodes to make this cluster safe and redundant.

I now have data flowing from ZFS to the new drives. Once that is completed, I will be able to take 12 TB that was part of a ZFS pool and turn them into OSDs.

Life is good, learning is good. Today is rearranging the shop day. I am going to take the CNC router apart, stash the important parts, ditch the things that aren’t worth keeping or turn them into metal for other uses.

This will give me back 1/3 of my shop space, and access to the shelves behind. The new workbench will have a place to go, and I will make progress on organizing my shop. To make it easier to work in.

It depends on what your definition of “is” is. To quote a Democrat.

The ATF has not changed the contents of form 4473. The same questions, the same information, the same warnings are there in the 2023 revision as were in the 2012 revision.

But since I’m not stupid, I can look and see that the form changed. What gives?

What gives is that the ATF rearranged the form. This is supposed to have been to make the form better for the buyer.

On the earlier forms, the first page had your personal identifying information and the questions. The back of the first page had a bit more and was where the information about the firearm was placed.

Yes, people sometimes missed that there was a second page.

This was easily corrected because the FFLs would just tell the customer to finish filling out the form and point them to the second page.

No issues.

But, as my local FFL pointed out, the ATF is not a nice agency. They lie and cheat. It used to be that he would set them up in a back room when they came to do an inspection. One day, he walked in on them taking pictures of 4473s. This is against the law.

He called them on it. Moved them to the main room where he could watch them. No more photos of 4473s.

Each 4473 required the agent to take two pictures and to be able to prove that image 1 was related to image 2. Since that was nearly impossible, the images weren’t as useful to the ATF as they wanted.

The latest changes rearranged the form so that the first page now contains your personal identifying information as well as the firearm(s) identifying information.

The questions now run over from page 1 to page 2.

These new forms can be used to create a registry buy just scanning the front of the form. Or take a picture of it.

Many people, myself included, believe the ATF made the change to make it easier for them to clandestinely create a firearms’ registry.

In [xCite item=”2BWL9AJA” pos=0], the Supreme Court found that the BATFE had exceeded their authority in changing the definition of “machinegun”. The ATF argued that they were just interpreting the law that congress had passed.

This is in keeping with our governmental forms. The three branches of the government are the legislative, executive, and judicial. The legislative branch creates laws, which must be approved by the head of the executive branch. Or the congress must override the president’s veto. The executive branch then implements those laws. The judicial branch defines what the laws actually mean.

In addition, the judicial branch is tasked with evaluating laws that are in conflict to determine which law overrides the other.

So, if the ATF can just make up laws, where did the 4473 come from?

It came from a Democrat, of course. Instead of yelling about “mass shootings” and “school shootings” the cry in the 60s was about assassinations. That is to say, three assassinations. JFK, RFK, and MLK. Because three assholes killed three men, we had our ability to acquire firearms infringed.

In 1968, the Gun Control Act of 1968 was passed. This codified the first full on gun control in the country. The NFA attempted to establish full gun control with full registration and prohibitive taxes on all firearms, but it only did it to machineguns, short barreled shotguns, short barreled rifles, and suppressors.

The reason given was that this would force all the bad guys to buy guns in person.

The 4473 was part of the executive’s implementation of the GCA of 1968. Every question on the 4473 is supported by code, not regulation. If you read §922(g) you will see that it is translated directly into questions in from 4473.

From 1968 through 1993, the process was a buyer went to the FFL, decided what firearm they wanted to buy. Filled out the 4473 and walked out with the firearm.

There was no waiting.

If a bad guy wanted to buy a gun, he could walk in, fill out the 4473 and just lie. This meant that when he decided to use his gun in an illegal way, or was picked up as a felon in possession, they could add on lying to an FFL, lying on the 4473.

This would stop the bad guy from doing bad things.

Since evil people are going to do evil, and criminals will do criminal acts, this didn’t actually work like the gun-control infringers said it would. It didn’t stop anybody. To get a feel of just how bad this is:

This was a former ATF agent. He truly believes that a piece of paper stops people. This is the same sort of person that gets women killed by denying them firearms but giving them a restraining order.

One of Hagar’s friends was murdered by her estranged husband. She had a restraining order against him. This didn’t stop him from killing his wife and children. Nor did taking some of his guns from him. He had decided to commit murder. Why would violating a restraining order slow his rampage down?

I’m sure that when she held up the restraining order, it stopped the bullets he fired at her.

In the 90s, the infringers started screaming that the 4473 wasn’t stopping criminals. They demanded that background checks be done before a person took possession of their firearm.

The original goal was to add waiting periods while the background check was being done. There are states that have excessive waiting periods. I was upset when purchasing some rifles and all pistols required me to wait 21 days. Oh, even though that sounds like three weeks, it is really 4 weeks and 1 day. Because those are business days. This was when I was back in Maryland.

The NRA was the group that got NICs as part of the deal. When some moron tells you that the NRA supported background checks, they didn’t. What they did was fight for a compromise of an instant background check, with the default being you get the firearm.

Some “compromises” they defeated were options where the state had 30 days to reply, but there was no penalty if they took longer. Just ask J. Kb. how the state is perfectly willing to use their incompetence as an excuse to deny you, your Second Amendment protected rights.

So, is form 4473 “Constitutional”?

The answer is yes. This is because the form is a proper implementation of the GCA of 1968.

Is the GCA of 1968, as amended, Constitutional?

Bruen did not answer that question. Bruen told the inferior courts how to properly apply the Heller methodology.

If the individual’s (proposed) conduct implicates the plain text of the Second Amendment, the state has the burden to show representative regulations from this Nation’s historical tradition of firearms regulation.

If we have a hypothetical case, where a person was stopped for a routine traffic stop, and during that stop admitted to smoking a little weed and the cops find he is in possession of a firearm. According to §922(g)(3), he is a prohibited person. He is going to jail. See the Range case.

Did his conduct implicate the plain text of the Second Amendment? Yes. Gun, bear, possess, Second Amendment implicated.

If the Second Amendment is implicated, the state has the burden to prove this Nation’s historical traditions of firearm regulation (in the 1790s) would have prohibited a person who smoked weed (or drank) from keeping or bearing arms.

Since the state cannot do so, §922(g)(3) is Unconstitutional.

Which takes us to lying to an FFL.

If §922(g)(3) is unconstitutional, then lying about being a drug user is not a material fact. Thus, no violation of §922(a)(6).

Which only leaves §924(a)(1)(a). This gives a penalty for making a false statement or representation. This is where I yell IANAL!!!!

My reading says that this could stand.

Regardless, the 4473 is still here. It is being challenged because §922(g) is being challenged.

Final note:

See, the ATF is not changing the form very frequently, OOPS!

It seems like the ATF lies even when they have nothing to lie about.

This is “the bump stock” ban case. It has been kicking around for a while.

In October 2017, there was a mass casuality event in Las Vagas, Nevada. 58 people were killed and over 500 were wounded.

When the police breached the room they believed the shots were coming from, they found a corpse, IIRC. I don’t believe the cops shot him.

They found a number of weapons, some of which were AR15 style semi-automatic rifles. They found magazines and at least one of the rifles was equiped with a bump stock.

President Trump, looking at the make up and the will of the congress told the ATF to ban bump stocks.

One version says that Trump is a traitor to the Second Amendment for doing this. Another says that Trump was playing 5D chess and kept congress from acting.

The ATF promligated a new regulation where they redefined “machinegun” to include semi-automatic firearms equiped with bump stocks as machineguns, and demanded that all owners of bump stocks turn them in within 90 days or face charges.

Mr. Cargill turned over 2 bump stocks to the ATF, under protest, then filed suit challenging the final rule as being in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act.

This is NOT a Second Amendment challenge. This is an Administrative Act challenge. It is a claim that the ATF did not have the authority to exerciese its power the way that they did. The ATF can not change laws nor can they make laws.

The district court found for the ATF. A merits panel of the Fifth Circuit court afrimed. The case was then heard en banc where the Fifth Circuit reversed the merits panel. Note that this was a weak finding.

The Fifth Circuit en banc found that under the rule of lenity, the plaintiff, the good guy, wins.

The rule of lenity is that when the law is ambiguous, The People win.

This means that the case was appealed to the Supreme Court which granted cert and issued their opinion today.

So what did the Supreme Court actually say?

Justice Thomas delivered the opinion of the court. He answered the question put to them. Did the ATF exceed its statutory authority? The Supreme Court said they had.

With this, the ATFs rule is gone. Does this mean that we can now own bump stocks? The answer is a strong “maybe”.

If your state has banned bump stocks, those laws are still good. This opinion only affects the ATF’s Rule. It was found that the ATF did not have the authority to redifine the meaning of “machinegun.”

Even if your state’s government waved the magic pen and banned bump stocks, those bans have to be fought in court. This case is not even good case law for a state level executive ban.

This case is even weaker as case law IF your state’s legislature passed bills that were signed into law banning bump stocks.

On the good news side, Justice Thomas does a great job of describing the trigger group of an AR-15. This makes it absolutely clear that an AR-15 is a semi-automatic firearm. This can be used to slap down the Woods and Easterbrooks of the country that find that AR-15’s aren’t even arms protected by the Second Amendment.

This is why I like originalist Justices. Justice Alito concurered. He wrote that he was agreeing with the majority because that is what the law said. He then goes on to say that if the Congress that defined what a machinegun was knew about devices like bump stocks, they would have considered a bump stock to be a machinegun.

But he says very clearly:

But the biggest take away comes not from the majority opinion, but from the minority dissent.

The dissent gives us “in common use” for semiautomatic rifles and implicitly says that AR-15s are not M-16s

Not a Second Amendment win, but a win for The People.

More later.

We are halfway through the month of begging and have not met our goals.

Please consider purchasing: 1 Month server Hosting, or 1 Month Web Services, or just a A Cup of Coffee.

J.Kb. has some items for sale there in The Shop

Yesterday was the 13th anniversary of the delivery of my machine shop. Wednesday, I was working in the shop and felt like I actually knew what I was doing.

I have a new project, making springs. This is to repair an oil can check valve. I also noticed a need for custom springs in certain objects that are dealing with reciprocating masses and loud noises.

I need to make mandrels and a wire feed device. The choices are: Blondihacks, This Old Tony, simple stupid, and simple not stupid.

My current inclination is to go with simple, not stupid. This is a cylinder with an 1/8 hole down the center almost to the end. The end is cone-shaped. The top of that cone is cut off, exposing the center drilled hole. A V notch is then cut from the end of the hole to the tip of the cone.

This is a standard design. I am going to augment this with a flat cut on the top for alignment purposes and a tensioning screw on the side. It looks like I can use brass or a brass tipped setscrew for this.

We are looking for the Supreme Court to do something on the PICA cases from Illinois soon. We are waiting for the Supreme Court to issue their opinion in Rahimi any day now.

Have a great weekend! Please let us know what you are thinking about, any stories we should have covered, and so forth.

Yesterday, I finished the machining on the toolholder bodies. I need to make 5 adjustment nuts to complete the project. This means there are four toolholders that are good to go, as is.

Comedy of Errors

I do not think there is a single toolholder that is 100% right. There is the one where the tool in the collet grabbed it and chewed on the edges.

There are the three where I cut the dovetail 0.100 too deep.

There is the fact that the adjustment stud is too close to the dove tail. There are the edges where I missed the chamfer and have a ridge where there should be none.

Which takes us to

Hot Bluing

This was so much fun, not.

The formula that I used was 13 cups of water to 4 lbs of sodium hydroxide to 2 lbs of sodium nitrate. Bring to a boil, cook each piece of metal for 30 minutes. Rinse in hot tap water and then coat with WD40 or other oil.

First, I purchased a 5 qt stainless-steel pot to do this in. The stainless-steel handles were attached to the body of the pot with aluminum rivets. This formula will eat aluminum in short order.

Which it did. The pot sprung a leak and the boiling, caustic bluing mixture went everywhere.

I have more cleanup tomorrow to recover from that mess. That stuff started eating my hot plate.

As prep for each piece going in, I first deburred them all, used air to clean them, washed them in the parts washer, used air to dry them. Then Hagar cleaned them with acetone.

I don’t think we got them clean enough. We should have used more acetone and got them 100% oil free.

After they were cleaned, they were hung from spring wire in the pot for 30 minutes. Then rinsed under hot tap water for 2 or 3 minutes.

Finally, they were sprayed down with WD40. I then used a Scotch Bright(gray) to lightly rub the flash rust from them. The results are what you see.

I think they are beautiful. They are not that deep black I was looking for. They have a sort of case-hardened look to them.

Yes, one of them is still in the white. I forgot I had three machined, so it wasn’t processed into the pot.

Next time, I will clean each part better. I believe that the aluminum might have reduced the quality of the bluing solution.

We’ve put it all in a jug for use next time. I might have to remake it, making sure not to get any aluminum in the solution.

It is amazing watching aluminum bubbling away…

matter of law

A matter of law, or question of law, is a determination of the applicable law as opposed to a matter of fact. Matter of law is seen in judgments as a matter of law where a judge makes a decision applying the relevant laws to irrefutable evidence.
[xCite item=”MFITNXA9″ pos=0]

Consider the “fruit of the poisoned tree”. Detective Billy-Bob is interrogating Jimmy. He asks Jimmy where the loot is hidden. Jimmy tells him.

At court, the defense argues that Jimmy was not afforded his constitutionally protected rights and the “confession”, the loot, the finding of the loot, and the finding of a body with the loot are all “fruit of the poisoned tree”.

As fruit of the poisoned tree, the evidence should be excluded.

This is not a question put to the jury. This is a question of law, or a matter of law. As a matter of law, it is the court’s responsibility to answer the question.

The court will evaluate the evidence and how it was acquired to determine if it should be excluded from the court.

When Jimmy was picked up, he was carrying a gun without the state’s permission. He is charged under state law of having a canceled weapon without state permission slips.

The defense, Jimmy, files a motion challenging the law requiring state permission slips to carry a gun as a facial challenge. This means that they think the law is unconstitutional in all cases. They argue, in the motion, that under Supreme Court case law, if a law or regulation implicates the plain text of the Second Amendment, the individual conduct is presumptively protected by the Second Amendment.

The lawyers say simply, “It involves a gun. He wants to bear it. That implicates the plain text of the Second Amendment. The state has the burden of showing a tradition of firearms regulations that is in keeping with this Nation’s historical traditions of firearm regulations.” (Sorry for the poor language.)

The court then issues his opinion. He is answering a matter of law. He says to the state, “The plain text is implicated. You now bear the burden to …”

The court then reads the motions, the replies, the counter replies, holds a hearing where the parties present/argue their standpoint.

The court then issues their opinion. If the court says the state failed to meet their burden, the charge is dropped. If the state met their burden, then the charge is kept.

Let’s say the court says that the law is constitutional. At trial, the state will present evidence that Jimmy was in possession of a firearm at a particular time, that he was not issued a permission slip and any other evidence they feel will convince the jury of the facts.

After both parties have presented their arguments, it is the court’s responsibility to tell the jury what facts they need to determine. After the jury has made their determinations of the matter of facts, they will mark their verdict.

So, the jury determines facts, the court determines law.

In the Hunter Bidden cast, I have not looked for the defense challenging Count III on constitutional grounds.