I said that my brain was mostly dead. I couldn’t even copy and paste correctly.
The brain is mostly dead. I marked this article back in December 2023 for reading and writing about.
When it comes to the Second Amendment, there are at least four primary ancillary rights that arise from the plain text:
the right to train with firearms
the right to purchase firearms
the right to purchase firearmsthe right to make firearms
and the right to acquire ammunition
To illustrate, one of the freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment’s text is the right of free speech. But that right also protects a host of other ancillary rights such as the right to paper and ink, the right to print and sell newspapers, and the right of access to the public square (or social media). Similarly, the U.S. Supreme Court has found that the right to counsel guaranteed by the Sixth Amendment implies the right to pay for a lawyer, or to have counsel appointed in serious cases for indigents.
Spindle Nose Cap for Southbend 13×5 with 1 7/8 8 TPI thread pitchTen years ago, I purchased a chuck of cast iron 2.25 by about 12 inches. This was to make a spindle thread protector.
Yesterday I completed that thread protector.
This was required to finish the alignment spigot, which is required to mount the backplate to the rotary table, which is required to mount the chuck to the rotary table which is required to hold the mandrel to hold gear blanks, which is required to make gears, which are required to make the Casinator.
See, this is firearms related.
This was the first time I used an internal grooving tool. It was the first time I’ve run the lathe in reverse to do any cutting.
While there were no precision requirements for the thread protector, I still treated it as if I were making a backplate for a chuck to be mounted on the lathe. This gave me practice in measuring bores correctly, and hitting my numbers.
I am going to decide if I coat it in LPS-3 or if I give it a bluing treatment.
When we are dealing with political “stuff”, there are three different things at play.
Rights. A right pre-exists us. Everybody has the right to be armed. Everybody has the right to speak freely. Everybody has the right to seek happiness. These rights are endowed by their Creator
Authority. Authority is permission to exercise some power.
Power. Power is the ability to do something.
As an example, the state has the power to imprison you. They do not have the right to do so. They may have been granted the authority, by The People, to do so.
Our Constitution does not grant us any rights. It does not give any power to the state. It authorizes the state to do some things. As part of that authorization, the state has gathered power to itself.
People are greedy. Anybody who claims we are not is likely lying to you or themselves, or both. Greed is not bad.
I want toys for the safe. I want toys for the shop. I want toys for the house. I want good food. I want good water.
There are 1000s of things I want. There are things that I need.
My greed makes me want to get the things I want.
I need to decide on what is the best way to get the things I want. I could decide to steal these things. This does not have a long term positive outcome.
Because I want, and because I need, I have to find a way to get money. I have decided that the best way for me to get money is to marry well, sell my skills to others, and sell things that I make.
When I am selling things that I make, I need to sell them at a price that will earn me a profit. The size of that profit is set by greed. If the price is too high, I will not be able to sell very many. If the price is too low, I will not be able to make enough profit. I want to find the price that generates enough profit and enough sales to make an overall profit that I’m happy with.
That is greed at work.
Unfortunately, greed also causes people to look for advantages. One of the easiest methods of getting an advantage is to change the rules such that you have some sort of advantage over others.
You are making a widget. You have been making widgets for years. You have a strong customer base and many return customers.
A new player comes into town and starts to manufacture widgets in competition with you. They are not making much headway, as your long-term efforts and excellent product keep people coming to you to purchase.
The new player decides that they need an advantage. They know there are potential safety issues with the widgets that they are making. It is easily mitigated by using a known procedure.
They go to the government and lobby to “Make Widgets Safer.” “Protect The Children From Bad Widgets!”. They get a new regulation passed which requires a compliance report on using the particular procedure in making widgets.
The government is now using a power they may not have the authority to use. Regardless, they do have the power. They have more power than you do.
You now have to hire a person to perform compliance reporting along with compliance testing. Your costs have now gone up to the point where your competitor’s price/quality is closer to yours, and they start to take customers from you.
The question then becomes, by what authority did the state impose that compliance regulation on you?
The state always has the power. When some purple haired whale yells that your penis replacement AR-15 isn’t going to stop the state, they are explicitly saying that the state has more power than you.
Their opinion is that the state should exercise that power to force you to do whatever it is they want you to do.
Save for your retirement? Yep, the state has the power to force that on you.
Pay for illegal aliens to have an education? Yep, the state has the power to force you to do that.
Buy car insurance? Yes, some individual states have forced you to purchase car insurance.
Buy health insurance? In a bill, we had to pass to know what was in it, the state did exactly that, they forced you to buy health insurance.
That is the exercise of power.
Does the state have the authority to do so? That is an entirely different question. You need to look at what the Constitution authorizes the state to do. What you find is that the lawyers have twisted small things to make it look like an authorization.
If you look at the original NFA, it was based on a tax. The state is authorized by Article I, Section 8, Clause 1:
The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States
This is the first of the enumerated authorizations. The state can tax just about anything they want.
But, their authorization to tax “just about anything” was modified in 1791 to exclude taxes on arms. …, the right of The People to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed. The word “infringed” means to “hinder”, thus a tax on keeping or bearing arms is an infringement and unconstitutional.
To conclude, we, The People, have rights and powers. The state has power but no rights.
Our rights are protected by different parts of the Constitution, including the Bill of Rights. The state is authorized by the Constitution to exercise some of its powers.
If the federal government is not authorized to exercise a power, that authorization goes back to the individual states and The People.
Do NOT let anybody claim that the state has “rights”, it does not. It has power. It is either exercising the power under the authority of the Constitution or it is abusing its powers.
The weekend is nearly here! I’m actually looking forward to it.
We’ve had a win out in the Ninth Circuit. Stand-bye to have the merits panel’s opinion stayed and the en banc panel decided for the state.
We are expecting to hear from the Supreme Court on Rahimi in June.
The Supreme Court had conference yesterday, the 16th. In that conference, they discussed a number of 2A cases. I’m keeping an eye on that. What we want to see is cases bound over for another conference.
If they are going to deny the case, they will just do it. If they are not going to hear the case but will hold it pending some other case, it will not be scheduled for another conference.
On the other hand, if they schedule for another conference, that means that multiple law clerks and justices will be taking a hard look at the case to see if there is a good reason to NOT hear it.
We should know that later today or Monday.
I’m pretty sure you are all tired of hearing me talk about shop work. Shop work is part of my health plan. I spend about 12 hours per day sitting. Either in front of my computer or with family or driving. This is not good. I’m currently spending 3 to 6 hours per day in the shop.
This time in the shop is time on my feet. I’m starting the process of recovering the shop from my leftover mess. It is getting better.
Those hours on my feet moving is causing pain in the evenings, but it is the pain I’ve earned.
I’ve noticed several new people commenting. WECLOME! Please tell us a little bit about what you are looking for with GFZ.
The rotary table arrived the other day. Monday the dividing plates arrived.
The plates look great. The package was not so great. Amazon slapped a mailing label on the box and dropped it in the mail. It arrived with pieces missing.
There are supposed to be three screws and a handle/indexing plunger. These were missing.
But, that is ok, there is lots to do before the replacement parts arrive.
The rotary table needs one modification and one change. The worm shaft is keyed for the dial handle. Which is wonderful.
You can’t use a keyed shaft in the adjustment arm. The adjustment arm is a slot and a hole. The hole has a set screw to hold the handle at the right distance from the dividing plate. The slot fits over the worm shaft over two flats. It is held in place by a center screw. The same screw that holds the handle on.
The worm shaft is missing those flats. I will need to mill the flats in place to make it all work correctly.
The dividing plate mounts to a collar with three screws. The collar exists and is held to the elliptic housing with two set screws. The collar has the 0 index as well as a 10-second vernier scale. The collar does not have the three drilled and tapped holes to mount the dividing plates.
I’ve manufactured a replacement collar. I still need to drill and tap the holes for the set screws. Then I’ll drill and tape for the screws that are on the way to hold the dividing plate to the collar.
All good!
Making that collar was interesting. It is the first time I’ve used a sacrificial mandrel, and the first time I’ve used the superglue trick. That’s where you superglue the part to something you can hold on the lathe. When you are done, you heat the part and the superglue will release.
This worked much better than I expected.
I faced off both sides of an 8.0 by 1.25 disk of aluminum for the backing plate. I then made the registration boss. That boss is oversized. Once the backplate is mounted to the rotary table, which is centered, I can mill the registration boss to final dimension on the rotary table, this will maintain concentricity. I.e. the center of the rotary table will be the center of the chuck.
The plate needs to be drilled and counter sinks done to mount to the rotary table.
The rotary table does NOT have drilled and tapped holes. Instead, it has T-Slots. I am making the T-Nut blanks. They need to be cut apart, squared up, and then drilled and tapped 3/8 16. The T-Nut blanks have been tested, and they are a snug sliding fit into the T-Slots of the rotary table.
If I get lucky, I will finish making the backplate today. The only question I still have is the mounting holes for the chuck. I will hit up my local hardware store to buy the 3 screws I need to make it all work.
Hopefully, I will be cutting gears next week.
With the rotary table, some Casinator operations become easier. I’m excited about a productive week, working on the Casinator.
Bruen slapped down the inferior courts that were using interest balancing to deny The People their rights. As Judge VanDyke pointed out, from the time of the Heller opinion, the Ninth Circus court has not found a single regulation to be unconstitutional.
Interest balancing takes place at the time a regulation is passed or ratified. When The People ratified the Second Amendment, and the rest of the Bill of Rights, The People performed interest balancing and the result was the Bill of Rights.
The People, having looked at the Constitution, as passed, decided it wasn’t fully to their liking. They then used the methods of laid out within the Constitution to amend the Constitution.
When the NFA was passed, the state explicitly acknowledges the right of the people to keep and bear arms. They knew that it was unconstitutional to limit The People’s right to keep any arm they wished. To bear any arm they wished.
Instead, they looked to “balance” the authority of the state to tax with the right of The People to keep and bear arms. Since the state had the authority by the constitution, they hoped to finagle the NFA past the courts.
The original district court heard the Miller case and found for the defendant. The NFA was unconstitutional, on its face.
Miller had bad facts. Miller was a bad man who did bad things. The law-abiding citizen would want him imprisoned. The criminals he associated with would want him dead.
At this time, it is strongly believed that Miller was murdered by his criminal associates.
The congressional hearings emphasized that all involved with the NFA knew it was an infringement.
Regardless, the Supreme Court issued their opinion in Miller and we were stuck. This case allowed for more civilian disarmament regulations.
From that point forward, the infringing assholes searched for methods to weasel around the Second Amendment.
This took the form of attempting to transfer the rights protected by the Second Amendment from The People to the state. This worked. They used interest balancing to allow the courts to override the decisions of The People.
Remember, all interest balancing regarding the Second Amendment was completed in 1791 when it was ratified.
The state does not want simple. The more complex the “rules” are, the easier it is for them to create an infringement.
Years ago, I owned an Internet Service Provider. My partner at the beginning wanted to make the rules of conduct. He started listing all the things that people were not allowed to do.
I threw it all away. “Be Good. If you do bad things, we will charge you for cleanup at $75/hour and at our discretion drop you as a customer. If you send SPAM, you will be charged $2000 + $75/hour for cleanup. Final decisions are ours.”
We didn’t have a single person object to the rules. We used the SPAM rule once. Guy got charged $5000. We didn’t get the money, but the credit agencies went after him like mad.
Our Constitution was written the same way. The government is given authority to do some things. If they are not granted that authority by The People, they are not allowed to do that thing.
The first 10 Amendments are also simple. Don’t abridge The People’s right to speak or assemble. Don’t infringe on The People’s right to keep and bear arms.
The state wants to make it complicated.
Bruen said that the inferior court’s two-step method was wrong. That there should be only one step.
The state is attempting to make it a two-step method, again.
Judge Wood in her malice and aforethought wrote an opinion that said something like “Haha! Look at the idiots on the Supreme Court. They said no more two-step processes, and then created a two-step process”
The Supreme Court did not create a two-step process in Heller, nor did they create one in Bruen.
They created a question and a single step.
While I know that many idiot liberals can’t answer simple questions anymore, “What is a woman?”
You can see this in any testimony from a liberal in congress. Listening to Education Secretary Miguel Cardona refuse to answer Representative Bob Good is a perfect example:
The Keep It Simple, Stupid (K.I.S.S.) principle is what should be applied to the question part of Bruen
Does the individual’s conduct implicate the plain text of the Second Amendment?
This is a question, it is not a step. It does not require an expert. It does not require any significant analysis.
I have made the joke observation in the past, “If Brady, Giffords or Everytown is interested in the case, it implicates the Second Amendment.”
That is too simple of a test for our courts. On the other hand, I would love it if the mere fact that an anti-gun group spoke up was enough to clarify that the Second Amendment was implicated.
There are three questions that need to be answered in the affirmative to implicate the plain text of the Second Amendment.
Is it an arm?
Is the individual a member of The People?
Does the individual wish to keep or bear arms?
That is it. If you answer yes to all three, the question is answered. Any honest Judge can answer these three questions.
Once the plain text of the Second Amendment is implicated, the burden shifts to the state, which must demonstrate that the regulation is consistent with this Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation[xCite item=”75DAVPP7″ pos=0]
When answering the question, it is not “is this individual virtuous?” It is, “is this person part of The People?”. It is not about law-abiding, nor is it about how dangerous an arm is. It is not about how common the arm is, nor is it when the arm was invented.
To be very, very, blunt, if somebody wished to carry a nuclear weapon, that is conduct that the Second Amendment’s plain text covers.
The burden then shifts to the government to demonstrate that their infringement is consistent with this Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.
It is unlikely that the courts would overturn a ban on The People keeping and bearing nuclear weapons. They would argue that nuclear weapons are particularly dangerous and that they are not in common use.
So when you hear some moron arguing about the meaning of the plain text, just call them out as stupid, ignorant, and dishonestly malicious.
The following is the dissent of Judge VanDyke in <i>Duncan v. Bonta. It is not a legal argument. He leaves that for his fellow judge, Judge Bumatay.
Judge VanDyke and Judge Bumatay are two of the voices of sanity coming out of the Ninth Circuit court.
This dissent is a justifiable take-down of the actions of the Ninth Circuit court since, well, the 1960s. It was written before Bruen. The observations about the Ninth Circuit continue to be true today, post Bruen.
When this case was GVR from the Supreme Court, the Ninth Circuit punted it back to Judge Benitez, at the district level, I expected a quick response. It was not quick.
Today, while thinking about it, I believe that Judge Benitez was actually playing a waiting game before issuing his ruling.
Everybody knew that the state was going to appeal Judge Benitez’s ruling. The Ninth Circuit’s administrative panel was likely, no highly likely, to grant a stay. We all knew this.
But, and this is a huge but, the case would then be assigned to the merits panel. It is my belief that Judge Benitez was waiting for a favorable merits panel before issuing his opinion.
This is why the Ninth Circus began its razzle-dazzle tap dance, claiming the case was a “come back” to be assigned to the same en banc panel that had ruled against The People originally.
If they had not been able to take it to the en banc panel, we would have had another favorable ruling from a merits panel in the Ninth Circuit.
This is pretty easy reading. There are a few citations, but it is not overly heavy on them. The language is written for The People and not for lawyers.
Enjoy.
I largely agree with Judge Bumatay’s excellent dissent. And to paraphrase James Madison, if judges were angels, nothing further would need be said. But unfortunately, however else it might be described, our court’s Second Amendment jurisprudence can hardly be labeled angelic. Possessed maybe—by a single-minded focus on ensuring that any panel opinions actually enforcing the Second Amendment are quickly reversed. The majority of our court distrusts gun owners and thinks the Second Amendment is a vestigial organ of their living constitution. Those views drive this circuit’s caselaw ignoring the original meaning of the Second Amendment and fully exploiting the discretion inherent in the Supreme Court’s cases to make certain that no government regulation ever fails our laughably “heightened” Second Amendment scrutiny.
This case is par for the course. The majority emphasizes the statistical rarity of law-abiding citizens’ need to fire more than an average of 2.2 shots in self-defense, but glosses over the statistical rarity of the harm that California points to as supporting its magazine ban. Instead of requiring the government to make an actual heightened showing, it heavily weighs the government’s claim that guns holding more than 10 rounds are “dangerous” (of course they are—all guns are) against a self-defense interest that the majority discounts to effectively nothing. Once again, our court flouts the Supreme Court’s exhortation against such “a freestanding ‘interest-balancing’ approach” to the Second
Amendment. District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570, 634 (2008).
I added some nasty pictures of my very messy and dirty shop after the MORE
Yesterday was another cleaning day. I tore the rotary table apart to inspect and clean it.
As expected, there were several areas that were out of sight that needed to be deburred.
Taking it apart was straightforward.
All but one machined surface was nicely done. For a slow speed tool, it is very nice.
That one place was the actual worm. The leading thread, which isn’t in contact with the worm-gear, was buggered to hell and gone, razor sharp and just plain nasty.
A bit of work with a file and that was fixed. The good news is that the shop towel I was using discovered that razor and not my fingers.
I will be redoing parts of the cleaning with some serious degreaser. I wasn’t able to get it entirely clean.
There was nasty grit in places. All the grit has been removed.
I intend to put it back together today. I’ll have to replace one socket head screw because the head stripped while removing the screw. This means I need to find my box of metric socket head screws. It shouldn’t be that difficult.
All said, I’m happy with this purchase.
Tomorrow the dividing plates arrive. I hope that the inner hole matches the shaft they are to go over. If I need to machine a bushing for the two plates, that’s no big deal.
The rotary table is missing the three tapped holes to hold the dividing plates in place.
This is not an issue. The disk where the holes go is a separate casting. It will go in the milling machine with no issues. I’ll either transfer punch the holes or I will do a simple 3 hole pattern using the DRO.
If I was being really cool, I would mount it on the rotary table and drill and tap the holes that way.
P.S. I finished the new chuck key for the old chuck. It looks damn nice. I’m actually proud of my work on it. I might have to polish one handle to make it look a little better, but neither the less, it is pretty. Read More
Take the time to read some quotes from Judge VanDyke. It is worth the time.
The panel first held that the Orders’ 48-day closure of gun shops, ammunition shops, and firing ranges burdened conduct protected by the Second Amendment, based on a historical understanding of the scope of the Second Amendment right.
In assessing the appropriate level of scrutiny, the panel held that the district court erred by determining that Jacobson v. Massachusetts, 197 U.S. 11 (1905), applied to Appellees’ Second Amendment claim. The panel held that Jacobson, which addressed a substantive due process challenge to a state statute requiring smallpox vaccinations, did not apply here because Jacobson did not concern the specific, constitutionally enumerated right at issue, and essentially applied rational basis review. The panel declined to determine whether the Orders were categorically unconstitutional and instead, because the Orders failed to satisfy any level of heightened scrutiny, based its decision on the traditional tiered scrutiny analysis.
— Judge VanDyke
Reversing the district court’s judgment, the panel vacated Steven Duarte’s conviction for violating 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(1), which makes it a crime for any person to possess a firearm if he has been convicted of an offense punishable by imprisonment for a term exceeding one year. On appeal, Duarte challenged his conviction on Second Amendment grounds, which the panel reviewed de novo rather than for plain error because Duarte had good cause for not raising the claim in the district court when United States v. Vongxay, 594 F.3d 1111 (9th Cir. 2010), foreclosed the argument.
The panel held that under New York State Rifle & Pistol Ass’n v. Bruen, 597 U.S. 1 (2022), § 922(g)(1) violates the Second Amendment as applied to Duarte, a non-violent offender who has served his time in prison and reentered society; and that Vongxay, which did not apply the mode of analysis that Bruen later established and now requires courts to perform, is clearly irreconcilable with Bruen.
— Judge Carlos T. Bea, joined by Judge Lawrence VanDyke
I largely agree with Judge Bumatay’s excellent dissent. And to paraphrase James Madison, if judges were angels, nothing further would need be said. But unfortunately, however else it might be described, our court’s Second Amendment jurisprudence can hardly be labeled angelic. Possessed maybe—by a single-minded focus on ensuring that any panel opinions actually enforcing the Second Amendment are quickly reversed. The majority of our court distrusts gun owners and thinks the Second Amendment is a vestigial organ of their living constitution. Those views drive this circuit’s caselaw ignoring the original meaning of the Second Amendment and fully exploiting the discretion inherent in the Supreme Court’s cases to make certain that no government regulation ever fails our laughably “heightened” Second Amendment scrutiny.
&mdash: Judge VanDyke, dissenting
Once again, our court flouts the Supreme Court’s exhortation against such “a freestanding ‘interest-balancing’ approach” to the Second Amendment. District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570, 634 (2008). — Judge VanDyke.
I’ve described before how our circuit’s version of Second Amendment “heightened” scrutiny has no height. It is practically indistinguishable from rational basis review. — Judge VanDyke
Judge Hurwitz has penned a short concurrence respectfully characterizing as inappropriate and hyperbolic my observations regarding how my colleague’s personal views influence our court’s Second Amendment cases. I agree that it is a troubling charge to posit personal views as a driving force behind judicial decision-making, and not one I make lightly. But whatever else it may be, my claim is hardly hyperbolic. Here are the facts: We are a monstrosity of a court exercising jurisdiction over 20% of the U.S. population and almost one-fifth of the states—including states pushing the most aggressive gun-control restrictions in the nation. By my count, we have had at least 50 Second Amendment challenges since Heller—significantly more than any other circuit—all of which we have ultimately denied. In those few instances where a panel of our court has granted Second Amendment relief, we have without fail taken the case en banc to reverse that ruling. This is true regardless of the diverse regulations that have come before us—from storage restrictions to waiting periods to ammunition restrictions to conceal carry bans to open carry bans to magazine capacity prohibitions—the common thread is our court’s ready willingness to bless any restriction related to guns. Respectfully, Judge Hurwitz’s claim that our judges’ personal views about the Second Amendment and guns have not affected our jurisprudence is simply not plausible. Res ipsa loquitur.
— Judge VanDyke
Most of this comes from Judge VanDyke’s dissent in [xCite item=”AMZR6I5Y” pos=0] His dissent is so good, I’m going to grab it, format it, and drop it in an article. It is an easy read. In it, he eviscerates the Ninth Circus.
These are just a few highlights of his frustration with the Ninth.
He is there fighting for our Constitution. He is doing it right. He is making few friends on the Ninth.
He is precisely why the Ninth played so many games to make sure that Duncan was heard en banc and not by a three-judge merits panel.
It is very embarrassing when there is a well reasoned, extremely well argued opinion issued in favor of The People, which the en banc court must then wiggle out of.
By his count, 50 post Heller Second Amendment cases were heard by the Ninth Circuit at this point, and in every one, the Ninth found for the state.
