Chris Johnson

Third Circut Court Win

Judge Jennifer Mascott now sits on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals. This means that the Third is no longer an agenda-driven leftist playground.

She was confirmed last Week, Trump signed her appointment early this week, and she was sworn in on the evening of the 14th or the morning of the 15th.

And the first case she heard was as a member of the en banc panel, Association of New Jersey Rifle and Pistol Clubs I v. Attorney General New Jersey, 24-2415 (3rd Cir.) This is an Assault Weapons Ban and a Large Capacity Magazine Ban (propaganda terms).

The court was 9-7 last week and is 10-7 this week. This means that it takes to Republican appointed judges to slide over to the dark side to lose this case en banc.

This is a case that is fully briefed; it has been decided at the trial (district) court level the 3-judge merits panel and has now been heard en banc by the Third Circuit.

My guess is that The People will win. The state will decline to appeal. If they were to appeal, it has all the right characteristics to be granted cert. It is fully developed; it will be the cause of a circuit split; it is a ban case that the Justices have said they want to hear.

Rogue Inferior Court Judges

In another set of rulings from rogue judges, a judge in California has decided that Trump can’t fire federal employees until she approves.

The magic is that Trump couldn’t fire people who had been funded by Congress. When the funding ran out, he can fire them. So he did.

Another rogue judge has decided that he gets to decide if Trump can deploy the National Guard. He thinks the opinion of a local police chief holds more weight than the Article II executive, which was granted that power by the Constitution.

Still another Judge ordered the fence protecting the ICE facility in Chicago removed. It was blocking the road, according to the court. ICE declared one side of the building a “no protest zone” so of course that is where they are protesting, screaming about the 1st Amendment (that screaming statement is my guess, not verified).

Home Owner Tribulations

Very little demo involved. If you want demolition pictures, go read Miggy’s Substack.

Our plumbing is the result of additions being added and then new pipes being put in place. At one time the owners of our house ran a daycare facility. One of the reasons our doors open out and not in.

Part of the requirement was to add another bathroom. The floor of that part of the house is nearly two feet lower than the rest of the house.

As they say in the plumbing business, shit flows downhill. Except that the output of the toilet was only 6 inches above the outlet to the sewer system on the other side of the basement. This did not allow for enough slope to carry that shit downhill.

The answer is simple: a pooper shooter. This is a sump with a garbage/ejector pump. The output of that bathroom flows downhill into the sealed sump. When the solid/fluid level gets high enough, the pump fires up. This ejects the contents, violently, up a 2 in PVC pipe into the joists and across the basement to flow down into the sewer system.

Great system, works great. Until the pump fails. That was a $2.5k replacement. The entire system had to be cut out and a new one put in place.

That was 4 or 5 years ago. The next problem we were having is that the output from the kitchen sink was going through copper pipes across the basement one way and then the other to get out to the sewer. Food particles and grease were building up in those pipes and making me flush those pipes every four or five months.

The fix? We had the plumber reroute the sink to the pooper shooter. No problem. Until…

Somebody was pouring grease down the sink. This would flow into the pooper shooter, and it slowly built up a dam around the pump. Then it sealed off the pump inlet.

This allowed the sump to overflow. Yes, it was a gross as you think it was, and it smelled worse than you think.

My son and I spent a less than pleasant day opening each cleanout and making sure there were no blockages. In the end we got a plumber in who emptied the sump, cleaned it out, and made it all good. We called the plumber because the installers had not put the proper joints to allow us to remove the lid of the sump to do the cleanout ourselves.

See above about total replacement.

Which leads us to today’s unpleasantness.

If you remember, my son and I removed every cleanout to do what we could. We put them back. We got them on tight. We thought.

For the last two years we’ve been chasing a “bad smell” It wasn’t all the time. It was only part of the time. We checked for dead animals in the crawl spaces. We checked to make sure the pooper shooter was still shooting. We couldn’t find where the smell was coming from.

I had isolated it to wet weather. I was thinking the vent pipe might be to low. But before I invested in that. I did another check in the basement.

There was a mound of dirt below the last cleanout before the sewer. It was a little damp.

As I was looking at it, a drop of water fell from the cleanout onto the pile.

Our basement gets wet when it rains hard.

During the dry seasons, that drop is slow enough that it dries before the next drop lands. In the wet seasons, it doesn’t.

We had a shit pile in the basement, built from a single drop of water carrying small amounts of solid waste.

And I can’t get the damn cleanout open to clean the threads and reseal it correctly. That’s today’s fun project.

Oh, I love being a home owner.

Holsters

My new holster system from “We The People Holsters” arrived this week. I’ll be at the range testing it out tomorrow. It feels good. It looks good. My only issue is that it doesn’t come standard with the pad to protect my delicate skin.

If you are looking for holsters, they might be worth looking at.

(Of course you are looking for a better holster)

Mantis Laser Academy

This Mantis system uses the laser insert to spot where your shot goes. The the targets are self identifying. There are multiple games that can be done with the different targets.

Push stick, app, laser, and targets all get a giant thumbs up.

The phone holding tripod and phone holder, not so much. My phone in its OtterBox case didn’t fit. Luckily, I have real camera tripods and real phone holders.

The little I did was helpful. I’ll do more when I have a bit of time and now that I have a holster.

Hello, My name is Chris, and I’m a (sugar) addict

My wife’s birthday was recently. She ended up with many pies, which was an acceptable day off the diet. We like our food way too much, and I eat too much if given the chance.

I’ve lost nearly 20 pounds since I went on this diet. Not enough, but a start.

What I can’t do is walk by those sugar things without taking a piece. A cookie, a slice of pie, a slice of cake. I don’t even like the flavor. It leaves my mouth tasting bad. And I feel, mentally, horrible after I do.

Yet I still do it. I can walk past a sugar thing 10, 20 times and leave it. But at some point I give in and eat that sugar thing.

The only thing I don’t do is buy those sugar things and stash them. It isn’t that I crave them so badly that it overcomes my innate laziness; it is that I have difficulty not eating those sugar things when they are available.

Question Of The Week

If you have been listening to regular news reporting, what are some of the subtle ways they twist the narrative?

I’m not talking about the outright lies they tell about Trump, or quoting out of context. There is nothing subtle about that.

It things like the straight reporting that Trump had authorized the CIA to operate in Venezuela because they had emptied their prisons and sent the prisoners into the US.

The statement, as presented here was neutral. The reporter then followed it with, “President Trump has offered no evidence that Venezuela emptied their prisons into the US.”

How to listen

Before we can learn, we need to have an open mind. A mind ready to learn new things. To unlearn old things. To ask questions and evaluate answers.

If we are not willing to question what we think we know, or if we are starting from a set stance, we do not have an open mind.

Having an open mind does not mean a willingness to accept garbage, but it does require us to ask if it is garbage.

Holocaust Denial

Years ago I ran into Holocaust denial for the first time. It was shocking to me because I knew what happened to the Jews and other undesirables during WWII by the Nazis.

How could somebody deny that it happened?

So I asked a simple question: How do I know it happened?

The answer was that my elders told me so. These were my teachers and my history books.

Could they all be wrong?

This was in the early days of the Internet, so it was a little more difficult, but I found a couple of sites documenting why the Holocaust was fake and a few others that were debunking the deniers.

I compared these sites, and the first thing I noticed was citations to external, primary sources. The deniers made many claims, but there were not very many links to back those claims up. On the other hand, the debunkers’ site was full of references to primary sources.

When I did look at the primary sources, I found that my personal evaluation of that evidence matched what the debunkers were saying.

The deniers told me that all those sources were lying to me. But I could see the images. I could examine the images for altercations and to see if they were faked. I didn’t find anything in the primary sources or the debunker sites that even suggested altercations or fabrications.

This was not true of the denier’s site. Their primary sources did not support their conclusions.

The other thing that I quickly spotted was a comparison between ethical, reasonable, modern actions vs. wartime evil operations.

For example, they claimed that the trains could not transport that many people. But they based that on human treatment of the people stuffed into the cars. There was no indication of such human treatment. Those being transported to the extermination camps were stuffed into those cars with no room to move.

There are multiple accounts of people standing next to dead people who couldn’t fall to the ground. They were held up by the crush of humanity around them.

Finally, the deniers made a claim that a sample they stole proved that the levels of cyanide in the showers were not high enough to cause death in humans. Except that the sample they stole had been exposed to the elements for over 50 years. The values they used for LD50 were appropriate for insects, not humans.

After my research, I had personally determined that the Holocaust did take place and the deniers were sacks of shit for attempting to deny something so evil.

Before I could make that determination, I had to open my mind to the possibility.

Lies

People lie. You can’t escape it. As thinking humans, we are pretty good at detecting people who are lying to us. But that only works when dealing with average people.

We have all chuckled at the videos of children lying about something when they are covered in the cake frosting of their misdeed. A child will flat out deny they ate the cake while covered in frosting.

They have not learned the guile of how to lie.

This is the simplest type of lie: to simply say something not true. “Did you eat the cake?” “No, Mommy!”

Most people move past this method rather quickly.

The next place that people go is to deny knowledge or to exaggerate. “Did you eat the cake?” “What cake?” or “Just a teeny tiny piece.”

There is an entire science of lying with statistics. If you have heard something like “There as a 50% increase in murders in Small Town, year over year,” you know that something horrible is happening.

What if last year there were 2 murders and this year there are 3? That is a 50% increase. While every murder is bad, the difference between 2 and 3 murders a year is just as likely to be noise in the data.

But we can see where going from 2000 violent crimes to 3000 violent crimes in a year is bad.

Now look at a different version of this: “Over the last year there have only been 10 more murders year over year.” What they might be saying is that Small Town has gone from 2 murders per year to 12 murders per year. That might be alarming.

You have to know what to look at. Per capita? Raw numbers, percentages?

You also need to look at what the definitions are. It is impossible to compare the murder rate in the United States to the murder rate in the United Kingdom. We count different things as murder.

In the U.S., if a person is murdered, it counts as a murder. In the U.K., if a person is convicted of murdering somebody, then it is counted as murder. Until there is a conviction, the wrongful death is not classified as a murder.

There are many other ways to lie. There are two more that are worth touching on.

The first is a lie by omission. This is when a pertinent fact is left out of the fact pattern. “Today the police broke into a local man’s house, arresting him after he had an altercation with his neighbor [where he threatened to kill him while brandishing a firearm].”

The bracketed text changes the entire gist of the story. Both versions are true, but in one case it sounds like the police arrested that local man for something minor, breaking down his door to do so. When the more complete version is there, it sounds like the police are acting reasonably to protect the community.

The final method we’ll touch on is lying by telling the truth. If you can tell the absolute truth in such a way that nobody believes you, then you have succeeded in lying, if that was your intent.

Short Quote

By selectively quoting a person, you can change the meaning of what is said, or at the very least, the conotations.

Consider the following quote: “I did not have sexual relations with that woman.” Now consider the following quote:

I did … sexual relations with that woman.

By omitting two words, “not have”, the entire meaning of the quote has changed. While we did not change any of his words, we have changed the meaning of his statement.

Or this made up newscast:

Again, the quote is correct, but the meaning is twisted.

When you read an article that has short quotes in it, it is best to assume that the meaning of the original statement is being manipulated. Find the original and listen to the statement in context.

Example

The following is a partial transcription of the attached video.

Something a little different.

Wolford is in an interlocutory state. They are appealing a preliminary injunction.

The purpose of the trial court is to gather evidence, hear legal arguments, and then decide based on evidence and the legal standing.

What the Supreme Court has said is that Second Amendment challenges do not need evidence. They are legal decisions, decided by the courts.

The law says “x”. The challenger says the plain text of the Second Amendment covers the conduct regulated by the law. The burden shifts to the state to show that the current law is consistent with this Nation’s historical tradition of firearms regulation.

There is no evidence to present. The court decides if the plain text covers the conduct. The court decides if the government has proven a history of firearms regulation that matches the current law. If the state fails to meet its burden, then the law is ruled unconstitional.

If the state wishes to bring in expert testimony regarding this Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation, that expert must be a lawyer. Not only must they be a lawyer, they must be part of the case.

Friends of the court can express their opinion, but the only place those opinions have any weight is if they are legal arguments regarding regulations from the time of the founding or somehow relevant to finding that the conduct is not covered by the Second Amendment.

At this point, everybody in Wolford has agreed the plain text of the Second Amendment is implicated. The state can present their arguments to the Supreme Court just as easily as to the trial court. There is no value the trial court will add to the analysis the Supreme Court will do.

Which leads us to, when will we hear back from the Supreme Court?

Cert was granted on October 3, 2025. Per rule 25 of the Supreme Court, the Petitioner (Plaintiff) must have their briefing in within 45 days. November 17, 2025. It is unlikely that this date will be pushed. Amici briefs supporting the Petitioner are due 7 days after.

The Respondent’s (defendant’s) brief is due 30 days after that, on December 17th. Again, Amici briefs the Respondent or neither are due 7 days after.

The Petitioner gets to reply to the Respondent’s brief. That is due 30 days after the respondent dockets their brief, putting us at January 10, 2026.

If everything goes as scheduled, oral arguments will be heard in February, with the opinion issuing in May.

I expect we will see at least one other Second Amendment case this term. If the Court is looking at Wolford to address sensitive places, then there will be no other sensitive places challenges heard.

That leaves a case dealing on what “arms” means. When that case is heard, they will address the proper usage of the “in common use for lawful purposes” shortcut to a Second Amendment win.

Winning the Battle

There are too many historical situations where a combatant won a battle, but it cost them the war. Little Big Horn comes to mind, though I don’t know enough to say if it is a true or good example.

The cost of winning might come with excessive loss of resources. A Pyrrhic victory.

The anti-gun people understand this. They are sometimes willing to lose a battle to maintain battlefield dominance. In N.Y.S.R. & P.A. v. New York City the city and state fought tooth and nail. They didn’t stop fighting. We lost in the district court. We lost in the Circuit Court. We appealed to the Supreme Court, and we were granted cert.

The anti-gunners looked at this and proceeded to remove the challenged regulations for New York City gun owners. The state of New York passed a law saying that New York City could never do it again. The state then told the Supreme Court the case was moot. The case was never heard. It died.

We “won” the battle; the anti-gunners won that war.

Rahimi

The anti-gun Biden administration saw a slate of cases moving towards the Supreme Court challenging §922(g)(8), Domestic Violence Restraining Order in Possession. The best case for us was the Range case. The worst for us was the Rahimi case.

Range was a case about a man who failed to claim income from his lawn care side hustle while he was receiving aid from the state. He was charged with defrauding the government. This was a felony. He pleaded guilty. He served no time. He was told to go forth and sin no more. And he kept his nose clean.

As a convicted felon, he is prohibited from possessing firearms. He went to court to get his rights back. His case would have been a wonderful opportunity to show that non-violent felons, under the 1968 GCA, cannot be prohibited from possessing firearms.

Rahimi, on the other hand, was a violent criminal. Witnesses saw him slam his girlfriend’s head into the car. He fired his gun at witnesses. He was arrested and was in prison for multiple felonies as well as being subject to a DVR while in possession.

After Bruen was decided, the Fifth Circuit court pulled the Rahimi case back after issuing their opinion. In their second opinion, they applied Bruen faithfully and declared §922(g)(8) unconstitutional.

Merrick Garland pushed Rahimi to the front of the line, and it was heard by the Supreme Court, which issued their opinion. Rahimi is a bad man. He needs to be in prison. He is precisely the sort of person that should not have access to arms.

This means that there are bad facts. Bad facts make for bad law. In this case we ended up with an opinion that was more easily twisted by inferior courts.

Garland v. Bondi

When Rahimi was requesting cert, the Garland-controlled DOJ pushed the Supreme Court to take the case. When the DOJ asks the Court to take a case, they are more likely to take the case requested by the DOJ than other similar cases. We did not want this to happen. Yes, we wanted the Court to hear a 2A case. This was not the one we wanted in front of the Supreme Court.

We are now looking at Rush v. USA. This is another case with bad facts. Mr. Rush is not a good man. He was doing bad things, and FO was applied to him.

He had his license revoked. He drove to his court hearing. He drove away after the court hearing. The cops stopped him to ask what he was doing driving on a revoked license. During the stop they smelled and observed pot. He was arrested. While searching his car, they found an SBR.

We don’t need to go into what he had done to be in court in the first place; needless to say, not a good fact pattern.

We do not want Rush in front of the Supreme Court. In the best of worlds, we are only going to get a lackluster result. In addition, there are other vehicles in the works attacking SBR, Silencers, and SBS remaining inside the NFA.

Damning With Faint Praise

My father explained this to me in terms of how a superior officer might praise a lower ranking member with faint praise. He said nothing that can be challenged, but everybody reading the report will know what is not said.

A pitcher might be praised for how far he can spit his tobacco juice. This likely implies he’s not a good pitcher.

The DOJ must make a good faith effort to explain why cert should be denied. It has to be grounded in legal reasoning. And they do that.

Their motion is darn weak. They rely on regulations from the 19th century. The whitewash Miller‘s findings. In short, it half hearted. But they use it as a method to say:

This is on point. It is a statement that the DOJ wants the Supreme Court to hear a 2A case, just not this one.

Final Note

As we have discussed, a circuit split is useful for getting the Supreme Court to grant cert. Getting a circuit split on anti-gun laws is very difficult because anti-gun states passing infringements exist within anti-gun inferior courts. The Ninth Circuit is many to zero in favor of California infringements.

The Seventh is nearly as bad. So are the Second, Fourth, Third, and First circuits. Well, sort of.

The Third Circuit, as of Friday, was 7-6 Republican appointees. In an upcoming en banc hearing, they will be 8-6. The problem is that if one of those Republican appointed judges flips to the side of infringement, we will lose in the Third Circuit, again.

On Friday, the Senate confirmed Professor Jennifer Lee Mascott to the Third Circuit. If President Trump signs the confirmation, and she is sworn in by a Supreme Court Justice by the morning of the 15th, she will sit and hear Association of New Jersey Rifle & Pistol Clubs v. Platkin (consolidated with Firearms Policy Coalition v. Platkin, Docket Nos. 24-2002 and 24-2003).

With Judge Mascott on the Third Circuit for this hearing, there will be a 10-6 balance. Even if we were to lose one judge to the dark side, we still win the case.

If we win in the Third Circuit, we will have the circuit split on “Assault Weapons” bans.

Conclusion

All is not as it seems on the surface. You have to look beyond what we are seeing and look to the future. Pam Bondi and Trump are good for the Second Amendment. If it looks like they are not, wait a minute. Take a deep breath and figure out what else is going on.

Yeah, it really was the judge being a clown. The state did not ask for membership lists.

On Friday the parties, the state, and the plaintiffs filed a joint motion to amend the final judgement.

They Can’t All Be Lieing?

My new car audio console uses Android Auto. It will provide a choice of podcasts to listen to. It can also play music, which I prefer, but today I pushed the button for news.

Two minutes of advertisements, one minute of news from Fox. Two minutes of advertisements, five minutes of news from some unknown source. Two minutes of advertisements, ten minutes of news from Routers.

In those ten minutes I did not detect a single lie. What I did hear was a narrative created by what wasn’t said and what was reported.

The story was about Trump calling for J.B. Pritzker and Brandon Johnson to be put in jail. They choose to leave off why he wanted them to be put in jail. They left it hanging as if it was for personal reasons. They then added another truthful fact. Neither man has been charged with any criminal act.

The narrative was that Trump is threatening his political opponents with jail time, even though they have not done anything wrong.

Not All Power Supplies Are Equal

One of the nodes in my Ceph cluster died, taking three OSDs with it. Two of the drives were moved to a different node, and the cluster rebalanced.

Because I’m cheap, I didn’t toss the dead node. Instead I stripped it out of its case, saved the case fan, power supply, and the motherboard, still with its memory and NVMe card.

Saving this board turned out to be useful. When I found that the CPU that I had purchased for the replacement node didn’t have integrated graphics, leaving the new node totally headless, I was able to use that old board to install an OS to the NVMe card and then move it to the new node.

When I put the NIC into the new node and buttoned it all up, I thought it would be fine. When I attempted to power it up, it failed to start.

Pulling the NIC out allowed it to boot.

I tossed the “bad” NIC. Went back to check things out and to move forward with the new node. Installing another NIC caused the same failure.

Back to that singleton motherboard with a desktop power supply powering it. No problem running with any of the NICs. As an aside, did you know you can hotwire a computer? I was accused of hot-wiring a computer the other day because I used a jumper to emulate the power switch on the case.

Overall, it turned out that the power supply wasn’t supplying good power. I replaced it with a new power supply, and that headless node is busy rebalancing the Ceph cluster. And I found that I really like modular power supplies. The ability to choose which cables you want makes the wiring so much easier and cleaner.

Do You Feel The Need For Screwing?

I have a manual ratcheting screwdriver that I really like. It is a Stanley FatMax with an integrated bit holder and good ergonomics. It was my go to when I needed to drive screws.

If I need to drive many screws, I use my cordless drill. The problem with that is that it is a pain switching between drill bits and driver bits. It is also bulky and a bit heavy. Finally, it doesn’t always have a light touch.

One of the YouTube videos I was watching had a powered screwdriver. I decided to try one. I purchased the SKIL one from Amazon for around $30.

This was well worth the dollars just for the Ceph node build. The process of building out that node required me handling 30 some screws. Most were removed and reinstalled multiple times.

The amount of time and wrist ache this one tool saved me was worth it. I have a couple of other tasks coming up and this tool will be in my pocket for the job.

It’s In An Interlocutory State?

When they say that nobody knows what the Supreme Court will do, they are not joking. There are people with much more experience than I who have spent a lifetime trying to predict what the Supreme Court will do. They get it right about 50% of the time (Joke).

There are some things we do know. Having a circuit split on a question increases the likelihood of a case being heard. Its being a novel question also increases the likelihood. The Court doesn’t like to relitigate the same question. Having many cases with the same question will also increase the likelihood.

Other things we know are that cases that are repeats don’t get heard, or they might just get a GVR. And cases that are in an interlocutory state are not heard. The Court does not want to hear cases until the case has been fully litigated in the inferior courts.

Wolford v. Lopez was granted cert, even though it is in an interlocutory state.

The Court has also agreed to hear Trump v. Cook, 25A312 (SCOTUS), which is also in an interlocutory state.

Things, they are a-changing.

Cloud Init

This is a game changer for me, if I can get it all to work. The ability to put a thumb drive into a new node, power it on, and end up with a full install with no action on my part is wonderful!

I’m looking at setting up a server to do the full configuration from a network fetch instead of from the NoCloud datasource.

He Deployed the National Guard!

I worry about government overreach. Having the president deploy the National Guard to cities to perform police functions worries me.

What will the Democrats do when they are back in power? Will I see troops in my small town demanding to see my papers?

Then I remember the beautiful images of our troops guarding a chain-link fence surrounding buildings in D.C. and go, yeah, already done that.

Keep your head on a swivel, watch your six, stay strapped.

Question of the week?

When you take a long, hard, honest look at what the current administration is doing, the powers they are flexing, which of those powers do you think will be used against us when the Democrats next take power?

Just examine J6 vs BLM mobs in the same time frame to see what I’m talking about.

History

Back in November of 2020, Caleb Reese, Joseph Granich, FPC, The Second Amendment Foundation, and the Louisiana Shooting Association filed suit in the Western District of Louisiana challenging 18 U.S.C. §§ 922(b)(1) and 922(c)(1), 27 C.F.R. §§ 478.99(b)(1), 478.124(a), and 478.96(b).

U.S.C. is United States Code, or laws. C.F.R. is Code of Federal Regulations. So they are challenging the rules and regulations infringing on The People aged 18, 19, and 20 from purchasing firearms from FFLs.

The named plaintiffs, Reese and Granich, were in that age range when the suit was filed. Since it was filed in 2020, there is no way that they are still in that age range today. The case is moot.

This is why the organizations are required to be in the suit. They need real people to start the suit, but the organizations can add other members that meet the requirement of being in the age group as the original plaintiffs age out.

On May 5th, 2021, the plaintiffs did just that; they added Emily Naquin to the suit. This gave them a longer window and added a woman to the complaint.

On June 10, 2021, Joseph Granich left the suit.

In July of 2022, the court was formally made aware of Bruen. This means that the district court must use the Heller methodology as affirmed in Bruen. Is the plain text of the Second Amendment implicated? Is there an analogous regulation in this Nation’s history of firearm regulation?

The state immediately responded that Bruen affirms the Second Amendment allows a ‘variety’ of gun regulations, including ‘laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms’. In other words, the state ignored the holding and dicta of The Court and instead cherry-picked a phrase from a concurrence. I love how they say, “Justice Kavanaugh’s concurrence emphasizes….” They added the word emphasizes to imply what is not there.

On December 21, 2022, the district court found that the Second Amendment was implicated. Further, it found that Congress had designated 18, 19, and 20-year-olds as particularly dangerous, and therefore they could be disarmed in keeping with this Nation’s history of firearms regulation. Never mind that this implies that Congress can disarm any group by declaring them “dangerous.”

The case was appealed to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which issued its opinion January 30 and issued its mandate on April 17, 2025.

The Fifth Circuit Court’s Judgment

The Fifth Circuit dealt with the state’s contention that the law didn’t even implicate the Second Amendment like this:

Note that the state doesn’t even believe that newly enlisted members of our military are part of The People.

The court then went on to discuss what plain text means. The threshold textual question is not whether the laws and regulations impose reasonable or historically grounded limitations, but whether the Second Amendment “covers” the conduct (commercial purchases) to begin with. — Id.. Clearly this is the correct methodology.

Step one isn’t really a step; it is a simple question. If it takes more than a sentence, then they are likely doing it wrong.

Or, put another way, why not assume it is covered under the plain text? The courts used to do this, until they couldn’t wave a magic wand and say the state’s argument is more important than The People’s rights.

This is a good example of “tradition.” We can look at this Nation’s history of firearm regulation and find outliers. These outliers do not outweigh the consistent approach, the traditions of all states.

In the end, the Fifth Circuit concludes:

Three of the potential outcomes from an appeal are “AFFIRM,” which says the superior court agrees with the inferior court. “VACATE,” which says that the inferior court got it wrong and needs to do it over, considering the named opinions. But the strongest of them all is to “REVERSE.” To reverse an inferior court’s decision is to say not only did they get it wrong, but that the superior court doesn’t believe the inferior court will get it right.

Or in some cases, there is no need for the inferior court to put their oar in the water. What’s done is done.

The District Court Beclowns Themselves

The circuit court’s holding is that 18 U.S.C. §§ 922(b)(1), (c)(1) and the regulations that build on them are unconstitutional. There is no wiggle room in that opinion. It is a pure win for The People.

There is nothing in that opinion that suggests that this is an as-applied or is any other way limited to just the plaintiffs.

In Rahimi we had an “as applied” finding. This is being played out in other §922(g)(8) situations. They are coming down in “as applied” opinions.

Once the district court receives its marching orders, it is supposed to follow orders like the inferior it is. There is a clear winner and a clear loser.

The court then orders the parties, both the winners and the losers, to submit a proposed judgment. The court is supposed to look at the proposed judgment, make sure it aligns with the superior court’s orders, and then sign off.

Generally, the parties work out an agreement, which is then presented to the court.

The plaintiffs, the good guys and winners, suggested the following:

With the court ordering the state to stop enforcing the rules and regulations. This judgment would stop the exercise of the relevant rules and regulations in the jurisdiction of the Fifth Circuit. A giant win. And it could be used in support of other cases.

The state, the defendants, the bad guys, and the losers proposed the following:

Here the state changes this from a facial win to an as-applied. Which is even worse than it originally sounds. This judgment would only last for 3 years. At the end of three years, everybody that would be covered by this judgment would have aged out of the category.

The state argues that Trump v. CASA applies. The state claims that the judgment of the court would be a universal injunction, which would be too wide. But that was never the case. This ruling would only apply within the Fifth Circuit. So the state is full of excrement.

They go on to say that it should only apply to members of the organizations that were members when the case was filed. This would limit the relief to people that joined FPC or SAF when they were children; otherwise, they would have already aged out.

The state is also requiring that the organizational plaintiffs provide membership lists because: limiting the scope of permanent relief to members of the organizational plaintiffs who were members when suit was filed is necessary because only such persons have standing to sue, and because equity requires this limitation to avoid incentivizing free riders.

The judge’s final order includes FFLs that were members of the organizations when the suit was filed in 2020.

The only people who would benefit from this order are the two named plaintiffs.

Conclusion

The judge is a freaking clown. He got his knuckles rapped by his superior and has decided to thumb his bright red nose at them.

My most productive years of programming and system development were when I was working for the Systems Group at University. We all had good professional relationships. We could trust the skills of our management and our peers.

When I started developing with my mentor’s group, it was the same. The level of respect was very high, and trust in our peers was spectacular. If you needed assistance in anything, if there was a blocker of any sort, you could always find somebody to help.

What we soon learned is that we didn’t need their help. What we required was somebody to listen as we explained the problem. Their responses were sometimes helpful, sometimes not. It didn’t really matter. It was listening that was required.

When I started working for an agency, that changed. Our management was pretty poor and had instilled a lousy worker mentality. Stupid things like making bonuses contingent on when management booked payment.

If the developers worked overtime to get a project done on management-promised schedules, their money would not be booked in time for bonuses to be earned.

Every hour that wasn’t billed to a project had to be justified, and management was always unhappy with the amount of billable hours.

Interrupting a coworker to listen to get help just didn’t happen. Even when management (me) told them to stop digging the hole and come talk to me.

We still ended up with fields of very deep holes because nobody would come out of their little world to talk.

This wasn’t limited to just our agency; it was everywhere.

The fix was a stupid rubber duck. It sits on your desk. When you are stuck, you explain the problem to your rubber duck, and often the answer will come to you. It was the process of accurately describing your issue that created the breakthrough.

I don’t have access to those types of people, and oftentimes the rubber duck is just as ignorant as I am. Not very useful.

I have a silk duck. This duck actually talks back, performs searches, and verifies potential solutions, and it does it within a reasonable time frame.

My Silk Duck is named “Grok.”

Grok is X’s AI offering. As a search engine, it far exceeds anything Google Search can do.

A simple example: I’m building out a new node. The motherboard I’m using is an H610M-ITX. There are dozens of motherboards using that designation or something similar. In hours of searching, I haven’t been able to locate the manual for my motherboard.

Locate a manual for the Huanzanzhi H610M-ITX motherboard.

One minute and 14 seconds later, Grok delivered me the PDF manual. It found it on a Chinese website written in Chinese and English.

That manual was enough to get me moving in the correct direction.

We then rubber ducked a video issue. On power on, the fans would spin up under control. When a computer first starts, the fans run up to max; they then ramp down under CPU control. You can hear that. I also got a single BEEP indicating good Power-On, Self-Test (POST)

But no video.

Over the next hour, Grok and I debugged the issue. We both thought it might be caused by memory; we both had the same methodology for checking memory issues. We both decided to remove the NVMe card just in case.

When I found what looked like POST indicator LEDs, Grok accurately determined what they were.

We narrowed the issue down to video.

I noticed that my silk duck kept talking about iGPU. I figured out that this must mean “integrated Graphics Processing Unit”.

Why would a motherboard have built-in video displays, and yet Grok was talking about iGPU?

I thought for a moment and then asked, Verify that Intel Core i3-12100F has iGPU.

Here is the kicker: while I can get this motherboard to work with a graphics card, that doesn’t help me as I need that slot for my Fiber NIC. In looking at other motherboards, some of them seem to work with CPUs without iGPU, while others require iGPU.

This “feature” never occurred to me. It makes sense, but Grok is the one that found it for me.

Conclusion

AI has its place today as an assistant. It can do a great job of rubber ducking. It does a good job of editing articles, if you keep it in its place.

This is a powerful tool that is only going to get better.