Chris Johnson

We will be working with the legal use of the term “facts” to help this discussion. This is difficult to put into words because there is so much loose thinking in the world. We use terms that sort of apply, but not completely. We treat opinions as facts and facts as opinions.

It is a complex subject.

To help, I’ll start with a simple differentiation: “need” versus “want”.

“I want a bowl of ice cream.” expresses a desire. If I don’t get the bowl of ice cream, nothing bad will happen. I might feel bad about it. I might be upset that I don’t get it. It is just a want.

“I need food.” expresses a requirement. If I go without food for an extended period of time, I will die. I will become weak and likely fall ill if I’m without food before I die from lack of food.

This shows why it is important to understand that the words have meaning, and it behooves us to use the right word to communicate the right message.

“Known or proved to be true.” Seems simple enough. But it isn’t always. We need to ask, “How do we know it to be true?” “Has it been proven to be true?”

“Joseph Biden was the 46th president of the United States.” This is a generally accepted fact. But how do you know?

To know if a thing is true, we evaluate evidence.

Evidence is a presentation of potential facts and testimony that are presented to us to prove a fact. I can provide you with a link to a YouTube video showing the swearing in of Joe Biden.

As you watch that video, you will be evaluating the evidence. At the end of the video, you will decide if that evidence proves the fact I am presenting.

You have to decide what evidence you will accept as proving a fact. You have to decide how trustworthy the evidence is. You have to decide how trustworthy the person presenting the evidence is.

After you have made those determinations, then you will decide if enough evidence that you trust has been presented to prove the fact.

Trusting The Presenter

For years the left labeled Fox News as fake news. They dropped that moniker when Trump started using it to describe other media sources.

The argument was that evidence that Fox News presented was not trustworthy. Since it was not trustworthy, you should not accept the evidence presented as proving a fact.

We all have opinions as to how biased and trustworthy a news source is.

I asked Grok the following using its expert mode (Think Harder):

Grok’s thinking is exposed, and this is its thought on the rules:

The resulting table is:

I’m disappointed that the Vine ranked so low in trust, but it is what it is.

This is the biggest issue in getting people to open their minds. They have already formed opinions about the bias of the sources they use and about how trustworthy those sources are.

You need to establish your opinions. You also have to be willing to look at other sources. You need to be willing to look at sources on the other side of zero.

Trusting The Evidence

We started with trusting the presenter because the presenter can twist the evidence, and you must be aware of that.

When I saw Jeffries’ statement, I assumed he had gotten it wrong. That he was lying. Why? Because I have an opinion of Jeffries that marks him as being untrustworthy.

I had heard Leavitt’s statement and heard something different. I heard her say, “The people that the Democrat party support are …”

Jeffries did not provide enough evidence for me to know that Leavitt had said what he said she said. MSNBC did. They provided video, and they provided a transcript that matched the video. I know the fact to be true, with a caveat.

I trust the evidence when I can verify the evidence presented with primary sources. That evidence includes videos, images, full context, statements by the parties, written documentation.

—Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the final solution in Poland (HarperCollins 1st ed ed. 1992) is a hard read. It describes horrific events. Is every word true? I don’t know. I don’t know the author; I can’t assign a level of trust to him. I do understand citations. The citations are excellent (I just realized that I haven’t verified that for this article; I remember the citations as being good). But his sources can be verified, even if I choose not to do so.

The Evidence Itself

Otherwise known as the sniff test. And the sniff test is pretty poor test.

Do we believe the evidence presented?

If somebody shows me they can hover in air, I’m not going to believe them. I am going to examine the entire situation before I believe.

I know how the trick is performed. You can likely guess. But the evidence that a man is just floating above his patch of flowers doesn’t pass the sniff test.

(If you look at every image of the floating statue/performer, they all have one thing in common: they all have something connecting them to the ground.)

Another example: “The amount of CO₂ output by man is dwarfed by the amount emitted by volcanoes.” According to NOAA, humans emitted roughly 40 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide in 2015. Volcanoes emitted around 0.3 billion metric tons.

Do you trust NOAA in this area? Then the fact is proven. Since this value is backed by references to the studies, we can look up how the studies were performed to discover if these numbers are factual. Or we can trust this source.

Conclusion

When we are evaluating evidence to discover the truth, to determine the facts, we have to have an open mind. We must be willing to look at different sources, to evaluate the presentation of the evidence, and the support given in that evidence. It isn’t enough to believe something is true; we need to know it is true.

That means we have to learn to look at evidence and decide for ourselves what the facts are. We need to be able to do that absent an authority telling us what to think or how to interpret the facts.

Congratulations to the No Kings protesters! They did it! There are no kings in the US. Trump is still our president.

I had to go out yesterday to sign up at a new range. The new range is nice. But they are a membership club; pay in advance for a year, take an orientation class, provide proof you can pass a background check (a CCW or a recent firearm purchase qualifies), and proof of a safety class.

This was a worrisome trip because I would need to head out near the local college town; I knew the “No Kings” idiots would be out protesting the lack of freedom of speech. And they might have become violent. Best to avoid.

I was able to avoid because the range isn’t near the town. It was good to know that I didn’t have to deal with them.

On the way home, pulling into my local town square, who should be there? Those selfsame people I was trying to avoid.

There were some yelling across the street as there were counterprotesters. I couldn’t tell who were the protesters and who were the counterprotesters. Or maybe it was just poor English on the part of the protesters, making their signs impossible to understand.

The sad part is that this nonsense has made it to my little town. My alert posture just went up a few more notches.

I’ve tried drawing network maps a half-dozen times. I’ve failed. It should be simple, and I’m sure there are tools that can do it. I just don’t know them, or worse, I don’t know how to use the tools I currently have.

In simple terms, I have overlay and underlay networks. Underlay networks are actual physical networks.

An overlay network is a network that runs on top of the underlay/physical network. For example, tagged VLANs, or in my case, OVN.

OVN creates virtual private cloud. A powerful concept when working with cloud computing. Each VPC is 100% independent of every other VPC.

As an example, I have a VPC for my Ceph data plane. It is on the 10.1.0.0/24 network. I can reuse 10.1.0.0/24 on any other VPC with zero issues.

The only time there is an issue is when I need routing.

If I have a VPC with node 172.31.1.99 and a gateway of 172.31.1.1, that gateway performs network address translation before the traffic is sent to the internet. If the node at 172.31.1.99 wants to talk to the DNS server at 8.8.8.8 traffic is routed to 172.31.1.1 and from there towards the internet. The internet responds, the traffic reaches 172.31.1.1 and is forwarded to 172.31.1.99.

All good.

If I have VPC2 with a node at 192.168.99.31 and its gateway at 192.168.99.1, I can route between the two VPCs using normal routing methods by connecting VPC and VPC2. We do this by creating a connection (logical switch) that acts as a logical cable. We then attach gateway 172.31.1.1 to that network at 192.168.255.1 and the gateway at 192.168.99.31 as 192.168.255.2.

With a quick routing table entry, traffic flows between the two.

But if VPC2 was also using 172.31.1.0/24 then there is no way to send traffic to VPC. Any traffic generated would be assumed to live in that VPC. No router would become involved. And NAT will not help.

Why use an overlay network? It allows for stable virtual network, even if the underlay network is modified. Consider a node at 10.1.0.77. It has a physical address of 192.168.22.77. But because it needs to be moved to a different subnet, its physical address changes to 192.168.23.77.

Every node that had 192.168.22.77 within its configurations now needs to be updated. If the underlay is updated, it does not affect the overlay.

Back to Simple.

There are three methods for traffic to enter a VPC. The first is for a virtual machine to bind to the VPC. The second is for a router to move traffic into the VPC, sometimes from the physical network. And the final method is for a host (bare metal) machine to have a logical interface bound to the VPC.

My Ceph nodes use the last method. Each ceph node is directly attached to the Ceph VPC.

It is the gateway that is interesting. A localnet logical port can bind to a port on a host, called a chassis. When this happens, the port is given an IP address on the physical network that it binds to.

When the routing is properly configured, traffic to the VPC is routed to the logical router. This requires advertising the logical router in the router tables.

I had multiple VMs running on different host servers. They all sent traffic to the router which was bound to my primary machine. My primary machine has physical and logical difference from the rest of the host nodes.

What this meant was that traffic to the VPC was flaky.

Today, I simplified everything. I turned down the BGP insertion code. I added a single static route where it belonged. I moved the chassis to one of the “normal” chassis.

And everything just worked.

It isn’t dynamic, but it is working.

I’m happier.

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.