Chris Johnson

In May of 1963, there were mass protests in Birmingham, AL. Blacks were protesting racist laws, passed by Democrats, and enforced by Democrats.

The laws were bad. The leaders were bad. The cops and other enforcers were bad.

That isn’t to say there wasn’t more than a bit of propaganda going around.

A motel manager was told to get the blacks out of the motel pool. His orders were ignored. The police were being ignored.

The law was bad. The people enforcing it were bad. The hotel manager? We don’t know, but he was painted as bad.

The gallon of acid he poured into that pool would not have done a damn thing to anybody in the pool. Unless it was poured on somebody, it was so diluted b the time it entered the pool that it did not and could not cause harm.

He used fear and ignorance to drive the blacks from his pool, because he was ordered to do so.

Not every person in the South was racist. Not every person was bad. Enough of them were to paint an entire section of our country as evil racists.

64 years later, conservatives are still being painted as racist using these images of Democrats enforcing Democrat-passed laws.

The problem with dealing with people in the spur of the moment is that “bad” or “evil” is not visible in the moment. It takes time.

I still remember the first time I saw the George Floyd video. I was enraged. I was glad I didn’t have to choose between watching a cop kill a black man or shooting the cop and spending the rest of my life in jail.

It turned out that every single thing told to me by that video was a lie. And my country burned.

The evil that is the modern (and historic) Democrat came to the forefront. They held “protests” that turned into riot after riot after riot.

They attacked federal buildings for weeks on end. They took over parts of cities and refused to allow people free travel through their city.

And they lied to us. The entire memo of “mostly peaceful” comes from a reporter telling us that the “protest” was mostly peaceful while the rioters set fires in the background.

When Kyle showed up to defend a commercial property, because the Minneapolis police wouldn’t or couldn’t, he ended up being chased by a convicted felon. When that felon attempted to take Kyle’s rifle from him, Kyle shot him, and made a good communist out of him.

A little later, another man became known as Lefty. He was carrying concealed. He attempted a sneak attack on Kyle, when Kyle pointed his rifle at Lefty, Lefty stopped, then continued his attack, quickly losing the use of his right arm.

Lefty was not legally carrying, by the laws of Minnesota. His permit to carry had expired.

He absolutely had the right to carry. The Second Amendment protects the right of every person to armed self-defense, and more. The law that made it illegal for Lefty to carry was unconstitutional. It might not have been found such, yet, but it is.

I will stand up to anyone to clearly, loudly state that Lefty had the right to carry.

He did not have the right to misuse his gun. When his gun came out of its holster to threaten Kyle, he was no longer on Second Amendment protected grounds.

You have the right to carry. You have the right to defend yourself. You don’t have the right to use your gun for criminal acts.

We need to be aware that rights are not situational. Your right to carry doesn’t end when you go to protest. Your right to carry doesn’t end when you go to a restaurant that serves beer. Your right to carry doesn’t end because somebody else is scared.

The Fifth Amendment does NOTend when a person is accused. That would make it worthless.

Your rights are not situational.

I’ve been told I live in a MAGA bubble. If I wasn’t brainwashed by FauxNews and actually cared about others, I would no longer be a Maggot.

The reality is that I can’t escape their noise and opinions. It is everywhere.

Ally and I noticed a while ago that every cop show on TV talks about “legally registered guns.” Every single one of them. NCIS was horrible about this. Law and Order had the excuse that it was taking place in NYC where all “legal” guns are supposed to be registered.

Though an egregious one popped up recently. The detectives of L&O were investigating a “sniper.” They tracked the gun back to the FFL that sold the gun.

They then accused the FFL of attempting to hide the identity of the purchaser because the signature on the 4473 was illegible. They made a big deal about it.

Every 4473 that I’ve ever filled out requires me to fill out the form with my printed information and the FFL then copies my government ID information (DL) onto the form. If the left didn’t lie they wouldn’t have anything to say.

The Question

What is a trope or common “everybody knows” that you see in movies or shows that is pure left-wing talking points?

I don’t like losing. I hate losing. I don’t want to lose.

In war, if you are not cheating, you’re not playing to win.

The Democrats and the Leftists of my Nation have declared war on me and mine decades ago. They hid it. They disguised it. They cheated.

They knew they were at war, and they were willing to do anything to win.

We saw this in gay marriage. They fought battle after battle, losing every time. They put forth a referendum in California, of all places. And the people of California soundly defeated the drive for gay marriage. The people of California amended their state constitution to define marriage as being between a man and a woman.

The left then found an activist judge to rule that the amended constitution was unconstitutional under the state constitution. What BS.

This led to a Supreme Court decision. And suddenly, gay marriage is the law of the land, against the wishes of the people.

And now I’m told I must accept it forever and ever, amen.

The left took over education, from K-12 to higher education. They won.

They attacked the truth through their constant lies on TV and later “main stream media”. They won.

At every step, they won.

And my side let them. Because we were too polite. Because we took the high road. Because “it was the right thing to do.”

After Sandy Hook, I got in a discussion on Facebook with a liberal. She wanted assault weapons banned. She cared for the little children.

I went on the attack. I threw every argument that had ever been tossed at me, at us. I told her that she hated children because she didn’t want people to defend them. That she wasn’t willing to sacrifice for the children.

For three days I hammered on her. I wasn’t giving an inch until her niece, a good friend, asked me to stop. It turned out that this liberal anti-gun was a teacher who had dedicated her life to children. She couldn’t understand why she was being accused of such heinous thoughts and deeds by a stranger.

I took the high road and stopped. No longer.

We, The People, attempted to stand up to the thieves who stole 2020. The result was that people were thrown in prison, denied their rights, lied about, socially destroyed, and financially destroyed.

To this day, the left lies about what happened. None of the people responsible for that travesty of justice have been punished.

I want them punished!

I don’t want my enemies armed. Not with knowledge, not with training, and certainly not with firearms.

They have exposed themselves to the world as animals. Unwilling to be active members of our societal contract. I want them to suffer.

I also believe in the right to free speech. I believe in the right to armed self-defense. I believe in the rights acknowledged and protected by our constitution.

And it is hard, really hard, to let those evil worms exercise their rights. I want to escalate their sound attacks to an extreme.

I’m reminded of the guy who mounted an aircraft carrier landing light, or something like that, in the back of his pickup truck. When somebody refused to dim their lights, he would light that thing off. Instant blinding of the person who was looking in that general direction.

That’s what I want in the sound world. They’re using a 50W Megaphone, I want to hit them with a 500W megaphone. I’d use a 5000W megaphone, but I’m not sure if I could carry that, even on a vehicle.

I’m of the opinion that ICE should be treating those insurrectionists blocking traffic as speed bumps, and I want it to be legal for you and me to treat them as speed bumps.

They have lost my empathy. They might live next to me, but they are not my neighbors. Neighbors have agreed to a social contract. These monsters have not.

They have no morals. They deserve no mercy from me.

They need to be at the strong receiving end of FO.

The right to self-defense is what keeps us from having mass graves.

I disagree with everything you said. I will defend to the death your right to say it.

Rights exist. We are all born with them. Every person in the world.

We are lucky to live in the United States, where many of those rights are protected by our constitution.

Those are not our Second Amendment rights. Those are our Second Amendment protected rights.

The same is true of all of our rights. Some are explicitly protected through the Bill of Rights, others are implicitly protected through the body of the Constitution and other Amendments.

TCK is wrong. Civil rights do apply to everyone.

My morals are not situational. Ally’s morals are not situational.

TCK’s seem to be situational. Rights for him but not for them.

When Dickwad was accused of sexually molesting the daughters of my best friend, I waited until I had seen enough evidence to know it was true.

When the detective asked me what I thought should happen to him, my answer was simple: After he is found guilty and sentenced, I want him placed in genpop.

Dickwad still had rights. He had a right to a jury of his peers. He had a right to face his accusers. He had the right to not incriminate himself. He had a right not to be tortured.

When he was convicted of the crimes he was accused of, he was sentenced, and his rights were removed from him.

He lost the right to vote, he lost the right to keep and bear arms, and he lost the right to move freely. And I fully expect he will lose his right to life will be removed from him before he gets out of prison.

Now I’m going to put on my administrative hat.

TCK: Feel free to leave. Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.

If you do stay, drop the insults. Ally put on her administrator hat and gave you the rule.

She told you that “Go fuck yourself.” is unacceptable. I echo that. “Go fuck yourself.” is unacceptable.

Her reply was thoughtful and did not attack you. She expressed her opinion clearly without attacking you.

Your reply again resorted to insults. You can’t point to a single thing in her original article or her reply that even remotely sounds like she’s being an “asshole.” You are wrong. Take a step back and read her article again and her comments without taking it personally.

Civil rights apply to everyone. You might not like it, but they do.

Do you even know what gaslighting means? Ally’s perspective is incredibly valuable to me, and I hope to the blog in general. Because she isn’t a “far-right conservative”. She’s barely right of what center used to be. Her perspective brings how the left perceives things.

She isn’t telling you this is a reality; it is how the left perceives things.

Are their fears irrational? Absolutely. If the Trump administration was disappearing people, like they claim, they wouldn’t know it was happening. If they were out of control, they would be rounding up those insurrectionists and throwing them in the oubliette, never to be seen again. That’s not happening. This means their fears are irrational.

“[Y]ears brutalizing the innocent” doesn’t seem to match with my memory. Those people up in MN didn’t brutalize the innocent. Maybe the Joe Biden puppet masters did, but not those people.

You might think “they” are guilty, you haven’t even presented enough evidence for me to consider them guilty. Regardless, people don’t lose their rights because they say nasty, evil, horrible things. They have to commit an actual crime.

If they haven’t committed a crime but what they did should be a crime, then we need to work to make it a crime.

We don’t get to say, “They committed a moral crime” anymore than they get to say it to us.

The reason they are called “civil rights” has nothing to do with social contracts. They are called that because they are “civil” cases, not criminal cases.

Criminal cases can only be initiated by the state. Civil cases can be initiated by anybody. A boundary dispute between to neighbors is a civil case.

A case about a violation of your Second Amendment protected rights is a civil case.

There is an insurrection taking place in our country. There are clear indications of Command and Control structures and a host of other CIA style “how to” markers.

The left wants highly visible incidents. They want people like Goode and Perti to have their stupidity splashed across the nation’s TVs (and the modern equivalent). It hits at a visceral level when you see somebody being killed.

It doesn’t matter whether it is justified or not; watching somebody being killed causes emotional trauma.

So here is something lighter, from my childhood, maybe yours too:

https://youtu.be/RJREOkcRbv4?t=50

It is ICE cold in my office as I write. Our basement is unheated and has zero insulation, and it leaks like a sieve. This makes the floors cold.

My big goal for the coming spring is to get some insulation into the basement.

But that’s not the type of ICE Cold I’m talking about here.

Up in the insurrectionist state of Minnesota, we had another FAFO moment.

A man who was carrying decided to interject himself with ICE agents. He got physical with them. Five agents were trying to detain or arrest him before he was shot and killed.

He was carrying his firearm in the small of his back. The video I’ve seen shows the gun in his hand before shots were fired.

He’s dead because he FA’d and found out.

Our AG and the director of the FBI both made public statements to the effect that bringing a gun to a protest means you are intending violence and is illegal and can get you shot.

I do not give up my Second Amendment protected rights when I choose to exercise my First Amendment protected rights.

Exercising a right does not even rise to “suspicion.” Merely exercising your rights does not ever give the state the authority to detain you. There must be more.

My friend from Canada was talking about guns and mentioned that carrying them into a bank was illegal. That it was a good way to end up in jail.

He was shocked to learn that I carry every time I enter a bank.

In short, Kash and Pam can go to hell for even thinking that The People must forgo their Second Amendment rights before they can exercise their First Amendment rights.

The “want” of a 3D printer was to be able to make foundry patterns. This is quickly becoming the standard for small run castings. It is much easier and faster than traditional pattern making, and you don’t require the same set of specialized tools.

The downside is that most 3D printers don’t have a large enough print volume of interesting castings, requiring printing in parts and then assembling the parts to create a whole.

This want was not enough. There had to be something that was a reasonable fit with our household. It isn’t like I’m going to be printing dragons and dice and hoping to pay for the hobby with that. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of people doing that.

My son just showed me a site where he has purchased D&D figures. He and I will see what we can do for him.

One of my issues is organization. If something has a place, it goes back to that place. Most of the stuff in my life lives on a flat surface. And it is time sorted. The oldest stuff is on the bottom.

I want organizational tools.

Enter two 3D solutions. One is a system of displaying things in an organized way for quick access. The other is the worlds fanciest peg board.

I plan to use GridFinity for most of the “flat” storage areas. That means draw and shelf organizers.

The more extensive system if Multiboard. This is much more complex than GridFinity.

Here’s a simple example of what sorts of things can be done. The eco-system consists of MultiBoard, the pegboard, hooks, and simple shelves. MultiBin, containers to hold things that can be attached to the MultiBoard. With MultiPoint me the connection system.

Take the time to watch the introduction video, get some ideas.

Here are three to think about:

1. Is it an assault with a deadly weapon to use a Super Soaker in -7F tempetures?
2. Should Don Lemon be charged for his participation in the invasion of the church in MN?
3. What is the thing your SO will decide they must have once the snow has started?

My first computer was a Litton Automated Business machine. It used drum memory to store data and had an instruction register and maybe two other registers. I purchased it for $100 my first summer home from college.

It was a remarkable machine. It was fun to work with, but you really couldn’t do much with it. It had dual paper tape readers, a printer, and a paper tape punch. I wrote an inventory control program for my father with just that, in something that looked very much like machine code.

It wasn’t a usable machine for my father.

The computer I told my parents to get was a Macintosh. They just worked out of the box. Plug them in and you had a word processor, a paint program, and I think a spreadsheet. It all just worked.

They got a PC and fought with it for years.

Today I can buy a piece of hardware, load an operating system on it, and have it fully functional as a general purpose computer or acting as an embedded machine in just about an hour.

The biggest time sink is removing and inserting screws to hold everything in place.

3D Printer

10 years ago or so I purchased a 3D printer kit. I’m sure I never got a fully successful printout of that damn thing. I had to do so much to just get it to do something. I spent more time trying to make it work than I did printing. And it was fragile.

Today, I believe that the kit instructions had the count of the number of teeth on one of the drivers wrong. Which meant that cubes were squished.

Today we have Macintosh printers. After 6 months of research, I pulled the trigger and purchased a Bambu Lab’s P2S printer with AMS.

Setup took around 2 hours. Every step was clearly documented. All the tools to do setup were included. Mostly setup consisted of removing packing, tape, and shipping screws.

Thereafter, it was plugging in one cable, 2 tubes, and the power. Turning on the power brought up the screen that forced me through an initial setup process that calibrated everything.

Finally, I pressed a few buttons on the control panel, and it printed a tool.

From there I used the phone app to scan a QR code, which took me to a cloud version of a storage box to print. That’s printing as I write this.

Again, there is no effort on my part to do any of this. It is pick, click, and print.

Calibration

My kit had no bed leveler. That was done by putting a piece of paper on the bed, lowering the nozzle until it just touched, and then clicking the next button to repeat. I think there were 20 or more sample points. And I still don’t know if that was enough.

The automated version required the printer to be working to print a new piece for the printer, which would hold a switch. The switch used a paperclip as a probe. This went much faster, but it still didn’t work.

The motors were noisy, but it was a joy to watch them move the hotend around.

Today’s calibration took around 45 minutes. This included using the built-in lidar to measure the distance to the bed, and then I think it used a pressure sensor to determine when it actually touched the build plate. It took samples every centimeter or so in a grid. That went rapidly.

It then went into a noise tuning calibration. For 20 minutes it ran the hothead around in diagonals, working to find the correct stepper speeds at different head speeds and then tuning them to be quiet.

It worked. These are stepper motors you can’t really hear. It blows my mind.

From there it did vibration calibration. This thing can accelerate so fast that it will cause the printer to move. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.

This thing figured out, for this printer, on this surface, just how much the printer reacted to head movement to be able to offset that motion during the deceleration stage.

The first print after calibration took only a few minutes to check calibration before it started printing.

Slicers

To create a 3D print, you start with an idea. You build a 3D model. I use FreeCAD; people use many CAD systems; Fusion 360 is a popular one.

Once you have a “solid”, a completely closed volume, you export that solid as an STL or a STEP file.

An STL is a triangulated file; a STEP file still retains geometry. For example, an STL file will represent a cylinder as a mesh of triangles, while STEP represents the same geometry as a cylinder or as a curved surface; regardless, STEP is the cleaner format.

Now that you have a surface representation of your solid, you import that into a slicer. I’m using OrcaSlicer which is a fork of the Bambu Studios.

This allows some manipulation of stl/STEP objects. The important part is to position the object on the build plate with no overlaps. Once that is done, you can slice the volume.

This is where things have come so far.

The solid is sliced into layers, generally 0.2mm high. The slicer then calculates the path of the print head over the object at the same height. It knows where edges are and uses loops to make solid walls, it adds internal fill to keep the print light yet strong.

3D prints can’t print in thin air, sort of. They can span short distances before the plastic droops too much. To print with an overhang, or to put a top on something, the slicer has the hot end create a raft across infill or across supports. Once that layer is completed, it will put a more finished layer, then an actual finished layer.

The slicers are pure magic. It really is easy.

All the hard work remains back in the CAD package, which is the same package I’m using for all my other engineering builds.

If you are interested in 3D printing, decide why you want it. Then pick any of the plug and play printers out there. I strongly suggest getting one with an enclosure. An enclosure will be needed for certain types of filament.

A good set of starting projects are GridFinity, an organizational system for flat surfaces, including shelves and drawers, and MultiBoard, which is a hyped up pegboard system.

In this analysis, I’m not going to be doing as much quoting. There are others that do so. Instead, I’m going to attempt to distill the argument or line of questioning.

Alan A. Beck, lawyer for the good guy

The Second Amendment is implicated. Hawaii has not met its burden to prove there is a historical tradition of firearms regulation that matches this law. This is a presumptive ban on The People’s right to bear arms, even if not stated explicitly.

Thomas: You argue that the law prevents access to about 97% of public areas? how did you arrive at that?

Beck: The entire package of laws is 96.4%, this law is less. We got that value from an architecture firm that went through public records of the County of Maui.

Sotomayor (interrupting Thomas): It’s not really 97%, right? This law is much less than that. People can carry in other places, Right?

All right. So you say that there is a constitutional right to carry a gun on private property?

Beck: Yes.

Sotomayor: I’ve never seen that right. I mean, I understand that there is a right to carry a gun on private property with an owner’s consent, express or implicit, correct?

Me: I did read it in the Constitution: the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. And she just said it, she gave it away. You have that right if you have the right to carry on public property if you have the owner’s express or implicit consent. And that is what property open to the public means: you have explicit consent to enter, and you have the implicit consent to carry.

The state of Hawaii removes that implicit consent to carry.

Sotomayor then goes on to try to conflate carrying where you are legally allowed to go with trespass. It is difficult to follow because she wants it to be difficult to follow. She is attempting to make the case about property rights. Which is not at question.

Nobody is arguing that private property owners can forbid trespass and can set rules for entering their property. “No shoes, no shirt, no service” is exactly that. A “No Guns” sign means I’m shopping somewhere else.

She then goes on to yap about the “custom” of carrying on private property with implied consent. She then pulls a quick one by trying to say that since Hawaii has a 200 year custom of forbidding firearms, this is the custom that should stand now. Beck fires back that it is a “custom of the nation”, not the state. Falling into her verbal trap.

There are no laws in this Nation’s historical tradition of firearms regulation that takes away that implied consent.

Sotomayor and Beck get into a back and forth regarding a previous Supreme Court case, McKee. Sotomayor claims it was talking about the customs of just the state of Missouri, while Beck points out that Justice Scalia used the term “Nation” multiple times. I’ll take Beck’s word over the second dumbest justice to sit on the Supreme Court.

She then tries to bring in laws from 1721, 1722. There’s a huge issue with this. The laws of 1721, 1722 are the laws of England, not this Nation.
Even if the laws were applicable, they all dwelt with closed lands. Lands that were not open to the public.

Barrett and Beck agree that Hawaii could pass a law that prohibited carrying on closed lands as a property right.

Dumber (Jackson) now opens her mouth. Justice Thomas takes off his glasses, leans back in his chair and waits for the magpie to stop making noise.

This is just a property right issue. Property rights trump Second Amendment rights.

Beck calls her BS saying the issue implicates the right to keep and bear arms. Jackson says it doesn’t. It is just property rights.

Gorsuch: This law destroys the right to bear arms in Hawaii. Where does this fit into the Bruen framework?

Beck: Carrying is implicated by this law. The burden must shift to state to prove a match with this Nation’s historical tradition of firearms regulation.

Sotomayor: So the 96% doesn’t really matter? There’s no means end scrutiny? Hawaii has a right to regulate a custom. That means the Second Amendment isn’t implicated.

Using a 1763 for the colony of New York, they banned trespass on private land; that means Hawaii can ban carry on public land.

Sotomayor’s method is to talk over, to interrupt the lawyers she disagrees with. She doesn’t listen to what Beck has to say.

She is actually doing performative art. She and Jackson are both saying things that can be quoted later and which they will quote in their dissent about why this was wrongly decided.

Sotomayor ran this guy out of time. And even when Chief Justice Roberts says he is out of time, Sotomayor talks over Roberts for another paragraph or two. Beck tries to answer; Sotomayor cuts him off before Roberts cuts Sotomayor’s line of questioning off.

Roberts uses a gas station and a home on the side of the road to highlight that there is a difference between private property closed to the public and private property open to the public. Beck does a fantastic job of pointing out that all other rights extend to the door. As Roberts says, “A stranger can walk off the sidewalk and go up to the door?” Beck, “Yes, up to the door, Your Honor”

Alito asks if there are any other objects besides guns that a person may not possess when they enter private property open to the public.

Sotomayor goes back to the Hawaii custom of denying rights to prove that they should still be able to deny The People the right to keep and bear arms.

And she is snarky about it; it looks like she yanks some number out of her ass: So 78 percent of Hawaii residents and 64 percent of Hawaii gun owners do not think that loaded concealed weapons should be allowed into businesses at all, correct?

Beck: I’m unaware of that statistic, Your Honor.

Sotomayor: “I wasn’t aware of your 97 — 96 point — percent number”

She would have been aware of his numbers if she had read the fillings. Thomas knew. Thomas mentioned it, not Beck.

Kagan: Hasn’t the state met its burden with the many historical regulations it has cited? And they have multiple references to legislation that flipped the default.

Beck: No. The poaching laws limited carrying on private lands for poaching, not for self-defense. The other laws cited are black code laws. Laws designed to discriminate against blacks. We’ve moved past that.

Kagan: Well, yes, they are anti-pouching laws, and yes, they did allow people to carry for self-defense, but that is close enough to banning armed self-defense on private property, right?

Kagan: You see, the anti-poaching laws were about preventing injuries to private property, and Hawaii’s law is about preventing injuries also.

Me: No, anti-poaching laws were to stop people from stealing food on the hoof.

Beck: This entire line of questioning is irrelevant. The laws you are referring to were closed property; Hawaii’s law is for property open to the public.

Gorsuch: The laws being referenced are a New Jersey 1771 anti-poaching law. The other is an 1865 Louisiana law that a Reconstruction governor explained was aimed at the freedmen. A black code law. Do you think that black codes should inform our decision-making?

Beck: Hell no.

Gorsuch: Well, the state claims it is a dead ringer for this statute.

Beck: The 1865 law was expressly passed to discriminate against African Americans that were newly freed slaves. And I just don’t see how a law like that can be used to be analogized to a modern-day law, this modern-day law, Your Honor.

Barrett asks if Beck agrees with everything the government said in their brief. Beck thinks she is talking about the state of Hawaii. Barrett clarifies that she is speaking of the US federal government, which filed supporting The People and will be arguing next. Beck corrects himself and there is a bunch of laughter.

Barrett: The government that’s on your same side.

Beck: Yes, I understand.

(Laughter.)

Beck: I agree with every —

Barrett: I’m not asking you to throw your case away.

(Laughter.)

Beck: I fully endorse the United States’ brief, Your Honor.

Barrett asks for clarification regarding “open to public” and “closed to public” and the 1865 black code law. Beck replies that there might be something to discuss there, but the fact that it is a black code law means it is not part of this Nation’s historical tradition of firearms regulation.

Jackson is back for another whiff at bat: Chief Justice Roberts asked about a gas station on the side of the road. We don’t get to enter that gas station because of a Constitutional right but because the owner of the gas station has given us consent. That consent has limits, and the owner can set those limits, and the state can set limits, right?

Beck: You have a constitutional right to carry your firearm onto that specific gas station.

Good going, Mr. Beck. Don’t let Jackson distract you.

Goodness, is Jackson dumb or just incompetent? She is attempting to set a word trap, and she’s nowhere near as good as Sotomayor, and Sotomayor is bad at it. She denies there is a constitutional right to carry on private property. She then says that there is an implied license. Then claims that there is a historical tradition of requiring a license to enter private property.

This is so convoluted. Nowhere do you need a “license” to enter private property. She is using an obsolete definition where “license” is the same as “permission”. She then continues to use the term “license” to say that you require a license to enter. This type of language will be used in the dissent to justify Hawaii’s licensing (permission) scheme.

Cringe warning

Jackson:

(I had to take a break after that.)

She goes on, saying that when Thomas wrote “this Nation’s historical tradition of firearms regulations” he said that we were bound by history. Since 1865 is part of our history, then that should be part of the Bruen test. Which also means that any law ever passed becomes part of our history and thus becomes justification for all future infringements, even if that law is later struck down.

Ms. Harris is the Principal Deputy Solicitor General for the Federal DOJ. She was acting solicitor general before D. John Sauer was confirmed as solicitor general. She is now the second in command of the office of the solicitor general. John Sauer was presenting on a different case the day this case was argued.

In other words, she’s way the heck up there. Trump->Pam Bondi->John Sauer->Ms. Harris. And she’s arguing for us!

Harris: Hawaii is lying about why they passed this law. It is aimed at only legal gun owners with CCWs. There are no other items these laws affect. Besides, the only law they can use to support their current law is an unconstitutional black code.

There is back and forth regarding pretextual laws. The example given is of English game laws. These laws were to “preserve game” but were designed to prevent commoners from hunting.

The gist is that when looking for an analog firearm regulation, the real reason is looked at, not the pretext. Hawaii says it is protecting property rights for safety reasons. Just because they say it is for safety and property rights doesn’t mean that laws dealing with property rights and safety are a match to this law.

You have to look for the true reason for the law. In this case, the vampire laws are designed to keep people from carrying because there are too many places where it is illegal.

Kagan opines that The Court doesn’t look at the motives a law was passed. Harris fires back that if the stated purpose and the text show a fundamental mismatch, it belies the asserted motive of the legislature.

Kagan says The Court can’t do that because that would be means-ends scrutiny.

It is clear that the three crones of the Supreme Court are trying to neuter Bruen.

Kavanaugh has had enough of this.

Harris: Absolutely!

This is a trap that “smart” people fall into. They get distracted by the details. Instead of focusing on the big picture, they get lost in the weeds, and then instead of deciding based on the big picture, they end in a major fight over details.

Harris is fighting a different battle here, though. She is fighting to make it clear that doing an end run around the limits the Supreme Court sets out is not acceptable to the United States. She is clearly targeting New York, California, and the rest of the states that had Bruen tantrum response bills.

Kavanaugh is say to keep it simple. Hawaii didn’t meet their burden. Done and done.

Gorsuch brings up First Amendment case law that addressed a similar issue. Harris uses Lamont as her example. In Lamont they flipped the script on mail delivery. The rule was that you got mail of all sorts unless you explicitly said “no”. The law in question in Lamont flipped it to require a person to explicitly request mail on a “very easy-to-send postcard”. This was firmly rejected by The Court.

Jackson is back with another attempt to make this only about property rights. Harris gives a perfect example of how stupid this argument is. She points out that today a politician can have somebody come to your door to campaign. But if this law was followed in a First Amendment situation, the homeowner would have to post a large sign on their property before that door knock could take place.

Alito sends a soft pitch asking about why antipoaching laws are not an appropriate analogue. Harris knocks it out of the park. You know why.

Alito then asks what is the purpose of the Second Amendment right is. Harris, self-defense, and other lawful purposes.

Alito focuses on Heller, which he wrote, to point out that the wording was about self-defense but that other lawful purposes also existed. Harris does a good job in the answers.

Sotomayor is back. Still attempting to make it all about property rights and the owner’s consent. She tries to use Hawaii’s tradition of screwing over The People’s right to keep and bear arms over the last 200 years as the tradition that allows Hawaii to pass the vampire laws.

Harris fires back, stating clearly that local customs in a state doesn’t allow that state to have its own Second Amendment. The meaning of the Second Amendment doesn’t change as you move from state to state.

Ok, this is good!

Harris:

It is almost as if Harris had this response lined up before it was asked. Great response.

In an interesting exchange between Kavanaugh and Harris, Kavanaugh asks about sensitive places as mentioned in Heller. He attempts to get Harris to agree with Heller as is. Instead, Harris goes with, We agree with the principle as stated that there are obviously sensitive places. You determine them with respect to the history of firearm regulation.

This is a massive statement by the DoJ. It says they are not arguing that sensitive places do exist, but that it isn’t as easy as saying, “That’s a sensitive place,” to get guns banned. You can’t declare the island of Manhattan a sensitive place. So New York declared Times Square a sensitive place.

Barrett asks about anti-poaching regulations. Harris points out that poaching was and is a problem.

In my state, and most states that I know, you have to post your land to keep hunters out. Hunters are presumed to be able to hunt on any land that is not posted. In my state the limit on where you hunt is 100 yards of an occupied dwelling. And they mean occupied as people living in, not that nobody is home.

JUSTICE JACKSON: So I guess I really don’t understand your response to Justice Gorsuch on the black codes. And here I thought that Jackson had gotten her “I don’t understand” under control. There is so much she doesn’t understand.

She’s arguing that black code laws, laws that have been found unconstitutional, can be used to justify more unconstitutional laws.

More tomorrow.