Chris Johnson

An interesting thing is happening within the circuit courts, those judges who are tired of seeing the majority rubber stamp any infringement a state wants, are speaking out.

They are taking their lead from Thomas, Van Dyke and others who have spoken up to shed light on just how badly these rogue judges are behaving.

This explains the game. The majority of the Bianchi merits panel found for The People. The minority refused to write his dissent. Because of “traditions”, the merits panel did not issue their opinion, instead waiting for the dissent.

Meanwhile, the Fourth was waiting for another 2A case to show up. That would be Price.

The Price panel decided the “plain text” question was worthy of considerable attention. Since Mr. Price was charged with a criminal act, the panel decided he wasn’t a part of The People. To use their words:

Boy is it cleaned up.

1) It is undisputed that petitioners Koch and Nash—two ordinary, law-abiding, adult citizens—are part of “the people” whom the Second Amendment protects. —New York State Rifle & Pistol Assn., Inc. V. Bruen, 142 S.Ct. 2111 (U.S. 2022) So the fourth is going down the path that the definition of “The People” in the Second Amendment is a subset of The People as used in the rest of the Constitution.

2) In common use, was not part of “plain text”. It was a reference to Heller‘s work, which states that the state cannot ban weapons in common use.

This is essential to note and understand. A weapon that is in common use cannot be banned. This does not mean that weapons that are NOT in common use may be banned. If a weapon is not in common use, then the government bears the burden of proving that there are firearms regulation in this Nation’s history which match the modern-day infringement.

3) “Shall not be infringed?” That appears to be pretty clear-cut.

There are 84 pages of this twisting of language in Price all to get to the point where they say “The plain text of the Second Amendment does not encompass the proposed conduct.”

The gist of this argument is the self-centered arrogance of the Fourth Circuit and the Seventh Circuit. When Justice Thomas wrote: Despite the popularity of this two-step approach, it is one step too many. Step one of the predominant framework is broadly consistent with Heller, which demands a test rooted in the Second Amendment’s text, as informed by history. …—id. at 10 he did not claim that any of the Circuit Courts got it right, just nearly so.

Nevertheless, the Fourth circuit believes that Justice Thomas was speaking about them as having been “broadly consistent” with Heller in the past. Since they are the exception, they must have gotten it right the last time. Thus, they are correct in thinking that “plain text” has anything to do with common use.

In common use is only of use to The People. If an arm is in common use, it cannot be banned.

In Bianchi, the Fourth issued Price first, used that to justify their “We were broadly consistent before, we still are.”

So, in the minds of the Fourth circuit court, “plain text” is a sophisticated problem requiring detail examination of the etymological meaning of each word and phrase, ignoring the Heller Court doing exactly that, for them.

I started caring about computer infrastructure in the early 1980s. We feed our computer via punch cards, 9 track tape, and a few dozen hardwired terminals at 4800 baud.

We upgraded our network. We got our IBM 3090 on BITNET. I learned more about networking.

We upgraded to 10base2 when our Sun 360s arrived. More and more of campus had Ethernet.

When I arrived in Maryland, I was babysitting some Super Computers. There were nearly 1000 computers hooked up to the network. Most of those were running some variation of Unix.

To keep all of those machines up-to-date took a highly skilled team of system administrators. They handled all the machines on campus except for the Super Computers, which my team took care of.

If they needed help, the team could call on my Mentor’s team. His team was part of the group of people that defined the Internet. Yes, really.

That support team spent about 25% of their time caring for around 800 Unix machines. They spent the other 75% trying to care for the Apple’s and Microsoft machines. The workload was getting greater and greater as more and more Microsoft and Apple machines came on campus.

By the time I left, they had to increase the size of that support team from two skilled workers, to four skilled workers. 2 of them did nothing but Microsoft support.

The number of Unix boxes increased and still was taking less than 20% of the teams efforts.

I wish that was still the case.

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There are 15 shooting sports in the current Olympic Games:

1. 10m Air Rifle Men
2. 50m Rifle 3 Positions Men
3. 10m Air Pistol Men
4. 25m Rapid Fire Pistol Men
5. Trap Men
6. Skeet Men
7. 10m Air Rifle Women
8. 50m Rifle 3 Positions Women
9. 10m Air Pistol Women
10. 25m Pistol Women
11. Trap Women
12. Skeet Women
13. 10m Air Rifle Mixed Team
14. 10m Air Pistol Mixed Team
15. Skeet Mixed Team

The pistol and rifle are .22 Caliber, the trap, and skeet are 12gage. The air pistol and air rifle fire 10 mm projectiles.

In reading the rules, they talk about how the shooting jackets are padded to reduce recoil.

How would they deal with the recoil from a 30-06? It boggles the mind.

The rapid shooting requires 5 rounds on target from low ready in 4, 6 and 8 seconds.

Jerry’s 6, reload, 6 in 1.9 seconds would likely break their heads. Of course, they are looking for accuracy rather than speed. Jerry puts all of his rounds in the A box, that is different from the ISSF target.

The 10 Ring is 100 mm in diameter with the inner 10 being 50 MM, the outer ring is 500 mm. They define a miss a bit differently than we would at “9.7”.

Regardless, there are still real rifles at the Olympics.

No, it looks like this:

Yes, it does call into question the accuracy of my statistics.

I do make mistakes. This is one of the reasons I often put citations in my articles. That is so you can check my work.

It is also why I put my math in documents. I don’t just give you a number. I tell you how I got to that number. I.e. I show my work.

$$\mathrm{P(A)}=\frac{f}{N}$$

Where P(A) is the probability of an event (A) occurring, f the frequency of the event, and N is the total number of occurrences.

So if there is a 1 in 5 chance, the probability is $\frac{1}{5}=0.200$.

The probability of events A and B happens is $\mathrm{P(A\; and\; B)}=\mathrm{P(A)}\times \mathrm{P(B)}$.

Using De Morgan’s Law, we know that NOT (A or B) is equal to NOT A and NOT B. When addressing the question of rape, we are looking for the probability of a woman NOT being raped in year 1 AND of not being raped in years 2, and so forth. This if the probability of being raped is 1 in 4 while in collage, that means that we have NOT(P(rape(y1)) or P(rape(y2)) or P(rape(y3)) or P(rape(y4)) = 3/4 = 0.75. Y1 through y4 represent years at collage. We are assuming a four-year collage.

P(rape(yN)) is fixed at some value, for the sake of argument and ease of calculation.

$$\begin{array}{ccc}{\mathrm{P(rape(Y))}}^4& =& 0.75\\ \mathrm{P(rape(Y))}& =& \sqrt[4]{0.75}\\ \mathrm{P(rape(Y))}& =& 0.930604859\end{array}$$

Now that we know what the probability of a woman not being raped, per year, while in collage. We can restate it as the probability of a woman being raped. That is simply $1–0.930604859$ or 0.06939514. Converting to a percentage, that gives us a 6.94% chance of a woman being raped per year at collage.

We want to convert this to per capita using 100K. This is simply multiplying the percentage by 100,000 which gives us 6939 per 100,000 women attending collage.

You can verify the formulas used at —No. 114 Dominic Bianchi v. Anthony Brown, No. 21-1255, slip op., n. 2 (4th Cir.).

So what about the other direction? I used two sources. One was found using “rapes per capita by state” and the other was “rapes per capita by country”. The value given for rapes per capita by states for the US was 40 per 100k. The per country gave us 41.77 per 100k. This being close enough to 40 that I choose to use the 40 per 100k as being “good enough”.
—United States v. Price, No. 22-4609, slip op. at 11,12 (4th Cir.)

Using 40/100000 gives us $\mathrm{P(rape(Y))}=0.0004$. This gives the probability of not being raped as $0.9996$. Using our formula for multiple occurrences and using a 50-year span, we get ${0.9996}^{50}=0.9802$. This means that the probability of a woman being raped over the course of 50 years is 0.0198 or 1.98%.

As Elrod stated, this all depends on your definition of rape. Definitions matter. As an example, in some countries, like the UK, it is not a murder unless the person is convicted of murder. So, again as Elrod said, a man with 6 bullet holes in the back of his head is just a dead person, not a murder victim, until and unless a person is convicted of the crime.

Rape is much the same. Different places have different definitions. In particular, the US statistics I used were “forcible rape”. This has a better definition than just the word “rape”.

All of the above is just to get to the following paragraph.

I struggle with dyslexia. The result of this is that once I type a word, it always looks correct to me. Or almost always. Spell checkers go a long way to fixing simple misspellings. I have to work to misspell a word.

I also pay for a plugin called LanguageTool. This does grammar analysis as well. Unfortunately, if the word I am using is grammatical correct, LanguageTool often does not catch my errors.

In the course of an article, I will expect between 10 and 100 error corrections. I apologize for those that get through.

Here is a word that I hope you do not struggle with, sweet and sweat. One of those words means a nice thing to eat, filled with yummy sugar like flavor. The other is what happens when you exercise.

I don’t think you want me to give you a sweat tart on Halloween.

I believe I have that correct, I would have to look up the word in a dictionary in order to double-check it.

So please, if I make a mistake, call me on it. If I don’t give you the references, it is likely because I didn’t bother to click the buttons to make a citation, I was lazy. Call me on it.

This dude looks relaxed and laid back as he takes the Bronze. What is spectacular, in this picture, is that he doesn’t look like a cyborg. No fancy gizmos, nothing except ear plugs and prescription glasses.

Why is some random ex-cop from Turkey taking a bronze in a shooting competition? The top four slots should all be Americans.

USA! USA! USA! Rah rah rah.

How many of you have precession air guns? I have one. And it isn’t great. If I had a few hundred to spend on a good air-rifle, I have enough to spend on a good rifle.

My guess is that air-pistol and air-rifle competition just isn’t that popular in the states. We have young children competing in shooting sports. Often times starting with their parents’ firearms.

Those that are superb get sponsorships and are soon professionals, which means they don’t qualify for the Olympics.

Since they added snowboarding to the Winter Olympics, maybe we can hope they will add Three Gun or one of the other standard shooting sports. At that point, I would expect to see more American’s taking medals. Until then, I’m going to laugh at the people who think that a guy shooting with limit equipment is something unheard of.

Then I’m going to the range and putting a few hundred rounds down range. A mix of 9mm, 0.45.

I just do not get it. At least that’s what I keep saying. That isn’t as true as it used to be, but I still don’t thoroughly understand it.

We run risk assessments all the time. Most people do a shitty job of it. They conflate probability of occurring with the amount put at risk.

As an example, consider the following bet, “I will bet you this $10 bill at a 3:1 payout.” That means I will get back $30 if I win, and I will forfeit my $10 bet if I lose.

If you can afford to lose $10, you might take that bet.

Now, let’s say that you have a 1 in 4 chance of winning. Over the course of 8 games, you will win 2 times for $60. You will have bet $80. The house walks away with $20.

This is how casinos make their money. It is not always this obvious, but it is the same thing.

Now consider a second type of bet, one where you are betting $10 on the flip of a coin against $10. The odds and the payout are a match. Over an extended number of plays, you will come out even.

Would you be willing to bet $100 on the flip of a coin? $1000? $100,000? Your life?

This is risk assessment. It is looking at both the probability of the event taking place and the “cost” of the event.
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From Miguel’s substack, with permission.

At least from the regular Venezuelans.

At this writing, the 2024 presidential elections in Venezuela are in the can and Maduro seems to have “secured” his re-election. Protest about the fraud committed did happen, and the government was swift arresting over 1,500 so far who are slotted to go to prison ipso facto without pretty much legal niceties, plus also announced that other thousands of so members of the “Opposition” and protesters are pre-approved to be also arrested and given free “vacations.”

So, what happened to what used to be Latin America’s most vibrant and stable Democracy? What led to Venezuela becoming just another Communist dictatorship? I am going to try to give you a short explanation and for that, let’s begin to kill misconceptions.

Number one: In the 203 years of existence, Venezuela was a democracy (of sorts) for only 3 decades, from the 1960s to the 1990s. Before that and thereafter, the country was run by Caudillos (Strong Men) who fought, bullshitted or bullied themselves into the Presidency. Democracy was a short-lived experiment that was eventually was used by the Left to vote itself into the power they could not obtain by the traditional revolutionary methods of the 50s. Were there elections during those old times? Yes, but again, they were either vaudeville show elections except in one case where the elected President was kicked out by a revolutionary Leninist coalition who were themselves promptly removed by the Military which took over the control of the nation and kept it.

So, the historical DNA of the country is firmly programmed to accept Caudillos and a central government directing every aspect of your life. And with that comes the sad fact that such government will implement and use whatever force and persuasion it requires to remain in power. Scaring and programming people into submission is standard operational procedure: “Violence doesn’t solve anything” and “If you defy the “law”, we will use violence upon you and yours” are not contradictory terms in Venezuela or the rest of Latin America, they are just facts of life we learned to live with.

Number two: I don’t recall when exactly, but in the very late 1980s or early 1990s, there was an article in a major newspaper in Venezuela proudly announcing that the biggest employer in the country was officially the government. More than half of working Venezuelans derived their income to feed their families from the people in power, and that meant voting against the government meant voting against your wallet, voting against keeping your kids fed and a roof above your family and medication for grandma. Politics no longer was about ethereal principles like “Freedom” but real issues like having a job and not going hungry. And even if you were not on the Country’s payroll, more than likely you would be providing goods and services to those who were or to the government companies themselves. And people not only will they not fight against the government, but they will also gladly denounce to the proper intelligence authorities if they suspect anybody wants to do something against their security. Yes, they will snitch you at Warp 5 and have zero remorse about it because you are messing with their lives.

Number three: Historically, Venezuela always had Caudillos that promised radical changes in our way of living, swearing they would improve them. People would throw support at them, but most ended up failures, and a very few were successful, only for the new man in the Presidential Chair to become just another version of the previous occupant. “Mismo musiu con diferente cachimbo” is an old Venezuelan saying roughly translated to: same guy with a different pipe AKA Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. People eventually get tired of broken promises, so when somebody comes along with visions of wealth and prosperity if you join him, the recently burned just ignore them. It takes time, usually almost a generation, to get a fresh crop of hopeful idiots to support a “change” that could end up in a successful transfer of power. The Left tried to get in the hard way in the early 1960s after the transition from a military regime to Democracy and failed because both people were sick of the instability, Castro had shown his colors, and true Democracy was the newest-coolest product in the market for Venezuela. But The Left knows how to play the long game and started to infiltrate universities and the Media with their “light version” of themselves (Me a Communist? Never! I believe in social change and equality like a good Christian!”) but never lost track of the country’s DNA and hence comes Comandante Hugo Chavez and his coup attempt.

The coup failed… and not. Long story short: by the mid-1990s, thanks to a combination of corrupt practices, economic downturns and a very successful long-term campaign to undermine the country’s morale, people were once again ready for a “change” in the hands of a Caudillo. What the failed coup gave Chavez was a constant mention in the Media that amazingly fast went from negative for the people who got killed, to “we understand why he did it” to “Maybe he is the change we need” and people simply agreed with what been planted all along in their minds for many decades.

And not only did they vote Chavez into power but voted to give him more power: He was able to dispose of the Supreme Court by popular vote. The same vote gave him the OK to change the constitution, control of the Election Council and grant himself re-elections for as long as he wanted. I laugh when I hear people now complain about how it was possible that Maduro rigged the elections, since Venezuela’s elections have been worse than a rigged reality-tv show before the Millennium kicked in.

The above is a very simplified summary, and I am going to condense it even more: If the government feeds me and can kill me without consequence, why should I try to depose it to install a new set of assholes that probably won’t do any better?

One last thing:

“You can vote your way into socialism, but you’re going to have to shoot your way out.”

We know this is true. They are willing to kill to remain in power, and killing is the only way to remove them. But then you read this:

Just a couple of reminders: Peaceful demonstrations only work if the targets of those demonstrations are moral and scrupulous people.
The Left mastered the “peaceful demonstrations” and knows its weaknesses.

Until I see the stacks of pro-government bodies piled high on the streets of Caracas, I won’t believe that change is actually happening. And I doubt this will happen in my lifetime.

— Miguel Gonzalez © 2024.

Almost everybody has seen the iconic image of Che Guevara. Looking heroic with his beret and unkempt look. His eyes looking off into the distance.

That symbolism is not welcome in my home or in my spaces. If somebody were to wear something with his likeness in my presence, I would leave if it wasn’t my space, or tell them to remove the offensive article or leave my space.

To quote Wikipedia:

You have to carefully parse those words to understand what it actually means. Note, I’m not a historian, just somebody that studies history.

So what are the “social reforms” mentioned? Social reforms might not sound all that bad.

This was “decree 900”, also known as the “Agrarian Reform Law”. This law took land from landowners, if the state felt that the landowners were not using the land. This is also known as “stealing”. In exchange for the forced sale of their land, the landowners were given “government bonds.”
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If you are reading this, you are part of the 1% richest people in the world.

I can confidently say that because there are so many people living in object poverty. Not poverty as defined by the government, but actual poverty.

The government likes to define poverty in relative terms. This means that when you are part of a rich society, you can be “below the poverty line” and still be richer than most of the world’s population could ever dream of becoming.

If you are reading this, you have a device capable of connecting to the Internet, that makes you wealthy.

But wealth is not just money, it is also goods. I do not consider myself or my family to be well-off. We struggle to pay our monthly bills, we struggle to support our children’s quest for a collage education. It feels like we are always just one paycheck from disaster.

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