Chris Johnson

Tenth Circuit Finds that Machine Guns Are Not Arms

As discussed yesterday, the tenth circuit decided that the first step in the Bruin methodology is to determine if the arm is in common use for self-defense before it can be considered an arm under the Second Amendment.

The reasoning behind the opinion is bad, to say the least, but we are not ready for this fight.

The criminal case involves a Glock Switch and other bad facts that would make bad law.

It Is Never Easy

I attempted an OpenStack install. The process never got to a working cloud. I want to be using OVN but the documentation is lacking, and I couldn’t make it work.

I learned something new: the concept of “cloud-init.” This might be interesting.

The problem I was having was that when using OVN I could sometimes get instances to come up and run, but sometimes the network wouldn’t work correctly. Breaking things.

The OVN implementation says that it has a metadata agent, but I could never get it to bind nor to answer queries. In the end, I decided to go back to using OpenvSwitch. Which then borked the OVN networks.

I’m in the process of removing the network part of OpenStack from that node.  I’ll try again once I have a baremetal machine ready to go.

Cloud-Init Looks Cool

Cloud-init is a set of processes that run during first boot, which pulls metadata from a “well-known” server.

The metadata can be scripts, configuration instructions, or a host of other things.

After the network is up and running, cloud-init makes a request to http://169.254.169.254. The server that answers at that IP will reply with the metadata for that particular server/instance. It would be nice to have a local server that provided an SSH key on first boot.

This should work for bare-metal installs if I set up a server at the above address to serve the metadata based on the IP of the request. An interesting reason to learn more about “Flask.”

Woodworking

Thursday I got my foreplane up and running. This was an eBay purchase of a narrow iron, high-chamber, medium-length plane. It is used for the rapid removal of stock.

If you are thinning a board or doing other bulk removal, a well-tuned foreplane will cut chips instead of shavings. You then smooth with a smoothing plane to get to the final dimension.

The plane looked good in the images, and what was delivered matched. What wasn’t obvious is that this plane had been made into a wall hanger.

Like a firearm that has been repaired but is no longer safe to use, this plane is no longer usable.

A former owner had applied a finish to the plane. Likely a polyurethane. I spotted this when I noticed a couple of drops that had not leveled out.

For the sole of the plane, this just meant it took a little longer on the lapping board. What I found Thursday was that there is more to a plane than a sharp iron and a flat sole.

That finish got into the throat and mouth of the plane. When it cuts a shaving, that shaving flows through the mouth and into the throat before it is pulled out and tossed or is otherwise disposed of.

What happens with that polyurethane is that the mouth is not only a little smaller, it also has a different coefficient of friction. This caused the shavings to jam so tight that I had to use an awl to free the shavings.

In the process I damaged the iron, which would require a few hours of sharpening to repair. Those old irons have very brittle cutting edges.

I’ve decided that this plane is now a wall hanger. I might be able to save the iron and tote, but I’m not sure anything else can be salvaged.

Furniture Plans

When I am using plans, I expect them to have instructions that tell me how to lay out my lines and to build the furniture. I don’t expect lifesize templates.

The plans for the trestle table I purchased don’t have radii or points of reference; you just tape the paper to the wood and cut it out.

I’m sure it works, but it is not how I like to work.

Scottish Girl

I’ve read some reporting that our ax and knife girl might get a little justice.

According to the original press stories, this was just a privileged white girl threatening an immigrant. Those stories did not mention what happened before the filming started.

The Scottish police originally claimed that the CCTV footage had gone missing, but they have now found the footage.

The muslim and his wife have been arrested. There are hospital reports of physical harm done to the 12-year-old that Ax Girl was defending.

The police are still insisting that the knife possession was a worse crime than being assaulted, but it is the UK.

Speaking Of Stupid Police

Some muckity-muck in the Canadian police is telling Canadians that if there is an intruder in their home, the best thing to do is to cooperate.

He strongly discourages anybody from taking the law into their hands.

Question of the Week

Have you ever set out to learn something, learned it, and then decided it was a total waste of your time?

I would love to own a machine gun. It would cost me $75 and ten minutes at the milling machine. Locate the selector switch hole, move to the deck a specific amount, and drill a hole. Flip over the receiver and repeat. Then install the parts.

Total time would be around an hour because I would be going slow. The longest time would likely be finding the reamer of the correct size.

Today it would cost me over $10k to buy a machine gun. Because I’m not allowed to manufacture a machine gun, not because of any law directly forbidding it, but because the Hughes amendment in 1986 closed the NFA registration to new machineguns.

That took the cost of an M16 from slightly more than the cost of an AR-15 to astronomical amounts today.

There are other machine guns I would love to make; I’d love to make an M3 grease gun for the Blue-Haired Faire.

But that is not the state of case law today.

The simple answer is that I should be able to go to court and say, “I want to manufacture a machine gun for my personal use. I would do so but for 18 U.S.C. §922. This is in violation of my Second Amendment protected rights.”

The next step that should happen is that the court does a lexical analysis. Are machine guns arms? The answer is obviously “Yes.”

Subsequently, the state must prove that machine guns are both unusually dangerous and uncommon. The Supreme Court has set the upper limit on “common” at 200,000. If there are more than 200,000 machine guns owned for lawful purposes, then machine guns are in common use.

Because the Supreme Court did the analysis in Heller, the common use test is all that must be done. Any other language in Heller, Bruen, or any other Supreme Court finding is outside the holdings of those two cases. That is still good case law.

This is not happening currently. The courts are tying themselves in pretzels to say that machine guns are not arms. Or that “in common use for lawful purposes” actually means “in lawful use for self-defense,” where “self-defense” is defined as pulling the trigger.

Regardless, the fact remains that machine guns are arms, they are protected by the Second Amendment, and they are in common use for lawful purposes. If the number in common use isn’t at the 200k mark, the case can be made that they would be in common use if the law didn’t prohibit making new ones for The People.

This means that there are cases being argued along these exact lines. And the district and circuit courts are doing the shuffle and twist to find machine gun bans constitutional.

The question becomes, do we want a machine gun case to reach the Supreme Court?

I point you to Rahimi. This was a case with a terrible fact pattern. Rahimi was an asshole wife/spouse/girlfriend beater who had no problems shooting at people, brandishing his firearms, and being a criminal thug. If his conviction for having a firearm while being a prohibited person had been overturned at the Supreme Court, he would still have been in prison. The firearms charge was just a topper on all the other charges he was convicted of.

Rahimi was good case law for us. The holding was fairly simple: if you are adjudicated a violent person, you can have your Second Amendment protected rights temporarily abridged. While the inferior courts continue to misuse this case, that was the holding.

If it had been Range that made it to the Supreme Court, we would have had a much more favorable fact pattern. He failed to report extra income he was earning doing odd jobs. He pleaded guilty to the charge. He served no time. The maximum amount of time he could have been sentenced to was exceeding a year.

Under the GCA of 1968, this makes him a “felon” and a prohibited person. There is no evidence he is a violent person. Since his conviction, there have been no other incidents to paint him in a bad light.

Garland did us dirty with Rahimi. He knew the fact pattern was horrible; he used that to get a holding that wasn’t as strong as it might have been in the Range case.

When you or I think of machine guns, we are likely thinking about M16s or an MP-5, or any of those cool things. Most machine gun cases in criminal court are about “Glock Switches.” These cases almost always have bad fact patterns. We don’t want these cases in front of the Supreme Court.

Which leads us to my example case: I file a civil lawsuit with the backing of the gun rights group. It will take a while to make it up the courts: 6 months in the district court another 8 to 12 months before the circuit court opines. Then a year or so waiting for cert., oral arguments, and then the opinion from the Supreme Court.

Just a few million dollars to exercise my God given rights.

What is the likely outcome before the Supreme Court?

I believe that Thomas and Alito would find for The People. Given what Kavanaugh said in Heller II, I expect that he would find for The People as well. Jackson, Sotomayor, and Kagan would find a reason to support gun control. That leaves three justices.

Roberts isn’t to be trusted on this sort of case. That leaves Barrett and Gorsuch. I don’t know where they will fall in that case. I’ve been impressed with Gorsuch and Barrett, but there is too much at stake right now.

What I want to see is a couple of Second Amendment cases make it through this court, with maybe an additional Trump-appointed justice. I would like to see where Barrett, Kavanaugh, and Gorsuch line up before I risk a machine gun case in front of them.

Suppressors, SBRs, and SBS are all ripe for the Supreme Court to take on. Those are tax issues. With a zero tax, there is no justification for the registration process. This means they become firearms regulated under the GCA of 1968, not the NFA of 1934.

Sensitive places is another good subject for the Supreme Court. Kavanaugh thinks we will be seeing a magazine and semi-auto rifle ban before the Supreme Court shortly.

I don’t know about those. I think that the Supreme Court is more likely to take a different subject for direct reasons and then clarify what “plain text” means with explicit language. I’d love to see part of the dict that reads, “Just as AR-15s are arms under the plain text of the Second Amendment, …” because that is a hammer to be used in the inferior courts.

I needed something relaxing, so back to my college days with Bob James

Watching a woman rant about how the only “right” thing to do is to cut her parents out of her life because they don’t have her political views made me sick. It made me miss my parents all over again.

More than anything else the left has done to my country, the unending hate dividing families is the most evil. It seems to flow in only one direction, from the left against the right.

My parents were right leaning until late in their lives. They drank the Obama Kool-Aid and were lost. They talked about the Republican candidates as evil, horrible people. The only “news” they watched was CNN.

During Trump’s first term, it got even worse. It was a constant repeat of CNN talking points and hating on Trump.

I quickly learned to keep my opinions to myself in political areas. I loved my parents. Their political stance did not change that, nor did it split them from me.

My wife has been fighting this for longer than I have. Since her father passed, most of the family older than her have gone full TDS. She doesn’t express her opinion.

Because I am who I am, I don’t need to talk to my friends every day. A year can go by, and then we are together as if it was only yesterday. One of my friends, and Ally’s best friend, contracted TDS during Trump’s first term.

We continued to be “friends,” but couldn’t talk freely around her because of the hate that spewed from her when anything Trump was mentioned. The reason she became a Trump hater was because of Dobbs. According to her, her reproductive care had been stripped from her and her daughters.

The state laws didn’t change. Her access to abortion hadn’t changed. Her daughters’ access to abortion hadn’t changed. She is postmenopausal, so she can’t get pregnant. Her eldest daughter is married and busy making babies. Her youngest isn’t sexually active with men.

For her, the issue was that if her daughter was raped, and if her daughter conceived, and if her daughter wanted an abortion, and if her daughter lived in a state that had banned abortions for rape survivors, her daughter would have to leave that state to get an abortion. Because the Supreme Court ruled that abortion was a state issue, it was Trump’s fault for putting his pick of Justices on The Court.

After Trump was elected to his second term, she posted that if you voted for Trump, she couldn’t be friends with you. She has been written off. Not because she has TDS, but because she kicked us to the curb for not agreeing with her political views.

I’m watching postings from people in New Hampshire on local groups. Everything “bad” is Trump’s fault. The school system’s business administrator appears to be responsible for the school system being short more than $5 million. It’s Trump and the MAGAot’s fault for not wanting to fund schools.

It is MAGA’s fault for electing a Republican governor. Nobody bothers to notice that the elected school board, which oversees the business administrator, were all elected by them. And they all appear to be Democrats.

But the blame goes to the Republicans.

If you are anti-gun, I don’t hate you. If you want to take my rights away, then I will fight you. Hate requires too much energy to engage in. Yet it seems to drive the left.

There was a church shooting. As soon as the media reported it, the left started yelling it was MAGAots. They blamed me and you because we own guns. And they hate on us.

I’m reading The Red Badge of Courage with one of my ESL students. The civil war pitted brother against brother, father against son, neighbor against neighbor, but the level of hate for family and friends didn’t seem to be there. Yes, soldiers and civilians were disgusted by the other team, but I haven’t read about brothers disowning each other because of the side they chose.

And the left continues the battle to fill our lives with hate. They keep telling us who to hate, and the left listens and falls in line.

The project list keeps growing.

• Mud the hallway so the wife can paint it after it’s been stripped to the drywall (and then some).
• Finish building the joiner’s chest. This has subprojects:
  • Finish planing the first end to thickness and avoid knots in the future.
  • Sharpen the plane irons for the new planes
  • Finish smoothing and jointing the boards on hand to create the top, front, back, and other side.
    • Repair the broken saw handle.
    • Take the handle off the saw panel.
    • Clean the saw panel.
    • Sharpen the saw.
    • Preserve the saw.
    • Reattach the handle.
    • Repeat for the crosscut saw.
  • Get the rest of the lumber needed
  • Finish the required sides and top.
  • Smooth and plane to thickness the bottom boards.
  • Rabbet the bottom boards (learn how to cut nice rabbets.
• Fill the joiner’s chest in an organized way.
• Build a new 6 board chest for Ally to use in reenacting.
• Build a couple of stools.
• Create a new nut and screw for the leg vise at the Fort.
• Install and configure a new Ceph node to replace an existing node.
• Upgrade the Ceph cluster.
• Build, populate, and configure a new Ceph server.
• Make the new “managed” switch do switching stuff.
• Move the current switch from the internal net to the DMZ
• Loose more weight
• Exercise more.

Boring, but it just keeps growing, and after my wife reads it, I expect her to add to it.

My father had degrees in engineering, something military, and business. He was also a carpenter, electrician, and cabinet and fine furniture maker.

I learned to look at things from watching him work.

At University, I was a teaching assistant (TA). We graded papers and programs, taught labs, and sometimes presented lectures.

This was a great way to learn, and I loved doing it. I still love teaching.

One of the computer science professors started in the psychology department. Since computers were relatively new, he became interested in them as a psychology problem. To that end, he wrote a textbook about programming. He then requested and was assigned to teaching CPS300 FORTRAN for Engineers.

This was a large lecture hall with around 300 to 400 students in it. Labs were taught by TAs.

His big thing was flow charting. Everybody loved flowcharts at that time. And he had some of the most beautiful flowcharts I’ve ever seen.

Mostly because he was using Nassi-Shneiderman Digrams. These things show program structure clearly, making it trivial to verify the correct functioning of the flowchart.

The problem with them is that they are almost impossible to modify. You didn’t so much modify them as rewrite them.

As engineering students, we were taught piecewise progression. You know where you are, you have an idea of where you want to be, so you take a step in that direction. Verify that the step got you closer; iterate until you are there.

If it becomes impossible to proceed, you backtrack and try again until you reach your goal.

Professor Hans Lee wasn’t an engineer. He was a psychology dude. About a third of the way through the first term working with him, I had a private conversation with him. The gist of the conversation was, “How do you write programs? What do you do when your program doesn’t work?”

His answer was that he visualizes the complete Nassi-Shneiderman, draws it out, and then translates that into code. And if the program doesn’t work, he “throws that design out” and creates a new version.

I had to explain to him that his students were not creating the flowcharts first; they were using the flowcharts to document the code they had already written and proven out. And that as engineers, they were all taught a piecewise problem solving method. His methods might work for the general student body, but for engineers it was a bad fit.

This was the first time I actually vocalized a part of being an engineer actually means.

One of the things I do at The Fort is “fixing” things. Here’s the problem with that: many of the things that exist at the fort don’t have Google pages telling you how to use them. They certainly don’t have IKEA instruction manuals on how to put them together. And many of them are broken, repaired badly, or missing parts.

So I look at things and figure out how they go together and how they work. For me, it just makes sense that tab A goes into slot A. I have been told that most people can’t identify “slot A” or “tab A,” much less that the two go together.

This played out last weekend when I stopped at The Fort; they had a newly donated great wheel plus some parts to go with it. I went over to give it the once-over to determine its condition and what we would need to do to get it back in production.

The answer seems to be replacing two leather axel holders, two leather adjuster holders and putting new drive string on.

The thing that happened, was that as I looked at the wheel and parts, it was obvious to me how the pieces should align. But the kicker in fitting two pieces together was a notch in one of the pieces.

The first rule is that any cut or extra work was done for a reason. The spokes are turned down for a reason: to make the wheel more responsive. The little grooves are for beauty.

Given that rule, why is there a notch cut in that part? What does it do? Some craftsman spent the time to put the notch there. Why are those risers threaded? Making a threaded hole in wood and the matching screw is extra work.

Why is the axle bearing for this part in a separate peg instead of being a part of the riser?

Each of these questions leads to only one answer.

The notch is so that the spindle drive pulley has enough room to run freely. The riser posts are threaded to be able to adjust the tension on the drive string. The separate pegs to hold the axle bearings (holes in the pegs) are so that they rest on top of the risers and the risers can be adjusted.

It all makes perfect sense, once you know what to look for.

Politics And Engineering

When something happens, politicians want to be seen addressing the problem, right now, in very public view. The issue is often that they have no idea what the problem or issue actually is. Instead, they have feelings about what the cause of the issue is.

So they propose a change. What they don’t do is look at what the possible results might be. Instead they focus on what they want the results to be, becoming blind to potential failure or, at best, a waste of taxpayer money.

The problem with most bills is that they are experiments with our freedoms, our livelihood, and our search for happiness. They never seem to have a plan for what to do if their experiment fails. Or if they do, it is mostly “throw more money at it.”

Church Shooting

Miggy nailed it, again. This was a church shooting, not a school shooting.

If I recall correctly, many or most Catholic churches are anti-gun and mark their churches as “gun-free zones.”

This may or may not have the force of law.

But if you have a school attached to the church, then you are suddenly covered under the gun-free schools regulations.

Favorite Anti-Gunner Stupid of the Day

The mayor of the city where the shooting took place got on national TV to explain that guns are bad.

In one paragraph he told us, “Don’t paint all trans as evil because of this incident; the problem is all gun owners who refuse…”

It really was one single breath.

Network Stuff

I know you guys are tired of this. Yesterday I got my virtual network put back together. I finally found the magic document that told me what to do where.

The really cool thing is that once I had that magic, it was trivial to copy it to the different nodes to bring them into the “cloud.”

Ironic

This is a component of OpenStack. It is the tool I was expecting to use to get my network functional again. I haven’t figured it out yet.

The issue is that Ironic is too much. It requires a Baseboard Management Controller (BMC). A BMC is an embedded computer and OS in a server. You connect the BMC to a network, generally referred to as the management network, to gain access to the server hardware.

From the BMC, you can change BIOS settings, initiate power down and reset functions, and access the hardware for configuration purposes. Some even include KVM capabilities.

This is such a useful feature that most “real” servers come with them. Ironic has a couple of dozen drivers designed to work with them.

What it doesn’t have is any way to work with a computer without a BMC. There is an SNMP driver, but it is just for UPSs. I might play with it to get new boxes provisioned.

Maybe somebody has a fake IPMI implementation that runs under the actual OS.

Ceph is up?

I have 3 nodes that are not back up, plus the one node that was taken out of service. I’ll work on those two nodes today, but I also have to do honey-do jobs.

Question of the Week

This latest church shooting feels different. I can find the shooter’s name, but his name isn’t being dropped every other breath by news people.

Normally we are so cowed that we just “offer thoughts and prayers.” but this time we are still praying for those that were killed and injured as well as for those emotionally hurt by the shooter. Parents and such. The difference is that when there is that push for gun bans, there has been pushback at higher levels.

It also feels like we are getting more support from the top of the political party.

Does this terroristic act feel the same as the last shootings?

Another deranged asshole killed children at a school. 2 dead, 17 wounded. Nationwide headlines. The blood vultures leap to blame me for a shooting that took place more than a 1000 miles awy.

Meanwhile, CBS News is running a headline on August 28, 2025: “6 dead, 27 hurt in Chicago weekend shootings, police say.”
6 dead, 27 hurt in Chicago weekend shootings, police say

I would rather not deal with it today.

OpenStack

Over the last month, I’ve been dealing with somebody who has not kept up with the technology he is using. It shows. I like to learn new things.

For the last two years I’ve been working with two major technologies. Ceph and Open Virtual Networks. Ceph I feel I have a working handle on. Right now my Ceph cluster is down because of network issues, which I did to myself. OVN is another issue entirely.

A group of people smarter than I looked at networking and decided that instead of doing table lookups and then making decisions based on tables, they would create a language for manipulating the flow of packets, called “OpenFlow.”

This language could be implemented on hardware, creating very fast network devices. Since OpenFlow is a language, you can write routing functions as well as switching functions into the flows. You can also use it to create virtual devices.

The two types of virtual devices are “bridges” and “ports.” Ports are attached to bridges. OpenFlow processes a packet received on a port, called ingress, to move the packet to the egress port. There is lots going on in the process, but that is the gist.

The process isn’t impossible to do manually, but it isn’t simple, and it isn’t easy to visualize.

OVN adds virtual devices to the mix, allowing for simpler definitions and more familiar operations.

With OVN you create switches, routers, and ports. A port is created on a switch or router, then attached to something else. That something else can be virtual machines, physical machines, or the other side of a switch-router pair.

This is handled in the Northbound (NB) database. You modify the NB DB, which is then translated into a more robust flow language, which is stored in the Southbound (SB) database. This is done with the “ovn-north” process. This process keeps the two databases in sync with each other. Modifications to the NB DB are propagated into the SB DB and vice versa.

All of this does nothing for your actual networking. It is trivial to build all of this and have it “work.”

The thing that has to happen is that the SB database has to connect to the OpenvSwitch (OVS) database. This is accomplished via ovn-controller.

When you introduce changes to the OVS database, they are propagated into the SB database. In the same way, changes to the SB database cause changes to the OVS database.

When the OVS database is modified, new OpenFlow programs are created, changing the processing of packets.

To centralize the process, you can add the address of a remote OVN database server to the OVS database. The OVN processes read this and self-configure. From the configuration, they can talk to the remote database to create the proper OVS changes.

I had this working until one of the OVN control nodes took a dump. It took a dump for reasons, most of which revolved around my stupidity.

Because the cluster is designed to be self-healing and resilient, I had not noticed when two of the three OVN database servers stopped doing their thing. When I took that last node down, my configuration was stopped.

I could bring it back to life, but I’m not sure whether it is worth the time.

Now here’s the thing: everything I just explained comes from two or three very out-of-date web pages that haven’t been updated in many years. They were written to others with some understanding of the OVS/OVN systems. And they make assumptions and simplifications.

The rest of the information comes from digging things out of OpenStack’s networking component, Neutron.

I have a choice: I can continue down the path I am currently using, or I can learn OpenStack.

I choose to learn OpenStack.

First, it is powerful. With great power comes an even greater chance to mess things up. There are configuration files that are hundreds of lines long.

There are four components that I think I understand. The identity manager, Keystone. This is where you create and store user credentials and roles. The next is the storage component, Glance. This is where your disk images and volumes are accessed. Then there is the compute component, named Nova, which handles building and configuring virtual machines. Finally there is the networking component, called neutron.

For the simple things, I actually feel like I have it mostly working.

But the big thing is to get OVN working across my Ceph nodes. That hasn’t happened.

So for today, I’ll dig and dig some more, until I’m good at this.

Then I’ll add another technology to my skill set.

Got busy and forgot to write last night. Take some memes as an apology and checkout Giga Based Dad’s thread for more.

Yes, I took them all from him.

The reports are that this is a 14 year old girl in Scotland. As you can clearly see, she is brandishing a knife and a hatchet. Both of which she is prohibited from having.

This is just another example of how the youth of the UK are becoming more and more violent. We need to make an example of them.

Maybe there is more to this story?

Such as the girl in the picture was defending her 12 year old friend who had just been assaulted by a foreign invader. That she was afraid of being assaulted herself. That there were more foreign invaders moving toward her.

If you have watched the video, you can hear that evil invader taunting her to show the knife. He knows that if he reports her for having the knife, she will be arrested.

Nothing will happen to him.

This video clip might be the start of something good for the UK.