…….

I watch Mark Smith’s Four Boxes Diner YouTube channel because he explains legal concepts clearly. He often addresses issues that I’m concerned with understanding.

There are more than a few things I’ve picked up from him, as far as language goes.

One of those is “inferior court”. Article III of the US Constitution establishes the Supreme Court and such inferior courts as … When I am speaking of an inferior court, it means that it has a superior court which tells it how to act.

Mark Smith makes this point over and over. I got it from him.

The concept of inferior court makes it very clear that all inferior courts should be taking their marching orders from the Supreme Court.

When a court does not follow the clear instructions of the Supreme court, I label it a rogue court, or a rogue judge.

One of the things I’ve learned, while reading 100s, if not 1000s, of court filings, is that rogue judges spend more time on what wasn’t said in Supreme Court opinions than they do on what was said.

These rogue courts will often latch onto a tiny part of an opinion and fixate on that part. Nothing else matters outside that small safety net of infringement.

They will quote Heller that “no right is absolute” as if that somehow makes this infringement that exception. Every modern regulation requires that nuanced approach.

My son is on the spectrum. We used to tell him, “Stop hunting zebras”. Yes, those hoof prints might be zebra prints, but we aren’t in that part of Africa, we aren’t near a zoo that has misplaced a zebra, it is much more likely that it is a horse.

The Supreme Court says, “When you are looking at a horse, this is how you ‘do it’. There is a small chance it is a zebra, in which case you “do it” this alternative way.” They then spend 99% of their instructions on dealing with horses.

Then an inferior court starts looking for zebras, doesn’t find a zebra, but it could be a zebra, the Supreme Court did mention a zebra in one sentence of one paragraph of a 70-page opinion, so we’ll assume this is a zebra, just like the Supreme Court said.

The other common argument used is the “they didn’t say anything about it, so it must be constitutional”. Heller went through every word of the Second Amendment and explained what each phrase meant. They didn’t bother with “infringe” because that’s straightforward.

All that is needed is to look at Samuel Johnson’s dictionary and you would know.

Too many inferior court judges instead throw up their hands and say, “We don’t know what it means, so it must mean the modern regulation is constitutional.”

The part about all of this that drives me bonkers is that Heller and Bruen clearly state that if the modern regulations touches fingers with the Second Amendment, the regulation is presumptively unconstitutional. To quote Mr. Smith, “When in doubt, throw it out.”

Finally, the actual lying to The People’s face. To look at a modern regulation, to absolutely know it is a gun control law, and then claim it doesn’t touch fingers with the Second Amendment.

Just make the assumption and let the Constitution work as intended. Instead, they are so afraid of following the plain text of the Constitution, as they know it will be the downfall of much of their statist regulatory dream.

Thank you for all the suggestions I got from people that understand Linux.
Don’t click the more button unless you want to read Linux geek stuff.

(1300 words)
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It has been a good week. A week to be thankful for.

Oregon had a massive win in regard to measure 114 and its follow-on bill. A state court granted a permanent injunction against the entire mess. Measure 114 is currently on life support.

This was at the lowest level in the state courts. Sort of at the “district” level if compared to the federal courts. The final judgement can be appealed to Oregon’s appeals court and from there to the Oregon Supreme court. From the Oregon Supreme court, there is an appeal to the US Supreme Court.

It will be interesting to see what the state does. If they don’t appeal, this is a loss but only takes out the permit to purchase and magazine bans. If they run it up the chain, they could lose and set a precedent for Oregon or the entire country.

The case was decided as a state constitutional challenge, not a Second Amendment challenge. I’ve not read the court’s opinion and might not. One of the lawyers I follow read a part of the opinion that struck me as particularly intriguing. The court applied a plain text, history and tradition test, against the Oregon state constitution. Very cool.

One of the first cases GVR out of the Supreme Court post Bruen was [xCite item=”V9B87K44″ pos=0]. The Fourth Circuit court heard oral arguments shortly after the case was GVR. They still have not issued their opinion on that case.

That case is a direct challenge to [xCite item=”QRND22EY” pos=1] which, is the Fourth Circuit court’s means-end case law.

In an entirely different case [xCite item=”APL6JJ3B” pos=2], the Fourth Circuit issued their opinion supporting The People and upholding the rights protected by the Second Amendment. It was a three—judge panel. The case challenges Maryland’s permit to transfer/purchase a firearm. It is a so-called Universal Background Check.

In addition, Maryland requires a “handgun qualification license” or HQL. It is that HQL that was struck down by the Fourth Circuit. That opinion is in my to-do queue.

I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving. If you did not participate in this American Tradition, I hope your Thursday was joyful.

On the not fun side of things, Wed. I started the upgrade of my primary computer. In the process of performing that upgrade, my system stopped booting. The system is booted, now, but it required some magic to accomplish.

The gist of which was to boot off an external device, get to the grub menu, escape to the grub command line. Install the GPT partition module. Type the magic incarnations “linux (hd5,gpt1)/ROOT/ubuntu@/boot/vmlinuz-6.5.0-13-generic -root=ZFS=rpool/ROOT/ubuntu” with no errors. From memory.

I’m still fixing things, maybe it will get better. If not, I do know how to “fix” it.

Comments are open, I’m eager to hear your feedback.
[xCiteBib]

I grew up in a traditional family. Part of this meant that we ate as a family every night. When we finally got a TV, we didn’t eat in front of it. That was something that was a reserved special treat.

For a long time, I had lost that. When my wife and I got together I reinstated that family meal.

Unless it is something special, we eat at the table. The entire family. If you are feeling anti-social, you still come down and say prayers.

We go around the table and everybody gives thanks for something real to them for that day.

• Thank you to Miguel for letting me write for the blog and for trusting me to take care of his child
• Thank you to J.Kb for putting up with me as a co-blogger.
• Thank you to you, our readers.  Your readership means a great deal to me.
• Thank you to our founding fathers that gave us this great country
• Thank you to all the men, women, and children that have fought to keep this country free
• Thank you for winning the lottery when I was born an American.
• Thank you for the protected right to armed self-defense
• Thank you for the vast wealth our country has
• Thank you for the vast wealth each of us has.
• Thank you for the technology that allows me to work in this great state with people around the world.
• Thank you  to our Creator, who has given us so much.
• Thank you for the joy of bang sticks.
• Thank you for the smiles of my new born children
• Thank you for the smiles, glares, “Oh Dad…” of my children today.
• Thank you for the health care that has allowed my wife to have four knee replacements.
• Thank you for the modern medicines that keep me going.
• Thank you for all the plenty that is on our table, every day.
• Thank you to my friends.  Those that have passed, those that are gone, those that are close, and for all my friends I have yet to meet.

Happy Thanksgiving

After Heller, the law of the land was that if the proposed conduct implicated the plain text of the Second Amendment, then the history and tradition of arms regulation was examined. If there was an analogous regulation from the ratification of the Second Amendment, then the modern-day regulation was constitutional.

The rogue, inferior Article III courts then proceeded to take unimportant parts of dicta, focused on those crumbs with laser like intensity to discover that the state could still infringe.

Because the Supreme Court, in Heller was only deciding on a single question, there were laws that were not directly struck down. To put this in perspective, when Bruen was decided, there was only one law struck down, that being the good cause part of the NYC permitting requirement.

Every other law in the land still stood, exactly as it had been written.

When the Supreme Court GVRed several cases, no laws were vacated. Instead, the inferior courts were told “Do it over. Do it right.”

In Heller, the Supreme court told the inferior courts how to analyze Second Amendment challenges. Those rogue courts looked at the dicta, the crumbs, and decided to use an interest balancing test instead. They claimed that since the state was allowed to interest balance free speech, and because no right was absolute, that they should engage in interest balancing in Second Amendment cases.

This allowed the inferior, rogue courts, to decide just how badly a regulation was raping you, and then allow the state to argue it was in the best interest of the rest of the state’s subjects to allow you to be raped just that little bit.

Bruen was a slap in the face to those rogue, inferior courts. The major point of Bruen was to say, “We told you how to do it in Heller. You refused. So now we are going to explain it to you, in simple words, that even a lawyer can understand.”

If the plain text of the Second Amendment is implicated, the burden shifts to the state to show a history and tradition of analogous laws from the time of the ratification of the Second Amendment.

If it is an arm or if it is ancillary to the right to keep and bear arms, then we look to see if there is an infringement.

Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary, published in the 175 and 1773 defined “infringe” as:

1. To violate; to break laws or contracts
2. To destroy; to hinder.

If a regulation hinders your ability to keep or bear arms, then the Second Amendment is implicated.

This puts the burden on the state to find laws that match the modern-day law.

There were not any in the 1791. Thinking about it, The People have just done an interest balancing test of the right to keep and bear arms. The People have decided that this is one of the most important unalienable rights that must be protected from government overreach.

Because The People believe it to be a core, unalienable, right, they have enshrined protection of the right to keep and bear arms in their newly created Bill of Rights.

If the right to keep and bear arms is so essential to The People, is there any reason to expect them to be creating laws that destroy or hinder that right? No. There is no reason.

This means that the modern state has not been able to find analogous laws. They just don’t exist. They have to reach in to the 1600s or the late 1800s before they can find analogous laws. Even those laws are questionable.

What they did find were regulations that removed arms from people who were individually dangerous. Many of those regulations allowed for disarming a person for only the duration of the danger. A drunk person could be disarmed while drunk. When they were sober, their arms were returned.

If a person was dangerous, they could be incarcerated. While incarcerated, they would be disarmed.

If a person was too dangerous to possess arms, the state could make a finding of dangerousness, and disarm a person.

These infringements on an individual’s right to keep and bear arms are what the state is using to disarm us today.

Their stated reasoning is that since the state has the authority to disarm a dangerous person, the state also has the authority to determine if you are dangerous before allowing you to possess a firearm.

We argue that this is backwards. By default, we have the right to keep and bear arms. The state’s argument is that they have to be given a chance to prove you are dangerous before you can possess a firearm.

In Rahimi the Supreme Court pushed the state to articulate what criteria they were using to disarm Mr. Rahimi. The state dithered between “responsible” and “dangerous”. They want the criteria to be “responsible” because that is an easier objective standard to reach than “dangerous”.

It is fairly clear that Mr. Rahimi was not a responsible person. He had not been proven, in a court of law, by a jury of his peers, beyond all reasonable doubt, with a strenuous defense, that he was dangerous.

Translation: He has to have access to a lawyer and have his day in court.

When the state was backed into a corner by the Justices, they relented and stated that it was only the “dangerous” criteria that they actually could justify.

Conclusion

The state threw a bunch of stuff against the wall. Courts, such as Judge Benitez’s, and others have knocked most of the historical regulations out as not applying. The state is left with one potentially winning argument, disarming dangerous people.

Because that was determined to happen on an individual basis, the state is going to do their best to flip the argument from the state proving you are dangerous to you proving that you are not. If they can’t do that, they will push to have time to “verify” that you are not dangerous.

From this, I foresee a spat of regulations coming out of the infringing states regarding permits to purchase and other such infringements.

Something a little more modern than my normal.

The house has started releasing J6 video footage. So far, about 29 GB of video has been released. I’ve looked over some clips. Interesting things I noticed:

Some cameras are PTZ (Pitch, Turn, ZoomPan, Tilt, Zoom). One video had the camera suddenly turn to face the crowd. It then zoomed in on a dangerous individual. The danger? She was looking straight at the camera and recording it on her cell phone.

Much of the footage is of empty or nearly empty halls.

There were multiple people being marched away in handcuffs.

When groups of cops interacted with groups of regular people, there was posturing but no violence. In one encounter, somebody was attempting to get around the line of cops. The cops just extended the line and blocked that forward motion.

The one angry person I saw was a cop. He was chasing a person back towards the larger group with his baton in hand. Once he got there, the group of cops stopped him, and he was turned around, still angry. Then the cop that stopped baton cop indicated to the group of people that they could proceed where baton cop had just come from.

I saw the violence of somebody kicking over an umbrella plastic bag holder. Bags that hold wet umbrellas, so they don’t drip on the marble floors.

The absolute worse thing I observed the people wondering through do was knock a stanchion with velvet rope was knocked over and then step on the velvet rope! A little later, they picked up the stanchion and moved it out of the way, so nobody would trip over it.

I just found one where the people entering are committing real crimes. First, there is a point where something is thrown at a cop and lands on the floor. Interestingly, none of the cops picked it up. I thought it might have been a magazine, but since we didn’t hear about a “magazine” I’m sure it was not.

The crowd then surges forward until the cops stop them. Then one person breaks(?) open a door on the right, and the crowd backs up and enters that room. It looks like it might be a way around the cops blocking the way.

Then the strange stuff started happening. There were attempts to open the left door. Some of those temps were very lame. In those cases, somebody almost always grabbed that person and told them to stop, and they did.

Then there were the “dressed for success” people. These people were ready for physical confrontation. One of them went at that door hard. Then got another person to help. Then tried to open the door with a sign post as a battering ram. When that failed, he left, he returned with somebody else, and they proceeded to start banging on the door. They got still more reinforcements until they forced the door.

None of the people right there seemed to want to engage. My spider senses tell me something isn’t right with these people.

Regardless, if they are on the “Trump team” they need to be arrested because they did the crime. If they are on the evil side, then they need to be arrested and, after being found guilty in a court of law, strung up.
West Stairs 2021-01-06 1440

CHA Subcommittee Reading Room

Firearms need to be cared for. I’m not good at it. I came to it later in life and just didn’t understand what it takes.

That being said, I’m attempting to do better. Part of “doing better” is actually training with EDC in normal clothing/gear and being willing to send self-defense rounds down range.

This sometimes leads to sending many more range candy down range to overcome my bad habits.

The other day, my wife comes out of the bedroom and is putting on her coat, screaming “Which rifle is the right rifle to kill that (long bleep) rodent!”

It is that time of year when the weather turns and the damn mice come in out of the cold. There is one or more that have made a nest in the crawl space under the bedroom. When they are eating, and we are trying to go to sleep, it is very loud.

The problem is that it sounds like there might be an animal just outside our window. This has led to many a parameter walk by at midnight with the R92. On this particular night, my wife was in bed before me. I was busy writing an article for you guys. So she couldn’t just tell me to go deal.

So she’s looking to take one of the rifles out varmint hunting at around midnight.

It was at that moment that I realized: I don’t know if the Henry Golden Boy has been sighted in.

Longer story shortened, I, blue haired fairie, and wife go outside, I prove that there is nothing out there. She heads back to bed.

The next day, I took that .22 out to the test range and proceeded to put 50+ rounds through it. I sometimes forget just how much fun it can be plinking with a .22. I rang steel, put rounds on paper, and destroyed a small pumpkin.

Then I took out my SIG P938 out to test myself.

It is a small 9 mm pistol. Beautiful sights. I take aim, pull the trigger and click. No bang.

I’ve not shot this pistol in too long. Maybe something is wrong and it needs to be clean. I rack the slide, and it doesn’t go into battery.

I give it a slight push, and it slides into battery. Press, BANG! Clean miss.

Next press and another BANG!

Failure to feed.

Drop the mag, clear the failure to feed. Put the no-bang round back on top of the mag, reinsert mag.

Bang. Click.

Cock hammer, click.

Cycle the gun, finish sending rounds down range, finally ringing steel.

We take everything back inside, and I take the Ruger PC9 out, drop one round into the chamber, click.

Out of seven rounds, one failure to fire, one failure to feed. I need more practice.

When I went back inside, I tossed the round to the blue haired fairie and asked, “What’s wrong with it?”

When I came back to her, she stumbles over the words and says, “I don’t remember what it is called. The spark button didn’t go off.”

I hereby declare that from this time forward, “primers” can also be referred to as “spark buttons” in polite company.

B.L.U.F.
My rambling on the newly issued Supreme Court Code of Conduct.

(2150 words)

The Supreme Court has always had a code of conduct, their formal ethics. It was not published for good reason.

There is only one way to remove a Supreme Court justice, that is through impeachment as described in the constitution. There is no authority given in the constitution for any sort of punishment of a justice, short of impeachment.

Because there is no bite behind the code of conduct, it was sometimes ignored by those justices motivated by agenda and followed, in the most part, by the justices motivated by the constitution and the law.

As an early example of an ethics question, an attorney was nominated for a position on the Supreme Court. They had no experience sitting as a judge. Had written no legal opinions.
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We’ve had some news out of a couple of rogue inferior courts. The level of gymnastic skill exercised by these courts rivals anything ever seen at the Olympics.

On the good news front, the Supreme Court will hear the Range petition for writ of certiorari today. There are three potential answers we can get back: 1) A granting of cert., 2) A denial of cert., 3) A holding pattern where they don’t grant or deny.

When the Court heard Bruen they had a number of Second Amendment cases waiting for a decision on cert. Right after Bruen the Court Granted Cert, Vacated the inferior courts’ opinion, and Remanded the case back to the lower court.

We have had another case docketed requesting a writ of certiorari, Caulkins v. Pritzker out of IL. I’m not very knowledgeable about this case yet. Now that it is at the Supreme Court, I can read the legal filings and find out what’s happening.

One of the short stories about this case is that it went to the Illinois Supreme Court. Two of the judges on that court were asked to recuse themselves because they had accepted a million dollars each from governor Pritzker for their election. This is in violation of the $500,000 limit, but Pritzker did a little hand waving, and it was allowed.

The two judges refused to recuse themselves. They said that it would not influence their opinion on the case. And then sided with the state against The People.

Thus, this petition includes a due process claim as well as Second Amendment claims.

In other news, the Supreme Court issued their code of conduct. I’ve read about half of it and will likely write something about it for tomorrow’s article.

Thank you for all the feedback this week on everybody’s articles.

The comments are open. Please give me some suggests for articles. Yesterday morning’s article was difficult as I had writer’s block.

A professional author friend of mine explains writer’s block as such: Your job doesn’t allow writer’s block. Your job is to write. If you think you have writer’s block, write something, anything. That is what happened.

OH! I almost forgot, that little piece of lawyering had a layer I had missed on the first go around. There were multiple cites to Friedman v. City of Highland Park, Ill. All of those cites were to judges and justices saying how wrong Friedman was. There are cites from Justice Thomas, for example.

The author of the Friedman opinion was Judge Easterbrook. The same judge who was the ghostwriter for the Seventh Circuit court’s opinion that Bevis v. Naperville is requesting a rehearing en banc. That is just a delightful snarky slam on Easterbrook.