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It has been a good week overall. We got some great news out of a local court in Massachusetts regarding honoring out of state permits to carry.

It is really great news. About a half dozen of the people I watch have talked about it as well as J.Kb.

One point, it is an “as applied” ruling. In any court opinion, the court can rule on how something applies to the plaintiff/defendant OR they can rule on the law. In this case, the court ruled that their finding only applied to the defendant.

This means that if J.Kb were to travel to Mordor and was investigated by the authorities and found to be carrying under his New Hampshire license, he would have to go through the same type of trial. Until the Massachusetts courts knock down the law, this will be the case.

It is still wonderful news.

The Rahimi case is getting attention in all the usual places. You’ll be hearing more about it as it will be the next big Second Amendment case heard by the Supreme Court.

Sometime in the next month or so, the good guys will have to have all of their briefs in. That will be easier reading. In looking at all of this, I might actually attempt to write a brief for the case… I am not sure how that will go.

The comments are open, feel free to be commenters.

Form 4473 is the federal background check paperwork and firearm registration form used by the ATF to make sure you are not a prohibited person and to create a registry. This came into existence in 1993 with the passage of the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act. [xCite item=”BQYSSUQN” pos=0]

Correction: Form 4473 came into existence with the GCA of 1968. Which is what my muddled brain remembered. The NICS came into existence with the passage of the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act of 1993. My apologies

Out in California, they are currently litigating the background check requirement for the purchase of ammunition.

Something interesting hit me as I was talking about yesterday’s article with my wife. If placing a burden on the purchase of ammunition is conduct protected by the Second Amendment, and there were no regulations for background checks until 1993, does that mean there is no history or tradition of background checks?

With multiple cases moving towards the Supreme Court or all ready there challenging parts of §922(g), will we see §921 fall as well?

4473s are a small rape as compared to states being designated sensitive places and requiring The People to prove they are law-abiding, responsible citizens before being granted permission to exercise the right to keep and bear arms.

I can’t see 2A groups pushing an attack on §921. It is a fascinating thought experiment.

What current laws or regulations in your state would you like to see challenged?

Miguel’s post about harping on health really hit me. I’m struggling.

Two years ago, I was around 330. Today I’m hovering around 292. During the week, I lose weight. On the weekend, I gain it all back. I have to make the conscious decision to not eat bad things on the weekend. It is difficult, but I need to do it.

On the good side of things, my skin doesn’t fit as well as it use to. While my weight isn’t going down, my health is getting better. I do at least 30 minutes of spin, 5 days a week. This has made it much more likely for me to get up and move.

If you can, make a commitment to doing just a bit of exercise, every day. We need you healthy!

Software moves forward. I need to do an update to GFZ’s infrastructure, but haven’t yet.

Meanwhile, the comments are open, please let us know what you are thinking about and what you want to hear about.

I finished moving a new client onto our servers yesterday. They had been cracked and abused. Thank you to Miguel for that client.

On different fronts, I’m fighting with PyQt6. For whatever reason, the QMediaPlayer will not reliably play an MP3 or WAV. Lord help me if I want to change the start position. This is very frustrating for me because I’m at the 80% mark in a transcription program with a GUI.

You tell it to fetch a recording of a hearing before a court. It figures out how many speakers are recorded, when they are speaking and the duration of their segment. It then uses external guidance to do a voice ID of the different speakers before finally generating a transcription of the audio.

The issue? There is a part of the interface where you connect different speakers to named people. It allows you to listen to a segment of the audio and make comparisons.

For example, I have two cases where there was only one judge in common. That means that there should only be one match between the two cases, and that match should be the judge. There were two matches.

It turns out that both cases had the same court manager. So my software picked out the fact that there were actually two people speaking in both cases, which is cool.

Regardless, I’ll make it work. It is what I do.

There are numerous things happening in different cases right now, but I’m looking at Dayonta McClinton v. UNITED STATES which was recently denied certiorari. Not because the case has anything to do with the Second Amendment, but because Sotomayor, Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, Alito, and Barrett are in agreement.

The case is about a man who was charged with murder and robbery. The jury found him guilty of the robbery charge and not guilty of the murder charge. Under the sentencing guidelines, McClinton should have been looking at 5 to 6 years.

At the sentencing hearing, the state told the court that McClinton had been charged with murder. The court used the accusation, of which McClinton had been found not guilty, to increase the sentence to 20 years.

If you are interested, please let me know in the comments.

The comments are open, go for it.

Sorry for the lack of legal analysis these last few days. I have been fighting depression, but I think I’ve finally pulled myself out of it, for now.

Depression for me means it is hard to do anything that isn’t “fun”. Work slows down. Small things stop me from moving forward.

Yesterday included some loud noises, 18 of them to be more precise. The CETME had failure to feed on two rounds. The tip of the round started up the feed ramp and then jammed. The bolt carrier/bolt came over the top of the round and dinged the brass, locking it in place.

Clearing it was trivial, pull the charging handle back into the catch, flip the rifle upside down, the round falls out, slap the charging handle. BANG.

I find it interesting that a 300-500 word rant about idiots writing idiotic things gets more traction than long, detailed analysis of court filings.

Have a fantastic weekend, the comments are open.

We had some excellent responses regarding car safes. I looked at an in console safe for my truck, the price has come way down, it is now on the “to buy” list.

I’m in the process of bringing a new client onboard. This makes me grateful to Miguel for getting me started on WordPress.

Ballistics software is currently on hold until I get client work caught up.

For our readers in Massachusetts, be aware that there is a horrible bill being pushed. I’ve not read the bill, but second hand descriptions from people I trust on the Interwebs suggest it will truly mess with everybody.

As predicted, the argument being pushed by the infringers is that “in common use” actually means “in common use for lawful purposes, like self-defense” which actually means “In common use for self-defense” which actually means “shots fired in a self-defense event”.

There are some cases pending transcription that I’m going to be evaluating over the following days.

Meanwhile, the comments are open, tell us what you are thinking, what you’d like to hear more about, what you’ve heard to much about.

Things are getting better. I have a few rounds to be pulled. All the “hot” rounds have been put in a safe place, and I’ll pull them tomorrow.

There have been a couple of horrific opinions issued by the courts in the last few weeks. I’m going to be looking at more of them.

There have been a few wins. The 11th Circuit has vacated the opinion of the 3 judge panel and is currently planning on hearing the 18-20 yo aren’t a part of The People en banc.

The 2nd Circuit is still dragging their heels. The 7th Circuit hard testimony and is not going into wait it out mode. The 4th circuit still hasn’t made up their mind if they are going to follow Bruen and declare Kolbe bad law.

I’m still looking for dana950 and OldNFO to contact me via email.

Have a fantastic weekend!

The comments are open to everybody.

It is 2100 and after 6 hours of working with our cloud provider, everything is back.

There was a hardware glitch that caused a node to fail. The website automatically moved to a new node and attempted to restart. Unfortunately, that hardware glitch caused the cluster to believe that the node was still there and still working. Since it was there and working, none of the resources (disk space) used by GFZ was released.

Because the resource did not release, the website on the new node would not start.

Linode took 8 calls from me, 22 ticket updates and worked the entire 6 hours to get things working again.

I’m sorry the site was down for so long. I’m working with Linode management to make sure it doesn’t happen again. Furthermore, I’m also looking at options for shared file systems so that a pod can move from node to node seamlessly.

AWA

First, thank you to Miguel for creating this fantastic place. Thank you to J.Kb. for contributing. Thank you to both of you for allowing me to be an author here.

Just over a year ago, Miguel announced his retirement to J.Kb. and myself in a private email. We considered a couple of different options, one of which was to just move it to Substack with a Patreon style of support system. We all wanted to have some small amount of monetization from the blog.

I suggested a pay to comment with some content being restricted. Miguel and J.Kb. allowed me to try that.

It didn’t really work.

We pay for a number of things directly for the blog. The total for all of those services is around $1000/year. Those include the different yearly subscriptions for certain plugins and other direct paid support.

In addition to that, there is another $600/year for the servers that host the blog.

In prior years, there was an additional $600/year to me. The minimum cost for the blog per year was $2200. Miguel paid all of that out of pocket. He asked for money once a year to pay me and the hosting costs.

In other words, this blog cost him money.

I can no longer charge for my work on the blog. That’s good because I have spent countless hours, easily well over 200 hours. I work dirt cheap at $50/hour, that’s $10,000 of billable time. That does NOT include any of the time I spend writing.

We are seeing the renewals happening now. I did not break even last year. I won’t break even this year.

I do care. It doesn’t matter. I’ve been in love with this blog for many years. I lost it for a couple of years. Realized I was missing it, went and found it. I’ve never left.

The comments you leave help so much. It tells me when I get things right. I stumbled onto a new gun blog yesterday, went looking through their postings, and there was reference to one of my case analysis. That single back link made me smile through a rather shitty day.

So, I thank all of you.

If you want to help the blog out financially, please sign up for one of the membership levels. The lowest level is $1/month. The highest is $5/month. You do have to pay for a year at a time.

Here’s wishing all of you a great year. Remember that we do want guest postings, and I mean real guest posts, not the “If you say yes, we’ll spend 30 seconds and send you an article with the word “gun” in it and 1000 words talking about us.” Yeah, we get about 1 a week of those.

My standard reply to them is something similar to, “That sounds great, what is your favorite 45-70 load?” I’ve never gotten a reply to that question.

This is a feedback article. Comments are open to all.
P.S. OldNFO and dana950, please reach out to me at awa (at) troglodite . com

Welcome to Friday! It’s almost the weekend.

I really wish that the climate change gods would decide which way it should be. The last couple of nights I’ve gone to bed, it has been so hot and mucky that I didn’t want to be near my lady. Halfway through the night, I woke up shivering and had to pull up the blankets.

On the good news side, we had about two days of sun. It stopped raining just long enough to get the lawn mowed. Of course, the rain has started back up again before I got the weed wacker out

I’m hoping to do some reloading this weekend. I just have to clear a path to the reloading bench. After two years of not being able to find 30–30 bullets, suddenly everybody has them. I’m going to load a few hundred rounds and do the ballistics on it.

I’m halfway through a reference on ballistics. Not only that, but I actually remember some of my calculus from way back when. My first graphs came close to the correct answer, but not perfect. Likely because I wasn’t using the software correctly.

I picked up a laser range finder today. The range cards show up tomorrow. I intend to have range cards for each of the windows in the house, plus some known locations outside the house.

How many of you have ever used a range card? How many of you have actually used a ballistics chart or table to more accurately put rounds on target at distance?

The squirrel article is in the queue.

I expect to do a product review of the range finder after I’ve had a chance to use it for a bit.

Are you interested in articles about range cards and how to use them? I’ve read a bit and I’m going to put it to use, I am NOT an expert.