Rant

The state is constantly looking for weasel words in Supreme Court opinions to further their arrogant subjugation of their subjects. We see this in how they misconstrued the language of —United States V. Miller, 307 U.S. 174 (1939) to claim that the Second Amendment only protects militias.

We see this when they misconstrue —District of Columbia v. Heller, 467 U.S. 837 (2008) to mean that “presumptively constitutional” means that any infringement is constitutional.

We see this when they misconstrue —New York State Rifle & Pistol Assn., Inc. V. Bruen, 142 S.Ct. 2111 (U.S. 2022) to mean that anyplace can be designated as a “sensitive location” where infringements are required. Like defining all of Times Square as a sensitive place.

The state is constantly looking for any words that could be taken to mean that infringement is allowed.

—Opinion, United States v. Rahimi, 602 S.Ct. ____ (U.S. 2024) has far too many weasel words for the state to latch onto. Bad facts make for bad laws.

Schoenthal v. Raoul in Chicago shows exactly this.

After Rahimi was issued, the state in every case rushed to bring that opinion into their arguments. Not because their case had anything to do with individuals found to be credible threat of physical violence to another who had a court of law issue a domestic violence restraining order against them, but because they wanted to use the weasel words.

In Schoenthal the state wanted a status hearing to set a supplemental briefing schedule. This is the official way to get more arguments before the court, regardless of the current status of the case.

The state says it is a joint motion. This is true in fact, but not in spirit.

The state wants to brief the court regarding how wonderful Rahimi is for their case. The plaintiffs (good guys) just want equal time, if the court allows the state to submit additional arguments.

The judge said “No”.

Now, the language the state is trying so hard to get into the record is suggest a law trapped in amber —id.. This is where the Supreme Court explained how to do regulation matching. The state latches on to “it doesn’t have to be an exact match, so our horrible, not even close, matches should be allowed.”

So the state made a second motion to brief Rahimi to the court. This time they included the language they felt would save their case.

The judge said “no” a second time.

So the state, instead of requesting permission to brief the court on Rahimi, submitted a notice of supplemental authority regarding Rahimi. This was not the simple, “We wish to bring to the court’s attention that Rahimi was decided, no, this was a short brief with the state’s arguments.

Therefore, the court said “no” again, a bit more forcibly.

Me or your lying eyes?

For the last four years, the only time I heard about Kamala was when she had messed up, again. It is a feature of her actions, she messes up.

She was assigned to close the border. Joe used Obama’s term, “Tsar”. As in “Border Tsar.”

Today, I’m being told, “Kamala was never the border tsar. That’s just a Trump lie.”

This is where we are today.

As one X pundit put it, “How have you explained the ‘fine people hoax?'” The consensus was that it wasn’t worth the time or effort. That even if you did manage to get them to acknowledge it is a hoax, within a couple of weeks, they will have forgotten.

This is getting crazy.

Ok, but what does that mean? More importantly, what does it mean to us?

To get an example of cognitive dissonance in “practice”, dig up “I Mudd” from Star Trek. At the end, the crew destroys the androids by setting up cognitive dissonance in their “logical” brains.

One such method was Spock saying to one android “I love you”, and to another, identical android “But I hate you.” When the androids point out that they are identical, Spock replies, “Exactly.”

The left has been trained to exist in a state of cognitive dissonance.

Read More

Having watched the video of Trump being shot, my first thoughts were of “Thank God he survived the attempt.”

My third though was of grief for the person in the audience who was killed and the other that was injured. This asshole, shooting at Trump, didn’t give a shit who was hit by his shots. In his zeal to kill Trump, he killed a Trump supporter, and likely considered that “good.”

My second thought was, “Why would I give up my guns now? You evil assholes.”

There are many more. It is always the same, “Now that it happened to YOU, you will ban guns, right?”

This is just as revolting as the idiots that post “Now that “People of Color” are buying guns, Republicans will be willing to ban them.”

There isn’t a single drop of blood these vultures won’t use against us.

For the last week or more, I’ve been watching Paris burn, and with it, France.

This is portrayed as “the far-right” vs. the “left-wing”. Which begs the question, what does it take to be “far-left”?

Right-wing and Left-wing come from where the different parties sat in the German parliament. The communists sat on the left, the Nazi, and socialists and everybody else sat on the right.

So to say that Nazi’s are right wing only refers to them being further right than communists. Which wasn’t very far.

The “right” in these United States are conservatives, not Nazi’s or other socialist scumbags.

Parliaments

“That’s a nice business you have here, it would be a shame if anything happened to it.”

For years and years, I was told to shut up and sit down when the Supreme Court made a 6-3 or 5-4 decision. My side lost. Just shut up.

And once I lost, I was told that I couldn’t fight it anymore.

When the left loses at the polls, they run to the court. They can always find a judge to rule the way they want.

I am reminded of the gay marriage fight in California. The people of California were asked to make gay marriage legal in multiple referendums. The people voted “no” each time.

Finally, they got a referendum to modify the California constitution to codify that marriage was between a man and a woman. The voters approved and the California constitution was amended to add that definition.

The left screamed and took it to court. In court, they got a judge to say that the amendment to their constitution, don constitutionally, was itself unconstitutional.

The court literally said that the constitution was unconstitutional.

When the Dobbs opinion was released, the left protested, violently. When Bruen was decided, the left had a violent meltdown.

Every time they lose, it is always because the other side is cheating.

The left is the party that breaks with tradition, to give themselves more power. Then they scream for the very protections they dismantled, once they are out of power.

The odds of Joe Bidden being the next President of these United States is getting lower and lower as the MSM finally stops hiding his abuse.

If Trump were to win, I am afraid that they will burn this country down. It will make the “mostly peaceful protests” of BLM and saint Floyd look like a small corner protest.

They are currently claiming that the Supreme Court has said that the President can murder people and get away with it. That’s not how it works. But it was another 6-3 opinion, which means that the left will not accept the results.

They lost, they won’t accept a loss.

B.L.U.F.
Senior Circuit Judge Keene wrote the dissent in this case. She is unhappy with the majority opinion because that opinion would find most, if not all gun-control regulations, unconstitutional.

Because this goes against her agenda, she latches onto footnote 9 of the Bruen opinion to justify why any set of objective hoops placed to hinder a member of The People from keeping and bearing arms is constitutional. It doesn’t matter how long it takes nor how much money it takes, nor what those hoops are. As long as the state must grant permission at the end, that regime is constitutional.

(4200 words)

On November 21, the Fourth Circuit court issued their opinion on Maryland Shall Issue’s challenge to Maryland’s “Handgun Qualification License”.

This is a permit to purchase. Before you can purchase a handgun in Maryland, you must first submit fingerprints, undergo a background investigation, take a four-hour-long firearms safety training course which includes firing at least one round. After that is completed, you can submit your application for your HQL.

The state has 30 days to approve or deny the application, after they receive the application. We know that “the state” has a habit of not “receiving” things they want to receive. If they haven’t “officially” received the application, the clock hasn’t started. In addition, the 30 days is not clearly defined in law. Is that 30 business days or 30 calendar days? And how long do they have to inform the applicant of the determination? Or, as one state is doing, they are granting appointments for fingerprinting 6+ months in advance.

The reality of this egregious infringement is that it is likely three months from the decision to get an HQL before you have one.

The three judge panel reversed the district court’s “contrary decision”.

This means that the case is not going back to the district court. It can only move forward to the Supreme Court. The state has 21 days to appeal, IIRC. Reversing a decision is “You got it wrong, we don’t need you to mess it up again, it is wrong, and we are setting it right.” This is better than vacating and remanding a decision. When a case is vacated and remanded, the case is sent back to the inferior court where they do the case all over again, collecting new arguments and evidence.

So the Fourth Circuit panel did the right thing the right way in a reasonable amount of time.

Of course, there is always the thorn in your side in a case like this. That thorn is Senior Circuit Judge Barbara Milano Keenan. Born in 1950, making her 73 years old. She was nominated by Obama in 2009 and appointed in 2010. She assumed senior status in 2021.

Yes, that type of judge.

The Dissent

Read More

B.L.U.F.
Another day, another rogue inferior court scratching for anything that allows them to upload an infringement.

This time it is a CO law requiring a waiting period before taking possession of a legally purchased firearm. The mental gymnastics this Jimmy Carter appointee goes through would make Mary Lou Retton jealous.
(1250 words)

The court profoundly erred in their reading of Heller and Bruen. The first step is to determine if the conduct proposed implicates the plain text of the Second Amendment.

To “have weapons” is the conduct that the plaintiffs (good guys) wish to do. To refute this frivolous argument on the part of this inferior, rogue court, all one needs to do is extend the waiting period from 3 days to 3 years.

Would a waiting period of three years implicate the Second Amendment’s protected right of “keeping”, “possession” or “having” arms? Yes, it would.

Thus, the conduct implicates the plain text of the Second Amendment.

Once the Second Amendment is implicated, the conduct is presumptively constitutional and the modern-day regulation is presumptively unconstitutional and should be vacated.

One of the things we keep discussing is the fight to keep Second Amendment challenges in the legal realm. There is no need for history professors or experts in what the founding fathers wanted or thought. All that is required is an examination of the regulations of the time.

The Government merely needs to bring regulations from the founding era that are a match for the state’s modern regulations to the attention of the court. If they can do that, they will win.

Today, I might have to order a firearm from my LGS. I might have to wait for it to arrive. Or I can choose from something in stock and walk home with it. Professors Spitzer and Roth gave their expert opinion that a three-day waiting period was to be expected in the founding era because people couldn’t just buy the firearm they wanted.

This is irrelevant. If I want a Serbu BFG-50, it will have to wait for it to be made. It will take a few weeks. So what? I can still buy other firearms right now if I wanted it.

This is why the battle of the “experts” is not allowed under Heller and Bruen.

The judge then says that all the case law showing that acquiring a firearm is protected by the Second Amendment is no longer good case law. “Because they happened before Bruen and didn’t examine the plain text”. Of course, he fails to note that the actual methodology was put in place with Heller in 2008, so all those cases after 2008 are good case law IF they followed Heller. I.e., didn’t use means-end.

This judge should be impeached. The Supreme Court ordered the inferior courts to look first at the plain text of the Second Amendment. If the conduct implicated the Second Amendment, the state had the burden to bring forth a history and tradition of regulations that are analogous to the modern regulations.

First, he says that purchasing a firearm doesn’t implicate the plain text of the Second Amendment. Then he says that since the state can’t show a history of regulations requiring waiting-periods, he is going to look for a tradition of waiting periods.

This means that there wasn’t a founding era regulation for waiting periods. The fact that society, as a whole, didn’t have the same level of instant gratification as today, doesn’t mean that waiting periods can be forced today.

The judge relies on the Spitzer declaration of laws from 1623, 1631, 1632, 1655, 1868, 1878, 1883, 1879, 1888, and 1893 regulating possession of firearms by intoxicated purposes to justify a waiting period. Please note the era that is missing from that list of dates. That’s right, nothing from the founding era.

Because this is a request for a preliminary injunction, the Winter factors are being analyzed. That is to say, the likelihood of success on the merits, irreparable harm, balance of equity, and public interest. If the challenge involves the deprivation of a core civil right, irreparable harm is done. If the court finds that it doesn’t involve a core civil right, they can use other means to decide on the level of harm.

In the same way, once the court decides the constitution doesn’t apply, they can balance the equities in favor of the state and use “good enough reasons” to determine the public interest.

I’m sorry about the quality of this morning’s post. I read it this morning and was, “Did I write this piece of bleep?”

When I started reading the opinion of the Seventh Circuit Court, I was not expecting anything in favor of The People or the Second Amendment. I remember the oral arguments.

What I remember about the oral arguments was the level of disrespect the panel showed to the plaintiffs. How the snark came through in their questions, how belittling they were to the plaintiffs. I remember listening to them attempting to turn semi-automatic rifles into machine guns.

Every excuse I read in their opinion was making me more and more upset. An AR-15 is not a machine gun. It cannot be readily converted to a machine gun. If that were the case, the ATF would have already done it. Any claim that an AR-15 can be banned because it is readily convertible to an M-16 is garbage.

The court is supposed to follow the instructions of their superior court. In this case, the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court has instructed them on how to process motions and appeals regarding preliminary injunctions and TROs. The very first step is always, always, to look at the merits.

That means they have to look at the merits. They have to do the analysis. They have to do the work. They did not.

My ranker kept growing. In the end, I did not do a professional job of analysis. I’m sorry. I will attempt to do better in the future.
– AWA

B.L.U.F.
A partial analysis of the Seventh Circuit Court’s recent opinion telling the Supreme Court how it should have been done.
(2350 words)

Drawing your attention to the center ring, we hear Judge Wood say The ink was barely dry on the pages of the Act when litigation began—United States V. Miller, 307 U.S. 174 (1939) Wow, what sarcasm. Judge Wood, the only reason they waited until then was because they weren’t allowed to file before that moment. Your sarcasm is poor.

When courts are doing serious work, they speak and write in a serious manner. Once the suit was filed and landed in
Judge Kendall’s court …—District of Columbia v. Heller, 467 U.S. 837 (2008) is not a serious statement. The case was assigned to Judge Kendall’s court. Judge Wood continues in the same way.

A more correct way of saying it would have been “The plaintiffs filed a motion for preliminary injunction.”
Read More