• The court has issued 40 opinions as of June 7th. We are expecting more before the end of the term later this month.

    Two of those cases were Second Amendment cases, around 5%. We had 2 major opinions, for The People, in the 2023 term.

    The first major win for The People came in Loper Bright. This started life as a case regarding offshore fishing regulations and inspections. The Commerce Department issued new rules regarding inspections of offshore fishing. The rules required the fishing vessel to provide food and bunk space, as well as to pay the cost of the inspector onboard the vessel.

    In short, the boat had to pay to have an inspector living onboard looking over their shoulders, even if they weren’t catching any fish that required the inspector.

    They sued for relief.

    The lower courts applied the Chevron doctrine, which had been interpreted to mean, “What the Federal Agency says is what we have to agree with.” Chevron has stopped many civil suits through the decades. Loper Bright puts an end to that.

    Takeaway ONE

    The court’s job is to decide what the law is, not some regulatory agency. Courts must do their job and not just accept what the government says.

    This takeaway is used in later opinions of the Court.

    NRA v Vullo is our second interesting case, this is one of the lawfare, red tape war waged against gun owners’ rights. The short of it was that the state of NY was pressuring regulated business to stop doing business with the NRA.

    Takeaway TWO

    The government cannot compel a third party to do what the government is forbidden to do.

    Garland v. Cargill was one of the cases that led to the striking of Chevron. In Cargill, the Court found that the ATF exceeded their statutory authorizations.

    Takeaway THREE

    The executive branch does not get to create legislation, even when Congress appears to have granted that transfer of power.

    United States v. Rahimi was a case with bad facts which did get us a reasonable result.

    Rahimi had a TRO against him. He was aware of the TRO. He was in the courtroom when the judge issued the TRO and he had agreed to the conditions of the TRO. Those included “no firearms”.

    Rahimi was and is a violent person. He was charged with multiple crimes and was captured with TRO paperwork and a firearm.

    Takeaway FOUR

    There is no regulation in this Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation that permanently removed the right to keep and bear arms.

    Takeaway FIVE

    A violent person can be temporarily denied his Second Amendment protected right.

    Bondi v. VanDerStok

    HELD: The ATF’s rule is not facially inconsistent with the GCA.

    This case is a legal match to Rahimi The question we wanted to be answered in Rahimi, and which was answered, is 18 U.S.C. §921(g)(8) facially unconstitutional.

    To be facially unconstitutional, there can be no situation where the law is constitutional. This means that the law is unconstitutional when applied to 1 million people, but because it is constitutional when applied to the 1,000,001st person, then it survives the challenge.

    In Rahimi, was there any time a person could have their Second Amendment protected rights removed? The answer turns out to be “Yes.” They can be taken away temporarily if the person has been adjudicated violent.

    In VanDerStok it was again a facial challenge. The Court found that there was at least one kit being sold which met the definition of a firearm.

    Takeaway SIX

    There are infringements which will survive judicial review in light of Bruen and Heller

    Takeaway SEVEN

    The Court attempts to be consistent with their previous opinions. This leads to outcomes we dislike.

    Smith & Wesson Brands, Inc., et al. v. Estados Unidos Mexicanos

    Takeaway EIGHT

    The Remington settlement caused negative ripples. It emboldened the infringers to ramp up their lawfare actions.

    Takeaway NINE

    The agenda-driven Justices agreed that Mexico did not meet the requirements to pierce the PLCAA protections.

    Takeaway TEN

    AR-15s are in common use for lawful purposes.

    Takeaway ELEVEN

    While it does not require a probable event to pierce PLCAA protections, it does require a true allegation of a crime and plausible connection of the defendant to that probable event.

    Takeaway TWELVE

    PLCAA is a powerful protection against frivolous lawsuits.

    Takeaway Thirteen

    This was a major course correction after the failures in the Remington case.

            
  • Prohibition on bringing of qualified civil liability actions in Federal or State court

    1. In general

      A qualified civil liability action may not be brought in any Federal or State court.

    2. Dismissal of pending actions

      A qualified civil liability action that is pending on October 26, 2005, shall be immediately dismissed by the court in which the action was brought or is currently pending.

    —Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms, 15 USC § 7901 Ch. 105 (U.S. 2022)

    There are five listed exceptions.

    1. The transferor was convicted under section 925(h) of U.S.C. 18. This is part of the gun control action of 1968, as amended.
    2. The seller is guilty of negligence or negligent entrustment.
    3. The manufacturer or seller knowingly violated a State or Federal statute applicable to the sale or marketing of the product, AND the violation was a proximate cause of the harm for which relief is sought.
    4. for breach of contract or warranty.
    5. Death, injury, or property damage resulting from a defect in design or manufacturer of the product, when used as intended.

    Only section iii has any wiggle room. The question then becomes one of “proximate cause”.

    For example, in the original Lilo and Stitch, there is a scene where the child crawls into a washing machine or a dryer. If your child were to watch the movie and then replicate crawling into the dryer or washing machine, and then they were injured or killed, you might be able to sue Disney for that scene because it was the “proximate cause” of the injury.

    Claiming that an advertisement, in a firearms’ magazine, stating “Consider your man card reissued”, is the proximate cause of an asshole killing children and adults in a school shooting is a serious stretch.

    This is precisely what the blood vultures did after Sandy Hook. They had the parents file a lawsuit against Bushmaster, with the novel legal argument that since Connecticut has laws about certain types of advertisements, and because the PLCAA had an exception for sale or marketing, that the suit would evade PLCAA protections.

    This should have required the plaintiffs (bad guys) to prove that not only did Bushmaster produce advertisements that were in violation of CT law, but also that the asshole actually saw the advertisements and that those advertisements somehow incited the asshole to go murder children.

    This should have been thrown out in the lowest court, where the case was filed. Instead, the case made it to the CT supreme court where they said, “This advertising claim might actually pierce the PLCAA protections. Please continue the case to establish a fact pattern.”

    The Supreme Court did not stop this travesty. Remington went under, this lawsuit was part of the reason.

    Since the insurance companies, which owned the Remington Name, settled for a considerable amount, more lawsuits attacking manufactures have been filed. One bad decision leads to more bad decisions.

    Most of the motions for writ of certiorari are simply denied. The only thing the Court says is “Certiorari Denied”. The justices have started adding statements stating clearly that the denial of cert or denial of a stay does not mean the Court has made any judgment on the merits of the case.
    The Government of Mexico brought this lawsuit against seven American gun manufacturers. As required by a federal statute, Mexico seeks to show (among other things) that the defendant companies participated in the unlawful sale or marketing of firearms. See 15 U.S.C. §7903(5)(A)(iii). More specifically, Mexico alleges that the companies aided and abetted unlawful sales routing guns to Mexican drug cartels. The question presented is whether Mexico’s complaint plausibly pleads that conduct. We conclude it does not.
    —23-1141 Smith & Wesson Brands, Inc. v. Estados Unidos Mexicanos, 2025 605 U.S. Justice Kagan, delivering the opinion of the Court

    Kagan gets it right, Mexico is alleging that S&W et al. were doing something illegal. For that to be true, there would have to be convictions for those illegal acts.

    In the very next paragraph, she slaps down all those that say that the firearms industry is the only industry that can’t be sued. 15 U.S.C. §§7901–7903, bars certain lawsuits against manufacturers and sellers of firearms. — id.

    But PLCAA’s general bar on those suits has an exception, usually called the predicate exception, relevant here. That exception applies to suits in which the defendant manufacturer or seller “knowingly violated a State or Federal statute applicable to the sale or marketing” of firearms, and that “violation was a proximate cause of the harm for which relief is sought.” §7903(5)(A)(iii). If a plaintiff can show that provision is satisfied—that, say, a manufacturer committed a gun-sale violation proximately causing the harm at issue—then a suit can proceed, even though it arises from a third party’s later misuse of a gun. Or otherwise said, the predicate violation opens a path to making a gun manufacturer civilly liable for the way a third party has used the weapon it made.
    —id.

    Kagan skillfully avoids the advertising part of the law, here. Instead, she gives a concrete example of how the law was intended to be used. If the seller or manufacturer breaks the law by the transfer of the firearm, they can be held responsible for later harms caused by a third party.

    The Mexican Government, seeking redress for this gun violence, brought suit in 2021 against seven American firearms manufacturers. The suit, brought in a U.S. District Court, asserts a variety of tort claims against the defendants, mostly sounding in negligence. The basic theory is that the defendants failed to exercise “reasonable care” to prevent trafficking of their guns into Mexico, and so are responsible for the harms arising there from the weapons’ misuse. Id., at 184a. That theory, as all agree, runs straight into PLCAA’s general prohibition. Mexico’s action, that is, seeks to hold firearms manufacturers liable for “the criminal or unlawful misuse” of guns by third parties—and so, according to PLCAA, “may not be brought.” §§7902(a), 7903(5)(A). The complaint thus tries to plead its way into PLCAA’s predicate exception. It asserts, as that exception requires, that the third-party misuse of guns in Mexico resulted from the manufacturers’ knowing violations of gun laws. See §7903(5)(A)(iii).
    —id.

    Yep, the PLCAA is implicated here, and should protect the defendants (good guys). Mexico is attempting to pierce the PLCAA’s protections by claiming the manufacturers were knowingly violating gun laws.

    Mexico’s complaint survives PLCAA only if, in accord with usual pleading rules, it has plausibly alleged conduct falling within the statute’s predicate exception. See Ashcroft v. Iqbal, 556 U. S. 662, 678–679 (2009). Because Mexico relies exclusively on an aiding-and-abetting theory, that means plausibly alleging that the manufacturers have aided and abetted gun dealers’ firearms offenses (such as sales to straw purchasers), so as to proximately cause harm to Mexico. See supra, at 2–3. We need not address the proximate cause question, because we find that Mexico has not plausibly alleged aiding and abetting on the manufacturers’ part. “Plausibly” does not mean “probably,” but “it asks for more than a sheer possibility that a defendant has acted unlawfully.” Iqbal, 556 U. S., at 678. And Mexico has not met that bar. Its complaint does not plausibly allege the kind of “conscious … and culpable participation in another’s wrongdoing” needed to make out an aiding-and-abetting charge. Twitter, Inc. v. Taamneh, 598 U. S. 471, 493 (2023).
    —id.

    Wow, this is a big one. To pierce the PLCAA protections, the plaintiffs must prove that the manufacturer’s actions were the proximate cause of the injury. Before that can be done, they must first plausibly prove that the manufacturers added and abetted the illegal act which led to the injury. Mexico has not met the minimum requirements for plausible, much less probably.

    Finally, Mexico’s allegations about the manufacturers’ “design and marketing decisions” add nothing of consequence. Brief for Respondent 23. As noted above, Mexico here focuses on the manufacturers’ production of “military style” assault weapons, among which it includes AR-15 rifles, AK-47 rifles, and .50 caliber sniper rifles. See supra, at 6; App. to Pet. for Cert. 121a. But those products are both widely legal and bought by many ordinary consumers. (The AR-15 is the most popular rifle in the country. See T. Gross, How the AR-15 Became the Bestselling Rifle in the U. S., NPR (Apr. 20, 2023.) The manufacturers cannot be charged with assisting in criminal acts just because Mexican cartel members like those guns too. The same is true of firearms with Spanish-language names or graphics alluding to Mexican history. See supra, at 6. Those guns may be “coveted by the cartels,” as Mexico alleges; but they also may appeal, as the manufacturers rejoin, to “millions of law-abiding Hispanic Americans.” Tr. of Oral Arg 80; Reply Brief 20. That leaves only the allegation that the manufacturers have not attempted to make guns with non-defaceable serial numbers. See supra, at 6. But the failure to improve gun design in that way (which federal law does not require) cannot in the end show that the manufacturers have “join[ed] both mind and hand” with lawbreakers in the way needed to aid and abet. Direct Sales, 319 U. S., at 713.
    —id.

    To translate into language even a leftist can understand, “AR-15s are in common use”

    And that conclusion, we note, well accords with PLCAA’s core purpose. Recall that Congress enacted the statute to halt a flurry of lawsuits attempting to make gun manufacturers pay for the downstream harms resulting from misuse of their products. See supra, at 1–2. In a “findings” and “purposes” section, Congress explained that PLCAA was meant to stop those suits—to prevent manufacturers (and sellers) from being held “liable for the harm caused by those who criminally or unlawfully misuse firearm[s].” §7901(a)(5). Mexico’s suit closely resembles the ones Congress had in mind:…
    —id.

    Justice Jackson wrote a concurrence. Her concurrence is designed to limit the extent of the actual opinion.

    In her flawed opinion, the only reason Mexico did not prevail is that they didn’t point to a specific violation of state or federal laws. If only they had done that, the court would have allowed them to put it to those evil gun manufacturers.

    She also, intentionally, misstates the reasons for PLCAA. We have observed that lawfare is intended to destroy the defendants. The flood of civil lawsuits was designed to destroy the firearms industry. Even the military said as much.

    According to Justice Jackson, Activists had deployed litigation in an effort to compel firearms manufacturers and associated entities to adopt safety measures and practices that exceeded what state or federal statutes required.—id..

    She has such a strong opinion of the good will and selfless motives of those filing lawsuits.

            

  • On Wednesday, I went to the Fort to do some interpreting for a home schooling group. I always love when I have homeschoolers in, because they ask the BEST questions. This group was a fantastic one, and it included a bunch of kids who were very obviously not normal students but who nonetheless were engaged and engaging. I loved their questions, their interest, and their sharing of their own successes and failures.

    This particular week, I decided I was going to try a new to me bread recipe. This is a 1750s “receipt” that came to me from the internet, and the original poster received it by way of people in Illinois, who got it from French settlers, who were originally from the New France area during the Fort’s era. With such an illustrious ancestry, I decided this was THE recipe to work with. Also, the recipe only makes a single loaf instead of two, which is nice because I’m rather afloat in bread right now.

    It’s an easy loaf, very simple to pull together, with half the kneading required of my other bread. I was excited to give it a try! I got into the Fort, started up the fires to warm the oven and hearth, and pulled out all the items I needed to make my bread: flour, yeast, water (very warm to the touch), and honey. Like I said, simple recipe. To that, I added my big mixing bowl (a shiny wooden bowl with such a fine grain that the dough barely sticks to it) and a wooden spoon for stirring.

    As the kids and their accompanying adults trickled in, I started the process of mixing together my ingredients. As a baker with a bit more experience, I started with my water and yeast, rather than the flour (it’s much easier to add flour if your dough is too wet, but much more difficult to add water if it’s too dry). I put 1.5 cups of water into the bowl, and sprinkled it with about a tablespoon of dry active yeast. I explained to the kids that they didn’t have dry active yeast in the 1750s, and most likely would have used either a bit of salt rising (a golf ball sized bit of the last bread dough you made, saved in a bowl of milk and kept in the salt barrel until needed) or the barm off the top of the beer vat as the source of their yeast. Once the yeast started bubbling, I added in a dollop of honey (about 1.5 tbsp) and stirred until it was dissolved.

    (more…)

            

  • Snope and Ocean State Tactical

    This was a real bummer. We couldn’t get four justices to vote to grant cert. Thomas wrote a powerful dissent.

    Unfortunately, if the Supreme Court is only taking two or three Second Amendment cases per term, they will be picky about which cases they take.

    I believe that Thomas and Alito want to take every Second Amendment case which allows them to correct the inferior courts or to advance Second Amendment jurisprudence. If I were on the court, I would be the same way.

    I believe that if they are being told, “You only get three Second Amendment cases in the 2025 term.”, then it is better to pick cases that advance Second Amendment jurisprudence over just slapping down the inferior courts.

    Let’s face it, the Fourth Circuit was told they got it wrong in Bianchi, they then heard oral arguments in front of a three judge merits panel, then took the case en banc before the merits panel released their opinion, then decided they got it right the first time.

    For different reasons, mind you, but they always get the same result.

    S&W v Mexico

    And just in time, a 9-0 opinion from the Supreme Court which advances Second Amendment jurisprudence. Congress passed the PLCAA to protect the firearm industry. PLCAA is designed to stop frivolous lawsuits against those involved with firearm sales, distribution, and manufacture.

    There is a very tight exception, which is if the sued party aided, abetted, or committed an actual crime.

    Kegan said that this case should have been dismissed at the outset via PLCAA. That third-party actions which are illegal is not the responsibility of the defendants. She went on to say that sales and advertising does not confer responsibility. And that making items that are attractive to third-party evildoers does not confer responsibility.

    This is a case that will be used to stop lawfare suits before they begin.

    Remington

    An asshole killed his mother, stole her Bushmaster AR15, went to a school where he was known, entered the building and killed children, teachers, and staff(?).

    Because Connecticut doesn’t allow for armed teachers in the classroom, they had no way of stopping this monster.

    The usual suspects then got the parents of some victims to file a lawsuit against Remington. They filed against Remington because Remington had purchased Bushmaster. This lawsuit falls square in the PLCAA protections.

    The plaintiffs (bad guys) alleged that Bushmaster had violated CT law by creating advertisements that appealed to bad actors. This violation of the CT law would pierce the PLCAA protections.

    The CT supreme court ruled that there was not enough evidence to decide, and allowed the case to go forward.

    Remington appealed to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court denied their petition.

    This is not unusual, the case was still in an interlocutory state.

    The battle went on and on. Remington went out of business. The name was left with ???, the insurance companies cut a deal with the parents to make the suit go away.

    This has emboldened the blood vultures to continue to file lawfare suits whenever there is a mass shooting.

    Uvalde

    An asshole entered a school in Uvalde, TX. He shot multiple children and adults.

    The cops stood around with their thumbs up their collective asses in a circle jerk for over 40 minutes.

    A group of border agents rolled up, stacked up, and ended the standoff with a good school shooter. I.e., the shooter is dead.

    The usual blood vultures lined up to get parents to front another lawfare attack.

    I do not know where that case currently is.

    If it is still active, I expect the defendants (good guys) to file notices on the docket pointing to S&W v. Mexico, and that should bring that suit to an end.

    Good Teachers Have Skills…

    I was at The Fort at No 4 on Wednesday. It was a good group of homeschooled children.

    There was one student that was a little mouthy and it changed how I dealt with him.

    I have to do better. Even if he and I were cool, it wasn’t cool. As the adult, representing the Fort, I must do better.

    It sometimes sucks learning new people skills. No, it always sucks learning new people skills.

    Hard Things Made Simple

    My entire computing career has been at the bleeding edge of technology. Even when it wasn’t, it was doing things that nobody else had done. Of figuring out how to do something with little guidance.

    Back when I was babysitting Cray super computers, there was another site that wanted to upgrade from the Cray specific operating system to Unix (SYSV/UNICOS).

    These people were performing cutting-edge research in the medical field.

    This type of upgrade is normally a two-week project if pushed but normally three weeks.

    I did three one-day prep visits to the site, then did the complete upgrade over a three-day weekend, finishing 20 hours earlier than we expected.

    Was this cutting edge? Not really, I just knew it had to be done and did it. My boss’s boss’s boss was there, he kept pizza and coke-a-cola in the ready room and took notes.

    One of the difficult things I’m learning is that if it is a hard problem, it is likely somebody else has already published a solution. Go find it.

    This just happened to me with Django content Types and generic foreign keys. Sigh, I wish I had known about them 7 years ago.

    New Skills

    I’ve taken up net making. I’m likely to finish my first round net today. Too many people are telling me that learning a new skill in a couple of days is not reasonable.

    Question of the week

    What is one skill you would like to learn in the next year?

    What is one skill you would like to master in the next year?

            

  • In a unanimous opinion, delivered by Justice Kagan, the Supreme Court held:

    Because Mexico’s complaint does not plausibly allege that the defendant gun manufacturers aided and abetted gun dealers’ unlawful sales of firearms to Mexican traffickers, PLCAA bars the lawsuit
    — 605 U.S. ____ (2025)

    Thomas and Jackson both wrote concurring opinions. I have not read them yet.

    This is a huge win. In just the skim I did, they specifically call out advertising as being irrelevant.

    I intend to have an article on Saturday. This case advances Second Amendment jurisprudence.

            

  • Yesterday’s article was a surprise to me. I started the post with one mindset, and ended in a different place. Occasionally, it helps to talk out your issues.

    It started with my statement, Snope should have been GVRed.

    Why? Because the Supreme Court has already done a gun ban case. It is a slam dunk, easy case.

    Slam dunk, easy cases, don’t make good law. Just like bad facts make bad law, easy cases don’t advance the law.

    Every case the Supreme Court takes is important. They intend it to be important. While every case is important to somebody, or to a group, not every case is important to the country or the Court.

    Every Second Amendment case is important to me. I want every court at every level to make a good ruling based on the plain text of the Second Amendment and this Nation’s historical tradition of firearms regulation. To do anything less is to flaunt the rule of law and our founding documents.

    Too many judges are agenda-driven hacks, black robed wannabe tyrants, operating their rogue inferior court as if they are the supreme authority of this nation.

    When an inferior court makes a bad decision, their superior court should step in and set them right.

    If every inferior court judge had every bad decision slapped down, there would be many fewer bad decisions. On Monday, the court decided 116 cases.

    Of those, three cases were an invitation to the Solicitor General to file a motion on how the US Government stands in the case.

    Two were, “You can proceed as a pauper, you must pay to play.” One denial of cert had two dissents written. The rest are denials. Most of which are dealt with by being put in a column titled “Denied”. Nothing more.

    If the Supreme Court was capable of dealing with more cases in a meaningful way, then I could see them taking these slam dunk cases.

    Unfortunately, the court has painted itself into a corner in what they feel they can say. I can wish all I want that a GVR would say more than “in light of Rahimi“, but a GVR never has more than “do it over obeying this new opinion”. This should be happening with more targeted language.

    But they don’t.

    Instead, they hear 65 to 70 cases per term. They decide which cases will have the most impact on our country. Which cases will bring common understanding across all the circuits.

    They choose. And right now, Roberts is not going to let more than a couple of Second Amendment cases be heard per term.

    I agree with Thomas and Alito, the Court should have dealt with Snope in some way other than ignoring it.

    Dealing with it now might make a difference in the next few years.

    More likely, it would not have accomplished anything. The Court is supposed to set guiding principles. It isn’t supposed to be fixing individual results.

    Assume the Court said, “AR-15s are arms under the plain text of the Second Amendment. They are in common use. They cannot be banned.”

    What would change in the Ninth Circus court? The First, Second Third, Forth and Seventh Circuit? Nothing.

    “The Supreme Court has said that Semi Automatic rifles are arms under the plain text, they are most similar to machine guns which can presumptively be banned.”

    Or they require a permit to own an “assault weapon”. It is no longer “banned”. Instead, you are required to register as an assault weapon owner, pay $1000/year per assault weapon.

    They didn’t ban those evil assault weapons, they are just making sure that people treat the ownership of such weapons seriously.

    We need to see advancement in the Second Amendment.

    When Bruen was decided, multiple cases were GVRed. Those cases are making their way back to the Supreme Court. If the Court takes any of them and produces a major opinion, like Heller, or Bruen, then we are on track.

    So I’m licking my wounds and preparing to fight for the rights of The People to keep and bear arms.

            

  • I belong to several writer’s groups on Facebook, partly because I like to connect with other authors and partly to hear about new opportunities when they come by. One of the groups I belong to is run by a very successful cookbook author (who I’m not at liberty to talk about in public, as the group is private and very bougie). The owner posted this video, and then left us to comment on it before coming back. I’ll skip to the good part: if you watch about five minutes of it, you’ll get the whole gist.

    Basically, what she says is cookbooks are training you to think you’re bad.

    That’s right folks, the recipes you’ve been enjoying in your family for the last umpteen years, the ones you’ve snatched off the internet? They’re apparently actively attempting to strip you of your abilities. I can’t make this shit up. Here’s a quote:

    “I want to show you that your cookbooks are more than just lists of instructions for how to cook your next meal. Your cookbooks are in fact deeply judgmental stories telling you that you are not already good enough at doing mundane household tasks.”

    What I got from the half of this travesty that I managed to watch is that because a cookbook usually contains a story, it’s only a vehicle for the author to tell you that you’re a failure, because if you weren’t a failure, you wouldn’t need to read the cookbook. As a secondary message, apparently we’re also being told that if we cook like Rachel Ray, we’ll look like her and be rich like her. As near as I can tell, the only thing cookbooks aren’t communicating to you, is how to cook. She’s adamant that people cannot possibly learn to cook from a book, and that it must be transmitted from person to person.

    I’m aghast that this woman, Dr. Rachel Rich. She’s a doctorate, so that means she has a PhD in this stuff. Per her own words, “…I’m a historian at Leed Becket University and co-editor of the journal Food And History. I’ve been researching and writing about cookbooks for over 20 years…”

    So, is there enough information out there to keep a food historian busy for over 20 years? Absolutely. It’s a fascinating subject, and one which has important connections with today’s world. Not only are food historians bringing the past to life in a way that no other historian can, they’re also behind the revival of several old types of food, plants that were popular in the middle ages or earlier but that had faded into obscurity in modern times. That’s important because we can learn about plant genetics, and how to better feed our growing population by studying those plants and the recipes that they were used in. So yes, there’s a ton of information out there, and a solid researcher could spend a lifetime tapping it.

    Instead, this Dr. Rich is handing out this pap.

    (more…)

            

  • During the term, the Supreme Court has multiple conferences. The Friday conference is when they decide which cases will be granted cert, which will be denied, and other issues relating to cases, outside of opinions.

    On the following Monday, they publish their order list. This is a list of all the cases they have an action on. Some of those a denial of cert, others are denials of moving forward as somebody that can’t pay filing costs, others are invitations to the federal government to speak up on the case.

    The only people in the conferences are the 9 justices. There are no law clerks, no bus boys, no secretaries. It is just the nine of them.

    When evaluating a motion for a writ of certiorari, it only takes 4 justices to grant the writ.

    A case that is granted cert can be quickly handled by vacating the inferior court’s decision and remanding the case back to the inferior court. This is normally accompanied by instructions to “do it over, right, in light of a recent opinion”.

    I would have loved to see the Court GVR Snope with “in light of Heller and Bruen“. Not that it would have done anything when dealing with the Fourth Circuit, but it still would have been an interesting method of dealing with these rogue inferior courts.

    If they are not GVRing a case, but simply granting cert, they will schedule oral arguments and set deadlines for all briefs to be filed. They never state a dissent or make a statement when a case is granted cert.

    If they deny cert, most times it is a simple list of cases with a short sentence at the end, “the motion for certiorari is denied.

    The Snope case is ripe to be heard by the Court. It has been kicking around since 2013. It was one of the cases that was seeking cert while Bruen was seeking cert. It could have been the case to move Second Amendment jurisprudence forward.

    The Court did the right thing in taking Bruen. Snope, known as Bianchi at the time, was a simple repeat of Heller. Bruen advanced our cause significantly.

    The holding was that the Second Amendment extends outside the home. That is huge. It is much bigger than saying, “It is a gun ban case, we decided it in Heller, you can’t ban guns in common use for legal purposes.”

    The Supreme Court only hears 70 or so cases a year. That is across all parts of the legal landscape. First Amendment, Fourth and Fifth amendments, environment and a host of other subjects.

    The question becomes twofold, how many Second Amendment cases will the court hear in a term, and what are the best cases to take?

    The Supreme Court heard Rahimi in the 2024 term (current term) as well as VanDerStok.

    Was Snope the right vehicle for the next major Second Amendment opinion?

    Maybe not. If the Court could hear every Second Amendment case presented to them, then yes. This was a slam dunk case for The People.

    It would not have advanced Second Amendment jurisprudence in any significant way. It would be a redo of Heller.

    Justice Thomas would have written, either as the author of the opinion or in a concurrence, that the plain text is plain, there is no evaluation to do. But it would still just be another Heller.

    We have other cases coming forward. My feelings were that an opinion in Snope would have addressed these other cases, but maybe we need to have the court look at sensitive places?

    When the Bruen opinion issued, I remember focusing in on “sensitive places”. It was obvious to me that many of the rogue states would laser focus on making as much of their state “sensitive places” as possible. The goal isn’t to make every place illegal for you to carry, it is to make it so legally dangerous that you don’t bother.

    Every time something comes up on Craigslist that I want which is in MA, I evaluate it in terms of drive time and danger. Because I have to leave my firearm behind when I travel into Mass. It is painful.

    There are two east-west roads near me. One is faster to certain towns in NH. But, it dips into Mass for part of that trip. I refuse to use that route, even if it adds 15 to 30 minutes to trip time.

    Now imagine thousands of little “legal guns prohibited” areas in a state. What happens if you’re driving to pick up a rabbit hutch, and you drive past a school. With the way some states work, that could be a felony.

    So the Court could be looking for a sensitive places case. Or, one that I would like to see, a reciprocity case? How cool would it be if the court found that whatever requirements my state requires is all it takes for me to be able to carry any state?

    I’m disappointed. I never expect anything of Roberts. I was hoping for better from Amy.

    This is a war. It is better to not lose this battle and continue to make headway in the Supreme Court.

    Boy am I disappointed.

            

  • I’m feeling down from the SCOTUS lack of spine. I was looking for a song about good things to come. Instead, this came to mind.

            

  • Today, the Supreme Court denied cert in both Snope and Ocean State Tactical.

    Thomas and Kavanaugh wrote dissents. Alito and Gorsuch joined Kavanaugh in his dissent. Amy and John sided with the agenda driven left of the court.

    Because Ocean State Tactical is in an interlocutory state, they will have at least another two bites at the apple. If this outcome is any indication, I do not expect a positive result.

    On the better news front, Kavanaugh listed several cases that are making their way up the chain and will be or are seeking cert.