We had our first “ask anything” It didn’t go the way I expected. I was going to collect all the questions and then have Hagar make a post answering them all. Still it worked out.
I’ll offer up an “ask me anything” for myself if you all would like, see the poll at the bottom.
I’ve made my way through most of the filings in Duncan v. Bonta case. Thank you to the Michel & Associates for having everything in one place and open for us to read.
The gist of the State’s argument is that magazines are not “arms” under the scope of the Second Amendment and the good guys haven’t proven it, and even if they were within the scope of the Second Amendment there is a long history of banning guns.
More on Duncan v. Bonta next week. The state has filed multiple “briefs” in excess of 50 pages, it just takes a long time to wade through it all. Oh, for grins, the state up in Oregon is upset because one of the expert witnesses in their case used almost the same words as Massad Ayoob. This seems to be a big deal. Not that two different firearms experts came to almost exactly the same opinion in regards to magazines.
I’m reading the transcript of Judge Benitez’s conference meeting with the 2A cases out in California.
He has four 2A cases in front of him right now. He told the state: Put together a spreadsheet like summary of all the laws, regulations, and ordinances that you feel support your case. I want just one for all four cases. You will meet with the plaintiffs to go over those laws and they can object are not.
MR. DILLON(GG): It will just be a straight list of the laws. We will have a chance to review it as Plaintiffs. And like a summary judgment, if we have a contested issue of the summary of the law that they present, we can note that contest in the — you know, a joint document? Is that what you’re —
THE COURT(St. B): Sounds reasonable. Sounds reasonable to me.
MR. DILLON: No problem. Thank you, Your Honor.
MR. KELLY(BG): Your Honor, I think we would object to that as well. I think we would want, if we need to, to introduce experts to interpret some of the laws and the standards —
THE COURT: No.
MR. KELLY: — in the language —
THE COURT: No.
MR. KELLY: — and the statute —
THE COURT: No. Look — no, no.
Mr. Kelly, with all due respect, I don’t need — every one of these experts that you’ve put forth, I have read, just like experts that they have put forth, like Mr. Copill, for example. Your experts — these are people that have, you know, biased points of view. I mean, Mr. Bosey, for example — I hope I’m pronouncing his name. The fellow who worked for —
MR. MOROS: Kimber, Your Honor.
THE COURT: Kimber. Yeah. Who at some point in time had an epiphany and realized that all the work that he’d been doing for all these years, selling these weapons to the public was not good. And now he works — he’s a consultant for Everytown — I’m trying to remember.
Anyway, look. These people’s opinions of what these statutes say, right, means nothing. It means nothing. It’s like, I remember — I think it was Justice Brier in — I think it was Bruen, who talked about, “Well, we need to have this factual record,” and this and that, what have you.
No. 702 says that the admission of expert testimony is help — is possible if, because of the expert’s knowledge, skill, or experience, it will assist the trier of fact. Okay.
But there’s nothing. I mean, I’ve read these declarations. Every one of these folks come in here with a biased — it’s not like they’re really neutral experts, okay, or they’re not experts who’ve come up on these opinions as a result of these cases, okay, doing research for these cases. These are all people that already come with preconceived ideas and opinions, but their opinion is not worth any more than your opinion or her opinion. They’re going to tell me, “Well, in my opinion, if you look at this statute, this statute means that — you know, that the State of Wyoming regulated concealed carry of brass knuckles,” and so I can read that. I can figure that out by myself.
Damn…. This Judge Benitez gets it. He doesn’t need some opinion from an Everytown shill telling him, an actual legal expert, what a statue means.
A number of years ago I was having a discussion with my kids principal at the elementary school. I think the issue was that my kindergarten or first grader had drawn flowers on his name for some in class work. The teacher had marked him down.
The principal kept using some offensive words and in the end I said something like “When you say X it makes me want to jump down your throat.” We finished our conversation, she didn’t seem to have any issues. As I was leaving she asked me why I didn’t become a teacher because she thought I would be great teacher.
Later that day my son came home and had a letter saying I wasn’t allowed on school grounds because I had threatened the principal. It seems that they thought that “jump down your throat” was a threat of physical violence. It isn’t.
So I made an appointment and when I showed up to talk to her to figure out what was going on she brought in the only male teacher in the school and 3 other people, it was all intended to be very intimidating. I don’t intimidate very well.
I tried to show them the actual meaning of the phrase they were upset about. The refused to read it. I was accused of threatening her multiple times and when I asked “If you feel I had threatened you, why did you ask me to join the school as a teacher?”
She replied that she hadn’t said that.
All in all it was very accusatory.
I finally had had enough, turned to her and asked “to you have a bad memory or are you just lying?”
Everybody in that room responded in shock over my statement. “How rude!” My response of “But you all have been accusing me of making death threats which didn’t happen. Why are you allowed to insult me and I can’t ask why she is getting it so wrong?”
They didn’t see it. I was forced to leave with the threat of them calling the cops on me.
This is the way of the left. They attack us over and over again and at the point where we respond, we are the bad people. The number of videos of some white kid attacking a black kid are pretty extensive. Nobody seems to capture the tormenting that happens prior to their response. But they are always the bad ones.
Which takes us back to the report from Enfield, CT. From the headline I assumed that they had made some sort of threat against school officials.
Nope:
Two people have been banned from school property after they mailed letters to the homes of school officials, spewing “gibberish” and appearing to promote a global constitution…
This is a chilling effect. If you communicate with a school official and they decide that your communication was “gibberish” or they think you are promoting wrong think, you could be banned from school property.
I wonder how they would have reacted if the had received letters supporting BLM and promoting systemic racism? I wouldn’t be surprised if they were invited to be guest speakers.
The letters, which were received Wednesday, do not contain threats and neither person who signed them is accused of committing a crime, Zoppo-Sassu said. But police have told the Enfield man and Somers woman they are not permitted on school property, including school board offices, she said.
The reasons that they are banned is because “…we have zero tolerance for attempts to distract our elected and appointed officials from their jobs.”
Hagar has agreed to accept a chance to answer questions from you, our readers. This posting is in the feedback category so anybody can post comments. Questions should be in by Friday, Feb 24th.
The comment posting rule still stands, “Don’t be a dick”.
Hagar will answer every question you post of her. The answer my be a short “I don’t know” or “I won’t answer this question.” Those are answers.
B.L.U.F a derailed train of thought regarding gun infringers. BORING.
The anti-gun battle is difficult to understand because it requires us to acknowledge that there are different classes of people out there advocating for gun infringements.
I was at a client’s office shortly after the Boston Bombing. The owner of the company and I were talking. I mentioned that the media was talking about how the suspects were heading towards New York, or Canada, or a dozen other places. What they didn’t mention was a concern that they might be heading into NH.
As my lady put it “The people of New Hampshire are out in their front yards in their lawn chairs with rifle at hand hoping to bag their limit of bombers.”
The owner went was very surprised at that statement. He didn’t know that just about anybody could get a license to carry in NH. NH is now a constitutional carry state.
He asked me “Do you think there have been any guns in our office?”
I replied with “Have we had customers in the office?”
“Yes….”
“Then it is likely we have had guns in the office.” I replied.
I didn’t bother to tell him that there was a pistol on my hip and another in my EDC bag.
“Oh… I don’t like guns. My brother was killed in a gun accident when we were kids.”
My client had a reason to be fearful of guns. He had never learned safe gun handling and his strongest memory of a gun was his brother dying from a gunshot. His children were like wise anti-gun people.
But they didn’t do anything about it. Guns were not part of their culture. They didn’t want to be around guns and they didn’t think it was safe have guns. They didn’t try and push their wants on others.
There is another type of anti-gun person. This is the person that firmly believes that certain firearms are just to much for you to own. They have bought into all of the anti-gun propaganda. They are true believers. What they believe is that we would all be better off if there were no more “bad” guns.
They don’t really know what a “bad” gun is. They just know it when they see it. This is the person that has no problems with a mini-14 but freaks at an AR-15. That thinks an AR-15 platform like rifle that shoots .22LR is horrible and should be banned but doesn’t think anything is wrong with an M1.
A person they believe that “weapons of war” and “military style” weapons should be banned but have no issues with people owning weapons that were actually carried in war being owned and wanting to ban rifles that have never been carried in war.
These people are obnoxious but can be reached. They just need one little bit of gunshine in order to understand that maybe they haven’t been told the truth.
For these people I’ve used the “Which round sound be banned?” while showing them all sorts of rounds. They pick things like 7.62x54r, 30-06, 7.62×51 NATO, 30-30 Win, .303 British, and other rounds of that style. They almost never pick 5.56×45.
With a little bit of verbal manipulation I’ve been able to get them to pick .45 Colt over 5.56×45. I’m looking forward to having them decide between 45-70 and 5.56×45.
I had a guest ask to see my firearms when visiting. I did a small show and tell. He was from LI, NY. We were going through different things when I handed him a loaded magazine.
He started to take it and I yanked it back. “You’re from New York. Your governor says that having a magazine with more than 8 rounds (I don’t remember what it was that year) will make you a killing mass murder.” I stripped off some rounds to bring it into “S.A.F.E.” standards and handed it back to him.
“There you go, it is now safe for you to handle.”
He looked at me like I had gone crazy. “What are you talking about?”
I explained to him what the law was in his state and how having one too many rounds in a magazine was a violation of law but having the “right” number of rounds was perfectly ok.
He got it. He didn’t turn into a gun person, he stopped being anti-gun.
Another friend of mine is what I call a “thinking leftist”. She leans so far left that she’d fall over if there was a strong wind. We were having lunch together, talking about compromises in gun laws. I told her that what she was calling a compromise was just me giving up less.
I then used as my counter “If they were to offer us national reperprocity, that would be a compromise.” After I explained what reperprocity meant she was shocked to learn that it wasn’t. Explaining that carrying a shell casing into Mass could get me arrested and charged with a felony was even more shocking to her.
She is no longer a slave to the media propaganda.
Then we have the gun infringing busy bodies. These are those that know that the best thing for society is to remove guns from your hands. They believe this so firmly that they will lie, cheat, and steal in order to bring this about.
These are the day to day drones that buzz around Everytown, Mom’s Demands, Giffards, and the like. They believe it is their duty to take your guns away from you.
They can attend events where their organization is paying for armed guards and think “that’s ok” because the armed guards are “better” than those gun nuts. These people believe all of the propaganda and work diligently to make society “safer” by removing guns from you.
I believe that my representatives and senators fall into this category. To attribute more to them would require they be sharper than they’ve shown themselves to be.
The next level is the liar and cheat. These are the people that are knowingly creating lies in order to modify society. These are the people that will intentionally conflate a suicide in a school parking lot by a 40yo man with a “school shooting”.
These are the liars that claim there have been more mass shootings this year than days. They actually claim there is more than one per day.
They get there by using bad data and bad definitions. They talk about the real mass shootings with lots of victims and then in the very next breath talk about a “mass shooting” where 10 gang bangers were exchanging fire with each other, no deaths and one injured.
Not the video I was looking for. The video in question shows an incident where gang members are running to cars to grab weapons. Lots and lots of rounds fired at each other. No signs that anybody was hit. When you hear the sirens start to approach they ditch guns in cars. Lock the cars and calmly walk away.
These people lie using statistics. “The ATF reports that there has been over a 1000% increase in ghost gun traces.”. They never tell us if these were home manufactured firearms or if they are firearms whose serial numbers have been removed. They also don’t tell us why a gun with no serial number is being sent to the ATF for a trace.
And finally, they don’t tell us that the reason for the vast increase in traces of ghost guns is that they are now asking law enforcement to send in trace requests for “ghost” guns. The intent to be to drive up the numbers.
So we don’t know if 1000% means that there was 10 traces in 2018 and there were 100 traces in 2022 or if there were 10,000 traces in 2018 and 100,000 in 2023. When people want to lie with statistics they use the method that gets the results they want.
If the numbers are small they will list percentages. Using percentages small changes in the absolute number make for large changes in percentages. If the percentage change is small but the number is large, they use the absolute number because people don’t have good feel for raw numbers.
The entire goal of this group of people is to create a narrative that paints gun owners and people that want to defend themselves as “evil” and bad.
At the top are the manipulators. I attribute true evil to them. They don’t want you to have guns for deeply personal reasons. Often they think it is an obstacle to their goals.
I talk about “polite police” from time to time. The less likely a populace is to be armed, the less polite the police are. The more likely the citizens are armed, the more likely the police will be polite.
I stopped in at the local cop shop the other day to speak with the chief. It took only a few minutes to get in to see him. I had my EDC on me. Did he see it? I don’t know. Did it matter?
No.
It didn’t matter because my ability to act didn’t mean I was going to act.
There is a joke about a game warden coming up on a woman and her young son fishing on the lake. She was sitting there reading a book while her son fished. There were a couple of poles in the boat but only the son was actually fishing. The warden asked to see their licenses.
The woman got out her son’s license and showed it to the game warden.
“Where’s yours?”
“I don’t have one. I don’t fish and I haven’t been fishing.”
“Well I see you have the equipment to fish so I’m going to write you up for fishing without a license.”
She argued a little bit but gave in at last.
“Just to let you know warden, when I get back to shore I’m going to file rape charges against you.”
“What!?!?!?”
“You have the equipment so you must have done it….”
The point being what we all know. It isn’t the equipment that does evil, it is the evil that lurks in the hearts of men.
The manipulators at the top are evil. These are the ones that are fighting not only to disarm us but to make self-defense and defense of others impossible.
These are the people that are fighting to change the meaning of our Constitution in order to remove the protections it guarantees to use.
These are the people that make the claim that the second only applies to Militias and holds that line in court for decades. When that is overturned they switch to “But we have a good and laudable reason for this infringement.” They convince the courts to balance our rights away.
These are the people that change rules, ordinances and laws in order to moot cases to keep them from the Supreme Court.
Today I read their words in court filings and my blood boils.
“Magazines aren’t arms” because why? The Supreme Court has already given their opinion that things like magazines, ammunition, reloading supplies and such are all “arms” within the scope of the Second Amendment.
“It doesn’t matter if it is in common use, it is unusually dangerous”. No, the Supreme Court has said that in order for an arm to be outside of the scope of the Second Amendment it has to be both unusually dangerous and uncommon.
“The laws of Merry Old England in the 1600’s are part of the history and tradition of the Second Amendment.” Again, no. The Supreme Court has stated that history and tradition around the founding. This is 1791 when the Second was ratified along with the rest of the Bill of Rights. The end of the founding era is 1826 when the last of the founding fathers died. Laws from around the time of the ratification of the 14th amendment, 1868, can be used to support laws from 1791.
“A sensitive place is anywhere we say it is.” The Supreme Court has commented on this. After reading Bruen for the first time I read “sensitive place” and predicted that it would be come an attack vector. It has.
At every step of the way, these manipulators have used every trick they have. They have bent language to mean what it doesn’t mean. One they recently used in Duncan v. Bonta is that by analyzing the written documents of a time period they can assign a numerical value to the “normal” usage of a word.
In this they analyze “bear” and “to bear” in the context of arms. From the statistical analysis they claim that the term “to bear arms” is most commonly used in the context of the military. Since that is the most common usage that must be the one meant in the Second Amendment which means that you don’t have the right to bear arms, only the militia.
Thoma: Virginia, we said “dangerous and unusual”, we did not say “or”
Judge Virginia M. Kendall, for the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, Eastern District opened her mountmouth and removed all doubt as to her abilities.
The case is No. 22 C 4775, Robert Bevis, et all v. City of Naperville, Illinois and Jason Arres, in his official capacity as Chief of Police. It is a challenge to the city of Naperville passing their own little “assault weapons ban”. They could do this because Illinois does not have a preemption law for stricter gun laws.
History
On 2022-08-16, after Bruen was decided, the city of Naperville, IL passed an ordinance to prohibit the local commercial sale of assault weapons.
The ordinance reads like an Everytown press release, or the maybe the Gun Violence Archive. You know, those people that consider a drug deal gone wrong in a bus yard to be a “school shooting”. For justification they have 13 “Whereas” clauses that report that a shooting took place. Many with AR-15 style rifles. 13 over 10 years that is.
The City then takes the stance that it is acceptable to ban the sale of a class of arms because “keep and bear” doesn’t include buy, sell, or make. Those founding fathers only meant that people could continue to keep and bear the arms they already had, not to acquire any more.
Clause 16 mentions the Federal AWB from 1994 through 2004. They point out that the AWB survived constitutional challenges but all were rejected for lack of standing. They conveniently forget that Heller was specifically designed to stop that type of rejection. Heller affirmed that the right to keep and bear arms is an individual right, not reserved to the state or “well regulated militia.”
17 mentions four cases where the circuit courts upheld AWB on state and local levels. All of which took place prior to Bruen and all of which used “means-end” which is explicitly rejected by the Supreme Court. Remember that Bruen didn’t create a new way of interpreting the second amendment, it affirmed the Heller decision which said “text, history and tradition”.
Clause 18 is a doozy. From Heller “Some have made the argument, bordering on the frivolous, that only those arms in existence in the 18th century are protected by the Second Amendment. We do not interpret constitutional rights that way.” but the city of Naperville did just that. They say that assault weapons didn’t exist in 1791, were rare prior to 2004 and that the use of “assault rifles” in mass shootings “indicates that assault rifles are uncommon and unacceptably dangerous”.
I think they are trying to say that if a criminal uses a particular arm in the commission of a crime that it makes the arm “uncommon and unacceptably dangerous”.
They then explain how an AWB is illegal for them to pass, so instead they are just going to ban the sale of “assault weapons”.
They have the standard list of things that make a rifle an “assault rifle” in their eyes. Assault Rifle Ordinance
Memorandum Opinion and Order
The order denies a request for a TRO and a preliminary injunction based on allegations that the Naperville ordinance violates the rights of the plaintiffs (Good guys).
The Judge starts by telling us that mass shootings are common and “assault weapons” are used to commit mass shootings. She then footnotes her use of the term “assault weapon” with “The Court will use the terms, as they are widely accepted in modern parlance and effectively convey the substance of the bans.”
It should be noted that she is correct, everybody knows exactly what we are talking about when we talk about “assault weapon ban”, we are talking about the banning of firearms with scary appearances or which are perceived as scary by infringers or their useful idiots. It totally ignores the actual definition of “assault rifle”. The propagandists have won this battle in this court.
In order for a plaintiff to be granted a TRO or an injunction “A plaintiff seeking a preliminary injunction must establish that he is likely to succeed on the merits, that he is likely to suffer irreparable harm in the absence of preliminary relief, that the balance of equities tips in his favor, and that an injunction is in the public interest.”
This is the standard and is quoted in almost every case where a TRO or injunction is requested.
She denies the request because:
…although the plaintiffs have standing to bring this lawsuit, they are unlikely to succeed on the merits of their claim because Naperville’s Ordinance and the Protect Illinois Communities Act are consistent with the Second Amendment’s text, history, and tradition.
Humm, let’s see the proof there judge. This isn’t a question of the what the definition of “is” is.
So now we get to the fun part, taking her arguments apart.
The Supreme Court first recognized that this provision[, the second amendment,] enshrines an individual’s right to keep and bear arms for the purpose of self-defense in District of Columbia v. Heller
Incorrect, as has been pointed out many times in the past, Heller affirmed that the second amendment guaranteed and individual right. Until late in the 20th century nobody claimed that the second amendment was a group right. It made no sense. Then in the late 1900’s courts started striking down second amendment cases for lack of standing.
See the discussion above about Naperville’s assertions about the federal AWB.
It wasn’t until Heller that the Supreme court was given an opportunity to tell the inferior courts “The People means the People, you dunces!”, an individual right.
One of the things that keeps coming up in these cases is the bad guys using “presumptively lawful” statements out of the Supreme Court to justify their infringements. The court must answer the question that is asked of it. They can’t start answering other questions. It doesn’t work that way.
This is why the Miller opinion says that nobody told the court that short barrelled shotguns or any shotguns are used in military/militia contexts. They knew that to be the case, they just couldn’t rule on it because it wasn’t in evidence. In the same way, the court can tell the inferior courts how to form their opinions, how to interpret the law, but they can’t just reach out and rule something unlawful if it isn’t the question before the court.
When the Supreme court says that “forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as …” is presumptively lawful, that only means that they haven’t ruled on the constitutionality of that restriction, yet.
Often those words are clues that they want somebody to bring that challenge to them. The sensitive place splurge by infringing states is likely to get “sensitive places” challenged at the Supreme Court. If that happens, the court might very well rule that only very very limited places are “sensitive”.
Here she goes again with “New standard of applying the Second Amendment.” The Second Amendment was always an individual right, that right was stolen from The People. In Heller they got it back. Heller told the courts to use text, history and tradition. The inferior courts instead decided on “means-end”. Bruen told the inferior courts that the two-step methodology of means-end was “one step too many.”
No more means-end.
To quote Virginia quoting Thomas in Bruen, the appropriate standard now is:
When the Second Amendment’s plain text covers an individual’s conduct, the Constitution presumptively protects that conduct. The government must then justify its regulation by demonstrating that it is consistent with the Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation
Page 15 of her opinion is some serious mental gymnastics. She admits that the Seven Circuit court was using means-end and that the Supreme Court said that was not the right way to judge second amendment cases. She then goes on to say that because the Seventh Circuit Court used means-end for at least five years, there must be something to be salvaged from all that “good law”.
She is attempting to see if Friedman is “still good law”. She does a partial pull quote:
we think it better to ask whether a regulation bans weapons that were common at the time of ratification or those that have ‘some reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia’ and whether law-abiding citizens retain adequate means of self-defense.
— Seventh Circuit court in Friedman
What she left out, which might be important “But instead of trying to decide what “level” of scrutiny applies, and how it works, inquiries that do not resolve any concrete dispute, we think it better…”
So the Seventh Circuit court was discussing how to use means-end (“level” of scrutiny). This is, again, explicitly rejected by the Supreme Court in Bruen.
Because of her pull quote, Virginia believes that she can figure out if the Seventh Circuit court used means-end or if they rejected the question based on whether the arm(s) were covered under the second amendment. This is incorrect. It doesn’t matter what the seventh said prior to Bruen. Post Bruen the courts are required to first determine if the law in question touches upon the second amendment.
The strong implication of the Supreme Court’s opinion is that it is better to over extend the second amendment than to under extend it.
See the multiple rulings from the Supreme court in regards to censorship. The government doesn’t actually have to censor something for it to infringe on first amendment rights, the fact that a law exists that has a “chilling effect” is enough.
Interestingly, Naperville conceded that if the Seventh Circuit used means-end in Friedman then Friedman is bad law. The judge leans towards using Friendman to exclude “assault weapons” from the scope of the second amendment.
Having waded through all of that, she gets it right:
Friedman cannot be reconciled with Bruen. The explanation that semiautomatic weapons were not common in 1791 is of no consequence. The Second Amendment “extends … to … arms … that were not in existence at the time of the founding.” Caetano v. Massachusetts, 577 U.S. 411, 412 (2016) (quoting Heller, 554 U.S. at 582). Relatedly, the Supreme Court has unequivocally dismissed the argument that “only those weapons useful in warfare are protected.” Id. (quoting Heller, 554 U.S. at 624–25). To the extent that the Seventh Circuit classified the weapon as either “civilian” or “military,” the classification has little relevance. And the arguments that other weapons are available and that fewer assault weapons lower the risk of violence are tied to means-end scrutiny—now impermissible and unconnected to text, history, and tradition. See Bruen, 142 S. Ct. at 2127. Accordingly, this Court must consider the challenged assault-weapon regulations on a tabula rasa.
“tabula rasa” means “an absence of preconceived ideas or predetermined goals; a clean slate” – Oxford Languages.
Now she goes off the rails. She lists the classes of prohibitions that are allowed. She pulls these from Heller because Bruen did not explicitly displace the examples provided in Heller
“prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill”;
“laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings”;
“laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms”; and
bans on weapons that are not “in common use.”
From this she concludes:
Under this framework, Naperville’s Ordinance and the Protect Illinois Communities Act are constitutionally sound. The text of the Second Amendment is limited to only certain arms, and history and tradition demonstrate that particularly “dangerous” weapons are unprotected.9 See U.S. Const. amend. II; Heller, 554 U.S. at 627.
In the case of Oregon where the state used a long list of laws, regulations, and ordinances from Duke LawDuke Center for Firearms Law. It seems this judge read the same list. She starts with William Blackstone. The words she wants out of this are “dangerous or unusual weapons”. That “or” in there is extremely important to the infringers. If the case is that an arm must be “dangerous and uncommon” then any arm that is common is covered by the second amendment’s plain text. If the courts or infringers can get that wording changed to “dangerous or uncommon” then they focus on showing that the arm is “dangerous”.
Bruen and Heller are clearly stating that a weapon must be both. It must be both unusually dangerous and uncommon before it is no longer within the scope of the second amendment.
Fortunately for us, Blackstone was writing of English common law prior to 1791. While much of American law is based on English Common Law, they are not the same. The Supreme court has explicitly stated that the only laws regarding bans are from the time of the ratification, 1791.
She then goes on to say that the use of guns was not common for self defense in founding era. Instead people used knives and clubs. So laws, regulations, and ordinances regulating the use, carry, or possession of knives or clubs is the same as a gun ban/regulation.
Her first actually listed weapons ban is from the early 1800s. A ban on “Bowie knives”. These Bowie knife bans came about after the Vidalia Sandbar Fight which happened in September of 1827. The last founding father(s) died on July 4th, 1826. This ban is more than a year late to be included in Bruen approved history and tradition.
Of course she has to do the standard game of quoting from rules that say that the government has the power to prohibit weapons that are “dangerous and which are not usual in civilized warfare, or would not contribute to the common defence.” and out of the other side of her mouth tell us that the weapon is too dangerous because it is used in modern civilized warfare and contributes to the common defense.
She then conflates booby trap guns with keeping and bearing arms. I.e. a law that made it illegal to set traps with guns should allow the government to now ban the bearing and keeping of arms.
Excuse me while I wipe up some coffee:
The muzzle velocity of an assault weapon is four times higher than a high-powered semiautomatic firearm.
So a semi-automatic rifle fires a round that travels faster than a round fired from a high-powered semi-automatic firearm?
She continues with “high-capacity magazines share similar dangers. … high-capacity magazines led to five times the number of people shot and more than twice as many deaths…” Damn, that is a super duper magic box and spring.
Note that they are using the language of “gun accessory” to describe magazines. I have pistols that will not function without a magazine. Yet they consider that to be just an “accessory.” The reason is clear, if it is an accessory, then it isn’t an arm covered by the second amendment.
Here we come to the meat of her opinion. She uses “and” instead of “or”
Assault-weapons and high-capacity magazines regulations are not “unusual,” Bruen, 142 S. Ct. at 2129 (Kavanaugh, concurring), or “severe,” Heller, 554 U.S. at 629. The federal government banned assault weapons for ten years. Today, eight states, the District of Columbia, and numerous municipalities, maintain assault-weapons and high-capacity magazine bans—as more jurisdictions weigh similar measures. Because assault weapons are particularly dangerous weapons and high-capacity magazines are particularly dangerous weapon accessories, their regulation accords with history and tradition. Naperville and Illinois lawfully exercised their authority to control their possession, transfer, sale, and manufacture by enacting a ban on commercial sales. That decision comports with the Second Amendment, and as a result, the plaintiffs have not shown the “likelihood of success on the merits” necessary for relief. See Braam, 37 F.4th at 1272 (“The district court may issue a preliminary injunction only if the plaintiff demonstrates ‘some’ likelihood of success on the merits.” (emphasis added)); Camelot Bonquet Rooms, Inc. v. United States Small Business Administration, 24 F.4th 640, 644 (7th Cir. 2022) (“Plaintiffs who seek a preliminary injunction must show that … they have some likelihood of success on the merits.”).
So there you have it. Fancy boxes with springs can be banned because the second amendment doesn’t cover gun accessories that are unusually dangerous or unusual. She does the same with a subset of semi-automatic rifles.
I cleaned up a couple of wrong words. These are marked with deleted and inserted markup. If you look in the actual source these deletes/inserts actually have a time date stamp saying exactly when I made the changes.
There were a couple of missing close tags where I accidently allowed italics to run on. I sometime have the same thing happen with bold markup. Lots of this is that I write my articles in HTML and not visual mode. The visual mode doesn’t give me as much control and sometimes is not an actual representation of what you will see.
Finally, It isn’t clear from this article but the Plaintiffs(good guys) have standing because one of the plaintiffs is “Law Weapons” a gun store in the city of Naperville.
Columbus students take gun safety course at elementary school
We’ve seen these headlines before, generally it means that some gun infringer has gotten permission to go into the schools and spout off about how horrible guns are. How they need to tell the school if there are any guns in their home and other such crap.
Not this time, NBC 4 in Columbus Ohio is reporting that the schools brought in actual gun people to give classes in gun safety. Of course the used the NRA safety training for children.
Stop
Don’t touch
Run away
Find/tell an adult
This is the gist of the Eddy Eagle program. NRA is not mentioned, that would be a bit to much to expect, but still, real gun safety education in the schools.
There is a long running joke in the gun community that “my safety is between my ears.” The idea being that if you follow the the four rules religiously if there is an unintended discharge it will not harm anybody or anything.
One of the most important rules in this is to keep your finger off the trigger until you are ready to shoot.
Messing around with the trigger of any loaded and cocked firearm is an invitation for an unintended discharge.
This Houston man has created a device that fits around the trigger with enough “meat” behind the trigger to keep the trigger from moving back past the break point.
At first glance, this looks like a sort of neat second safety. Or a method to add a safety to a firearm that doesn’t have a safety.
Consider your old SAA Colt revolver. Push this device over the trigger and now you have to remove the device before you can do most anything. Sounds good. It might even work on some firearms.
Where it fails is on all firearms that can be cocked with the trigger forward. And hopefully you don’t end up breaking your firearm by attempting to cock it while the device prevents the trigger from moving backwards.
But let’s take as our example the wonderful Glock. You want that “extra” bit of safety. So you slap in a mag, cock the weapon and it is now “hot” As you attempt to push this device around the trigger it goes a little wrong and “BANG!” there is a new hole. Hopefully not in anything you care about.
Assuming you did manage to get this thing on your Glock you hear a bang in the night from downstairs. You grab your Glock and need to remove the device. You attempt to push it out with your trigger finger and “BANG!” Your pistol goes off because your finger pushed the device off the trigger and then continued in to press the trigger proper.
No gun safety device should ever be used around a trigger when a depression of said trigger would cause the gun to fire. Just don’t do it.
B.L.U.F. California Assemblymember Gipson has introduced legislation that would punish people that send STL or CNC files to people in California without state permission.
The International Traffic in Arms Regulation, or ITAR.
That’s right, while the state of California is arguing that magazines are not Arms covered under the Second Amendment, the federal government has or had listed ciphers as an “arm” covered by ITAR(22 USC. §2778).
(b) Information security or information assurance systems and equipment, cryptographic devices, software, and components, as follows:
(1) Military or intelligence cryptographic (including key management) systems, equipment, assemblies, modules, integrated circuits, components, and software (including their cryptographic interfaces) capable of maintaining secrecy or confidentiality of information or information systems, including equipment or software for tracking, telemetry, and control (TT&C) encryption and decryption;
(2) Military or intelligence cryptographic (including key management) systems, equipment, assemblies, modules, integrated circuits, components, and software (including their cryptographic interfaces) capable of generating spreading or hopping codes for spread spectrum systems or equipment;
(3) Military or intelligence cryptanalytic systems, equipment, assemblies, modules, integrated circuits, components and software;
(4) Military or intelligence systems, equipment, assemblies, modules, integrated circuits, components, or software (including all previous or derived versions) authorized to control access to or transfer data between different security domains as listed on the Unified Cross Domain Management Office (UCDMO) Control List (UCL); or
(5) Ancillary equipment specially designed for the articles in paragraphs (b)(1)-(b)(4) of this category.
While it says “military or intelligence cryptographic” the truth of the matter is that if the encryption is good enough to be “military grade”, then it is covered by ITAR.
Back in 1991, Phil Zimmerman created a program called “Pretty Good Privacy” or PGP. Today it continues as Gnu PGP or GPG. This software consisted of three major parts, a method of doing key exchange via public key cryptography, a symmetric cipher to encrypt the actual message, a methodology for establishing key trust.
He released this for free on the Internet using FTP.
Shortly thereafter the United States Customs Service started investigating Zimmerman because the “high strength cryptography” of PGP made it a munition covered under ITAR.
What this meant was that if somebody from outside of the United States or who was not a US citizen could download the software it was considered exporting without a license.
Zimmerman fought this on First Amendment grounds. He was loosing and the government kept coming after him. He finally won the case after the distribution started happening from outside the US.
One of the ways that the software was legally exported was that the core algorithm was printed in an OCR font on a Tee-shirt and then worn through customs. There were other examples of this methodology. Where the code was printed in OCR format and then it could be shipped.
The government finally figured out that the code, printed out in a machine readable font was protected under the first Amendment. They then applied a little bit of logic and came to the determination that having the code as a file on the Internet was no different from printing it out and then being able to read it back in.
I.e. If OCR is protected, is paper tape/punch cards? If paper tape/punch cards are protect, what about magnetic tape? If magnetic tape is protected speech, what about files stored on magnetic disk or CDs?
In the end the government agreed that it was all protected speech. Computer programs are works of art and can be copyrighted just like any other piece of art. (This article is “a piece of art” in this context.)
Which brings us to the next step in this monstrosity which is gun infringement world.
There is a bill currently before the California legislature which would make the following lines of text not illegal but open to a civil action against somebody outside of California or inside.
If you were to locate 0,0 on the forward take down pin of an AR-15 receiver, those instructions tell a CNC machine to load a 7/64th drill bit, move to a location on the AR-15 receiver, drill a hole there, load a 1/8 reamer and ream the hole that was drilled to size.
For those that aren’t in the know, that’s a small hole just above the selector switch. Number extracted from M4A1 blueprints.
The bill would additionally provide that a civil action may be brought against a person who distributes any code or digital instructions for the manufacture of a firearm using a three-dimensional printer or CNC milling machine. The bill would specify that a person is strictly liable for any personal injury or property damage caused by any firearm manufactured using the distributed code.
This is the game that is currently being played in the legislature and courts, we, the government, aren’t going to throw you in jail for violation of this statue, but we are going to encourage all the people to sue you out of existance.
One of the magic things in this bill is that a CNC machine is only OK if it isn’t “reasonably designed or intended to be used to manufacture or produce a firearm.” I’m sorry but if you have a CNC machine, it doesn’t care if it is an AR15 receiver in the vise or a medical device. This bit of language game sounds good, but any CNC machine they decide was used to work on a firearm would be covered under this bill.
They have also decided that being an FFL isn’t right for them. So now they are requiring state-licenses. Not sure how that works, but I can be pretty sure that the difficulty of getting an FFL to manufacture a firearm from the ATF is much easier than getting a California License to manufacture a firearm. You will still need the FFL, it just isn’t good enough on its own for California.
For purposes of this section, a CNC milling machine or three-dimensional printer has the primary or intended function of manufacturing firearms if the machine or printer is marketed or sold to the public in a manner that advertises that the machine or printer may be used to manufacture firearms, or in a manner that knowingly or recklessly promotes the machine’s use in manufacturing firearms, by individuals who are not California licensed firearms manufacturers, regardless of whether the machine or printer is otherwise described or classified as having other functions or as a general-purpose machine or printer.
This means that if Hass markets a CNC machine as a full capacity CNC machining center, and somebody, not to say Everytown would do this, but somebody who is not Hass then publishes an advertisement for a Jig that works in that Haas to hold AR-15 receivers, this law would turn all such Haas machines into “primary or intended” to make firearms.
Go read this monster, it is only a few pages long. Just another infringer attempting to limit our rights to keep and bear arms.
