Gun Free Zone

B.L.A.B. Bottom Line At Bottom

In 1967 a bad dude was arrested in connection to a rape and kidnapping. He was also charged with robbery where he matched the description.

Appellant was convicted of the crime of kidnapping, Count I; and Rape, Count II; and sentenced to serve from twenty to thirty years on each count, to run concurrently. From the judgment and sentence of the court he appeals. Appellant, hereinafter called defendant, was in another information charged with the crime of robbery. After arraignment in the instant case, on motion of the county attorney, the trial on the robbery case was consolidated with the instant case, but thereafter one day prior to the trial of this case separate trials were granted. Defendant was tried and convicted on the robbery charge, from which he is also appealing in the companion case…

Here is the court’s description of the case:

The facts, as they relate to the defense as charged under Counts I and II in the instant case are as follows: On March 3, 1963, the complaining witness a girl eighteen years of age had been working in the concession stand at the Paramount Theatre in downtown Phoenix, and had taken the bus to 7th Street and Marlette. After getting off the bus, she had started to walk toward her home. She observed a car, which afterwards proved to be defendant’s, which had been parked behind the ballet school on Marlette. The car pulled out of the lot, and came so close to her that she had to jump back to prevent being hit. It then parked across from some apartments in the same block. Defendant then left his car, walked toward her, and grabbed her. He told her not to scream, that he would not hurt her. He held her hands behind her back, put a hand over her mouth, and pulled her toward the car. He put her in the back seat, tied her hands and feet, and put a sharp thing to her neck and said to her “Feel this.” She stated it all happened so suddenly that she did not have time to do anything. Defendant was unknown to the complaining witness. She had not seen him before, and he was not related to her in any way.

He then drove the car for about twenty minutes, during which time complaining witness was lying in the back seat crying. When defendant stopped the car, he came to the back seat, and untied her hands and feet. He told her to pull off her clothes. She said “no,” whereupon he started to remove them. She tried to push away from him, but he proceeded to remove her clothing. And, then, after one unsuccessful attempt, made a successful sexual penetration, while she pushed with her hands and was screaming. She testified:
*22 “I was pushing against him with my hands. I kept screaming, I was trying to get away but he was a lot stronger than I was, and I couldn’t do anything.”

He then drove her to 12th Street and Rose Lane, during which time she dressed. She ran home, and told her family, who called the police. Her sister testified that the complaining witness came home that morning crying and looking as if she had been in a fight. On March 13, 1963, defendant was apprehended by the police. The officers who picked him up both testified that he was put into the “line-up” and was identified by complaining witness. Thereafter he confessed that he had forced complaining witness into his car, drove away with her, and raped her. After these statements he signed a statement, partly typed and partly in his own handwriting, which was substantially to the same effect as the testimony of the officers. Defendant offered no evidence in his defense at the trial of his case.

So there you have it. Open and shut case. Dude stalked this girl, grabbed her off the street, forced her into his car, threatened her with a knife, then raped her. He then drove off with her and later released her.

When the cops arrested him, he confessed. At his trial he offered no evidence in his defense.

He was guilt, the judge knew it, the jury knew it. He was found guilty and sentenced to 20 to 30 years.

At the same time he confessed to the robbery but didn’t sign a written confession. He was found guilty of the robbery as well and sentenced to 20 to 30 years.

The law at work.

This court appointed lawyer, at trial claimed that his client was to ignorant to knew he had rights under the constitution. That he just talked to the cops and then signed his confession. Because he didn’t have his lawyer present, his confession should not be admitted.

The court disagreed and the confession was entered into evidence.

After he was found guilty, he appealed to the Arizona Supreme court.

Defendant contends that admission into evidence of his written confession was error for the reason that he did not have an attorney at the time the statement was made and signed. The police officers Young and Cooley testified to oral statements made to them before the signing of the written confession. Their testimony was substantially the same. They first saw defendant at his home at 2525 West Maricopa on March 13, 1963, when they went there for the purpose of investigating a rape. They took defendant to the police station and placed him in a “line-up” with “four other Mexican males, all approximately the same age and height, build,” and brought in the complaining witness who identified him as the one who had perpetrated the acts against her. Then they immediately interrogated him. They advised him of his rights. They testified that he made the statement of his own free will; and that there were no threats, or use of force and coercion, or promises of immunity; that they had informed him of his legal rights and that any statement he made might be used against him.

Having weighed all of the arguments and evidence, the Arizona Supreme Court affirmed the conviction in the rape case.

Justice is served, a bad dude is in prison for 20-30 years. A raped woman gets to face the animal and help send him to prison.

Unfortunately, this scumbag wasn’t done abusing the court system. He appealed to the Supreme Court of the United States. His claim was that since he didn’t have his lawyer present when he gave his confession that it shouldn’t have been admitted into evidence at trial.

The Supreme Court combined his case with others and in 1966 issued their opinion.

Our holding will be spelled out with some specificity in the pages which follow but briefly stated it is this: the prosecution may not use statements, whether exculpatory or inculpatory, stemming from custodial interrogation of the defendant unless it demonstrates the use of procedural safeguards effective to secure the privilege against self-incrimination. By custodial interrogation, we mean questioning initiated by law enforcement officers after a person has been taken into custody or otherwise deprived of his freedom of action in any significant way. As for the procedural safeguards to be employed, unless other fully effective means are devised to inform accused persons of their right of silence and to assure a continuous opportunity to exercise it, the following measures are required. Prior to any questioning, the person must be warned that he has a right to remain silent, that any statement he does make may be used as evidence against him, and that he has a right to the presence of an attorney, either retained or appointed. The defendant may waive effectuation of these rights, provided the waiver is made voluntarily, knowingly and intelligently. If, however, he indicates in any manner and at any stage of the process that he wishes to consult with an attorney before speaking there can be no questioning. Likewise, if the individual is alone and indicates in any manner that he does not wish to be interrogated, the police may not question him. The mere fact that he may have answered some questions or volunteered some statements on his own does not deprive him of the right to refrain from answering any further inquiries until he has consulted with an attorney and thereafter consents to be questioned.

Bottom Line At Bottom

This is the famous Miranda v. Arizona case. The Supreme court case that lead to “Miranda Warnings”. This is good case law. Unfortunately it meant that Miranda’s conviction was overturned. He was retried with his confession not being admitted into evidence. He as found guilty again and sentenced to 20-30 years. His robbery conviction was not overturned.

A good outcome in the end, both for Case Law and for society by putting this animal away for decades.

State of Arizona v. Ernest Arthur Miranda, 98 Ariz 18(1965) No. 1394

Miranda v. Arizona, 384 US 436 – Supreme Court 1966

He wasn’t just “walking home.” Stand Your ground was never an issue but for Gun Control and the Media.

But they need to lie and lie because they cannot raise funding with the truth.

And that is pretty much what the Gun Control movement is good for now: White Liberals’ version of BLM seeking cash to buy their own mansions paid by the fools that follow them.

-“Mr. Gonzalez, I am prescribing you Hydrocodone for the post-surgery pain. Take one pill every six hours.”
-“Good, I don’t like pain.”
-“Opioids will make you constipated. You may need a stool softener or laxative.”
-“Whut?!?”

I only took 3 pills, and I am now officially off opioid painkillers. Still, it took me 2 days to be back to the wife bitching about me not using enough Fabreeze in the bathroom.

Because relief comes spelled in more than one way. Plus being bloated after having abdominal surgery is not a very smart combination.

And no, I won’t post pictures.

I’ve been working on a project for several months, that is going to turn into a post, hopefully in about a week or so.  I’m looking forward to publishing the final results.

As I gear up for it, I was thinking about other work I have done in this area and wanted to share some of that with you.

I don’t have much in the way of impressive skills.  I’m not an artist or a musician.  I can’t dance.  My writing sucks.

What I am, though, is an extremely good metallurgist.  And a bit of a sick evil fuck.  That makes for an interesting combination.

What I am exceptionally good at is using metallurgy to kill things better.

Once upon a time, I was classified by the DOD as an “enhanced lethality engineer.”  I really wish I had gotten business cards with that printed on them.

Here was the nature of that job.

Let’s say you have a missile system, like the TOW or Javlin.

It exists and has existed for a while.  There are (or were) many in inventory.  Soldiers have been trained on them.  There is an entire production infrastructure that exists to make them.

But they are not as effective as they once were on the newest generation of armored vehicles.

Rather than scrap them, my job was to improve the warhead, so that existing systems could be upgraded to be more effective.

I enhanced the lethality of an existing system, hence, I was an enhanced lethality engineer.

This type of system upgrade happens all the time.  Guidance improvements for accuracy, rocket improvements for range and speed, etc.

I did warheads.

The explosive physics of a shaped charge is not terribly complicated.

There is a cone of metal backed by a charge of explosives.  The explosive detonates.  That sends a shockwave into the back of the cone at a speed of 8,000+ meters per second.  The cone collapses.  As the walls of the cone impact each other, the material at the inner surface of that cone experiences forces in the range of tens and hundreds of gigapascals.  That much pressure causes the metal to undergo shear and act like a liquid.  It literally squirts out of the cone, sort of like how you can shoot a watermelon seed from between your fingertips by squeezing it.

The front of that jet is moving at about 12 kilometers per second.  The back of the jet at about 6 kilometers per second.

The jet takes a short distance to form, which is your optimal standoff distance for the warhead.

Only the inner layer of the cone forms the jet, the rest of the cone becomes a slug and travels behind the jet at about 3 to 4 kilometers per second.

When the fully formed jet hits the target, it erodes it, like a water jet cutter.  When you were a kid, did you ever squirt a hole into the dirt with the jet nozzle on a garden hose?  Same thing.

The penetration of the jet is a function of the length of the jet and the relative densities of the jet and the armor.  If you wondered why some tanks use depleted uranium armor, this is why.  No metal is strong enough to resist impact at velocities of 12 kilometers per second and tens of gigapascals of force, so you just use the densest material you can to limit the depth of jet penetration.

The length of the jet is determined by the diameter and angle of the cone.  The optimal angle for a deep penetrating jet is 42°.  The diameter is limited by the size of the missile.

All you can do is play with the density of the metallic liner.

Typically, the liner is copper.  Copper has a higher density than steel and is very ductile.  The liner material has to be ductile, or the liner will shatter and not form a good jet.

The amount of precision that goes into making shaped charge liners is very high.  Tolerances in the tenths of thousands of an inch.  Little imperfections alter how the jet forms and reduce its penetrating capacity.  Military shaped charge liners are very expensive.

As an aside, the shaped charge liner design for perforating charges in oil and gas is different.  In a military setting, you only get one shot to kill a tank.  If you don’t it will shoot back.  In oil and gas, rocks don’t shoot back.  You use lots of charges to perf a rock so shaped charge liners have to be cheaper to be cost-effective.  Oil and gas love powder metal liners because they are less ductile and the slug breaks up and doesn’t plug the perf hole.

One of the metals that makes better liners is molybdenum.  It’s more dense than copper and forms a jet very well.  The problem is, it doesn’t deep draw easily like copper does, so making liners is harder.

I started out on an additive manufacturing process that created full-density moly liners that had the metallurgical properties to make good jets.  There is a lot of metallurgy, grain size, orientation, etc, that affects jet formation and we wanted to optimize for that.

But then I got to thinking.

We know that only the inner layer of the cone forms a jet and the rest forms a slug.

You need the cone to have a certain thickness, if you try to make it thinner so that only that jet-forming layer is there, it won’t form a jet.  The backing layer of the cone is what drives the jet formation.

The good news is that we know just how thick that jet-forming layer is.

So, what can we do?

I made a bi-metallic liner.

The inner layer was jet-forming molybdenum.

What to make the driving layer from?

How about zirconium?  It bonds well to molybdenum so you don’t get delamination during jet formation.  It can be applied with the same additive manufacturing process as the moly.

Oh yeah, and it’s pyrophoric and burns at a few thousand degrees in air.

When the charge goes off, the bi-metallic cone collapses.  The molybdenum inner layer shears and turns into a jet at 12 kilometers per second and erodes a hole through the armor.  The zirconium slug traveling behind hits the hole made by the moly jet.  The zirconium slug sheers through the hole and comes out the other side having been adiabatically heated to a few hundred degrees.

The hot zirconium exits the hole into the crew compartment of the armored target and ignites, spraying everywhere.

I just punched a hole through the side of your armored vehicle with a hypersonic jet of molten metal and then sprayed your crew, your ammo, and your fuel with 3,000° burning metal with three times the muzzle velocity of a 5.56.

Why?

Because it was fucking fun to design this shit and set it off.

The word engineer means “one who builds engines.”

The word engine, in its origin, meant a siege engine, a machine for breaching fortifications.

Metallurgy is the oldest form of science.  It is what made us take that first step from using the materials we found around us in the Stone Age to making the materials we needed with smelting in the Bronze Age.  All of civilization became possible when we started making metal tools.

I embrace the roots of my field.

I am a metallurgical engineer.

I use my knowledge of metal to build more effective machines for breaching fortifications.

Better killing through metallurgy.

B.L.U.F. If the case at hand is an outlier or the people involved are particularly sympathetic, the case law created in the case isn’t going to be very good.

Consider an EMT with a long history of service to his nation and his community. He finds a woman that he likes and starts a relationship with them. After a short(ish) period of time he discovers that his GF is toxic any many many ways so the tells her to go.

He makes every effort to make that separation as painless as possible. Bending over backwards, loaning her a vehicle, all sorts of things.

After months of separation she gets a bug in her ear and goes psycho ex. She goes to the judge and says that our EMT is stalking her. That she is afraid of him because he is one of those right-wing gun nuts. The judge listens to all of this testimony with nobody to stand up for our EMT.

The judge decides to grant a TRO with the right markers on it. Our EMT just became a prohibited person. Shortly thereafter the cops show up at our EMT’s home and tell him he has to hand over his weapons or dispose of them. Lucky for him he has that sort of friend you call when you need a backhoe and “we’ll never speak of this again” sort of friend.

Friend shows up and EMT sells all his firearms to his friend for a token amount.

Our EMT now enters a long legal battle to get his rights back.

Our EMT has cops and people in the community to testify to his virtue. He has proof he was out of town when psycho-ex claims she saw him, he has documentation that he was helping her get on her feet after the broke up. He has everything he needs to prove his innocence once he gets in front of the judge.

This is a “hard case”. Our EMT is exactly the sort of person that we want. He is a good person. Yet that TRO has striped him of his rights. He files a lawsuit against 18 USC § 922(g)(8) saying that it is unconstitutional when evaluated in regards to Bruen. The court agrees and rules that §922(g)(8) is unconstitutional.

And then the reason why this is bad (case) law. Did the judgement happen because our EMT is a good and virtuous person who was abused by the system? Or did it happen because the law is bad.

No matter what the actual reason, no matter how good the opinion, there will be many people that will question if this is “good case law”.

Now let’s consider a different person. We’ve got a guy that was arrested for shooting at people, he has a TRO on him because he beat the stuffing out of his girl friend and baby maker, he has had multiple run ins with law enforcement yet has never been convicted, he is not a felon.

When the cops arrest him they charge him with all the shooting he did. They find he is in possession of a firearm and that he has as TRO against him, so they stack a firearms charge on top of all the rest.

He files a case to have the firearms charge dropped because 18 USC §922(g)(8) is unconstitutional.

The court finds that §922(g)(8) is unconstitutional. Nobody things they did this because they had any real sympathy for the guy.

He deserves to spend time behind bars. He is a danger to himself and others and he committed multiple crimes.

That doesn’t change the undisputed fact that he is part of “the people” that are protected by our Constitution as amended by the Bill of Rights. The first still applies to him, as does the fourth and fifth. If those rights still apply to him, then so does the much more explicit second amendment “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed”

To quote Clarence Thomas “…Only then may a court conclude that the individual’s conduct falls outside the Second Amendment’s ‘unqualified command.'”. The second amendment is explicit and it issues an unqualified command upon our government.

Hard cases do make bad laws. I don’t like the fact that bad dudes are the center of some of the good 2A opinions that have been coming down.

Not long enough? Ok. I really wanted the quote from Thomas including “…the Second Amendment’s ‘unqualified command.'”.

Regardless of what you think about the person, we have to judge the law based on the rule of law. Our country uses “common law” as its standard.

We have the law as passed by the people through their representatives. Those laws fit within a hierarchy. The top is our Constitution, as amended, at the bottom are the little rules, regulations, policies of your local government.

What those laws mean, how they are interpreted, is determined by the judicial system. Because we use “common law”, the decision in one court affects all other questions that are related. Since our courts are also exist in a hierarchy, we have the Supreme Court Of The United States at the top and all other inferior courts under them. The higher up the hierarchy the court is, the stronger their opinion becomes in case law.

We need good case law in support of the Second Amendment. This means that bad people are going to make Second Amendment claims in their defence. We can still want those bad people to be convicted, but of the bad things they did. We need the case law that comes out of these cases strengthening the courts interpretation of the Second Amendment.

For those that say that we can just have judges issue TRO’s that prohibit possession of firearms, that is not going to fly, long term. Where in the constitution does it say that a Judge can remove your right to free speech, freedom of religion, the right to petition your government, your right to be secure in your person and papers? It isn’t there.

There are very few situations where your rights can be removed.

We want good Case Law.

This is apparently from reboot of a Disney show.

I could go on and on about how wrong this whole thing is, but I’m not going to waste the time.

The one thing I do want to point out is this:

Making the one white girl stand silently and hold up a demeaning sign of her guilt for some crime she never committed.

That picture really reminds me if this:

Racial struggle sessions.

That’s where we’re headed, and they are leading our children to that.

Nope, fuck that noise.

I hope DeSantis turns Disney into a parking lot.

I am known for long rambling written communications. I’m old enough that I was taught to present my facts, my argument first, then once those have been accepted, I present my conclusions, based on those facts and arguments.

This was the standard method for many many years.

Unfortunately this leads to “Burying the lead” where you don’t get to the point of a written communication until you have waded through all the gunk you don’t really care about. Or you lose your audience before you get to your primary point.

In order to combat this, we started using “abstracts”. An abstract is suppose to be a condensed statement of what the communication will communicate. These can be a paragraph or they can be a page. The longer they are, the less useful they become.

Back when secretaries were a thing, it wasn’t uncommon for an executive to ask their secretary for an “executive summary”. The person so charged would read the entire thing and then present a condensed statement of the paper. Sometimes as short as a sentence.

Now consider a military situation. You are the commanding officer, a junior officer from intelligence comes running in, out of breath. They start explaining that they have this indicator, that indicator, this observation, that observation. Finally after 15 minutes of explaining all the facts they say “From this I expect the enemy to be attacking from the north east via the river valley,” pauses to look at his watch, “in about 10 minutes”.

Now consider the B.L.U.F. methodology,”Colonel, we have strong indicators that the enemy will be attacking in about 25-30 minutes from the north east via the river valley.” Before launching into how they reached that conclusion. The Col. might just interrupt them to send out an alert, maybe saving lives.

I was introduced to B.L.U.F. when I was doing work for the DoD. It is not my default methodology. In one of our Friday Feedbacks it was mentioned that it would be nice if there was something at the start that would let them know if they actually wanted to wade through my long posts.

The “cool kids” version of B.L.U.F. is “TL;DR” which means “Too Long; Didn’t Read”. I don’t like that style because it assumes that the person is to lazy to actually read something.

I’ve started writing articles for one of my clients. My articles run 1500 to 3000 words. (yeah, that long). All their other contributors submit articles that run around 500 words. They actually have guidelines that say “At least 500 words”. For me, they ask that I either let them break my article across multiple postings or that I do it for them.

I’ve never sent a single tweet. How can I even form a thought when I’m limited to 140 characters?

So you get BLUF now when I remember, which is most of the time.