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.

In the United States District Court for the Western District of Oklahoma a District judge has ruled that 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(3) is unconstitutional. If you read A strike against the GCA of 1968 as amended – UPDATED you can read all of § 922(g).

In CR-22-00328-PRW United States of America v. Jared Michael Harrison the district court granted Harrison’s motion to dismiss his indictment.

On May 20, 2022, Harrison was pulled over by an officer of the Lawton Police Department for failing to stop at a red light. When Harrison rolled down his window to speak to the officer, the officer smelled marijuana and questioned Harrison about the source of the smell. Harrison told the officer that he was on his way to work at a medical marijuana dispensary, but that he did not have a state-issued medical-marijuana card.

Harrison is also “known to law enforcement”. At the time of his arrest he was on probation from Texas for aggravated assault.

Because he was wearing an ankle monitor, the cops search the car, found marijuana and “loaded revolver on the driver’s side floorboard”.

The cops arrested him for the pot. About 2 months later a federal grand jury returned an indictment charging Harrison of being in possession of a firearm “with the knowledge that he was an unlawful user of marijuana”.

This indictment came post Bruen which means that any good lawyer facing a weapons charge is going to be looking at the second amendment as a defense.

The defense through “unconstitutionally vague”, “violation of Due Process”, and infringement of his right to possess a firearm, contrary to the guarantee of the second amendment.

The argument of the government was that the second amendment doesn’t apply to Harrison because he is not “a law-abiding citizen” and is “unvirtuous”.

When we look at these cases, we need to pay attention to the how of the government’s argument on why they should be allowed to infringe. For years it was “you aren’t part of the militia, the second amendment doesn’t apply to you.” After Heller it was means-end balancing which said that while the law was infringing, the law was narrowly tailored and in support of a good goal.

Post Bruen the government has been arguing that limiting locations isn’t an actual infringement, that certain weapons are to dangerous to allow the people to possess, that requiring “good moral character” is not an infringement.

In defense of §922(g) they are now arguing that they don’t have to follow Bruen and defend the law on the basis of Text, History and Tradition because this class of person is not part of “The People” because they are not virtuous.

If this argument were to prevail, you can bet that we will see more and more laws passed requiring people to prove they are virtuous and of the different levels of the government passing laws defining actions, traits, or opinions as proof that someone is “unvirtuous”. All of which is bad.

Oh, interesting side note, the GCA of 1968 prohibited a prohibited person from receiving a firearm. In other words, an FFL couldn’t sell to a prohibited person nor could you transfer a firearm to somebody that you knew to be a prohibited person. If that person already possessed firearms, they could continue to possess those firearms.

It was only when § 922(g) was amended in 1986 was the GCA changed to prohibit the possession of a firearm by a prohibited person.

It is pretty clear from this sort of verbiage that in 1968 congress knew that trying to ban somebody from possessing a firearm would be found unconstitutional. Instead they used the interstate commerce clause to justify banning the transfer of firearms to a prohibited person.

On this point, the United States points to Bruen’s description of the plaintiffs in that case as “ordinary, law-abiding, and adult citizens.” Bruen, 142 S. Ct. at 2134. But that description can’t be read as breaking new ground with respect to who make up “the people” protected by the Second Amendment. First, Bruen noted that it was undisputed that the plaintiffs in that case were part of the people protected by the Second Amendment, so at best, the United States is relying on dicta. But even so, the United States is reading too much into the dicta because immediately after describing the plaintiffs, the Bruen Court cited Heller’s holding that “the people” includes “all members of the political community,” not just “an unspecified subset.” Id. (citing Heller, 554 U.S. at 580). Thus, this reference in dicta to “law-abiding citizens” cannot possibly be read as overturning the very holding upon which it relies. See Denezpi v. United States, 142 S. Ct. 1838, 1847–48 (2022) (explaining that stray statements “[r]ead in isolation …. cannot overcome the holdings of our cases, not to mention the text of the Clause”).

This footnote (20) in the opinion is devastating to the gun grabbers normal attack vectors. Historically the gun grabbers have latched onto stray language within an opinion and made that the linchpin of their method of attacking.

In the absence of any evidence tending to show that possession or use of a “shotgun having a barrel of less than eighteen inches in length” at this time has some reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia, we cannot say that the Second Amendment guarantees the right to keep and bear such an instrument. Certainly it is not within judicial notice that this weapon is any part of the ordinary military equipment or that its use could contribute to the common defense.
— United States v. Miller, 307 US 174 – Supreme Court 1939

In this paragraph the court states that the short barreled shotgun had no reasonable relationship to a “well regulated militia”. The gun grabbers used that “stray language” to argue, successfully, that the court actually meant that the entire second amendment only applied to a well regulated militia.

The gun grabbers still make this argument, IIRC, The Hill had an article claiming that the supreme court ignored those three words, “well regulated militia” when they gave their Bruen decision.

This opinion talks about how the first, fourth, and fifth amendment all apply to “the people” and not to just those that are law-abiding.

Prosecutor: Didn’t you kill your wife?
Defendant, on the stand: I take the fifth.
Prosecutor: You are not law-abiding, the fifth doesn’t apply to you!

In this particular case, it feels like the government hung their entire argument on flipping the tables and making Harrison outside of the class of people covered by the second amendment. Because this was their argument and because there really isn’t any historical tradition of banning the possession of firearms by people that were unvirtuous, the government failed as soon as this district court said “the people means all the people.”

Historically we know that drunkards and ne’er do wells were often armed.

The government did give seven different laws that they felt were representative of §922(g)(3). One from 1655 (misses target date by 136 years), and six from 1868-1899, which misses in the other direction by 70 to 100 years. And the Supreme Court specifically stated that laws from the postantiballum time frame could only be used to affirm restrictions from the 1790 period.

Where the seven laws the United States identifies took a scalpel to the right of armed self-defense—narrowly carving out exceptions but leaving most of the right in place—§ 922(g)(3) takes a sledgehammer to the right. Recall that § 922(g)(3) imposes the most severe burden possible: a total prohibition on possessing any firearm, in any place, for any use, in any circumstance—regardless of whether the person is actually intoxicated or under the influence of a controlled substance. It is a complete deprivation of the core right to possess a firearm for self-defense, turning entirely on the fact that an individual is a user of marijuana. Section 922(g)(3)’s “burden on the right of armed self-defense” is thus not “comparable” to the seven historical intoxication laws.

There are so many more great quotes in this opinion, it is worth reading just for the chuckles.

Paraphrase: When the government was asked if the congress could make mowing your lawn a felony and then make all of the new felons prohibited persons, the government responded “yes” Why? Because courts must defer to a legislature’s judgements about what is and is not a felony…

…It’s as if Bruen’s command regarding the inappropriateness of such deference to legislative judgments has been lost in translation. In a sense, one must applaud the United States for its steadfast commitment to its legal position. But “giv[ing] legislatures unreviewable power to manipulate the Second Amendment by choosing a label” is inconsistent with the entire point of constitutionalizing a fundamental right in the first place: to restrain a legislature’s ability to infringe that right through legislation. What would remain of the Second Amendment if the Court were to accept the United States’ view that a legislature could prohibit the exercise of the right it protects simply by declaring anything or everything a felony? Nothing. Maybe that is what the federal government desires, but it is hardly what the Constitution requires.

The government is going to have to decide if they want to appeal this case. Right now this is just a district court’s opinion. It has no official sway in other cases. Other courts in the Tenth Circuit might quote this judge in the future but it does not have the same gravatas as if a Circuit Court had issued the opinion.

The government might just take the loss and move on. It looks like Harrison is going to be jammed up for a bunch of other reasons even without the gun charge.

If the government does decide to appeal, we might find another Circuit court ruling that parts of §922(g) is unconstitutional.

If enough of §922(g) is found unconstitutional this might be the death neal of “background checks.” Or maybe just 4473s. You want to buy a firearm? Hand your official ID over to the FFL, they call it in and ask “Are they prohibited?” No record keeping no muss, no fuss.

We live in exciting times.

A bunch of long guns was found in a dumpster in Oklahoma. Here is the description according to Insider.com and don’t miss the title of the article.

According to court filings first reported by CourtWatch, on January 19, 2023, an Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, sanitation worker stumbled upon a dumpster with 236 rifles and 12 shotguns in it. The shocking finding led him to call authorities, who found many of the guns were functional, the filings stated.

Feds Discovered Dumpster With 250 Rifles and Shotguns in Oklahoma (insider.com)

But in page 8 of the court filings that they link to, you will read what authorities found.

In total, agents and officers found 236 Radikal Arms, model NK-1, 12-gauge shotguns inside the
dumpster

gov.uscourts.okwd.120827.1.0.pdf (courtlistener.com)

I will admit to you I had never heard of this particular firearm, but it took me the 5 seconds to access and search in Google to find it.

We went from 236 bullpup shotguns in 12 gauge to 236 rifles and 12 shotguns.

The other explanation would be malice: Trying to scare people and get more clicks by calling them rifles since they look like the mythical assault weapons they hate so much and have been killing innocent Americans since the foundation of Rome.

Take your pick.

Hat Tip @assaultclip

You can call Jews Nazis and say Israel is an apartheid state, but they won’t let you call Palestinians terrorists.

That’s just too hateful for Twitter.

Miguel is a friend.

The kind of friend that if he calls in the wee hours of the morning telling me that he needs help and a bag of lye, I’m on my way no questions asked.

He told AWA and I he was having hernia surgery earlier in the week.

I’m surprised he did post about it beforehand, he usually does when he’s going through stuff like that.

When he texted us that he was in recovery, I sent him a screenshot of the draft post I made.  He laughed.

That’s when I knew it was okay to post it.  I wasn’t going to until I knew he was safe in recovery and in good spirits.

There is an episode of MASH called Tea and Empathy, in which a British officer enters the recovery tent and starts yelling at his soldiers for being lazy.  Hawkeye throws him out.  Later the officer returns and Hawkeye confronts him.

The officer says that only a madman would yell at greviously wounded soldiers and his men know he’s not a madman. So in his own way he was telling his men that they would be alright.

There are two other articles you should read.

Women are not capable of understanding ‘GoodFellas’

And

The Art And Joy Of Busting Someone’s Balls

I’ll also reference you to all of the Friars Club roasts.

When we are all assured that Miguel was going to be okay, a little gentle ball-busting was warranted.  Especially since he had inguinal hernia surgery, I had to be gentle with his balls (zee, another joke).

Nothing malicious.

Just a guy friend doing what guy friends do.

The male version of watching The Notebook with a quart of Ben &Jerry’s.

Perhaps this doesn’t translate as well in written form as it does verbally, but know this fir what it is.

And if it makes you feel any better, this is the get well present I got for Miguel.