Month: May 2024

I don’t celebrate birthdays.

Not mine and anybody else’s. A quirk I have with my own strange reasons.

But I do at least acknowledge my second birthday and thus announce I am 45 years old today.

 

I had never worn a seat belt till that day. Drunk driver t-boned himself into my car. He spent 9 months in a hospital, at least two in a coma.

I and a friend walked away with seat belt bruises only.

Let’s say that my hate for drunk drivers has not diminished one iota.

I do keep grudges.

PS: It was Mother’s Day to boot.

It has to be a cult-like mentality.

I am old enough to remember I was already old when you could buy one for $69 and then the outrage when they jumped to $99.

This particular company got a shipment of them and apparently sold them all at that price.

You can get a Savage Axis in .308 for a hundred buck less and it is a superior rifle in all accounts.

I just don’t get the fascination that would push anybody to shell that much money on a crappy rifle.

Duncan v. Bonta, VanDyke dissenting

The following is the dissent of Judge VanDyke in <i>Duncan v. Bonta.  It is not a legal argument.  He leaves that for his fellow judge, Judge Bumatay.

Judge VanDyke and Judge Bumatay are two of the voices of sanity coming out of the Ninth Circuit court.

This dissent is a justifiable take-down of the actions of the Ninth Circuit court since, well, the 1960s. It was written before Bruen.  The observations about the Ninth Circuit continue to be true today, post Bruen.

When this case was GVR from the Supreme Court, the Ninth Circuit punted it back to Judge Benitez, at the district level, I expected a quick response.  It was not quick.

Today, while thinking about it, I believe that Judge Benitez was actually playing a waiting game before issuing his ruling.

Everybody knew that the state was going to appeal Judge Benitez’s ruling.  The Ninth Circuit’s administrative panel was likely, no highly likely, to grant a stay.  We all knew this.

But, and this is a huge but, the case would then be assigned to the merits panel.  It is my belief that Judge Benitez was waiting for a favorable merits panel before issuing his opinion.

This is why the Ninth Circus began its razzle-dazzle tap dance, claiming the case was a “come back” to be assigned to the same en banc panel that had ruled against The People originally.

If they had not been able to take it to the en banc panel, we would have had another favorable ruling from a merits panel in the Ninth Circuit.

This is pretty easy reading.  There are a few citations, but it is not overly heavy on them.  The language is written for The People and not for lawyers.

Enjoy.


I largely agree with Judge Bumatay’s excellent dissent. And to paraphrase James Madison, if judges were angels, nothing further would need be said. But unfortunately, however else it might be described, our court’s Second Amendment jurisprudence can hardly be labeled angelic. Possessed maybe—by a single-minded focus on ensuring that any panel opinions actually enforcing the Second Amendment are quickly reversed. The majority of our court distrusts gun owners and thinks the Second Amendment is a vestigial organ of their living constitution. Those views drive this circuit’s caselaw ignoring the original meaning of the Second Amendment and fully exploiting the discretion inherent in the Supreme Court’s cases to make certain that no government regulation ever fails our laughably “heightened” Second Amendment scrutiny.

This case is par for the course. The majority emphasizes the statistical rarity of law-abiding citizens’ need to fire more than an average of 2.2 shots in self-defense, but glosses over the statistical rarity of the harm that California points to as supporting its magazine ban. Instead of requiring the government to make an actual heightened showing, it heavily weighs the government’s claim that guns holding more than 10 rounds are “dangerous” (of course they are—all guns are) against a self-defense interest that the majority discounts to effectively nothing. Once again, our court flouts the Supreme Court’s exhortation against such “a freestanding ‘interest-balancing’ approach” to the Second
Amendment. District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570, 634 (2008).

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“We need to be more like Europe!”

No, we do not.

 

This is why you need at least a 12 pounder Napoleon loaded with grape shot.