Today, this song would never get air play. Yes, the south lost. That didn’t mean that the army was dishonorable, nor did it mean the people were.

President Lincoln, famously said:

Later, after the surrender, he stated I have always thought ‘Dixie’ one of the best tunes I have ever heard. Our adversaries over the way attempted to appropriate it, but I insisted yesterday that we fairly captured it. It is good to show the rebels that, with us, they will be free to hear it again.

There are so many things that are now labeled “racist” because somebody is offended.

Some things change because they should. Some things are removed from history, to allow the past to repeat itself.

Translation, since Bruen said that the government must demonstrate that the regulation is consistent with this Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulations —New York State Rifle & Pistol Assn., Inc. V. Bruen, 142 S.Ct. 2111 (U.S. 2022) that there must be some regulations from that time that would be acceptable under Bruen

This argument has been made many times. “If Bruen means what Bruen says, there are no modern infringements that would stand. Since the Supreme Court presumed that some infringements are constitutional, or that they were not addressing questions regarding those other infringements, then Bruen can’t mean what it says.”

“No true scotsman…”

I recently picked up 8.75 inches of 5.5 DuraBar, a type of cast iron. This is to become the backplate for a lathe chuck.

Friday afternoon, I started work on the backplate.

Since I repaired me horizontal bandsaw, cutting 2.75 inches off the bar was trivial. While the saw was working its way through those 5.5+ inches, I turned the jaws around on the chuck and got ready.

My saw did an outstanding job. It was time to start working on the blank.

The first operation was to face the raw end. The raw end had a sticker on it and was too rough to think about. It had around 0.25 of variation.

Since this is an interrupted cut, it requires light cuts until we are cutting almost completely. I was taking 0.050 cuts at the end. About an hour to get the first face done.

Normally, you would flip the piece and face the other side so that the two faces are parallel to each other. Since the purpose of this job is to end up with one face perpendicular to the spindle, that was not required.

The next operation was to poke a hole through the center of the disk. I did that in three steps, spot drilling, 3/8in starter drill, then a 7/8in taper shank drill.

I then bored the hole out to 1.125inches. Perfect.

The next step was to turn down the face to create a 0.625 boss with a 0.25in radius. Doing that operation was time-consuming, but I got it done. It looked great. That huge corner radius made it work.

My only issue was that my 0.5″ button toolholder needs to be kicked out. I didn’t notice at first, which required some adjustments. All the final passes were free-handed.

That was the end of Friday’s progress. I would have done more, but I couldn’t find my large, 18″ adjustable wrench to get the chuck off.

Saturday started with getting the chuck off. I found a tool that I could use, a couple of light taps with a dead blow hammer and the chuck came loose. It is still held on by at least an inch of thread engagement.

You would rather not drop the chuck on your ways, it would damage them. I use a piece of 3/4in plywood. I then started unscrewing the chuck.

I was using my left hand to support the chuck.

I stupided.

You can’t tell from that image, but my ring finger is the color of a purple grape. It is swollen by about 30%. It is no longer painful after taking meds.

Oh, did you suspect that I’m a touch typist? I use that finger often to type characters on the left of the keyboard.

Regardless, that stupid is even more stupid as I was contemplating making a cradle for the chuck, as Joe Pie suggested in one of his tips videos a few months ago.

I didn’t. I am suffering the consequences of my stupid.

After I had my “oops” I continued with my measurements. Turns out that a Craigslist purchase a couple of years ago has paid off again. I have not only my personally purchase’s 0-1″ micrometer, but that purchase came with 0-1″, 1-2″, 2-3″, 3-4″, 4-5″, and 5-6″. I’m happy to have found them again.

Once I have my measurements, I put the chuck back on the spindle and go to work boring to minor ID for 1 7/8×8 threads.

I hit my mark at 1.753 instead of my target of 1.750. Still within the specifications for 1 7/8×8.

Because I was set up to do the boring, I then bored to 1.887 0.250 deep. This is the most critical operation. The spindle has a registration boss at its base. This pocket needs to fit snugly on that boss. The better the fit, the more repeatable returning the chuck to the lathe will be.

I hit 1.8875. That’s spectacular for me. All is going well.

After lunch, I came back out and made that cradle. It took 15 minutes on the band saw.

That’s ready for the next time I need to pull the chuck.

I then cleaned up the lathe, cast iron chips had gone everywhere. Yes, I wear good protective eye wear.

The next operation is to single point the thread. This requires me to rotate the cross slide from 29 degrees to 119 degrees. This was done. I then indicated my tool post square.

It was time to cut threads.

This is where stupid number two comes in.

Normally, I use a dial indicator when cutting to depth. Because I wanted accurate locations, I used my micrometer stop.

That works for most things, but isn’t as accurate as using the micrometer stop. Nor is it as easy.

I had been using the micrometer stop for the boring operations. I now moved it out of the way to use the dial indicator.

And it doesn’t fit with the micrometer stop in its parking location.

So this is where error number two comes into play. I think I have a “regular” boring bar with a high-speed toolholder at the end. If I had bothered to find this and if I had bothered to grind a tool for grooving, I would have cut a relief groove inside that bore.

When you are cutting a thread on a lathe, the tool moves to the left in sync with the rotation of the spindle. At 8 threads per inch, the tool is moving at around 0.5 inches per second. I need to stop the forward motion at exactly the right spot. If I do not, then “bad things” will happen.

If I had that relief groove, I have more of a landing spot.

Using the dial indicator, if I over shoot, nothing bad happens. With the micrometer stop bad things can happen.

And bad things did happen. I missed.

Once I had everything straightened back out, I tried to recover.

No luck with that. I didn’t notice, but that crash rotated the cross slide, it rotated the tool post, it pulled the tool out of the toolholder. Yeah, everything was wrong. The good news is that nothing broke.

I’m cutting threads at the back of the hole, but I can’t seem to get things to work at the front. Nothing is working.

The tool post looks wonky. I slap a wrench on it and prepare to square it up again. As I start to loosen the nut, the entire cross slide rotates. That explains everything! I get the cross slide back in place and try again.

Nothing is working as expected. I can’t pick up the threads. I can’t seem to cut. It is just weird.

Looking hard at the boring bar, I decide to check to see if it is still square to the toolholder. It isn’t. That fixes it all, right?

Nope, the tool post is still twisted.

In the end, I get everything straightened out. I try to pick up the threads. At which point I realize that I’ve chewed the treats to shit.

The part is junked. I’ll be boring out the mess I made in the center, then that chuck of cast iron goes into the scrap bucket, and I’ll start all over again.

At the time I scrapped this part, I had about 6 hours of labor into it. I’m slow. I had turned around 4 pounds of cast iron into chips of the original 16 pounds.

Regardless, I had fun making chips.

No. Simply no.

I give you Judge Easterbrook, Judge Wood of the Seventh Circuit court, who looked at the Heller and decided it didn’t apply to the states. That was their “honest” understanding of the Constitution. Since the Second Amendment didn’t apply to the states, only state constitutions could be used to defend the rights of “the [little] people”.

I give you Judges Jacobs, Lynch, and Lee for the Second Circuit court, who looked at Bruen and Heller and decided that 3 regulations from 1837 and 1843 (past the founding era) excluding people with intellectual disabilities, mental illnesses, and alcohol additions from militia service plus some unknown regulations restricting firearms in schoolrooms met the requirements of this Nation’s historical tradition of firearms regulations.

They reasoned that since alcoholics, mentally defectives were banned from Militia’s, not from keeping and bearing arms, that justified modern infringements on people who are neither alcoholics nor mentally defective.

I give you Judges Kayatta, Selya, and Gelpi. Who, using Bruen and Heller, found that even if the presumed that LCMs and “assault weapons” are arms (but they don’t know for sure), found that they are not in common use for self-defense. Thus, they are not protected.

But, you say, these are those nasty circuit courts coming up with these horrible opinions. But it isn’t just the circuits. It is happening in anti-gun courts everywhere.

Look at the fact that of the half dozen or so cases that were combined for the Seventh Circuit to hear, only one was in our favor. The courts in all other cases found that PICA was constitutional. Out in Oregon, we see the same thing. The district courts are finding the state’s infringements constitutional.

We are a land of common law. That means that the law means the same thing for everybody everywhere in the country.

When it is not, a superior court will bring it into agreement.

Continuing from our last article, Cases are won and lost before they are heard, we look at —No. 126. Ronald Koons v. Attorney General New Jersey, No. 23-1900, slip op. at 12–13 (3d Cir.).

The state wants discovery. They put the plaintiff’s (good guys) reasoning as:

The plaintiffs are correct. No discovery is required. Are the plaintiffs part of The People? Do they wish to keep or bear an arm? If the answers are both yes, the plaintiffs’ burden is met. The burden then shifts to the state to demonstrate that the regulation is consistent with this Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.Missing citations for 75DAVPP7

Not only was Bruen resolved solely on the pleadings, so were Heller, McDonald and Caetano. I’m not sure about Stables.

When the question is purely of law, there is no need for experts. The experts are the courts. The parties bring forth their arguments via pleadings. The court reads the pleadings, listens to the arguments, evaluates case law, and then issues their opinion.

“Expert testimony” is expressly forbidden to give legal opinions. If there are legal arguments, the parties must present them, as their own experts.

In one of the Ninth Circuit cases, the state is arguing that certain expert testimony is actually opinions of law and must be discarded.

Even if the state was arguing about “The People” or “arm”, there are no experts involved.

The state offers a powerful argument. Surely, overpowering the weak argument of the plaintiffs, who relied on Supreme Court opinions and holdings. The state tells the court that other district courts allowed expert testimony and discovery.

This is as bad as the Seventh rejecting arguments for The People because courts inferior to them had ruled against The People.

Ignoring the courts that found for The People.

This discovery process can be very intrusive and expensive.

The reality of this is that the discovery process will add 5 months to this litigation.

When I was nerding, I was complaining about the amount of effort I was going through to just display a line of text with proper word wrapping. I introduce you to, QTextLayout which does exactly that. I’m in the process of debugging the newly re-written code.

3 steps forward, two steps back. Regardless, I feel better about it.

On the other hand, I started reading the transcript of Delaware State Sportsmens Association Inc v. Delaware Department of Safety and Homeland Security, 23-1633, (3rd Cir. Mar 25, 2024) ECF No. 118. My blood pressure went up. I’ll be reading the rest of it and presenting some feedback. Suffice to say, the judges in the case asked questions that indicate that they have reading comprehension issues.

The left is busy screaming that Justice Thomas has no business hearing a case regarding the persecution of the J6 victims because his wife was “participating in the insurrection.”

Isn’t it amazing how the most heavily armed group of people in the world, showed up for the insurrection and forgot to bring their guns?

The number of J6 victims that were persecuted for having scary looking tactical gear and med kits is not surprising.

Note, I do have far too many spelling errors. “Prosecution” and “persecution” are two different words.

We are also watching the trial of Trump. If I wasn’t already sick from what they were doing to the J6 victims, I would have more sympathy for what they are doing to him.

This weekend will be “fun”. I’m going to be making a backing plate for a lathe chuck. I picked up a “chunk-o-iron” this week. 5.5in in diameter, 8.76 inches long. I should be able to get at least 3 backplates out of that. The cost of one backplate, if they made one to fit my lathe, would cost more than twice the cost of the raw stock.

This will be an adjust true collet chuck. When I’m done, it should be able to maintain 0.0002″ TIR. That is beautiful.

There are three primary types of lathe chucks. There is an “independent” chuck, a “self-centering” chuck, and then collet chucks.

The chuck is attached to a backplate which mounts on the spindle of your lathe. You machine the face of the backplate in place on your chuck. The better you do, the better your check will be centered.

When using a self-centering chuck or a collet chuck, you are stacking total indicated run out, TIR. The backplate will have some run out. By doing the final machining in place, you can reduce that greatly. You leave a boss on the face and that fits into a recess in the back of the chuck.

If that fit is very close, there is very little movement that can be done to cause run out. But there might be some.

When using an independent jaw, each jaw moves independently. Normally, that would be a four jaw chuck. By carefully measuring the run out, you can determine which jaw is the furthest from the center. You can tighten that jaw and the work will move closer to the center.

If the jaws are already tight, you can loosen the jaw on the opposite side slightly. Using this method, you can easily get your work running true (no run out) to within 0.0005.

The magic of an “adjust true” chuck is that it combines a self centering chuck or a collet chuck with an independent type of adjustment.

You put the backplate with chuck onto the spindle. You put a known quality pin in the chuck. You can now shift the front part of the chuck independently to get that very low TIR.

Using a collet chuck, you can take the work out of the chuck, do something to it, put it back in the collet. It will have the same run out as it had before.

This allows me to do some things more easily.

I’m glad you all got to laugh at my misfortune of losing some of my music. The magic of streaming music has introduced me to 1000s of songs I would never have heard otherwise.

What artist or song from your past have you listened to recently and said, “that’s horrible?” For me, it was Olivia Newton John’s “Physical”. I thought I would enjoy that blast from the past, I didn’t.

What artist or song have you discovered today that you would not have enjoyed in the past? For me, it is all the old time swing bands and Frank Sinatra.

The comments are open.

Back in January 2024, Judge Suddaby slapped New York State around. At issue was a requirement that people who were living in public subsidized housing were required to enter into a contract that forbid firearms on housing grounds.

The contract was a complete ban on keeping or bearing arms within the housing properties.

Because Judge Suddaby’s court is inferior to the Second Circuit court, he is required to follow their opinions. This is a true mess because of the Second Circuit’s laughable opinion in Antonyuk II.

Bluntly, the Second Circuit court is not acting in a serious manner. They are making a joke out of your rights and mine. They would rather play word games in direct rebuttal of the clear guidance from the Supreme Court, their superiors.

When the Second Amendment’s plain text covers an individual’s conduct, the Constitution presumptively protects that conduct.

Is the individual a member of The People? Yes. Do they wish to keep or bear arms? Yes. Then the plain text of the Second Amendment clearly covers the conduct.

The plaintiffs, having met their burden, need only refute the state when the state presents regulation that is consistent with this Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.

In short, the state has the burden to prove that historical tradition of firearm regulation.

The state may not simply posit what the founding fathers could have done, they have to show what the founding fathers actually did. It has to be a regulation. That regulation must be a part of our Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.

The Second Circuit got it wrong. Even the state doesn’t like citing the hot mess of the Second’s opinion.

Regardless, the Second Circuit got it right when they said Reasoning from historical silence is thus risky. Which they then proceeded to do. They claim that they know that legislatures would have created regulations that match the current infringements if the legislatures had found a need. So obviously, this is an acceptable infringement, today.

That doesn’t seem to match government must demonstrate that the regulation is consistent with this Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.

This is the baggage that Judge Suddaby is laboring under.

Even so, he granted the plaintiffs (good guys) motion for a TRO and preliminary injunction against the state.

When the court writes:

It doesn’t matter whether those words are from the plaintiff or from the court. The court is outright saying that the behavior of the defense (state/bad guys) is appalling.

This case is still in an interlocutory state. There are things that have to happen first. Which is where the title of this article comes from.

At the start of a case, there are several motions filed asking the court to do things. There are motions for temporary restraining order, motions to dismiss, motions for preliminary injunctions, motions for summary judgment and a host of other motions/requests.

One of the things that happens during this process is discovery. This is when the parties ask questions of each other and request documents. This is also the time in which different people are disposed.

If a party refuses to provide answers or documents, they must have a reason. If that reason isn’t satisfactory, the parties take it to the court for resolution.

The questions asked, and the documents requested, are often revealing. Just as revealing are the questions that are not answered and the documents which are not produced.

Some questions and documents are known to be off limits. The scope of those limits changes over the course of the case. The scope changes when the parties bring certain facts into the court.

In this case, the state is arguing that public need allows them to ban arms in public housing. The plaintiffs argue that they need arms because dangerous people live in the housing units. The state countered that the plaintiffs don’t know that there are dangerous people in the housing units.

This opens the door for certain inquiries.

The state is refusing to answer these requests. They claim that it would violate tenant privacy. The plaintiffs argue that the state opened themselves to these production requests because they claimed that the plaintiffs didn’t need arms to protect themselves.

This little battle, behind the scenes, goes on for many cases. How the judge rules will change how the parties advance.

An important thing to note, is that some suits have no expectation of winning the suit. The goal of the suit is to do discovery. To get behind closed doors.

The questions about permits by CHA employees suggests an attack vector. Why are you denying the plaintiffs arms when your employees have arms? Can you provide protection if none of your security team are armed? How many dangerous people live in the CHA?

All in all, it is an interesting game to observe.

Oh, none of this discovery is needed under Heller as affirmed by Bruen. Does the Second Amendment’s plain text cover the individuals’ conduct? If so, the state bears the burden of demonstrating that their modern infringement is consistent with this Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.

There is no need for discovery outside of: “do you want to keep or bear arms?”, “Are you part of The People?” If both of those questions are answered in the affirmative, then the burden is upon the state to prove that the modern infringement is consistent.