I am old enough that I started school before the Federal Department of Education came into existence. My father was in the U.S. Navy. We traveled around the country as he was posted to different bases.

Sometimes those locations were in “The South” and sometimes they were in The North.

I am an American, first, last and always.

Years ago, in a motorcycle group I belonged to, I made a statement about the Civil War. One of the respected members replied with a question, “How many slaves did Lincoln free?”

The answer is surprising to most. Lincoln freed zero slaves. His proclamation only applied to the states that were in revolt. It did not apply to the states that remained a part of the Union.

This gentleman taught me to look a bit deeper at the history.

That is why I sometime choose to use terms I learned in school. At the time, my teachers taught both sides. Later I learned still more, yet my teachers still treated the south with respect.

If you took offense at my choice in terms in today’s tunes, please ask yourself “Why?” and if you have a good answer as to why I was out of line, feel free to let me know.

There were a few big wins in the 2A world this week. We have a case out of Western Virginia, a class action suit, which found that all members of the class of 18,19, and 20-year-olds are allowed to purchase handguns, at a federal level.

This is a district court ruling, and the Judge made it a nationwide injunction. It doesn’t apply to two districts that are also hearing 18,19, and 20 year-olds are part of The People.

We had the District of Columbia surrender and agree to pay millions of dollars in a class action suit for denial of civil rights regarding handgun possession in the District.

The Feds are making pretzel makers look linear as they argue for that The People didn’t include this group or that group at the founding, based on racist laws. Their argument’s would be perfectly reasonable to deny Second Amendment protect rights to people of color.

In other words, the arguments they are making could just as easily be made to justify new racist regulations.

We had an outage earlier this week. We did lose some data. I lost all of my citations and WordFence tables.

Fortunately, those are trivial to rebuild, which we have.

There will be some downtime coming up as I move a boatload of data around. I’ll try to keep it to a minimum.

Meanwhile, the comments are open. Please let us know what you are thinking about, what you are interested in, what you’ve heard around the water cooler that might be of interest to us all.

It has been a good week overall. We got some great news out of a local court in Massachusetts regarding honoring out of state permits to carry.

It is really great news. About a half dozen of the people I watch have talked about it as well as J.Kb.

One point, it is an “as applied” ruling. In any court opinion, the court can rule on how something applies to the plaintiff/defendant OR they can rule on the law. In this case, the court ruled that their finding only applied to the defendant.

This means that if J.Kb were to travel to Mordor and was investigated by the authorities and found to be carrying under his New Hampshire license, he would have to go through the same type of trial. Until the Massachusetts courts knock down the law, this will be the case.

It is still wonderful news.

The Rahimi case is getting attention in all the usual places. You’ll be hearing more about it as it will be the next big Second Amendment case heard by the Supreme Court.

Sometime in the next month or so, the good guys will have to have all of their briefs in. That will be easier reading. In looking at all of this, I might actually attempt to write a brief for the case… I am not sure how that will go.

The comments are open, feel free to be commenters.

Form 4473 is the federal background check paperwork and firearm registration form used by the ATF to make sure you are not a prohibited person and to create a registry. This came into existence in 1993 with the passage of the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act. —Text - H.R.1025 - 103rd Congress (1993-1994): Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, 18 U.S.C. § 921 (U.S. 1993)

Correction: Form 4473 came into existence with the GCA of 1968. Which is what my muddled brain remembered. The NICS came into existence with the passage of the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act of 1993. My apologies

Out in California, they are currently litigating the background check requirement for the purchase of ammunition.

Something interesting hit me as I was talking about yesterday’s article with my wife. If placing a burden on the purchase of ammunition is conduct protected by the Second Amendment, and there were no regulations for background checks until 1993, does that mean there is no history or tradition of background checks?

With multiple cases moving towards the Supreme Court or all ready there challenging parts of §922(g), will we see §921 fall as well?

4473s are a small rape as compared to states being designated sensitive places and requiring The People to prove they are law-abiding, responsible citizens before being granted permission to exercise the right to keep and bear arms.

I can’t see 2A groups pushing an attack on §921. It is a fascinating thought experiment.

What current laws or regulations in your state would you like to see challenged?

Miguel’s post about harping on health really hit me. I’m struggling.

Two years ago, I was around 330. Today I’m hovering around 292. During the week, I lose weight. On the weekend, I gain it all back. I have to make the conscious decision to not eat bad things on the weekend. It is difficult, but I need to do it.

On the good side of things, my skin doesn’t fit as well as it use to. While my weight isn’t going down, my health is getting better. I do at least 30 minutes of spin, 5 days a week. This has made it much more likely for me to get up and move.

If you can, make a commitment to doing just a bit of exercise, every day. We need you healthy!

Software moves forward. I need to do an update to GFZ’s infrastructure, but haven’t yet.

Meanwhile, the comments are open, please let us know what you are thinking about and what you want to hear about.

I finished moving a new client onto our servers yesterday. They had been cracked and abused. Thank you to Miguel for that client.

On different fronts, I’m fighting with PyQt6. For whatever reason, the QMediaPlayer will not reliably play an MP3 or WAV. Lord help me if I want to change the start position. This is very frustrating for me because I’m at the 80% mark in a transcription program with a GUI.

You tell it to fetch a recording of a hearing before a court. It figures out how many speakers are recorded, when they are speaking and the duration of their segment. It then uses external guidance to do a voice ID of the different speakers before finally generating a transcription of the audio.

The issue? There is a part of the interface where you connect different speakers to named people. It allows you to listen to a segment of the audio and make comparisons.

For example, I have two cases where there was only one judge in common. That means that there should only be one match between the two cases, and that match should be the judge. There were two matches.

It turns out that both cases had the same court manager. So my software picked out the fact that there were actually two people speaking in both cases, which is cool.

Regardless, I’ll make it work. It is what I do.

There are numerous things happening in different cases right now, but I’m looking at Dayonta McClinton v. UNITED STATES which was recently denied certiorari. Not because the case has anything to do with the Second Amendment, but because Sotomayor, Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, Alito, and Barrett are in agreement.

The case is about a man who was charged with murder and robbery. The jury found him guilty of the robbery charge and not guilty of the murder charge. Under the sentencing guidelines, McClinton should have been looking at 5 to 6 years.

At the sentencing hearing, the state told the court that McClinton had been charged with murder. The court used the accusation, of which McClinton had been found not guilty, to increase the sentence to 20 years.

If you are interested, please let me know in the comments.

The comments are open, go for it.

Sorry for the lack of legal analysis these last few days. I have been fighting depression, but I think I’ve finally pulled myself out of it, for now.

Depression for me means it is hard to do anything that isn’t “fun”. Work slows down. Small things stop me from moving forward.

Yesterday included some loud noises, 18 of them to be more precise. The CETME had failure to feed on two rounds. The tip of the round started up the feed ramp and then jammed. The bolt carrier/bolt came over the top of the round and dinged the brass, locking it in place.

Clearing it was trivial, pull the charging handle back into the catch, flip the rifle upside down, the round falls out, slap the charging handle. BANG.

I find it interesting that a 300-500 word rant about idiots writing idiotic things gets more traction than long, detailed analysis of court filings.

Have a fantastic weekend, the comments are open.