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.

We had some excellent responses regarding car safes. I looked at an in console safe for my truck, the price has come way down, it is now on the “to buy” list.

I’m in the process of bringing a new client onboard. This makes me grateful to Miguel for getting me started on WordPress.

Ballistics software is currently on hold until I get client work caught up.

For our readers in Massachusetts, be aware that there is a horrible bill being pushed. I’ve not read the bill, but second hand descriptions from people I trust on the Interwebs suggest it will truly mess with everybody.

As predicted, the argument being pushed by the infringers is that “in common use” actually means “in common use for lawful purposes, like self-defense” which actually means “In common use for self-defense” which actually means “shots fired in a self-defense event”.

There are some cases pending transcription that I’m going to be evaluating over the following days.

Meanwhile, the comments are open, tell us what you are thinking, what you’d like to hear more about, what you’ve heard to much about.

If you are so inclined, share with us your method of securing your firearm in your vehicle. I would love to see what and why and prices if you would.  Add links if possible.

The comment section is yours to propagate.

Thank you!

Things are getting better. I have a few rounds to be pulled. All the “hot” rounds have been put in a safe place, and I’ll pull them tomorrow.

There have been a couple of horrific opinions issued by the courts in the last few weeks. I’m going to be looking at more of them.

There have been a few wins. The 11th Circuit has vacated the opinion of the 3 judge panel and is currently planning on hearing the 18-20 yo aren’t a part of The People en banc.

The 2nd Circuit is still dragging their heels. The 7th Circuit hard testimony and is not going into wait it out mode. The 4th circuit still hasn’t made up their mind if they are going to follow Bruen and declare Kolbe bad law.

I’m still looking for dana950 and OldNFO to contact me via email.

Have a fantastic weekend!

The comments are open to everybody.

It is 2100 and after 6 hours of working with our cloud provider, everything is back.

There was a hardware glitch that caused a node to fail. The website automatically moved to a new node and attempted to restart. Unfortunately, that hardware glitch caused the cluster to believe that the node was still there and still working. Since it was there and working, none of the resources (disk space) used by GFZ was released.

Because the resource did not release, the website on the new node would not start.

Linode took 8 calls from me, 22 ticket updates and worked the entire 6 hours to get things working again.

I’m sorry the site was down for so long. I’m working with Linode management to make sure it doesn’t happen again. Furthermore, I’m also looking at options for shared file systems so that a pod can move from node to node seamlessly.

AWA

First, thank you to Miguel for creating this fantastic place. Thank you to J.Kb. for contributing. Thank you to both of you for allowing me to be an author here.

Just over a year ago, Miguel announced his retirement to J.Kb. and myself in a private email. We considered a couple of different options, one of which was to just move it to Substack with a Patreon style of support system. We all wanted to have some small amount of monetization from the blog.

I suggested a pay to comment with some content being restricted. Miguel and J.Kb. allowed me to try that.

It didn’t really work.

We pay for a number of things directly for the blog. The total for all of those services is around $1000/year. Those include the different yearly subscriptions for certain plugins and other direct paid support.

In addition to that, there is another $600/year for the servers that host the blog.

In prior years, there was an additional $600/year to me. The minimum cost for the blog per year was $2200. Miguel paid all of that out of pocket. He asked for money once a year to pay me and the hosting costs.

In other words, this blog cost him money.

I can no longer charge for my work on the blog. That’s good because I have spent countless hours, easily well over 200 hours. I work dirt cheap at $50/hour, that’s $10,000 of billable time. That does NOT include any of the time I spend writing.

We are seeing the renewals happening now. I did not break even last year. I won’t break even this year.

I do care. It doesn’t matter. I’ve been in love with this blog for many years. I lost it for a couple of years. Realized I was missing it, went and found it. I’ve never left.

The comments you leave help so much. It tells me when I get things right. I stumbled onto a new gun blog yesterday, went looking through their postings, and there was reference to one of my case analysis. That single back link made me smile through a rather shitty day.

So, I thank all of you.

If you want to help the blog out financially, please sign up for one of the membership levels. The lowest level is $1/month. The highest is $5/month. You do have to pay for a year at a time.

Here’s wishing all of you a great year. Remember that we do want guest postings, and I mean real guest posts, not the “If you say yes, we’ll spend 30 seconds and send you an article with the word “gun” in it and 1000 words talking about us.” Yeah, we get about 1 a week of those.

My standard reply to them is something similar to, “That sounds great, what is your favorite 45-70 load?” I’ve never gotten a reply to that question.

This is a feedback article. Comments are open to all.
P.S. OldNFO and dana950, please reach out to me at awa (at) troglodite . com

Welcome to Friday! It’s almost the weekend.

I really wish that the climate change gods would decide which way it should be. The last couple of nights I’ve gone to bed, it has been so hot and mucky that I didn’t want to be near my lady. Halfway through the night, I woke up shivering and had to pull up the blankets.

On the good news side, we had about two days of sun. It stopped raining just long enough to get the lawn mowed. Of course, the rain has started back up again before I got the weed wacker out

I’m hoping to do some reloading this weekend. I just have to clear a path to the reloading bench. After two years of not being able to find 30–30 bullets, suddenly everybody has them. I’m going to load a few hundred rounds and do the ballistics on it.

I’m halfway through a reference on ballistics. Not only that, but I actually remember some of my calculus from way back when. My first graphs came close to the correct answer, but not perfect. Likely because I wasn’t using the software correctly.

I picked up a laser range finder today. The range cards show up tomorrow. I intend to have range cards for each of the windows in the house, plus some known locations outside the house.

How many of you have ever used a range card? How many of you have actually used a ballistics chart or table to more accurately put rounds on target at distance?

The squirrel article is in the queue.

I expect to do a product review of the range finder after I’ve had a chance to use it for a bit.

Are you interested in articles about range cards and how to use them? I’ve read a bit and I’m going to put it to use, I am NOT an expert.