Welcome to Friday! Just one more day until the weekend.

This weekend will be busy. I’ve got my lady on deck to help me organize my office, my reloading/gun supply room, and to remove my spore from the living room and dining room.

After that, I need to cast some bullets for .357 Magnum. I was able to pick up 1000 Magnum Small Pistol Primers, CCI the other day along with a new powder.

I realized the other day that my eyes just aren’t good enough. The “test range” is only 25 yards long. There is a small, 4-inch, hanging gong, a larger 8″ hanging gong, and a 1/3 IDPA target. The IDPA target is set up such that just it’s little head is visible at the 1 o’clock of the small gong.

When doing my testing, I start with the big gong, move to the small gong, and then move to the “headshots”. I’m not bad at it, just not good.

What happened was that I could no longer even see the damn head. It blended in so well that it was impossible for me to see. I was still hitting it, I knew where it was in relationship to the small gong. (You can hear the difference and the gongs swing when you hit them).

All of this is to say, I decided I wanted to start using scopes for some of the more precision shots.

I have never mounted a scope before. I haven’t sighted in a scope in the last 30 years. That scope was mounted by a professional and bore sighted before I started.

I attempted to mount and bore sight my .22 bolt action.

No go, I couldn’t even get it on paper/large gong. 10 rounds and I gave up.

I spent $40 and picked up:

Damn, I wish I had done this earlier. It took a few minutes to figure it all out. Once I did, it took maybe 3 minutes to bore sight the rifle.

Back on the range, first shot was on paper. The rest of the shots were on paper. I am a bit disappointed, my groups at 25 yards are about 0.5 inches, offhand. I expect better of myself.

The comments are open, have at it.

Last week we asked which cases you were interested in next, the winner was Oregon Firearms Federation, Inc. v. Brown. Unfortunately, this got put on the back burner when District Judge Bumb issued her opinion regarding New Jersey’s Bruen response bill. Part two of the analysis of her opinion is in progress.

Hagar has a couple of articles in the queue, based on the feedback you provided.

After O.F.F. v. Brown is updated, I’ll be looking at Boland v. Bonta which is the California rooster case.

There are a few more cases in progress.

I’m hoping that Miguel will take a look at some of the bills making their way through Congress. One of my feeds reported a bill that was introduced to restrict firearm purchases for anybody 25 or younger.

Is there anything you’d like us to look into?

Give your feedback down below.

Have a Great Weekend!

Hagar asks: What do they want a woman’s perspective on?

Is there something that you would like to hear her woman’s perspective about? Put your requests down below.

Hagar also asks: What would they like a more left of center view point on?

She is not a left-wing nut, but she is left of center. Ask away.

I hope you enjoyed the three part series about Judge Easterbrook’s history of writing bad opinions. Is that something you would like to see more of?

Finally, there are a couple of cases I want to dig into. Pick your favorites and let me know.

Add your comments down below, thank you!

This has been an interesting week for me. I’m working on a project where I’m being required to do much more frontend work than I normally do. This required me to actually learn Bootstrap’s grid system. It is astonishing how much I learn when I read the code instead of just reading the documentation.

Another part of this was learning about citations and what they mean. This became critical when reading Judge Lindsay Jenkins’ Memorandum Opinion and Order regarding the Illinois AWB + LCM ban.

Consider the following: “561 U.S. 742, 767 (2010)”. This is an official reference to McDonald. “561” is volume 561 of U.S. which is “United States Reports”. The same case can be referenced via the “S.Ct.” reporter, which is “Supreme Court Reporter”. And finally, there is “L.Ed.” and “L.Ed.2d) which is the “United States Supreme Court Reports, Lawyers’ Edition”.

The next number, in our example “742”, is the page number in the printed reference. The “767” after that is the page from which this particular quotation was taken.

Here is the quote of interest to me:

Id. is Latin for “idem” meaning “the same”. In citations, it means the same citation just used. This means I have to find the correct citation. This particular Judge is good with his citations. Whereas most people put the citation immediately after the quotation, this Judge puts them close. He mentions McDonald v. City of Chicago and a line later he gives the citation.

This reference is to pages 899 through 900. Somewhere on those two pages of the printed reporter will be the quote he is citing.

Now I don’t remember anything in Heller, McDonald, or Bruen that said that there was a history or tradition of banning the possession of especially dangerous weapons. The judge quoted them; therefore it must be there. Maybe he pulled it out of context?

The text of the McDonald opinion is available from multiple sources. What isn’t available from most of those sources is a version with the page numbers as used in the cited reporter.

After a bit of looking, I found it at the Library of Congress. I verified it was the correct version because it starts at page 742. Time to find his quote.

Oh shit, there it is:

That is pretty damning language. Why didn’t I know about this?

Oh, here it is, “Stevens, J., dissenting”. Yes, that is Associate Justice Stevens in his dissent to McDonald making this statement. When he quotes back to Heller you have to be cautious because he will often cite back to his own dissent.

In conclusion, this judge decided to justify his acceptance of “historical record” of firearms regulations because the loosing side in McDonald thought, incorrectly, that there were such historical regulations.

On the fun front, a Henry Golden Boy in .22 followed me home. She is very sweet. I need to do a bit more hole punching to get it fully zeroed, that’s just fun.

I hope you all have a great weekend.

Did any of you listen to the Mean Mary music from Tuesday? Should I be looking for different types of music for you’ll?

This is it! Really.

This is that post where you give us some feedback.

Please add some down below.

You might have noticed that more and more I am linking to https://courtlistener.com. There is a very good reason for this. They are doing a great job.

I’ve talked about how hard it is to find case documents and how expensive it is to get them from the government. CourtListener is a sort of crowdsourced legal document repository. If you want to help out CourtListener all you need to do is to download their “RECAP” browser extension and signup for a PACER account. They have instructions on the site.

When you are looking at a case, on CourtListener, it will either tell you that they already have the document, and you can just read it on their site. If they don’t, they will have a link to buy the document on PACER. When you buy the document on PACER, the RECAP add-on automatically uploads that document to the RECAP archive.

While it is expensive to download PACER documents, the big cost is doing searches on PACER. By using the links supplied by CourtListener, you don’t do any searches on PACER. It takes you directly to the page to purchase the documents you are looking for.

In addition, if you buy less than $30 worth of searches and downloads per quarter, PACER doesn’t charge you. This means that if you only download a couple of documents for RECAP from PACER, no charges.

Anyway, go give them a look if you are interested in looking at or for court documents.

CourtListener is a project run by the Free Law Project. To quote them:

Y’ll know what to do!

Leave some comments down below.