Welcome to another Friday!

This has been a week of finding interesting 2A cases that are all moving in the right direction. It has been a week of listening to the left scream about banning guns for reasons. It has been a week of accomplishing new things with a new project.

I’ve started to put pictures on the postings, I’m working with Hagar to get slightly different. Anything you don’t like about those images, blame me. If you like it, praise her. If you want to send in your own article headers for me to use, please send it to our email and include a statement that you own the copyright and that you give us permission to use it on this blog.

If you have any feedback on the formatting of the long articles, let me know. If you have suggestions for article formatting, let us know.

Don’t forget to give praise to J.Kb. if you liked his Sci-Fi writings.

The Firearms Policy Coalition has a list of cases they are following. I am not interested in going through that entire list to figure out what is interesting or not. If you are interested, please look it over and let me know what cases you would like my to look at.

If you don’t get around to it on today’s feedback, send me email at AWA(at)troglodite.com. When identifying a case please give me the name and the court.

Gun Case Tracker by FPC & 2Aupdates

I have another picture article I’m working on for next week. Hagar is working articles. I’m looking forward to a productive weekend and coming week.

Let us know what you are thinking about or topics you would like us to cover.

The GFZ admin had a short discussion and decided that we do want to add links for those organizations that are fighting for the Second Amendment. To that end, if you have a favorite organization let us know in the comments.

There have been a number of cases that are making progress, I’ll continue to bring updates as I get them or I find new cases.

Hagar has a couple of new articles out and J.Kb and Miguel keep cranking them out.

In the next week I’m going to do an article on PACER and RECAP. PACER is where you buy court documents. RECAP is a site that collection PACER documents for others to use. I’m looking at being able to put out a call for our readers to add documents from PACER to RECAP. Since you get $30 dollars worth of PACER documents per bill period free, this might work well for us.

We are going to be doing some site work later this week as it is time for a WordPress update. This will cause a brief outage.

Anything else you want to tell us about, feel free in the comments.

It was great to see so many of you have been advocates for the Second Amendment. More of you have testified than I expected to see.

Thanks to all of you that fight the good fight.

We had a couple of articles this week that were not authored by your normal hosts. Thank you to SkinnedKnuckles for his article about working to get an actual firearm safety program started in the local school system.

The other outside article was the blurb from Michel Associates, PC. That was more interesting to me. I had reached out to the helpdesk at the firm and expected to end up communicating with some public relations person. To have the first response come from the senior partner was shocking to me.

Is it of interest to you to get short articles about groups and firms that are fighting for the Second?

The Second Circuit court hard oral arguments on 5 Second Amendment cases on Monday. We are now in a wait and see holding pattern. We can make a couple of different assumptions about the judges, they could all be anti-gun, they could all be pro-gun, they could just be ignorant, or they could just be following the law.

If they are anti-gun they are going to ask if it is in the best interest of the infringers to find for the state or the plaintiffs. If they find for the state the plaintiffs will appeal to the Supreme Court and that would be bad for gun rights infringers. If they find for the plaintiffs the state might not appeal but might instead change the law to require a relitigation.

If they are anti-gun rights I can almost bet that it will take a long time for them to reach an opinion.

If they are pro-gun or just following the law they will find for the plaintiffs and the state will have to decide if they want to play in the Supreme Court, again, after just being slapped down in Bruen.

If they are ignorant, we are going to end up with case law that is going to be hard to deal with. This might be the worse case.

Thank you once again to all of our readers and thank you to all the people that found the article like button.

There was a small snow storm up here this week. Everything is back to normal.

Later today there is going to be oral arguments in Koons v. Reynolds. Finding the transcripts has proven difficult and listening to oral arguments drives me bonkers.

We are waiting on a number of cases as well. There is the case down in the Eleventh Circuit Court where the three judge panel decided that Bruen be damned, they were going to find laws justifying today’s infringements. There are the CCIA cases in New York that will be heard by the Second Circuit court soon.

All in all there are a lot of moving parts.

One of our readers asked “Why do you spend all this time on legal cases?” to paraphrase. I had to think on that a bit.

Just before I headed off to University I was thinking about buying a gun. I didn’t really have the money but I was thinking about it. I really wanted to buy an M-16. They weren’t that expensive and they were cool.

At University I spent my money on music (CD Collection) and stereo equipment, books and education. I collected knives but couldn’t justify buying a gun because I couldn’t carry it. Heck, most of the knives I carried on campus were illegal but…

I graduated, had a kid, thought about that M-16 and suddenly that was gone. In the blink of an eye the cost of an M-16 went through the window with the Hughes Amendment. For those that don’t know, the Hughes Amendment was a poison pill added to the Firearm Owners Protection Act. The FOPA was designed to reign in the ATF and to allow citizens to transport weapons through gun unfriendly states without being harassed or charged.

The Hughes Amendment closed the NFA list to new machine guns.

In that blink of an eye my options changed. I slowly started to see and understand how stupid gun control laws were. When my mentor died his father took ownership of his AR-15. I had to explain to him that he had to unload all the magazines to meet Maryland law regarding “unloaded firearms”

Before my mentor died we had testified in the state legislature against gun infringements. We found that our rights were being eroded.

When I started writing for GFZ I was finding articles and writing opinion pieces based on what those articles said. I tried to find primary sources but most of the time they were missing. As I wrote more I got better at finding the references and reading the references.

At this point I have an acceptable grasp of how to get case documents, not always, but most of the time.

My goal when I write about these cases is for you to see how the fight is fought in court. How the state twists things to get the infringements they want. I also want you to be able to get to the primary sources quickly and easily. That’s why I attempt to cite everything I quote.

I hope my efforts are successful.

One of my biggest thrills on the blog to date was when some lawyer group liked one of my legal analysis articles. I wish that they would fire off an email or start commenting in general. I’d love to have actual lawyer feedback on some of the things I’ve written, I have no real feedback if I’m getting this stuff “right”.

Question of the week, if you are interested in gun rights, how did you get there?

You know you’ve been reading to much law geek language when you get two cases totally confused. I claim as a defense that Judge Benitez in his conference meeting with parties was talking about opinions given in one case while talking about another and it looks like the state managed to get it confused too.

This was so bad that I had to revise the article. This is different from an update in that to much changed. I hope the method I used was useful.

It is all infringements.

I’ve started a new series which I’m calling Legal Arguments. This is how I see the state currently arguing. I’m also going over some older cases that were used to establish case law against us. Hopefully you all find them interesting.

There are a number of cases happening in other parts of the country. The CCIA challenges are currently waiting for oral arguments before the Second Circuit. We are waiting on an opinion from the Forth Circuit regarding Maryland’s AWB. There is a very upset District Judge in New Jersey that is about to hand NJ their asses in a sling regarding Koons et al. v. Reynolds et al 1:22-cv-07464. NJ has threatened to appeal to the Third Circuit court if she doesn’t rule right now.

On the fun side of the world, it is beautiful today. The sun is shining off the snow, the trees haven’t be cut back so far as to destroy the view. Power is up. Oil tank is 4/5 full and the Furnace just got its yearly servicing for the first time since we bought the house over 10 years ago. (Things you don’t know as a homeowner).

The furnace thing was sort of funny. It stopped creating heat. I went down to check on it. Couldn’t get it to fire. Called the heating people. They sent out a tech. He spent the rest of the day doing service. Turns out that we are considered long time customers as we’ve been buying oil from them since we moved in. The tech looked at it and decided to bill it out as yearly service instead of emergency call out. It cost a bit more in parts but those were parts that should have been replaced yearly.

Enough, I hope you all had a great week and will have a great weekend.

Give us your thoughts below!

So Miguel, when are you going to do your “Ask me anything?”

I can’t make him do an AMA but he is the winner of that poll.

There are enough cases going on out there that it should be possible to write a different case analysis everyday for the next ten years. I can’t handle it and I don’t think you can either.

One of the things that I despise is when quotes are taken out of context. The number of times I’ve read some media shill string four 3 word quotes together in order to make somebody look bad (or good) is in the tens of thousands. It is just wrong.

The liars seem to do this all the time. Listening to Bonta’s people say … The Second Amendment isn’t a “regulatory straightjacket”… and leave of the blank check part of the clause is infuriating to me.

Since I’m now writing for the public, you all, I decided that I wasn’t going to provide out of context quotes. These leads to huge pull quotes. The quotes were getting so out of hand I wrote CSS to support my tendency to create such quotes.

It is very difficult when I’m writing to keep my articles short. I know that for “best engagement” blog postings should be in the 500 word range. My articles run 1500 to 3000 or more words.

The article I am writing about Rupp v. Bonta is about 7000 words long. I broke that into three different postings but each of those three are still long.

I’ve added B.L.U.F. to try and help and I’ve started adding “asides” to help break up that word wall, but they are still long.

I am also going to try and remember to take advantage of the “read more” feature so that the home page is less of a wall of text.

Anything else you want to say, please add it down below. Thank you to all our wonderful readers.

Welcome to another Friday!

We had our first “ask anything” It didn’t go the way I expected. I was going to collect all the questions and then have Hagar make a post answering them all. Still it worked out.

I’ll offer up an “ask me anything” for myself if you all would like, see the poll at the bottom.

I’ve made my way through most of the filings in Duncan v. Bonta case. Thank you to the Michel & Associates for having everything in one place and open for us to read.

The gist of the State’s argument is that magazines are not “arms” under the scope of the Second Amendment and the good guys haven’t proven it, and even if they were within the scope of the Second Amendment there is a long history of banning guns.

More on Duncan v. Bonta next week. The state has filed multiple “briefs” in excess of 50 pages, it just takes a long time to wade through it all. Oh, for grins, the state up in Oregon is upset because one of the expert witnesses in their case used almost the same words as Massad Ayoob. This seems to be a big deal. Not that two different firearms experts came to almost exactly the same opinion in regards to magazines.

I hope you all have a great weekend.