Archive for the 'Second Amendment' Category

Surprising no one, The New York Times published one of the most insulting commentaries I’ve ever witnessed, directed mainly at Christian gun owners.  It’s a guest commentary written by Peter Manseau, who claims to have published elsewhere, but I’ve never read any of this books, nor will I considering the lack of scholarship displayed here.  We’ll start, lift some commentary out, and I’ll make remarks along the way.

Is our gun problem a God problem?

The AR-15-style rifle used in the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, last month was made by an arms manufacturer that regards selling weapons as part of its Christian mission. In a state where Gov. Greg Abbott declared, six months after an earlier massacre, “The problem is not guns; it’s hearts without God,” the gun’s provenance challenged pious suggestions that declining religiosity might bear some of the blame.

That this paragraph made it through editing is amazing.  Provenance is “the chronology of ownership, custody or location of a historical object.”  In the following paragraphs he takes aim at Daniel Defense and the religious beliefs of Marty Daniel, but no editor worth his salt would have let this paragraph go unmodified.  Presumably the writer is trying to link Daniel’s views with the gun he built, but that case cannot possibly be demonstrated.  I know plenty of irreligious men who own AR-15s, and many more who work on them.

Daniel Defense, the Georgia company whose gun enabled the slaughter at Robb Elementary School, presents its corporate identity in explicitly religious terms. At the time of the shooting, the company’s social media presence included an image of a toddler with a rifle in his lap above the text of Proverbs 22:6 (“Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, he will not depart from it”). For Easter, it posted a photograph of a gun and a cross resting on scriptural passages recounting the Resurrection.

So Marty Daniel is a Christian.  What of it?  What does that bring to bear on the case he’s trying to prove?

While some might suggest a Christian firearms company is a contradiction in terms, Daniel Defense is hardly alone. According to a Public Religion Research Institute study, evangelicals have a higher rate of gun ownership than other religious groups. Across the country, they account for a significant share not only of the demand but of the supply.

So now the writer has expanded the sweep of his analysis and is targeting all evangelicals.

In Florida, Spike’s Tactical (“the finest AR-15s on the planet”) makes a line of Crusader weapons adorned with a quote from the Psalms. Missouri-based CMMG (“the leading manufacturer of AR15 rifles, components and small parts”) advertises its employees’ “commitment to meet each and every morning to pray for God’s wisdom in managing the enormous responsibility that comes with this business.” And in Colorado, Cornerstone Arms explains that it is so named because “Jesus Christ is the cornerstone of our business, our family and our lives” and the “Second Amendment to our Constitution is the cornerstone of the freedom we enjoy as American citizens.”

For many American Christians, Jesus, guns and the Constitution are stitched together as durably as a Kevlar vest.

“We are in business, we believe, to be a supporter of the Gospel,” Daniel Defense’s founder, Marty Daniel, told Breitbart News in 2017. “And, therefore, a supporter of the Second Amendment.”

He is on the outside looking in.  Most of my readers would say that the constitution (and thus the 2A) only matters the extent to which is comports with Biblical law.  The foundation of our rights is to be found in the Holy Writ, and our philosophical pre-commitments are to the Lord of the universe and His law, not a piece of paper.  The piece of paper is a covenant and contract, null and void upon unfaithfulness.  You don’t have to be a Christian to understand my point of logic.  If the writer is targeting Christians, he’s gotten it exactly backwards.  The constitution isn’t infallible and wasn’t written by God.  Christians don’t turn to the constitution to ascertain rightness and wrongness in their lives.

Entwining faith and firearms this way has a long history. It encompasses the so-called muscular Christianity movement that began in England in the 19th century with a focus on physical fitness as a path to spiritual strength and that in America made exemplars of pastors roaming the frontier armed with Bibles and six-shooters.

More than a hundred years ago, this trope was already so well established that a popular silent western from 1912, “The Two Gun Sermon,” told the story of a minister assigned to a rough-and-tumble outpost; when ruffians menace him, he holds them at gunpoint until they listen to him preach. The film’s message is one with which 21st-century Christian gun enthusiasts would probably agree: Sometimes guns are necessary for the Lord’s work.

It is easy to miss, but this melding of evangelism and the right to bear arms is a step beyond the “natural rights” argument for gun ownership, which holds that self-defense is a law of nature required to protect life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. These rights are often said to be God-given in the sense of being taken for granted, and they are enshrined as such in the Declaration of Independence. As interpreted by many evangelicals, the distant deistic “creator” Thomas Jefferson credited with endowing such rights has become a specific, biblical deity who apparently takes an active interest in the availability of assault rifles.

He has now turned to an irrelevant English movement and a movie to prove his point.  But here he misses so badly that it’s going to take a few moments to sus this out.

If he was a scholar he would have first turned to OT law, where the right of being armed is founded in the Pentateuch.  As I’ve observed so many times before, John Calvin discusses this aspect of the ten commandments and makes it clear that defense of life is not only allowed, but required as a good work by the Godly man.

We do not need to prove that when a good thing is commanded, the evil thing that conflicts with it is forbidden.  There is no one who doesn’t concede this.  That the opposite duties are enjoined when evil things are forbidden will also be willingly admitted in common judgment.  Indeed, it is commonplace that when virtues are commended, their opposing vices are condemned.  But we demand something more than what these phrases commonly signify.  For by the virtue of contrary to the vice, men usually mean abstinence from that vice.  We say that the virtue goes beyond this to contrary duties and deeds.  Therefore in this commandment, “You shall not kill,” men’s common sense will see only that we must abstain from wronging anyone or desiring to do so.  Besides this, it contains, I say, the requirement that we give our neighbor’s life all the help we can … the purpose of the commandment always discloses to us whatever it there enjoins or forbids us to do” (Institutes of the Christian Religion, Vol. 1, Book 2, Chapter viii, Part 9).

Calvin has here expressed the Biblical position.  “Thou shall not kill” also means “Thou shall protect life.”  This is of course at least partially why Jesus himself commanded his disciples to sell their robes and buy a sword.  He won’t have His followers being defenseless against the onslaught of ne’er-do-wells.  Any loss of life, trials or tribulations, will be by His hand, in His timing, for purposes that He knows, not by anyone else.

But here it’s important not to miss one of the main points of the command in Luke 22:36 like so many do.  Quite literally, He is commanding the purchase of weapons in spite of strictures against ownership and carry of said weapons at the time.  He is commanding His followers to be law-breakers for the sake of self defense.

… for some evidence, see Digest 48.6.1: collecting weapons ‘beyond those customary for hunting or for a journey by land or sea’ is forbidden; 48.6.3.1 forbids a man ‘of full age’ appearing in public with a weapon (telum) (references and translation are from Mommsen 1985). See also Mommsen 1899: 564 n. 2; 657-58 n. 1; and Linderski 2007: 102-103 (though he cites only Mommsen). Other laws from the same context of the Digest sometimes cited in this regard are not as worthwhile for my purposes because they seem to be forbidding the possession of weapons with criminal intent. But for the outright forbidding of being armed while in public in Rome, see Cicero’s letter to his brother relating an incident in Rome in which a man, who is apparently falsely accused of plotting an assassination, is nonetheless arrested merely for having confessed to having been armed with a dagger while in the city: To Atticus, Letter 44 (II.24). See also Cicero, Philippics 5.6 (§17). Finally we may cite a letter that Synesius of Cyrene wrote to his brother, probably sometime around the year 400 ce. The brother had apparently questioned the legality of Synesius having his household produce weapons to defend themselves against marauding bands. Synesius points out that there are no Roman legions anywhere near for protection, but he seems reluctantly to admit that he is engaged in an illegal act (Letter 107; for English trans., see Fitzgerald 1926).

Jesus knew the law, and the potential legal troubles He was exposing His disciples to by issuing this command, and yet, that didn’t stop Him.  So going back to the law of Moses, to the command of Christ, and then on to the Crusades which were primarily defensive in nature, the history of armed self defense isn’t traced back to an English movement a few years ago or a silly movie.  It’s in the very nature of the beliefs.

But then the writer can’t stop at merely misunderstanding the subject he purports to analyze.  He then decides to expand his (ill-fated) analysis to insults.  “As interpreted by many evangelicals, the distant deistic “creator” Thomas Jefferson credited with endowing such rights has become a specific, biblical deity who apparently takes an active interest in the availability of assault rifles.”

Christianity has always been about a specific, living being who loves us and redeems us and commands us, not about a distant deity who once interacted with His creation.  If he means that the second amendment would have been written differently if Jefferson was not a deist, that point is unproven at best and misguided and simply historically incorrect at worst.  Jefferson wasn’t responsible for the second amendment.  Maddison wrote the text, but the entirety of the colonies insisted on it, most of the Southern colonies being Presbyterian.  It’s too much to discuss in the present context, but in English circles they knew the basis for the war of independence and called it “The Presbyterian Rebellion.”

Why does this subtle shift in the meaning of “God given” matter? It’s important to understand that for the manufacturer of the Uvalde killer’s rifle, and many others in the business, selling weapons is at once a patriotic and a religious act. For those who hold them to be sacred in this way, the meaning of firearms proceeds from their place at the intersection of American and Christian identities. Proposing limits on what kinds of guns they should be able to buy — or how, when, where and why they can carry them — is akin to proposing limits on who they are and what they should revere.

He’s just making things up now.  Ownership and bearing of arms, if a God-given right, doesn’t depend in the least on where one lives or what system of government obtains.  It didn’t in the case of the Armenian Christians who were slaughtered in the deserts of Turkey by the Muslims, it didn’t to the Christians targeted by Idi Amin of Uganda, and it didn’t to the Russians and Ukrainians starved by Stalin.  He wants a scary boogieman to blame, but the intersection of Christians and America has nothing to do with it except in his imagination.

Since then, despite being debunked by data showing that firearms are more likely to injure their owners or their owners’ families than safeguard them, the protection offered by good guys with guns has emerged as an article of faith, supported with anecdotal evidence passed around like legends of the saints.

I vow never to use that word, debunked.  It has become the wordy-word of progressives trying to prove something wrong and who have run out of ideas.  Guns are only unsafe to those who do not treat them with respect and obey all the rules of gun safety.

As the historian Daniel K. Williams has noted, “Gun rights advocacy is not an intrinsic feature of every brand of evangelicalism.” While recent surveys find that four in 10 white evangelicals own guns, the majority do not, and other denominational affiliations offer examples of religious participation discouraging a fixation on firearms. It is possible that the less one sees oneself as an itinerant loner in a hostile world, like the armed preacher in a silent western, the less one is likely to look to guns as a source of salvation.

Nonetheless, the ways Christian ideas may be contributing to a gun culture that abets our epidemic of mass shootings by helping to keep the nation well armed should inspire reflection. None of the recent mass shootings had explicitly religious motivations, but the religious contexts of our seemingly eternal problem with gun violence — its history, its theology, its myths — are too important to ignore.

Mass shootings are, in a way, assaults on the idea of community itself. They occur where there are people gathered — for entertainment, for learning, for shopping, for worship — in the spaces we create together. Some believe that such attacks are the fault of armed individuals alone and can be addressed only through armed individual response. Others believe they occur within the framework of what we collectively allow and must have communal solutions.

After blaming Christians for mass shootings, he has finally, at long last, divulged his own philosophical pre-commitments, or religion.  He is a collectivist, and says that the solutions to problems are to be found in the collective.

What he doesn’t mention is that in the twentieth century alone there were over 212,000,000 mass murders by governments across the globe.  The writer doesn’t explain how his collectivist solutions would be better than ours, nor do I believe he can.

The New York Times has paid for another loser commentary that wanders and fails to stay on point, refuses to interact with the real scholarship of its intended target, insults a large constituency of Americans, and considers neither the history of the subject nor the failures of its own solutions.

Is it any wonder that they’re constantly begging for money?

Source.

TALLAHASSEE (FLV) – Gov. Ron DeSantis and Florida House Speaker Paul Renner said Florida will pass constitutional carry legislation.

DeSantis was asked at a press conference if his administration will be able to pass constitutional carry.

The governor responded and said “I’ll let Paul [Renner] answer that because I’m ready, so you guys gonna do it?”

“Yes,” Renner responded.

NEW: Florida House Speaker @Paul_Renner and Gov. Ron DeSantis say state will pass constitutional carry

Question: "Are you gonna be able to pass constitutional carry?"
DeSantis: "I'm ready, so are you guys gonna do it?"
Renner: "Yes." pic.twitter.com/KFAXDQw3Uj

— Florida’s Voice (@FLVoiceNews) December 15, 2022

Let’s hope it happens this time, but another delay is highly possible given the weak state of legislative leadership in Florida.

I’m especially interested in seeing open carry legalized in Florida, as I know The Armed Fisherman is.  If we can get open carry, it won’t be necessary any longer to do stuff like this.

It’s my understanding that constitutional carry includes open carry, but if they don’t formulate the law this way, that is, if they formulate a bill that only removes the permitting scheme, this fight will have to continue.

Reason.

From U.S. v. Reyna, decided yesterday by Judge Robert Miller, Jr. (N.D. Ind.) (for a case reaching the opposite result, see this post):

[ … ]

Guns with obliterated serial numbers belong to “those weapons not typically possessed by law-abiding citizens for lawful purposes” so possession of such guns isn’t within the Second Amendment’s scope. Heller. Guns with obliterated serial numbers are useful for criminal activity because identifying who possessed a firearm is more difficult when the serial number is destroyed. By using a gun without a serial number, a criminal ensures he has a greater higher likelihood of evading justice.

Mr. Reyna might be right that a deserialized gun is just as useful for self-defense as a gun with its serial number intact, but that doesn’t suggest that deserialized guns are typically used by law-abiding citizens for lawful purposes.

Nice try.  Now do Bruen.

Do like Judge Benitez ordered and go find me laws written at the time of the 2A requiring serialization of firearms.  I dare you.  Supply us with a complete catalog of said laws.

We all know how you want the 2A to read: “Given that intermediate scrutiny allows us to prioritize our view of public safety, the right of law enforcement to know at all times what you’re building in your basement shall not be infringed.”

But the 2A isn’t really about the rights of law enforcement is it, and Bruen did away with the idiotic notion of scrutiny, didn’t it?

Source.

A small Iowa town of 800 residents likely has no need for a police force armed with 90 machine guns to keep the peace.

That, at least, is the view of federal prosecutors, who on Wednesday announced the indictment of Adair Chief of Police Bradley Wendt on charges of making false statements to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to obtain numerous machine guns over a four-year period on behalf of the Adair Police Department, which during Wendt’s tenure has never had more than three officers.

Instead, according to prosecutors, weapons were resold for profit through Wendt’s private gun store or another store owned by a friend who also is facing charges.

According to court filings and a press release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Wendt used his position as police chief to obtain 10 machine guns for the official use of the police department, but later resold at least six of those weapons for “significant profit.”

In addition, Wendt obtained 13 guns for his Dennison- and Anita-based gun store, BW Outfitters, under the pretense they were to be used as demonstration models for potential future purchases by the department. Another 10 weapons were obtained in the same manner for Williams Contracting, a business Williams owned that is federally licensed as a firearms dealer.

Prosecutors say Wendt sought to purchase or demonstrate approximately 90 machine guns between July 2018 and August 2022. Some of the weapons were used for public machine gun shoots, where Wendt and Williams charged customers money to be able to fire the weapons.

The indictment describes the firearms as fully automatic weapons not legally available to the public, including an M60 machine gun, a belt-fed weapon widely used by the U.S. military since the Vietnam war that was purportedly obtained for official use by the Adair Police Department.

Wendt also sought repeatedly to obtain for the department a rotary M134 minigun capable of firing 50 rounds per second, usually mounted on military helicopters. The ATF denied the requested transfer.

“The Adair Police Department does not own a helicopter,” the indictment notes.

Wendt is charged with 18 counts of making a false statement to the ATF and one for unlawfully possessing a machine gun. Williams is charged with three counts of false statements and with aiding and abetting. Prosecutors are also seeking forfeiture of at least 35 machine guns involved in the case.

“Brad Wendt is charged with exploiting his position as chief of police to unlawfully obtain and sell guns for his own personal profit,” Eugene Kowel, a senior FBI agent based in Omaha, said in a statement. “The FBI is committed to working with our law enforcement partners to investigate and hold accountable those who violate their oath of office to enrich themselves.”

Well, that last part is a pregnant bit of prose, yes?

So no doubt he wanted to enrich himself.  He’s corrupt like so many other LEOs.  But if the FBI is so committed to hold those accountable who violate their oath of office, how about those ATF agents who violate the 2A?

For whatever reason, Matthew 7:3-5 comes to mind.

There is a solution to all of this, of course.  Undo the infringement of the NFA, GCA and Hughes Amendment.  Then no one will be able to enrich themselves this way by selling machine guns.

Reuters.

A federal judge has blocked New York from restricting the carrying of guns on private property under a Democratic-backed law adopted following the U.S. Supreme Court’s June ruling that struck down the state’s strict gun permitting regime.

Tuesday’s ruling by U.S. District Judge John Sinatra in Buffalo struck down a provision in the law that made it a felony for a licensed gun owner to possess a firearm on any private property unless the property owner allowed it with a sign or by giving express consent.

From the decision.

Property owners indeed have the right to exclude.  But the state may not unilaterally exercise that that right …

We believe in property rights, even against the state.  That certainly includes property owners who do not wish for you to bear arms on their property.  But you see what NY did there, yes?  They exercised that right on behalf of property owners.  In other words, they didn’t respect the rights of property owners to make the decision on their own property.

What NY did runs exactly counter to the notion of property rights, and thus the judge reached the right decision.

Ammoland.

Judicial Races

Equally large were gun voters’ judicial victories, where we made a clean sweep of NC Supreme Court and NC Court of Appeals races. Thanks to victories by strong constitutional conservatives Richard Dietz and Trey Allen, Republicans will now control the NC Supreme Court by a 5-2 margin – something that will serve North Carolinians well as we continue to struggle over redistricting and our as-yet-unimplemented voter ID law.

Congressional Races

Despite having a partisan, Democrat-led NC Supreme Court throw out and essentially redraw congressional districts, we were still able to send Chuck Edwards to the U.S. House in District 11. Edwards is a strong Second Amendment advocate who has been of considerable service to gun rights supporters in the General Assembly.

NC General Assembly (NCGA) Races

In unofficial results, it appears that gun voters achieved a super-majority in the NC Senate, with 30 seats, and 71 seats in the NC House, just one seat shy of a supermajority. Here too GRNC-PVF was highly successful, winning in 8 of 10 targeted Senate races and 10 of 16 targeted House races.

Well then, it’s time to get busy.  So now when another shooting happens, I don’t expect the GOP led Congress to buckle.  I expect the concealed handgun permitting process and the requirement to get CLEO approval of handgun purchase permits to be trashed by state law and replaced with constitutional purchase and carry.  I don’t expect the courts to roll over when anyone tries to send them gerrymandered redistricting plans.  I expect the GOP to vote pro-2A as a complete bloc rather than being splintered off.  I don’t expect open carry to be messed with or rescinded.

Is this too much to ask?  If so, we can be about our job of replacing you just like we’re going to replace that awful governor.

Friend of TCJ Stephen Stamboulieh got himself a win in New York.

DECISION AND PRELIMINARY INJUNCTION that Defendant Hochul is DISMISSED from this action as a party. Plaintiffs’ motion for a Preliminary Injunction (Dkt. No. [6]) is GRANTED in part and DENIED in part in accordance with this Decision. Defendants, as well as their officers, agents, servants, employees, and attorneys (and any other persons who are in active concert or participation with them) are PRELIMINARILY ENJOINED from enforcing the following provisions of the Concealed Carry Improvement Act, 2022 N.Y. Sess. Laws ch. 371 (“CCIA”): (1) the following provisions contained in Section 1 of the CCIA: (a) the provision requiring “good moral character”; (b) the provision requiring the “names and contact information for the applicant’s current spouse, or domestic partner, any other adults residing in the applicant’s home, including any adult children of the applicant, and whether or not there are minors residing, full time or part time, in the applicant’s home”; (c) the provision requiring “a list of former and current social media accounts of the applicant from the past three years”; and (d) the provision contained in Section 1 of the CCIA requiring “such other information required by review of the licensing application that is reasonably necessary and related to the review of the licensing application“; (2) the following “sensitive locations” provision contained in Section 4 of the CCIA: (a) “any location providing… behavioral health, or chemical dependance care or services” (except to places to which the public or a substantial group of persons have not been granted access) as contained in Paragraph “2(b)”; (b) “any place of worship or religious observation” as contained in Paragraph “2(c)”; (c) “public parks, and zoos” as contained in Paragraph “2(d)”; (d) “airports” to the extent the license holder is complying with federal regulations, and “buses” as contained in Paragraph “2(n)”; (e) “any establishment issued a license for on-premise consumption pursuant to article four, four-A, five, or six of the alcoholic beverage control law where alcohol is consumed” as contained in Paragraph “2(o)”; (f) “theaters,” “conference centers,” and “banquet halls” as contained in Paragraph “2(p)”; and (g) “any gathering of individuals to collectively express their constitutional rights to protest or assemble” as contained in Paragraph “2(s)”; and (3) the “restricted locations” provision contained in Section 5 of the CCIA. Plaintiffs are EXCUSED from giving security. The State Defendants’ request for a limitation in the scope of this Preliminary Injunction and for a stay of it pending appeal (Dkt. No. [48], at 115-16) is DENIED. Signed by U.S. District Judge Glenn T. Suddaby on 11/7/2022. (sal)

But it’s not just his win – it’s a win for liberty.  We encourage everyone to dismantle tyranny everywhere they find it, and in whatever station of life they find themselves, in Stephen’s case, the field of law.

Congratulations to Stephen, one of the premier 2A legal advocates in the country.  We like to celebrate wins, and especially wins by friends!

Source.

A federal judge based in Mississippi has released a scorching order expressing frustration with the Supreme Court’s Second Amendment opinion issued last summer and ordered the Justice Department to brief him on whether he needs to appoint an historian to help him decipher the landmark opinion.

The opinion in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen changed the framework judges must use to review gun regulations. Going forward, Justice Clarence Thomas said that a gun law could only be justified if it is “consistent with this Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.”

Judge Carlton Reeves – who is considering a case concerning a federal statute prohibiting felons from possessing firearms – said he is not sure how to proceed.

“This court is not a trained historian,” Reeves wrote in an order released last week.

“The justices of the Supreme Court, as distinguished as they may be, are not trained historians,” he continued.

“And we are not experts in what white, wealthy and male property owners thought about firearms regulation in 1791,” he said.

The Bruen decision, he said, requires him to “play historian in the name of constitutional adjudication.”

Well if you haven’t been looking to the historical context, what have you been doing with your decisions?  And don’t conflate your own ignorance with that of the Justices.

So here are some suggestions for you.  Read the primary source literature – such as the writings of the founders themselves, and also the newspapers of the era.  I think you’ll find that free men were allowed to possess firearms, that rapists, murderers and kidnappers were punished with death (as they should have been), and that there wasn’t generally a belief in the rehabilitative power of imprisonment.  So a man who is convicted today of assault and battery with intent to kill, for example, is likely to have been put to death in Colonial times even if he would be released today.  Much of this is a problem of our own creation.

Then after studying the primary literature, study the secondary source literature.  You can learn all about American history, like you should have done in your “education.”

Then maybe you won’t be a dummy.

David Kopel debunks a stupid set of claims with a made-up set of indices that proves nothing, all promulgated by the idiots at Duke University (among others).  We’ve run into these dummies before.

The authors, one at Duke, and one at Wesleyan University (who has probably never shot a firearm in her life), should read Kopel’s analysis and be ashamed for the poor “research” and bad analysis and writing they did.

Anyway, if you want to read all about this stupid notion of the lethality index, read Kopel’s analysis of what these writer claim.  I found the most interesting part of Kopel’s article to be these few paragraphs.

Miller and Tucker write:

The Founders lived in a period when they could perhaps be forgiven for thinking that “a gun is a gun is a gun,” because the basic flintlock hadn’t really become significantly more lethal in the previous 150 or so years. If the Constitution had been written in the middle of the nineteenth century, instead of the 1780s, the Founders would have been much more aware of the pace of innovation. (p. 2511).

This is incorrect. The American colonists from Europe who arrived in the early 17th century came mainly with matchlocks. In a matchlock, pressing the trigger lowers a smoldering hemp cord to touch the gunpowder in the firing pan. Over the course of the century, Americans shifted to the more expensive flintlock. In a flintlock, pressing the trigger causes a sharpened flint (held in the gun’s “jaws”) to fall forward. The flint strikes a piece of metal, and the shower of sparks ignites the gunpowder in the firing pan.

Unlike matchlocks, flintlocks can be kept always-ready. There is no smoldering cord to give away the location of the user. Flintlocks are much more reliable than matchlocks, and all the more so in adverse weather.

Americans made the shift from matchlocks to flintlocks sooner than did European armies or European civilians, because the flintlock was so vastly superior for use in the dense woods of the eastern seaboard, and for Indian fighting, which was very different from the rigidly organized, linear tactics of European warfare. For the same reasons, American Indians greatly preferred flintlocks to matchlocks. The TLI of a 17th century musket is 19 and the TLI of an 18th century flintlock is 43. So the transition of firearm type in the American colonies more than doubled the TLI. There is no reason to believe that the American Founders were ignorant of how much better their own firearms were compared to those of the early colonists.

Besides, the men who penned and approved the 2A had spent their lives and fortunes on overthrowing tyranny, which is the singular point of the 2A.  It would be idiotic to believe they would have written the 2A any other way based on a “lethality index” created by ne’er-do-wells in the twenty first century.

Dean Weingarten.

A three-judge panel issued an opinion on the case in the Fifth Circuit on December 14, 2022.

The three judge panel refused to consider either the separation of powers issues, or the Chevron doctrine, claiming they were irrelevant because the panel ruled bump stocks were machine guns.

The Fifth Circuit was asked to consider the case en banc,  which is to say, before the entire court, by a member of the Court. A majority of the members of the Fifth Circuit agreed to hear the case, en banc.

The trend of the case follows the GOA case in the Sixth Circuit. The Sixth Circuit agreed to hear the bump stock case en banc. The Sixth Circuit split evenly, with eight members voting to rule the bump stock regulation invalid and eight-member voting to rule for the government.  In the case of a tie vote, the district court ruling was upheld. The GOA case was denied a writ of certiorari on October 3 of, 2022.

The Cargill v. Garland oral arguments were heard by the Fifth Circuit, en banc, on September 13, 2022.

There is a good chance the Fifth Circuit will reverse the opinion of the district court. A majority of the Court agreed to hear the case, starting fresh, en banc. If the Fifth Circuit reverses the opinion and finds for Cargill, the case will create a split in the Circuits between the Tenth, the Sixth, and the Fifth circuits.

This gives the Supreme Court a strong incentive to hear the case.

Maybe.

But it’s either cowardice or mere stupidity that anyone can look at the description of a machine gun in the law and conclude that a bump stock turns a semi-automatic rifle into a machine gun.

The Supreme Court isn’t immune from cowardice and stupidity.  Therefore, I hold out no hope that the SCOTUS will reverse this awful decision.

As I’ve said before, I have no bump stocks and no arms braces.  But that’s not the point.

It doesn’t matter whether I have them – the only thing that matters is whether free men should have to suffer the infringement of controllers who want to disarm them.  And … whether a federal bureaucracy has the authority to make law in lieu of the Congress.