Source.

On Oct. 8, the justices will take up a dispute over ghost guns — firearms that can be assembled and lack serial numbers. It will be the second day for the justices after they return from a three-month recess to kick off the 2024-25 term.

The Biden administration asked the justices to review a case in which a federal appeals court struck down a regulation governing the sale of kits to make ghost guns, saying it stretched the definition of “firearm” found in the Gun Control Act of 1968.

Justice Department lawyers say ghost guns have turned into an end-run around federal gun control laws, allowing “anyone with access to the internet to anonymously buy a parts kit or partially complete frame or receiver that can be assembled into a working firearm in as little as 20 minutes.”

Gun rights advocates say if the government wants to regulate the sale of ghost guns, it must pass a new law, arguing the feds can’t stretch the 1968 legislation that far.

TTAG is also covering this.

The case, VanDerStok v. Garland, challenges the Department of Justice’s 2022 Final Rule that redefined important legal terms dealing with guns, including “firearm,” “receiver” and “frame,” making the longstanding American tradition of building personal firearms pretty much a thing of the past. Back in April, the court voted 4-3 to consider the challenge.

At issue is whether the DOJ and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) overstepped their bounds in promulgating the Final Rule. Plaintiffs in the case argue that the rule is just another example of the bureaucrat-run agencies ignoring the Administrative Procedures Act (APA) and overstepping their bounds by making laws instead of enforcing them.

That was, in fact, what the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously ruled last November, upholding an earlier district court decision on the matter. In the ruling, Judge Kurt Engelhardt, who wrote the majority opinion, agreed in no uncertain terms that ATF overstepped its bounds in making the Final Rule.

“ATF, in promulgating its Final Rule, attempted to take on the mantle of Congress to ‘do something’ with respect to gun control,” Judge Engelhardt, a Donald Trump nominee, wrote in the opinion. “But it is not the province of an executive agency to write laws for our nation. That vital duty, for better or for worse, lies solely with the legislature.”

The sad thing about all of this is that the judgment was made purely on procedural grounds. The FedGov violated the rules for promulgating new rules.

But the core issue here is the constitutionality of the FedGov regulating the self-manufacture of firearms to begin with. Self-manufacturing of firearms has a very long and respected tradition in America. And so it should remain. The founders wouldn’t have countenanced a law that forbade firearms manufacture and sales without the government knowing and approving.

If the supreme court refuses to tackle the issue of constitutionality, it will leave the door open to future attempt by Congress to pass such a law. This would then need yet another challenge in court, one much less likely to succeed than VanDerStok.

Here is his paper at the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy.

Here is him explaining it in summary fashion.

Source.

The Bay States’ already strict gun laws were made all the more stringent on Thursday when the governor signed sweeping new gun regulations into law, creating live fire requirements for new license holders, and banning most “assault-style firearms.”

A statewide registration system was also added among a broad range of other provisions.

Jim Wallace, the Executive Director of the Gun Owners Action League, told The Boston Herald that GOAL will challenge the law in court.

According to Gov. Maura Healey, An Act Modernizing Firearms Laws is meant to respond to the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen, which overturned state laws making it more difficult to obtain a firearms license, and as a reaction to the growing prevalence of so-called ghost guns.

As a response to Bruen, they tell the supreme court to sod off. They’ll do what they want to do.

And after similar laws in Maryland, Illinois and elsewhere, the supreme court is still running from the issue like scared little girls.

Here is the judgment. It’s a scathing indictment of the ATF.

Of course, this will be fought out in appellate court, including en banc. So it’s far from over because the ATF can’t take a loss like this one.

But the judgment is powerfully reasoned.

Source.

MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow thinks it’s very interesting that Republican vice presidential contender J.D. Vance named his venture capital firm after a magical object from the series The Lord of the Rings (LOTR).

“Lord of the Rings is sort of a favorite cosmos for naming things and cultural references for a lot of far-right and alt-right figures both in Europe and the United States,” said Maddow on Wednesday.

She further noted that Peter Thiel, a billionaire venture capitalist and supporter of Vance, also named one of his companies, Palantir, after a LOTR item.

It is absolutely true that Vance and Thiel are fans of The Lord of the Rings, the fantasy series by J.R.R. Tolkien. Many arch-conservative and probably alt-right figures are as well. Moderates also love LOTR. So do liberals, lefties, and the completely apolitical. That’s because LOTR is one of the most popular and best-selling book series of all time. The films, adapted for the screen by Peter Jackson, were among the highest-grossing movies of all time.

Rachel Maddow is an unstable, screaming little girl.

If I could visit one place in fictional history, it would be The Prancing Pony. Imagine the people you would meet?

Source.

U.S. Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle resigned from her position on Tuesday after her evasive testimony before the House Oversight Committee on Monday, the Associated Press reports.

Well, bye. Maybe for good.

I predict: She knows too much. She is now in danger. Like the folks associated with Blackrock and Austin Private Wealth who shorted Trump’s stock the day before the assassination attempt.

One comment at the link above: “I cannot believe how very few people (almost nobody) are talking about how the AR15 is laying 15 feet from where the sniper shot the 20 year old kid. That kid did not even have a rifle in his hands when the sniper took out his brain pan. Did he even fire a shot?”

Yeah, I mentioned it. But I estimated 20′.

Source.

Because an “educated” pig is harder to track or trap, Kentucky is taking steps to prevent the hunting of feral hogs known to damage crops, woodlands and potentially spread disease.

Kentucky wildlife management officials are finalizing a ban on the hunting of wild pigs in an effort to more easily capture them. Under the new regulation, pigs could still be shot if they’re damaging private land, although wildlife experts are encouraging landowners to instead contact the Department of Fish and Wildlife Resources to have the animals removed.

Steven Fields, an attorney for the department, told lawmakers during a legislative hearing earlier this week that if a sounder — the name for a herd of wild swine — knows it’s being hunted, the sounder avoids humans and shifts its activities to night, making it harder to track.

The Kentucky Fish and Wildlife Commission, the governing board overseeing the KDFWR, voted in December to approve a regulation eliminating the existing year-round hunting season for wild hogs.

Ben Robinson, the wildlife division director at the state agency, told the board the department was trying to prevent “anybody from shooting a pig at any time” because it can make feral hogs hard to trap en masse, something state and federal officials have actively been pursuing.

“It goes against what we’re trying to do with our trapping efforts by educating these pigs, making them much more difficult to trap,” Robinson said in December. “We’re having a lot of success with our partners, [U.S. Fish and] Wildlife Service, USDA, in trapping these animals and keeping them out of Kentucky. So by allowing landowners to just shoot freely, that goes against what we’re trying to do.

Here’s a stunning prediction. This approach won’t work.

I’m not going to get too far into the theories yet about everything else associated with the ugly event that unfolded a few days ago, but I have always followed some basic rules for thought. Among the most basic is the need for consistency. I don’t believe narratives – I believe data. After all, I’m an engineer.

There is an idiot writing for Slate named Myke Cole who penned a commentary titled “Was Thomas Crooks a Good Shot? He Didn’t Need to be.” I’ll let you go read the article for yourself, but there are a number of false statements such as the lack of recoil of the AR-15 being good for not jolting the rifle out of position. Specifically, he states “My experience shooting my M4 was that it was incredibly stable, aptly counteracting the recoil that throws shots off.”

Recoil doesn’t throw a shot off. Recoil may make it more difficult to regain sight picture, but it doesn’t throw a shot off. The bullet has long left the barrel before the shooter’s shoulder moves backwards from recoil (or before, say, a bolt action gun rotates about the pivot point and the barrel moves up).

Furthermore, thank goodness the shooter was using a crappy AR-15 build rather than a Tikka bolt action hunting rifle in 6.5CM, .308, Winchester .270 or 300 Win Mag. A Tikka is a << MOA rifle, whereas that crappy AR he was shooting was probably a 2-3 MOA gun.

Anyway, the narrative is apparently that this shooter was so bad that he was thrown off the shooting team in school for being dangerous, but so good because of using an AR-15 that he could take a single cold bore shot and come within 1 MOA of killing the president (without him turning his head), but then so bad (and here is the real rub for me) that a man on the very back row of the bleachers to Trump’s very left (looking at the stage) was shot and killed. That poor man was a long, long ways from Trump.

If something is inconsistent, it cannot be true. Remember what I said about having rules for my life? I don’t believe things that are inconsistent. This had bothered me since the shooting. I never accepted that we know the full story, and we may never know the full story. But there is a reason that man on the back row of the bleachers perished that day, and it wasn’t because the shooter was good, or bad, or so good, or so bad, or was using an AR-15.

There is much more to this story, and you know it. We all know it, the FedGov knows that we know it, and they can’t make up lies fast enough to cover this up. Trump’s team never requested more SS protection. But oops, now that we’re being investigated, we regret to inform you that we lied and maybe they really did request more SS assets. So sorry.

The Secret Service, after initially denying turning down requests for additional security, is now acknowledging some may have been rejected.

Now acknowledging means we lied and we want to cover that up as some sort of confusion before the investigation castigates us. But now, on to the things I have concluded thus far that make some sense of the poor man in the last row of the bleachers being shot.

Eleven shots were fired that day. Not 6, not 7, not 8, not 9, not 10, but eleven shots. Eleven shots were fired that day. It would be interesting to have examined the weapon the shooter used, and to recover the bullets he shot if possible, and mostly to have recovered the spent brass from the roof. But as local LEOs pressure washed the roof that very day, we will never know. Someone knows, but not us. Not you and me. I doubt there were eleven spent brass casings on the roof.

Next, the shots were fired at four different and distinct distances that day. Not one, not two, not three, but four different distances. What? They didn’t really think we weren’t going to analyze the audio signatures from that day? I will have to say that while not conclusive, I’m not so sure that the figure on the water tower wasn’t a human. But as of yet we don’t know. After all, while the shooter used a drone, the SS had no assets in the air.

There was an open window in the building adjacent to the roof of the building the shooter was on, and more troubling, the single image I’ve seen of the roof of the building shows the shooter’s rifle being some distance away from the shooter (I estimate 20′).

You can fill in the blanks for what we don’t know, or do know, or suspect, but we already know the things I said above. The narrative they have posited is inconsistent and thus cannot be true. There were eleven shots fired that day. Those shots were fired from at least four different distances.

There was more than one shooter (the would-be assassin) or two shooters (the would-be assassin plus the sniper team who took him out).

Prove me wrong.

They’re out there – people who believe strange things about bullet ballistics as if there’s some sort of magic to the science. Interestingly, it’s often the people who think they are the most dedicated to science who believe it has some sort of magical properties.

Polling data from Morning Consult shows 34% of registered Democrats believe it’s “definitely credible” or “probably credible” that the shooting was staged, according to The Washington Free Beacon. Another 18% of Democrats don’t know/aren’t sure whether the shooting was real.

Staged. As if it’s possible to shoot << 1 MOA into an ear, and as if someone would put themselves at risk to pull something like that off.

Here are a couple of good videos, but before we get into them, remember a few things. There is a difference between accuracy and precision. Accuracy has to do with how well your gun does at targeting the same view you have in your crosshairs. Precision has to do with how well your gun groups even if the gun is zeroed on the target.

When we speak of a sub-MOA gun, or a 1 MOA gun, or 1.5 MOA gun, it’s almost always an imprecise figure of speak. Technically, we should speak of a gun that is _____ precise (fill in the blank with 1 MOA or whatever), tested with 5 rounds, or 7 rounds, or 25 rounds, or 100 rounds, using cold bore conditions, with a relative error of ___% (or fractional standard deviation of ___).

It’s easy to say that a gun shoots 1 MOA. It’s much hard to shoot the requisite number of rounds with that gun to get a passing standard deviation with the data. A 3-shot or 5-shot group rarely proves anything. The grouping will increase with increasing number of shots (even under cold bore conditions) until the tails of the distribution are filled in and you have met the Central Limit Theorem. I think most readers will understand what I’ve said here.

This is math, and I know what I’m talking about.

It’s a shame that people rely on politics to inform them rather than admit when they don’t understand mathematics. The inability to admit ignorance is called stupidity. Ignorance isn’t a sin. Stupidity is.

Now to the videos. No one in their right mind would believe you could pull off a fake or staged shooting like this to damage just an ear, especially with a cheap rifle using a red dot sight rather than magnified optics.

Source.

A 72-year-old Montana man shot and killed a grizzly bear after it attacked him while he was alone picking huckleberries, according to the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks.

The man was hospitalized after the encounter, which happened Thursday evening near Columbia Falls on Flathead National Forest lands, the agency said in a news release.

FWP’s wardens and bear specialists referred to the incident as a “surprise defensive encounter.”

The man reportedly shot the bear with a handgun after the adult female grizzly charged him, the release stated. FWP responded to the incident and confirmed the bear was killed.

Neither the article or the press release says what make, model or caliber the handgun was. We would like to know this information.

It’s likely the man is alive because he quickly deployed a handgun rather than following the stupid advice to try bear spray first.