gattsuru
2d ago
If Hayes doesn't shoot Gannon, what crimes, if any, should Gannon be charged with?
Massachusetts doesn't have a specific brandishing statute (to my surprise!), but mostly wraps it up in the assault-with-weapon-without-battery statute. That, too, needs more than the mere presence and visibility of a firearm, and I'd argue too much more. But there's still a lot short of actually pulling the trigger that can trigger the law.
Is Hayes privileged to shoot Gannon?
Depends. Do you mean "brandishing" in the colloquial sense of showing a firearm, or in strict legal sense of having seriously threatened the victim? In addition to the CorneredCat essay I've linked before and I'll link again, as a matter of law, in Massachusetts:
There may be cases where the colloquial brandishing is sufficient to count; I'd certainly argue the moral case where someone points a gun directly at someone, and the law might agree with me (and would in most states; in Mass it's kinda a clusterfuck). But the mere presence and visibility of the firearm is not on its own sufficient. Meanwhile, there is a narrow band where an aggressor can have "engaged in 'objectively menacing' conduct with the intent to put the victim in fear of immediate bodily harm" without a reasonable person seeing that as fear of imminent grievous bodily harm as required for self-defense law to apply... but it'd be really hard to do with a gun.
gattsuru
2d ago
You can brush off the grocery store sample above as hyperbole, but it's not too far off from what happened here.
gattsuru
2d ago
If you want the serious legal talk you'll either need to pay for it or go to a Massad Ayoob seminar, but Cornered Cat's summary is pretty reasonable for the state of the law in most* Red States. For a tl;dr, it's not enough for someone to want to express the desire to kill you: they must be reasonably perceived as able to do so at that time, and reasonably perceived as trying to do so. That's fundamentally fact-based to be evaluated by the jury, but a jury is going to treat someone outside trying to beat a door down with their bare hands very differently from someone taking a fireax to one.
/* a tiny number of red states allow lethal force to defend property in limited situations; these are outside of the current scope of discussion.
... this article is written with similar quality and accuracy as a South Park joke. Compare:
A retired Las Vegas police officer walked free after fatally shooting a retired computer network engineer during a dispute over who had the right of way in a Walmart parking lot. Both men got out of their vehicles. Both were armed. The ex-officer said the retired engineer pointed a gun at him first.
[several paragraphs later...]
Witnesses told police Hoy appeared enraged at a parking lot intersection, yelling at the driver of a Chevrolet Equinox. The Chevy driver, 67-year-old retired Las Vegas police officer Kerry Ruesch, kept driving. Then Ruesch backed up his car and stopped about 10 feet away from Hoy’s Toyota Camry. Both men got out. Ruesch told police that Hoy first held his gun pointed down and then aimed it at Ruesch. The ex-cop said he “reactively pulled out” his holstered .45 caliber handgun and fired several shots. Hoy crumpled to the ground.
Contrast:
Well, that's just a one-off, and it's not technically a lie (and they could argue that this 'must' have been sourced from Ruesch's testimony... if they actually reported it, and found more than a couple pieces of profanity from the nurse they quote).
Compare:
In De Leon Springs, Fla., Edward Druzolowski, 78 years old, was watching a football game on TV when his wife said their neighbor’s 42-year-old son was cutting branches and had come into their yard. Brian Ford, accompanied by his 8-year-old son, had entered through a gate in the fence and carried a chain saw. Druzolowski went out to see for himself. He brought his .357 Magnum handgun, later telling police that he knew Ford had a criminal record and a reputation for violence. He repeatedly told Ford to get off his property. Instead, Ford cursed and walked toward Druzolowski.
Contrast:
And, for the money shot:
One Democratic legislator raised a hypothetical dispute at a supermarket checkout line. “I’m in the 10-items-or-less line, and I’ve got 15. The shopper behind me is understandably irate and proceeds to push me out of line,” Rep. Ari Abraham Porth said. “Can I then pop a cap on him, proceed to check out my 15 items, and ask for a cleanup in line 3?”
“You’re authorized to meet force with force,” said Baxley, who has since left office. “If you’re pushed, you can push back.”
I will bet cash money that this is not the full and honest conversation, or even a remotely accurate summary. Forget the question of whether Baxley was asked Porth's hypothetical and responded like that -- you shouldn't take advice from politicians or funeral home owners, but you don't need to be a lawyer to know Porth's hypothetical is wildly illegal in Florida -- does anyone believe that it's anything other than clipping unrelated conversations, and not even presenting the full argument from the side it doesn't like?
Because if they do, I've got a bridge to sell them.
The only one that I can't find on-the-ground details that they're clearly eliding or outright misleading on is the Mathew Dugger shooting. Maybe because there's almost no coverage of the case on the open internet, maybe because their editors decided one out of three wasn't half bad. Except then it ends in:
Prosecutors in September concluded Wilson’s killing was justified under Montana’s stand-your-ground law.
But in addition to the actual criminal being a literal coke fiend (still illegal to carry while drugged up!) and thus unlikely to have only carried a firearm or tried to shoot someone in an argument because of the state SYG law, it's absolutely not an SYG case -- you are not required to flee before trying to prevent someone from murdering a downed innocent woman.
There's some interesting deeper things that could be said about the wider state of self-defense law (although the FBI numbers are kinda sus if you look at them too hard) and the WSJ analysis is less actual analysis and more looking at a CSV and hitting the filter until you get a chart you like. There's some fun questions about the general state of courts and prosecutions where despite an increasingly-online constant-surveillance panopticon world, we somehow manage to know less and less about these Big Things.
But this news story isn't it, and that people from WSJ to Giffords to Bloomberg can't actually make that story about self-defense shootings... well, it's not strong evidence, because these people are also incompetent liars anyway, but evidence nonetheless.
I'll add a few things that may be too obvious to an expert to mention, but I've found necessary to learn :
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Before doing anything involving mains electric, grab an AC tester, and use it on a known live wire to check the battery. These don't detect DC or stored capacitance, but they're really essential for DIYers who might find reason to distrust whoever labelled their circuit breakers. Taking 110v hurts like a mother, taking 220v can lay you on your ass or cause long-term damage, and there aren't no stinking GFCIs here. AC work is the least likely space to zap you, but you really want to get in this habit before you're standing in a bathroom replacing a vent fan.
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Disable power to the outdoor unit (usually will have a nearby pull-breaker, but pre-00s units might only have the breaker at your main panel) and discharge the capacitor (even a known bad capacitor) before doing anything to the outdoor unit that gets near the wiring, especially anything that involves touching the capacitor. The Proper way to do it involves a tool with a 1k+ ohm resistor and an LED, but the normal way is to just use an insulated-handled screwdriver and touch every lead to every other lead, which isn't healthy for bigger caps but you're probably gonna replace it anyway. Again, you don't want to take 110v, even 'only' for the short period it takes for the cap to discharge across you.
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In many residential units, the capacitor is also used to start the outdoor unit fan: if there's an audible buzzing sound and the fan either isn't working or only works sporadically, 90% odds it's the capacitor, other 10% is the fan... if you get to it soon. If you wait too long, it's both. Guess which one is more expensive and annoying to replace. Those caps will have usually have multiple leads and multiple ratings (eg, 40/10 or 35/5), which means that they run both the fan motor and the compressor motor. Take a picture before removing any leads in general, but especially with these double-check you've got them wired with the right leads on the right rated ends. These seem to be less common in newer residential units?
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You can go with a much higher voltage rating for a capacitor without much trouble (>100% over will probably have shit ESR, and it probably still doesn't matter), but avoid large difference (>25% over) in capacitance if you can avoid it, screws with motor efficiency(? power factor?). Either might not be a problem, since caps are only rated +/- 25% anyway, but if it is an issue it'll be subtle. Don't go under on either. You can get customizable ones, but they don't make sense unless you're working for someone renting out a ton of apartments/houses (and I'd argue not even then). Good to know in case someone else working on your house used one, though.
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A lot of older (early 90s, sometimes early 00s) indoor units will drain directly outdoors rather than into an actual drain. This is technically against code in most of the US now (not for made-up reasons, esp if you have cats, the 'water' ends up heavily contaminated with ammonia), but however it's set up, make sure to pipe the whole thing out all the way to a major drain pipe and/or the dirt.
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Basement units will often have a condensation pump, usually at the end of some PVC (rarely, aquarium silicon tube) coming from your indoor unit. When clogged or where the motor's near-dead it makes a hilariously bad sound. Sometimes can clean em out and reuse, but they're <100 USD at a big box store and <50 USD from online, and if they start to go bad you're probably on the end of a bathtub graph. As above, use an AC tester when replacing them to make sure you turned the power off on the right spot before disconnecting live wires -- I've seen stupid installs where these were on entirely different breakers than the indoor unit proper (and one awful install that was running it on two live phases, wtf).
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I've been told to use vinegar for keeping muck out of condensate lines and pumps. Dunno if that's a regional thing, or superstition about ammonia, or just bad advice, but it does seem to work reasonably. Also helps a ton for sump pumps. You can get specialized tabs for these so you have to look at them less, but I dunno if they're worth it outside of rooftop units.
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A lot of outdoor units are obnoxiously far from any hose spigots. If that's you and you don't want to buy three hundred feet of hose, there's three options: foaming coil cleaner with a bucket, or simple green and a pump sprayer. Some people will recommend soft brushes, but I've been very hesitant because the fins are so fragile. Don't use a pressure washer on your outdoor unit. No, not even if it's got a 'gentle' setting. Yes, professional shops have battery-powered sprayers that are usable for this safely; they're like 300+ USD and you're not going to use them enough to justify it.
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If you buy a used home, check the indoor unit (evaporator) coils. They should be behind a filter and thus need maintenance a lot less often, but especially if you ever had smokers in the house, they get gummed up bad, and a surprising number of people just remove filters and run without them for weeks at a time. Vacuum the intake side, spray with an indoor-safe evap cleaner on both sides of the coils. If it's cooler months already, even if the evap cleaner says it's 'AC-safe', spray gently with water: it's intended to get washed off by condensate, and you don't want to have the stuff sit for six months. This side has thicker fins, so I'm pretty comfortable brushing them with a soft (eg, workbench) brush.
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If your indoor unit is getting cool temperatures, but individual rooms are not, check first if you've got dust buildup in vents, any disconnects or gaps in vent connections, and then consider a booster fan. It's stupid, but especially for attics or big houses they're surprisingly useful.
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If you're trying to get a garage, trailer, or recently reno'd attic air conditioners, and you're planning to stay with it for a while, look at mini-splits. They're more upfront cost and the install is much more obnoxious compared to the typical window unit (eg, you may need a licensed electrician for the final electrical hookup), but they're amazingly effective and much more useful in winter months. Not always the right option, but worth evaluating. Don't even bother with those stupid on-wheels mini-fridge-style units unless you have absolutely no other option, they're terrible.
gattsuru
3d ago
In addition to the normal race-to-the-bottom and lemon problems, there's also uniquely severe incentives toward fraud. Once you tell a lie, the truth will forever be your enemy, and there's a lot of reasons for low-tier immigrant-focused employers to have to lie. And since a few particularly scammy businesses make up the majority of H1-B applications in a few fields, there's a lot of potential to run into hilariously-incompetent people even where the median option would have been meh or even good.
gattsuru
4d ago
gattsuru
4d ago
... I don't like the man, but you may have missed a picture.
gattsuru
4d ago
I think there's a fifty-fifty chance the judge doesn't file an final judgement by the end of day after the conference, a twenty percent chance that they just end up scheduling another briefing (todo: whenever people's rights matter again)...
I guess I can't call this as a prediction since it had already happened, but :
gattsuru
5d ago
Superscript is implemented, just using html codes (E = mc<sup>2</sup> is E = mc2 when unescaped).
I’ll generally use gmail for unimportant stuff, a work email running on a managed service, and have a domain name running with a mid-tier email provider for ‘professional’ but not actual work stuff. Unfortunately enough of my day-to-day operations are normie-interacting enough where protonmail would seem weird or skuzzy, but I do know some of the advantages.
A lot of the difference depends on your use case and threat model. I’m not especially concerned about a google getting email spam notifications for web services I don’t care about, but there’s more serious issues if you work in AI safety or the DoD.
gattsuru
5d ago
Uh... more pointing at the upskirt, though I recognize it's a relatively subtle version of that. MarcusGrayArts put more of an emphasis on 'that's a saran-wrapped sausage', but it's also not even arguably non-porn.
If you're looking at femboy muscle, maybe something like this (cw: gay ass in gayer underwear, don't look at the rest of the artist's feed unless you like gay porn)?
gattsuru
7d ago
I'll caveat that there is femboy stuff aimed at gay men (not even always aimed at people who want to be the femboy, and sometimes not even at tops!)... and it starts at the 100% side of that bar (cw: femboy, furry, no bits but probably awkward to explain to your employer, Helldivers reference) and usually is going to aim for 110%+.
gattsuru
8d ago
To be clear, this isn't The Most Central Example of the problems. Unfortunately, time is an arrow, the door is ajar, talking about problems seldom coincides with maxima happening. If I absolutely had to point to a case that screamed out for preliminary injunction, I'd probably point to the Illinois ban-sans-definition, since it's a new law so all the 'maintain status quo' stuff was self-evident bunk and SCOTUS didn't care even as lower courts announced that the bans didn't even implicate 2A rights. Maybe sprinkle in some of CCW permit/renewal cases which are basically distilled "important and recurring issues which, by virtue of their relatively brief existence, would be rendered otherwise nonreviewable" and often also include state actors ignoring their own law, and never seem to matter.
But part of my point is to show that it's not some rare nutpicks, or just for cases so controversial as to get to SCOTUS, or only one particularly extreme or unusual policies, or only in particularly left-leaning jurisdictions and you could just move to a red state. On its own, this case wouldn't be that bad; maybe, eventually, someday, if a mandate ever issues and an FFL isn't terrified of the ATF playing silly buggers in three years, a 20-year-old will be able to legally buy a new handgun. But when no one can pull a counterexample from some vastly overexpansive ruling from one of Trump's many ideologically-driven and unprofessional nutjobs larger than Freedom Week, and no one can show a bigger or more by-the-book victory, and I can keep giving example after example after example over fifteen years of jurisprudence, it's a much more relevant pattern.
gattsuru
8d ago
For clarity, is the male portion of this category as broad as anyone who like to bottom for people of the opposite gender, anyone who wants to bottom for people of the opposite sex, men who want to bottom for anyone with breasts, or just specifically men who like to get pegged by women?
It's unclear whether NAACP would actually apply in this case. That case involved an as-applied challenge, not a facial one, and an challenge in this case would accordingly only be successful if the Plaintiffs could demonstrate both that the disclosure was unnecessary and that it would subject the members to harm.
While courtrooms and mathematicians might need people to demonstrate 1 + 1 = 2, actual humans -- including judges acting of their own volition -- can notice that a) the DoJ has a long history of leaking private information like a sieve after collecting it from right-wing-aligned orgs, b) no small number of SAF's members would face social and career ramifications were their membership publicized, and c) plaintiffs presented alternatives over two weeks before the judge submitted this final judgement.
I'm sure the court can Well Asckshutally how that's not quite the explicit standard from NAACP. I'm also hoping that the 'winners' in a court case not need be faced with the question of whether the final judgement is so unconstitutional it's covered all four corners under a decades-old foundational court case, or 'just' unreasonable and harmful to the 'winners' and likely unconstitutional.
My point here isn't that requiring such a disclosure would necessarily be impermissible, just that the judge isn't incompetent for assuming it wouldn't be, as there's no blanket rule prohibiting the government from making such a request.
The government did not make a request. The judge ordered that the full list be delivered, in three weeks, as a final judgment binding on the parties in this case. As you so wittingly pointed out, punishable by contempt for noncompliance. If you ignore what's voluntary and what's actually mandated by court order, the court orders look fine, but you've made this mistake multiple times in this conversation, and it's fooling no one else.
I'm not claiming it's incompetence -- I specifically say "regardless of Summerhayes' relative level of competence"! -- but it's clearly a problem, and more a problem for never even questioning whether the people he's targeting would want to comply, and if the search for neutral institutions just means we get a random selection between this and "the Second Amendment does not exist in this courtroom", all it's presented is a good argument against neutral institutions.
You have no idea what else the judge had to deal with in those 18 days, and he isn't going to drop everything to issue one order among many he has on his plate. The fact that he got it in within 30 suggests that he had a normal workload, but if the submissions hit in the middle of a trial it could have taken months before he got to it.
Behold, a federal courthouse operating at peak efficiency under normal constraints. I'm not claiming these guys are just sitting on their backside and eating bonbons the whole day long, and I'm sure there's other priorities. And I'm also pretty sure that they're not putting in 9/9/6 weeks. This just wasn't a priority.
I know this is your hobby horse and you think that these cases should take precedence because they involve fundamental rights or whatever, but every case involves someone looking for their rights to be vindicated.
That's an unintentionally funny joke. The courtroom's activities on September 19th were a sentencing hearing for a prohibited person case (drugs, coincidentally, albeit somehow still more sympathetic than Hemani), a revocation of supervised release, and then the one case that actually involved the judge in question here, a drug-related warrant case. The first two just plainly aren't about vindicating rights; they're about enforcing the law. An important role, but a different one.
Ah, but if the court had delayed Sam, perhaps I or someone else would be moaning about that... well, no, probably not. Apologies for linking to an AI summary, but I'm not paying for this case, and there's a reason no one else is either; it's hilariously overdetermined even by the morbid standards of Fourth Amendment questions. And, bluntly, I don't think that's the actual tradeoff.
There's a more serious defense that the courts can't do that sort of prioritization. And it died with Snope. They can and do and have. This just isn't a priority; this just doesn't take precedence when countless other matters have. That's absolutely my point, and more damning's that it isn't limited to this one hobby horse.
It seems that your overriding problem with the courts stems not so much from any of the things you describe, but with the fact that they don't always rule the way you want them to.
No. My problem is that I could buy either a court system actually obsessed with legal formalism, or one that considers the rights of individuals heavy on the scale regardless of the political allegiance of those rights. We have neither. We've had neither for a long time. I've spelled out that we've had neither for a long time.
But I'm not sure what your argument is here by posting a totally different case from a different court. Just because courts grant emergency releif in some cases doesn't mean it's appropriate in every case, and you haven't made the argument that it would have been appropriate here. They didn't ask for emergency relief because there was no grounds to do so, and of course the judge wouldn't grant the motion.
By, of course, the extremely well-grounded and long-standing principles of where that tots haven't been rebuilt post-hoc to support progressive goals and ignore conservative ones, you mean?
No, they didn't ask for emergency relief here for the same reason they didn't request a temporary restraining order, even though that'd be the only way for any of their plaintiffs to ever actually personally benefit: because the courts would suddenly find novel and strict adherence to very specific precedent, while other judges in other contexts would find such things irrelevant compared to the terrified hallucinations of an immigration lawyer.
If this is your complaint maybe you need to consider the possibility that you hold a fringe position that's broadly unpopular, and that it's unreasonable for you to expect the courts to do everything you want them to do, or that maybe Federal judges know a little more about the law than you do.
Considered, found in contradiction with the (available, since you don't bother actually arguing it) evidence, and even were it true, still runs into the central problem that we've still seen courts bend over backwards to defend fringe positions that were broadly unpopular, by federal judges that pretended to know a lot about the law as long as it got them what they wanted. All it's done is demonstrate nothing but will to power games winning.
More broadly, your complete inability to name any case where this should fall the other direction makes clear exactly how principled this position isn't. We're over a decade past a President completely refusing to defend a federal law because he thought it unconstitutional; there's no shortage of such gun laws today, no few of which have far less political or popular support. We do not see that happen today, no matter how bullshit or outright incoherent the law, nor do we see the administration assigning Guiliani to defend the laws badly on purpose. It's not a tactic that they use because it won't work, and they've found that out once already.
I don't know whether the groups in question are willing to provide the names of people whom the order would still apply to in a meaningful way. If there are a few such people, they might, with consent, release the names to the ATF in order to secure the injunction. I think this is what next week's conference is going to be about, and why the judge wants to hold one instead of simply signing a joint order.
There were only three plaintiffs when this case started, and the court for some godsforsaken reason isn't willing to include someone who already declared his name publicly after the case started and before it concluded, and was the only reason the plaintiffs still had standing, and would not have been covered by the previous final judgement even had SAF been willing to hand over their membership records.
I think there's a fifty-fifty chance the judge doesn't file an final judgement by the end of day after the conference, a twenty percent chance that they just end up scheduling another briefing (todo: whenever people's rights matter again), and whatever he does eventually give is a pointless pro forma that just delays the plaintiffs appeal and issuance of mandate, applying to a single-digit number of people or no one. 30% confidence it doesn't even include Broussard.
((Also, I was asking for your predictions in one of the trans military ban case. The one I linked where the courts already issued a pre-CASA injunction, where the court never did in this case, and where oral arguments have repeatedly shown judges trying to argue for the most expansive judgement possible post-CASA. By legal formalism, that's just the seven plaintiffs in that case; there's not even association standing. Do you want to bet whether that will change, and whether the join date on that organization will be set in January of this year? For the inevitable declaratory judgement?))
But beyond that, the upshot of the case is that the government won't be able to prosecute FFL holders for selling guns to 18-year-olds in the Fifth District... Whether or not any gun stores will be willing to sell to anyone under 21 is an open question, and is up to the discretion of the stores themselves.
Strange how they'd be willing to leave money on the table, if it were so certain. Oh well, good thing we don't have recent cases where the federal courts issued broad rules that the feds would have to follow to soothe the nerves of randos making broad and unsupported claims of bad actions or suspected bad actions!
gattsuru
8d ago
gattsuru
8d ago
To be clear, I'm not making allegations that there are clear violations of process or defiance of higher court. I have other examples for that. I'm making three different criticisms, here:
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Regardless of Summerhayes' relative level of competence or political alignment, there are pretty clear problems in this decision. A federal judge should not accidentally issue a ruling that leaves people referencing NAACP v. Alabama in rejoinder. The previous proposed order does not cover Broussard, a named member of the plaintiff orgs, who was the only reason the plaintiffs still had standing, which the plaintiffs specifically noted would not be protected by the language that the court adopted. The extreme constraint of declaratory relief are even less defensible, and seem to be based on an active misread of the Declaratory Judgement Act promoted by the defendants playing a game of telephone with citing mangled citations to irrelevant cases. And as a lesser bugaboo, the court could have read 44 pages and written a 2 page order in less than 18 days; I expect more from teenagers writing book reports, and many of them don't have this sort of grievous error at the same time they scrawl out their five paragraph essays the night before.
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((I'm using his name, specifically, because I'm trying to make a not-very-subtle dick pun as a contrast to the length-of-a-pregnancy one, and it's a lot less funny if the judge in question here was a woman or named Richard.))
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Going to relative competence, it's a problem if this is that average behavior, and that these are Just The Ways Things Are Done in the courts. Yes, it's absolutely normal for the courts to give out broad extensions; it's absolutely normal to rubber stamp the government's requests on final judgement; it's absolutely standard for the wheels of justice to grind slow and fall back on prayer when it gets to fine. It's absolutely normal for the government to treat the ATF and DOJ like honest actors, and anyone complaining about it to a judge would only hurt their own case. I'll quibble about the difference between joint and uncontested actions, and recognize that there are worse courts, but ultimately, they end here.
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Going to political alignment, it's a problem that there are exclusions to this standard. The ability of courts to offer widespread orders even very early in process and posture is not a casualty of CASA. Yes, there's a defense of the court process that in that case, people filed a request for an order (though I will note that they didn't request many specifics the judge ordered anyway, like the body cameras). Those plaintiffs were willing to request the moon, earth, and sky because they knew that they had a significant chance of getting it, and faced little risk of slowing their case's roll otherwise; the plaintiffs in Reese knew, quite well, that they had absolutely zero chance until after a lengthy appeal process that would outlast any relevance of the case to themselves.
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And, leaving aside the judicial system itself, I can point out that the Most Pro-Gun Administration Ever futzed around with considering a cert grant for months on end, and then could not come up with either a compromise or a reasonable request for judgment, and in that entire time still has not written a guidance letter to FFLs who this case would immediately impact and who the government is willing to tell -- but only in non-binding ways and only months after supposedly making the decision -- that it tots promises not to prosecute them (offer only good until a Dem administration thinks it's going to win in court). Yes, I understand how the difference between precedent and judgement works; I also understand that post-Defense Distributed settlement being treated like toilet paper, that this means a lot less than lawyers pretend it does.
I'm not sure what the case you linked is supposed to prove since the opinion was issued before CASA was decided.
I'm trying to make a prediction, and to get a prediction in response: if the case is not mooted or lost, do you believe that its final judgement will be solely limited to the seven current plaintiffs?
Whether or not vendors trust the ATF to not enforce the law is irrelevant if the court is powerless to grant an injunction.
The court isn't powerless to grant an injunction. The court has expansive opportunities to grant relief, so long as those opportunities are specific to the parties in this case. It's just not going to do so because no one asked it, and no one asked because they know and anyone remotely familiar with the courts knows that the courts won't grant such a request, as a matter of long-standing policy.
And other courts have been quite happy to jump up and down on that bar when they do not trust the government, or even when plaintiffs make sufficiently sordid stories about how they don't trust the government and we gotta have a ruling asap because of that.
They don't want to turn over a list, but they have no problem making their members voluntarily disclose their affiliation every time they buy a gun. I find it curious and a bit disingenuous, that's all.
No, they say that having members who want to buy a gun specifically under a legal defense provided by being a member of that organization 'making' that voluntary disclosure would at least be a possible response that doesn't involve telling the winners in a court case to sit on NAACP and spin. It's only one of the options that the plaintiffs provided, and the one they'd favor least, but it's a lot less destructive than 'here's our member list uncle sam please don't leak it'.
gattsuru
9d ago
As a general skill, it's notoriously mixed, not least of all because a good portion of the expert writers are wishcasting what they'd like to happen.
For my guesses, specifically? It's probably worth doing a serious retrospective breaking things down by the numbers at some point, but until I do, you can read along pretty easily. I've been hilariously overoptimistic in Viramontes, nailed VanDerStok and Rahimi and exactly what happened to Lujan Grisham, was too pessimistic on Bruen's result and too optimistic on its impact.
I don't think I wrote out that I expected a punt in Cargill (rather than the limited pro-gun read we did get), but I did think it, so take that with whatever value it has as an additional error. For non-gun cases, too optimistic-on-my-view and pessimistic from that of the average soccon for Skrmetti, too pessimistic for Fulton itself but a good guess for what would happen moving forward for others in similar cases.
gattsuru
9d ago
Do you think my posts above are about -- or even discussing! -- who was the wrongest wrong in wronglandia? Or did you just decide that's what everyone responding to you could only possibly be discussing?
Because I'll point out, to be extremely explicit, that I did not actually say that Republicans hadn't done anything bad, that there's no remotely charitable read of "approximately zero people in power in politics are interested in actually persuading or compromising on those policy disagreements, and even the virtues of an opposing side are being twisted into vices" that would exclude Republicans. You might even notice that I pointed out, to be extremely explicit, some things that Democratics were peeved about, and some of them could at least be described as reasonable differences of opinion.
I think there's a deeper discussion, on that matter, and if you don't care, I'm not going to waste my time or yours any further.
gattsuru
9d ago
Hm.
... any discussion that veers in the direction of "What happens when the other side does this?" will get a hundred stories about how the other side is worse anyway, the other side has been defecting forever, and only after we crush them and make them lick the soles of our boots might they learn to behave and restore a kind of equilibrium...
Do you think that the post I wrote above is just slapping into that category? If so, do you understand why I'd be uninterested in trying to go into deeper discourse, or expect it to be unproductive?
gattsuru
9d ago
I don't know what fucking script you think I'm following
I dunno what you're following, but you literally gave a list of what analysis and response you expected here, which me very uninterested in discussing the actual facts on the ground.
No, I do not think Trump refraining from literal shitposting would make things better. You're right, the brakes are off and it's too late. Congratulations, you win. I am not arguing for pragmatism. I am describing what I see. I do not expect "Who started it and who was worse?" to be a relevant question in the future.
That's a much more straightforward answer to the question:
what do you believe the Democrats will do as a consequence of particular Trump actions that they would not do otherwise? In short, what concrete effect on Democratic legislative or activist actions or priorities do you think a less-crass Trump administration would have?
I'm not seeing any undue delay here, just the normal operation of the judicial system.
A year ago, that was a plausible argument. It's not longer a plausible one. The normal operation of the judicial system now has the highest court in the land intervene to defend absolute randos in overnight on a holiday weekend. It means something when that happens then, and literally never here.
First, the ATF made it clear that it recognizes the court's decision and does not intend to enforce the prohibition within the geographic boundaries of the Fifth Circuit. That's the general consequence.
They only claimed that they did not plan to begin enforcement actions of an unconstitutional law as of September 2nd -- again, nearly eight months after the Circuit decision. There is no guidance issued to vendors, even today. And, unsurprisingly, vendors are not in a particular hurry to trust the ATF pinky swears.
And while the Plaintiffs made good arguments overall on this point, the most they could have gotten by my admittedly brief reading was an extension to members as of the date of the judgment.
Do you think that standard will be consistently applied to other causes?
I think that what happened in the end is that, in light of the CASA decision and that nether party could provide anything that was really on point and not possibly overruled by CASA, the judge was disinclined to grant any specific relief to any parties beyond those absolutely necessary to resolve the case, and gave the government more or less the order they asked for.
Yes, the judge gave the government exactly what it wanted (and then a little more), after the government had spent long years infringing on the rights of. And that's just how things go, when it comes to civil rights that progressives don't like. And I'm spelling it out.
(one suggested that the ATF form be amended to ask if the buyer was a member of a Plaintiff organization; aside from the impracticality of the government amending its forms to account for a small subset of purchasers, I doubt these groups want their members undergoing a guaranteed ATF investigation to verify their memberships)
It's a violation of federal law to lie on a form 4473 -- you may remember some high-profile schmuck with a neopotistic background getting a pretty weird pardon after a big criminal lawsuit on this matter -- and this would leave a lot of valid ways for anyone with a brainstem to think of ways for the ATF to validly prosecute violations only where they had reasonable belief, without first having a full list of the org's membership, that a specific member did not belong to the org. You know, if they weren't also claiming that they were not going to prosecute this particular unconstitutional offense to start with, making the whole question moot.
Now, ATF, so they'd probably still shoot someone and their dog while politely serving a subpeona for membership records specific to a named individual against a third party. But not because of this proposal.
There's ways to solve these problems. There's ways to solve these problems even under the most expansive reading of CASA imaginable, the way that's never getting applied to a single left-wing cause. But you know, and I know, that's never going to happen here.
gattsuru
9d ago
Even in places famous for promoting non-heterosexuality, there's a lot more guys who like woman-and-people-who-have-boob+dick than who like men-and-people-who-have-boob+dick, even before adjusting for demographics. The former category isn't universal or even common among otherwise-straight men, but if I had to guess, there's probably more of it than there are attractive trans woman in the real world. The latter category does exist, but it's really small, and most of the examples are more on the AGP or trans side.
There's some fun argument-about-definitions going on -- the tops are still fucking XY-chromosoned people some of the time, yes -- but whatever the resulting category is called, it's somewhat interesting that it's around. If even a small fraction of this population fit the stereotype of just wanting some breasts around to keep their other attraction toward the male form deniable, you'd expect to see some outputs fitting that, and it's really just not.
(by comparison, that's absolutely a category that shows up in bi porn: Corbin Fisher's a little infamous for having their main talent literally throw the women into the background or out of the camera frame to focus on the real action.)
Yeah, that sounds about standard for New Jersey, and why The_Nybbler's so direct to say that they've made the Second Amendment a nullity: "When dealing with guns, the citizen acts at his peril." Also a large point to why GVRO/Red Flag laws are given such skepticism. It's not hard to see this as what their advocates want, where the standard of proof to remove someone's rights is nearly nil, and they must jump high and arbitrary hurdles to get those rights back. And, of course, none of the takings clause people are going to come climbing out of the woodwork for this stuff.
But no serious org is going try to take this sorta case -- both because of its optics, and also just because he didn't cross every i and dot every t to preserve issues and present evidence perfectly -- and neither would the New Jersey State Supreme Court nor SCOTUS take it up if they did. Nobody that isn't already pro-gun is going to be appalled that they've read Rahimi to cordon Heller to a nullity, even a lot of self-described libertarians. And it shows how badly calibrated anyone must be to expect a 'bank shot' SCOTUS case that rules against its specific person while protecting the class of rights that person was trying to appeal toward.
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