And again, while it's onerous, practically speaking this shouldn't be a problem - people are required to store records and to use a document service if they sunset their practice. This is a common thing.
It's a minimal obligation to mental health professionals, who have to deal with this sort of thing on a regular basis. It's absolutely a serious problem for normal people, because randos don't have rolodexs going back into their childhood.
For a simple job background check, this doesn't matter, because if you're mistaken you just thank them for finding information you forgot, and at worst you don't get the job. For the FPIC, it's a strict liability offense and even if not prosecuted, prohibits any future FPICs with the corrected data.
With respect to your linked case, are you familiar with it?
Yes, which makes a lot of the summary by the lower court a little annoying.
The 'terrorist threats' were a reddit The Purge-themed thread, and a "Shut The Fuck Up Liberals" protest sign. The acting out with aggression and violence was from an incident where a Penn State professor beat him in the face while he was protesting COVID mandates. It's very unclear that he's even violated the law, nevermind in a way that would result in a felony charge.
The guy is a racist asshole (and moreover, the sort of person who'd wear the badge "racist asshole" with a grin). I absolutely wouldn't trust him with my login info, or to be polite to ... basically anyone, but and especially to be polite to anyone African-American, trans, or XX-chromosone'd. Some of the stuff floating around is downstream of people just smearing him over his politics, but some of it is genuinely some personality disorder (although I'd guess oppositional or defiant) and a good deal of it is just that he's that sort of asshole.
But if we're going to start stripping constitutional rights from people on the basis of making a bad social media post that a normal person while see as dangerous, or being enough of an asshole that someone wants to punch them, well, Do I Have A Deal For You.
Not a good test case.
The good test cases don't try to press the law when it pushes back, or flee these restrictions, or just quietly resent over in a corner.
There was a time where waiting for or building perfect test cases was persuasive, but between NYSRPA I, Whitaker, and most importantly the willingness of courts to dive down over holiday weekends to rescue absolute scumbags in other contexts, it's stopped being persuasive.
gattsuru
1d ago
"I went a few times as a kid to rule out ADHD and my parents and I don't have any records." Should be slam dunk 2A case
Unfortunately, no. The only successful challenges to the FPIC have been statutory (basically just Polotov, where 'lying' during an evidentiary hearing, rather than on paper, was not covered by the statute's 'essential character' clause or the "any person who knowingly falsifies any information on the application form for a handgun purchase permit" clause). Because you're stuck in a state court, the state court findings are given preclusion and Rooker-Feldman protection, and the state courts are New Jersey, they consistently point to the Bruen Footnote 9 and flip you the bird.
In The_Nybbler's specific hypothetical, the state will also just refuse to process an incomplete filing, so you have ripeness problems (and the state will argue against 18 USC 1983 federal charges allowing you to bypass exhaustion requirements).
I'm noting that your highlighted text does not note that seeing a psychiatrist outpatient is exclusionary.
Yes, the state can sometimes grant an FPIC to people who have had past outpatient care. And then sometimes it won't. And a past denial or incorrect statement is itself cause for a denial on later requests.
gattsuru
1d ago
There's a lot of ways to seriously defend some COVID responses. I was a COVID hawk, and if not as aggressive as what coastals had to deal with, not only a hawk by Tophattington standards, and I'm still more mid-position than most here. But the trouble here is that people either need to seriously defend, or actively eject, bad actors. Fauci isn't some rando, and whether he was actively lying, rather than mistaken, is a massive deal even and especially if you want a serious public health response to ever work ever again.
gattsuru
1d ago
To be fair, SAF and Reason have put a bit of publicity for the AAR case I linked. But you're right that it's not a major action target, and while there's some charitable reasons for that -- it's heavily insulated from review for the San Remo cause, SAF is really trying to get Koons down first and has funded some attacks on FPIC denials under state law, and Footnote 9 is a hard lift even if the clear text should pull against arbitrary decision-making like NJ's -- they're just complicated ways of saying your complaint is true.
It's not decided and lost; it's impossible to get a decision on and doomed.
The direct and actual defiance is a possibility. It'd be a massive escalation and the theory that state courts aren't bound by federal courts doesn't stop federal courts from handing out 18 USC 1983 rewards like candy. But the federal courts haven't really done that before in past cases of defiance, so the theoretical threat might not stop people.
Hence why this seems like a useful measure and metric.
gattsuru
2d ago
There's a lot of fun stuff like that. The supposed explosive nature of an AR-15 round on deer is traditionalist fuddlore, and you could at least imagine it's a bit messy if you try to use it for squirrel, but here I'm just more impressed that it's not even talking about the right concept, or plausibly talking about the right concept. It's a nitpick to say that AR-15s come in .22LR variants, but in the general class of semiautomatic rifles, the feed mechanism has nothing to do with the round and .22lr is very common and might even be a majority option. So there, the claim's not even wrong.
For an even better one, I'd like to highlight the 'ten times the energy of a musket ball' one, since I did chase its origin down. Because if you've ever been to a public range in hunting season, that's the sort of claim that makes you double-check: there's always some asshole with a 'realistic' antique muzzleloader, and they're actually pretty similar in muzzle velocity and boom to a modern centerfire rifle. And while a musket ball is much less aerodynamic than a modern bullet, it's also much less likely to overpenetrate. An order of magnitude difference in impact energy is pretty implausible for any practical range.
The actual specific claim appears to be downstream of this paper, having gone through several layers of citogenesis and the guy providing an 'expert declaration' to several court cases. Notably, the guy only publishes this claim in opinion pieces, and the procedure seems hilariously bad.
Like not every trying bad (cw: powerpoint slide deck, yes, really). He somehow found a 'musket ball' that had a lower-weight bullet (3.531 grams) than a 5.56 NATO bullet (3.564 grams). I don't know how he managed to do it on purpose; even pistol balls were two or three times that weight, and a small rifle musket ball would be almost an order of magnitude bigger. There's a ton of other methodological errors, the use of a broken sensor like an actual data point, standing wave edge effects, yada yada, but they're almost besides the point when he's not even doing a real comparison of the thing he claims he's comparing.
He doesn't even seem to think it's worth hiding it! Forget academic misconduct, let's just go lie in a sworn declaration before courts!
ANJRPC v. NJAG Case Law
The Third Circuit has found:
Applying the framework announced in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, 597 U.S. 1 (2022), we agree with the District Court that New Jersey’s ban on Colt AR-15s violates the Second Amendment.
However, because the record supports the same result for all semi-automatic rifles—not only Colt AR-15s—we will MODIFY the District Court’s order so that it deems the Assault Firearm Provisions unconstitutional with respect to the full class of semi-automatic rifles. We will AFFIRM that part of the order as modified. The LCM Provisions also violate the Second Amendment, so we will REVERSE the District Court’s order with respect to those. Because the LCM Provisions violate the Second Amendment, we need not address the Takings Clause challenge.
Mea culpa, I expected a loss or a close and constrained ruling, but this is about as broad as the gunnie side of the equation could hope for. The court has directly overturned the state's aggressive (and expanding) assault weapons ban as to rifles, the magazines ban to 10-round limits and strongly motioned about 15-round limits, and it even sent the case back to the district court to take a deeper look at the pistols, shotguns, and 'other weapons' with a pretty strong implication that the bans on those should fail, too. Doesn't mean the lower court will take that seriously, but it's strong encouragement.
The breakdown is interesting.
Freeman, who wrote the fire-breathing main opinion, is an early Biden appointee. In a fairer world, this sort of adherence to the Constitution come hell or high water would be a feather in her cap for cross-party appeal; in this one, it's just going to make her enemies on 'her' nominal side and maybe buy some discretion should a conservative Senate ever go hog-wild investigating Thackerisms. Not that a lifetime appointment as an appeals justice is a bad job. New Jersey built the law here with a ton of interlocking 'workarounds' that didn't exist in practice, with a permit that literally never issued and an attorney general carveout that closed in 1990, and Freeman tears into them fully on the record rather than letting the state skate on them. She's joined by six Trump-appointed judges, two Bush-appointed judges, and one other Biden-appointed judge (Montgomery-Reeves).
Most of the concurrences are just doubling down on that, and giving the state even less benefit of the doubt. No explicit writing from Bove, which would have surprised me but for how complete Freeman's opinion is.
The plain dissents side are pretty unsurprising, except to notice how bizarrely bad they are, even taking their legal positions for granted. Shwartz (Obama) claimed, and three other judges sign onto the claim, that "semiautomatic weapons are unlikely to aid in hunting for food or trophies given the destruction they cause to the target". That's not a serious matter available for debate, or a remotely defensible one; I'm hard-pressed to come up with a justification for it beyond intentionally signaling complete lack of knowledge about basic firearm functioning. Krause (Obama) opens her dissent with a paean to gun manufacturers having "pumped a sufficient (yet undefined) number of them into nationwide circulation", which is very hard to make fit with economic demand so severe that a small industry built up around people throwing together their own, and then later approvingly repeats a claim (from St Eve, a Trump appointee!) that a bullet from an AR-15 "releases ten times the energy of a musket ball upon impact", which is either very confused or simply wrong, since the two rounds from a normal rifle have near-identical muzzle energy and similar impact energy. Smith (Bush) has a one-page dissent motioning to Bianchi, which a) thank you very much Kavanaugh, very useful percolation and b) seems really unlikely to persuade any one of the four SCOTUS justices that already said in Snope's dissent-from-cert-denial or 'statement' that Bianchi was likely in direct conflict with past SCOTUS holdings.
It's worth spelling out how long the case has been bouncing around, and how little intervening SCOTUS jurisprudence seems to have shifted anyone's positions. Shwartz wrote one of ANJRPC's first three-judge appeal opinions in 2018, and while it actually said intermediate scrutiny at the time, it's pretty much the same logic as his position now. Hardiman, Bibas, Porter, Matey and Phipps all dissented from the original denial en banc hearing in November of 2020, before SCOTUS GVR'd the case, and Shwartz, Krause, and Restrepro all voted against rehearing the case back then.
((There's some minor comedy in the breakdown when you look at the original panel: the case was plucked up for en-banc review before judgement after SCOTUS GVR'd it in 2022, but the panel was Freeman, Shwartz, and Smith, aka a 2-1 loss for ANJRPC, and one where Freeman would have been a Biden appointee dissenting in favor of gun rights. Since Freeman had three months between oral arguments and initial en banc, there's probably a fantastic story we'll never hear about how much of this opinion started as a dissent.))
There's a complaint that the majority opinion feels a bit like an amici brief to Viramontes. Montgomery-Reeves's (Biden) concurrence is circumspect to say the court should have waited for SCOTUS before issuing their opinion, but it's not a subtle subtext from a couple dissents.
The mirror to that is that the dissents aren't. Krause's legal theory, defining 'common use' to require common wear for self-defense, is outright incompatible with the history from Heller and makes little if any sense to apply in this route for a bare possession ban. Shwartz promotes the "dangerous and unusual" = "unusually dangerous" rule from Hanson and NAGR, but that's just the interest-balancing test that SCOTUS had repeatedly tried to slap down. Chung's position is straddling both. I'm not going to pretend John "Article III Is <Not> Worth a Dollar" Roberts is steel in his principles, but it's hard to see him reading these dissents as anything but an argument to reward lower court defiance of SCOTUS dicta, and harder still to see these arguments in any other form.
Practical Ramifications
A big question is what, precisely, the court case actually means.
As The_Nybbler is sure to point out, this doesn't actually help with New Jersey's FPIC, where the state has banned mere possession based on people being really annoying. For procedural reasons it's near impossible to challenge a specific FPIC denial in federal courts unless and until SCOTUS grants cert for a state court decision because petitioners are encourage to bring their statutory appeal in front of a state judge (and may have to in order make their claim ripe and redressable for a federal as-applied lawsuit), but once they've done so federal district and appeals courts are constrained from reviewing a case or controversy that has already been litigated in state courts. That's the San Remo trap in takings clause jurisprudence, but applied with a felony charge. There might be workarounds -- San Remo got a bypass through Knick -- but Knick took decades, and is pretty tied to takings clause process stuff. Facial challenges are a little easier to bring, but post-VanDerStok, they're also facing a hell of an uphill battle, because no matter how arbitrary the 'essential character and temperament' requirement might be, not issuing permits to a convicted felon is legitimate. There's a tension here where SCOTUS seems to bring that Salerno 'no set of circumstances' strictly or not depending on the context, but even if FPICs are closer to Heller than VanDerStok, it's a long shot.
New Jersey's post-Bruen tantrum bill still makes carry licenses incredibly difficult to get and useless if achieved, and while Koons is still outstanding and before the same court, a ruling in this case is only tea leaves for a ruling in Koons. Outside of pure impossibility, the court here doesn't really handle pretextual restrictions. And there's obviously no ruling on the pistol, shotgun, or other weapon restrictions; that's on the lower court.
But there's also the question of the four corners of the ruling itself.
This is a first, both as an en banc circuit court striking down a broad assault weapon/magazine ban, and for a gun case with a broad and immediate impact. Bruen and Heller and McDonald were all permission to get a license or registration that previously wasn't possible at all, leading to Heller needing to wait months to register his specific gun from the case (and being denied for a semiautomatic handgun), and to New York City spending years with fewer issued carry permits than before Bruen. Here, removing the law it itself a categorical switch, and one that covers a wide variety of locations, both in New Jersey and in Delaware, and blocks some Pennsylvania bills that were getting increasing political pressure. But.
New Jersey residents can't go out and buy an AR-15 legally, yet. Under federal court rules, the opinion drops (in cases without a federal law), then there's a two-week period to submit a request for a stay or rehearing, and then a week after that, mandate issues to the lower courts. The precedent is set with the ruling, but the law gets to stay in effect until mandate issues, or if a stay is granted, until the stay concludes. That'd be July 31st for New Jersey's deadline, and August 7th for the mandate issuing. Possibly plus a couple days; ANJRPC is saying that the court clerk is planning to actually issue on August 10th.
But New Jersey resident can't go out and buy an AR-15 practically, yet, because in the state, it's only legal to buy a firearm from an FFL with a state Retail Firearms Dealer's License. Those regulations mean that the merchant has given permission to regular warrantless searches, and a single illegal transaction (even if under a law he or she can't be prosecuted for at the time of inspection) could mean waving goodbye to the licenses and thus business. The various laws about import and transfer weren't cleanly blocked by this opinion, cfe again Nybbler's complaints. And it's illegal for a New Jersey resident to go out-of-state to buy a rifle from someone, or for an out-of-state FFL to sell a gun to New Jersians, even if the buyers were willing to roll the dice on the possession ban.
Magazines, however, don't hit any of those requirements. The big vendors aren't going to ship them to a New Jersey address because they'll get sued, and even a meritless suit is expensive as hell. And New Jersey has been aggressive about lawsuits targeting vendors who sell lawful gun components under other theories. But in practice, there's a lot of merchants who were selling normal magazines, and an even larger number of private sales that would be practically impossible to trace or recover damages from, and they've all had very good business the last week and a half.
From a purely legal perspective, that's banned by the law, which is still in force. In practice, the state of New Jersey is physically incapable of bringing a case to trial in a month, and it would struggle to bring a case to trial before the end of SCOTUS's next session, and pretty much restricted to the case where SCOTUS GVR's ANJRPC post-Viramontes. If you think SCOTUS won't actively support the ban here, New Jersey's ability to actually convict under the law is nearly a dead letter. But before mandate issues, a police officer arresting you can argue that the unconstitutionality of his behavior was not clearly established, and you still get to spend days, weeks, or months in jail, have an arrest record, and have your FPIC(s) revoked for it. Of course, it's not like police arresting people over an unconstitutional statute reliably breaks qualified immunity even after literal decades after final judgement, so that's always at least a possible problem, but here it's more on the plausible side.
So I don't recommend, for your first state felony, taking a photograph and posting it on social media. I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice, but it's probably not the best plan.
No small number of people did it, though, and given things like California's Freedom Week, there's not-crazy motivations for everything up to the photograph part.
Legal Strategy
Which means a big question is what New Jersey does. California's Freedom Week was a week because California sought, and received, a stay. Courts have traditionally been very generous when staying rulings affecting a significant law, and SCOTUS in particular has been much more willing to stay pro-gun rulings than anti-gun ones. The smart money was that New Jersey would seek a stay and request cert from SCOTUS. Even if the state didn't receive cert, or even if they lost the case, the law could stay in effect for several months longer. Which also allows the state's legislature to write workarounds and successors to the law, like a slightly-less-impossible registration or permitting requirement. ANJRPC themselves predicts:
"Following the July 17 en banc ruling, New Jersey is expected to move to stay the mandate and seek further review (rehearing en banc or Supreme Court certiorari). The stay ruling will determine whether the assault-firearms and 10-round magazine bans remain enforceable in the interim — the key near-term development to watch."
So far, New Jersey has not, and has not yet committed to doing so. New Jersey's Attorney General doesn't even have a current statement on their website; it posted an image on Facebook without any clear statement beyond "considering our options". There's been a sequence of short e-mails that have gone out to merchants from the state police, but that started by giving the wrong date and has since turned into 'wait for further guidance'. It's possible the police don't know, either.
So there's some difficult questions, here. And it's not clear what New Jersey's legal side is doing. Possibilities:
- They're waiting for the last second to file a stay request or rehearing request with the en banc court. This does maximize uncertainty -- a gun purchase could be illegal July 30th, legal August 11th, illegal again on August 18th, and then a big question mark about the status for literally years -- in a situation where states have brought charges against legal conduct. But that's going to encourage a lot of theoretically-illegal behavior that New Jersey says it wants to block, for the sake of... not writing a fairly short request in a week? Preserving optionality? The worst case scenario is the en banc court says no, and that does speed up the final seven-day clock before mandate issues. But that doesn't stop them saying they're going to put in a request, and they haven't yet.
- They're waiting to file a SCOTUS cert request or stay request. That can go up to 90 days after judgment, plus 60 days if they request an extension, and near-certainly buys a stay given Viramontes. But they can request a stay before filing the actual cert request, and there, the normal course of events buys them 150 days before they even have to finish the paper, and likely 8-10 months before the earliest plausible denial and end of stay. It's a really obvious tactic... and it doesn't explain why it hasn't happened, or why the state hasn't finalized any recommendations for consumers or merchants.
- They're going to take it on the chin: stop enforcement of the assault weapons ban to rifles, allow purchase of magazines, and just focus on keeping the law in place for pistols and shotguns. There's been repeated
fantasieshopes that there would, at some point, be a Second Amendment loss so severe that an anti-gun state would accept it rather than risk SCOTUS making a disliked standard apply across the country. There's been a few close examples, though typically motivated by other forces (eg, Range was a Trump DoJ refusing to appeal; NYRSPA I and Teter v Hawaii were tactically mooted). It's hard to see the benefit to that, here: SCOTUS already has granted cert in Viramontes on assault rifles, and has Duncan, Lamont, and Gator's Custom Guns sitting on ice and available to grant for magazine bans. But I guess appealing it might inform SCOTUS of a circuit split, as if 28(j) letters didn't exist? - They're confused. The current Attorney General just took office, they were plausibly pretty optimistic about the case, and they failed to plan. Weird, but weirder things have happened.
- They're planning other non-legal strategies. The charitable version is the legislature reconvening and passing a massive gun bill tailored to comply with ANJRPC while being as restrictive as possible. The more plausible one is a regulatory change trying to slap together something that isn't clearly foreclosed by ANJRPC, like the same law but with a license one-in-ten people could achieve after a ton of sweat and money, rather than literally zero. The pessimistic one ... I dunno. There's a lot of room for harassment without leaving real civil liability for police or state officials, but I'm not seeing anything obvious that isn't hilariously unlawful. But I'm also not a lawyer, and the difference between 'unlawful' and 'can be punished for violating' is not trivial. Because the court didn't actually provide an injunction, and only instead told the district court to give one, there's some morbidly funny situations where no one's in contempt of court for weeks despite clearly treating the court with contempt.
I dunno. This case isn't equivalent to Obergfell, or Lawrence, where laws across the country were changed overnight in manners that had street celebrations acting on the newly recognized rights. It's limited to a single circuit, and even the broadest ramification is going to get some resistance, and that resistance isn't going to get the Kim Davis treatment. But it could mean something for hundreds of thousands of real people, as much as The_Nybbler's not going to be able to join that cohort without fleeing the state.
Maybe. This is the commitment now to say it's matters if it does, and it matters if it doesn't.
gattsuru
2d ago
Millions of dollars of equipment, sure, but far more attainable than running GPT or Opus.
Technically speaking, you can run a 3T model on 25x DGX Sparks. Not fast, but it's around 150k if you include networking and power costs. If you really don't care about speed, you could probably get a couple second-per-token on older server hardware running fully CPU under 70k, though I wouldn't recommend it.
Allegedly some US officials are considering restricting US companies from using Chinese open models. Despite this claim being repeated across many outlets, I didn't actually find any evidence.
I'm also just not seeing a route to do it. Putting Moonshot on the BIS Entity List is the nuclear option, and it'd fuck up Moonshot's business and operations a lot, but I don't think it'd actually stop anyone from using their weights legally, and might not even do much to prevent them from doing future training. And I just don't see any better avenue.
Unlawful extraction from companies that have themselves unlawfully extracted? Again, really?
To be fair, a distillation attack typically involves massive numbers of smurfed requests, and doesn't have the fair use backing that normal transformative works would. I agree it doesn't make much philosophical sense, but it's not quite the same thing categorically.
But that could effectively ban open models if it's implemented such that only closed models pass, like how "nobody can sleep under a bridge" applies equally to rich and poor but only affects the latter.
There's also an issue where it might be only possible to pass without letting anyone access the model directly, regardless of how public. Pretty much every model is vulnerable to 'heretic' modification which changes the weights in minor ways to make it see any request as legitimate. These are widely available and, once discovered, can be performed by anyone with the weights and some hard drive space. It's mostly been helpful for writing smut in more 'circumspect' models, but there's already a lot of 100B-sized models that can independently discover serious dangers that are not well-known among the general populace (and, to be fair, some legitimate and safe uses of the model that also trigger those safeguards and thus are good reason to want a heretic model).
I doubt China will surpass American companies if they're training on American models, especially since America has more hardware.
Not so sure. Qwen3.6 was a major step forward compared to other models of the same time, and even now it remains a good example of good ideas being able to best raw hardware or parameter count to some degree. And there is the power-and-regulation issue, where especially if China decides to really hammer on the matter, the US advantage might not stay around.
gattsuru
2d ago
If the appeals courts read it as a fighting words case, then there's a pretty big onus to review the facts de novo, and they're pretty favorable to Hendrix: the court has to hold that Hendrix's words were probable to cause an immediate violent response from the guy she said them to, and that she intended for them to provoke him. It's not a slam dunk, but it's her best-case scenario.
But they don't have to do that. Hendrix's conviction doesn't read as 'saying fighting words'; it's just disturbing the peace. If she was convicted because of a combination of words and actions, then the question of whether that conviction was really about the actions is a question of fact. And questions of fact get reviewed only for clear error, with a massive lean toward the findings of the initial court. And if you squint really hard, maybe the jury convicted because she was threatening! Or pushy! Or starting a loud argument in a public space!
You and I may know perfectly well that she's never have been tried without the word, but that's a selective prosecution argument, not impossible in a 1A context but a very steep lift regardless because it's near-impossible to prove.
So a motivated appeals court doesn't have to even examine the fighting words doctrine at all. And there's a lot of motivated judges to be found.
If it has to go to SCOTUS, that court has literally thousands of cert requests on an annual basis, and hears less than a hundred. They routinely deny more serious, wide-ranging, and impactful cases. John Roberts isn't going to bend over backwards for Hendrix.
gattsuru
3d ago
Yes I think physically abusing a child if true is worse than physically abusing an adult if true
From your link: "Cuyahoga County’s DCFS investigation into possible child abuse was “unsubstantiated”—that is, there was not enough evidence to support a finding of neglect or abuse." Now, I'd consider the facts separately from police or administrative findings. But it's a bit odd a look for you.
I'm not giving out bonus points just cause the abuse of adults was sexual.
What an odd thing to say.
Now he contests any intent on hurting her, and he contests it being at her neck, but it's clear he understands what she means by "poured steaming hot water on me" and refers to it as the water incident.
One set of allegations is that he literally poured boiling water on her, from a pot on the stove. Another is that he sprayed her with water from a kitchen sink. One of these is a serious allegation of criminal assault, and any pretense that Miller would not have intended injury would be a cruel joke. The other is inadvisable horseplay. The Snopes link has direct images, as presented by Moreno, of the alleged injuries.
I'm not a doctor; it's a single click and five seconds to evaluate.
I don't think this meaningfully proves what you're trying to prove; it picks up the goalposts and sprints for the horizon.
gattsuru
3d ago
Fair, though it depends on there being a chance of a relatively-easy win at the Supreme Court. Zero isn't a probability, but this case's cert chances are about as close to zero as it gets.
gattsuru
3d ago
(Morbid humor:
He's running for a +5R-+8R district, and his opponent (despite being literally named Poindexter) has some actual union bonafides, so there's a decent chance this sinks Miller, especially if the child abuse gets substantiated. Unfortunately, he didn't have a primary challenger. He could drop out until August 5th, but it's going to be a pretty hard battle to do it and I don't think he has the stones for it.
((Though there's very much a 'throw everything at the wall and see what sticks' here: Ohio's general voting population just doesn't care that much about an under-limit crash where no one was hurt but a lamppole, or about MDMA use. That might genuinely not have even have counted as driving under the influence under state law at the time of the crash.))
Hot off the Platner scandal, here comes Max Miller one upping him.
That is a fascinating choice of words where one party was credibly accused of multiple counts of rape, and it's not the "one up".
And the daughter for some reason seems to be scared of her father, so even if he didn't cause this particular injury it's not a great sign.
I'll caveat that they're in a very messy divorce and custody proceeding, and there's serious questions that one has (alleged misdiagnosed) BPD (and, tbf, I'd only be surprised for Miller in the sense that he doesn't seem likely to get diagnosed by consent). And the guy's a genuine putz and has been known to be one for a long time, ranging from fighting a glass window at a hookah bar to allegedly slapping Grisham. Which remains a good argument about him not getting reelected, but it makes the factual claims specific to each case a lot less strong than they look at first glance.
Likewise, it's very strange that his alleged expulsion didn't surface in the first election, and the claims are messy: both Mother Jones and the court filings jump between whether Miller "faced" expulsion or was actually expelled, and despite Mother Jone's attempt to frame the court transcript carefully, Miller did specifically deny (and offer to prove non-existence of) the expulsion to the New York Post. The stairs incident was brought up in 2021, but it's also almost twenty years after it allegedly happened now, released by someone who's name isn't on the record, and echoed by people talking as much about rumors or 'fits his character' than actually seeing whatever happened.
There's credible reasons no one can find proof - the former would only exist in records protected by federal law, the latter was allegedly a high-school party where no one was injured and the core of the allegation is just shoving someone at a wall - but it's still not very persuasive on its own.
The child abuse one and the water incident are the most impactful, but they're also the most dependent on facts not in evidence. The child's injuries were investigated and the allegations found "unsubstantiated", and the prosecutor's office that would have been involved doesn't exactly scream 'MAGA diehard'. The boiling water one fell in similar bounds, and was messy enough That Right-Wing Rag couldn't come out and call it clearly proven. The reddened skin is more than we have for Katie Portner, to be fair!
But if you are going to say "they" like crime, "they" have a strategy, etc., you need to talk about specific groups, not big nebulous groups like "the left." Unless you want to defend the proposition that literally everyone on "the left" likes criminals and dislikes people who arrest criminals.
Would you allow that? Because it doesn't seem hard.
There might be violent criminals that no one's going to accuse the Left of liking, such as the Olympic Park bomber (although.... There are definitely 'criminals' like Dexter Taylor that none of the institutional and anti-racist left cares about, no matter how grossly unreasonable their charges or sentence. The steelman is the same argument with asterisks and fancier words. If you want to be charitable to a fault you can give a paean to criminal justice reform and trying to fight recidivism in the dumbest way possible when anyone notices the constant and consistent low-ball numbers going left-ward, and when people notice the harsh punishments going one direction wave your hands about anti-racism and sentencing disparities.
But then I'll point to Matthew Dolloff again.
If I were to tell you there was a vehicular homicide attack this week, and that the murderer had a long history of past association with violent crime before this event but was left off with a slap on the wrist in the one case he was convicted over, what do you think the odds would be for political alignment? Because a 7B LLM can tell you, and that single fact distinguishes the case from the counterexamples someone like MKC's going to try and reach for. Hell, if I scratch out vehicular homicide, there was a mass shooting, too, and guess what?
Because there's a connecting thread, here, even as Tuscon Arizona and Germany are geographically and politically quite far from each other.
And the trivial disclaimer that would cover even the most self-aggrandizing defense progressives bring up doesn’t seem likely to actually solve your Reddit complaint.
The asterisks and handwaves are pretty naked. Yes, there's a tiny number of people who are leftist or liberal and Actually Committed To The Bit, and a larger number that pretend at it when it doesn't cost them anything. We have numbers, here: at most one-in-seven Democratic voters thought this wonderful array of comments weren't okay, and that's assuming that none of Jay Jone's many other scandals persuaded a single person. Is the requirement here sated if the OP had stuck "A strong majority of the progressive movement and almost all of its major advocates and leadership" in place of the first "They"?
Ten months ago, in response to the Kirk shooting, I gave you a list of varied bad actors ranging from federal Congress down to my own literal recreational social environments, predicting that none of them would be punished in the immediate aftermath. None of them were, and the only arguable examples in the following ten months was James getting suspended for other unrelated conduct, and TheSchism -- the 'we absolutely don't allow dehumanizing our political enemies place' -- have its eventual retrospective include "Kirk should not be dead. But I will not reflect on our shared humanity, nor will I mourn his passing." go unmoderated.
gattsuru
3d ago
I'm sure she will. But the standard of review is pretty deferential, Minnesota is heavily slanted when it comes to the appeals bench, and Hendrix isn't going to get (or be able to get, or be able to distinguish) the sort of legal force necessary to show up as anything more than an example of an 'unsophisticated' defendant.
Which might cost her less than she makes in GiveSendGo funds? But that's a hilarious indictment of the entire legal system, and requires approximating tail end risks.
gattsuru
3d ago
The Post Millenial has the jury instructions (... hosted by scribd, because fuck everything).
They are very much what a lawyer trying to cover the bases looks like, rather than a serious grappling with the First Amendment concerns... but that's probably enough to let the conviction hold, especially since the only review Hendrix gets is a universally DFW-aligned state bench (the only federal court that could hear her case is SCOTUS). In practice, she's going to be a moron for appealing anyway -- there's no way it costs her less than a thousand bucks or a couple hundred hours to actually bring the appeal, winning won't get her money back, and she's not going to win -- but that doesn't make the justice system look better.
gattsuru
5d ago
Oddly, she wasn't convicted for yelling at the kid, presumably because the fighting words doctrine would be especially inapt there.
gattsuru
5d ago
In addition to first-party updates and collabs, I'd hope for good modding support: the game could do a hell of a lot if it attracts some of the ARK and Minecraft modders. The infrastructure isn't there for it in the game yet, though.
gattsuru
5d ago
I like matcha, but I also like glass jelly and root beer, so some of this might just be a raw different tastes thing. That said, there are some fantastic options for boba; most shops will have mango tea and coconut jelly as an option, and so long as you get it low sugar it's very hard to dislike.
gattsuru
6d ago
What's the term for "This nonsentient tool that I asked to write a character summary and run a linter just installed python and a venv that I thought I'd blocked it from doing." Because that seems something different from error/loss, and it's something I hit with Pi-agent, a pretty minimal skill harness, and a 26B model.
gattsuru
7d ago
There was a bit of a bump in the Steam Hardware Survey, but it's held in the 3.5%-4% range, and there's no real breakdown of how and what demographics.
That said, Linus's "linux challenge" this year went from the normal joke where it seemed like he was intentionally trying to fuck things up, to a pretty serious effort where a handful of the people stuck with it at the end, and I have had actual students actually interested in trying it out.
gattsuru
8d ago
Botched several connections on v0.1 of the educational robot mainboard (thank you Chinese display board for having your FPC pins start with 1 on the right), but got enough to implement the inter-circuit comm UART, negotiation, and watchdog behavior. Next big push is trying to get over-wifi debugging running; it's theoretically plausible and realistically a nightmare with warnings like "don't use the second core of this processor defined by its multicore capability". Got some fixes in, and trying to figure out if I'm willing to deal with tuning my own NFC sub-board before I order v0.2.
Trying to throw together an agentic layout for editing, proof-reading, summarizing, pulling style notes from, and continuing a story. There's a lot of attempts, here, at varying levels of success, but the state of the ecosystems is just absolutely terrifying, and that's the '''good''' stuff rather than OpenClaw. Not just the obvious but hard problems like 'how do we set up permissions and access rules', though it's disappointing that the answer to that is near-universally 'docker' at best. I get the core idea of content-as-code, but holy shit people. Just because you want your LLM to be able to modify your template files doesn't mean they need to sit in the same directory as your output files!
gattsuru
9d ago
Fair. I'll admit I lost interest in the books pretty early, so probably munging some stuff.
gattsuru
9d ago
Early anime convention norms were weird: a lot of their institutional genealogy derived from watch parties and the movie equivalent of tailgating. Some of the awkward spots were people taking online mannerisms to reality, but there's also a lot of places where a norm developed organically in smaller and intimate settings, then melted when it went super-Dunbar.
I thought the show played the long-standing incest side up? Or did they only run the 'get caught and shoved kid out window' incident from her adulthood? At least in the books, it's pretty explicit that Jaime and Cersei screwed disturbingly early.
If so, fair, will focus the complaint on Daenerys
I have found a fascinating study. This is a long story, and a precise one, and worse one that mixes Imperial and Metric units. I'm sorry.
It ends with the study's fundamentals falling apart. One of the co-authors driving the study has used it to make claims he knew or should have known were false, misleading multiple federal courts, while receiving public funding for that advocacy. One particular false claim has been cited by appeals court judges in two separate federal circuits.
Study Design
The investigators took ballistic gel blocks, put a high-speed camera pointed at the side, slap pressure transducers in the front and back. Shoot the gel from three meters. Know the mass of the bullet, use the camera to measure speed of the bullet and size of cavity, do math. 21 shots, across 17 firearms. One gel block was specially manufactured with a pig femur in it, to examine the impact of a bullet that passes, but not hits, bone. It's not exactly a LuckyGunner comparison deck, but it's a first step.
And while the investigator's efforts were clearly not informed by the decades of experience that the gunnie community has built up since the FBI Miami Report got a lot of neurotic people very interested, they are also genuinely working on a different task. People interested in self-defense care a lot about downing an opponent quickly, or what thick clothing might do to a hollow-point. There genuinely is little ballistics gel work thinking ten or fifteen minutes after a shooting, rather than five seconds into a gunfight, and the investigators here cared about that.
Even among gunnies, the data has never been great. Hydrostatic shock has been a massive source of infighting and controversy among gun owners, and the experimental evidence is primarily deer carcass and tales about the one that got away. Depth-of-penetration testing is so dependent on experimental setup that replication was found hard and mostly not attempted. The FBI Miami Report is treated as a bible, but its foundations are little deeper than gut checks by professionals extrapolating from a tiny number of events. The end result is that there's a ton of spreadsheets that look more like marketing material, and serious advice that says little more than "a handgun's a good tool to get to a rifle".
And there are some innovations in this approach. Most gunnie work is in traditional organic 10% ordnance gel, with minimal calibration, validation, and a temperature control of 'the weather'. Here, the investigators used a 20% synthetic gel, which is more expensive but probably a better simulation of muscle tissue, and followed the manufacturer's calibration tests and temperature constraints to the letter. They're not the first to use high-speed cameras, but very few hobbyists could get their hands on a 50k frame-per-second camera, and fewer still actually did it. The use of animal bones inside a test sample has been done by Mythbusters, but it's not a part of the FBI Standard, and has meaningful impact for medical practitioners.
The most interesting decision is to completely reverse the conventional wisdom on overpenetration. Where self-defense testing tries to measure how far a round can penetrate before stopping, this study selected a ballistics gel block specifically such that every round penetrated all the way through, allowing them to measure how much energy bleeds off inside what the investigators considered a standard limb or torso. That's a decision with some serious tradeoffs, because round behavior changes dramatically as it bleeds of speed and fragments, and to allow low-power rounds to penetrate completely, they're going with a shallow enough sample that there's a lot of overpenetration at the high end.
Also, it's all FMJ for this round of testing. To be fair, there's not much public information on FMJ vs hollow-point when it comes to homicide or assault stats.
Results
Because the PDF is not especially navigable, I've transcribed the results into a single unified table, available here. Note that there's a few variables I can't properly place: I'll give points for a paper actually publishing so much of its data, but splitting input and output variables into two separate tables is painful. In particular, there is strong photographic evidence that a fragmenting 5.56 NATO round went into a 15x15x25cm target, but the numbers from that trial are only close, not the same or so close as to be a pure rounding error, so it could plausibly be a separate event.
I've triple-checked my version, but I can't guarantee I've avoided misunderstanding or transcription error, and it's more likely than not I've screwed up sigfigs or rounding or units somewhere. If anyone wants to prove me wrong, please do so.
Nitpicks
There are other aspects to the experiment that I'll just mark as not just inexperienced, but odd.
The methods say that they picked a 15x15x25cm gelatin target, or a 25x25x25cm cube, based on expected muzzle velocity. Sub-600m/s gets the smaller target, greater than 600 m/s gets the cube. That's a reasonable decision when measuring cavitation effects, since ballistics gelatin is expensive and annoying to work with.
But they didn't actually do it. At least two shots from 800+ m/s rounds were fired into the small block. And one of them is 30-06, a round that's very rare to find in subsonic ammo, and this specific shot very clearly wasn't, so either someone didn't read the packaging or they were using whatever blocks were available. A "rifle versus pistol" rule would have made more sense to start with, or if they wrote-up the procedure post-hoc after winging it, the methods section should have matched what they actually did.
As noted, this synthetic ballistics gel is new, and somewhat controversial. LuckyGunner just started moving to it for their last pistol trials, but had a lot of uncertainty for rifle ammo. The lead investigator here did lead a study to validate it against porcine and post-mortem human flesh... and as far as I can tell from the abstract, did so in a low-velocity (181 meter/sec), low-mass protocol. The slowest pistol round here is bigger, heavier, and faster. Most of the study result is dominated by supersonic and high-energy rounds, where this gel formulation is least-supported.
Looks nice, though, and that's a genuine compliment.
They've mixed mostly-fresh ballistics gelatin and remelted gelatin for a handful of tests, and the comparison is weakly supported by one paired shot, in a handgun round. Probably not a big impact on the final numbers, even if the remelted material isn't perfect, but it makes the small sample size even more frustrating, and the use of remelted material for one of the hottest cartridges counterproductive.
For repeatability, the study says "the AR-15 5.56 NATO projectiles, excluding the fragmented trial, produced low coefficients of variation in impact velocity (0.035), energy transfer (0.079) and maximum temporary cavity diameter (0.032)". That's mathematically correct, but only if you accept 'repetition' to includes different behaviors (a 12-inch barrel and a 20-inch barrel), while excluding an identical experimental setup that behaved differently (the fragmenting round). It's also not mathematically correct in a coherent single set: the impact velocity and energy transfer works for four AR-15 tests, excluding only the fragmentation example, but the cavity diameter only works with three, dropping both the fragmentation and bone test.
The one round that fragmented was also was the slowest round from an AR-15, and slower than the shot from a 12" barrel. Fragmentation in AR-15 FMJ is an artifact of both yaw and velocity, and this was at the lower range at time of impact. More critically, it's also massive variation from every other round. This could indicate they used a different cartridge and didn't document it, or got a bad powder load, but it could also be a sign their speed measurement wasn't up to par. A 80-dollar chronograph would have cost less than a single block of this ballistic gel, and would have validated the camera measurements.
There's some annoying summary stuff that's technically wrong, even if it probably wasn't intentional. "[B]ullets from handgun and sub-machine gun cartridges transferred only about half of the initial kinetic energy to the gelatin, except the 25 caliber round" kinda needs to expand that caveat to 'except the 9mm and .40 and .45 Auto and basically it only applies to the .32', presumably .32 ACP. They probably meant to say the smaller, weaker rounds didn't dump much of their energy into the gel, but 25% is not "almost half".
The Remington Bolt Action numbers don't match up at a basics physics level: they give a 150 grain (9.7 gram) bullet at 812 m/s and 247.6 m/s as having 2777 J and 258 J energy, respectively. If the energy measurements are right, that has to be a 130 grain bullet. If the weight is correct, the energies were 3204 J and 297 J. My guess is the weight is correct and some typo happened during a table format: 30-06 in 130 grain exists, but it's usually a higher-speed round. That said, it's shown up in other places.
It's just a typo, though, not a big mistake.
The Big Mistakes
There's the gelatin sizes, not as a procedure-following nitpick but what it does to the measure. The Remington Bolt Action shot produced a 20-cm diameter temporary cavity in a 15-cm cross-section. At least one of the AR-15 16" shots produced a greater than 17.1-cm temporary cavity in a 15-cm cross-section. Ballistic gel is elastic, so that's not physically impossible, but boundary effects almost certainly inflate the cavity size as the cavity gets close to an edge, since there's less force pushing back against the expansion. Since that's going against the experiment methods to start with, it's a bizzare decision.
Multiple sample measurements are just extrapolated. Literally "maximum temporary cavity extended beyond the camera view and was assumed as double the cavity diameter from the path of the bullet to the bottom edge of the cavity". Once is an accident, but it happened in fresh and remelted 30-06. Probably also means free boundary effects dominated there.
One take-away from the study is a massive correlation between velocity and how much energy is transferred : "impact velocity and energy transfer expressed a linear correlation (R2 = 0.71). However, the relationship between impact velocity and energy transfer displayed much stronger linearity when excluding the 30 − 06 caliber rounds from bolt action rifles (R2 = 0.94)". For a given caliber round that makes a ton of sense: drag is a velocity squared thing. But it's also a cross-section thing. Excluding the 30-06 rounds is plausibly defensible if you wanted to just compare the same round at different velocities, but if you're trying to validate how much effect impact velocity has across ammunition in general, excluding bigger rounds to improve the model is just ignoring that your model doesn't fit.
That's a philosophical problem, though. Worse, the math doesn't math.
I can reproduce the R2 = 0.94 number easily. I can't make the R2 = 0.71 one, at all. Just throwing the full dataset in gives 0.57. Correcting the Remington numbers to assume a 150 grain bullet just makes the relationship worse, to 0.51. Selective deletion of one example doesn't get you there. Adding a zero-origin point is incoherent for velocity to energy transfer, and it also gets you R2 = 0.75.
I'm not great at statistics, so maybe I'm missing something or messing up the formula. If I'm not, it's a big difference. It also highlights the philosophical problem and makes it into a genuine study design problem.
Remember how I talked about gunnies have spent a lot of time, money, and ammo to figure out a handgun is a good tool to get you to your rifle? Well, we've got two distinct groups, and a lot of intragroup variables. Removing the 30-06 rounds is the single strongest way to improve R2, and the study's cited reasons to exclude it are just examples of the paper's velocity-driven model not working. Worst, most other decisions hit the correlation hard. Never enough to make the correlation outright flip, so it's not a full Simpson's Paradox, but enough to start needing those other variables more and more.
Exclude all the handgun rounds and the submachinegun, because they penetrate poorly and low exit velocities have bigger impact on measurement errors? R2 = 0.224. Look at just the handguns, no rifles or submachine guns? R2 = 0.45. Dial down the comparison to just the 5.56 NATO rounds? R2 = 0.79, which isn't great since it should beactually removing all the other variables. Pull out the fragmenting round, too, and you get R2 = 0.325, which is worse than I would have expected.
That's a major point of the discussion, and it's near-certainly vastly overstated, and it's not the only relationship that falls apart on inspection. The paper says outright in its discussion that "Maximum pressure from non-fragmenting rounds was significantly influenced by bullet exit velocity ( p < 0.001), which was mainly driven by large maximum pressures paired with low exit velocities from 30 − 06 caliber rounds. Bullet caliber (p = 0.20), bullet mass (p = 0.087), and impact velocity (p = 0.072) did not significantly influence maximum pressure." That is a great p-value, but it's also a small relationship (r = -0.15) that flips back and forth depending on what rounds you look at, including the 30-06 rounds that the paper excludes elsewhere (r = + 0.14). Since impact velocity and bullet mass are two-thirds of the energy relationship, these non-significant relationships are a red flag.
Bizarrely, they don't actually write up that energy test number despite putting it in the conclusions, and it gives a R = 0.6 to 0.9 depending on whether you trust the small-block-rifle pressure data, with a p < 0.001. It's a bivariate predictor so it's defensible to focus on single variables first, but it's a glaring omission. If it's not so obvious that you want to put it in the conclusion, it's worth actually formalizing. It also holds up for all of the data no matter what outliers you decide to trim, no surprise.
Some of that mess is probably small sample size, measurement limits, high variablity. Two rounds from the same box and the same gun might have 1-2% muzzle velocity difference or one bullet might yaw and burn another 5% of its energy off, the fragmenting bullet is a genuine and targeted behavior. But the underlying measures here are weak enough, and the sample size small enough, that the analysis has lost most of its meaningful predictive power, even before getting to the actual design problems.
The Core
That pressure transducer implementation here is fundamentally flawed.
Pressure is a distance phenomena, falling off at roughly 1/√radius for cylindrical spread like this, with an emphasize on roughly. Depending on gel block size, the transducers were either 6.5cm or 10.5cm from the ideal bullet pathway. The optimistic math gives that a 25% difference reduction in pressure at a sensor head, going from the small gel brick to the large one, just because of transducer distance.
That distance varies with the bullet path. They tried to use a laser sight to assist with aim, and at three meters it's hard to miss, but even small errors compound a ton, here, and zeroing a laser sight perfectly is harder than you'd think: a 0.1 degree difference is aim is 0.5 centimeters at the front of the gel. Once the bullet actually hits, tumbling, yaw, and random behaviors in the gel dominate, and whether the bullet walks closer or further from the transducer effects the exit pressure dramatically. Again, a small difference here should have a big difference in measured pressure.
Which doesn't show up in the data, in the two cases where the same caliber was used in a small gel and the large gel. One is almost certainly the fragmented AR-15 round, which had over three times higher rear-pressure than its large-block equivalents, and with a front pressure sitting just over the center of the 200-650 kPa band large-block 5.56 NATO rounds gave. The other is the 30-06 Remington Bolt Action round, which gets less than 70% the front pressure of the large-block 30-06 rounds, and less than a sixth of the rear pressure. That's not a sign they avoided the falloff problem; it's a sign other, much larger unintended effects dominated their data.
The first is pretty likely boundary conditions, either a ton of pressure bulging or completely venting from the smaller block, or the temporary cavity nearing or encroaching on the transducer, or a combination of both. The videos and slide decks show clear free body behavior, along with the entire block recoiling and shifting, and while that's hard to avoid at the powers involved, it's also a nontrivial error source.
The 2500hz filter is extremely aggressive for this environment, both because the incoming pressure spikes from the bullet are fast, and because the wall reflections at 10cm are well under (<20 microseconds) the rise time for the filter (400 microseconds). Whether boundary effects add or subtract when merged depends a ton on the specific experiment setup, but at the higher energy states you can get large portions of pressure waves reflected or interference dropping the measurement dramatically. This probably understates the rifle max pressures, badly, but I can't write this in-depth of a criticism and only complain about the mistakes that hurt my side.
Distance from the cavity center might matter for some pressure measurements, where the max pressure wave comes from the energy dump rather than from the bullet's travel itself. This actually surfaces other data oddities, since the Polymer80 PMF's max cavity depth doesn't match the transducer behavior or expected 9mm round characteristics. That might be another typo or limit to the measurement tools. But the data (and reporting on the data) sometimes uses the phrase "first peak", which would point to the bullet's shockwave, and then uses data from the maximum peak, which is cavitation effects. From a biomedical perspective, both should cause damage, but the entire hydrostatic shock theory depends on them causing different types of damage; that's why the investigators are using the high-speed camera.
In at least a few cases, the cavity either got very close to, or swallowed entirely, the sensor. This doesn't clearly match the study trials, but it's the same test layout, and it shows everything from cavitation non-circularity to sensors at the cavitation edge to clear pressure venting.
Add all these things together, and it's no surprise that the coefficients of variation for the pressure ratings were left uncalculated. It's more surprising that they're 'only' 0.29 (5.56 excluding fragment) to 0.8 (including fragment) for the 5.56 NATO. Comparing the handgun rounds to the rifle rounds used here is probably directionally correct, but you're getting that more from first principles and intuition than from the data. And any numbers comparing magnitude within small variations of cartridge are barely better than random chance.
I'm not claiming intent or misconduct. Even the embarassing math problems here are just math problems, and the experimental design issues sounds like what someone trying to build a protocol from scratch, unfamiliar with gunnie past efforts, might do. This is not some high Impact Factor or H-Index publication, and it's far from the worst academic paper I've seen. The studies actually did happen, the measurements about cavity size are probably directionally correct, and to the extent they're contaminated by boundary effects, there's a fair argument that the human body has a lot of boundary effects going on, too. There's a real relationship between projectile velocity and pressure generated on impact.
But the study doesn't really illuminate what that relationship is, or what it means. The paper openly positions itself as triage and forensic science tool, and I really hope no one involved has to make a triage decision involving a 357 Magnum injury or any big, heavy rifle round.
Everything above is a hope for future papers to be stronger. I'm not sure what the fix for the pressure measurements could be, or even if one exists. Maybe much larger gel samples using multiple surfaces with transducer arrays? Or measuring the cavity path and correcting for distance? Using the transducers as a crude spatial probe?
But the first step to improving experimental design is recognizing the limits, so I do have to thank them for publishing the paper with this level of detail. This is important stuff, and the first step to doing something at all is often doing it kinda wrong.
It's not like anyone submitting clearly incorrect to a court as an expert witness statement, with either clear disregard for their factual basis or intentional effort to mislead judges.
Someone Submits A Sworn Statement
The published paper lists six co-authors: five academics from the Wisconsin College of Medicine, and one member of the Wisconsin Department of Justice's Division of Forensic Sciences. The last man on the list is Professor Stephen Hargarten, Wisconsin College of Medicine, MD, MPH.
Hargarten's staff page describes him as a professor at the Wisconsin College of Medicine, founding director of the Comprehensive Injury Center, and a Senior Science and Policy Advisor. He performed as an emergency physician until 2018, and left that field after a long term of difficult and appreciated service. Caps off to the men and women of emergency surgery.
He's also a political advocate, and has been since the 1990s, promoting a wide array of gun control. Not an unusual matter, for physicians in general, nor those with emergency room experience. See Firearms as a Market-Driven Epidemic or "The Bullets He Carried" as examples. He has served as the Chair of the Network to Prevent Gun Violence in the Americas since 2020.
Some of these past claims have been somewhat more based in current events and advocacy than theory. I'll give his publication and public commentary on the then-breaking news of the 'Black Talon' hollow-point bullets as an example. Hargarten's theory that the jagged edges of an expanding bullet might increase the risk of HIV or hepatitis transmission to surgeons never panned out, despite the round (renamed to Ranger SXT) remaining popular among law enforcement and self-defense users in the intervening three decades.
As far as I can tell, his state had invented forceps and tweezers by the 1990s. That's mean, and not deserved. Yet.
He has presented expert testimony in at least two cases I've been able to track down, focused on this particular test rig: Rocky Mountain Gun Owners v. Superior and _Barnett v. Raoul. His declarations also include past expert witness work in Viramontes v. Cook County, National Association of Gun Rights v. Highland Park, and Association of New Jersey Rifle and Pistol Clubs v Grewel (paragraph 9 here). I've not been able to track down those particular declarations, but given the timeline, they're likely to include similar claims.
Note that I say "focus on the test rig". Not the paper. Because his testimony has a different format, focusing on a smaller subset of trials, which line up mostly-ish to the study data, so long as you have a thick sharpie.
It also includes one new data point: a "musket". I've highlighted the data, here. The declarations only give energy lost and percent energy lost, so I've back-calculated those to estimate a 285 m/s impact velocity, and 136 m/s exit velocity. A little low by historical standards, but the velocity isn't insanely wrong.
The mass is, though.
For those unfamiliar with firearms, a 'musket' ball weighing 3.5 grams would be a lead sphere 0.32 inches in diameter, or a steel sphere 0.37 inches in diameter. Those do exist in the modern day: the lead version is even fairly common. It's known as OO Buckshot. Not the shotgun cartridge, the individual lead balls that go into the the 12-gauge shotgun cartridge nine at a time. My bet is the steel, but that's mostly hanging on deformation properties and environmental safety rather than a mathematical proof or trusting the clip art from a slide deck posted on his school's web site.
That's mean, and not yet earned. That's a mistake, and one that's hard to justify, but it's still remotely plausible someone who hates guns is just going to average names and not think it matters.
But it is a mistake that's hard to justify: neither formulation is compatible with an actual musket, and that's not just the trivial 'historical lead shot used soft tin-lead or pure lead, that would have definitely deformed under these pressures and velocities, causing drastically higher drag and energy transfer' sense.
For those who've never been to a Revolutionary War historical site, the typical rounds of the era were the British 0.71 lead shot for the Brown Bess (gun bore 0.75-0.8 inch) or the French 0.65 lead shot Charleville (gun bore 0.7 inch). Larger options were more common than smaller, and small cuts off around a half-inch diameter.
They do not weigh 3.5 grams. They have heft. Manufacturing limits of the time means they weren't perfect spheres, but 25-48 grams is the traditional range. By the Civil War, advances had lead to a slight decrease in ammunition sizes, but they were still large by modern standards. Even Revolutionary War military sidearms would not have been in 0.32 or 0.37. Mass increases with the cube of a sphere's radius.
That's not a surprise to anyone remotely familiar with guns. As anyone who's been to a range where some jerk is citing in their 'historically accurate' muzzleloader, they've got some boom to them. Whatever Hargarten's "musket" is, it's not one of them. Real muskets would have had an expected impact kinetic energy of 1000-1500 J, several times what was present here, with corresponding downstream impacts increasing drag, deformation, and kinetic energy transfer.
My first thought is that he, or his armorer, had gotten a squirrel gun and just not known any better. But Dr. Hargarten has multiple declarations. And his claims have only gotten more specific over time.
There's even a helpful footnote, in that very paragraph, explaining that "The size of the bullet can affect wound severity. In general, holding all else equal, larger caliber rounds are more likely to cause more severe injuries because they increase the surface area of affected tissue."
That's not a claim about his experiment setup. That's a claim about the world, and it's wrong.
He knew this mattered.
The data from a paper he co-authored, even if only as an editor, demonstrates clearly the relevance of bullet mass for the very transmission of energy and cavitation effects he focuses on, and his own expert witness declaration highlights the relevance of bullet diameter in the very same paragraph.
And this claim is not some number constrained to a PDF only two people on the planet ever read. He's not named when Judge St. Eve wrote that AR-15s “can discharge thirty rounds—each of which travels five football fields in half-a-second and releases ten times the energy of a musket ball upon impact—as quickly as he can pull the trigger”" in Barnett v Raoul, nor where Judge Krause cited it approvingly in ANJRPC. But he's the source, and it's a unique claim because it's not real.
Expert declarations are sworn statements before the court, and intentional and material false claims are thus perjury, so I am going to be very careful to say that I do not know whether Hargarten made every or any decision here with intent. It is, after all, still possible that he's completely ignorant of a topic he has selected to be an example of his expertise.
It also doesn't matter if he did. All that perjury stuff is theory; while prosecution has gone after expert witnesses, it's for stuff like falsifying credentials in medical malpractice civil suits or crime lab technicians committing forgery or tampering with evidence. In an adversarial system the responsibility of fighting false claims from an expert is to bring an expert of your own, and Hargarten has been opposed by a James Buford Boone, who is reasonably focused more presenting correct data than fighting incorrect methods. Daubert focuses more on whether the expert's methods are genuinely recognized in their field and testable, than whether the factual claims are true, and Hargarten has a paper immunizing him on that matter. Professional certification services are supposed to come down like a bag of rocks on men and women who use their expertise to wrongly steer a court, but Hargarten is no longer a practicing physician, so it's not even a remotely possible threat, and it wouldn't be a credible one even were he still working the emergency room.
I'd like to think that his academic environment might tut-tut and say not to do it again. He's a professor and "senior science and policy advisor" working at a medical school, proud to say he's a Founding Director of the Comprehensive Injury Center that promotes their very research. I might try to set up a PubPeer account to at least fix the math problems, and I'll be lucky to get anything on that.
Instead, I am going to say something more damning.
Dr. Hargarten is a professor, medical professional, and expert witness. He was paid 30,000 USD by Illinois alone in 2023-2024 for consulting and expert witness services related to this specific litigation. I don't know how many of his co-authors were involved in actually performing the 'musket' experiment -- his witness declaration just says "science leaders, and a technician and a doctoral student" and "the Wisconsin Crime Lab personnel" were involved -- but they include a published expert in and pioneer ballistics gel and a firearms-and-tool-mark examiner, each and every one from a career where precision, honesty, and consideration matter. I would hope he has their phone numbers.
And he is sloppy. Careless. Loose with the numbers, and the facts. Has been since he proposed surgeons were likely to cut themselves on Black Talon ammo, as if they were shoving their fingers into bullet wounds; in when he's signing on to co-author a paper or promote a slide deck with typos for several years; and he's just gotten more easily caught, now.
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