gattsuru
2d 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
2d 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
2d ago
gattsuru
2d 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
3d 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
3d 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
3d 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
3d 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
3d 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.)
I'll skip over the 'what's actually happening and who's done what' debate, since I don't think we'll make any progress if you're already decided on a script, but:
What, precisely, is the proposed mechanism, here? Over on Earth Beta, do you think the Butler County assassin would have held back because his tyrant hadn't made a poop joke while wanting to deport millions of thousands of illegal immigrants? Would a state judge not have ordered already-cast primary ballots to be left uncounted, because not!Trump only 'started a riot' and didn't make fun of a disabled journalist? Is their goatee'd Charlie Kirk still breathing, because even if he still wanted to shove trans people back into boxes, at least he didn't punk on a particularly goofy student before the media reporting mangled his quotes to make him into a turboracist?
There's serious policy disagreements, 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... and the poop joke is what people are going to remember? I'd like a world where professionalism was important, again. But leaving aside the many ways I could argue we've not been in that world for a long, long time, I just don't think the pragmatic argument holds water, or has held water for much of our adult lifespans.
gattsuru
3d ago
Santorum also, notably, still has his last name associated with shit on a google search.
gattsuru
4d ago
That's not true. The court will answer that question as part of the case, but whatever test and reasoning they use to answer that question will be precedent. Whether or not lower courts ignore it is a different story.
... not really? In normal courts, that's the rule, but the Ninth Circuit specifically has a unique relationship with stare decisis: simultaneously, even pure dicta from within the court may be binding, but to overrule a past case:
Yes, there's also the problem of lower courts ignoring SCOTUS as a matter of practice, but specifically the Ninth Circuit as a matter of open policy does not merely require the holding be part of the question raised for the case, or even that the holding be essential to the determination in the case, but that its logic be clearly irreconcilable. Otherwise, only an en banc Ninth Circuit court may overrule one of the many copious Ninth Circuit en banc opinions holding the Second Amendment to mean nothing.
Not quite, in the link you provided yourself, the only two questions formally presented in the petition are about the vampire rule and the question about historical analysis.
Fair. They were not Questions Asked in the sense of showing up in that section of the pdf, just questions brought up with a full exploration of their factual and legal background.
gattsuru
4d ago
On the surface level, there's an immediate problem where this case's question is just astonishingly bad for that purpose. Its holding can only be whether "Hawaii may presumptively prohibit the carry of handguns by licensed concealed carry permit holders on private property open to the public unless the property owner affirmatively gives express permission to the handgun carrier?" Anything more specific will be dicta, and the Ninth Circuit will ignore dicta they don't like, and this case only exists because they already ignored SCOTUS saying specifically you can't just declare a whole island a sensitive space.
At the deeper level, there's so much else going on in this case, both in the other question the plaintiffs brought up, and in the other questions relevant in the appeal. If SCOTUS just wanted to a case to nail down a test for sensitive places, it's nonsensical to exclude the Ninth Circuit's bizarre. And the law in question here separately blocked "all parks and beaches, playgrounds and youth centers, bars and restaurants that serve liquor, and places of amusement and libraries", questions squarely presented in the petition. There's so many better and wider questions if they wanted to apply a rule to solve the sensitive places flat.
I'm... a lot more pessimistic on worst-case scenarios. I don't think it's likely that SCOTUS gives a full thumbs-up to the vampire rule, but it's painfully plausible that they'll end up with an explicit test that's either so vague or so broad that any remotely specific ban can pass it, and then punts for eternity as lower courts take that to permit more expansive bans than the 'overturned' one SCOTUS ruled on. Wouldn't be the first time.
gattsuru
4d ago
I am not a SCOTUS-bar lawyer and this is not legal advice, but from understanding, no, contempt can only attach to parties. SCOTUS can answer a petition for writ of mandamus with a direct order to lower courts doing things, and that's been mentioned in a particularly egregious case, but eventually there's not much the justices can do but order a change in trial judge, and for process reasons they don't actually have that much power there, either, when a majority of a full circuit is flipping them the bird.
And, like The_Nybbler says, I think they just don't want to. It'd be one thing if we were only talking machine gun cases or the hairy edge of convicted criminals, but SCOTUS isn't even enforcing its own precedent when it comes to stun guns, or to whether the fourth amendment applies to people who own a gun. They just don't care.
gattsuru
4d ago
Obviously, I'm not a gun guy but this seems eminently reasonable to me, is this particularly onerous?
Yes. This statute might look reasonable from first glance, but it's extremely broad and very difficult to actually comply with it short of not carrying anywhere.
Private property is really broad, as it was used in this statute; it doesn't just mean houses or even businesses closed to the public, but businesses generally open to the public, lawns, outdoor areas of strip malls, even some sidewalks and roads. This is worse than average in Hawaii because of its generally anti-fence culture (for similar reasons as the open/closed range stuff in the Southwest), but even parts of the country with clearer deliminations would leave it really hard to tell where property lines start and stop without a deep survey dive for every single location you were visiting or even passing through. It wasn't until fairly late in oral arguments at appeal that the state claimed it wouldn't apply to all parking lots, and then only to exclude large parking lots, and only so far as you trust their nonbinding claims.
Even where the line for a specific private property is known, it's not always clear who could give permission. Even for the standard example of "I'm already CCWing, but I need to pick up some eggs and milk on the way home", if you want to run by a WalMart, what happens? Do you have to park outside of the WalMart's property line, lock your gun, go into the store, track down a manager, and then can they give you permission? Can you call ahead, even if the agent you'd get on the line near-certainly won't be at that specific store? For more complicated ownership situations, it might not even be clear to the people on the ground who could give permission: if you're visiting a friend in an apartment building, is it enough if they're okay with you CCWing, or do you need to call the property manager? If you're a tenant, do you need explicit permission to go through a public area on the way to your own apartment? Does this change whether the shared walkspaces are indoors or outdoors? If you're going through a strip mall, is it enough that you're going to a pro-carry gun store, do you have to call up whoever owns the strip mall, or do you need permission from every tenant?
((And then there's the social side of things. Antigun groups have routinely coordinated dox and protest campaigns against pro-gun establishments in anti-gun states, they've openly called for pro-carry businesses to face ruinously higher insurance premiums, and they've recently called out for civil plaintiffs so they can support lawfare against pro-carry businesses regardless of what connection any real or perceived harms had to the permit policies.))
Does it allow for a business to put up a sign saying "guns welcome" that serves as a blanket permission?
California's version only recognizes permission through a posted sign (of a specific size yada yada), which seems to be part of why it was too much for even the Ninth Circuit (though in turn it also only applied to private businesses open to the public). Hawaii's allows wider breadths of affirmative consent, though there's a lot of legal questions about oral consent that never really got answered.
Just speaking for myself, I would be outraged if someone carried a gun into my house without notifying me, like if I saw that my plumber was carrying a gun I would be angered by this and would definitely favor a law of this sort.
There's policy versions that focus on private homes or houses that's more reasonable, even if it might still raise constitutional questions if anyone could get standing/redressability, to an extent I wouldn't expect the groups like SAF to be willing to put the effort into a challenge. But this isn't that law, or even close to it.
(re: constitutional questions, by contrast, the same Ninth Circuit has held that blocking door-to-door salesman except where homes have "Solicitors Welcome" sign up was unconstitutional (Project 80s v. Poctello). And that law was much more restrained.)
SCOTUS picks a couple Gun Cases... kinda
SCOTUS has granted cert on two separate firearms-related cases, Wolford v. Lopez and US v. Hemani, for the upcoming term, and they're a bit night-and-day.
In Wolford, plaintiffs asked to block a law after Hawaii had put an effective ban on carry in almost all of the state. This is the 'Bruen says you can't just declare the entire island a sensitive space, Hawaii asked how about five islands then' case. While a couple goofier parts of the law did receive a temporary injunction, the lower courts notably did not block a requirement that CCW permitees get explicit and specific permission from any private property owner before carrying on their property; even the Second Circuit found this sort of requirement (nicknamed a "vampire rule" by opponents) as so likely unconstitutional as to mandate a temporary restraining order against it. Worse, the 9th Circuit did so under a chain of logic depending on very recent laws and sometimes even private company restrictions to justify Hawaii's rule, with little actual relevant to the rule in question here, while simultaneously promoting the historical analogues to such wide spread of generality as to permit any law. For the "vampire rule" specifically, Hawaii was only able to find two analogues even under that widely expansive standard, one an anti-poaching statute and one a literal post-Civil War racist Black Code, and the 9th Circuit still found it close enough despite the explicit text of Bruen that "[W]e doubt that three colonial regulations could suffice to show a tradition..." This is, yet again, plain defiance of higher court rulings.
Which makes the actual cert grant weird, because it's not really getting into all of that. The only question SCOTUS granted cert on was the "vampire" rule itself; the petitioners also asked about the 9th Circuit's fishing expedition into more recent laws (and non-laws), and SCOTUS punted on that despite a wide and clear circuit split. SCOTUS can and has granted cert for broader questions that petitioners asked, before, and without doing so, this seems near-certain to result in a decision good for one case only; even a Thomas-level dicta won't actually have a holding that applies even to other vampire rules, nevermind other 'declare an island a sensitive place'-style laws.
Hemani is more complicated. A lot of media coverage focuses on a comically bad set of claimed background details -- the US government claims Hemani is not merely a drug user or a jerk but a literal Iran-tied worshipper of terrorism -- and to a large extent, those claimed details overdetermine the near-certain resolution of this case. Like Rahimi, SCOTUS wants the case with the worst possible optics so as to give the thumbs-up to expansive gun control regulations; there's even a lot of tea leaves to suggest that the Biden-era DoJ put some effort into tailoring this case, given that the government conceded the case as covered by a different case they thought wrongly decided. A naive reader might hope that this is going to result in some broader rule that, even if bad for Hemani himself, leaves stricter rules for merely incidental drug-and-gun users, but you'd have to be really naive.
Which makes the actual cert grant weird. The lower courts put a lot of analysis on how poorly the government supported a blanket ban and how expansively they held it to apply to cases far more unreasonable than Hemani's, but ultimately it leaves the prohibited person rule in place so long as the government show the drug user wasn't sober while possessing the gun. Indeed, there were other earlier cases with the same constitutional question, answer, and far more palatable facts: the government just didn't request cert for Connelly; they don't seem to have been important enough for SCOTUS to care. Nor, frankly, does this case even seem to leave things unsolvable even for the constraints of its specific people, since not only does Hemani have a bunch of other things going on worth a lengthy prison sentence, it's not even clear why the government couldn't prove or at least present evidence toward the Connelly intoxicated-while-possessing standard.
There might be some schadenfruede to watch the left side of the bench throw away due process rights in favor of gun control (or, conversely, Thomas and Alito throwing gun rights under the bus because eww pot), but only to the extent anyone has any shame left.
On its own, these would not necessarily been that offensive as selections, but they are on their own. The court's selection of other recent cases has not been quick to grab every marginal or borderline case. There's no small number of other, broader cases going up before the court and only getting the punt. Duncan and Viramontes are both up for cert, now, and in Duncan's case both for final judgement and for all the marbles: failing to grant cert does not merely encourage more broad gun control, but actively will claw back a lot of previously-lawfully-owned property with a happy finger-flip to the Takings Clause, too. There's no law saying the court can only take so many gun cases, but if you had to put a bet about whether the court would pick two or four, the over/under is pretty clear.
Vullo Is Back... kinda
lol jk, there's basically zero chance of a cert grant on these facts
Adamiak had his day in the Fourth Circuit... kinda
A jury found Defendant Patrick Tate Adamiak guilty of receiving and possessing an unregistered firearm, possessing and transferring a machinegun, and three counts of receiving and possessing an unregistered destructive device. The district court sentenced him to twenty years’ imprisonment. On appeal, Adamiak contends that at least one of his convictions violated the Double Jeopardy Clause of the Fifth Amendment. He further objects to the adequacy of the indictment under which he was charged, the sufficiency of the evidence against him, the district court’s jury instructions, and his sentence...
Adamiak was accused and found guilty of posessing machine guns. The SAF has more details on both the charges and the convictions, but to be as a tl;dr: they weren't actually machine guns, or even guns. The ATF argued, under the Trump admin, that disabled (sometimes to the point of being cut in half) and inert pieces of a firearm were still machine guns or rocket launchers, because they could be brought to real functionality... by long efforts by skilled experts bringing in sizable parts, in some cases including everything that actually functioned.
Only his Double Jeopardy argument succeeds. Having thoroughly reviewed the record and carefully considered the briefs, arguments, and materials provided by the parties, we discern no other reversible error.
Where the court says "thoroughly reviewed", that's got a bit of an asterisk. The Double Jeopardy clause gets a bit more than a page; the other constitutional arguments get...
Adamiak’s Second Amendment challenge is squarely foreclosed by this court’s holdings in Bianchi v. Brown, 111 F.4th 438, 453 (4th Cir. 2024) and United States v. Hunt, 123 F.4th 697, 704 (4th Cir. 2024), and the relevant statutes are not unconstitutionally vague.
Yes, that Bianchi. Happy Fuck You Too Day, Justices, this is what your punts have bought; this is the nonconsentual volunteer VanDerStok demanded. And it's going to go nowhere. Malinowski is still dead, his widow's lawsuit is going nowhere, and no one cares that the agents involved gathered more bodycam footage of his widow pissing than they did of the actual raid. Dexter Taylor's still in prison, and in the unlikely situation his case ever gets to a court that actually recognized the Second Amendment as existing in their courtroom, he'll have served a majority of his unjust sentence first.
Reese v. ATF Wins... kinda
Reese is one of many lawsuits challenging the federal prohibition on sales of handguns by FFLs to people between the age of 18 and 20. Most of these have died quick deaths to mootness; prospective plaintiffs can only bring a challenge for three years after the matter becomes ripe on their 18th birthday and before it becomes moot on their 21st, court cases making decisions in that time frame (and not involving illegal immigrants) are rare, and they're rarer still in Second Amendment contexts. Organizational plaintiffs have thus had to prepare a consistent parade of young adults willing to sacrifice a lot of potential negative attention in trade for benefits that likely won't include them, while also ducking other procedural hurdles.
But Reese pulled it off. A complaint filed in November of 2020 eventually made it to a January 2025 appeals court decision which held:
And even more surprisingly the federal government did not appeal to SCOTUS. Perhaps that's downstream of a change in administrations, perhaps it's just caution about setting broad jurisprudence against a law, perhaps it's just about incompetence. But finally, a major change that could drastically impact a lot of people could apply to jurisdictions too wide for legislatures to just file the serial numbers off and try again, even if it's just one circuit.
Why am I only writing about it now? Why hasn't been newsworthy that a whole Circuit has let 18-year-olds buy handguns?
Well, the circuit hadn't; for various procedural reasons the appeals court does not issue mandates, and the trial court was in no hurry. October 7th finally (finally!) had a final judgement issued. And that judgement came with a massive caveat:
The Court enters declaratory judgment, as described in paragraph 3 below, with respect to (a) Caleb Reese, Joseph Granich, Emily Naquin, and (b) individuals and federally licensed firearms importers, manufacturers, dealers or collectors who were members of Firearms Policy Coalition, Inc., Second Amendment Foundation, or Louisiana Shooting Association at the time this action was filed on November 6, 2020.
The Court hereby declares that 18 U.S.C. §§ 922(b)(1) and (c)(1), and their attendant regulations, are unconstitutional and violate the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution to the extent those provisions prevent the sale or delivery of handguns and/or handgun ammunition by and to persons identified in paragraph 2 on account of the buyer being 18 to 20 years old.
That's not even a "if you were a FFL and a member of these orgs before November 2020, you can't be prosecuted under this unconstitutional law". Only where the buyers are under-20 and were members of the groups a half-decade before does the declaration apply. This judgement might not be literally absolutely toothless -- someone might have bought their thirteen-year-old kid a membership in the SAF five years back -- but it's so close that the distinction is meaningless. Forget "old men plant trees in whose shade they shall never sit", we've got young men making serious sacrifices for shade that covers nobody, ever.
The judgement was revoked for other even dumber reasons -- the judge demanded each org provide a verified membership list within 21 days, which wasn't going to fly at SAF for a variety well-formed objections and the government (claims to) have never asked for or wanted in the first place. So now we're waiting til October 27th to even start planning on how to have a final judgement in a case whose appeal opinion issued on January 30th, and I can accurately joke about how a healthy woman can make a baby faster than Robert R Summerhays, a duly-appointed honorable member of the federal court system, can make a decision protecting the real rights of tens or hundreds of thousands of people. And assuming the judge in question is not excessively overdue, in a month I can even joke about how, no, the courts don't do that for normal people.
(Additional bonus: no attorney's fees for the plaintiffs, so they probably spent between 50k and 150k on a case that means bupkiss. Why? Because fuck you that's why.)
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%+.
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