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Notes -
ANJRPC v. NJAG Case Law
The Third Circuit has found:
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:
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:
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?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.
I'm amused at how gun possession is supposedly a right, and yet with all the caveats laid out here, it seems more like a privilege in practice. Meanwhile, driving is supposedly a privilege, but I'd bet a million dollars I could get a NJ driver's license and own any car I wanted in NJ sooner than I could own any gun I wanted in NJ. Driving seems to be more of a right than guns are.
As I bring up when people talk about how they want guns to be regulated "at least" as much as motor vehicles. Vehicles are regulated when used on public infrastructure. There are virtually no regulations when utilized on private property.
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Eh, you can’t really compare rights indirectly. You’ve got to look for places they come into direct conflict: my rights to fist-swinging vs. your right to facial integrity, your life vs. my self-defense, and so on.
Cars are very heavily regulated when it comes to other people. But they have a lot more uses which don’t involve others.
The closest gun comparison is hunting rifles, which not coincidentally tend to get the most slack from regulators.
There is no such thing as a ‘hunting rifle’. You can hunt with any rifle chambered in the appropriate caliber- hunting with AR-10’s or AR-15’s rechambered in 6.5 is increasingly popular. In fact for a long time thé most common hunting rifles were WWII surplus.
I know! The latter are a big chunk of what I had in mind. Bolt-actions with integrated or at least very limited magazines, which are probably the most likely gun to get a carve out from wider bans.
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Well yes, we can't have 100% absolute rights everywhere because punching someone in the face (without good cause) violates their rights. But it's hard for me to see how me owning a gun inherently infringes on the rights of others. Meanwhile, I can own a car very easily despite it being just as capable of being used for mayhem and violence. Driving is a privilege that functions like a right and guns are a right that function like a privilege.
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The ability to be mobile would maybe be the first right I would add to the constitution under the 9th amendment under any living constitution argument. It just seems to be a basic thing you need to be able to do to exists. Like it’s basically required now to get food.
You already have the right to travel, you just don't have the right to any particular mode of travel.
You can walk isn’t that practical in the modern day. I think the system works now because the right to travel only has limited restrictions for misbehavior like DUI. The government hasn’t truly tried to act like mobility is only a privilege. No-Fly list may have been an abuse.
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Driving isn't technically a right, but it's even better than that; you can get a driver's license anywhere in the world, as long as it is in English or you have what's called an International Drivers Permit (which is just a translation of your license) and legally drive in New Jersey. For cars you're limited to what's street legal in the US.
For guns, unless you're a US citizen who lives in NJ, have at least two other unrelated adult NJ citizens willing to literally vouch for you, have never seen any sort of mental health doctor, are comfortable dealing with police, are willing to be fingerprinted and sign away your rights for them to examine your medical records, no guns (including pellet guns, and also all ammo) for you. If you do get all of that, you might be able eventually to purchase one of the ever-dwindling set of NJ-legal guns. Actually, as many NJ-legal rifles as you want, but only one handgun... for a second handgun you have to do the whole permit process again.
Yeah, it's a ridiculous joke, but the Supreme Court and all so-called gun rights organizations are fine with it.
It should also be pointed out that while US driver licenses have mutual reciprocity with all 50 states, the same cannot be said for handgun carry permits. Another instance where gun rights are a privilege and driving privileges are a right.
But left un-said constitutionally guns are a right and driving I would argue should be a right but is legally only a privilege.
Of course I say Delaware declared Pennsylvania drivers license were not valid in Delaware it would take about 30 days for the Supreme Court to declare that driving is a right and Delaware can not do that. Because the issue would be like 95% popular. Though some exceptions for blue states issuing commercial drivers license for illegals.
I know this is a directional comment and not meant to be taken as a true hypothetical, but my inner pedant is irked. I don’t think it would ever reach a rights discussion. This type of action would be nullified by the full faith and credit clause and/or post-Wickard commerce clause arguments.
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Hold on isn't this just "involuntary or voluntary admission?" Per google found a law firm saying that's the case. Including voluntary is a bit sketchy in my mind but the steel man is pretty reasonable - "did someone in the community and a panel of experts on safety agree that you were an acute danger to yourself or others" is not that unreasonable. The reality of the situation means that sometimes admissions are soft but on paper "a bunch of people though you were going to kill yourself or someone else" is not that unreasonable of a disqualified for owning a firearm.
If for some reason this involves mundane outpatient interaction with a psychiatrist then people in the state have the easiest lawsuit in the world - just find someone who saw a psychiatrist one time as a kid because they were annoying, was going through grief or adjustment disorder or something like that and take it to the Supreme Court.
No.
Yes.
Previous discussion: 1 2
Text of law
Filling out the form falsely is a strict-liability felony.
So, if you were "attended, treated, or observed" "for any mental or psychiatric condition", but you can't give the name, location, and date because you don't have the records, then you can't get a gun.
Great, easy lawsuit then! "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.
I'm noting that your highlighted text does not note that seeing a psychiatrist outpatient is exclusionary.
In my head-canon, @The_Nybbler exhibited this level of optimism long ago, but the sands of time have since worn it away, leaving behind an obsidian capsule sized just a bit too large for oral ingestion.
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There are no slam dunk 2A cases. First of all, if you don't put a name and hospital affiliation of the doctor, they deny the permit on the grounds that it is incomplete. Don't know those things? No gun for you. No appeal from that. Second, if you do, they may just deny the permit. You can try to appeal that but the state courts will be against you at every turn, and you have to exhaust all of that before you can even ask the Supreme Court to take a look, and in the end they won't. Sometimes, apparently, they'll require you to see a psychiatrist who will swear on his license that you're OK to own a gun (this seems to be with ex-military people who have seen a VA-associated mental health doctor, so it's probably a courtesy to them not to just deny it). Good luck with that.
I don't understand how the NRA can't get anywhere with "this person can't complete the form because they were six years old and their parents are dead."
You can not understand all you want; it is true nonetheless. My personal belief is the conservative gun rights people are fine with the restriction; they're fine with no one having guns unless they've had conservative beliefs all their lives and thus have both people willing to vouch for them and no mental health record at all. But the alternate possibility -- that they know fighting it is futile -- is not ruled out.
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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).
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.
First, I do acknowledge that this stuff has been used to abuse gun owners, although less than they fear.
I've also filled out a million background checks and other similar documents, we have techniques, the classic of which was "no, I do not remember going to a psychiatrist three times at age 6." Patients forget things all the time. Patients forget heart attacks, and as long as you aren't in a centralized database (like for involuntary admissions) you won't be found out. Psychiatrists do cash pay for healthcare people to help facilitate this type of thing (so they don't have to report to boards).
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.
With respect to your linked case, are you familiar with it?
Through a cursory review the person described therein is a central example of someone who shouldn't own a gun and who should be prevented by any means necessary.
The guy has a history of violent and suicidal ideation, has acted out with aggression and violence, exhibits a pattern of poor impulse control, judgement, and insight and engaged in terroristic threats and other threatening behavior. To the extent that the person doesn't have any criminal convictions which precludes gun use is solely due to undercharging. The person likely meets criteria for a cluster-b personality disorder, probably on the border of Narcissism and Anti-Social. This person has a the profile of a mass shooter. I've seen people with multiple bodies who have less red flags. Put another way - I'd rather give a gun to a banger, at least he's only likely to shoot a civilian by accident.
Yes people age out of these personality attributes but it's pretty alarming, I imagine if you ran this case by non 2A people nearly 100% would say god no no guns, and even a super majority of 2A supporters would be like yeah fine.
Not a good test case.
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.
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.
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.
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When I did it, the handgun permit let you get up to three within a 6? month period, but no more than once per month.
Somehow, that feels even more like malicious regulation.
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I expect what NJ will do is simply continue to enforce the law, relying (as New York does) on the (perhaps-dubious) idea that state courts do not have to heed the decisions of Federal Courts other than the Supreme Court, at least in gun cases.
But all these gun cases, as you note when you mention my handle, are pointless. If they lose they lose, if they win they get no rights enforced. They're not arguing about a right to keep and bear arms. They're arguing about the limits of the privilege of the elect who are able to get permission to bear arms. No gun organization is interested in taking on New Jersey's permitting system as a whole, probably because they consider this already decided and lost; Bruen's footnote 9 allows prior restraint on just about any grounds.
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.
Yep, and as long as that's true, there is no RKBA. The gun-rights organizations are doing the equivalent of arguing that you ought to be able to buy genre fiction as well as literary, when you need a difficult-to-obtain license to buy EITHER. And they have the nerve to claim to be winning.
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Are gun cases obsolete at this point?
They can protect you against common criminals but they can’t do nation state war at all anymore. It seems like two new technologies are game changers.
Drones defeat guns. You can have a human operated machine gun and you will lose to a drone. But we probably? can not let people own fleets of AI controlled drones.
Government will control your access to mobility going forward. Autonomous cars are awesome. But mobility is key if there is going to be any check on federal power because a free people with guns will resist. The backdoor they have on your electric car will get turned off when you resist.
Technology and the ability to have industrial and post-industrial society has always been an issue the American Democracy and Freedom project.
Nah.
Small arms haven’t been the deciding factor in state warfare since the proliferation of high explosives. The 2A remained relevant because you still have to interact with the population. Boots on the ground, as it were. That part hasn’t changed.
Agree, but let’s say the Tea Party went farther and rebelled and they all had guns. I don’t know if Obama is going to kill a few million of them versus having a diplomatic solution. And even in Iraq small arms against US not wanting to level the place had some success. Cheap drones are going to be effective against insurgencies if you don’t want to cause mass death.
Not sure I understand what you’re envisioning. A few million tea partiers? A few thousand TPs hiding in a few million Americans?
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Of course he'd kill them. To thunderous applause, since he had the press on his side to hold up the applause signs.
Democrats had a presidential candidate willing to nuke us cities over the second amendment.
And yet, Obama didn't massacre the bundy standoff, and Biden backed down rather than fight Abbott over Texas border enforcement, and Rittenhouse survived and was acquitted. The media's ability to dictate social consensus has declined sharply; Trump was re-elected.
The Clinton DoJ actions were hugely controversial at the time and even the normies think ruby ridge was an abuse of power.
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They're already coming out with dedicated 556 anti-drone rounds.
To indulge in some intellectual masturbation, I'm just going to quote an essay I slapped together one day on the evolution of warfare;
But hey, I'm just a dabbler when it comes to such things, at best. What do I know?
You really think medium term with AI improvements that a human can compete with a drone? And that’s besides in America training a soldier from birth to death on the battle field at 25 has to costs around $1-1.5m and drone tech probably improves to be a fraction of that.
Any commentary on this matter would edge far too close to fedposting for my liking, so I'll politely decline to go down that particular rabbit hole. I give my FBI handler fits enough as-is.
I will remark that I've developed a dislike with people utilizing the term 'AI' to act as plaster over the cracks in a particular wall, or as a magic term that just solves everything.
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Medium term?
Forget guns, right now if you pit an untrained person with a big stick against an untrained person with an FPV drone, the smart money is on the guy with the stick.
From what I can tell, the reason that the warfare in Ukraine looks the way that it does is because of guns. If tomorrow Ukraine turned in all of its guns (I'm including here machine guns, howitzers, mortars, etc.) for an equal cash value of drones, Russia would simply jam the entire frontline and roll their mechanized formations all the way to the Carpathians.
You can't jam a fiber-optic drone or a drone that is running autonomous target acquisition.
I have not investigated the degree to which autonomous targeting has made its way down to FPV-sized drones, but that's an expensive solution and machine imaging is pretty brittle.
Fiber-optic drones are also very tricky (they can't circle a target, for instance, because that might break the cable!) - apparently to the degree that some Ukrainians prefer radio-controlled ones despite the ease of disabling them. Furthermore they are insanely expensive right now thanks to AI datacenter construction (no, really!)
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You asked whether guns were obsolete at this point. At this point, no.
Drones will continue to improve. Drone defenses will likewise continue to improve, but I'm pretty sure there are going to continue to be ground units, and I'm pretty sure those ground units are going to want to be able to shoot things rather than just drone them; it's much, much cheaper. Also, those ground units are going to want to shoot at drones attacking them, which again is much cheaper than using your own drones. Almost certainly, they'll want to automate this into something like a mini-CIWS turret, but that turret will probably be using a gun.
Fair perhaps I should have said “becoming” obsolete. If your place the court game today and it takes years to judicate then in 5-10 years it does seem like guns are less relevant.
The main reason will be to fight urban crime if the state isn’t willing to put people in jail. My main comprehension of the 2A purpose was to either war Britain invading the US or to go to war with US government. Guns don’t seem to have any relevance for that in 10-15 years.
If there is still a government comprised of humans in 10-15 years, guns will still be quite useful if it becomes necessary to fight it. My guess is that you think otherwise because you have a very narrow model of what it means to use a gun to fight the government. You aren't entirely wrong within that narrow frame, but outside it you are very wrong.
There is no plausible future where I would be better off without guns than with them.
Can you expound on the narrowness of my argument? How else can you fight the government with guns?
You’re not doing anything against 300k autistic trannies control US drones under the Biden clone Presidency. They will win.
I would guess your model of "using guns against the government" involves something like a human-wave assault on a federal building by guys on foot armed with ar15s. This is about the worst possible mismatch, and it's still a threat drones cannot obviate now and may not be able to obviate in the future, given the continuous development of cheap, effective, man-portable anti-drone countermeasures.
Here is a scenario a single small step outside that frame. Leave aside the tribal shibboleths and focus on the material specifics: how would 300,000 autistic trannies and their drones under the Biden clone presidency effectively forestall this scenario?
In any case, that's all the illumination I'm comfortable providing on this topic.
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You can put a gun on a drone and not just have suicide drones. And AI drone with gun it’s going to crush human with guns.
Ai Drones with guns are certainly going to outperform humans with guns in the medium-term, possibly even the short term. They don't outperform humans with guns at present.
Also, a gun on a drone is still a gun. Guns themselves remain useful because of their innate capabilities: low-cost standoff firepower.
Also, ubiquity: you may not have a drone, but you always have you. And guns are much, much easier to make and use than drones.
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Guns have been obsolete in America for a long time since 'the people' are not willing to use them when it risks their convenient lives.
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Please watch the following footage of Ukrainians shooting down
ShahedsGerans with an assault rifle. Note that he's using an ACOG sight, and not, say, SMASH.Am I misunderstanding you or is the claim that you can reliably shoot down drones with rifles? Because that's not the feeling I get from watching drone strike vids at all. To get around linking that soul devouring crap, here's a YouTuber talking to a guy about drones. This video shows more how hard they are to shoot.
It's also hard to imagine a rebel force contesting the US Air Force for air superiority via prop planes.
What people generally refer to regarding drones are FPV drones. The kind that are extremely hard to shoot down. Couple a few of those together with an ISR drone with thermals and any 'Red Dawn' wargames go out the window.
My claim is that it's more complicated than rock-paper-scissors. Ukrainians (and Russians) are using machine guns to shoot down drones. That's a thing that happens.
My secondary claim is that firearms technology also benefits from technological developments, including the ones that benefit drones.
This is really all a point about how infantry dismounts aren't going away any time soon which is admittedly a tangent to 2A cases.
FPV drones kind of suck and there are easier ways to deal with them right now than shooting them.
This was the entire US MO in the Middle East: we had MALE and HALE ISR drones coupled with kill-drones (Hellfire missiles, and small bombs/rockets). I think we can conclude that the MALE/HALE ISR + kill-drone combination is not by itself sufficient to defeat a counterinsurgency, both because the US lost in Afghanistan and because the US had to rely on infantry for the entire duration of the GWOT.
This is all despite Afghanistan being smaller than Texas (although with a larger population) and the US rolling out a wide-scale biometric identification program to make identifying insurgents easier.
Men with rifles also took down machine guns. That didn't invalidate the use case for machine guns or the fact they changed warfare, even if they were very heavy and tended to overheat. So I don't see the relevance of the select scenarios where Ukrainians and Russians can fly props and shoot down slow moving drones. Or that there are operational issues with drones in many conditions. That can all be true and drones are still a force that revolutionizes the battlefield in a way that reduces the role of small arms.
An unreliable 1000 dollar drone is an option one can choose multiple times before it stops being cost effective. And that's assuming the tech remains static, which it wont.
It might be more complicated than rock paper scissors but that's not really saying anything. The typical American ideation of a group of armed men resisting the US government relied on a set of priors that drones all but eliminate.
The US lost in the middle east for a variety of reasons. The drones were not one of them and they undeniably moved the battlefield in America's favor. If Afghan and hypothetical US resistance fighters were of the same caliber one might make the argument you're making. But I'm not sure where you intend to find Americans who have the guts and ideological firmament to resist like the Taliban did outside of Amish communities. But in that case the victory condition is largely neither guns or drones.
Sure. I am against drone maximalism, not drone usage.
Right, it will evolve in ways that harm drones as currently employed. You know what's cheaper than a single AI-targeted drone with a 20km range and a cheap armor-penetrating warhead? A tiny interceptor drone with no warhead, a .5 km range, and a mindless acoustic-homing sensor.
I don't think this is a settled question.
If America is in a state of civil war, then the conditions of America have radically shifted enough that I don't really think this sort of postulating is particularly illuminating. Suffice to say that in civil wars both sides (particularly at the start) usually find many of the men with guts and ideological firmament the same place they did before the war: in the active duty military.
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Drones will absolutely revolutionize the battlefield and will likewise absolutely reduce the role of small arms. Reduction is not elimination, nor is it necessarily "reduce to a negligable amount". Guns provide a tactical and logistical capability that is likely irreplicable.
No, they don't.
This cuts both ways. You assume those resisting are complacent and cowardly, but you also assume those imposing tyranny have infinite courage and resolve. They don't, and in the words of the poet, they have moms. A fight of this nature would not look like the Taliban, because America is not Afghanistan, and Americans are not Afghans. It would be worse for the government in a whole variety of ways. It is very, very hard to make a bullet hitting you in the armpit from a thousand yards away with zero warning a negligible problem.
What they have is the attitude of "by any means necessary". And the necessary means.
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No, they don't. Guns are effectively a very specialized kind of drone, and the specialization they're good at hasn't gone away. It would be more accurate to say that guns defeat soldiers, but even this is highly contextual so long as we intend to keep having lots of humans around.
Maybe someday, certainly not yet.
You probably won't be able to stop them from owning these for roughly the same reasons you can't actually meaningfully control guns if the public wants them.
Okay. Why are illegal narcotics still a problem?
It is, but for exactly the opposite of the reasons you're thinking. Too much order is probably not the basic problem you should be worrying about. I'm not worried that Wokes or whoever are going to establish a permanent tyranny. I'm much more worried they're going to try, and the way they fail is going to have my kids dead or reduced to eating cat food.
From a more general legal perspective, the point of gun cases is not to secure redress from the government, but rather to build common knowledge that the government is incapable of providing such redress.
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Reminds me of listening to the local NPR affiliate round table talking about how you can't use an AR-15 to hunt because it'll scatter the deer into pieces all over the forest.
Presumably both the round table and these judges are working from the same talking point distributed somewhere, but I can't be arsed to find the origin.
I hunt with an AR-10, but it is indeed correct that you cannot deer hunt with an AR-15- although they are wrong about the mechanism.
Depends on the state: https://www.huntingnet.com/forum/whitetail-deer-hunting/227252-legal-rifle-calibers-state.html
While legal in some states, you probably can’t do it as a practical matter; thé bullet isn’t big enough.
I mentioned this in another comment to gattsuru, but here's some light reading for you:
https://rokslide.com/forums/threads/223-for-bear-mountain-goat-deer-elk-and-moose.130488/
Up to almost 700 pages, lots of pictures -- and not limited to the titular species either; some guys are a bit overboard and going after grizzlies and African game too, as I recall.
It's not something I'm planning on doing myself anytime soon, but they do make a compelling case that with heavy-for-calibre bullets the 223 kills pretty much anything pretty damn well!
I read years ago that the Inuit were extremely fond of the .222 Remington, and used it for hunting anything and everything up to and including bear and moose. I don't think they were worrying about one-shot stops, though...
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I've hunted whitetail effectively with a .223 round in the past. A 77gr monolithic copper bullet, out of a 20" barrel, will do the job at ranges less than 150 yards.
If you try to do it with a standard 55gr round out of a 16" barrel, you're correct, but modern bullet construction can do a lot of work.
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You can also just drop a larger caliber upper into an AR-15 platform.
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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!
The 223 fuddlore is dying fast -- there's a whole subculture of
wimpy, recoil sensitive millenialsserious hunters (see: Rokslide forums) promoting the use of 223 on literally all kinds of game; they do this by posting pictures of the results of lungshots in hundred-page forum threads. (impressive internal organ damage; frequent lack of an exit wound is actually one of the main complaints)It would be pretty hilarious if somebody tried to defend the "223 not good for hunting claim in court" -- the Rokslide guys are pretty autistic and very prolific -- I'm imagining one of the mods going through the fine details of a 1000 page powerpoint of dead animals as an expert witness!
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I believe the talking point1 was distributed all over the forest via shooting it with an AR-15. If you see bits of deer, you'll know you're close.
1It was a hollow talking point.
You are supposed to use hollow points for big game, although it’s not necessarily the law in every jurisdiction.
More likely soft tip or polymer tip. Hollowpoints are usually built to fragment too fast for deer-sized game. Great for coyotes though.
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How many people using that talking point would you estimate know that?
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