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Notes -
The Brooklyn District Attorney's website reports:
Taylor, also known as CarbonMike, was both a CTRL-Pew 3d printing enthusiast and a New Yorker, a combination that Didn't Go Well.
The specific charges and sentencing are complex, but if I'm reading matters correctly, almost all sentences run concurrently, so the headline charge about ghost guns, like the charges about possession of pistol ammunition and so on, are kinda swamped by a ten-year sentence for 'assault weapons' and for 'owning five firearms'. There are a few border issues on the text of the statutes, but there's not a ton to argue on whether Taylor complied with these statutes.
((Not least of all because many are vague or broad enough that it's very much up to the local DA to make the decision anyway.))
There's a lot to be debated about whether the laws are constitutional, but not much chance that it matters. The New York Assault Weapons Ban has been the target of prolonged lawfare since before Bruen, with the FPC currently supporting Lane after the state was getting good enough reception in Vanchoff v James about lacking credible threats of prosecution, and that's the case with the stance furthest along. Other statutes, like possession of ammunition or "ammunition feeding devices" without a matching pistol permit, are difficult to write cases to challenge before enforcement at all. Even if the statutes for each of the longer sentences are overturned, bail pending appeal is extremely unlikely. Taylor will have served most if not all of his sentence first, especially given the glacial pace that courts have set for these matters (cfe Duncan).
Taylor also makes the argument that he did not have a fair day in court, and while almost every defendant does that to some extent, his argument is unusually compelling. No few gunnies finding a pull quote from the judge allegedly claiming that "Do not bring the Second Amendment into this courtroom. It doesn’t exist here. So you can’t argue Second Amendment. This is New York." but the gameplay about objections, if honestly stated, is as bad or worse. (I'm unable to find a direct trial transcript.).
Also doesn't matter. There is a right to an impartial judge, but this mostly covers matters like giant campaign donations or hating an entire nationality or literally copying text from a party's submissions, rather than just figuratively being on the prosecutor's side. Even assuming Taylor's (and his lawyer's) summary is accurate and complete, the appeals courts don't care that lower courts hate people accused of making guns.
In some ways, Taylor might be the ideal test case: nothing in the visible court records or DA chest-beating show nefarious intent like violent personal history or planned mass shooting or intent to resell (and New York law places a presumption on multiple possession as for sale), he (was) traditionally employed, he credibly claims that he's never fired a single one of the guns, and at 52, he's aged out of the various high-criminal-risk age brackets. To beat the HBDers to the punch, he's even visibly a minority.
((To beat the HBDers with a stick, if we're framing absolutely everything as part of the progressive stack, I think there's strong evidence that the real top of the stack is whatever matches the politics today in a far more direct manner than mere race.))
Of course, the Brooklyn DA brought the case, knowing that. The judge acted like this, in this case, knowing that. And no matter how dim you might think they are, they're winning, and this know what it takes to win. Whether that's because the courts punt on serious cases because defendants fail to present long evidence of futile requests, because they credibly believe that Taylor's not Perfect Enough for the courts to actually handle or for various gun rights orgs to fund, or because even if they're wrong they'll never suffer for it, doesn't really matter. It's possible that Brooklyn DA took the case because Taylor's social media made it easier to prove, it might be that we're only gonna hear about this case out of many because of said social media, and it doesn't really matter.
There's a lot of ways to snark, in "What's the penalty for being late?" fashion, about how Taylor's non-violent noncompliance with a law has gotten a much longer sentence than nutjobs who were separately violent, or a comparable sentence to a man who literally burned another man to death on the pyre of an Approved Cause. And that's not entirely fair, because the federal system doesn't have parole and New York does, and anyway there's a million different squiggly little variables about the crimes and sentences, and there's nowhere near enough cases to make a deep statistical analysis even if I wanted to try. Gun control advocates will certainly quibble, at the edges, about whether this is really 'non-violent non-violent', since there's always the possibility of later bad acts or theft or loss or mental break.
And Taylor ain't dead yet, despite an (alleged) no-knock raid. The actuarials put decent odds on him even seeing the light of day as a free man again, parole or no. Unlike Mr. Lee, had Taylor expressed his dislike of current law enforcement with a bit what the ATF calls a destructive device through a bit of what I call a broken window, the odds would not be looking so good. But there's no magic court case, here, and no golden BB. This isn't even the strawman of a scifi writer drawing up villains who just want their laws as threats to hang over innocent men. If you are ruled by people who hate you, giving puppy-dog eyes and saying this is just a paperwork crime and no one was hurt won't buy you a cup of coffee before you get absolutely reamed in all the least fun ways, and contra a once-prolific-now-banned poster here, everyone who cares about this stuff is ruled by men who hate them.
This is what table stakes looks like.
Indeed. The Supreme Court position on the right to keep and bear arms is "Sure, people have the right to keep and bear arms. That doesn't mean any particular person has the right to own or carry a gun." Very conservative position, actually.
The current SC is not exactly shy about overturning precedent, have they recently affirmed this position or is it an older decision?
To add to The_Nybbler's point, oral arguments in Rahimi were November 2023, a case where an incredibly unsympathetic defendant (alleged multiple shooter, drug dealer, and girlfriend beater) was indicted for possessing a firearm while subject to a domestic restraining order. We won't know for certain how the court rules until the opinion drops, and that probably won't happen for a month (or up to three).
But it's extremely unlikely that this will result in a significantly broadened understanding of the Second Amendment. The most optimistic takes in the gunnie world hope that the Court will allow Rahimi's conviction and just require a finding of 'dangerousness'. Most expect that they'll overturn the lower court, or leave only the most narrow process grounds to protect Rahimi.
And there are reasons beyond oral argument tea-leaf reading for that. It's already happened before in Gary/Greer, where unsympathetic plaintiffs made it easy for the court to decide that for process reasons a prohibited person didn't need to be proven to know they were prohibited.
But even more broadly, there's just not that much of the court touching this right to protect all but the most aggressive infringements in the cleanest-cut cases across the wide scope of all people in a jurisdiction, and sometimes not even that, even as case after case was teed up.
If the Court wanted to protect the rights of people who hadn't been violent, they had a case where a man was banned from possessing guns because he was convicted of counterfeiting cassette tapes in 1987. And they punted. If the Court wanted to protect the rights of people who had suffered mental illness long ago and recovered, they had a case where a man was banned from possessing guns because he had a depressive episode in 1999. And they punted. States requiring guns to have technologies that don't exist? Taking private property without warrant or compensation or grandfathering? License denials for
driving while blacka police encounter that did not result in an arrest or any evidence of wrongdoing? Punt punt punt.The best result the gunnie sphere other than Bruen was Caetano v. Massachusetts (2016! and see the massive resistance in O'Neil v Neronha, only finished in 2022). After that, there's maybe the GVR on Duncan v Bonta... except they GVR'd it to the Ninth Circuit, which even at the time had literally never allowed the Second Amendment to do anything, and since broke rules to slow Duncan down further. It's not like Bruen is even the only example: Caniglia v. Strom, was more a Fourth Amendment case, but see the later punts on the massive resistance it has faced by lower courts.
Maybe I get surprised here, or VanDerStok is where (... in 2026? assuming it doesn't get punted then?). But despite an environment with a massive variety of low-hanging fruit, these are the only things the Court cared about, and that's not random.
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Big disagree. I know the current zeitgeist is that this is a super radical, extreme court that sweeps away precedent with the flick of the wrist, but the court I actually observe is very moderate, with a Chief Justice whose most salient characteristic is his desire to direct the court towards the narrowest rulings possible on any given case. When I read or listen to oral arguments, I certainly don't get the impression that any of the justices think that there's no reason to think about precedent.
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The Supreme Court has recently overturned only one precedent in a rightward direction, Roe. The last gun case it decided was Bruen. Various states (including New York, which lost Bruen) immediately made laws to restrict guns and gun carry despite Bruen, and various circuits have upheld them, and also upheld or refused to overturn older laws which should clearly be stricken by Bruen. The Supreme Court took up none of those cases. Instead, it took up a Fifth Circuit case, Rahimi, where the Fifth Circuit struck down a gun control law based on Bruen, with the clear intent of reinstating it. The message is clear: the right to keep and bear arms is an academic curiosity only, it doesn't actually mean you have the right to own or carry a gun.
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