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A legal case involving what are known as "80%" receivers is working its way through the federal court system, under the title Vanderstok v Garland.
For those of you who are not aware of the terminology, an "80%" receiver is a chunk of metal or polymer that does not meet the federal definition of a "firearm" at the time of its initial manufacture and sale. After sale, these objects are generally modified by consumers to produce home-built, unserialized firearm receivers. You may have also heard of these resultant firearms described as "ghost guns".
While the origin and evolution of the term "ghost gun" is interesting, it's considerably less interesting than the most recent 5th circuit opinion re: Vanderstok. The opinion directly quotes and cites an article from slatestarcodex.com.
This interests me for a few reasons. The first is that it's only the second time I've ever seen SSC referenced in "normie" spaces: the first being the NYT hit-piece from a few years back. The second is that the 5th circuit is broadly viewed as the most conservative-leaning of the US circuit courts, so it's interesting to see one of Scott's more noteworthy pieces showing up there.
VanDerStock's case path is weird. SCOTUS has already issued a stay on the district court's vacateur of the law until the case reaches SCOTUS again or is denied, which makes pretty explicit what the expected long-term conclusion is. I don't think there was any reasonably optimistic perspective that would have any of the progressive branch notice the various due process and vagueness concerns here, but having both Barret and Roberts agree to leave the regulation in place for what's likely to be years is... disappointing, if not necessarily surprising.
The appeals court sending the case back down to the district for a new remedy... I dunno what they'd even do, here. The standard behavior, as both the appeals opinion here and the lower court both spelled out, is normally vacateur. And a separate injunction pending appeal tied to the same rule was likewise overturned. What's next: a permanent injunction against enforcement of a regulation, which SCOTUS will then stay too? A declaratory judgement that any enforcement of the regulation would be unlawful, which will only bind a tiny part of Texas?
There's a lot of options, but they're all going to make the extent courts treat the second amendment like a red-headed stepchild apparent, and it's not like the district judge has any reason to back down: the chickens are coming home to roost.
There's been a limited tendency toward snarky writers reaching out for outre citations, with perhaps one of the best-known being Scalia's citation to Vonnegut as a closing point for his PGA Tour v. Martin dissent. I've got mixed feelings on the practice, and it could mean something deeper, but it could just as well be a one-off.
That said, if you want to try to pull out some insight, the process does feel a bit like part of the response to @TracingWoodgrain's political collapse of public institutions. Oldham could have linked to a Cardiff Professor of Philosophy (that's what Scott did himself!), among other options, but there's reason he found a random blogger with a good point more persuasive than a PhD or a hundred-year-old-dictionary ipse dixiting it. The institutions going
badLeft doesn't unavoidably give the progressive movement an unshakable control over systems of information or administration; it just invites alternative proofs. In the short term and in the specific context of judges, conservatives can now take some public institutions simply by the opposite of their word (VanDyke's "arrogant, lazy, [and] an ideologue”; “lacks humility”; and “has an ‘entitlement’ temperament" in particular are not benefits!), but over the longer term some other metastable point will come up. PoC || GTFO is a hacker ethos, but it also applies to pondering whether the exhibitionist furry mechanist-chemist or systems designer or rocket company is doing good work or not.Deeper than that, I think there's some broader collapse of public authority. Not necessarily that our public authorities have gotten worse -- much of the collapse in trust reflects a lot of big names from the 90s and 00s making absolutely boneheaded behaviors common knowledge in ways that once coudl be papered over -- but that it's become common knowledge not just that it happens, but that no one in authority is even interested in trying to persuade watchers it doesn't. And this is bigger than the Red Tribe noticing its small remainder of public authorities can and do change their positions on a dime, and sometimes in bizarre ways. I can point to Toobin jerking it during a Zoom call while burnishing his feminist bonafides, but I can also point to a pro-sexuality Big Name who was a founding member of the Burned Furs and pretty clearly never wants to face or apologize for the contradictions.
There's problems to that! The conservative movement's difficulty with 'alternate paths of knowing' including grifters, charlatans, and outright nutjobs as often as merely radical-but-genuine actors predates the internet; the progressive movement's failure points are not as well-repeated, but just as present. But listing off the problems is misunderstanding my description: this is a process in the sense that gravity or crowd flow is a process, rather than the way microcontroller power staging is a process.
My unrealistic hope is that they're kicking the can down the road because there's a soon to be released decision about agency powers that might apply here, which would bypass the entire gun hornets' nest completely.
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