Arms and the Law

The government's "constructive possession claim didn't get very far. The government had been contending that designating to whom the firearms could be transferred was "control," and hence exercising illegal "possession." Then before argument they conceded that Henderson could transfer them to a licensed dealer. Looks like they didn't prepare for "if his transfer to a dealer isn't possession, how can his transfer to a nondealer be possession? There's no difference in terms of exercising control"?

Charity Navigator just revoked their rating and put a "donor advisory" alert in its place. This comes in the wake of a $15 million payout to settle an extortion and bribery suit, and moving $26 million to offshore accounts.

I just heard, know no details.

Mike produced "Waco: The Rules of Engagement" and directed "The FLIR Project" and "Waco: A New Revelation." Back in '93, he and I forced reopening of the Waco issue, which led to appointment of an independent counsel (who spent a lot of money, prosecuted the one honest guy on the government side, and did little else). The third member of the group (I can't call it a team, since we had no organization) was Gordon Novel, who died last year. (If a dictionary wanted an illustration for the term "enigmatic," they would have used Gordon's picture

Tuesday, Feb. 24, the Supreme Court will hear argument in Henderson v. United States, describing in this SCOTUSblog post. Henderson surrendered his firearms to the government, as one of his conditions of release. He was later convicted of a felony, and thus could not "possess" firearms. He requested to be allowed to sell or transfer his firearms to others, who could legally have them. The government refused, arguing that one aspect of possession is control, and for him to designate who the firearms went to would be for him to exercise control. In other terms, he "constructively possessed" ("constructive" here derived from "construe") if he tried to transfer them, even if they were locked away in an evidence locker and inaccessible to him. Looks like Second Amendment issues are raised, as well.

By pure luck, I came across this, a provision allowing recovery of attorneys' fees in forfeiture cases. It ought to be of great use in gun forfeiture cases at the Federal level.

M855 is the current military issue, and so comprises the "surplus" ammo market in 5.56 NATO. BATFE originally classed it as suitable for "sporting purposes" and thus exempt from the AP ban. It now proposes to reverse this and ban production for the civilian market. The official reasons given largely hinge on the development of AR-15 platform handguns.

It's carried as the cover story.

Mance v. Holder, opinion in pdf. US District Court for the Northern District of Texas holds that the ban is unconstitutional on its face and as applied. A resident of Washington, DC (which now allows handgun in the home, if registered) wanted to buy from a Texas FFL, because the only FFL in DC charges $125 to do the paperwork. The court holds that the GCA prohibition on the sale fails strict scrutiny, and also intermediate scrutiny, and enjoins enforcement of the restriction. Another win for the industrious Alan Gura!

An amusing video takedown, from Louder With Crowder.

The Washington Post, no less, discusses Park's private papers and what they tell about guns.

Story here. Original story here.

Right here. It features Jonathan Goldstein, attorney for the good guys, and Shira Goodman, director of a Bloomberg subsidiary, excuse me, of CeasefirrePa.

Story, with video, here. A Florida man with a CCW carry permit walks into a Walmart. Some guy sees him holster the gun in the parking lot, and tackles him, apparently trying for a chokehold. (Reports have it that in the fight the carrier said to him "I have a permit!") The legal carrier was black; not clear whether that mattered, but if it had been me I doubt he would have decided it was time to try to go for it. Clue: if the guy has a holster and a salt-and-pepper beard, he is probably not a risk). Good ending: police charged the attacker with battery.

Story here. Operation Chokepoint was aimed at discouraging financial institutions from dealing with certain forms of business that were supposedly likely to generate returns, credit card protests, and things like that. It quickly expanded into discouraging dealings with governmentally disfavored forms of business... including licensed firearms dealers, and coin dealers.

(I've actually stayed in the building pictured: it has a hotel-like wing, and a special deal for local universities. Never again. It was like a hotel designed by Joseph Stalin, or perhaps some architect of prisons. You had to pass a checkpoint to park the car, another to get into the building. One soda machine in the entire place.).

Sometimes you can't make this stuff up. Fourth grader is suspended for telling someone he has the ring of power and can make him invisible.

He's already been suspended twice: for mentioning that a black classmate was black, and for bringing The Big Book of Knowledge to class. As Glenn Reynolds says, in this day and age sending a kid to some public schools constitutes child abuse.

Bill Whittle's presentation on the issue may just be the best one I have ever seen.

The Washington Times has the story. The Inspector General getting involved sounds like a good sign to me. Now, if someone whose bank spurned them would file a Federal Tort Claims Act claim, citing tortious interference with contract, things might get quite lively, especially during the discovery process.

The Jay Dobyns story hit Fox News.

This morning I argued a first amendment case in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit; it was one of three cases argued. Video for the argument is here. My argument was the second, beginning at 1:21:30, so skip ahead.

I still haven't figured out what the first argument was about, except that it involved somebody selling software.

I realized I'd misread the court's docket: there were two judgments entered, one still sealed, the other redacted and unsealed. So here's the latter one. Pretty excoriating. Read the footnotes, too.

The court finds in Dobyns' favor, says that the BATF defense witnesses (who were all highly involved in Fast and Furious, BTW) lied on the stand, that their conduct toward Dobyns was "reprehensible." They tried to frame him for the arson of his house, knowing that this was false.

In fn. 25, the court notes that an ATF attorney blocked a reopening of the arson investigation, telling people that it would hurt this civil case (i.e., show that Dobyns was innocent of the arson), and that she covered that up from the court.

The final fn. explains why the judge ordered the judgment served on the Attorney General, the Office of Professional Responsibility, and the Office of Inspector General. He directs the clerk to call their attention to fn. 25, and says that he will put off disciplining the attorney until he sees what Justice is going to do to them.

Got into the Court of Claims docket-- here's the ruling (pdf) in which the Court accuses the Department of Justice attorneys of having committed a fraud on the Court. That's the document which the Court recently ordered unsealed.

The judgment (the order ruling that Plaintiff won) is still sealed. But it must be pretty explosive. Here's the Court docket for that time period. Notice right after entering the judgment, the Court orders that copies of the judgment be served on the Attorney General, the DOJ Inspector General (responsibility to prevent fraud, waste and abuse) and the DOJ Office of Professional Responsibility (charged with investigating ethics violations). I've never seen a court order anything like that.