Category: You Can’t Make This Up

San Diego County Sues Filament Maker Over Its 2A Ties

There’s nothing illegal about selling plastic filament for 3D printers, even if some customers use that filament to manufacture firearms. But according to officials in San Diego County, there’s something legally actionable about a filament maker embracing the Second Amendment community and touting its products to people who print their own guns.

On Monday, San Diego County, aided by Giffords Law Center, filed suit against Polymaker LLC, accusing the company of violating California’s Unfair Competition and False Advertising laws by allegedly promoting it’s products to the 3D-printed firearms community. The county isn’t claiming that Polymaker sells guns, unfinished frames or receivers, or even a product that’s uniquely suited for making firearms. Instead, much of its case rests on what Polymaker has said and done while selling a lawful, general-purpose product.

According to the county’s complaint, Polymaker developed firearm-themed products, sponsored and worked with gun-printing influencers, offered technical advice about using its filament for firearm applications, and cultivated relationships with the broader 3D gun community. San Diego contends those activities helped facilitate violations of California’s restrictive laws governing privately manufactured firearms.

While this lawsuit implicates the Second Amendment, it raises substantial First Amendment questions as well. From the complaint:

To be clear, 3D printing filament is not inherently illicit and has many lawful, productive purposes, and this lawsuit does not seek to ban the sale of filament in California.

Rather, the People bring this lawsuit to hold Polymaker liable for its strategic business choice to design and market its filaments in order to profit from the illegal manufacture of 3D printed ghost guns in California.

These actions violate California law and reflect a conspicuous disregard for the public safety interests of Californians that those laws are designed to protect.

San Diego isn’t taking aim at what Polymaker sells. It’s suing over how the company talks about its products, who it talks to, and what those customers might legally do with them in much of the rest of the country, where California’s idiotic laws are not in place.

Nowhere in the complaint does San Diego allege that Polymaker is designing or marketing it’s filaments with California specifically in mind. Instead, the county heavily relies on California’s ridiculously broad definition of a “firearm precursor part,” which includes “any forging, casting, printing, extrusion, machined body or similar article . . . that is marketed or sold to the public to become or be used as the frame or receiver of a functional firearm once completed, assembled or converted.”

In support of its lawsuit, San Diego County points to the California DOJ’s designation of the Ghost Gunner “AR-00,” which is nothing more than a solid block of aluminum, as a “firearm precursor part” simply because it’s marketed as something that can eventually become a firearm frame or receiver.

While that might buttress San Diego County’s argument, it’s also a perfect illustration of just how expansive and open-ended California’s law is. Under San Diego’s theory, a company that produces a general-purpose product can be held liable for promoting one particular use because California prohibits that activity, even when the marketing isn’t specifically directed at Californians.

Punishing commercial speech directed at a nationwide audience because that speech promotes conduct that’s illegal in one state, even when the same conduct is perfectly lawful elsewhere, seems like a pretty clear violation of the First Amendment to me.

If California can turn a spool of plastic into a regulated “firearm precursor part” based largely on how it’s marketed, then this case isn’t just about what Polymaker sells. What the company says about its products, and even who it associates with and employs, are also fundamental parts of the county’s litigation, and you don’t have to be a Second Amendment supporter or a 3D-printing aficionado to be extremely concerned about where this theory can lead.

Pennsylvania court case declared mistrial because none of the jurors would own up to smoking a doobie in the jury room.

The U.S. court system is 100% broken, and nothing shows that fact better than this case out of Pennsylvania.

Safon Gump was accused of fatally shooting Gregory Prince, but the trial that would have brought justice to Gump derailed because one of the jurors got high in the jury room.

TribLive has the details:

Because Gump remains in custody — and court rules prohibit jurors from seeing a defendant in handcuffs for fear it could prejudice them — jurors were returned to their fifth-floor room to await the all clear to leave for lunch.

When Common Pleas Judge Edward J. Borkowski’s tipstaff arrived to release the jurors, Seman said, ‘He’s immediately hit with the smell of marijuana.’

Then, one of the jurors ‘looked at him and said, ‘It wasn’t me.”‘

This is where things really went off the rails.

The prosecution and the defense both agreed that if the juror had a prescription it was fine, and the judge said no one would be in trouble for the incident, but all the jurors also swore that they were not taking any medications that could affect their judgment in the case, so the judge needed to figure out who it was.

One by one, the jurors were brought to the judge’s chambers privately and questioned.

They all answered no in chambers, as well.

The judge also asked the jurors if anyone had ingested anything legally or illegally while in the jury room.

‘All of them denied it,’ Seman said.

The defense asked for a mistrial and the judge agreed to it.

Trans gunman caught in alleged casino terror plot with huge cache of weapons 

Las Vegas cops busted a transgender gunman who allegedly planned a casino massacre using a huge cache of weapons.

Allison Howlett, 36, who was born a man but lives as a woman, was arrested Saturday on charges of making terroristic threats, assault with a deadly weapon, auto theft, gun theft and other offenses.

The wild story unfolded shortly after 9:30 a.m. Saturday when Howlett’s former spouse, who is female, called police to report Howlett had stolen her car and the vehicle held numerous firearms, Henderson Police Chief Reggie Rader said.

The former spouse said Howlett intended to commit “suicide by cop” or carry out a mass shooting, Radar said.

Howlett’s ex was tracking her stolen car on her phone and led cops to it where it was parked in a garage at Sunset Station hotel, the top cop said.

As officers approached the vehicle Howlett blasted music over the car’s stereo and refused commands to exit. He did, however, ask cops for a drink of water.

“Officers were eventually able to establish communication and convince her to roll down her window during negotiations,” said Rader.

“When she asked for water, the quick-thinking officers developed a plan to take her into custody as an opportunity arose when she reached for the water,” he explained. “Officers used that moment to gain control of her hands and remove her from the vehicle.”

Allison Howlett in a jail uniform during a court appearance.
Howlett is seen in a courtroom still on July 1. The judge set her bail at $500k.

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The Black Codes Are a Cautionary Tale, Not a Useful Precedent

It has not been a great few months for Neal Katyal. As Charlie Cooke has detailed, Katyal and Hawaii got trounced, and properly so, in Wolford v. Lopez, which sought to masquerade a state law by which the government criminalizes having a gun on any private property as merely private conduct, because it allows the property owner to explicitly permit guns to be carried. Nobody in the 6–3 majority was fooled.

The really contemptible thing in this case was Katyal trolling the Court’s consideration of history and tradition in gun regulation by arguing that Hawaii was just following in the path of Southern states that adopted strict “Black Codes” during Reconstruction that limited the right of freedmen to carry guns. As I explained after the argument in January, this is the worst possible use of history:

It was left to Justice Thomas to ask the obvious rejoinder: “If you’re going to cite the Louisiana black codes of 1865, don’t you also have to cite the subsequent adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment that was in part generated because of laws like that?”

Thomas is right. It’s not just that the Black Codes were later found to be unconstitutional; it’s that the people who wrote and ratified the 14th Amendment were specifically responding to those laws. . . .

The history of the Black Codes [should be read] not as proof of our history and tradition, but as proof of what defenders of that history and tradition were aiming to abolish by enacting the 14th Amendment.

. . . Reading the Black Codes into the 14th Amendment is like reading the law of slavery into the 13th Amendment or reading bans on black voting into the 15th. It has the whole point of the amendment precisely backward.

Alito dismissed Katyal’s troll with the scathing contempt it deserved, saying that it “cannot be taken seriously” given the actual history. But Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was taken with the argument, and as has happened several times of late when Jackson decides to promote some nonsense about the methodology of the Court’s work, Justice Amy Coney Barrett felt compelled to respond.

Jackson — joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor but, pointedly, not by Justice Elena Kagan  — leaped at the analogy to the Black Codes as a club to wield in her continuing campaign against the use of history and tradition in reading the Second Amendment. That’s why Katyal was offering her the argument — not because he seriously believed that anybody applying the Court’s existing tests in good faith would fall for this hackish fallacy, but so that the Court’s test itself could be attacked. That’s also why commentators such as Mark Joseph Stern like the argument: “Virtually all of the laws that SCOTUS credits as relevant to the Bruen analysis were written by racist white men . . . by and for heterosexual white males.” Here’s Jackson:

As I see it, there are two potential reasons to use—or exclude—the Black Codes in Bruen’s history-and-tradition test. First, it could be that the Black Codes regulated guns consistent with the Second Amendment but States chose to exercise their regulatory authority in a discriminatory fashion. . . . Under this framing, those gun regulations are not examples of an unconstitutional abridgment of the right to bear arms, but rather exemplify a violation of a different constitutional Amendment—the Fourteenth.

Alternatively, it could be that States did not have the constitutional authority under the Second Amendment to enact such regulations but did so anyway for discriminatory reasons. Under that framing, not only did the States violate the Constitution by acting on the basis of race; they also violated the right to bear arms. Only the second set of circumstances justifies removing these laws (and the experiences of those they targeted) from the body of evidence that determines the historical reach of the Second Amendment under Bruen.

Jackson writes this as if she is completely oblivious to both the cause-and-effect relationship between the Black Codes and the enactment of the 14th Amendment and the fact that states could violate the Second Amendment with impunity before 1868 because until then it only bound the federal government. (Of course, nearly all such states had their own state constitutional guarantees, but Jackson just blows past the distinction.)

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Key rule: Don’t let weirdos run your society.

“A possible referendum in Oregon on animal rights would end fishing, hunting, even pest control, just when Democrats are trying really hard not to be seen as ‘weirdos again.’”

I’m reading “Protect Every Animal From Cruelty? Not in 2026, Oregon Democrats Say” (NYT).

The measure, known for now as Initiative Petition 28… would give all animals the same protections from cruelty that Oregon grants dogs and cats…. Hunting, trapping and fishing would be outlawed, along with scientific research on animals, lethal pest control and conventional livestock production….
The fight is in some ways very Oregon, long a proving ground for ideas that initially seemed politically impossible only to enter the mainstream, such as medical aid in dying, universal vote-by-mail and legalizing the hallucinogenic compound in magic mushrooms for therapy.

When people think of “animals” — as in “I love animals!” — they’re not thinking about cockroaches and mosquitoes.

ADDED: According to Ballotopedia, the initiative “Applies to mammals (including vermin), birds, reptiles, amphibians, fish.” So I think “lethal pest control” is meant to call to mind mice and rats, not the various troublesome insects. The NYT article says “all animals” and also, more than once, says “pest control.”

In the comments here, Tom T. said, “Then would come the court decisions defining pet ownership as cruelty and outlawing it.” That got me looking into the argument that pet-keeping is a form of cruelty to animals. Here’s an interesting Vox article from 3 years ago: “The case against pet ownership/Why we should aim for a world with fewer but happier pets.”
Excerpt:
We demand companionship with as little friction as possible, expecting our pets (especially dogs) to be docile and agreeable, and to adapt quickly to the human world, with its countless rules and norms that mean nothing to them. And then when they inevitably fail to do so at first, we deem their natural habits misbehavior in need of correction, or abandonment….

Just how uneven the relationship is between pets and their human owners was demonstrated during the pandemic when, lonely and stuck at home, one in five households adopted a new pet. As new pet owners returned to work, however, their newly lonely pets struggled with the sudden change, showing high rates of chewing, digging, barking, escaping, pacing, hiding, and indoor urination and defecation. Our pets might not be so bored if they just had some autonomy, but having a pet means regularly denying it….

Gary Francione and Anna Charlton, a firebrand animal rights couple who teach law at Rutgers University… have advocated for the abolition of pet ownership. “Domesticated animals are completely dependent on humans, who control every aspect of their lives,” they wrote in a provocative essay for Aeon in 2016. “Unlike human children, who will one day become autonomous, non-humans never will. That is the entire point of domestication — we want domesticated animals to depend on us. They remain perpetually in a netherworld of vulnerability, dependent on us for everything that is of relevance to them.”…

Extreme Ballot Initiative in Oregon Criminalize Hunting, Fishing, and Trapping

I understand the allure of ballot initiatives for many people, especially those who believe their causes are popular enough to win with the public but controversial enough that no politician will touch them. A ballot initiative puts the matter before the people and lets them decide, and that’s had some interesting results in various places over the years.

The problem I have with them is that they also allow moronic people to potentially screw everyone else in the state over.

A prime example of this is a ballot initiative in Oregon that reportedly has enough signatures to go on the ballot. The initiative is…well, it’s something special because it basically bans, among other things, every way possible for a person to get meat besides the grocery store.

A radical initiative to ban hunting, fishing, and trapping in Oregon is now one step closer to making the ballot in November. The animal rights activists who are running a paid campaign to advance the petition say they’ve gathered enough support to surpass the threshold of 117,173 signatures. An online ballot tracker shows that the campaign had submitted 120,735 signatures as of Wednesday.

Those signatures still have to be verified by the Secretary of State’s office. There are certain verification standards for these signatures, and it’s possible (or even likely) that some of them will be thrown out before the official signature deadline on July 2….

Initiative Petition 28, also known as the People for the Elimination of Animal Cruelty Exemptions (PEACE) Act, would dramatically reform Oregon’s existing animal abuse laws by eliminating the legal exceptions that protect lawful activities like fishing and farming from the state’s animal abuse statutes. It would also establish a Humane Transition Fund and a Transitional Oversight Council to help Oregon transition into a “no kill or harm” sanctuary state.

Now, this might not sound so bad, because animal cruelty is a terrible thing that no one approves of.

The problem is when the rubber meets the road. (meats the road?) Like a lot of proposals, this might sound acceptable when you look at the overly broad strokes, but when you get into the nitty-gritty, it’s something far more dystopian.

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