Best Concurring Opinion Evah!

Judge Lawrence VanDyke wrote the court’s opinion in McDougall v. Ventura County (California). It was a recent 9th Circuit Court of Appeals decision that found Ventura County’s public health order closing of gun shops, ammo stores, and shooting ranges for 48 days violated the Second Amendment.

Judge VanDyke was appointed to the 9th Circuit by President Donald Trump. He had previously served as the Solicitor General for both the states of Montana and Nevada as well as Assistant Solicitor General for Texas. VanDyke earned undergraduate and graduate degrees in engineering before attending Harvard Law School.

VanDyke gets appeals court seat despite Cortez Masto, Rosen protest

Judge VanDyke did something quite unusual. He actually wrote a concurring opinion to the court’s opinion that he himself had written.

Why, you ask, would a judge write a concurring opinion to his own opinion? VanDyke, knowing that virtually all Second Amendment wins in the 9th Circuit get overturned en banc by the court, wanted to point out the absurdity of those opinions by giving the court a draft en banc opinion.

Given both of these realities—that (1) no firearm-related ban or regulation ever ultimately fails our circuit’s Second Amendment review, and (2) that review is effectively standardless and imposes no burden on the government—it occurred to me that I might demonstrate the latter while assisting my hard-working colleagues with the former. Those who know our court well know that all of our judges
are very busy and that it’s a lot of work for any judge to call a panel decision en banc. A judge or group of judges must first write a call memo, and then, if the en banc call is successful, the en banc majority must write a new opinion. Since our court’s Second Amendment intermediate scrutiny standard can reach any result one desires, I figure there is no reason why I shouldn’t write an alternative draft opinion that
will apply our test in a way more to the liking of the majority of our court. That way I can demonstrate just how easy it is to reach any desired conclusion under our current framework, and the majority of our court can get a jumpstart on calling this case en banc. Sort of a win-win for everyone.

The real beauty of VanDyke’s concurrence lies within the footnotes where he gives his snarkiness free rein.

You have gems like this:

We refer to strict scrutiny as a theoretical matter—a thought-experiment, really. Our court has never ultimately applied strict scrutiny to any real-life gun regulation.

And this:

Here’s the deal: Whenever we think the history helps us in upholding the challenged regulation, we’re happy to rely on it in step one of our test. See, e.g., Young, 992 F.3d at 784–826. But most of the time the
history either doesn’t help us uphold the gun regulation, is indeterminate, or is just really hard to evaluate. So usually we just skip over step one of our “two-step” test by assuming the challenged regulation burdens Second Amendment-protected conduct. But that’s okay, because the real beauty of our two-step test is its amazing flexibility at the various stages of step two in balancing the government’s asserted interest versus the claimed impact on the “core” of the Second Amendment.

And another one:

The first prong is always met in Second Amendment cases. Guns are dangerous, after all, so the government’s interest in ameliorating such danger is always important. At first we were worried this case
might be a problem, because the regulations here don’t really have any nexus to the dangerousness of guns. But COVID-19 is dangerous too, so that substitutes in nicely.

And his concluding footnote:

Again, it doesn’t matter much what we say here. Once we’re allowed to effectively balance competing interests under our Second Amendment intermediate scrutiny, it’s so easy justifying a regulation that we could easily just delegate this part of the opinion to our interns.

VanDyke ends his concurrence by saying” You’re welcome.” I’m sure this won’t endear him to some of his fellow judges on the 9th Circuit but I don’t think he gives a damn. From what I can tell, VanDyke’s dissents have really irritated the liberals on the court for which I say, “Good!”.

Many SHOT Show Exhibitors Dropping It

If you have been following any of the Facebook or other social media sites with SHOT Show 2022 information, you know that many companies have dropped out of attending. You had SIG Sauer saying a few months ago that they were not coming due to Covid-19.

The list now includes major firearm companies like Ruger, Springfield Armory, Beretta, Benelli, Weatherby, Savage (I confirmed this at DSC), and CZ. Other industry stalwarts such as Trijicon, Swarovski, Redding, Nosler, and a whole host of others.

On the face of it, the oft-stated reason for not attending is the fear of the Coronavirus and the impact the spread of it would be to their employees. However, the imposition of contract tracing, enforced masking, etc. could actually be the reason behind many companies bagging the SHOT Show.

From an email I received tonight from Larry and Stacy Lasky of Froglube who have canceled out:

Since COVID struck in 2020, FrogLube attempted to continue our participation in SHOT SHOW despite unlawful, cost prohibitive and convoluted restrictions imposed by the governor of the state of Nevada. We looked to NSSF to stand up for our industry and to pressure the state authorities into allowing our trade show to return to normal. As a small business, any attempt to engage in commercial interaction with our customers under constantly changing, unrealistic and absurd restrictions is cost prohibitive and places an undue burden on our company. 

 We do not question the reality of the COVID 19 disease, in fact, most of us have had it. At issue is that a disease is not sufficient cause for the removal of god-given/inalienable rights by any man, government agency or commercial enterprise. Does the governor of Nevada restrict trade show attendance for any other communicable diseases with transmissibility? FrogLube and NSSF engage in free enterprise in an industry that uses individual rights as a selling point to attract people to purchase our firearms products. We find the NSSF stance is mutually incompatible to the expression of both the 1st and 2nd amendments of the US Constitution. How can we stress the 2nd amendment at the show while yielding on the 1st amendment?

My friend Ben Langlotz, the Gun Patent Attorney, with whom I had the pleasure of having a wonderful dinner in Dallas, has been very vocal about this loss of freedom on both Facebook and in his newsletter sent around the industry.

He had this to say in his newsletter and I’ve excerpted parts of it.

I’m skipping because of the mask mandate, pure and simple.  As you have read in prior months, I was an optimist that our firearms industry culture is on the free-thinking side and not too trusting of governments, especially those dominated by politicians who want to take our guns.  NASGW proved me right, and I trumpeted it in this space….

The NSSF leadership is in an impossible situation, forced to do business with the devil, tied up in contracts in jurisdictions that hate our freedoms, and having no power to negotiate around mandates.  BUT…I’d feel more sympathetic to the NSSF if they at least offered something that told members that they were on our side, not that of the local democrat governments.  A little signal that they weren’t happy either, like: “We believe our members have the right to make their own medical choices, and we oppose mask mandates. We have done all we can on behalf of the liberties of our members, and still face an unwanted mask mandate imposed by local regulations and enforced by local authorities. We are also working to locate suitable sites for future SHOT Shows that are more respectful of our members’ liberties, especially to ensure medical privacy and freedom of choice without ever being subject to vaccine passports.  Like most of our members, we are not happy to be subjected to the mandates in Las Vegas.”…

Ben goes on to add that it is time for NSSF to move out of a place that treads on us while taking our money.

I wrote above that the NSSF has the unenviable task of being forced to do business with the devil in the form of Democrat authoritarians.  But at some point, it becomes a choice.  There may be contracts that could be broken if there’s the will to fight.  There are the compromises that come with second-choice venues lacking the capacity and comfort we all value.  It’s a lot more work to having a roving location for a trade show than to have the drill down (and booth locations memorized) at a familiar location, even with its faults.

But at some point (and I think we’re past it) it’s time to move on, and get out of a bad relationship.  The SHOT Show needs to be in a Red State that has shown reasonable and restrained policies respectful of our freedoms.  How they handled Covid signals what to expect from Las Vegas in the future.  Will it be vaccine passports next year?  Is there a contingency plan for that plausible scenario in Las Vegas?  Don’t forget that the Mandalay Massacre gave Las Vegas Leftists and their Casino Cronies the excuse to deny our right to keep and bear arms when attending SHOT.  How much more will we put up with?

I agree with Ben. I am not a fan of Las Vegas. In the harsh light of day, it is a grungy place which looks upon the tourist and convention goer as a Rube who must be separated from his money. Moreover, the state has now been taken over by the anti-gun, anti-freedom element.

Let us not forget that many of the big casino companies have helped fund gun control in Nevada. I wrote a post in 2016 that questioned why a number of hotels that had helped fund the universal background check initiative were official SHOT Show hotels. I suggested moving from Las Vegas to Orlando which had as many hotels and an equally large convention center. I remember getting pushback on Facebook when I suggested that. While we are going to SHOT this year, we will not be staying in any of those hotels. In fact, we decided to go “off strip” where we don’t have to pay a “resort fee” nor breathe second-hand smoke.

Quote Of The Day

Every Saturday morning I go to the Powerline Blog to see their roundup of the week in pictures. Along the way I stumbled across a post by Kevin Roche on a speech given by President Biden regarding the Omicron variant. Or, as Roche put it, the Moronic Variant.

From the post:

Biden delivered the remarks setting forth his big plan to stem the panic he has helped foment over the Omicron variant of the novel coronavirus. Does this make sense? Are we going to develop seasonal campaigns to address each new variant of the virus? This is madness.

As always, the remarks stressed a theme with monomaniacal intensity. We are all voyagers on the good ship Pequod. Biden is our Captain Ahab. Covid-19 is his Moby Dick. The prospects are not good.

The Moby Dick reference is very apropos given it was first announced in November. If you have ever read Melville’s book, you might remember this line from the very first paragraph.

Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.

South Africa Is Not Happy

The countries in southern Africa are not especially pleased with the rest of the world. This is due to the travel bans being put in place restricting travel to and from a number of southern African nations as a result of the Omicron variant of COVID-19.

Probably no country is as pissed off as South Africa. President Cyril Ramaphosa was especially angry calling the travel restrictions “unjustified and discriminatory.” He went on to add:

“The prohibition of travel is not informed by science, nor will it be effective in preventing the spread of this variant. The only thing the prohibition on travel will do is to further damage the economies of the affected countries and undermine their ability to respond to, and recover from, the pandemic,” Ramaphosa said on Sunday.

Travel and tourism were finally getting back on their feet in South Africa after being crushed by COVID-19 in 2020. This is especially true for the safari industry. For example, with the US ban on visitors from South Africa, Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe, and Mozambique among others, outfitters and safari companies will not be able to send representatives to major conventions in January such as those of the Dallas Safari Club and Safari Club International.

Spike.T, who is a regular on the Africahunting.com forums and who lives in Zambia, posted this somewhat satirical account of the Omicron variant and the world’s reaction.

“In just 48hrs everything just went upside down, looking at all the updates and social media posts I could not help but write the below outlining the absurd response from the countries. Maybe some of them will realize what has actually transpired.”

South Africa: Hey guys, look what we discovered in our labs while researching Covid19 variants and mutations

World: What??

SA: It’s a new variant of Covid19, seems to be different than others, lets work together and study it further.

World: What? You have a new variant of Covid19?!?!

SA: No, we just found a way to ‘identify’ a new variant, it seems it has also already been detected in Hong Kong, Israel and Botswana.

UK: Hey guys, no offence but we already have 45,000 cases a day, don’t wear a mask everywhere, allow large gathering however we cannot risk getting a new variant.

SA: But we just identified it and showed you guys how to check for this variant, it did not originate here. We have advanced labs because we do research on AIDS, TB and other communicable diseases.

UK: Thank you for the research, however a complete travel ban to you and your 5 neighbors.

Netherlands: We heard UK banned flights to you because you have the new variant, we are also imposing a ban to you and your neighbors!

Namibia: WTF! What did we do? We have less than 20 new cases a day since a month now!

EU: Guys, we have a situation in our hands.

Namibia: The situation where Germany has had 76,000 cases a day and Other countries are breaking daily records for cases?

EU: No, not that situation.

Lesotho: Is it that UK still has 40,000+ cases a day and doesn’t seem to have it under control?

EU: No, UK isn’t a part of us anymore, not our concern.

Malawi: We hear Poland has some serious rise in cases and hospitalizations

EU: Really?! We have no idea, we must look into it. But not what we are talking about.

Eswatini: What situation then?

EU: We heard that South Africa has a new variant, their numbers are rising rapidly and since some of you are next to them, we need to close travel to the region with immediate effect!

SA: Dude, we just identified it! We only have a few cases in the region. Especially when compared to what you guys have. What’s with the knee-jerk reaction?

Namibia: Knee-jerk, that’s the word we were looking for.

UAE: We are closing flights to Southern Africa, we don’t want to risk it. Sorry guys.

USA: We are looking into this and studying the variant, we wont ban flights yet.

SA: Thank you USA, finally a voice of reason!

Mauritius: Sorry SA and the variant group, I saw some other countries refer to you as that, we are friends and all but we are concerned about our tourism and economy, so we will also ban you guys for now until we know further.

SA: We thought you were family. Goes to show how money is more important!

Belgium: We already have 1 new case of the new variant, thanks a lot SA.

SA: We literally just showed you how to identify it.

UK: Thanks a lot SA, now we also have 2 cases of it.

SA: What about our vaccinated people?

World: Nope, we need to run tests first and figure out what this virus can do and how effective the vaccination is against it.

WHO: Hey guys, a quick question. The next Greek alphabet is ‘Xi’. What do we do? China? Are you here?

China: Don’t you dare! Leave us and our president out of it. Call it something else. And we don’t allow anyone in anyway, so the variant is not our concern.

WHO: We got it boss. It’s now called Omicron.

WHO: Sorry we meant Sir. China isn’t our boss.

SA: It’s true what they say, no good deed goes unpunished. The next time we won’t tell you guys about the next mutations or variants we find.

World: Sorry can’t hear you, too busy dealing with the outbreak that you caused. How about we talk about this later?

Namibia: It’s the weekend, lets braai & go camping and let the world figure this one out themselves, we are still open to everyone. And if you wish to travel here, ask your leaders to start thinking before making decisions.

To be continued…..

Written by Nrupesh Soni.

I know there is great fear about COVID-19. While I am neither a scientist nor an epidemiologist, it seems that this strain may be more transmissible but on the ground reports indicate that the symptoms tend to be less severe. We shall see but I really hope that we don’t head into another round of lockdowns or even Australian-style concentration camps.

NRA Special Meeting…Canceled

Stephen Gutowski of the Washington Free Beacon is reporting on Twitter that the NRA Special Board Meeting scheduled for Sunday has been canceled.

While airlines and hotels have been pretty fair about cancellations due to COVID, there are undoubtedly some board members who had already left for Texas and those expenses will need to be reimbursed.

It would be cynical to think the meeting cancellation had anything to do with the attempt by the NY Attorney General’s Office to depose Judge Phillip Journey. A hearing on that is set for Monday in US Bankruptcy Court. However, it will be by WebEx.

2021 NRA Annual Meeting Moved To September

In a post made today at NRA Family, it was announced that the date of the 2021 NRA Annual Meeting and Exhibits has been moved to Labor Day Weekend. Originally scheduled for mid-May in Houston, it will still remain in Houston but 3 1/2 months later.

From NRA Family:

The National Rifle Association’s 2021 Annual Meetings and Exhibits will be held September 3-5, 2021. Originally scheduled for mid-May, the event will remain in Houston, Texas at the George R. Brown Convention Center. 

As many uncertainties around COVID-19 restrictions persist, the National Rifle Association rescheduled its 150th Anniversary celebration to help members and exhibitors make the necessary plans to attend. Approximately 850 exhibitors will provide an exhibit hall that offers attendees a one of a kind experience with thousands of firearms on display from all their favorite manufacturers.  

The 150th NRA Annual Meetings & Exhibits is open and free to all NRA members. Some events require a ticket, which can be ordered in advance. Members should watch their monthly membership magazine or go to www.nraam.org for updates and the latest information.

Blade Show 2020 Canceled

Another major event in the outdoor-sporting-weapons space has been canceled due to COVID-19. The 2020 BLADE Show scheduled for August 7-9 in metro Atlanta has been called off. It had been previously postponed from June.

The BLADE Show is the major event of the year for knife lovers and knife makers. It was to have had 950 exhibitors, multiple seminars and classes, and competitions such as the Balisong Flipping Championships. Unlike the SHOT Show, it was open to the public and you could buy from exhibitors. Sponsored by BLADE Magazine, this was to have been the 39th annual show. Moreover, unlike the Gun Rights Policy Conference, it would have been impossible to hold such an event virtually.

The official announcement of the cancellation is below:

With the 39th annual BLADE Show scheduled for Aug. 7-9, we have been receiving countless questions from exhibitors and attendees about the impact of the coronavirus (COVID-19) on the show and its guests. 

Unfortunately, we have reluctantly come to the conclusion that it’s in the best interest of all concerned to cancel BLADE Show 2020.

Please know that we did not reach this decision lightly. Having been in daily contact with guests, exhibitors, local officials and the show venue for the past two months, it has become apparent that we cannot present a 2020 event that meets exhibitor and attendee expectations and BLADE Show standards. 

While the state of Georgia continues to grapple with decisions about new guidelines and restrictions to deal with the pandemic, BLADE Show too recognizes its responsibility to ensure the safety and well-being of all attendees. 

BLADE Magazine and the BLADE Show staff appreciate the support we received from our many industry friends who worked with us to plan for the alternate August dates after we were forced to cancel the original June event.

The 40th Annual BLADE Show is scheduled for June 4-6th 2021, at the Cobb Galleria Centre in Atlanta, Georgia.  

**CURRENT EXHIBITORS & TICKET HOLDERS: Please check your emails for further instructions**

If this pandemic ever ends, events held in 2021 should have tremendous attendance due to pent up demand.

June 2020 Adjusted NICS Checks

The National Shooting Sports Foundation adjusted NICS figures have been released. June 2020, while having the most raw NICS checks on records, actually is behind March 2020 when adjusted for permit checks and rechecks.

Nonetheless, June was an impressive month and the first half of 2020 was likewise impressive.

From NSSF:

The June 2020 NSSF-adjusted National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) figure of 2,177,586 is an increase of 135.7 percent compared to the June 2019 NSSF-adjusted NICS figure of 924,054. For comparison, the unadjusted June 2020 FBI NICS figure 3,909,502 reflects a 70.6 percent increase from the unadjusted FBI NICS figure of 2,291,066 in June 2019.

The second quarter 2020 NSSF-adjusted National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) figure of 5,451,599 reflects an increase of 92.8 percent over the 2,827,606 figure for first quarter 2019.

The NSSF-adjusted NICS figure for March 2020 was 2,375,525.

It should be pointed out the states of Alabama and Michigan have had their qualified alternatives under the Brady Law removed in 2019 and 202 respectively. This means in those states, you can no longer use a carry permit as a substitute for a NICS check. That raised the percentage of NICS checks in those states by over 400% compared to last June.

To see how June 2020 compared to the month of June in past years, look at this graphic. You can see that it just skyrockets!

As I remind everyone when I post these numbers, neither the raw nor the adjusted-NICS checks are a one to one correlation with gun sales. They do not capture private sales where legal, they don’t capture sales where an alternative is accepted, and they don’t figure in multiple firearms sold with one NICS check. The Form 4473 has room on it for up to four firearms per transaction. Thus, it is safe to assume the actual number of firearms sold in the month of June is well past 2.1 million.

Now if all those new gun owners will vote the Second Amendment, we should be in good shape. Time will tell.

The SARS-CoV-2 Pandemic Has Given Us Two Very Successful Experiments In Social Control – One Global, One National

The following editorial was written by my friend “ScotShot”. He is a resident of New Jersey and a firearms trainer. ScotShot is a NRA Training Counselor, a USCCA instructor, and a CCW instructor. He is also the co-founder with Klint Macro of National Train-A-Teacher Day. He has a greater appreciation for the US Constitution and especially the Second Amendment than many. That is because he grew up in a country which has no written constitution and no such protections.

More to the point of this editorial, “ScotShot” has a PhD in immunology from the University of Strathclyde and served for a few years as the Director of Research at a university center on biodefense.

It seems like an interminable time since the first recognized case of COVID-19 hit places in Europe (Northern Italy) and the USA. At the time of writing it’s been five months. There are many timelines out there that you can find, and the question of whether it actually came earlier is real. However, there’s a great interactive published by the New York Times that is well worth a look:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/03/22/world/coronavirus-spread.html

In these five months, the United States and other Western countries have been transformed by this event. Your present correspondent, who writes from the aggressively confinement-orientated New Jersey, has been struck by how much and for how long we have allowed this to modify our behavior and change our lives.

I’m not going to discuss the various successes and errors nor whether the Orange Man did well or poorly. I also am not going to discuss whether it was correct or wrong for Western governments to fall over themselves to follow the apocalyptic modeling of a certain Dr F from Imperial College, London after it became clear that it was only older people who were generally at significant risk. Hindsight is a wonderful thing. We always, as they say, fight with the tools of the previous war, and this was fought with the tools built during the emergence of HIV. No foul, Drs F’n’B.

Let’s talk, Gentle Reader, about two Great Experiments.

EXPERIMENT ONE – “OK, we didn’t plan a biowarfare attack, but…”

Take another look at the NYT interactive linked above and remember that while this was taking place, China had essentially shut down, or was in the process of shutting down, internal travel. The Chinese Authorities very likely knew about how contagious this new virus was and the morbidity/mortality it carried. While we can’t know exactly what they were thinking, it’s interesting to speculate that some bright spark may have come up with the idea of letting a bunch of very likely infected people leave the epicenter of the outbreak to a whole bunch of countries just to see what would happen. That is, just to see how Europe, Australia, the USA would react at the levels of their governments and their citizens. I’d say that they are happy beyond their wildest dreams right now.

The whole Western economy disrupted, (multi?)-generational debt accrued, lockdown frustration amplifying civil unrest here in the USA (and whether the murder of Mr F was a deliberate trigger-act is for others to discuss). Oh, they learned a lot about us. Importantly, they learned that certain parts of our manufacturing capabilities were so dependent upon them that countries would order protective materials only to find that they were, for example, defective upon shipping or would buy back their own previously charitably-given supplies . They also learned that the political process here is so fractured that parties would use the pandemic to further their venal political ends. This brings us to…

EXPERIMENT TWO – “Wow, I never thought they’d do this…”

It is perhaps surprising (but only in retrospect) that only one or two countries, e.g., Sweden, didn’t follow the others in the mass-lemmingization of the West into the economic and social chaos of the pandemic lockdown. The UK, well England to be more precise, did make an attempt, but it was half-hearted at best and they basically caved at the first sign of trouble. Scotland, with its more socialist political environment, went for it whole-heartedly and are this week rejoicing that the affectionately-known “wee Nichola” has allowed them to once again go out and socialize but “at a distance.. over your garden fence, and not going into your neighbors’ homes..”. This is remarkably like it is in more blue-hued States here in the United States: NJ, NY, WA, OR, CA…. As we now begin to emerge armed with actual data about the effects of the pandemic and the entrepreneurial economy re-emerges in the red states, we see the true political agendas laid bare on the beach like little blue puddles as the tide of pandemic caution recedes.

Don’t wear a mask… everyone wear a mask… you don’t need a test… everyone needs to be tested… two weeks to flatten the curve… could be six months till we get a vaccine… back to normal…. emerge into the New Normal…

The “New Normal?” What is this New Normal that Democrat Governors are talking about? I’d say that they too have had a very successful experiment going in enhanced social control over their citizens. Well, I guess when you force small business owners to close down while letting corporate giants (naming no names) stay open, you are garroting your opposing political base. Who really cares whether people wear masks properly so long as they cover their faces somehow and you get the bonus of a bunch of Karens hounding those who do not, live-streamed on Facebook. You issued an Executive Order and people rushed to squeeze through the Overton Window just so that they could get out of the house.

What can we conclude…

So, what can we conclude, Gentle Reader, about the outcome of these two experiments? To date, they have been very successful and those who conducted them have learned a lot about their experimental subjects. Personally, I think it’s more important to think about what we, those very subjects, have learned about the experimenters and our fellow subjects.

As the lockdown is eased in red states and not blue, we see a picture emerging that is disturbingly similar to the cover of Kurt Schlichter’s book, “People’s Republic”. Blue State Governors working with the DNC to maintain control and build a New Normal up through the Election, and they do not care that they are now in plain sight. It’s probably wishful thinking to hope that there will be a move away from China as the source of inexpensive essentials and towards more domestic manufacturing, too. Too many of us are like the bunnies in Watership Down… “Look! Free Carrots!” and never mind where Fred went.

So I leave you with a question. Will those of us who believe in self-reliance and paying our own way simply become a thing of the past, turned to dust and blown away on the breeze, or we once again turn and say that we are ‘we’, “WE, the People”?

Social Distancing Made Understandable

“Social Distancing” seems to be the word of the year along with “flatten the curve”. All of this is due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

You go into many stores and you see “X” on the floor indicating just how far apart you should be from the next person. X’s are fine but I stumbled across an easier explanation that will appeal to those in the gun culture.

Instead of trying to figure out if that is 6 feet or is it merely 5 1/2 feet, the picture below makes it simple. I found it on Reddit.

I’m sure if you wanted to be pedantic you could say that an AR15 with an A2 stock is going to be longer than the M4gery with a collapsible stock throwing off the suggested distance.

Whatever.