Quote of the Day
During cross examination of Ronkainen, the state drilled into the difference between military spec and civilian firearms when considering pounds of pressure to pull the trigger. For military, Ronkainen said the pounds of pressure is higher, or around 6 lbs of pressure, to ensure there is no unintentional trigger pulls. For civilian firearms, the pressure could be as low as 2.5 lbs of pressure.
When the state asked if that means it would take 90 lbs of pressure to fire a 30 round magazine from a civilian firearm, the plaintiffs objected saying that was wrong. The state said it wanted to show the difference in level of fatigue in rapidly firing a civilian firearm versus a military firearm. Ronkainen said that is immaterial.
“I’m not sure the defense understood what a trigger pull was, but overall with what they got I think they did as well as they could,” Maag said.
Greg Bishop
September 17, 2024
Distinction of military, civilian firearms made during Day 2 of IL gun ban trial (msn.com)
If I had been asked that question while on the stand, I would have been tempted to ask for a higher IQ idiot to do the cross examination. I would further explain that this lawyer had just demonstrated such a profound level of ignorance and/or stupidity that I doubted there was sufficient common ground for me to realistically establish communication.*
This is the level of ignorance and/or stupidity that we are up against and yet they manage to win many of these battles.
It’s like debating an idiot. It is an unfair contest because they drag you down to their level and win via having vastly more experience.
* Once, at a party, I witnessed two friends of mine meet each other for the first time. One was a multimillionaire from numerous successful startups with a PhD and currently working on creating a state-of-the-art quantum computer. The other was a sweet lady who had a little too much to drink and even when sober was… not the sharpest knife in the drawer.
I kept as straight a face as I could as the PhD tried to establish some sort of communication. It went on for several minutes without a connection and he finally gave up.
As Barb and I went home after the party I told her I had watched as PhD and the lady talked to each other. Barb’s response was something like, “OMG! I would have loved to have seen that.”
I’m pretty sure there have been studies done which show that when the IQ difference is more than about two or three standard deviations apart, without sufficient training of the higher IQ person, it becomes almost impossible to communicate.
At 2 standard deviations, communication is extremely limited. Remember, the definition of retarded is 2 SD below average. At three SD, you might as well talk to a toddler. At four SD, you’re better off talking to your dog.
“But, Brawndo is what plants crave!”
I guess I had intelligent toddlers. Nowhere near 3SD. I had more knowledge, of course but not intelligence. And they absorbed things like a sponge. They both started K literate, one of them in two languages.
For that matter, I have a more intelligent dog. When she went deaf, she started lipreading.
It’s possible that the bad guy’s attorney is retarded. But it is also possible that he understands perfectly well and was maliciously introducing this absurd argument in the hopes of confusing the jury.
It is a bench trial, so there is no jury, but your point is still valid.
Since intended recipient for this mathematic non sequitur was a judge, i.e. another lawyer, the state’s lawyer might have been working from a solid premise: most lawyers, including judges, go to work with the assumption that there will be no math that day.
I once got a ticket for passing a school bus with its red lights flashing. The circumstance was a bus in Seattle sitting at the curbside on a multi-lane one-way road, with its yellow lights flashing. I saw it five blocks away; the road was otherwise unoccupied at the time. I was in the far left lane, other side of the road from the bus. As I’m crossing through the intersection just behind the bus, it suddenly pops out the STOP sign and the red lights start flashing. The camera mounted to the side of the bus records a video of my car passing by.
So I get a notification in the mail, and the option to challenge the ticket. I am provided a link to the evidence video. The hearing does not allow lawyers to be present, only the defendants. I check with my law firm anyway, and the lawyer they had assigned my case said that he drove a school bus in Seattle for a while, and he knows for a fact that they are playing games. But I can’t bring him as an expert witness, and there is no point subpoenaing the driver because there is no way I can keep him/her/them from lying.
So, using VideoLAN, I use a plugin that takes the state’s evidence video and breaks it down into individual frames. 30 frames per second, lossless compression, and every frame is individually timestamped in the picture. Then I get to work: using my own car as a yardstick (using the wheelbase from the vehicle’s specifications), I use visible features in the road like lane stripes, patched cracks, etc, and I first calculate the speed of my car using time and distance: 30mph the posted speed limit for that road. (I was using cruise control, that’s why I knew it was constant. Just need to establish my mathematical bona fides). With that as a baseline, I can calculate, to the foot, exactly where my car was at at every 1/30th of a second. I also know the width of the lanes, so I have an X and Y distance and therefore I can calculate the angular relationship between my point of view as the driver and all the indicators (rear flashing lights, retractable stop sign). Then at every thiertieth of a second, I can calculate what the angle of the sign is as it extends, and for almost a whole second, it is edge-on to my point of view. I can also show that when the rear lights on the bus are flashing red, they are so far out of my line of travel that I can’t see them.
So, armed with 17 pages of printed Powerpoint slides outlining all the calculations, plus pictures from Google Streetview, and a top-down plot of the position of everything, all derived from either the state’s own evidence or publicly available information (with links for everything!), I have three avenues of attack for this ticket:
1) A Due Process claim: I was effectively notified of a change in expectations for my conduct too late for me to comply. Also lays down a marker for a constitutional challenge.
2) A reasonableness claim: Using research studies from Norway concerning the response time of drivers to things happening a larger and larger angles away from the driver’s primary view of concern (their line of travel), which the researchers are using to study response times to moose suddenly charging from the side of the road but can apply to anything
3) A legal challenge to the entire charge: In researching the law, there are two ways school bus drivers can use their lights, and this bus driver had been correctly using the amber flashing lights, but the use of the red flashing lights is constrained to specific criteria that this bus was not following because they were not in a lane of travel at that time.
When time came for all the hearings related to passing a bus came around, the judge let us all know: if we plead for leniency, she can reduce the fine but the charge sticks. If we choose to challenge, she can only dismiss or assign the full fine; she claimed she was given no authority to do otherwise by the legislature. They call the first case and I’m up first, and I confirm that I want to challenge the charge.
I produce copies of my packet for the court recorder, the judge, and one for the prosecutor, who is not present so I just keep it. I start my explanation of my basis for the challenge. Here are the questions the judge had:
J: Who did these calculations for you?
Me: I did.
J: What are your qualifications to do this?
Me: USAF weather officer, plus two quarters of being a TA for freshman level physics at the University of Washington before I got my degree in Atmospheric Science. These calculations would have been a good example for a homework problem for the first quarter of Newtonian Physics.
J: Next time, attach your CV to the packet.
J: This says you were 130 feet back from the bus when they started flashing the lights. You should have seen them and had time to stop.
Me: At 44 feet per second, I would cover that 130 feet in three seconds.
J: You were going forty-four feet per second!?!
Me: Yes, yerhonner, that is what 30 mph means. That’s a straightforward unit conversion, and you can see the math for that on page 8.
Once I started on the basic trigonometry to calculate angles, we had been at this for about ten minutes and I showed no sign of slowing down, suddenly the judge turned into my defense attorney.
J: Is this diagram accurate?
Me: Yes, yerhonner, and we can verify this by the Google streetviews I have attached…
J: Based on this, if you had stopped you would have been in the middle on an intersection, and that’s unsafe and unreasonable to expect, case dismissed.
As I’m going along, being surprised by some of the judge’s questions, I came to some realizations:
1) The judge didn’t think there was going to be math today.
2) The judge expected any kind of math to be done by an expert, not a regular person
3) The soundness of math in a courtroom is established by the credentials of the expert, not the rigor of the calculations
4) I get the distinct impression that the judge couldn’t follow the math
5) The application of math to the facts of the case seemed novel to her.
So, coming back to the point of today’s post, I think the word salad of math terms being used by the state’s attorney was a good move for them because there is a high likelihood that is an effective technique in a courtroom, to a judge. It doesn’t pass muster to anyone with the most basic of mathematical skills and ability to use those in the real world, but from the point of view of the state’s lawyer, that doesn’t matter, because in all likelihood, that kind of person is not making the decisions.
> 3) The soundness of math in a courtroom is established by the credentials of the expert, not the rigor of the calculations.
I think this observation also applies to climate prophets, social speculators, economists, and politicians.
Other people attach the word “scientist” to the first two, but they don’t deserve that word until they achieve experimentation repeatability. I arguably don’t deserve the word “engineer” after my title, but indeed do achieve with a computer on a highly repeatable basis things my colleagues describe as magic.
Though a finance person, I have worked with a lot of lawyers. Bond lawyers do math but none of the rest.
In my experience, it is pretty easy to confuse judges too.
Maybe they grade the BAR exams on a curve these days?
That’s hilarious!
And Mr. Ronkainen should have testified civilian triggers CAN be as low as 2.5 lbs. or even lighter. But are not always. Most of the triggers I grew up with seemed well above 6 lbs.
And creep, he forgot to mention trigger creep. How on some triggers your finger might have to travel as much as 15 inches to fire 30 rnds.!
But what he forgot to say was what should be repeated with every question.
Irrelevant your honor.
How can trigger weight possibly be used to affect a human right under the color of law?
Trigger weight is somehow not covered by “the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed”?
As well as weapons defense may or may not consider as weapons of war.
Defense is trying to make a distinction, where no difference can possibly matter under law.
And this line of questioning is no more than hopefully a vain attempt to baffle this court in ignorance.
“If one’s argument cannot aspire to the facts, all that left is to muddle the argument with bovine excrement.”
And defense’s trigger weigh line of questioning stands as empirical proof of this dictum.
The question before the court is if these weapons are protected by the 2A from government infringement.
Which they are.
Not trigger weight.
(I’m quite sure the emotional wailing and gnashing of teeth would have shut my screed down before I got half of it out though.)
P.S. Is it just me, or is it weird that there are 10, count’em, 10 seguels to the “Planet of the Apes” series.
At the same time our border is being invaded by the third world?
Na, must be me.
As a teacher in the 140-145 IQ range who has to deal with the entire typical IQ spectrum in class, meaning roughly +/- 2 SD every day, up to -3 often, occasionally +3-to-4, this is a real problem. I need to consciously think about how I approach explaining something, and how much necessary supporting information will help vs confuse. Most days I do pretty well, sometimes, especially early in the year before I know the students, I miss wildly. Most days, it just means lost time and making adjustments to style. Communication across the 2-SD IQ gap can be totally done, but it’s very tiring when done for long periods. It’s typically easier and less tiring to teach higher level classes because the sub-average dullards are mostly weeded out.
Some days I need to proof-read better. I deal mostly with normies, +/- 1 (one) SD all the time, some down to -2 SD (70 IQ) (not -3 who’d all be deep in a Spec Ed program) and occasionally slightly below it, and the normal mix above, but with a hundred students a year, I’d only see a >=140 every few years on average. Smart and curious is such a joy to work with.
I can communicate more effectively with my cat than I can with some people….who are allowed to drive, to vote and to breed.
“When the state asked if that means it would take 90 lbs of pressure to fire a 30 round magazine from a civilian firearm, …”
Based on the above assumption, my calculator says a 1,000 round case of ammunition would require 3,000 pounds to fire – a ton and a half.
Perhaps ATF should take that philosophy to heart and conduct a study on the lifetime trigger operation weight requirements for firearms and publish it in a spreadsheet (at least doing that would occupy them elsewhere and maybe even advance the stock prices of some aftermarket trigger manufacturers; “our triggers are over 6 tons less per year than the other guy’s triggers.”).*
* Don’t mind the non sequitur, someone else wrote the joke.