Our newest essay is live. We just had the biggest influx of new gun owners in recorded history — and then did it again one month later.
This piece is about what that means. Hint: it’s much bigger than people realize.
The old model of gun ownership was a centralized one where gun rights are highly valued, but always mediated by a central authority that decides who has those rights. And the “gun debate” historically wasn’t a debate about the model being wrong, it was just a fight over who’s in charge of deciding who has gun rights.
2020 is an epochal shift towards something very different: the rejection of the centralized model itself.
It’s being replaced by an internet-native, decentralized model of gun rights that spreads like the internet: “the Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it”.
The essay is about the history of both models of gun rights, how they work, and what this shift means. Enjoy.