2021 was a good year for this newsletter — most of you weren’t subscribers a year ago. Welcome aboard.
So we’ve got some work to do to catch you up on what you missed. Here are our five favorite posts from the past year:
OSD 102: Gun stonks
From the height of GameStop-mania, this is an exploration of what it’s like to be a publicly-traded gun company. There are two of them: Ruger and Smith & Wesson. It turns out that regulatory mechanisms for the public markets make handy centralized chokepoints for shareholders who want gun companies to stop selling guns.
OSD 105: The ATF is giving out machine guns, whether you want one or not
That time when the ATF retroactively decided that all the G36 clones that Tom Bostic had sold for years were actually machine guns.
By all indications, both on the shop floor and back at ATF HQ, Tom is the only person involved in the saga who actually knows how the G36 and T36 work. That’s the key lever here: the ATF doesn’t have to know how the guns work. They can use a hammer to smash some parts together, get the gun to go off once, break the gun while they do it, and then write that down in a report that nobody’s allowed to see.
And that’s a success! That’s “taking machine guns off the street”. It’ll be a highlight in the annual performance review of the agent who did it. When those are the incentives, it would be genuinely stupid for ATF agents to invest time in doing the right thing. Just invest in a hammer.
OSD 120: Guns are dangerous. That’s a feature, not a bug.
A breakdown of Judge Roger Benitez’s ruling that California’s assault weapons ban is unconstitutional.
This is the single biggest misunderstanding about gun ownership — the assumption that “are guns dangerous?” is the dispositive question. As we wrote in the breakdown:
Guns are weapons, and it’s up to us to make the case that that is good.
OSD 139: The structure of scientific revolutions
On JStark’s death, 3D printing, paradigm shifts, and Eroom’s law.
OSD 145: Guns, Andy Warhol, and Coca-Cola
A way to think about the state of innovation for different products in the gun industry:
Andy Warhol said this about a particularly high-value-per-dollar good in 1975:
You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it.
That makes a useful rule-of-thumb for how innovative a consumer industry is: do billionaires and middle-class people buy the same product? There’s nothing necessarily wrong with an industry that doesn’t pass that test — it just means there’s still a lot of value left to be created.
This week’s links
How to build a supersonic trebuchet
Cool engineering. And you can hear the sonic boom at 14:38.
L.A.’s arms race of the affluent
In Beverly Hills, even the purchase of a firearm comes with certain…expectations. The city’s only gun store, Beverly Hills Guns, is a “concierge service” by appointment only, for a largely affluent clientele. And business is booming.
Since opening in July 2020, the store has seen upscale residents from Santa Monica to the Hollywood Hills increasingly in a panic following several high-profile smash-and-grab and violent home invasion robberies. The apparent siege has brought in a daily stream of anxious business owners and prominent actors, real estate moguls and film execs, says owner Russell Stuart. Most are arming themselves for the first time.
“This morning I sold six shotguns in about an hour to people that say, ‘I want a home defense shotgun,’” says Stuart, whose store is discreetly located in a Beverly Hills office building, with no sign on the doors, down the hall from a diamond dealer. “Everyone has a general sense of constant fear, which is very sad. We’re used to this being like Mayberry.”
The state treasurer of Rhode Island is attempting to pressure Mastercard into blocking the sale of homemade guns
/r/videos voted the clip of the failed South African cash-in-transit heist to #1 this week
“2021 driver of the year Leo Prinsloo”
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