OSD 154: The inertia of the status quo
Before you can move the Overton window, you have to realize you're stuck inside it.
Someone asked us this on Twitter a few days ago:
It’s cut off in the screenshot above, but Ed was asking about this tweet from Jake Charles, who directs the Center for Firearms Law at Duke University:
And there Jake was referring to a new public opinion poll on permitless carry.
It’s interesting data. As Ed noted, there might be some preference falsification in these numbers. It probably also reflects the fact that individual rights actually very often don’t enjoy the support of popular majorities, especially at times when the right is most controversial. A cornerstone of the American system of government is skepticism about the whims of the majority. That’s why, for example, the Constitution is designed to be very hard to amend.
But the most interesting thing about the data is that it might just reflect status quo bias. People mostly go along to get along, and they’re too busy to become experts on things that don’t affect their daily life. So if you ask people if they approve of something, subconsciously most of them won’t think “What’s my opinion?” They’ll think “What’s everybody else’s opinion?” And then their opinion will converge on that.
Same-sex marriage is a useful example on this. Here’s the last 25 years of polling data on the subject:
There are two ways to read that. Either half the country changed their mind about a deep-seated cultural belief (ask yourself, how often does that actually happen?), or their mind was never that made up to begin with. The latter is far more plausible. (This data is also surely partially explained by a generational shift, too. That just strengthens the point. Generations are kind of a made-up concept, but to the extent they mean anything, they mean “the group of people in a particular age cohort who are most aligned with the cohort’s modal views“.)
Status quo bias is powerful, without any clear limit. The list of genocides and regimes of slavery that enjoyed broad popular approval is longer than the list of those that didn’t. Today people look on those atrocities with horror, but their ancestors looked on them with a shrug if they looked at all. Yesterday and today, people mostly go along with what everyone else is doing.
And in our less dire domain, status quo bias is also instructive for gun stuff.
Three quick examples.
First, a thread on the ATF trying to reinterpret the legal definition of a machine gun to ban forced-reset triggers by fiat:
Second, a great thread from the journalist Brandon Soderberg about why Maryland’s push to criminalize “ghost guns” isn’t going to do any good:
Third, the gun YouTuber CRS Firearms got arrested by the ATF for promoting a piece of metal with a drawing of a lightning link on it:
In the first and third examples, you have people jammed up by the ATF for doing something allegedly too machine gunny. In the middle example, you have someone questioning the anti-crime utility of requiring guns to be serialized. The temptation there (which we succumbed to in the first example!) is to go “Well actually, that doesn’t match the legal definition of a machine gun, because…”. To litigate the details.
Noam Chomsky had something to say on this in 1998. He wasn’t talking about machine guns, but nevermind that:
The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum — even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there's free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.
“The presuppositions of the system.” That’s the key. The systems’ presuppositions above are that of course machine guns have to be illegal. Or that of course all guns should be serialized. And then you just end up litigating within the boundaries that those presuppositions draw for you.
That’s an important trap to watch out for. If you want to change the status quo, you can’t let the status quo define the limit of your ideas.
This week’s links
23-minute interview of Ian McCollum
Cool to hear Ian on the receiving end of an interview.
Thread on an AR for kids
The Garand Thumb mud test
Back for more after his ice test made us never look at our SCARs the same way again.
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On the status quo and machine guns, I think it's worth pointing out that the recorded number of crimes committed with legal civilian-owned machine guns between 1934 and 1986 is precisely zero. ZERO. But we got the Hughes amendment regardless, which only served to make them astronomically expensive, and thus effectively banned by economics. Ironically, since 1986, there have been TWO crimes committed with legally-owned machine guns. Interestingly, both occurred in Ohio. The total is two crimes in 88 years, which is insanely low. And yet, any talk of loosening controls on machine guns would be met with accusations of us being completely insane. Ironically again, the quickest way to rid the country of bumps stocks, Akins Accelerators, and FRTs would be to repeal Hughes and allow us to buy registered machine guns for reasonable prices.