OSD 200: The dark matter of power
This week Stephen Gutowski over at The Reload reported on some copy editing on the CDC’s website.
What happened, as shown in emails that Gutowski acquired, is that the CDC…
…deleted a reference to a study it commissioned after a group of gun-control advocates complained it made passing new restrictions more difficult.
The lobbying campaign spanned months and culminated with a private meeting between CDC officials and three advocates last summer, a collection of emails obtained by The Reload show. Introductions from the White House and Senator Dick Durbin’s (D., Ill.) office helped the advocates reach top officials at the agency after their initial attempt to reach out went unanswered. The advocates focused their complaints on the CDC’s description of its review of studies that estimated defensive gun uses (DGU) happen between 60,000 and 2.5 million times per year in the United States–attacking criminologist Gary Kleck’s work establishing the top end of the range.
“[T]hat 2.5 Million number needs to be killed, buried, dug up, killed again and buried again,” Mark Bryant, one of the attendees, wrote to CDC officials after their meeting. “It is highly misleading, is used out of context and I honestly believe it has zero value – even as an outlier point in honest DGU discussions.”
Bryant, who runs the Gun Violence Archive (GVA), argued Kleck’s estimate has been damaging to the political prospects of passing new gun restrictions and should be eliminated from the CDC’s website.
After pushing back a bit and defending the inclusion of the Kleck citation, the CDC ultimately removed all specific numbers and replaced them with a sterile placeholder:
What is defensive gun use? How often does it occur?
Although definitions of defensive gun use vary, it is generally defined as the use of a firearm to protect and defend oneself, family, other people, and/or property against crime or victimization.
Estimates of defensive gun use vary depending on the questions asked, populations studied, timeframe, and other factors related to study design. Given the wide variability in estimates, additional research is necessary to understand defensive gun use prevalence, frequency, circumstances, and outcomes.
The temptation here would be to complain that this is unfair. Leaving aside the question of whether the Kleck data is accurate, it seems unfair that while some people have to go through written procedures to influence a government agency, others get to just email a human who’ll give-and-take like a human.
And yeah, that is by definition unfair. So then the next temptation is to expand the written procedures. Make them better and stricter. Make everybody go through them. And add monitoring to make sure that’s happening. Problem solved. Right?
Not quite. Because until every office is just a bunch of ChatGPT instances talking to each other, there will be humans in the loop on all these written procedures. Those humans will have questions and disagreements. And to resolve them, they’ll need to talk to other humans. That’s what going to work is. Written procedures are what happens in the spaces between where the actual work happens.
So written procedures (like, to pick a random example, the rulemaking process whereby the ATF gathers public comments on its proposed rules before they become law) are the matter of power, the visible substance. And humans talking behind the scenes are the dark matter, the invisible substance that actually comprises most of the mass.
Fair or not, that’s how human institutions work. So if you want to have influence, you need to build the relationships to get yourself into the room when these conversations happen. That’s much more about making friends than it is about making enemies. The gun industry has gotten much better at this over the past few years, driven mostly by content creators. Let’s keep that accelerating. Because if that’s working well, the written procedures start to matter less and less.
This week’s links
NVGs so light they can clip onto your hat
Love to see complacent incumbents get pantsed.
Lucky Gunner’s “backyard sniper” build
Lightweight edition:
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