OSD 207: The FAL is coming from inside the house
OSD 207: The FAL is coming from inside the house
The first step of not feeling like an outsider is to stop treating yourself like one.
Last week the University of Wyoming announced it’s launching a center for studying guns and gun ownership. The press release described it this way:
The Firearms Research Center (FRC), housed in the University of Wyoming College of Law, has officially launched after earning faculty approval and private financial support.
The center was established to bring more voices to the firearms discussion; create a pipeline for law school graduates prepared to serve as firearms attorneys; and act as a reliable, nonpartisan resource for firearms-related information and research.
“In the United States, there is an ongoing debate over the Second Amendment, violence and the relationship our country has with firearms,” says George Mocsary, the FRC’s director and co-founder who is a professor in UW’s College of Law. “Discussions are frequently siloed, lacking cross-disciplinary work and contributions from diversified voices. By bringing together scholars from a wide range of academic disciplines and experts from other backgrounds, the Firearms Research Center will foster a broad discourse to produce meaningful change in how firearms are discussed and understood.”
Back in “OSD 135: A sociologist walks into a B.A.R.”, we talked about the sociologist David Yamane’s work on guns:
Yamane is known as one of the only sociologists studying guns not as a pathology but as a culture. He described this in a lecture in 2019:
A quarter-century ago in 1995, sociologist James Wright included among his “Ten Essential Observations on Guns in America” that “gun ownership is normative, not deviant, behavior across vast swaths of the social landscape”. The idea that guns are normal and normal people use guns may seem common-sense to those of us gathered here, but it's actually a dramatic departure from the standard social scientific approaches that view guns and gun owners as deviant, and research literatures that are dominated by criminological and epidemiological studies of gun violence. This theme is so constant that the New York Times ran a headline just last week declaring, “Gun Research Is Suddenly Hot”. In fact, the story was about how research on gun violence is suddenly hot. Research on the lawful use of guns is as cold as ever.
So in a world where studying guns is synonymous with studying what’s wrong with guns, it’s unusual that a center like this launches. Gun research is a domain where people spend their entire careers on it, but develop surprisingly little insight into 99.9965721% of guns out there — the ones that aren’t used in a murder. This would be like if you went to a famous orthopedic surgeon and they were like, “Well I’ve actually never seen an intact femur, I’m not sure how they work. My grandfather grew up on a farm and had intact femurs all the time, I know that working femurs are a cherished tradition for many people. But here we really only know what the broken ones look like.“
Ok, fine, this isn’t shocking news. Large, prominent institutions haven’t been on the “guns are normal and normal people use guns” train in recent history. But why is that? There’s a gun in 45% of American households. Parachuting into society and looking at that data, you wouldn’t predict that the percentage of mainstream companies and large institutions that take a normalizing view towards gun ownership would be roughly 0%. What’s up with that?
There are a few possibilities:
The 0% observation is wrong, and there actually are some supportive institutions.
There are gun-friendly people at these places, but they’re not effectively exerting their influence.
Maybe voluntarily and maybe not, gun-friendly people aren’t in these institutions at all.
These institutions are structurally impenetrable to the idea that guns are normal.
1. The 0% observation is wrong, and there actually are some supportive institutions.
This hinges on how the question is scoped. If “institutions” includes gun companies, then sure, they’re supportive. But the premise of nonexistent support is invalidated if you can find notable examples of mainstream institutions supporting guns-as-normalcy.
Ok, so Starbucks is pretty mainstream. In “OSD 176: Don’t force people to have an opinion”, we talked about the open carry kerfuffle there from a few years back:
A group of California open carriers used to meet up at their local Starbucks to hang out back in 2010. The Brady Campaign caught wind of this and organized a campaign to pressure Starbucks into banning open carry. Starbucks eventually released a statement saying that their open carry policy is to simply allow whatever local law allows. Technically this was a loss for the Brady Campaign. So a bunch of gun rights folks — who badly needed to have read this newsletter first — reacted by organizing a Starbucks Appreciation Day, encouraging people to carry at Starbucks.
That snowballed into the CEO of Starbucks, Howard Schultz, eventually needing to release a statement on the topic. It was titled “Our Respectful Request”.
Tldr Starbucks publicly said that people can carry in their stores, a bunch of people who do not understand game theory then started open carrying ARs there, and the CEO then gently asked people not to open carry but did so with the subtext of “guys just knock it off and stop provoking people”.
Sure, it’s not the CEO posting claymore roomba memes. But Howard Schultz writing an open letter saying, “People who carry are welcome in our stores, just don’t upset people. Bro just be cool, I’m trying to run a coffee company here” is about as good as you’re going to get from most public company CEOs on any controversy. We’d call that 45% support, not 0%.
Another recent example: Visa’s public letter quite strongly supporting gun commerce. “A fundamental principle for Visa is protecting all legal commerce throughout our network and around the world + upholding the privacy of cardholders who choose to use Visa. That has always been our commitment, and it will not change with ISO’s decision.”
There’s a nuance here about the difference between support and neutrality. Yes, the Starbucks and Visa statements aren’t proactive support. With very few exceptions, you’ll never hear mainstream institutions proactively support any negative rights. Gun rights aren’t about everyone having a gun, they’re about everyone being free to choose whether they want one. So to thrive, gun rights don’t even need proactive support from mainstream institutions (although sure, that wouldn’t hurt). They just a commitment to the idea that gun ownership is a valid, normal choice that people are entitled to.
2. There are gun-friendly people at these places, but they’re not effectively exerting their influence.
This one is clearly true. We and many of you reading this newsletter are these people. The issue is less about doing any kind of internal agitation or political stuff, and more about just helping coworkers catch blind spots. At most companies and institutions, this really isn’t relevant at all. There’s no reason the institution would need to think about guns. But whether it’s some public position the company is taking or some more private thing (e.g. rules on carry at work), if the only information the decision-makers are getting is coming from a perspective that has no experience with normal-people-use-guns, then it’s going to be predictably blind to the experience of those gun-using normal people.
This one is starting to change. Compared to ten years ago, do more or less of your friends own guns today? Statistically, the answer is “more” for … everybody in the US. This helps close the blind spot, and it will also have an accelerating effect on people’s willingness to come out of the safe. It’s hard to come out when you’re doing it by yourself. Easier if it’s you and one other person. Trivial if there’s ten of you.
3. Maybe voluntarily and maybe not, gun-friendly people aren’t in these institutions at all.
A sticky thing about tribalism is that whoever “started it”, both sides are quickly incentivized to deepen it. So to the extent that gun-friendly people perceive hostility from certain institutions, doing what the tribe’s hivemind dictates means withdrawing from those institutions. Which is the exact opposite of what’s actually effective. If things would be better if you were running things, then the obvious solution is to go run things. (Disclaimer: obviously that’s not easy. But if you just up and quit, it goes from hard to impossible.)
One bit of evidence about this voluntary withdrawal: Judge Lawrence VanDyke on the Ninth Circuit received zero clerkship applications from Harvard Law students in the 2020 cycle. Judge VanDyke is one of us. The clerkship stat has only two explanations: either zero Harvard Law students are ideologically aligned with the judge — seems pretty implausible with 560 students in each class — or those who are aligned aren’t even attempting to get this prestigious clerkship.
There’s some ostracism happening too, but that’s much harder to address. What’s within people’s control is their own voluntary withdrawal. Makes sense to fix that first. And fixing that will have the side effect of reducing the ostracism as you go.
4. These institutions are structurally impenetrable to the idea that guns are normal.
Sure, some probably are. The Firearms Research Center at the University of Wyoming is going to produce different ideas than the one at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. But it’s not realistic, or even desirable, for 100% of institutions to think the same way about something. So let some institutions be impenetrable. Focus on the ones where you can be effective, and that’ll be enough.
Conclusion
Let’s recap the four responses to the idea that no institutions take a normalizing view towards gun ownership:
The 0% observation is wrong, and there actually are some supportive institutions.
There are gun-friendly people at these places, but they’re not effectively exerting their influence.
Maybe voluntarily and maybe not, gun-friendly people aren’t in these institutions at all.
These institutions are structurally impenetrable to the idea that guns are normal.
There’s a noteworthy thing here: #1-3 are within the control of gun-friendly people to change, but often we spend all our time focused on #4. That’s strategically backwards.
To the extent that #4 is a thing, it’s largely because #1-3 are a thing. And if #1-3 are directly solvable, then #4 is solvable by proxy. So focus on the things you can control, and you’ll find the things you can’t control might start to take care of themselves.
This week’s links
Frank Herbert’s short story “Committee of the Whole”
H/t to Discord user BakerEasy, who posted this on our server as “what may be the most OSD-brand short story ever written”.
On the brace ban and non-compliance
Hop makes a good point here about the difference in effectiveness between non-compliance and civil disobedience.
On modern balloon tech
Now modern ML algorithms allow balloons to control where they go using the wind. In the stratosphere there's always a wind going in the direction you want it’s just a matter of adjusting altitude. Sounds simple but it wasn’t possible until recently. It’s pretty amazing what these algorithms can do.
Book review: Larry Correia’s “In Defense of the Second Amendment”
Characteristically thoughtful review from Isaac Botkin.
Digital night vision has arrived
Doubling up on Isaac content this week, with this 43-minute look at the SiOnyx Opsin. See also: “OSD 145: Guns, Andy Warhol, and Coca-Cola”.
Federal court rulings that the bans on gun possession by people under a civil restraining order and by marijuana users are unconstitutional
From the Fifth Circuit and an Oklahoma district court, respectively. H/t to Discord users Sawa D. and wyvern, respectively. Another Discord user also posted a Kentucky district court’s decision reaching the same conclusion as the Fifth Circuit.
Breakdown of CDC emails on researching guns-as-pathology
The source is political, so excuse the first couple minutes of the video. But this is a good step-by-step breakdown of how preference laundering happens. H/t to Discord user RyVar.1.
Merch
Top-quality hats, t-shirts, and patches.
OSD office hours
If you’re a new gun owner, thinking about becoming one, or know someone who is, come to OSD office hours. It’s a free 30-minute video call with an OSD team member to ask any and all your questions.