OSD 222: The ingroup is judged on effort, the outgroup is judged on results

Demand excellence from your ingroup, because nobody else will.

Last Tuesday, the governor of Maryland signed the state’s Bruen curtailment bill into law. LIke similar laws in New Jersey and New York, the law makes it illegal to carry in most public places. (Also like those other laws, it’s now being litigated and is unlikely to survive.)

On Thursday, the local NBC affiliate in Baltimore ran this story about a guy who, to protest the law, has been showing up to the local school bus stop with an AR for the past few weeks. He stands there with the rifle at the collapsed low ready, successfully weirds everyone out, and eventually goes home.

BJ Campbell of Handwaving Freakoutery recently made the point in a group chat that the gun rights community would benefit from more actively shaming people who, through their idiocy, brand us all as idiots. (The specific cases he was talking about were the recently much-discussed wrong-door shootings).

Re the AR edgelord above, @hoffnung in our subs-only Discord (which you would like and should join!) put it well: “You have to get it right, it's not about being ‘one of the good ones’.”

That’s the standard we need to hold ourselves too. “You have to get it right.” Not how much do you care, or how hard did you try. Did you, at the end of the day, get results? Period. If you didn’t, internalize that and figure out how what you are going to change to be more effective.

The irony is that the people who care about gun rights the most (care emotionally, that is — if the rational side of their caring could moderate the emotional side, we’d all be better off) are often the ones most likely to play with footguns (like, say, protesting with an AR at a school bus stop and hurting their own movement). The harm they cause to gun rights comes from how much they like gun rights. Overly simplistic thinking plus a strong emotional attachment skips them right past “How can I be actually effective for my cause?” to “How can I cater the most intensely to my own feelings?” (Also, side note, some of these people have diagnosable handicaps in social reasoning or awareness.)

All persuasion falls into one of three categories:

1. Effective

2. Ineffective

3. Counterproductive

“Counterproductive” isn’t just a strong version of “ineffective”. It’s an agent attacking (inadvertently or ignorantly) their own cause, and that’s a qualitatively different outcome. The biological equivalent is cancer — cells that get so excited about the organism’s mission to grow that they think their zeal is the organism’s mission. Then their zeal kills the organism.

You could also analogize it to AI, where people are worried about paperclip maximizers. These misguided gun rights advocates are like paperclip maximizers. Single-minded, undoubtedly committed to the cause, and very badly mistaken.

We don’t get points for zeal, we get points for results. When people are being counterproductive for gun rights, nobody else is going to come fix that for us. We have to hold a high bar ourselves. That doesn’t mean shouting and shaming, but it does mean that anywhere you see someone being a counterproductive advocate for gun rights, look for an opportunity to orient them towards results, not effort.

---

This week’s links

Shooting is fun: a reminder from the field

Range report from David Yamane.

Lessons learned from analyzing 40,000 gun fights

From John Correia of Active Self Protection.

Massad Ayoob writes an account of one of the few DGUs involving a legally owned machine gun

This copy-pasta of the story was posted in 2008, not sure when Massad wrote it.

Sunday, February 24, 1984, approximately 2 PM. Gary Fadden, 26, and his lovely 22 year old fiancee are driving from a birthday party in Martinsburg, WV, into Virginia to look at some property for what they hope will be their starter home after their marriage. It's a bitterly cold day, and with the winter coats in the back of a new '84 Ford F-250 supercab 4WD diesel pickup, the Pendleton-clad Fadden looks from a distance like a harmless Yuppie. That means he and the pretty brunette look like prey to another kind of person.

Anti Matter Industries ScopeSwitch

Cool innovation.

Sketch about guns from The Richard Pryor Show

From 1977. Noteworthy how this was apparently the consensus cool person’s opinion at the time, versus how today it would seem preachy and out of place on just about any comedy show.

---

OSD Discord server

For those that enjoy talking about gun stuff and want a welcoming place to do so, join our Discord server. The OSD team and readers are there. Good vibes only.

---

Merch

Gun apparel you’ll want to wear out of the house.

---

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.

---