OSD 224: The history of “this time it’s different”
This week in the OSD Discord, a subscriber posted this video from the early 1960s:
It’s a history of gun culture in the US, focused largely on the military (which makes sense because it was produced by the Army). But at 15:35 it shifts gears to a section about how regular gun owners get punished for misuse of guns:
Both the careless and the lawless hurt the law-abiding shooter and sportsman. Because someone always says, “There oughta be a law.”
Exterior establishing shot, U.S. Capitol. Cut to the interior, where a legislator speaks.
“Mr. Speaker, I have here a bill for the registration of firearms.”
Back to the narrator.
Despite repeated failure of attempts to disarm the criminal or irresponsible by statute, fresh attempts are made each year to introduce undesirable firearm legislation. Registration will not keep guns out of the hands of lawless and undesirable persons. It tends instead to prevent the use of firearms altogether.
If that didn’t sound familiar enough to modern ears, the film then starts making fun of the UK’s gun laws. The more things change, the more the stay the same.
If you’re interested in that dynamic, check out “OSD 168: There’s nothing new under the gun” where we lay out a template of moral panics. This excerpt is long, but it illustrates how the talking points around guns have always been the same:
Here’s an excerpt of an April 16, 1934 House committee hearing on the bill that became the National Firearms Act. The speaker is Homer Cummings, who was attorney general of the U.S. at the time:
All right, Mr. Chairman. As I was saying, I do not know exactly how this bill will work out. Nobody can tell. We must feel our way through these big problems. But, after all, it represents a lot of thought, and a lot of study.
Frankness compels me to say right at the outset that it is a drastic bill, but we have eliminated a good many suggestions that were made by people who are a little more enthusiastic about this than we are — I mean enthusiastic about the possibility of curing everything by legislation.
For instance, this bill does not touch in any way the owner, or possessor, or dealer in the ordinary shotgun or rifle. There would manifestly be a good deal of objection to any attempt to deal with weapons of that kind. The sportsman who desires to go out and shoot ducks, or the marksman who desires to go out and practice, perhaps wishing to pass from one State to another, would not like to be embarrassed, or troubled, or delayed by too much detail. While there are arguments for including weapons of that kind, we do not advance that suggestion.
This bill deals, as the very first part of it indicates, with firearms, but defines “firearms” to mean a pistol, a revolver, a shotgun having a barrel less than 16 inches in length, or any other firearm capable of being concealed on the person, a muffler or silencer therefor, or a machine gun. In the next paragraph it defines a machine gun as any weapon designed to shoot automatically, or semiautomatically, 12 or more shots without reloading. The inquiries we have made of experts on the subject of the length of the barrel of sawed-off shotguns indicates the general belief amongst such people that 18 or even 20 inches would be a better maximum length than the 16 inches suggested in our bill.
A sawed-off shotgun is one of the most dangerous and deadly weapons. A machine gun, of course, ought never to be in the hands of any private individual. There is not the slightest excuse for it, not the least in the world, and we must, if we are going to be successful in this effort to suppress crime in America, take these machine guns out of the hands of the criminal class.
That was 88 years ago, but Homer’s already playing the greatest hits. He’s got:
Paragraph 1: no law is perfect, but we have to do something
Paragraph 2: compromise
Paragraph 3: nobody wants to take your guns, and gun rights are for hunting
Paragraph 4: assault features
Paragraph 5: nobody needs <thing>
Karl Frederick was the president of the NRA at the time, and also testified at the hearings. His points are also familiar to modern listeners.
Homemade guns make gun registration obsolete:
I may say that a gun is a very easy thing to make, that a third-class automobile mechanic can make a pistol which will do deadly work, and can do it in an afternoon with the materials which he can find in any automobile shop. And I can say that it has been done time and time and time again.
People who comply with gun laws will be by definition the people the laws aren’t targeting:
…pistol licensees, those who have gone to the trouble of securing a license to carry weapons, are a most law-abiding body, and the perpetration of a crime by such a licensee is almost unknown.
Even the “you have to register your car but not your gun” motif shows up. It comes from both sides of the table. First from David Lewis, a representative from Maryland:
Mr. Frederick, the automobile is a dangerous, even a deadly instrument, but never intentionally a deadly instrument, of course. States uniformly have taken notice of the danger to the innocent pedestrian and others involved in the use of the automobile. They have set up around the privilege of its ownership and operation a complete regulatory system consistent with reasonable rights to the use of the automobile. Approaching the subject of firearms, would you not consider that society is under the same duty to protect the innocent that it is with regard to the automobile and that with a view to the attainment of that result, the person who wishes the privilege of bearing firearms should submit to the same regulations as rigid as the automobile owner and driver is required to accept?
And then in response from Frederick:
You have raised a very interesting analogy, one which, to my mind, has a very decided bearing upon the practicability and the desirability of this type of legislation. Automobiles are a much more essential instrument of crime than pistols. Any police officer will tell you that. They are much more dangerous to ordinary life, because they kill approximately 30,000 people a year. The extent, so far as I know, to which the Government, or the Congress, has attempted to legislate is with respect to the transportation in interstate commerce of stolen vehicles, which apparently has accomplished very useful results. The rest of the legislation is left to the States, and in its effect and in its mode of enforcement, it is a wholly reasonable and suitable approach, because, if I want a license for my car I can get it in 20 minutes, by complying with certain definite and well-known regulations.
One argument we didn’t cover is “this time it’s different”. The writers of the Constitution didn’t foresee machine guns. Modern rifles are too effective. Ten round magazines are fine, but 30-round magazines should be illegal. And so on. These are all arguments about a threshold — the idea that things were fine up to a point, but this time it’s different.
That’s a lens people apply to technology in general, not just guns.
The investor John Templeton once wrote (reproduced on page 12 of this PDF), “The investor who says, ‘This time is different’, when in fact it’s virtually a repeat of an earlier situation, has uttered among the four most costly words in the annals of investing.”
The same applies to technophobia. As applied to new tech, “this time it’s different” has an impressively consistent track record. It turns out that no, this time it’s the same. AI is in the hot seat at the moment, but before that it was social media, smartphones, encryption, computers, TV, cars, bicycles, and, if you go far enough back, possibly sundials.
A lot of gun control comes from that same technophobic impulse — “this far and no further” — but the extra emotion of the topic makes it that much harder to resist.
“This time it’s different” is a question of thresholds. So if it were just a matter of figuring out where to put the threshold (for a ban), you’d expect people to get it right sometimes and wrong sometimes. You would not expect them to get it wrong (i.e. make a prediction about technological catastrophe that fails to come true) every time. So there must be something else going on.
Where “this time it’s different” goes wrong is that it treats a question of values as a question of thresholds. If the value is “technological freedom is on net good”, then there’s no threshold to draw — the value already rejected the concept of a threshold, no matter where it’s drawn. That doesn’t mean that all uses of technological freedom are good, just that on net things will turn out better if tech is allowed to advance.
People can of course debate whether the value is good. But instead, what usually happens is this:
Some people come to the discussion believing that a particular value is good, end of story. Take “technological freedom is on net good” as an example. For some people that’s axiomatic.
Others come to the discussion with a threshold mindset. They’re not particularly attached to a value on the topic, and instead think of it as “Tech freedom is good when it creates good results and bad when it creates bad results. And I can identify the difference and draw the threshold there.”
Neither discloses their true position. Often they’ll falsely adopt the other’s perspective, either professing interest in the value or conceding that some threshold is reasonable.
Then they talk past each other.
Be careful about that dynamic. “This time it’s different” arguments are your signal. When you hear one, know you’re hearing from someone who believes in drawing a threshold. If you believe in a value that’s incompatible with that, then put that on the table and try to align on values. Either you’ll successfully agree on some values, and then you can make progress, or you won’t, and then you’ll know to move on.
This week’s links
“No such thing as a responsible gun owner” except for the 99.6% who are
Over at Handwaving Freakoutery, BJ Campbell analyzes this talking point.
”ATF says a quarter million guns registered under pistol brace ban”
That number represents just a fraction of the braced guns believed to have been sold in the decade since the ATF first classified a version as outside the scope of the NFA. In the impact assessment for the rule, the ATF estimated that three to seven million devices exist. However, the Congressional Research Service puts the number much higher at somewhere between 10 and 40 million.
That puts the registration rate for pistol-brace-equipped guns at between 0.6 percent and eight percent.
There’s also a good video on this topic from Washington Gun Law.
T.Rex Talk podcast about USC film school’s guidelines for using guns on film
Good breakdown from Isaac. Here are the guidelines themselves, and here’s a report from The Reload on it.
“Do gun classes really teach dangerous lessons and erode democracy?”
Video from David Yamane responding to a New York Times op-ed (linked in last week’s newsletter) titled “Firearms classes taught me, and America, a very dangerous lesson”.
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From the USC guide: "Black Americans are three times more likely to be killed at the hands of law enforcement."
Note the lack of the word "than". Your brain fills that part in with whatever your brain thinks is most appropriate. This is a common weasel way of presenting a statistic that is probably technically true, but in a way that is intended to mislead in some way. The best part is that it can mislead different people in different ways, depending on their own assumptions and biases, leading to inevitable arguments over what the statement means.
We are so accustomed to seeing this that it doesn't even register as a half statement grammatically or mathematically. "3x >" is nonsensical, but they get away with it all the time in narratives. Gun-related statistics are often presented this way, and it's another clever linguistic trick used by the grabbers.
Start asking "Than what?"