OSD 225: Innovation is good actually

Gun rights are a subclass of techno-optimism.

That seems like a rather obvious point, no?

Well, no. It’s surprisingly controversial.

Broadly speaking, there are two schools of thought about decentralized innovation:

• Techno-pessimism: unconstrained tech might produce seductive results, but it is net-dangerous. Think Michael Crichton books or AI apocalypse prophets. Tech shouldn’t be snuffed out entirely, but some central body needs to pick the good parts and ban the bad ones.

• Techno-optimism: tech is net-good. Seems like a pretty banal idea, but the strong version of the idea is that technological development is inherently good — it’s not just that it happens to produce good results, but that by its very structure, it trends toward good results. In the free speech domain, people frame it as (to paraphrase a Brandeis concurrence in, ironically, an anti-free-speech ruling) “the remedy to bad speech is more speech, not silence”. Techno-optimists don’t deny that some tech produces bad results. They’d just say that the remedy to bad tech is more tech, not bans.

Squeezing everyone into two buckets eliminates some nuance, and some people switch buckets depending on their goals. But generally, any particular reaction to any particular tech will fall into one bucket or the other. Either hit the brakes or let it rip.

We’d argue that gun rights is a subclass of techno-optimism. Why? Well, gun rights is the belief that as you make small arms increasingly effective and make access to them freer, the benefits will accrue to positive uses faster than destructive ones. We’ve spoken about this before.

In a tweet thread from a while back:

A thing about guns: the benefits accrue preferentially to defenders. An attacker, by definition, has time to plan — changing time/place/manner at will to work around obstacles. A defender, by definition, has none of that and so needs the most effective weapon to close the gap.

Or in “OSD 203: Siri, brick my target’s car”:

Nissan’s products have only been software for … well, they still aren’t. Kind of. They’re simultaneously software (as evidenced by the fact that you can brick them remotely with just the VIN) and not software (as evidenced by the fact they’re 4000 lbs. of atoms). Cars are at a moment in time when they’re software-like enough to get hacked, but so new to it that there’s low-hanging fruit everywhere you look.

Eventually this reaches a mostly stable equilibrium, where defenders have the upper hand and all the easy, high-leverage attacks are gone. That’s not to say they’re impossible. And maintaining the equilibrium does requires large ongoing investment from defenders. But the investment pretty much works, and that’s where things stabilize.

Using this as a lens into guns, belief in gun rights is implicitly a belief in the conclusion above — that the stable equilibrium when everyone has force multipliers (access to a computer, in the example above) will favor defenders. So the thing that makes sense is to get to that equilibrium as fast as possible.

When people reject gun rights, the underlying assumption is that the world above would settle on an equilibrium that favors attackers. So in that framing, the logical conclusion is to take away force multipliers.

Naturally, opposition to gun rights comes from the belief (in fairness usually held in earnest) that technological progress in small arms produces net-bad results. You see this in the talking point that you might have a right to a musket, but not an AR. But harder to dismiss is that you see it in law, too.

California’s Unsafe Handgun Act (UHA) was first enacted in 2001, requiring that all handguns sold in the state could pass a drop test and a number of other tests. In 2007, the state added a chamber-loaded indicator and a magazine disconnect to the list of requirements for a handgun to be legal. In 2013, they added microstamping, a technology which is imaginary outside a lab setting.

That’s California’s legislature staking out the techno-pessimist position. “We’ll define which tech is good, and ban the rest.” But the thing about techno-pessimists is that they don’t have the expertise to make technical design decisions. Nor do legislatures. (Nor, for that matter, does any centralized body.) So the results produced by a legislature full of techno-pessimists are … not high-quality.

A federal judge recently struck down the UHA’s chamber-loaded indicator, magazine disconnect, and microstamping requirements. California appealed to the Ninth Circuit, where the case now sits.

The smartgun company Biofire (we wrote up the bull case and bear case for smartguns a few weeks ago) filed an amicus letter in the appeal, supporting the gun rights position:

Although the UHA’s stated goal is safety, Biofire asserts that the UHA stifles innovation in firearm safety in two ways. First, by mandating a specific, novel, never before-commercialized microstamping technology, the UHA requires emerging companies like Biofire to spend limited financial, research, and development resources to attempting implementation of the government’s specifically and arbitrarily designated technology. It is worth noting that no company has implemented microstamping in a commercial firearm in the more than 15 years since the microstamping concept was first introduced by California lawmakers. This requirement comes at the expense of developing and implementing other safety innovations, like biometric authentication, that may have a more meaningful impact on safety. Further, because many pre-existing manufacturers’ products were admitted to California’s handgun roster and continue to be available to sale in California, this requirement places an unfair burden on new, innovative market entrants like Biofire that existing manufacturers are not required to meet. This double standard makes it more difficult for companies like Biofire to bring innovations in firearm safety technology to California consumers.

…

In reviewing the State’s opening brief on appeal, Biofire notes the State’s claim that striking down the challenged provisions would allow the retail sale of a “significantly expanded pool of semiautomatic pistols lacking safety features that can save lives”. In practice, the opposite has happened: the UHA’s arbitrary requirements have limited safety options and only stand in the way of allowing Californians access to a more secure handgun.

That’s a techno-optimistic premise: the right way to make guns better is for everybody to freely make the best gun they can think of, and then let customers decide if they want it.

Pretty simple, but it’s surprisingly controversial.

A non-gun example: the European Union, where USB-C is now baked into law as the required connector standard. In 2010, the last time the European Parliament appointed itself as the continent’s electrical engineer-in-chief, they tried to mandate Micro USB. If they’d succeeded back then, it would have been disastrous for connector standards even though it wouldn’t have been obvious why — the USB-C spec wasn’t published until 2014. There’s no reason to think that this renewed effort will be less disastrous in the long run.

It’s tempting for techno-pessimists to freeze tech progress in amber, out of a sense that that’s the safe thing to do. But that’s only safe if you already think that tech is dangerous. (More on the begging-the-question fallacy here.) If you don’t assume tech is dangerous, then freezing it is actually the unsafe choice because you’re enshrining the status quo above all the ways it could be improved.

If you think innovation is good, the only answer is to let it rip.

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This week’s links

An employee at a gun range leaked names and phone numbers of a group of customers to some other nosy folks

And was then fired. Data security at ranges and retailers generally is likely to be extremely poor if you look under the hood.

Slate: “We may be entering a new era of Second Amendment litigation, one in which left-leaning judges reluctantly embrace gun rights as a tool of progressive constitutionalism.”

From a user on our Discord server:

Slate: Hah! Bruen can be used to decriminalize firearm possession by felons.

Everyone: <Yes Chad image>

Garand Thumb and Brandon Herrera hunt each other with drones

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