OSD 228: Fault tolerance in gun design and gun law

Gun control is a 1911, gun rights are a Glock.

Over the weekend, Isaac Botkin posted this engineering-heavy look at Glock’s rise to ubiquity:

It’s a good watch generally, and we want to zoom in on a particular aspect. At 6:54, Isaac explains why Glock’s critical innovation that changed the entire industry is … the slide stop.

Hang on. The slide stop is a tiny piece of metal, and shouldn’t affect a gun’s overall design or manufacturing process.

But that’s exactly the point. Isaac points out that (with some exceptions), pistols pre-Glock were designed such that the slide stops had to be robust and precisely machined. That single design choice — requiring tight tolerances for the slide stop to work properly — cascades into the engineering and manufacturing steps. It limits the materials you can make the slide stop from, creates a pretty high minimum time to produce the part, and requires tighter quality control.

Multiply that by every part in the gun and you end up with a gun that’s expensive and slow to build, and difficult to repair. And forget about iterating quickly on the design for future updates.

So what Isaac identifies is that Glock’s magic wasn’t in making its precision great. The magic was in making its precision not matter. Stamp your slide stops out of sheet steel. Make the frame out of plastic. Make the design so good that those things don’t matter.

Execution matters, but the best designs can tolerate a lot of faults in execution. If your design is great but impossible to execute well, then your design isn’t great.

This is a mirror for gun rights and gun control. We all start from the premise that if someone’s trying to hurt you, you have a right to stop them. Gun control then delegates that right to the police. But for that to work, every step of the process has to go right. One bit of imprecision — one violent person who isn’t apprehended, one 911 response that’s too slow, one police officer being too quick to shoot at a shadowy figure in your home — and the overall system stops working for you. Whereas gun rights are the opposite — everything else can fail you, and gun rights still work as a backstop for your self-defense. Flamewar version of this analogy: gun control is a 1911, gun rights are a Glock.

Let’s wrap with an excerpt from “OSD 179: Where order comes from”, which dives into this concept of gun control as a fundamentally impossible-to-execute solution to the problem of self-defense. For context it came out the week after Elisjsha Dicken used his concealed carry gun to stop a mass murderer in a mall.

Elisjsha Dicken’s heroism is already famous, and it bears repeating as an example of how order emerges from decentralized control. For a centralized system to work, every piece of it has to work. That’s how you get the scope creep of “there are a lot of murders in <city> → let’s ban guns in <city> → guns are still showing up → that just means we need to ban guns nationally → guns are still showing up → so we just need to ban more types of guns and magazines → guns are still showing up → let’s make banks and credit card companies deplatform gun sellers → ….”

The centralizing worldview turns a local murder problem into something whose solution needs to be a national effort at all layers of society. Because if the foundational premise is that order comes from centralized control, then the answer to any lack of order is obvious: more centralized control. Isaac Botkin explains this ratchet well on the latest T.Rex Talk episode, “Putting the ‘Total’ in Totalitarianism”.

By contrast, the idea that order emerges from decentralized control is inherently fault-tolerant. It has to be, because the system needs to automatically route around any parts of it that fail to work. TCP/IP, for example, assumes some amount of packet loss. In fact, efficiently dealing with packet loss is one of the main reasons that TCP/IP, rather than competing protocols, became the foundational infrastructure of the internet.

Unlike a centralized model, in the decentralized model of order, you don’t need to force every Elisjsha Dicken to show up. You only need to get out of the way and let one show up.

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This week’s links

Federal judge vacates the ATF’s 80% receiver rule

Common FPC W. This is the rule that the ATF had been using to ban 80% receiver kits (which come with a jig, drill bits, and so on). The ATF had also used this to serve a search warrant at Polymer80 and to visit Polymer80 customers and seize their kits.

Expect more litigation on this at the appeals level.

The Supreme Court is going to review the constitutionality of gun bans for people with a domestic violence restraining order

The case is being appealed from the Fifth Circuit, which struck down the ban. Coverage from The Reload:

The question of who the government can and can’t prohibit from owning guns has been at the core of many challenges in the wake of the Bruen decision. And it’s one that has seen judges offer diametrically opposed opinions on the constitutionality of a given provision.

Earlier this month, the full panel of the Third Circuit ruled a Pennsylvania man’s felony-level conviction for food stamp fraud in the 1990s couldn’t prohibit him from owning guns for life.

“We agree with Range that, despite his false statement conviction, he remains among ‘the people’ protected by the Second Amendment,” Judge Thomas Hardiman wrote for an 11-4 majority in Range v. Attorney General. “And because the Government did not carry its burden of showing that our Nation’s history and tradition of firearm regulation support disarming Range, we will reverse and remand.”

That ruling happened just weeks after a three-judge panel for the Eighth Circuit came to the opposite conclusion in the case of a Minnesota man who is barred from owning guns for previous drug convictions.

“Given these assurances by the Supreme Court, and the history that supports them, we conclude that there is no need for felony-by-felony litigation regarding the constitutionality of § 922(g)(1),” Judge Steven Colloton, a George W. Bush appointee, wrote in his opinion.

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