OSD 231: The best laws are discovered, not made

This week a young man sitting in a field made a 3D printed version of the forced reset trigger:

Naturally, this touches on themes we discuss a lot around here.

First, the efficient way to think about gun tech (and laws about it) isn’t to focus on where it is today. Instead just fast-forward to where it’s obviously going in the long run, and think about that state.

The ATF and gun control groups push back on the clever sort of rules-lawyering that forced reset triggers represent. They read things into the legal definition of “machinegun” that aren’t actually in the law, and gun rights groups/companies take them to court. The Super Safety highlights the reality that however those arguments shake out, this is all headed to the same destination: a world where, like it or not, legal or not, people manufacture whatever they want.

Second, this illustrates something we discussed back in “OSD 106: Law is a verb”:

Here’s Paul Graham talking about music and intellectual property rights in the internet age (timestamp 34:25):

The funny thing is “what is property?” historically has been somewhat defined by what’s convenient to be property. In the days of hunter-gatherers, it was not convenient for land to be property. But now it is, so now land is property.

If you imagine that we lived on the moon, and we had to get air in pipes and paid for the air, people could charge for smells. People could charge for good smells. So it would seem reasonable for smells to be property. But [today] you walk by a restaurant and you smell this delicious smell — you get this free boost, for nothing.

I think the record labels are like these people who are from the moon. They used to be able to sell these things, because the only way you could get them was through their channel. But now, files move around like smells and it’s just not convenient to charge for them. Ultimately, this stuff is pragmatic.

This dynamic applies to laws, too. On the ground, the law is determined by what’s feasible to have as law. For popular laws (like, say, those against murder), people pretty much follow them voluntarily. For unpopular laws (like, say, those around taxation), feasibility is achieved by making it so that people have little choice but to comply. Employers have to report employees’ income to the IRS, and there’s little way around that. Fitting this theory though, feasibility — and therefore compliance — immediately drops off a cliff when you look at taxation of cash income.

Guns are in an odd spot right now, where the the laws about them are shifting from feasible to infeasible right in front of us.

If law is a function of what’s feasible to make into law, and the feasibility of gun laws is changing, then that means the laws will find it increasingly hard to stay as-is.

That doesn’t rely on individual choices to pass or repeal any particular law. It’s a selective pressure that applies to all laws. Any particular law might live or die by the choices of individual power brokers. But in the long run they’ll tend towards what the environment selects for.

And the corollary to that is something the economist Deirdre McCloskey said in a recent interview: good rules are discovered, not made. A good law is congruent with its society — otherwise it’ll either be ignored or will need to be imposed with brutality. (Side note, this applies even if the society’s emergent tendencies are bad. The track record of top-down laws swooping in to forcibly save a society from itself is quite poor.)

The on-the-ground reality that gun laws attempt to govern is changing. And the laws are going to change with it, whether that happens in practice or in the law books.

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This week’s links

The NYPD approved more permits in the year before Bruen than the year after it, despite the number of applications almost doubling

Looks like they responded to the influx by simply slow-walking all applications.

Long technical writeups about pistol red dots from Aaron Cowan and Gary K. Roberts

Iron-sighted pistols are going the way of iron-sighted rifles.

“Study: Minute-Long Video Can Make Children Safer Around Guns”

Chalk one up for excellence in the basics. From The Reload.

“Busting the Durable Myth that US Self-Defense Law Uniquely Fails to Protect Human Life”

Interesting paper demonstrating that other countries’ self-defense law is, at least on paper, surprisingly sometimes more permissive than the equivalent laws in the US.

“Why is San Jose’s gun insurance law going unused?”

The figures reported by the city also present a challenge for another key part of the law: a yearly fee paid out by firearm owners to a nonprofit that helps combat gun-related violence. San Jose’s roughly 55,000 gun owners were expected to contribute over $1 million to the group — but 17 months after the council approved the measure, it has yet to be formally set up. That part of the city’s law is also in limbo because U.S. District Judge Beth Labson Freeman in her Thursday ruling allowed the two plaintiffs suing the city to challenge the fee requirement through an amended complaint on First Amendment grounds.

BolaWrap

A less-lethal apprehension device that some police departments are trying out. Less-lethals seem extremely overripe for innovation. For example, police departments report that Tasers fail to stop people 25-40% of the time.

Here’s an example of a successful use of the BolaWrap. (Disclaimer that the manufacturer posted this video.)

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Merch

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

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Office hours

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