OSD 234: Accidental rebels
You could plot gun laws on a graph that has “severity of punishment” on the y-axis and “how easy it is to break this law accidentally” on the x-axis. And it turns out that what draws all the attention is laws in the top-right.
A few examples:
Patchwork carry laws, best exemplified by New York’s Bruen response law. It’s a felony to break that law, and it’s not clear that anybody can successfully travel from their home to, say, their workplace without passing through an area where the law bans carry.
Assault weapon laws. New York again provides a good example with its SAFE Act. Violations are punishable by up to seven years in prison. Go into a local gun store and ask a first-time gun buyer to guess which rifle grip shapes are legal pieces of plastic and which ones are felonies to possess.
Bans on the at-home manufacture of guns. Litigation about this was in the news this week. This law would seem easy to not break accidentally, but there are a couple nuances to it. First, it’s not a law passed by Congress, it’s a redefinition of “firearm” that the ATF promulgated on its own (since the ATF has been delegated the power to control certain aspects of the sale of firearms, but not of non-firearms). Second, the rule bans only certain gunmaking kits that are, in the ATF’s judgement, too close to being a premade gun. It’s up to sellers and buyers to guess if their kits will be retroactively swept into that rule.
The best example is the barrel length provisions of the NFA, violations of which are federal felonies punishable by ten years in prison. There is a fun history of people who saw their guns in half to publicly disavow gun ownership, but accidentally create illegal short-barreled rifles in the process. The NFA is a law that says getting anything wrong in this flowchart is a felony:
A redditor made a since-deleted comment on a related subject, which we linked in a newsletter a while back:
You’re thinking in terms of the written language of the law. They’re not trying to amend the law. They’re monkeying with ATF’s interpretations of the law which are already arbitrary, often secret, and subject to change at any time. They’re sick of us finding ways to comply with the law and still have stuff. Opacity is a feature, not a bug.
If the goal is making it easy for people to legally own guns, you’d want zero laws to fall into this “easy to violate accidentally x severely punished” quadrant. But if you want to stigmatize gun ownership, you’d want all laws to fall into that quadrant. It harasses current gun owners, but much more importantly it scares off new ones. So it shouldn’t be surprising to see a weaponized ATF or weaponized state legislatures creating more laws that are increasingly easy to break accidentally. With their goals, it’s the highest-leverage move they can make. (See more on this dynamic in “OSD 90: Weaponized ATFism”.)
We’ll leave you with a passage from “OSD 95: Schrödinger’s gat — the ATF and Polymer80”:
Officially, these things all run according to a set of laws and administrative rules. In reality, the laws and rules are enacted through a vast body of unwritten norms, which often turn out to be more important than the underlying laws. One example of such a norm would be, “If we tell you explicitly that your product is legal, we won’t secretly change our mind about that several years later. And if we did secretly change our mind, we’d update you about that instead of raiding your business by surprise based on our new secret interpretation of the law.”
But that’s not written down anywhere, because even if you did write it down, there’d be a thousand other assumed norms that you can’t articulate ahead of time in order to write them down. So at some point you have to draw a box around a subset of the issues and say, “Ok, we can fight about the details of the other stuff, but within this box, let’s save ourselves both some time and say the rule is just ‘Try to be cool’, ok?”.
That’s the point of norms — they’re the grease that allows organizational relationships to actually function instead of just sending written policies back and forth all day, clarifying detail after fractal detail. Now, of course, organizations do get mired in that sort of thing all the time. But norms help keep that time-sink sandboxed.
If you were advising a proactively weaponized ATF, you’d be foolish to focus on the written rules. Those are hard to change, people complain, Congress gets involved, it’s a slog. Instead, you’d throw the unwritten norms out the window. Ban things you previously said were legal, and raid the manufacturers over it. Suddenly start rejecting tax stamp applications for minor errors, without giving applicants a chance to correct them. And when people start complaining, you can deny that anything even changed — because nothing did, at least not in writing.
The flip side to that coin, though, is that norms work to stabilize a relationship. And relationships are two-sided. So when one side unilaterally throws out the norms, now both sides of the relationship are destabilized, and therefore suddenly hard to predict. For the past few years, manufacturers (particularly in the pistol brace and 80% receiver industries) have tried hard to play ball with the ATF. With the ATF suddenly signaling that it doesn’t want to play anymore, we’ll see what manufacturers —and customers — do.
One effect: this is likely to accelerate technology and business practices that are fundamentally ungovernable. You can model reliable, stable norms essentially as “incentive to play ball with the system” — it’s not all peachy, but hey, you get predictability. Getting rid of that incentive isn’t the end of the game, it’s the beginning. It’ll be interesting to see how it plays out.
This week’s links
OSD’s own Chuck Rossi on the Tactical Business podcast
Good interview.
Shadow Equipment gear
Our pal Sean just went full-time on his web gear company. Check it out, he makes good stuff and does custom orders too.
Disney-produced WWII cartoon explaining camouflage
“Camouflage”, is one of a series of animated movies made by the Walt Disney Co. in support of the U.S. war effort. Between 1942 and 1945, during World War II, Walt Disney was involved in the production of many propaganda films for the US government, some featuring well-known Disney characters including Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse. The widespread familiarity of Walt Disney's productions benefited the US government in producing support for the war. In “Camouflage”, the purpose is a bit different — it’s an attempt to educate members of the U.S. Army Air Forces about this vital skill. In it, Hoodie the Chameleon explains the importance of camouflage and decoys for equiment and ground installations against aerial attacks.
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Necessity is the mother of invention/ingenuity.
Make a better mouse trap - it's human nature to improve a tool - or customize.
How dare us.
God bless all those badly lit shops - burn the midnight oil boys and girls.
ATF likes to scratch the itch from time to time just to make us think they are doing something and that they care. Justifies their salary and COLA.