OSD 236: Guns are for nerds … for now
OSD 236: Guns are for nerds … for now
This is a continuation of last week’s piece, “OSD 235: Guns are for nerds”.
Last week we talked about a lesson from history that if people need to know or care how your tech works, then a lot of people just aren’t going to use it. To use a gun safely today, you have to know a lot about how it works. So guns going truly mainstream* is gated on a major product development challenge — they have to get so easy to use that most gun owners don’t need to know how they work.
(*Yes, for all the pro-gun-rights cultural change of the past 30 years, guns are still not mainstream. That might be surprising, because about 85 million American adults own guns, and you might live in a place where pretty much everyone has a gun. But gun ownership is very clumpy. Substantially every house in rural Montana has a gun in it. But New York City has a near-zero gun ownership rate. Before the 2020 gun ownership spike, the city of 8.5 million typically saw ~4000 gun permit applications each year. Assume generously that that was the average for the past 30 years and you’d have a legal gun ownership rate of 1.4%. Meaning most NYC residents don’t have any close friends who own a gun. When we talk about going mainstream, we’re talking about gun ownership being at least as normal as, say, golf club ownership.)
So where are the opportunities for improvement? Well, let’s look at where the pain points are. The fintech company Stripe uses an approach called “friction logs” to analyze this sort of thing. Approach your product as if you’re a brand new user, and write down every bit of friction you experience while getting up to speed. It’s fine to nitpick. You want to catalog everything, big or small, that creates incremental friction for your new users. Then you eliminate the sources of friction one by one.
From last week:
Let’s enumerate some basic things you need to know to own (let alone to carry) a bog standard 9mm Glock:
How to load and clear the chamber
How to disassemble and reassemble the gun
How to clean and lubricate the gun
How to aim using iron sights
We can expand that to other aspects of gun ownership.
Before you can own the gun, you need to buy it. To do that you need to:
Figure out which gun you want.
Figure out how to buy a gun in your state. Do you need a permit? Do you need to buy from a gun store or can you buy from your cousin?
Walk into a gun store for the first time in your life. That’s often pretty weird for people.
Learn about ammunition. What are grains?
To carry a gun, you need to:
Choose a carry position, typically either 4 o’clock or appendix.
Choose one of the half-dozen-or-so different holster systems for your carry position.
Learn and train how to safely draw and reholster.
Learn about your local laws for carrying. Hope you weren’t planning on dropping off a package at the post office while carrying your new gun.
Learn about self-defense law. You could build a career on the details of this and still not know everything.
Figure out how to carry comfortably and in a way that doesn’t mess up your fashion sense. PHLster produces great educational materials on this topic, and they accurately compare the process of fine-tuning your holster fit to the process of refining a custom-fit prosthesis. It’s closer to bespoke tailoring than to throwing on a t-shirt.
To buy and use a silencer, you need to:
Navigate the eForm 4 process
Decipher the silencer industry’s baffling product strategy
New customer: “Hello, I would like a silencer.”
Silencer company: “Sure thing. Here are a dozen .30 cal silencers that you can spend two weeks figuring out the difference between.”
Commit to one company’s muzzle device system
Always install the silencer tight enough so that it doesn’t back off, but never install it tight enough for one of the several threaded parts in the mounting system to unscrew itself. Oh, and make sure you haven’t cross-threaded it onto the gun.
Tune the gas system on your rifle. Don’t know what a gas system is or how to tune it? Oopsie.
To install an optical sight on your gun you need to:
Know what loctite is
Own a torque wrench or have a gut feel for torque values
Learn what minutes of angle or millirads are
Be able to shoot well enough to get valid 3-to-5-shot groups while sighting in
Do the math on how much to adjust your sight after each group
That’s where we’re at. Adding a sight to a gun is beyond the reach of most newbies.
That puts guns firmly in hobbyist-only territory today.
That’s bad news in the sense that it means we have a lot of work to do. But it’s also good news in the sense that we have a lot of work to do — every pain point is an opportunity for a product to get better or for somebody to start a company.
For all the points of friction today, it’s a lot better than it used to be. Standardized cartridges in the mid-19th century made it so being a gun owner didn’t also mean you had to be an ammo reloader on every shot. Mass production in the 20th century made it so replacement parts didn’t have to be hand-fitted to your gun. And in the ‘90s, the Picatinny rail made the modern gun accessory industry possible — before that you had stuff like Delta Force operators hose-clamping flashlights to their carbines.
Buying an optic bundle from Scalarworks eliminates every sight installation pain point — all you have to do is zero the gun. That’s still work, but it’s a big improvement. PEW Science is making silencer performance more understandable. PHLster is building carry education around the Enigma and T.Rex Arms is open-sourcing their gun scan and Sidecar files. The trend here is very good. There are lots of pain points, but the pace of new solutions is fast and growing. This is a much more capable industry than it was 30 years ago, and the more smart people it attracts, the more that’s going to continue accelerating.
An industry that has nothing left to invent is dead. The gun industry is swimming in improvements that are ripe for invention. By that standard it has never been more alive.
What’s your favorite company driving innovation in guns and related tech, gear, or content?
This week’s links
The intersection of honor culture, social media, and teens shooting each other
The article eventually veers into a rote anti-Section 230 piece, but the look at honor culture dynamics is interesting.
Two relevant studies:
Thanks to our Discord user WaGuns45 for these links.
A state trial judge in Massachusetts strikes down the requirement for non-residents to obtain carry permits
Interesting outcome in a criminal case. Look for this topic to be litigated further by both sides.
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