OSD 266: The buffalo jump
How people are panicked into throwing their rights off a cliff.
There are many ways to go hunting. You can use bait. You can track or stalk. You can use game calls. And there are lots of others.
But the most effective method if you’re hunting for power is to organize a buffalo jump. Meriweather Lewis described it like this in 1805:
in this manner the Indians of the Missouri distroy vast herds of buffaloe at a stroke; for this purpose one of the most active and fleet young men is scelected and <being> disguised in a robe of buffaloe skin, having also the skin of the buffaloe's head with the years and horns fastened on his head in form of a cap, thus caparisoned he places himself at a convenient distance between a herd of buffaloe and a precipice proper for the purpose, which happens in many places on this river for miles together; the other indians now surround the herd on the back and flanks and at a signal agreed on all shew themselves at the same time moving forward towards the buffaloe; the disguised indian or decoy has taken care to place himself sufficiently nigh the buffaloe to be noticed by them when they take to flight and runing before them they follow him in full speede to the precepice, the cattle behind driving those in front over and seeing them go do not look or hesitate about following untill the whole are precipitated down the precepice forming one common mass of dead an mangled carcases;
In other words, you scare the whole herd of your prey into running off a cliff.
It works well. Lewis wrote, “[I]n this manner the Indians of the Missouri distroy vast herds of buffaloe at a stroke.”
The National Firearms Act of 1934 was born from the fever around Prohibition-era gangsters. The Gun Control Act of 1968 was first broached after JFK’s assassination (Oswald had ordered the rifle straight to his house from an ad in the back of American Rifleman magazine), and ultimately catalyzed into law by the months-apart murders of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy.
And modern gun control proposals are always at the peak of their power right after a mass shooting. From our piece “Gun rights are winning and nobody has realized it”:
[Any reports that show rising support for gun control almost always] take a snapshot of the data within a couple weeks of a horrific mass shooting, without mentioning that the polling data reverts to the long-term trend within a month or two.
A 2016 study in Frontiers in Public Health (not a publication that has any reason to be gun-rights-friendly) found that after a mass shooting, the media becomes something like a pop-up gun control advocacy group. From the paper's abstract: "Gun violence is related to substantial morbidity and mortality with surrounding discussions framed and shaped by the media. This study’s objective was to explore national news media’s reporting of gun violence around a mass shooting. National news pieces were coded according to categories of gun violence, media frames, entities held responsible, responses, and reporting of the public heath approach. Individuals were held responsible for gun violence in 63% of pieces before and 32% after the shooting. Lawmakers were held responsible in 30% of pieces before and 66% after. Background checks were a proposed gun violence prevention method in 18% of pieces before and 55% after Sandy Hook, and lethality reduction of firearms was in 9% before and 57% after. Following a mass shooting, the media tended to hold government, not individuals, primarily responsible. The media often misrepresented the real picture of gun violence and key public health roles."
Combined with Adam Lankford's findings of $75 million worth of media coverage for mass shooters, it's natural that this all has an effect on polling numbers. What is surprising, and supports this idea of a multi-decade trend towards gun rights, is that the media saturation's effects evaporate within a month or two.
This is all a long way of saying that the real test of how much people value gun rights is how much they value them on “September 12” — at the height of an emergency.
The gun rights community is not immune to this. One example: the Stockton schoolyard shooting in 1989 sparked the idea of AWBs. To save semi-automatic rifles, Bill Ruger threw his weight behind the idea of a federal magazine capacity limit. And how many in the gun rights community in October 2001 supported the “anti-terrorist” financial surveillance provisions of the Patriot Act? That law is now used to threaten banks out of doing business with the gun companies and gun rights advocates.
That’s why it was impressive to see two stories fizzle so quickly last week:
A federal judge in Illinois struck down, on Second Amendment grounds, the blanket prohibition on illegal immigrants possessing guns.
On the first story, this was the modal response:
Some initial thoughts on Vermilion China's piece on Holosun:
The reporting is some quality, shoe leather stuff. Pretty bulletproof case that Holosun sells gear to the Chinese military.
This is not surprising or unique (it's generally a safe assumption that large companies are very friendly with the government of their HQ country), but it's interesting to see how it works behind the scenes.
If people don't want to buy Holosun gear because of that, that's fine, that's the free market at work. Lucas Botkin has a good take on prioritization frameworks over on his IG.
There will emerge an alliance of various factions (gun control groups, ITAR fans, China hawks, etc.) who push for banning Holosun gear. The article does that explicitly: "At the government level, foreign owned companies with ties to Chinese Armed Services should be banned from operating in the United States."
Here's what that means:
The president unilaterally gets to decide who he doesn't like. This US is not at war with China, so this means administrative action that is opaque and can change at the whim of the president.
The ban wouldn't be satisfied with stopping at just the Chinese military or even at all Chinese companies, but all companies worldwide with "ties" to the Chinese military. What are "ties"? If you go all the way down the stack to raw materials, who isn't tied to the Chinese military, along with every other military in the world? The world is a small place.
The president could just up and ban any military gear with "ties" to anyone he doesn't like. Thought exercise: how would a president who does not like gun rights use that power?
Summary: people who like the import ban powers that the president got in the GCA will really like this, because it would be the GCA on steroids.
Reaction was more mixed on the news about illegal immigrants. But a couple decades ago, reaction to the court ruling among gun rights advocates would have been a uniformly outraged law-and-order perspective. Today there was understandable concern about the lawlessness of it, but also a recognition that if we’re going to take gun rights seriously as rights, it means they are not lost automatically. Fugitives or criminals can’t, for example, be charged with a crime for exercising their First or Fourth Amendment rights while on the run.
And this perspective was pretty good too:
There’s a coda to Lewis’s description of how to get a herd of bison to run off a cliff:
the <Indian> decoy in the mean time has taken care to secure himself in some cranney or crivice of the clift which he had previously prepared for that purpose. the part of the decoy I am informed is extreamly dangerous, if they are not very fleet runers the buffaloe tread them under foot and crush them to death, and sometimes drive them over the precepice also, where they perish in common with the buffaloe.—
The people who instigate the stampede often find themselves harmed by the panic in the long run. And Lewis continues with another lesson:
we saw a great many wolves in the neighbourhood of these mangled carcases they were fat and extreemly gentle
Wolves aligned with neither the bison nor the hunters swoop in to feast on the spoils.
The fact that people very quickly moved on from the Holosun story and the illegal immigrant controversy demonstrates something encouraging in gun rights land: the buffalo are learning not to run.
This week’s links
Stephen Gutowski interviews the founder of a group in Hartford, CT called the Self-Defense Brigade
h/t Discord subscriber @BakerEasy
Crime is a significant problem in Hartford, Connecticut, and some residents don’t think local politicians and law enforcement are doing enough to combat it.
Some of those residents have now decided to do organized armed patrols in Hartford’s more dangerous neighborhoods. Cornell Lewis is one of the people doing that organizing. He runs a group called the Self-Defense Brigade, and he joined the show this week to explain his group’s tactics and motivations.
Clip from oral arguments in Murthy v. Missouri
This is the SCOTUS case about federal officials pressuring social media companies to make content decisions the government agrees with.
Justice Alito: “When I see the White House and federal officials repeatedly saying that Facebook and the federal government should be partners … regular meetings, constant pestering…. Wow, I cannot imagine federal officials taking that approach to print media.”
Full oral argument audio here.
The ATF raided someone’s house at 6 a.m. for dealing guns without an FFL, and shot him dead during the raid
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