OSD 280: Catechizing the elites

A little while ago, Santiago Pliego made this observation:

That’s a powerful concept. Let’s think about it. Way back in “OSD 110: What smart people are supposed to think”, we wrote the following takeaway from a New York Times newsletter about some gun stats:

Yes, all the facts in the NYT newsletter about guns are wrong. But that’s the least interesting thing about it.

After all, this is the internet. Everything’s wrong all the time! That’s the whole fun of it! Being upset that someone on the internet is wrong is like being sad that there are waves in the ocean. The whole point is that it’s turbulent, and sometimes the waves crash into each other and make cool shapes. The sane thing is to do some boogie boarding and build a little sandcastle and wear sunscreen and have a Coke and just hang out for a little bit, and don’t get worked up about the shape of some particular wave.

What is interesting about the NYT newsletter is the meta-game that it’s playing. We’ve talked many times how cultural disagreements are a tussle about what is normalized vs. what is stigmatized (e.g. in OSD 80, OSD 99, and OSD 107).

What’s really going on in the NYT newsletter has almost nothing to do with content itself. The “facts” literally don’t matter, as you may have observed if you’ve ever noticed how useless facts are at changing people’s opinions on this stuff. So the newsletter could have said pretty much anything. The point isn’t to communicate information, the point is to draw a box and label it, “This is what smart people believe.” Once they’ve made that box, it doesn’t matter much what goes into it. If people want to be seen as smart, they’ll sign up for whatever’s in the box.

…

The meta-game the NYT’s newsletter is playing is to make it embarrassing for you to come out of the safe, particularly in the aftermath of a mass shooting when emotions are high. But if you come out anyway, and stay friendly and confident while you do it, the meta-game crumbles.

“What smart people are supposed to think” dictates a lot of what’s acceptable. In “elite” circles, it defines what is normalized vs. what is stigmatized. So if you’re interested in normalizing (or stigmatizing) guns, then you need to pay attention to what smart people are told they’re supposed to think.

In recent history, for guns this has gone through the public health system in an impressively-executed example of what we call preference laundering.

There are two ways to think of gun research. The first is what you think of when you think of research. Have a hypothesis, go learn and measure, and then see if you were right or wrong. The second is preference laundering. Take a preexisting belief and launder it into science.

The power of preference laundering is that it turns personal beliefs into the “official” answer for what smart people are supposed to think. It's hard to run “I think guns are bad” as straight news in the NYT. But it’s easy to run “Scientists say guns are harmful”. People are busy and don't have time to look at the details of gun nerd stuff. They know they’re busy and lack context on details, so they’re smart enough to not take some random political opinion as fact. Preference laundering is a hack around that defense, because it presents as expert consensus, not political opinion.

Pre-internet, the pro-gun-control view could be preference laundered undetectably through the small handful of media outlets that people got their news from. The big three networks, the major newspapers, and a handful of magazines. After a few decades of that, the gun control catechesis of the elites was complete. It was no longer acceptable to publicly value gun rights. Lip service to hunting, sporting, and some limited self-defense applications was fine, but “widespread ownership of weapons qua weapons is good actually” was outside the Overton window.

A preference laundering machine is powerful, but it’s also fragile. Because it hinges on monopolizing “this is what smart people are supposed to think”, it’s vulnerable to any hint that it is in fact built on a foundation of basic mistakes — it’s embarrassing to be seen believing something that’s been poked full of holes. But for decades, there was no scalable way to poke holes in core fallacies.

Today the internet pokes holes instantly for anyone to see. Everyone’s on a level playing field. Increasingly it doesn’t matter who the message is coming from. Only the content matters. So people are learning that the only clear outcome of the history and empirical reality of gun control is that it increases police power; that gun rights have been getting steadily more popular for 30 years; that silencers are pretty great; that racial minorities outpaced any other group in the 2020 gun buying surge; and that the statistical dogmas we’ve grown up with are, well, wrong.

The surgeon general’s declaration last week that “firearm violence is a public health crisis in America” is a good example. Thirty years ago, the surgeon general could have built an orchestrated PR push around this crisis framing. The cover of Time, a segment on 60 Minutes, the whole bit.

Today the push didn’t stand up to a few minutes of Twitter replies.

The takeaway here could be, “Great. Now let’s catechize the elites for gun rights instead of gun control.” And yes, let’s. Also, there’s good news about how to do that. People who are against gun rights almost always don’t know much about guns — and the critical implication of that is if you teach people about guns, they tend to be cool with them. That’s all you have to do. No big studies, no media capture, no preference laundering. Just be friendly and share gun knowledge and gun ownership. And as Santiago said, on Twitter you can do that directly with people you look up to. Go give it a shot.

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This week’s links

Story about a call to the Sig Sauer customer service line

I’ve told this story before but my buddy used to work customer service at SIG Sauer USA.

One day he gets a call from someone asking about a .357 SIG conversion kit for a P226. He gives all the details, takes the customer’s payment details, & asks for the billing address. The customer says, “1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20500” and my friend goes, “Sir that's the White House.” Customer laughs and says, “Yep that’s my house.” My friend hangs up.

It goes on from there. Not sure if this one’s true but it would be fun if it is.

Behind the scenes on why NFA form approvals are faster now

Historically, the ATF has approved suppressor applications as they arrive — what [Knox Williams, the president of the American Suppressor Association] called a “first in, first out” system. This sounds fair, but it means that a delay for someone at the front of the line halts the process for everyone behind them.

Usually, this delay occurs at another federal agency, the FBI. When the ATF receives a Form 4, they request a background check from the FBI via their National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS). This is the same check that takes place during a gun sale, which usually happens instantaneously. But sometimes that check is delayed — whether because the applicant has the same name as a felon, has incorrectly filled out the paperwork, or has actually committed a crime that makes them a prohibited person.

Under the old regime, that delay resulted in everyone behind that applicant also being delayed. Now, the ATF allows those people who are instantaneously approved by the FBI to move forward in line. Since 70% of those checks come back clean within minutes, those Form 4s can be approved within just a few days.

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“They were just sitting on thousands of applications that have an approved NICS check, saying, ‘We’re going to wait because we still have people in front of them in line that haven’t gotten approval back from NICS.’ It’s so basic and simple, but that was one of the root causes for delays,” [Williams] said.

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