OSD 289: Freedom is in the dictionary
Repealing laws through innovation.
Last week we talked about the various ways that machine guns might, and might not, get legalized. The most unlikely way was through an act of Congress:
It’s theoretically possible that Congress would pass a law repealing the ban. But in the history of the country, they have never passed a law that expands gun rights*. So it’s unlikely they’d start now.
*Two slight exceptions: (1) FOPA, which made it harder for the ATF to paperwork FFLs to death. But that was bundled with the machine gun ban, so we’ll call it a wash. (2) Obama signed a law in 2010 that repealed the carry ban in most national parks.
We breezed past that in the essay, but it’s pretty startling. It violates most people’s mental model of legislation. People think of a legislature as safeguarding them, but in practice the legislature doesn’t expand rights, it takes them away. That’s a structural feature. Legislatures are instruments of popular will, strong individual rights are by definition anti-majoritarian, so they tend to act against individual rights. (See more on that in “OSD 195: Majority rules”.) That’s not unique to guns. Congress hasn’t passed any laws to enforce First or Fourth Amendment rights either*, but it does have a track record of taking them away (e.g. Espionage Act and Lanham Act for the First, Bank Secrecy Act and Patriot Act for the Fourth).
(*The Civil Rights Act of 1871 is the notable exception. It created a civil cause of action against government officials who violate your constitutional rights. But it only applies to rogue agents, not the much more widespread violations that are the normal course of lawmaking. And it has any in case been mostly a theoretical protection since the creation of qualified immunity.)
The basic framework from the essay is that the more decentralized and off-the-books a process is, the more likely it is to be a source of freedom. The more centralized and formal, the more likely it is to take rights away. So we said machine guns were least likely to come from Congress and the Supreme Court, and more likely to come from federalism and people chipping away at ATF rule definitions.
In our Discord after the essay last week, people started brainstorming on what they’d do with machine guns after they got bored of mag dumps. What are the practical applications? We ultimately landed on “small PDWs with cool fire modes”. Hyperburst, fire-when-on-target, that sort of thing. Technically those are machine guns, but they’re not really what the NFA’s writers had in mind. They’re just cool designs that got their shoelaces caught on a 90-year-old law.
That is a clue about the future of gun innovation. On a long enough timescale, a law becomes irrelevant when its terms no longer apply to the modern world.
Pistol braces, bump stocks, and state-level AWB compliance devices (fin grips and the like) are past examples of that. It turns out that legislatures and courts aren’t the only ones who can repeal a law. Founders and creators can repeal laws too. They do it by changing the definition of a product so that the the law doesn’t apply.
If you like those past examples, the best thing to do is cultivate future examples. Here are three we can think of:
Airguns.
mentioned this in the comments last week. Airguns are pretty cool. The best ones give you handgun-level muzzle energy for a few shots. That’s a hard limit, because you’re up against how much energy (in the form of compressed air) you can store onboard the gun. Making airguns much more powerful would require fundamental breakthroughs in compressed air storage. But the upside is that federally these don’t meet the definition of a firearm. So no federal gun laws apply. Silencers, full auto, it’s all fair game.Rail guns / coil guns. Like airguns, federally these are not firearms, so that opens up a lot of room for innovation. Unlike airguns, these do benefit from fundamental breakthroughs in the underlying technology (namely batteries, although capacitors are the limiting factor at this point). A 16” MacBook Pro battery stores 360,000 joules of energy. The muzzle energy of 9x19mm is around 500 joules. So one battery has 720 shots worth of energy. That’s a maximum, because you can’t assume 100% efficiency. But it’s easy to see how a few more years of development would make these guns a real competitor to firearms. And crucially, they’d be exempt from all federal firearms laws. The first good electromagnetic home defense PDW will be impossible for traditional firearms to compete with.
Fire by wire. We wrote this up in “OSD 217: A fire control API — the bull case for smart guns”. When fire modes are controllable via software, you can do a lot of cool tap-dancing right up to the definition of “machine gun”.
What are your favorite examples? Reach out if you’re working on any, we’d love to talk with you.
This week’s links
“How medicine has masked a colossal rise in crime and disorder since the 1960s”
“If aggravated assaults in the United States had been as lethal in 1999 as they were in 1960, the murder rate would have been 3.4 times higher.”
The rate at which police shoot people dead is down by 69% over the past 50 years
That’s an average across 18 US cities.
Forgotten Weapons on Arcflash Labs’ gauss rifles
The company appears to have shut down unfortunately, but the products Ian reviewed are a cool proof of concept.
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Electronic triggers are something that could be explored. It's already had a massive amount of development in the paintball arena, so most of the hard work is already done. This can include things like 'bounce' modes to facilitate rapid actuation while staying within the '1 shot per trigger pull' letter of the law.
If said triggers are locked to read-only mode without a USB key inserted (that would conveniently contain the bluetooth module, so the trigger is completely airgapped otherwise), they should be reasonably secure from hacking and such as well.