OSD 326: The NFA is coming from inside the House
On the rumors about companies undermining NFA reform.
We were going to write a detailed breakdown of what happened in Congress last week with NFA reform, but then Isaac Botkin made an excellent video about it that you should just watch instead:
The summary is that there were various bills under discussion to remove silencers and potentially other items from the NFA, then those bills got watered down to keep everything in the NFA but reduce the cost of a silencer tax stamp to $0. That will probably be the final draft that gets voted on (if it does ever get voted on), despite some chatter that the more comprehensive reforms are still under discussion.
The really explosive gossip is that silencer companies were lobbying behind the scenes to keep silencers in the NFA. Silencer Central put out a statement endorsing the Hearing Protection Act after social media glommed onto them for some reason as the culprits:
It makes sense at a surface level that incumbents who have built their business in the current regulatory context might be comfortable in that world and might not want to see it change. And sure, in theory a company might lobby in favor of the status quo if they were unprincipled and knew that the truth would never come out.
But is that the world we live in? Forget that a lot of the people running these companies are actually quite principled. Imagine instead a mustache-twirling villain running a silencer company, just waiting for a chance to sell out your rights to the government. Even he would know better than to lobby against NFA reform. Because he’d know that news would get out, and then his company would be destroyed by social media. He’d be the mustache-twirling CEO of a pile of ashes.
In any case, it is interesting to think about what would change in the silencer market if the NFA did go away. We see three key changes:
If you’re Silencer Shop or Silencer Central, you go from being one of only 3-4 retailers in the US that make it halfway viable to buy a silencer, to competing with anybody competent enough to sign up for Shopify. Could be a threat, but it’s also a huge expansion of your market.
If you're Dead Air or SilencerCo, it would be like living in a world where the only clothing brands in the world are either Walmart or Ralph Lauren (and you’re the latter), and then suddenly Zara gets legalized. Could be a threat, but it’s also a huge expansion of your market.
If you’re a gun company, you’d wake up in a world where suddenly every single customer is wondering why their gun doesn’t come with a silencer. Could be a threat, but it’s also a huge expansion of your market.
All three are big opportunities for ambitious incumbents (note, to extend one of the analogies, that Ralph Lauren has built sub-brands today across the entire price spectrum, from $17 polo shirts to $1900 polo shirts). They are also severe threats for any lazy incumbents.
As ever, companies will adapt or die. That has been a theme as silencers have grown in popularity even without regulatory changes (remember AAC?), and any changes to the law will accelerate the same dynamic.
From talking to some of these companies behind the scenes, they’d be very excited about deregulation. That’s good because it means the odds are low that there’s much behind-the-scenes mustache-twirling. But more importantly, it also means that there’s appetite for innovation. That can happen because companies intrinsically want it or because they recognize that that’s what’s required to stay competitive. The result for customers is the same. Better products.
This week’s links
@gan_ikawa on Instagram
A Japanese fashion brand making Wilcox night vision mount hat visors and carry handle handbags.
“Into the Abyss”
From Dirty Civilian: “How do you balance the use of white light, night vision, and thermal to exact your will on an opposing force? We break down a cinematic recreation of a maneuver we executed years ago in a force-on-force environment to show you how to play to the strengths and tech of each guy on your team.”
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Think FocusTripp had the best comment, "They need to fire whoever wrote that down that way".