OSD 331: What will guns look like without barrel length laws?

Until it was abolished 1983, a federal agency called the Civil Aeronautics Board regulated the interstate airline industry in the US. That sounds fairly normal, if not quite innocuous, until you learn what they actually did. They “regulated” the industry in the same sense that Franklin Roosevelt “regulated” Japanese Americans or what farmers could grow on their property — everything is illegal, and any carveouts to that exist at the government’s pleasure.

Specifically the CAB:

• Decided every interstate airline that could be legally flown in the US. If as an airline you wanted to start flying a new route, or stop flying an existing route, you had to apply to the CAB for permission. They would take years to make their decision, and would require you to prove you had a really good reason. Think things like, “There are already two airlines flying this route, why do we need a third?” or “Why fly to <city> instead of <random nearby city>?”

• Set the prices of every route for every airline. They’d typically set the same price for each route across all airlines, which in practice made it illegal for airlines to compete on price.

  • This is why midcentury airlines had lavish extras like gourmet dinners and on-board piano bars. Since they couldn’t compete by lowering prices, they competed by bundling extra services into the set price.

• Approve new airlines to start operating. They predictably made the process impossible to navigate. That plus the central planning of routes and prices meant that established airlines got a government-protected oligopoly.

The abolition of the CAB is what created the modern airline industry. It has never been cheaper or easier to fly. If you want a fancy first class experience, you can buy that. If you want to pay $29 to stow away on a Spirit flight, you can probably do that too. And anything in between, to anywhere you could want to go. The industry as we know it could only exist once the CAB was gone.

Short-barreled rifles today are CAB-era airlines. We wrote a few weeks ago about how in all the talk about silencer deregulation, the even stronger case for SBR deregulation deserved attention too:

OSD 328: Give ‘em a mile and they’ll take an inch

And what do you know, they did it. The crazy sonofabitches did it:

Well, “did it” in the sense of putting it into the bill. In practice, whether it becomes law will be up to the parliamentarian. But what if it does become law? What effects should you expect on the market?

Mitch Barrie of Mesa Tactical nailed it in this long overview in a group chat:

The most important effect of removing the SBS and SBR designation is they will no longer be esoteric and the big manufacturer will immediately begin offering 14 inch shotguns and M4 knock-offs and Mini 14s, and these will be popular. Sure, tinkerers will be able to buy new barrels or uppers, but that won’t be a very important part of the market, compared to off-the-shelf shorter barreled long guns. Mossberg, for example, will offer tactical versions of the Mossberg 590 in 14-, 18-, and 20-inch configurations, right there side by side in the gun store rack.

Keep in mind the firearms industry for the last 20 to 30 years or so have survived on the successful response to a marketing challenge: because it’s impossible to actually grow the market enough to sustain it, how do you get your current customers, who literally don’t need to buy any more guns, to continue buying and collecting guns? Keep in mind most gunmakers’ product will literally last a century or more of active use, they don’t really wear out. You have to come up with new products featuring 80 year old technology, and new ways to excite interest and bring the punters into the shop.

The best practitioner of this was Smith & Wesson, which nearly went out of business at the turn of the century, and is now a hugely successful firearms conglomerate. Their primary product, the revolver, was practically obsolete, and they had to come up with ways to get revolver owners to buy more revolvers, which hadn’t really evolved from a technical standpoint in a hundred years. They put their thinking caps on and flourished, after floundering under mediocre management for a decade or more.

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Anyway, the most exciting new thing in the shotgun space in the last decade has been the Shockwave style of shotgun with 13 or 14 inch barrels. Remington and Mossberg sold thousands of these to people who already had 18 inch shotguns, and Mossberg just this year introduced a new model, the semi-automatic Mossberg 990 Aftershock.

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Aside from novelty, why would anyone want a shorter barreled shotgun or rifle?

With shotguns, it is simple: if you are looking for a “tactical” shotgun, a 14 inch barrel will simply do the job better than an 18 inch barrel. It is lighter and handier. Since I have been buying and Form 1ing shotguns, full length barrels look odd to me. The 14 inch shotguns look more “correct” and are easier to handle. Once 14 inch barrels are no longer regulated differently, there is literally no reason to buy an 18 inch barrel if you are shopping for a tactical shotgun (aside from magazine capacity, thanks @raz-0).

I think with rifles the big market will be for people who simply want the closest configuration they can get to what the military use. Most people won’t want anything especially short or esoteric, but there will be strong demand for 14 inch barrels like the M4 Carbine and I guess most other assault rifles. And the PDW business might be an interesting one as well. Short barreled scout rifles cold be a thing, but I don’t know how popular scout rifles are anyway. Maybe making them shorter and handier will improve the business.

[edit: if suppressors and short barreled long guns are deregulated at the same time, they will mutually support each other because suppressors make the long guns a little unwieldy, and shaving a few inches off the barrel will help with that. Personally, I will be permanently installing suppressors on most of my SBR builds, and installing the Huxwrx adapter on the rest. The YHM shotgun suppressor I am Form 4ing right now will go on a 14 inch Benelli M4]

Because .22LR versions of all rifles and pistols are so much less expensive than their centerfire counterparts, many, many gun owners will be enticed by the .22LR short barreled rifles from Ruger and others, and they will buy thousands.

Remember, tinkerers and hobbyists and people who shop on PSA represent edge cases, compared to the broader market of normies fingering cool shit in their LGS. Those probably represent the real numbers and the big manufacturers will pander to them. From the manufacturers’ point of view, removing SBSes and SBRs from the NFA would be a godsend because it would open up entirely new product categories with ready-made markets.

The one thing we’d add is a heavy underline on “the PDW business might be an interesting one”. Much as the CAB made entire types of airlines effectively illegal, and therefore unknown until the 1980s (think Southwest and JetBlue), the NFA has prevented entire categories of guns from being invented. Specifically:

• Next-gen PDWs. Think the B&T USW or TP9 but with a 50x bigger market, a few more generations of improvement, and every company in the industry trying to make a better one. In a world without barrel length laws, look for micro PDWs to become the standard home defense gun.

• AOWs. Pen guns and cane guns are novelties because it has been effectively illegal for them to evolve into something useful.

• Integral suppressors. As Mitch said, if these come off the NFA too, everyone will want to put them on a short barrel gun in order to keep overall length at a reasonable level.

The whitepill here is that even if this change in law doesn’t happen this time around, in the long run is seems almost inevitable. To be this close to gutting the non-machine-gun/non-destructive-device portions of the NFA would have been unthinkable even ten years ago. Another few years of momentum will make it unthinkable that it won’t be gutted.

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This week’s links

Calling it now: the next gucci gun is this $25 Pakistani MP5

Garand Thumb pls review

Open source munitions portal

/r/CarSpotting for munitions.

“How U.S. Gun Culture Spread to a Remote Island in the Baltic Sea”

Another good one from Thomas Gibbons-Neff at the New York Times.

Urutau

The Urutau is a 3D-printable, semi-automatic, bullpup, pistol-caliber carbine. The firearm was designed and manufactured between 2021 and 2024 by a Brazilian gun designer known by the pseudonyms “Joseph The Parrot” and “Zé Carioca”.

H/t Superlincoln on our Discord.

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