The whole newsletter last week was about the government judo’ing gun owners’ enthusiasm for competent government into enthusiasm for powerful government. Lo and behold, the week since then has been full of debate about a federal agent shooting someone dead. So there’s more discussion about the power of government today than there was a week ago. But not exactly in the right direction.
The focus on the details actually obscures the real story. The minutia matter if you’re only interested in a specific case. Frame by frame, who made which move, who had which fears, and which fears were reasonable. Those are useful details to litigate for any specific case, but the broader point isn’t about any specific case.
It’s about what government’s relationship to people is, and who decides. The government does not get to enforce the law at any cost. The implicit premise of gun ownership is that when push comes to shove, the people decide where the tradeoffs should be.
A natural retort is, “Well, the government has to enforce the law.” But it often doesn’t enforce the law. Every government makes constant tradeoffs about which laws it will enforce, and how. The optimal rate of compliance with the law is not 100%. That’s because at the margin there are always tradeoffs, so the closer you get to 100% compliance, the harder further gains are. Eking out the final 1% of compliance with any law would be an exercise in tyranny. What would it take to ensure 100% compliance with tax law? Or traffic law? Or even laws against violent crime?
So the optimal compliance rate is less than 100%. What’s the right level then? It varies based on the specifics of each law and enforcement methods. The key to the decentralized American system of government is that no one entity decides unilaterally. Ultimately, the people impose their opinion — unless, of course, they can be persuaded not to.
The top priority is to expand power. Not in a structurally-minded, “let’s build a process that naturally works in good weather or bad” kind of way. There’s no time for that, the next election is in T-minus four years. They get what they can take right now. If the consequences are more than a few weeks away, who cares. So they prosecute their agenda like Kobayashi at a Sizzler that’s going out of business.
Predictably, excesses happen in the course of that, and nobody in power tries to moderate them. Quite the opposite. Excesses are a test of commitment to the cause. This is driven by people’s fear of being ostracized from their ingroup. It is human nature that traitors are reviled more than outside attackers are. In Dante’s Inferno, the innermost ninth circle of Hell is reserved for traitors. When ISIS was in power, their worst punishments were reserved not for unbelievers (Christians and other non-Muslims) but for Muslims — specifically Shia Muslims, who in ISIS’s view were all guilty of apostasy. Nobody wants to be suspected of being a traitor.
Power changes hands.
Go to step 2.
The most important detail here: there is no step where power contracts. Structurally, it’s a ratchet that only ever expands the government’s power. There are only two ways the government can shrink its own power:
The ruling faction voluntarily reduces the power of the government. This would require a level of principled action that has never been observed in Homo washingtonius. And that shouldn’t be too surprising, because as BJ Campbell pointed out in reading an early outline of this piece, there are actually very few voters out there who want to reduce government’s power across the board. Note the nearly empty bottom-right quadrant:
The out-of-power faction gums up the works. In practice, this can be an effective way to prevent expansion of power, at least temporarily, but it almost never succeeds in rolling back illegitimate-but-long-established powers.
So you wind up with the result that each faction spends its time flipping between two states:
When out of power: “The reason we have guns is so that if a gang of thugs acting under color of law helicopters onto your roof or jumps out of their car to grab you, you can shoot them in the face.”
When in power: “Sure they’re black helicopters, but they’re our black helicopters.”
Apply that dynamic to the current situation. Imagine if the ATF was doing an enforcement push that was a fraction as heavy-handed as ICE’s. Pushing out into local communities to round up NFA violators. Pulling up at gun ranges to check everyone’s papers, arresting legal possessors for talking back or not having their papers on them (“we’re arresting you until we can verify whether you have a Form 4”), and so on. We all know 20 people who would be zeroing their .338 Lapua by now. But the powerful arms of the government are executing an analogous scheme on the current outgroup.
That’s backed by a Palantir data mining operation that probably makes Operation Choke Point look like an ACLU board meeting. Imagine if that were applied to tracking down all the people sharing templates for how to drill the third hole in your AR lower or how to make a drop-in auto sear.
When the shoe is on the other foot, whoever the president will use the same enforcement apparatus, accretively manufactured by each predecessor like a dystopian 3D printer, to “make sure we’re fully enforcing our laws” on people who engage in gun ownership, social media wrongthink, qualms about the draconianism of the COVID era, take your pick. The ratchet clicks tighter. You already don’t remember a time when employers didn’t have to send every detail of your earnings directly to the federal government. Will your kids remember a time when federal agents weren’t at Home Depot checking their immigration or vaccine papers?
In spirit, gun ownership is about self-reliance, and implicit in that is the belief that whether through malice or incompetence, the government will not always have your back. That spirit is naturally hostile to any sort of large-scale police roundup operation by any agency at any level for any reason. Especially by federal police. We should keep that spirit alive. Not because every crackdown’s goals are bad in theory, but because a government that can domesticate the public for anything can domesticate the public for everything.
Just discovered this (originally aired in 2023). This was the first in-depth interview with Michael Taylor, who along with his son orchestrated this operation. They ended up serving two years in a Japanese prison in the aftermath.
Good Substack on physical security for schools. Lots of interesting articles, including this one about why procedure should not be to go room-by-room meticulously clearing a building before starting to tend to wounded victims. TIL because of this procedure, the last victim of the Brown University shooting wasn’t found for 2 hours and 16 minutes. H/t @Hoffnung in our Discord for the link.
I host a radio show in Alaska. Every Friday we discuss guns and the 2nd Amendment. Would you be willing to come on the show and discuss this article? I've been pondering it for a few days since I read it and think that it would open up new avenues of discussion for my listeners.
the 'havana syndrome device' stuff sounds like a bunch of confabulation, ultimately sourced to some california GOP guy(?!) who in turn simply offers an unattributed quote.
it has seemed likely to me that the entire havana syndrome thing, while perhaps rooted in some kernel of truth, has become an unverifiable, unfalsifiable get-100%-disability-free-card for federal employees and i am inclined to believe it is deeply overstated if it is true at all; this anecdote, in turn, i am inclined to believe is fanciful fiction barring any actual material evidence otherwise, which appears to be totally absent afaict.
that said, we've known about LRAD (acoustic) and ADS (directed microwave) crowd control weapons for decades, it doesn't sound implausible that they just turn it up an extra OOM for actually military operations, so i don't think that this kind of thing can't exist; i am just irritated by the dogshit epistemics in this conversation
I host a radio show in Alaska. Every Friday we discuss guns and the 2nd Amendment. Would you be willing to come on the show and discuss this article? I've been pondering it for a few days since I read it and think that it would open up new avenues of discussion for my listeners.
the 'havana syndrome device' stuff sounds like a bunch of confabulation, ultimately sourced to some california GOP guy(?!) who in turn simply offers an unattributed quote.
it has seemed likely to me that the entire havana syndrome thing, while perhaps rooted in some kernel of truth, has become an unverifiable, unfalsifiable get-100%-disability-free-card for federal employees and i am inclined to believe it is deeply overstated if it is true at all; this anecdote, in turn, i am inclined to believe is fanciful fiction barring any actual material evidence otherwise, which appears to be totally absent afaict.
that said, we've known about LRAD (acoustic) and ADS (directed microwave) crowd control weapons for decades, it doesn't sound implausible that they just turn it up an extra OOM for actually military operations, so i don't think that this kind of thing can't exist; i am just irritated by the dogshit epistemics in this conversation