OSD 369: Et tu, Virginia?
Kai su, TEC-9?
Home to Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and George Washington, Virginia was the intellectual center for the founding era of the United States. In 1776, fifteen years before the Second Amendment to the US Constitution, George Mason wrote the Virginia Declaration of Rights. Section Thirteen reads as follows. It’ll sound a bit familiar:
That a well regulated militia, composed of the body of the people, trained to arms, is the proper, natural, and safe defence of a free state; that standing armies, in time of peace, should be avoided as dangerous to liberty; and that in all cases the military should be under strict subordination to, and governed by, the civil power.
Ironic, then, that the intellectual birthplace of the Second Amendment this week is poised to be the latest state with an assault weapons ban and a magazine capacity ban. The bills are on the governor’s desk and will be signed imminently.
We talked a few months ago about how gun rights have recently sustained losses in states where things had previously been stable:
Delaware passed an assault weapons ban in 2022 and Illinois and Washington passed one in 2023. Colorado is going to have a permit-to-purchase regime for “assault weapons” in 2026. Those were major setbacks. Previously, we had often cited the pleasing fact that all seven states with AWBs had originally passed them between 1989 and 1994. The idea was that AWBs weren’t a trend, they were a relic from a moral panic. That is no longer entirely true.
This is either a rising trend or a last gasp. The argument for the former is that it seems to be accelerating. The argument for the latter is that of course it’s accelerating — states always pass performatively extreme laws when they know the Supreme Court is getting ready to strike them down.
The Supreme Court probably is going to curtail AWB laws in the next couple years, so “this is the last gasp” is probably the correct analysis. But that doesn’t make the laws any less real. The Supreme Court is a last line of defense for vindicating individual liberties, and more often than not, it abdicates that role at the crucial moment. So if you’re in a position where you need a Supreme Court ruling to go your way, you need to improve your position.
This is all just a reminder of the order of operations we always come back to: tech → culture → politics. Politics is the furthest downstream, which makes it the least stable one to rely on. You could even tack “law” onto the end, downstream of politics. Keep focused upstream. Doing a good job there makes the job downstream much easier.
This week’s links
What weapons should weapons rights cover?
Hoffnung surveys the topic.
New drone just dropped. It goes 300 mph.
Basically a big bullet that you (or AI) can drive.
Federal court strikes down a California law banning some gun ads
It’ll take some time for the appeals to play out.
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Any time now, Brett "next term or two" Kavanaugh.
That said. It's not a stream, it's a loop. If nobody argues for a permissive policy then the culture gets suppressed and the tech gets banned. I asked my local libertarian party affiliate what they do about gun rights. They said they leave the heavy lifting to GOA in the courts. This mentality has held us back
In those States with ever increasingly strict regulations, non compliance becomes commonplace. NY's strict handgun control laws do little to reduce violent crime in the cities....
Of course, the judicial system does little to assist in enforcing.....