OSD 53: Mom found the boogaloo memes
Big week for OSD essays, we had two new ones for you:
We met the former president of the Brady Campaign. At SHOT Show. Here’s what happened. This is about the most surprising meeting we had at SHOT Show — a small-group chat with Rob Pincus and Dan Gross, the former head of Brady. Dan has remarkably (and quite bravely) disavowed a lot of the ways that gun control groups conduct themselves, and he had some really interesting perspectives on the Center for Gun Rights and Responsibility, the group he's launching with Rob.
Gun policy needs a “Decision Support System”. The latest from BJ Campbell, this is a framework BJ imported from his training as a civil engineer. A DSS is a way for people to resolve a contentious issue without throwing chairs at each other. Let’s see how it goes.
Check them out, share them with friends, and let us know what you think.
Lastly, you can now help fund Open Source Defense! We’re working on a few ideas and don’t plan for donations to be our primary funding mechanism. But they will be a dead-simple way to kick in a few bucks to help us keep growing like crazy. You can contribute at Buy Me a Coffee.
Thank you for making this movement what it is. Make it a great week, everyone.
This week's links
Kansas City sues Jimenez Arms into bankruptcy
Everytown funded the lawsuit and announced it back in January, and Jimenez has now filed Chapter 7. Now, this specific case has some oddities, and the lawsuit makes some pretty serious allegations of illegal pistol sales.
But it’s worth noting the framing of the suit. Essentially, Kansas City — backed by Everytown’s legal team — argued that Jimenez’s pistols were disproportionately well-represented among criminal gun uses, and that they were ipso facto a public nuisance.
This is essentially an updated spin on the Saturday night special talking point. The idea that cheap guns are a public nuisance is a way of saying that cheap guns shouldn’t exist — which is a way of saying that poor people shouldn’t have guns. Obviously not an acceptable viewpoint, which is why you see it in wrapped in this idea of public nuisance and the guns turning up at crime scenes.
So this is a great case study, and a lesson we can take with us. When you see people attacking a maker of cheap guns, that is usually a dangerously subtle attack on the gun rights of buyers of cheap guns.
3D-printed guns, explained
A good primer on 3D-printed guns to share with people who want to learn.
Victory this year in Virginia and Maryland
AWB bills in both states went down in flames this week, and barring something very unusual, they won’t be back for another try until next year. But they will indeed be back, so this is a year to regroup, plan, and actually expand gun rights next year instead of fighting to prevent losses.
The Slow Mo Guys: Firing a 2-inch gun at 12,500 frames per second
This came out a little while ago but made a splash in our Slack this week. Wild.
“Boogaloo technical to base, technical to base: we’ve been spotted.”
An academic report on boogaloo memes made the rounds this week. It dove impressively deep into online gun memes, but while there ended up seriously (and fairly slanderously) misrepresenting the community.
It’s worth reading the report though. It's an excellent case study of what Michael Crichton called Gell-Mann amnesia:
“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward — reversing cause and effect. I call these the ‘wet streets cause rain’ stories. Paper’s full of them.
“In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”
HK OEM plastic parts bin at Brownells – $100
Love Brownells leaning into it in the product description: “Here is an opportunity to own a very rare Heckler & Koch branded item that shows your highly developed taste and good life choices. While not as rare as a G11, these are factory original parts crates which we received parts in and most likely have never been seen outside of the factory floors in Oberndorf. Or at least that’s what you can tell your friends. Made from industrial grade plastics these are as rugged as one would expect from any HK firearm and incredible versatile. Measuring approximately 6” deep, 14-3/8” wide, and 22-1/4” long, these are stackable, so you’ll probably want to get more than one. What should you do with it besides brag, show it off, and flex on poors? Well obviously store gun parts in it, or maybe use it to organize your collection of caseless ammo in. Maybe you can put all those vintage copies of the Brownells Big Book in it and display it on the coffee table in the living room. It’s really up to you. Just remember, No Compromise. 50 State legal.”