Unintended Guns

Can you ban heroin use? Given that US federal law for being caught with a mere pound of heroin is life in prison yet more than a half-million people in the US have used heroin in the past year, I'd say either no or that the cost of doing so would be intolerably high (for example, killing on-the-spot anyone even suspected of either buying, selling or possessing the drug without due process might work, but that cost would be awfully high and probably intolerable). And heroin use is probably not protected by the constitution.

Can you ban AR-15s? Just like heroin, you can pass legislation to do so, but in reality, no, you really can't. Because unlike heroin, AR-15s are easy to make. Really easy. Unfortunately, because of fear of anti-AR-15 legislation, there is now a burgeoning underground market for the equipment to make critical AR-15 components:

But even fears of such legislation have lead gun owners to stock up on guns and ammunition after every mass shooting in recent history. And now a newer trend has emerged in the days since Omar Mateen killed 49 people with a handgun and a Sig Sauer MCX rifle: sales are spiking for the equipment and materials used by DIY gunsmiths to make their own, fully-functional, semi-automatic weapons. 

Using power tools, chunks of aluminum, and cheap, consumer-grade digital gadgets, those firearm-focused members of the maker movement fabricate homemade weapons like AR-15s and AR-10s that skirt all regulation and would be untraceable in some imagined, future crackdown in which the government were to seize registered weapons. “People are hopping off the mainstream train and accepting an underground dissident mentality when it comes to guns,” says Cody Wilson, the founder of the Austin, Texas-based DIY gun group Defense Distributed. “They’re making the connection: If [an AR-15 ban] is enacted, I can get this machine and make one anyway.”

Since the fall of 2014, Defense Distributed has sold approximately three thousand of the $1,500 devices it calls the Ghost Gunner, a computer-controlled, one-foot cubed milling machine designed to let anyone carve their own aluminum body of an AR-15 at home. Since all other parts of the gun can be bought without any regulation, the result is a lethal weapon that’s free from background checks, waiting periods, serial numbers, or any other government involvement.

On a typical day, Defense Distributed sells four or five of its gun-making machines, according to Wilson. But on the day after the Orlando gun massacre, it sold seven. The second day after the killings, as Democratic senators were filibustering, it sold 11. In all, Defense Distributed’s total revenue has jumped from around $30,000 a week to more than $50,000 last week, the most sales it’s seen since the hype around the Ghost Gunner’s initial launch 20 months ago.

Those are basically cheap CNC mills that are the same as what's used to machine every metal prototype part in the world, so those can't be banned without bringing new product innovation all over the world to a complete halt.

So congratulations anti-gun people. You have now guaranteed that not only can the AR-15 never be eradicated (and it never could've been), you've also guaranteed that any criminal and/or would be terrorist can make an untraceable AR-15 cheaply and easily no matter what future legislation is enacted.

I'm guessing that's a good example of an unintended consequence.

I Guess I'm Callous

I was shaken when the aircraft slammed into the World Trade Center towers on September 11, 2001. It thrust the world into a unknown state. Were more big attacks coming? What was our reaction going to be? Was it going to dramatically alter our well-being and lifestyle? What was it going to take for New York to recover? And, yeah, I felt bad for the dead and their families and friends.

I no longer feel bad for the dead from mass shootings (and the families and friends). That's at least partly because I've been desensitized. And partly because, well, I don't have time to feel bad for everyone that dies.

Approximately 7,000 people die in the United States each day from all causes. Each day, several dozen people are murdered. Twice as many are wounded from attempted murder each day.

Forty-nine people were killed in a nightclub in Orlando. I don't have it in me to feel more for them than the other 7,000 people who died that day or the other dozens of anonymous people who were murdered across the country that day. The dead in Orlando don't feel more special to me. I don't know why I don't feel more since they apparently do feel more special to virtually everybody else in the entire country.

It's interesting to look at the reactions of others from my detached state. The two big hot button issues that were pressed by the Orlando shooting are the role of Islam in events such as these and the role of gun control or the lack thereof.

Within seconds (maybe minutes) of the news breaking, people began to use the event to further their agendas in these areas. Others were saying things like, "how can you use a tragedy like this to further a political agenda?" My response is that there's no better time. If you have a weak or subjective position, using a time when people are all upset and emotional is by far the best time to advance your agenda because they're not thinking straight.

Let's start with guns and gun control. On one hand, the guy put a lot of bullets into a lot of people with a gun, so those in favor of control can use this incident to claim that gun control is critically important. And if we refuse to get rid of all guns and bullets, then let's at least get rid of those particularly scary looking guns like the AR-15 that was used at the Orlando nightclub. And after such an incident is a really great time to make such an argument because objectively, it makes no sense whatsoever; consider the following table (via Marginal Revolution):

Only 248 of 11,961 murders were perpetrated using rifles (plus some fraction of "type not stated") and that includes "assault" rifles like the AR-15. Banning assault rifles will simply make no noticeable difference at all in the number of gun murders and it's a foolish thing to focus on if reducing murder is the goal. But if banning AR-15s is your thing, then using this incident and people's emotional response is a really good idea.

On the other side (the anti-gun control side), we have people noting that the nightclub was a gun free zone. Call me crazy, but it seems to me that having drinking establishments be "gun-free" might actually be a good idea since people don't always make the best decisions when drunk and some people are quite violent under the influence. Some have suggested the compromise that non-drinking folks should be allowed to carry in drinking establishments and that seems at least a little more reasonable to me. Yet it's not clear it would've made much of a difference. There was an armed security guard at the nightclub and he didn't even slow the gunman down. These things are going to continue to happen and there's not much that can be done to stop them.

Now, onto Islam. Omar Mateen was crazy, completely deranged, totally nuts. To me, that's the fundamental explanation of why he did the totally insane thing of shooting up a nightclub. To claim this was caused by Islam seems misguided to me. To claim that restricting immigration would prevent stuff like this is even weaker given that he was a U.S. born citizen. At best, restricting immigration now might prevent something like this in several decades.

On the other hand, I don't think Islam is quite completely free of culpability.

It is true that vast swaths of Christianity are at least uncomfortable with homosexuality. And it's also true that some christian clergy in the United States have called for killing homosexuals. But there are more than a half-million clergy in the United States and only a tiny handful are that extreme and out of a half-million people some are statistically going to be crazy. The rest of those uncomfortable with homosexuality are more the "hate the sin, love the sinner" types or at least don't go around calling for the execution of gays.

Compare that to the fact that 100 million people live in Muslim countries where homosexuality is punishable by death. In other words, killing gays is simply much more mainstream in the Muslim world than in countries that are predominantly Christian.

So if you're a deranged lunatic who happens to be Muslim, the voices whispering in your head from all over the world are kinda gonna be egging you on to kill gay people instead of holding you back. That's a problem, perhaps one with no solution, but I can't ignore the fact that people immigrating from those countries have been exposed to and grown up in an environment that I consider to be relatively barbaric. I don't find that thought to be comforting.