I saw something profound on the final day of the Bridging the Divide on Firearm Policy initiative that I must share: I saw a former chief counsel and VP of legal at the Brady Campaign announce that he’d spent 25 years professionally representing the opinions of his employers on gun control, and had only started voicing his own views in the last five. He said that now, in 2025, when considering gun policy, he will always consider what harm that policy will have on responsible gun owners like Rob [Pincus] and BJ [Campbell].

That was worth the price of admission.

When I walked out of the conference on November 16th, 2025, I was probably one of the five most important people in that room for achieving what it achieved, both in terms of responsibility for the project and also its results. But I was also probably the least hopeful that it’d do all that much, and here’s the reason why: The underlying scope of the group was to reduce gun-related societal harms through gun policy, and the maximum mathematical gains possible through gun policy are relatively small. The real juice here is not regulatory and easy, it’s societal and hard.

But the group did impress me by humanizing people across the divide to a level I didn’t think possible in the modern dialogue. And the policy document itself can serve as a roadmap to show blue states how to get what they want without pissing off their red voters too badly, as well as give red states a gun-friendly regulation template to end-around getting Brady Bombed by a sea of school shooting enraged Karens.

There will be many media takes on this thing. This thing will be covered in NYT, NPR, The Trace, RECOIL, on podcasts, on TV, and even in a documentary that’s going to hit the festival circuit this spring and probably land somewhere between PBS and Netflix. I’m probably going to get an IMDB credit out of it. Cam Edwards already did his first poorly informed hit piece on it without appearing to have read the policy document. It’s likely that you’ll read angry culture warriors on both sides trying to spin their hot takes on this thing into independent click-money or 501C4 email fear-donations. Everytown is going to hate this thing, and it’s unlikely NSSF or NRA has the courage to say anything glowing about it either.

As these outlets throw Bridging The Divide variously into a blender and then under a bus, I feel responsible for outlining entirely what the project was, and what it wasn’t, so you’ll know. You’re reading that now. But it’s going to take two sittings to get through because it’s big. Brew a second cup of coffee and buckle up.

Origins

The “Bridging the Divide on Firearms” initiative was a year-long effort to put gun rights advocates and gun violence prevention (GVP, the new acronym for “gun control”) advocates in the same room to collaborate on a gun policy document, and is the brain child of Dr. Michael Siegel. Siegel is a public policy researcher with Tufts University, formerly of Boston University and the CDC, who spoke before Congress during the big tobacco trials. He refocused on gun policy around 2013, and I reference his material more than any other researcher in my own writing because his material is mathematically solid and notably clean of culture war. Most gun researchers start with the “guns are bad/wrong” position and back their way into justifications of their preconceptions. I have never seen that behavior from Michael, which is why I reached out to interview him on RECOIL TV in August of 2020. That interview is here, and lasts about an hour.

I am better on camera now than then, and apologize for the 2020 “ums” in advance

You can see the genesis of the Bridging the Divide on Firearm Gun Policy initiative in that video. In short, Michael did some research by polling gun owners themselves, identifying that many of them seem to support certain policy measures in theory, but never seem to support them in practice. I pointed out that supporting a universal background check is one thing, but banning all peer-to-peer transfers unless they take place at an FFL an hour’s drive away after a mandatory seven-day waiting period is something very different. Every policy impacting gun owners must be developed with gun owners in the room, and policies could be crafted that gun owners are okay with if they’re limited, convenient, and evidence-based.

97 Pounds of Sand

Almost immediately after this interview, Siegel became involved with a gun violence prevention organization named 97 Percent (97), which was ostensibly founded around Dr. Siegel’s work. It could not possibly have gone more poorly. The very first thing the gun community presumed about 97 was that they were a culture war attack vector trying to whitewash Brady policy and make it seem like it was supported by the gun community when it wasn’t. We also presumed that they were trying to back-end terrible stuff like assault weapons bans and mag size restrictions, which Dr. Siegel repeatedly states are “not evidence based,” which means they don’t work. 97 obliged the gun community by immediately proving both presumptions dead right, and the 97 brand was instantly and permanently poisoned by November of 2022.

97 tried to get me involved in the early days. I told them to pound sand. I know others who told them the same thing. I even lampooned them in fiction after their first big zoom call, in one of the funnier things I’ve ever written.

Since then, I’ve been led to believe they’ve purged their organization of people who were calling all AR-15 owners crazy, and who were calling for the suspension of gun owners credit cards, and who promised they’d push an AR-15 ban when they had enough “political capital.” 97’s public-facing statements about gun policy are much more reasonable now than they were a half-decade ago. But the sort of trust necessary to do anything 97 wants to do never existed to begin with, and 97 now mostly survives as a shell organization of unclear intentions which converts philanthropic money into an occasional interview spot on The View and probably backs state-level red flag laws under the table.

buy the author a 100lb sandbag

BJ and Mike (Disclosure)

My discussion with Dr. Siegel about doing something like this predates the 97 Faceplant and really started in earnest around October of 2021, when he and I discussed some prior work I’d done for Open Source Defense in February of 2020.

https://opensourcedefense.com/blog/gun-policy-needs-a-decision-support-system

My personal take was the GVP community should trade the gun rights community back our assault weapons, mags, and silencers, whose bans don’t work, in return for a gun owner friendly version of the universal background check (UBC) and for swapping violent misdemeanors in and nonviolent felons out of the NICS ban list. That’s still my personal take, and the Bridging The Divide policy document is exactly that, with more depth and nuance.

In 2022 and 2023 my dialogue with Mike consisted mostly of us mutually bitching about the CDC’s counterproductive and anti-science nicotine vape messaging, and then he invited me to serve on the panel for Bridging the Divide in the fall of 2024.

Juice of the Societal and Hard Variety

Panel selection was important, and he did a pretty good job with it, but the gaps in the panel can only really be understood once you understand where the scope of the project diverges from the reality on the ground. Here’s how.

Most gun laws do not reduce gun deaths at all. Effectively zero deaths are averted by assault weapons bans, mag capacity bans, 21 to buy a handgun, trafficking prohibitions, junk gun laws, or variations in stand your ground laws. The only three laws that do anything significant are universal background checks (14.9% reduction), violent misdemeanor prohibitions (18.1% reduction), and adopting constitutional carry (9.0% reduction). But those are homicide rates, not death rates, so when you convert those to “gun death” reductions nationwide you’re only looking at a combined reduction of around 12% of gun deaths as your absolute ceiling. To break through the 12% ceiling you need to figure out who’s doing the homicide, who’s doing the suicide, and why.

The “who” is in the maps. I did an exhaustive look at GIS maps put together by The Oregonian for gun suicide, gun homicide, and gun death that tells you everything. That analysis appears in RECOIL Issue 50, page 134, as well as at this publication in case you don’t want to go to public library microfiche:

Gun suicide is overwhelmingly a rural white male problem. Gun homicide is largely a black male problem, spanning the urban/rural divide. The borders between high suicide and high homicide areas in the country are often incredibly stark, follow county borders, and are related deeply to the cultural and racial makeup of each county.

The “why” is in the racial statistics. My second exhaustive look was based in part on work by Random Critical Analysis that I hope one day Dr. Siegel will corroborate with Tufts money. That analysis appears in RECOIL 69, page 84, and is reblogged here on my substack:

When we look specifically at homicide, we find that socioeconomics does influence the black numbers, but they are not explanatory for the differential homicide rates between black Americans and other races. An analysis accounting for fatherlessness rate, however, is fully explanatory, and flattens race completely out of the relationship. While fatherlessness rates are tightly correlated with socioeconomic outcomes in white and latino populations, they’re much higher for black folks, which creates the racial homicide rate differential we see in all the other socioeconomic comparisons. The general problem is lack of dads, and the “dads problem” hits the black community harder.

This is the real juice: policy to reduce homicide rates in the United States must somehow address fatherlessness rate, and policies to reduce gun deaths in the United States have to figure out why rural white men are shooting themselves. The real juice is societal and hard, and the Bridging the Divide policy document doesn’t do much on this front. I personally championed and wrote the suicide section, which was the only section unanimously approved by the group, and I was hogtied in what I could do because the scope was firearms legislation.

To do the hard work, Bridging the Divide would have needed not only a different mandate, but some different people in the room. The panel checked boxes for racial diversity, gender diversity, and thought diversity. But three of the four black folks on the panel were women, and the one black man probably drives a Mercedes to his job as a famous ER doctor. These folks were some of my favorite folks on the panel, but they were probably not going to have the direct personal perspectives of black males exposed to real societal homicide drivers. Of the ten-ish gun owners in the room, the closest to a rural white Carhartt-wearing male were Rob Pincus and I. Rob has more frequent flyer miles than the president of Delta and I’ve got two degrees in applied mathematics, so I’m not convinced we have enough redneck cred to know what’s going on in the rural white male suicide demographic either. We do both own chickens though.

But the policy does about as much as gun legislation can, maximizing impact while remaining friendly to gun owners, even though I don’t agree with everything in it. It’s a good document.

67 Pages, Condensed

Here’s a very abridged description of the sorts of horse trades that were in the final policy document, without dwelling too much on the details. It’s important to note this is a state-level policy proposal, with suggestions to the feds buried in it, and certain ways to make the state policy work outside of federal bounds because the state runs its own background check for peer-to-peer sales.

• The “Prohibitors” policy adds people who commit violent misdemeanors to the “can’t buy a gun” list for two to six years, but pulls nonviolent felons off of it.

• The “Background Checks” policy adds a state background check system that runs in parallel with the federal one, and can be used for peer to peer transfers or FFL transfers. It’s a state database and a smartphone app or website where you put a buyer’s information in, and it instantly returns a green flag or red flag on the prospective sale, without an owner registry. The state uses this for all peer to peer transfers which wouldn’t require a NICS check, and requests that the ATF allow it for FFL transfers as well. The policy also gets rid of state bans on SBRs and suppressors. This is the cornerstone, because it closes the supposed “gun show loophole” but does so in a way that is a convenient win for gun owners without a registry.

• The “Extreme Risk Protection Order” policy is the policy’s red flag law framework. It’s civil not criminal, the burden of proof is on the court, it’s temporary and automatically expires, it provides mental health treatment and social services automatically to anyone who gets flagged, and it’s a punishable crime for law enforcement or anyone else to abuse it. They can also have a third party hold the guns instead of the cops.

• The “Dealer Gun Regulation and Gun Trafficking” section focuses on criminal enforcement of straw purchase laws already on the books federally, by funding and directing state efforts to look more closely at the few gun stores in the state that are disproportionately responsible for the distribution of guns used in crimes. It also encodes a state level version of PLCAA to protect firearms dealers and manufacturers in case the federal protections go away.

• The “Childhood Firearm Access Prevention” section is the policy riff on safe storage, which says if you’ve got kids under age 18 in the house you have to keep your gun locked when it’s not near you. There are tax breaks in it for training and for buying a gun safe. I personally voted against this section after they added in a bit requiring safe storage in vehicles because it would force people concealed carrying to violate gun free zones unless they had a car safe, which they won’t have if they rode with a friend or family member. When I suggested that all gun free zones should provide firearm storage it was like a flashbang went off in the hotel soda tray.

• The “Firearm Suicide Prevention” section operates in three modes. It suspends any state level gun control law that would impede the transfer of firearms between two friends or family members if one of them is suicidal and wants to get their guns out of the house. It provides a list and map of safe places to temporarily store a firearm other than family and friends, such as a gun store who volunteers to provide safe storage. And it heavily invests in suicide awareness pamphlets and outreach, crafted in part by the gun community itself, which instruct people when and how to get the guns out of the house if they’re suicidal, knowing that they’ll get them back whenever they ask for them.

• The “Firearm Injury and Prevention Education” section adds firearm content to high school health class, and then gets deep into the weeds about what sort of content should be put into the class and who gets to pick that. My opinions on this section varied wildly during discussion, ranging from “hell yeah” to “shit no,” and in the end my vote was bought by making much of the curriculum controled by the local community.

• The “Community Violence Intervention” section is the only policy in Bridging the Divide that jumps outside of the realm of guns and into the realm of Juice of the Societal and Hard Variety as discussed above. It earmarks money for community and hospital based violence intervention programs, some of which have shown some effectiveness at crime reduction. It’s a start, but I don’t think it addresses the true root cause. I went ‘yes’ on this because it is indeed a start, and I would have gone all in on it if the money earmarks could also be redirected towards community programs working directly on the fatherlessness problem.

I like most of the policy document and I’m proud to have participated in crafting it. I think gun friendly states could use this as a guideline to deflect antigun forces from ramming far more restrictive rules down their throats after a mass shooting. I think purple states that have recently passed more restrictive policies could look at this as a way to soften their own policies before they get dumped entirely during the next political red-shift. I also think it would save a few lives along the way. Probably 15 a year in Utah, 70 a year in Kentucky, 200 a year in Georgia, and so forth. The numbers on this won’t be huge but they’re not nothing.

The Friends We Made Along The Way

The Tufts project’s ultimate goal solidified for me when The Great Satan of Gun Control Jonathan Lowy and I had lobster and beer at a marina in Portland, Maine, talking about whether Bob Dylan or Tom Waits was a better songwriter. I do not count Mr. Lowy among my allies in the gun rights movement, nor would I want to. Mr. Lowy is more valuable to me as a friend than as an ally, and I like him. This kind of connection transcends a mere policy document, because it means I can carry his position into my spaces and he can carry my position into his.

Dr. Siegel deserves all the credit for selecting and curating a panel that could make these connections. They were weighted a bit heavily towards Old Fart New England Academics, who are probably Mike’s social circle. But I give credit where it is due, even the more antagonistic ones softened tremendously after our first face-to-face conference over the summer in Denver. Dr. Selker of Tufts also deserves a tremendous amount of credit for holding the thing together on the Tufts end, in ways of which I’m only peripherally aware.

The mediation and facilitation team from Essential Partners also deserves a tremendous amount of credit. Their methods created a space for viewpoint sharing and discussion that allowed the panelists to start from a point of shared values and build out from there, which is the best way to organically discover resolutions to disagreements. The time they spent on humanizing the panel was fruitful.

Cry Havoc! And Let Slip The Poorly Informed Shit Takes

As HWFO has discussed repeatedly over the last decade, the goal of all modern media is to make a penny a click by feeding confirmation bias to echo chambers, while spending the least possible amount of time on research. This tendency is not limited to the gun space, but it’s certainly present in both sides of the gun dialogue. We see it in basically everything ever published by The Trace, as well as Cam Edwards’ first salvo in Bearing Arms in which he appears to call me a useful idiot for the communist party…?

So that’s new.

I met Cam at SHOT Show a few years ago in the media room. I doubt he remembers me but I know he knows my organization Open Source Defense. I also know he knows Rob Pincus, and he didn’t reach out to either of us before publishing this. He even referenced Open Source Defense in his article, while apparently not realizing that I was representing Open Source Defense on the panel itself and putting exactly the stuff Kareem talked about into the proposal. Cam said this:

Open Source Defense has published an interesting way to perform “universal” background checks that preserves the privacy of the buyer, and if that’s what’s being offered I’d be far less likely to object. But the outline offers no detail at all on what this state-level background check system for private sales would look like... including their proposed penalties for violating the law.

Cam didn’t appear to look into the details, or look at the panelist list. But I’m sure his article in Bearing Arms is going to get more clicks than mine will unless I can peddle a version of mine to RECOIL, which may be difficult while my editor Iain Harrison is doing Soldier of Fortune stuff in Kharkiv. I originally seemed to have Thomas Gibbons-Neff on deck to cover this for The New York Times but I think he got yanked and redirected to Minneapolis.

Be clear, it’s not Cam’s fault. Even while referencing Kareem’s article on UBC game theory traps, Cam is in his own game theory trap trying to drum up traffic just like Bloomberg. And that’s the filter through which the world will see this effort in the next few months - a filter that I’m not sure Dr. Siegel knows about or understands.

In the end, it’s one thing to draw up a document, and it’s another to promote it. What transpires over the next six months with Bridging the Divide will determine whether it becomes a policy pillar or an advocacy footnote. But in this case, for this document, I can say I was happy to be along for the ride regardless of the outcome.

And, in some areas, to help steer it.

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The last HWFO article on the last ICE shooting closed like this:

It really is surprising it took this long for a protester to get shot. It was predictable, the markets should have taken bets on when and where, and the Danse Macabre continues because few are smart enough or have the will to ask what the heck is actually happening, and whether it should it be happening, and how to change it if not.

Nineteen days later I’m writing about another ICE shooting, at the specific request of several of my liberal friends. Here’s the shooting:

And so I will write the article, but not to prove a thesis because my thesis hasn’t changed. This article will just be a snapshot of what’s going on in the gun rights discussion space about the second shooting, which is certainly interesting. Herein, I will let my readers and friends write the bulk of the article for me, through anonymized quotes taken from private channels, in the spirit of Scott Alexander’s “highlights from comments” work. You should read these quotes, which are curated for relevance and intelligence, but I’ll summarize the general zeitgeist briefly before we get into them.

The gun rights space is in two camps, and the camps seem to be drawn between folks who regularly carry firearms and folks whose interest is more rights focused and less practically focused.

The “rights” camp says you can protest while armed, you can film cops, and you can do both at the same time without forfeiting your life, and therefore the ICE cops murdered a dude in cold blood on the street for doing things you are allowed to do. People in the “rights” camp tend to bend libertarian or liberal, so they also tend to be less ICE positive.

The “practical” camp carry firearms regularly, and have been to numerous classes where their instructors told them to never under any circumstances get into a scrap with a cop while armed because someone might get shot in the confusion. They have been told that while you’re armed any conflict could turn deadly, so you have a moral and ethical obligation to avoid all conflicts and not provoke them. You also have an obligation to announce that you’re carrying a weapon to any cop you see and keep your hands clear, to be sure everyone in the engagement is calm and sane and nobody gets shot. The practical camp was taught this for their own safety. The practical camp tend to bend conservative, so they also tend to be more ICE positive than the rights camp.

Part of the Second Amendment schism comes from growing pains from 2020, when gun ownership grew and the prior gun owners were quite honestly a little bit worried about how to onboard all these new rights focused owners that didn’t have the same historical enculturation.

The rights camp views Alex Pretti as a hero. The practical camp views Alex Pretti as a dumbass, especially as information starts to come in about how the protests in Minneapolis are not organic, they’re organized opposition to intentionally track and interfere with armed cops that coordinate through secure channels on Signal with a defined command and control structure which are operating off of a known insurgency playbook.

To some, Pretti looks like a sacrificial pawn that the organization behind the protest killed on purpose to move the needle. If I were to engage that conspiratorial thesis at all, I would substitute the woke egregore for the “organization behind the protest,” because a distributed agenda by an egregore would look like a coordinated agenda to a conspiracy theorist.

There are also some folks who skate down the middle, who think that the sort of coordinated soft insurgency ongoing in Minneapolis is potentially legitimate, but doing it over this particular issue is dumb. And there are folks who are detached and looking at it from a larger tribal warfare standpoint, which is far more on-brand for HWFO, so we’ll start there.

I was and am one of the “rights” guys, so most of these quotes are from people arguing with me, as you’ll soon see.

Anon Who Writes Longly

This guy did a lot more than film cops.

Should physically interfering in an arrest come with a death sentence? No. Not even if you’re carrying. But this guy created a chaotic situation where the risks were extremely high.

You seem to perceive all of these shooting incidents through a framing of, “Since cops are able to get away with this, what is stopping them from doing it to me?” That’s a reasonable framing to apply. But you’re doing exactly the thing I described in another post: you’re projecting the actual events onto a different, imagined scenario. Specifically, the scenario that cops will arbitrarily kick down your door and shoot you. This is not a valid comparison because the actual events are not something you would ever do, and the imagined scenario you’re worried about is not one that would actually happen.

There’s consistently been a significant difference between the actual shootings and the hypothetical scenario that concerns you: in all of the actual shootings, the person who was shot was also the person who initiated the altercation. That’s completely different from cops kicking down your door in the middle of the night. But in every case, skilled propagandists use carefully curated videos and photographs to quickly promulgate an initial narrative that somebody was just minding their own business and the cops executed them. This narrative is compelling to you because it aligns to the scenario you’re worried about, where cops kick down your door in the middle of the night and execute you. You accept the narrative as presented, and then it becomes the framing through which you perceive all further evidence. Even as additional evidence starts to trickle out, showing that the initial narrative was a lie, that narrative has such a powerful hold on you that you keep insisting that it’s obviously true, and comparing it to the completely different scenario of cops kicking down your door in the middle of the night to shoot you. With the crazy lady in the car there was eventually enough video evidence from enough angles that you were finally able to see past the narrative to the reality that she deliberately tried to run that cop over with her car and even succeeded in hitting him. This time, you accepted the initial narrative that he was just filming and the cops went after him, which is now obviously false. How many times are you going to let these propagandists brain-fuck you before you realize what they’re doing and stop accepting their first-out-the-gate narrative?

I’m not saying that what happened with the most recent ICE shooting is OK. It’s not OK in all sorts of ways. What I’m saying is that the thing we want, which is a well-functioning society where everybody gets to be both free and safe, is not on the menu. We have a much less appealing set of options available to us. In the best case scenario, we manage to muddle our way through a few years of bad stuff before eventually finding some new equilibrium. Most of the scenarios involve catastrophic failure in some direction or another, and the only question is which of those directions we’ll slide off into.

This isn’t just about deportations, or ICE, or even Trump. This is tribal warfare. All of that other stuff is just the most convenient current excuse for the tribal warfare. If it weren’t ICE, it would be something else. A very important thing to keep in mind is that as tribal warfare escalates, the moderates on both sides lose control. It doesn’t matter that the majority of people on both sides are reasonable human beings who do not want violence in the streets and could reach a peaceful solution if they could sit down with each other and talk it out, because their influence is rapidly waning.

If you’re thinking in terms of laws or the constitution or your rights, you are in for a very rough time. Those things only matter in practice in a healthy society with a properly functioning government. We haven’t had that for years. Our decision-making processes (including our elections) have been hijacked by egregores and our government has been hollowed out. Our government hasn’t functioned on the basis of rule of law for years. That’s always been a marginal thing at best, but it’s been completely untrue at least since 9/11. Each time a faction takes control, they ratchet up the concentration of power, only for those new powers to be handed to their enemies the next time they lose an election. Everybody recognizes that pretty soon, the power will be so concentrated that all further elections will be locked in, and they are responding accordingly, trying to ensure that they will be the ones in the chair when it becomes a throne.

Talking in terms of rights and laws won’t make any difference because the only rights you actually have are the ones that you (and your tribe, if you have one) can demand at gunpoint. To the degree that this could be reversed, the people with the power to do that have no interest in doing so and your words will not sway them. If you’re actually thinking in terms of rights and laws, you are in for a very rude awakening.

I described two errors of thinking, and then BJ very helpfully responded by demonstrating exactly those two errors of thinking; I couldn’t have asked for a better straight man. They are errors of thinking because they are based on an ideal of universal principles. Universal principles are an excellent way to run a society. I would greatly prefer to live in a society based on universal principles, and I think everyone else in this Slack would as well. We frequently repeat the adage about designing a government so that you wouldn’t mind if your worst enemy were placed in charge. When you think in terms of universal principles, it’s natural to apply the general facts of a scenario as a template to other scenarios and think about how they would play out, which is exactly what BJ did. The problem is that a society can only run on universal principles when the overwhelming majority of people in charge cooperate to run it that way, and we have not had such a society in decades.

On more than one occasion, BJ has stated that when the shooting starts, he will look around, figure out which tribe seems to be most likely to win in his area, and hang their flag in front of his house. This is probably the best strategy in a civil war scenario, and many others have expressed similar plans. The thing is, neither of these are discrete events: the shooting does not start all at once, nor does the signaling of tribal affiliation. Even if you don’t yet want to declare allegiance to a tribe, you can’t help constantly sending small signals that both tribes will interpret in their own ways to sort you into their in-group or out-group. The biggest risk is doing something that causes both tribes to sort you into their out-groups.

I’m going to apply the tribal warfare framing to the most recent ICE shooting and BJ’s hypothetical counter-examples, keeping in mind the principle that “when the shooting starts, I’ll pick a tribe and fly their flag.” First, we see that the shooting has already started. It actually started a long time ago, but this is clearly a significant indicator of acceleration. The “flags” in this situation are behaviors like carrying a concealed weapon (used to be a solid indicator of red tribe affiliation, no longer) filming cops as they make arrests (used to be a fringe libertarian thing, now mostly associated with the blue tribe), and doing so in the context that they are surrounded by an angry mob (solid blue indicator). But the most important indicator of all is which cops you’re filming. If you film ICE agents arresting illegal immigrants, that codes solid blue. If you film ATF agents trying to arrest gun owners, that codes solid red.

If cops started randomly demanding Papiere Bitte at the Richmond 2A protest, and someone filmed them, and they disarmed the camera man and then shot him in the street, it would be the fucking OK Corral in about 5 seconds.

Yes, and this is exactly why the red tribe has gun rights. Not because of the 2nd Amendment, but because nobody else is willing to pay the price to take away their guns, and even if somebody were stupid enough to try, it wouldn’t work.

The blue tribe has other rights that the red tribe does not, including the right to riot with near impunity. They have secured that right by building up an infrastructure of material and legal support to rioters, propaganda engines, and loyal DAs who prosecute selectively. In 2020, the red tribe watched all summer as rioters shut down cities, caused billions of dollars in property damage, and even murdered multiple law enforcement officers, all without consequence. The red tribe interpreted this through a framing of universal principles, concluded that all of these behaviors were generally permissible to all Americans, and acted accordingly on January 6th of 2021, where they learned the hard way that the blue tribe has rights which they do not.

The blue tribe has long predicted that the red tribe would flip on gun rights as soon as black people started buying guns in large quantities. That prediction proved false, but if the blue tribe had applied a tribal rather than racial framing, they might have made a more accurate prediction which is playing out now: the red tribe does not support gun rights for the blue tribe, at least not in practice. The red tribe knows that they can carry in public and film police officers and get away with it, which are real gun rights. The blue tribe can buy guns, but are currently learning that they can’t actually use them in practice the way the red tribe does.

The red tribe is also now contesting the blue tribe’s right to riot with impunity, which is why we’re seeing so many dead anti-ICE protestors, charges against guys like Don Lemmon, threatened charges against state and local officials, etc. If the Democrats ever win another presidential election, and if they try to tit-for-tat by contesting the red tribe’s gun rights in a serious way, then we will have a full-blown civil war.

The reds already priced in full radicalization of the other side. There had been a gradual build-up through the “mostly peaceful” summer, cancel culture, attempted political assassinations, and other events, but the Charlie Kirk shooting put them over the top. The red tribe concluded that no matter what they do, they will have to deal with the consequences of the other side being fully radicalized. Since that’s already priced in, they might as well do as they please.

This is a reality to which the blue tribe has not yet caught up. Many decades of experience have taught them that they can exercise strong influence over the red tribe by modulating their radical behavior up and down. That will never work again because the red tribe will no longer let it work on them. That was a one-way switch flip. But the blue tribe has yet to realize that the radicalism knob is no longer connected to red tribe behavior, so they keep trying to twist it to 11 because they think it’s not working because they haven’t cranked it up far enough.

My prediction for most likely outcome:

The same machine that ran the summer of 2020 mobilizes and attempts a repeat. There will be riots, but it won’t be nearly as destructive as in 2020. This will give Trump the excuse he needs for a massive crackdown, possibly invoking the Insurrection Act.

In retrospect, seems obvious and I’m a little embarrassed that I was too caught up in the details to see this sooner. It seems like this was the plan all along: pick a deep blue city in a blue state and run an ICE blitz there in an attempt to goad them into rioting; if they don’t take the bait, move to the next deep blue city and try again.

All of the rising conflict we’re seeing is a direct result of forcing people with fundamentally incompatible value structures to agree on a common set of rules.

There are only two ways to resolve such conflict:

1. Let people split off and live in discrete political units composed of mostly like-minded people.

2. One group of people enforces their value structure on the other(s) by force (or eliminates those who won’t submit).

I know that some people will respond to this with #3: get the people to sit down, talk it out, and agree on a value structure that is acceptable to all. This is, indeed, the most preferable approach. In the current context, it is an unrealistic fantasy. The value structures in play are fundamentally incompatible, which limits us to #1 and #2.

If #1 is not implemented deliberately, then the default is #2. Sometimes, in the process of implementing #2, the losing side decides that #3 is preferable and makes terms.

(redacted) has described the endgame pretty well: Reconstruction 2.0. That would be the endgame that the MAGA egregore has in mind.

Cynic Anon

Watching these videos makes me feel like I’m watching a 2yr old playing with a loaded gun while dad and the uncles sit around watching and laughing. There are no adults in the room. Nobody understands violence or responsibility. It’s just a city-wide version of the Stanford Prison Study. One team was told to dress up like federal agents, and the other team was told to dress up like protestors.

My read is that Trump’s forcing the issue in the way he is to make Walz and Frey either order their troops to fire on federal agents, in which case he’ll definitely have the support to go arrest them, or to back down. He’s forcing the crisis point.

Withdrawing would be pretty unacceptable; the networks would just have time to regroup, retrain, rearm... Strategically it would be weak, operationally it would be painful, tactically there’s no benefit I can see unless they move in with more force after.

There’s some things you can let the states do their thing on. 10th amendment and the commerce clause is pretty shaky legal ground; nobody in their right mind would invade CO over weed based on a SCOTUS opinion that everyone hates. Immigration enforcement though? The federal government has like, three duties and that’s one of them. If they don’t do that job then they have no reason to be, and if they let states flout them on that then they don’t have any legitimacy.

Anon who Lives in Minneapolis

Today is my first time setting foot in Minneapolis since mid-December, I am downtown working (redacted).

I have literally seen zero ICE agents ever, but mostly because I only go to downtown Minneapolis for work, and I never go to Minneapolis for any other reason, and ICE seems to be mostly operating in the South Minneapolis area where I definitely do not go because that place sucks. Like you can totally avoid ever encountering ICE by just not following them around.

There’s a trend during riotous times for blues to post pictures of random parks or whatever away from the action and pretend that because that particular area is peaceful that it must mean the idea that there are serious riots going on must be a right wing fabrication. I could very very easily do that in Minneapolis. Again I have literally not seen a single ICE agent, though again this is mostly because I have no business in the parts of town where they are operating, and only even enter Minneapolis city limits maybe once a month on average. If I did not have access to the news I would literally have no idea that I’m in the middle of civil war 2.0.

During the 2020 riots the sky at night was orange from fires.

I wonder how much of the Rorschach test of this thing is swung by being someone who personally carries a firearm in public. IIRC, I seem to remember BJ saying at some point that he doesn’t carry (correct me if I’m wrong). As someone who does carry, I think there is something about strapping on a firearm and sincerely hoping you don’t have to use it today that affects your mindset toward conflict, in a way that people who don’t carry, or are not mindful of the full implications of carrying, don’t experience.

One year I went to the local Pride festival and hung out with some of the people I knew there from the local Pink Pistols chapter. They were stuck in a corner of the park with all the other conservative-coded groups. While I was there, someone saw the Log Cabin Republicans’ Trump poster. It was the photo from his first campaign where someone brought a rainbow flag to a rally that said “LGBT for Trump” and Donny saw it and proudly held it up.

Anyway, this person took offense to this poster and started trying to tear it down. There was a big scuffle. And meanwhile across the path from them was easily the most heavily armed section of the entire park. Probably two dozen of us. All of us looked at each other and just started packing up the tents to get out of there. I don’t think any of us gave more than a moment’s thought to going over to help or otherwise participate in the scuffle, because again when you carry a firearm, every fight is a gunfight.

The person who sincerely doesn’t want to use their firearm behaves like a massive fucking pussy, because that’s how you avoid using your firearm. And that’s why when we see a Rorschach test consisting of a guy carrying a firearm who decides to put himself in the middle of somebody else’s fight with the cops, we lack sympathy because we understand how monumentally stupid it is to do that, and simply can’t see ourselves in that position. But somebody who has never carried a firearm, and has never experienced the shift in perspective about conflict that comes from carrying a firearm, their takeaway from the Rorschach test is that they don’t see the issue with the moment the guy decides to involve himself with somebody else’s fight with the cops, because they have never experienced that voice in their head saying “don’t get yourself into a fight that you are not okay with escalating to lethal force “

The Anon on the HWFO T Shirt

Anyone emphasizing amplification is in the wrong. Pretti carried a gun into a “situation” which has few positive outcomes. I do not know if his death can be “justified” in any moral sense - I don’t know what his intentions were, but as a carrier, even if he was defending someone, he should have respected the rules of engagement - his carrying did nothing but amplify risk to himself and he was not legitimately a threat to the action he was protesting. He may have been a threat to an agent but realistically he was outgunned and outprepared and undertook risk that ended up with him dead with a VERY short leap from “bad choice” to “he dead.”

I do not know how they can actually de-escalate properly at this point. I think I’d prefer ICE take a moratorium on deportations in MN for a period of time - like, a few days, a week - just to give people a chance to reset and think, because continuing engagement gives the irrational no opportunity to think, only act. And that’s going to end up with dead people, for nothing, because the people being targeted for deportation need to be deported.

But with that said, the process is broken: MN is not cooperating, which only amplifies risk for everyone, including Minnesotans, should they choose to be involved. And they are choosing to be involved; they’re touching the stove and bitching that it’s hot, why is it hot just because it’s on and labeled as hot and cherry-red. But this commitment to enforcement is counter-productive…

Unless that’s the goal, and if it is, well, there’s a reason we should elect better people all the way up and down the slope. This saber-rattling on all sides is stupid. I think honestly that Walz and Trump and Bondi and these other goons need to be on the ground themselves: Let Walz, who is a gun-owner himself, he says, and a member of the National Guard (”Almost good enough to serve in the Army reserve!,” as my brother says), lead the protests on the ground himself, if he’s going to advocate for others. Why is the risk only to ordinary citizens? Similarly, if Trump’s all “see how big my penis is, no, it’s right THERE, it’s the hog, why you using a telescope bro, I’m sure it’s there somewhere” then let HIM go in with ICE, instead of relying on others’ service.

Intelligent Rights Anon

I’m seeing a lot of “isolated demand for rigor” around the “you need to avoid all conflict when carrying a gun” point.

No argument there, but people are not applying that rigor to the officers involved here. just gross incompetence and oafish escalation all around, but a lot of people are only pointing out the ways that Pretti failed, not the ways the officers failed. In fact a lot of people’s incentives are to deny that the officers failed in any way at all.

My biggest concern is I see zero interest on the part of the federal government in thinking about how they might have performed this arrest without killing the guy. Quite the opposite, all the messaging from the government was about how he was intending a massacre, kind of had it coming, was definitely a shitlib so who cares anyway, etc. And “we don’t particularly care if we kill you while arresting you” is not an attitude I am comfortable with the government having, and even if they have that attitude, I’m definitely not comfortable with them feeling secure to express that publicly. As gun carriers we can also take ownership of how to keep ourselves safe and out of trouble/danger. But I don’t want the government to get away with not taking ownership of their own need to become more competent too.

The good news is that this is the biggest step change in normalization of concealed carry since Bruen.

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Media Contagion Theory

Media contagion theory, briefly summarized, shows through statistical modeling, mathematical modeling, and by analysis of individual incidents, that the “spree shooter” problem in the United States is a direct result of the media’s behavior whenever a spree shooting happens. There is a wealth of information supporting this theory, which would include but is not limited to the following:

• Adam Lankford in 2018 was able to back-calculate that media coverage of spree shooters gets them approximately 75 million dollars in free press coverage.

• Jillian Peterson and James Densley studied every spree shooter from 1966 to 2019 and found that almost all of them studied and idolized prior shooters, and they propagate by media driven social contagion.

• Copycat suicides are well studied, and coverage of celebrity suicides increases other suicides by 13% to 26%.

• Jennifer Johnston and Andrew Joy modeled media contagion theory and determined that these shootings would go down by at least one third without the media contagion. Johnston published more about it here.

• Towers et al. published extremely similar results in PLoS ONE in 2015, in a study later covered by The Trace.

• Schweikert, Huth, and Gius used spatio-temporaly panel count models in 2020 to analyze the effect.

• Liu, Dong, and Qiu used machine learning to build predictable models of this effect in 2022.

But why would the media knowingly and purposefully increase spree shootings given the broad consensus that they are at least partially responsible for these things? HWFO explained that in 2021 by looking under the hood of our own publication’s traffic numbers.

The media has to do it because it makes money. If one outlet chose not to do it they’d lose market share to the outlets that did, therefore they must do it as well. It’s the Tragedy of the Commons phenomenon except with dead kids instead of hungry sheep. It is a classic game theory coordination problem with Moloch in the cable news editorial seat.

And because of that lack of coordination, no solution exists within government to prevent the contagion effect without complete suspension of freedom of the press. The one solution is extragovernmental. If more of these shooters get embarrassed and shamed by getting plugged by mall cops or ordinary dudes carrying concealed weapons, and that was what the media used for their clickbait, then the contagion effect would turn into a dampening effect instead. HWFO covered that concept here:

It’s nice to sit on a conceptual analysis and tell other people you’re right without any concrete examples of it. It’s nicer when a mass shooter gift wraps you evidence that your analysis is correct. That just happened in Minnesota. Let’s look at this guy’s manifesto.

Manifesto

First we must move through a series of caveats. First, the shooter was a male-to-female trans so calling him “him” may be considered misgendering “her.” But central figures in the neo-woke ecosystem such as Stephen King seem to be floating the idea that misgendering shooters is okay, and there’s some indication the shooter was tired of trans and was considering detransition anyway. Suffice to be said, I don’t misgender out of malice, and I’ve been using preferred pronouns since getting dragged on stage at Backstreet Atlanta with Charlie Brown in the 90s, and this one is confusing anyway, so I’m going with “he” and “him” and “this dude” henceforth. Cope.

Second, the manifesto was written in some version of online-ified Duolingo English/Russian hybrid, as translated by a Twitter/X anon, so I cannot guarantee any of the accuracy of the translation. I will say I have seen no media outlet challenging this translation’s accuracy. With those two caveats, let’s look at important excerpts from this dork’s manifesto.

Lately I have been entranced into the world of mass shooters. I have known about these events for (years?), even at the time being morbidly obsessed. As of late, I have really let myself go. {Presumably something akin to "Putting research"} into every single mass shooting video I can find. My interest in specifically school shootings started, I think, in seventh grade. [...]

He goes on at length about getting into repeat trouble in school and work and how the school resolved the trouble. He also highlights one of the interesting reasons why Red Flag laws don’t work - because they disincentivize treatment:

I can't talk to a therapist or family cause I will immediately be reported and put on a watchlist! (withanoose?)! I feel like I {unintelligible} a pretty be on some kinda of list (owing to?) my constant consumption of mass murder and violent content. I recently watched the films: elephant, (class?), (my heart of america?) I basically skipped trhe whole movies and just watched the massacre scenes. I don't try to hide my internet activity from Higher powers, yaknow? Like it would probably be unsettling and suspicious if {unintelligible} or someone saw my youtube history but I don't think it is weird enough for law enofrcement to step in.

He talks about being depressed and sick and not having a lot of control, as one might generally expect. Then he focuses here, as he does elsewhere, on how he idolizes shooters.

Today I assembled a school shooter cosplay. I have a ton of airsoft guns and gear and I put together a wicked loadout including an AK, a pump shotgun, and two pistols as well as many mags and gear. I had been really wanting to put that together, yearning for the moment {unintelligible} left to don the gear. It honestly felt amazing. I could feel the gravity of my outfit and I (played?) out a shooting in my apartment, including a police shootout and subsequent suicide. It was really fun and I loved how I looked and didn't want to take it off. I had never really done that before, creating a loadout specifically for shooting on a school.

[...]

I put on a baseball cap in a direct {something akin to homage} to Nicholas Cruz. I just found it weird I hated seeing my face. I have lately been creating shooting scenarios in {unintelligible} scenes including: schools, universities, malls, and stores. I have tons of (realism?) modes and started to enact these events. Mainly for fun, but also to see if I could maybe (kill?) these impulses. Nope! I love it, I crave more!. I get bored of the NPC behavior and crave more fear and devastation, which scares me. I don't want to do this, but I feel a deep calling to create devastation and death.

At this point in the manifesto, we have established that he obsesses over shooters. The next passage is incredibly important to the overall HWFO thesis that not only are (A) these are a social contagion, but that (B) if more of them ended embarrassingly by guards or armed bystanders for the shooter the total number would go down.

There are definitely shooting that take up more space in my head than others. Some stand out more than others due to the kill count. Devastation, and good or bad performance of the shooting. I wanted to see if any events had happened on my birthday, June 17th, and was so disappointed at what went down. This loser Brian Clyde tried to shoot up a courthouse. Idiot! Bro was talking mad shit. And dressed tactically, and got absolutely roasted by a security guard with a pistol. Bro killed no one, barely grazed a guard's vest. Didn't make it in the building, he ran away and bled out in a parking lot while pissing himself. How pitiful, what a disgrace, I am embarrassed to have that be the shooting that happened on my birthday!

He then points out the exact reason spree shooters choose soft targets and gun free zones.

I think his biggest mistake was attacking a courthouse. He also advertised his attack for {unintelligible} starting across the street. It's all about surprise! Bro wasn't locked in. Bro wasn't after what I want to do.

Media contagion effect is all but confirmed here:

I have a deep fascination with one man in particular: Adam Lanza. What a fucking freak haha. Sandy Hook was my first, I think, exposure to school shootings. I can remember vividly when I heard about it. I remember sitting in the computer lounge in, I think, 4th grade. We were just silently doing work on our computers, when a little notification popped on screen saying "20 children and 6 adults shot and killed at Sandy Hook elementary in Newton Connecticut". I remember not really knowing what that meant. I don't remember my classmates or teachers' reactions but I know that image of that little notification popping up {unintelligible} stuck with me. For some reason, I can't get it out of my head. It's such a... perfect.. event. I love thinking about what it was like to be in there on that day. What it's like to be {unintelligible}, the kids in rooms (ate eaten? no idea what he wrote there), the staff and teachers, and anyone else there that day. One event from the shooting which had stuck with me is where a survivor recalls hearing a little boy scream "Help me! I don't wan't want to be here" and Adam replied with "well, you're here." and multiple shots were heard.

[...]

I like the shooters that know what they're doing. Shooters that plan for mass violence and death. Adam Lanza, Nicholas Cruz, Eric and Dylan, Vladislav Roslakov, Anders Breivik, etc. I revere their status, I feel obligated to follow in their footsteps. Maybe to outdo them.

He connects his first thoughts of spree shooting at a school to the first time he heard about spree shooting at a school through a media popup alert, and admits earlier in the document that he’s been obsessed ever since.

Here he confirms again that he is incentivized by successful attacks but is severely disincentivized by the idea that his attack might fail:

Given my luck, he would be the motherfucker to rush me and save the day. That's one of my biggest fears is getting tackled and arrested. Especially before I am able to inflict a lot of damage and death.

The next bits are less important to explaining what his motivations are, as they are explaining what his motivations aren’t. He has a loving family, so that’s not it. He’s racist against Mexicans, Arabs, and Indians, and is okay with black folks but has his qualms with them as well. There’s no indication of a motivation there, though. He spells out that he dislikes the motivations of notable racist spree shooters.

I truly admire killers like Dylan Roof, Brenton Tarrant, and Patrick Kurstadt. I feel disappointed and pity towards killers like Ethan Miller, who planned for committing my bigger, but couldn't want to die, and gave it a half-ass attempt. All these events and stories have only falled a file in me to do it right. To take my time and plan for every outcome. I often don't find myself agreeing with these killers specific (ideologies). I think Nicholas Cruz and Patrick Kurstadt are MAGA idiots who thought "wait, people would pull the world and minorities shouldn't exist". I don't know... I think they should have rights and opportunities, I don't hate them: don't get me started on somalis.

[...]

Also I do love James Holmes, his theatre attack is the stuff of legend. I always wished he kept going and didn't give up. I am glad he lived to get inside into his mind. I am so sad his apartment bomb didn't blow up. Same with erik and Dylan's bomb. Imagine how amazing the {unintelligible} of destruction would be! I don't think I have ever heard of an attacker's bomb or some kind of second attack working. They either don't properly set them up, or cops {unintelligible} to disarm the threat before it works. So sad! Why?! Or mofo's who wanted more but had to die like Renee Steir.

In this passage he draws a point to say that the government interventions we do have are absurd and ineffective (firearm feature bans) while mentioning earlier that he wants to seek out soft targets that result from other laws, such as gun free zones.

I don't even know if I do this because I am suicidal. I have wanted to kill myself since I found out what I am and what world we live in. I hate this system of corruption that seems to have no other end but they fear and murder as in the case of the united hell(unknown) (egeek?) I think the steps we take in America to prevent these tragedies are a joke. Foregrips and extended mags are illegal? Good thing criminals follow rules haha. It makes me want to use all the things they "outlaw" and show them how easy it is to bypass these stupid, backwards rules that only hurt legal gun owners.

He further spells out his motivations in this passage.

In regards to my motivations behind the attack... I can't really put my finger on a specific purpose. It definitely wouldn't be for racism or white supremacy. Those fools seem to always get clowned and while I don't really like being around people of colour, I don't give enough of a shit about them to take my life over them. If I did carry out some racially motivated attack, it would most likely against filthy, Zionist Jews. I hate those entitled penny-sniffing (k-word). FREE PALESTINE! I think my dream would be to shoot on a middle or grade school like Adam, but that is probably unrealistic due to security awareness in 2025. I don't want to do it to spread a message. I do it to please myself. I do it because I sick. I am twisted.

In that segment he highlights that security works, and gun free zones don’t, and that spree shooters select their targets based on where they can do the most damage, and that spree shooters aren’t going to follow gun feature-ban laws. He further drills those same sentiments here:

I said I would maybe use illegal or tax-stamped gear or weaponry to make a point that criminals with intentions are NOT going to follow rules! I recently heard a rumor that James Holmes, the aurora theatre shooter, may have (reserved?) venues that were "gun-free zones". I would probably do the same, to shit on the rule and maybe change some minds. I get it for places like prisons and airports, I guess. But for most places, it only unarms the good guy (lmao) with a gun. Holmes wanted to make sure his victims would be unarmed. That's why I and many others like schools so much. At least for me, I am fucked up, {unintelligible} like Lanza I presume. I like the idea of slaughtering defenceless kids.

HWFO in 2014 did an entire section of our piece (also linked above) about this sentence:

Steven Paddock had it right and got the highest score in the US.

This is a direct result of Leon Festinger’s Social Comparison Theory which we covered here. This shooter was directly inspired by the Gun Violence Archive. This is the exact source.

Conclusions

I have stripped a lot of the material out, some because it lacks relevance, and some because it’s truly very sick and even more unpleasant to read than the excerpts I’ve included here. But he presented a very clear window into his psyche and reasoning, which is worth analyzing.

He was mentally sick. He became addicted to the media’s obsession with spree shooters. He wanted to target defenseless people, particularly children. He was scared he would get shot before doing a lot of damage, by a guard or an armed citizen. He liked the idea of targeting gun free zones for this reason.

Red flag laws would not have prevented this. Feature bans would not have prevented this. Gun free zones did not prevent this. He spells out specifically within the manifesto that none of the interventions the gun control community wants would have worked. He admits that he was influenced into this obsession by the media. He also spells out his one fear in his own words, getting punked out by “a good guy (lmao) with a gun.”

The problem is thus named, as is the solution.

The solution lies in leveraging the media clickbait engine in our favor, with more concealed carry, more citizens punking these shooters, and more media shaming instead of praising them. Then the disturbed kids who do this stuff will go back to sticking firecrackers in frog butts or whatever they were doing before.

The barriers to the solution are the gun control tribe in all their forms, because they oppose concealed carry, oppose school hardening, and are addicted to spreading tragedy articles on social media instead of ridicule articles.

As many times as it’s been said here, you no longer have to take it from HWFO. Take it from the mouth of the shooter.

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Today, President Biden and Vice President Harris are announcing a new Executive Order…

Etc. Nobody spends a tenth of the amount of time actually reading these things as they do arguing and complaining about them, so I figured I’d save you the time and read it for you.

After the prior Administration oversaw the largest one-year increase in murders ever recorded, President Biden and Vice President Harris took action from the start of their Administration to reduce violent crime.

This is meaningless chest bumping. The prior administration had three years of very low crime and then got miraculously stuck with a year of lockdowns, looting, rioting, and defunding of police - behavior which varied widely depending on the local reaction to the lockdowns and Georgie Floyd.

Under the leadership of President Biden and Vice President Harris, in 2023 the United States experienced the single largest homicide rate drop in recent history. The reduction in homicide has accelerated this year. Data submitted to the Department of Justice shows that the homicide rate dropped another 17 percent from January through June 2024, compared to the same time period in 2023.

This drop is real, and it’s because everybody stopped behaving like it was 2020.

Data from the Gun Violence Archive indicates that the number of mass shootings so far this year is 20 percent lower than it was at this time last year.

“Mass shootings” as defined by them are basically just a violent crime marker that goes up and down with ordinary crime, completely unrelated to highly public spree shootings. More on that here.

President Biden is signing an Executive Order to accelerate progress on two key priorities: combating emerging firearms threats and improving school-based active shooter drills.

The meat of the new Executive Order is broken up into two parts, and neither of them are particularly significant nor will likely affect your life in meaningful ways. Nor will they do anything about actual crime, which is falling on its own. The first has to do with 3D printers and auto-sears, the second has to do with new ways to psychologically terrorize children. 

Combatting Emerging Firearms Threats: In April 2021, one of the Biden-Harris Administration’s first executive actions to reduce gun violence was to address the emerging threat of firearms without serial numbers, often referred to as “ghost guns.” To expand these efforts, ATF established an Emerging Threats Center. This Center focuses ATF’s resources on identifying developments in illicit firearm marketplaces, including the use of new technologies to make and unlawfully distribute undetectable firearms and devices that convert semi-automatic firearms into illegal machineguns.

In 2021 they moved some people to a new desk where they Google about Glock Switches all day and occasionally write reports about what they saw on 4Chan.

Now, President Biden and Vice President Harris are taking additional action on two emerging firearms threats: machinegun conversion devices and unserialized, 3D-printed firearms.

Machinegun conversion devices enable semi-automatic firearms, including easily concealable handguns, to match or exceed the rate of fire of many military machineguns with a single engagement of the trigger—up to 20 bullets in one second. From 2017 through 2021, ATF recovered 5,454 of these devices, a 570 percent increase over the previous five-year period. Machinegun conversion devices are illegal to possess under federal law, but we continue to see these devices show up at crime scenes because they are small, cheap, and easy to install. Machinegun conversion devices are often illegally imported or illegally made on a 3D printer from computer code found online. The 3D-printing of a machinegun conversion device costs as little as 40 cents and takes fewer than 30 minutes.

“20 bullets per second” is about how fast a Glock equipped with an after-market auto-sear fires, so at least they got their math right this time. These are illegal to own or manufacture. We continue to see them used in crime because curiously, criminals don’t follow laws. The White House is not lying about these things becoming more popular with criminals. Of those 5000 switches seized by the ATF, around 500 were seized in the last year by Texas ATF alone. The rest of their depiction of how easy it is to 3D print an auto-sear for a Glock or other weapon is relatively accurate. You could probably do that tomorrow if you wanted, but you shouldn’t, because it’s already illegal. 

Unserialized, 3D-printed firearms can be used for illegal purposes such as gun trafficking, unlawful possession by people convicted of felonies or subject to domestic violence restraining orders, or unlawfully engaging in the business of manufacturing or selling firearms. These firearms can be 3D-printed from computer code downloaded from the Internet and produced without serial numbers that law enforcement use to trace firearms recovered in criminal investigations. Some 3D-printed firearms can be made to be undetectable by magnetometers used to secure airports, courthouses, and event spaces, even though these undetectable firearms are illegal to make, sell, or possess under federal law. As 3D-printing technology continues to develop rapidly, the safety threat posed by 3D-printed firearms may suddenly increase.

This is mostly garbage. The only fully 3D printable guns are basically one shot zip guns and even they would get detected by scanners because they require metal ammunition. There are multiple ways to build the part of the gun that holds the serial number, and mail order the parts that don’t, and stick the gun together at the end. And as long as the gun you build is itself legal, you can build it for personal use entirely legally with no serial number. They’re only illegal to sell.

In this Executive Order, President Biden is establishing an Emerging Firearms Threats Task Force, consisting of leadership from key federal departments and agencies. President Biden is directing the Task Force to issue a report within 90 days that includes: an assessment of the threat posed by machinegun conversion devices and unserialized, 3D-printed firearms; an assessment of federal agencies’ operational and legal capacities to detect, intercept, and seize machinegun conversion devices and unserialized, 3D-printed firearms; and an interagency plan for combatting these emerging threats. The report will include any additional authorities or funding the federal agencies need from Congress in order to complete this work.

The Administration is going to tell some bureaucrats to write a report asking for more money for their bureaucracies, using the fear of 3D printed guns and Glock switches as a justification for the additional money. 

That’s literally all this is.

Improving School-Based Active Shooter Drills: The Biden-Harris Administration is committed to preventing gun violence in schools, including by keeping guns out of the hands of potential school shooters and investing more resources in school safety and violence prevention. The majority of schools are currently using drills to prepare for an active shooter situation. Despite the ubiquity of these drills, there is very limited research on how to design and deploy these drills to maximize their effectiveness and limit any collateral harms they might cause. Many parents, students, and educators have expressed concerns about the trauma caused by some approaches to these drills. Federal agencies need to help schools improve drills so they can more effectively prepare for an active shooter situation while also preventing or minimizing any trauma.

Sending your child to school for one year is safer than stepping on a single commercial airline flight once. The actual solution to parents, educators, and children being traumatized by spree shooter drills is to quit doing the stupid spree shooter drills. If we actually wanted to dissuade school spree shootings we’d just call them terrorism and carve of 1% of the Global War on Terror budget and secure the schools, getting rid of the drills entirely. Unsurprisingly, this is not what the administration recommends, because terrorizing children is a feature not a bug to them.

In the Executive Order, President Biden is directing the Secretary of Education and the Secretary of Homeland Security, in coordination with the Attorney General, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, and the U.S. Surgeon General, to develop and publish, within 110 days, information for K-12 schools and institutions of higher education regarding school-based active shooter drills. The information will include a summary of: existing research on active shooter drills and resources for school districts and institutions of higher education on how to create, implement, and evaluate evidence-informed active shooter drills; how to conduct effective and age- and developmentally-appropriate drills; how best to communicate with students, families, and educators about these drills; how to prevent students and educators from experiencing trauma or psychological distress associated with these drills; and how best to serve people with disabilities and those with language-related needs, including by ensuring compliance with federal civil rights laws, when designing and implementing school-based active shooter drills.

Instead, they want to come up with ways to make the school shooter drills work better, without enough data points to even know what did or didn’t work so far. (pro tip: what actually matters is armed response time) This will of course lead to more funding for more bureaucrats to do more reports on more policy measures which won’t do anything.

In addition to the Executive Order, federal departments and agencies are taking the following actions:

Promoting Safe Gun Storage and Red Flag Laws

Encouraging Safe Storage of Firearms: Today, the Department of Education is providing schools, school boards, and policymakers with a new tool to promote safe gun storage in their communities. Following up on its initial safe storage actions, the Department of Education is publishing an interactive website that highlights examples of state, community, and school district actions across the nation that promote safe gun storage within school communities. The website includes a map with state safe storage laws, examples of how schools are communicating with parents about safe storage, and examples of local policies on safe storage education. This new resource builds on guidance the Department published earlier this year to highlight physical safety measures schools can pursue to help keep students safe in the event of gun violence in schools.

Voluntary safe storage is something that the gun community should adopt and encourage, as discussed here by Open Source Defense. It’s likely that whatever website the administration cooks up will probably berate communities which don’t have government mandated safe storage laws that encourage cops to kick down the doors of black people and charge them with random crimes, but it’s not likely to have much other effect. Whether safe storage becomes more prevalent within the gun community will depend entirely on the actions of the gun community itself. 

Clarifying Medicaid Reimbursement for Counseling on Firearm Safety: Health systems, hospitals, and healthcare workers are an essential component of a healthy gun violence prevention and intervention system. By the end of October, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) will announce that states may choose to use Medicaid to pay a health care provider for counseling parents and caregivers on firearm safety and injury prevention. This announcement will build off the coverage that Medicaid provides for “anticipatory guidance,” which is health education and counseling to help parents and caregivers understand and improve the health and development of their children. For example, Bright Futures/American Academy of Pediatrics’ guidelines include firearm safety guidance, such as safe storage guidance, as recommended anticipatory guidance for pediatricians to provide to parents.

Herein, they print money and pay social workers to talk to people about storing guns properly. This is technically less intrusive than passing laws, but probably not as effective as me going on a podcast and also encouraging the same behavior.

buy the author a gun safe

Implementing State Red Flag Laws: The Department of Justice is announcing over $135 million in formula awards to 48 states under the Byrne State Crisis Intervention Program (Byrne SCIP), which provides funding for the implementation of extreme risk protection order, or “red flag”, programs, state crisis intervention court proceedings, and related programs/initiatives. The implementation of state red flag laws is supported by the National Extreme Risk Protection Resource Center.

Herein they print money and give it to states to fund red flag law initiatives. Whether red flag laws work or not is a hotly debated topic. Sometimes they seem to work fine, and sometimes the cops call in their own red flags to circumvent the warrant process on people they want to beat with sticks. The ultimate result of this initiative remains to be seen, and will probably vary state by state.

Funding Community Violence Intervention

Funding Community Violence Interventions: In furtherance of the Biden-Harris Administration’s strategy to invest in community violence interventions as a proven solution to prevent gun violence, the Department of Justice is announcing an additional $85 million in funding through the Community Violence Intervention and Prevention Initiative (CVIPI). This funding will help 30 agencies and organizations develop and expand their community violence intervention work, including hospital-based violence intervention, street outreach, and cognitive behavioral therapy. These strategies are essential complements to law enforcement and this investment is part of the $400 million in total funding that the Biden-Harris Administration has secured for CVIPI. CVIPI is only one part of how the Administration funds community violence interventions. This fact sheet lists the full range of federal resources available to address community violence.

These sorts of initiatives actually worked in Oakland California and a lot of other places. And if they can work in Oakland, I daresay they can work anywhere. The question remains how much of the federal cheese actually makes it into the hands of the locals to use on the initiative and how much greases the mortgage payments of the beltway on its way down the pike. HWFO rates this measure as “probably good and worth doing.”

Clarifying Medicaid Reimbursement for Violence Intervention: CMS previously clarified that states may authorize health care providers to be reimbursed by Medicaid for violence intervention programs. In October, CMS expects to proactively raise this clarification with states. CMS will also explore how best to convene state governments and healthcare providers on incorporating Medicaid benefits into violence prevention programs.

I admit I do not understand at all how a Medicaid provider is supposed to run a violence intervention program.

Improving the Gun Background Check System

Facilitating Enhanced Background Checks for Individuals Under Age 21: The Bipartisan Safer Communities Act (BSCA) established enhanced background checks for individuals under age 21 trying to purchase a firearm. These enhanced checks have already stopped over 900 transactions, keeping guns out of the hands of dangerous individuals. 

Point of order: Just because they stopped 900 transactions doesn’t mean they prevented dangerous individuals from receiving guns. It might just mean they flagged every 20 year old hit by the system. The burden of proof for this claim has not been met.

But a number of states across the country have privacy laws that prevent state officials from fully responding to enhanced background check inquiries. The Biden-Harris Administration’s Safer States Agenda made fixing this issue a top priority for states, and Connecticut, Vermont, Nevada, Texas, and Kentucky have all recently made necessary changes. Today, the Department of Justice is issuing model legislation that additional states may use to inform their own legislation and allow a carve-out to share juvenile records solely for the purpose of enhanced background checks. In addition, the Justice Department is releasing information on whether state laws permit information-sharing with regard to juvenile records for the purposes of enhanced background checks.

This looks like a guidance document to adjust what sort of information gets farmed for NICS. Hard to say whether it’s a big deal or not.

Maximizing the Enhanced Background Check with Red Flag Laws: Part of the enhanced background check requires requesting records from state and local law enforcement and mental health repositories about potential purchasers under 21.  In these and other circumstances, if a person shows clear signs of being in crisis and a danger to themselves or others, they may qualify for consideration under applicable red flag laws which would generally result in that person being ineligible to possess or receive firearms.  By October 22, the Extreme Risk Protection Order (ERPO) National Resource Center will provide training to state and local law enforcement on the ERPO process, including how it intersects with individuals under 21.

Ditto.

Improving the Federal Gun Background Check System: BSCA’s enhanced background checks for gun purchasers under age 21 and the law’s narrowing of the “boyfriend loophole,” along with the expanding number of states with red flag laws, are placing new challenges on state and local agencies attempting to ascertain what records they need to send to the federal gun background check system. To address these challenges, there needs to be system-wide improvements and a new era of collaboration among various entities engaging with the federal gun background check system. By December 15, the Department of Justice’s Office of Justice Programs will have evaluated the existing grant programs that support improvements to the gun background check system and make any changes needed to support states looking to improve their records systems, which may include lengthening the duration of grants where appropriate. 

The “boyfriend loophole” is a new bit of jargon cooked up by the anti gun crowd, which goes like this. Currently, if you’re convicted of domestic violence against your spouse, kids, mom, or similar, you get added to the NICS list and can’t buy a gun. Prior to 2022, if you were convicted of domestic violence against your boyfriend or girlfriend while not living together, they didn’t add you to NICS. The “Bipartisan Safer Communities Act” of 2022 added domestic violence convicts to NICS even if they lived in different houses. Apparently they’re having a hard time keeping the NICS database up to date with the requirements in this new law. 

Whether this initiative will fix the problem is questionable. It might. But since my readers don’t beat up their romantic partners, please continue to not beat up your romantic partner and you should be unaffected by this bit. And if you do beat up your romantic partner, I hope it’s part of a consensual BDSM scene and not abuse. Otherwise, unsubscribe, I don’t need your traffic. 

Expanding Data on Gun Violence and Gun Trafficking

Publishing Additional Data on Ghost Gun Trends and Firearms Trafficking: This winter, ATF will publish the fourth volume of its National Firearms Commerce and Trafficking Assessment. This volume will provide an update on ghost gun trends and trafficking investigations, as well as expanded information on machinegun conversion device recoveries.

“The bureaucrats we talked about above will issue a report.”

Expanding Collection of Gun Violence Data: There is a lack of reliable and timely data on gun deaths and gunshot injuries that show what is happening nationwide and in individual communities. This data is critical to focusing investment and enforcement efforts. Today, the FBI is announcing that it will collect additional detail in its data collection for gunshot injury wounds in the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) by June 2025. The FBI will implement a new injury code to reflect a gunshot wound in the NIBRS victim segment. NIBRS will also enable law enforcement agencies to submit additional detail as to how firearms were used in specific crimes, and the nature of the crime at issue.

Undaunted by how the changes they made to NIBRS in 2020 screwed up data collection for a couple of years, they will issue a demand that local cops have to collect and file even more data.

Improving Data on Gunshot Injuries: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is improving a data visualization tool to present gun death and injury data faster and at a more local level. Using data from vital statistics and emergency rooms at the local level can help inform prevention strategies and evaluate the effectiveness of programs.

This should be fun to watch, actually. The CDC is not and never has been prohibited from doing research on guns, but they are prohibited from spending federal money on advocacy. This is obviously a way to sneak a ZOMG GUNS website into the CDC’s budget, but whether it counts as advocacy or not is going to be up to the UI.

Supporting Survivors of Gun Violence

Addressing the Trauma Resulting from Gun Violence: This fall, the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) will take additional action to support individuals dealing with the trauma that results from gun violence. SAMHSA will release:

Best practices for local offices of violence prevention to use in addressing trauma resulting from gun violence;A tip sheet for individuals affected by gun violence who may be seeking more information on the behavioral health impacts of gun violence and how to seek help;A report on lessons learned from the federal ReCAST grant program to uplift the voices of communities impacted by violence as well as share strategies other communities can implement to promote healing, recovery, and resiliency; and

A toolkit for faith-based leaders, educators, and other leaders to help communities affected by the trauma resulting from gun violence.

Bureaucrats who like to make PowerPoint presentations make more PowerPoint presentations. The curious thing about this bullet is they decided to make a PowerPoint presentation for preachers, when ordinarily the modern blues have moved to marginalize and sideline faith organizations. I don’t think this matters too much, but “ok we’ll make a PowerPoint presentation for preachers too” is an interesting look under the hood.

Destroying Crime Guns

Ensuring Appropriate Disposition of Firearms Seized by Law Enforcement: Firearms or firearm parts that were presumed to be destroyed by law enforcement have begun showing up in crimes. Sometimes the guns recovered by law enforcement are sent to a third-party that only partially destroys them. By October 30, the Department of Justice will refresh and clarify best practices for federal law enforcement disposition of seized firearms, including when working in partnership with state and local law enforcement. The Department of Justice will also release a plan to offer new training and education for state and local partners on safe and appropriate firearm disposition.

There’s a pretty amazing documentary series called Trafficked with Mariana van Zeller, in which each episode documents every supply chain link in a different black market, from producer to consumer. She does steroids, phone scammers, cocaine, and a lot of different subjects. The first season finale followed the trafficking of guns to the Sinaloa Cartel in Mexico from the United States. She and her camera crew even get swept up in a conflict while filming. I can’t be sure but I believe it was the Battle of Culiacán. 

I say all this because the guns being trafficked to the Sinaloa Cartel originated with LAPD seizures. Some dirty cops had sold them off to the black market to be exported south of the border. This is a real thing that does happen in places like Los Angeles. The Administration’s plan to “better educate police on how to destroy firearms,” however, will not prevent the dirty LAPD cop from being dirty. One thing that could prevent that, would be if the cops simply auctioned the gun off to responsible citizens, because then there would be a legitimate and public paper trail. They won’t do that, though, so we’ll probably see no change in how many guns seized by police are reintroduced to the black market.

Preventing Firearm Suicide

Facilitating Voluntary Out-of-Home Storage to Prevent Firearm Suicide: Voluntary out-of-home storage of firearms is an effective tactic to saves lives by creating time and space between a person in crisis and a firearm. A number of states, including Colorado, Louisiana, Maryland, North Carolina, and Wisconsin, have developed gun storage maps to show different locations where a gun owner can voluntarily store their firearms. A federally funded program has developed model guidelines, contracts, and standard operating procedures for businesses interested in providing this option. Today, the Department of Veterans Affairs and SAMHSA are using their network of teams committed to preventing Veteran suicide—known as the Governor’s Challenge to Prevent Suicide Among Service Members, Veterans, and Families—to encourage states to convene federally licensed gun dealers around offering out-of-home storage to our Nation’s heroes and their families.

This is a great idea and a good thing for the government to do. Around two thirds of “gun deaths” are suicides, and suicide rate is linked to gun ownership rate among men, as highlighted by HWFO in 2018. Safe storage of guns outside the home is inhibited by 7 day waiting period laws such as in California, where you’re literally not allowed to call a buddy up and ask him to hold onto your guns for you if you’re feeling suicidal. A federal program such as this might be able to plug some of the gaps in places like California where suicidal men are prohibited from entrusting their firearms to friends. 

Congress must act. While the Biden-Harris Administration’s gun violence prevention actions are saving lives, there is much more to do. President Biden and Vice President Harris continue to call on Congress to enact commonsense gun safety legislation—from a ban on assault weapons and bump stocks to universal background checks to a repeal of gun manufacturers’ immunity from liability—and to enact federal safe storage and red flag laws and fully fund community violence intervention programs and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF).

Their closer blames congress for not passing laws that would turn the entire country into Waco. 

Summary

Most of this Executive Order is simply bureaucratic “make-work” programs that will suck up money, bloat agencies, and allow anti-gun activists to circle jerk each other to no real effect. But thankfully, most of the EO won’t really do much damage to people’s lives either. There are two bits of it that seem valuable and worth doing, namely the “community violence intervention program” piece and the “voluntary out of home storage” piece, each of which are things HWFO has asked for before. 

On net, this EO is mostly trash but the two good things in it might outweigh the trash, purely because the trash isn’t significantly damaging. 

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..is that I can’t share them with my girlfriend yesterday, because she’s a high school teacher one school over from Apalachee High School in Georgia, where some 14 year old freshman apparently brought a rifle on the bus (or something?) and killed four people. Quoting numbers at her on the phone while she’s freaking out would make me the worst boyfriend ever, and you should also seek to avoid that mistake in your own personal relationships.

Statistics don’t matter in situations like this because human beings are not always rational, nor should they be, and that’s fine. It’s a hard lesson for a math nerd like myself to learn, but a valuable lesson, and it’s a lesson yesterday’s two dead math teachers might endorse. Emotion matters. Charitably, school shootings matter more than gang crime shootings because they damage the emotional zeitgeist of the public more. Cynically, they matter more because they scare the privileged white suburban women and cause them to go Facebook Crazy. Charitably or cynically, they matter more, so they deserve a hard look at how to solve them.

Solution Tree

Three possible solutions to school shootings exist as far as I’m aware. I don’t see a fourth, and if you have a fourth that’s not just a troll response, post it in the article comments. Here are the three:

1. Gather up the military and national guard and kick down the doors of 47% of the country to seize all the guns, invoking a civil war that will kill millions, starting with black people in Ferguson MO and “blacks and Latinos ages 14-24” in New York, or

2. Harden the schools against attack, or

3. Address root causes. See below.

I’m an open minded individual, and I’ll listen to an “option four” if someone has one, but if you offer one to me you better take a hard look at its efficacy first. “Ban the AR-15s” doesn’t work, because you can kill kids with any gun. Virginia Tech was one of the most lethal school shootings in history, so then you’re banning pistols, and when some dork kills three people and injures nine with a revolver and a speed loader you’re banning every gun design since the late 1890s. 

Gun taxes or bullet taxes or gun insurance or similar ideas don’t work because the perpetrators aren’t the ones impacted by the tax, and insurance doesn’t cover willfully illegal acts. Currently any criminal can get ten guns if they want, and seizing or buying back 200 million guns would just mean criminals could get five if they want. To save one life with a buyback, you’d have to buy around $86 million for every life saved, so that doesn’t work either.

help the author sell a rusty Hi Point

(1) Take the Guns

If you want to solve this problem by creating England level scarcity, you need to seize 98% of the country’s guns, which amounts to over half of all guns ever produced in the history of the human species by any country ever. Which means you’re going to have to stage a war and you’re going to have to convince all the gun owning red tribe infantry to kill their neighbors, when they mostly also own guns, in order to save four high schoolers a year. So that’s option one. 

You can probably tell I don’t think option one works particularly well. Option two on the other hand is mathematically intriguing.

(2) School Shootings as Terrorism

Governments like to define “terrorism” specifically to include “crap that is trying to influence government,” but academics broaden the definition to include violent acts that are literally done to sow anxiety and fear. Perplexity.ai has this to say:

School spree shootings fit most or all the bullets on the academic definition of terrorism, and we tend to treat terrorism completely differently than we do “regular murder” in the USA. We do this because terrorism is scarier than regular murder, and gives us more anxiety, which fits nicely with the effects of school shootings. Naming school shootings “terrorism” also gives us new and different ways to approach the idea of “hardening schools.”

How much money does the federal government spend against terrorism? It’s hard to say. TSA’s budget alone is somewhere around $11.2 billion, which is a shit pile of money for making us take our shoes off and go through a porn scanner. It probably doesn’t even reduce 9-11 style bombings anymore, since all you actually need to stop those is locked pilot doors and an air marshal. Even if a terrorist were able to make it onto a plane nowadays, the worst they could do is probably what Boeing technicians are already doing by forgetting to put the bolts on the doors. 

The TSA is mostly there to give us a sense of security when boarding a plane, so in some ways it’s just an advertising campaign for airlines to make us think they’re safe, and in other’s it’s exactly what we need for school spree shootings.

Sending your child to school for a year is already safer than it is for you to board an airplane once, so efforts to reduce school spree shootings mean very little statistically. But emotionally they mean a lot to the Public Zeitgeist and/or Privileged Suburban White Women, so we must undergo these efforts. Also, don’t send your girlfriend this link after a school spree shooting either:

Let’s say we only took half our shoes off, and TSA only screened half of us through their porn scanner, and we redirected half of the $11.2 billion to each of the 24,000 high schools in the country. That would be $233,000 per school per year. Schools could easily afford to hire two ex-Afghanistan combat vets to sit in lawn chairs with M4 carbines and plate carriers out in front of school all day, and that would be well enough to dissuade any fourteen year old nitwit from hopping off of Bus 320 with a rifle. They wouldn’t even need any training, because their job is literally to sit there.

Or we could expand the scope of our financial analysis to the “global war on terror” instead of just TSA. The USA has spent $808 billion on the “global war on terror” since 2001. That’s $16.8 million per high school. One percent of that is $168,000, which is enough to hire a dude in a plate carrier. 

Point being, if you just call a spade a spade and call a school shooter a terrorist, there’s a near infinite amount of money available for school hardening. And it won’t take much, because all you need to do is dissuade maniacs with a show of force.

Having attended an urban school with urban stressors I’m not a fan of arming teachers, but I think that a gun safe in the principal’s office with a few AR-15s in it alone might dissuade school shooters. At a minimum it might give your high school football defensive coordinator the option to run for equal firepower before confronting a kid with a gun. Either of these act as deterrent, and deterrent is what you need when hardening schools. That solution works, unlike the “raid 47% of households” solution. 

The more humane and smart and progressive thing to do, however, might be to start finally talking about root causes.

(3) Root Causes

We know the root cause for murder is not “the guns,” because of international comparisons. 

Despite a household gun ownership rate over 50% and vastly exceeding the rest of the world, the U.S. White demographic has a murder rate comparable to the World Bank High Income nations and lower than the G20 and Europe. U.S. Hispanics are also lower than both the G20 and Europe. U.S. Blacks have the fewest guns in the USA by ratio and have a murder rate double that of Sub-Saharan Africa. It’s not the guns. Within the black community, the culprit turns out to be a plague of fatherlessness, paired with teens and young adults resolving beefs through duels in an honor culture instead of through legal channels. While that problem is totally unrelated to school shootings, you can read more about that here:

Or in Issue 69 of RECOIL Magazine hardcopy:

When speaking of school shootings specifically, a growing body of research shows that these instances are much more closely linked to suicide than they are to homicide. Over 92% of school shooters were found to be suicidal. Many shooters engage in “leakage,” which is when they share their plans as a cry for help. Spree shootings are 3.8 times more likely to be premeditated than regular homicides, but only 1.2 times more likely to be premeditated than suicides. School shooters are more likely to have a history of suicidal ideation than even people who actually die by suicide. Society has broad and deep resources to approach and deal with suicide, but they could be improved, and these resources are the way to approach the root cause of school spree shootings. 

Severe Action

Someone down at The Trace or CNN or MSNBC is writing the same lying article as last time right now, where they define normal criminal activity as a “mass shooting,” they make people think that school spree shootings are happening daily, they kite those people into sharing those articles on Facebook, and they maniacally rake in piles of click-pennies on their way to moral and financial bankruptcy while increasing the chances of a future spree shooter by 30%. The First Amendment prevents us from stopping them from doing it, but perhaps we can leverage their moral decay into a part of the solution. Here me out.

In Uvalde, the cops jerked each other off for an hour, only went in after some border patrol guys showed up and instructed them on how to properly stack up, and went in to discover a bunch of kids who’d bled out over the past hour while the cops ate donuts and prevented parents from rescuing their kids on their own.

In Nashville, the cops were there in a matter of minutes, stacked up within ten, started room clearing, plugged the shooter two minutes after entering, and released the body cam footage of the lead rifle guy in the stack the same day to thunderous applause on Instagram. 

Nashville was a textbook example of doing everything right, Uvalde everything wrong, both in terms of on the ground procedure and in media management. Plugging the shooter in an embarrassing way and releasing the footage immediately disincentivized future shooters instead of incentivizing them. “Severe action” to adjust the incentives of the spree shooting machine might look something like this, if I were President of the United States:

1. Get on a C-130 in combat fatigues and fly to Joint Base San Antonio where I meet a dozen Marines, hop on a Black Hawk, land in Uvalde Police Chief Pete Arredondo’s front yard, drag him out into the grass, and beat the shit out of him in front of his wife and kids, while having one of the Marines film it for World Star Hip Hop (if that’s still a thing),

2. After he’s bloody on the ground, drop my trousers and piss on his head, taking a selfie while doing so,

3. Post that to Twitter with a caption that says “Feeling Frisky, OMW to self-pardon”

4. Send Police Chief John Drake, officer Rex Engelbert, and officer Michael Collazo of the Nashville police department congressional medals of honor on the C-130 ride back to DC.

That action, without need for Executive Order or other government procedure, would put every police chief on notice to get their ducks in a row regarding response times for school spree shooters. It would put them on notice because the click hungry media vultures would talk about it for weeks, which in turn would disincentivize the potential next crop of shooters as well. It might not eliminate school spree shootings, but that 30% media bump might instead turn into a 30% reduction in shooters, which would be nice. Even Uvalde Police Chief Arredondo can sleep well knowing he was responsible for saving some children in his pile of presidential urine. 

Combine this with “define as terrorism, treat as terrorism” and “maybe start figuring out what the nuts is going on with teen suicide,” and you’ve got about the most effective plan you can have, based on all the available research, data, and realities on the ground. 

So if you want to bitch about the “thoughts and prayers” crowd, don’t direct that bitching my way. I just gave you three options. Pick one.

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In it, Spike repeatedly displays graphs to illustrate his pro-gun position, most of which originated here on HWFO, and were very difficult to make out in the stream. I’m thankful he referenced us, but the viewer can’t really see them well or know their origins. Herein, I’ll review portions of the debate, show you the graphs in question, and link you back to their origins so you can verify them yourself. Also, we’ll provide some others which are even better, and review some missed opportunities in the debate in which Spike could have capitalized.

Review

18:50

At 16:30 Hogg is doing the usual “yay Massachusetts has fewer guns and fewer gun deaths” argument, at once ignoring that Massachusetts is a low crime state, a low GINI coefficient (wealth inequality) state, and a low black population state, all of which have been shown to be far more influential on gun homicide rate than gun ownership rate. He’s also doing the Ole Homicide-Suicide Switcheroo, referring to Massachusetts’ relatively lower gun death rate by including gun suicides (but not non-gun suicides) in his figures.

If I were to plot “rope ownership rate” against “rope-specific suicide” and show the obvious relationship, then scream IT’S THE ROPES on Twitter based on this graph, you’d consider me a fool. This is the same argument Hogg and other gun control advocates make with their “gun deaths” rhetoric. Spike covered this in his opener at 13:44 and Hogg immediately pulled the trick in his first statement to follow.

Spike had a couple ways he could address this and chose the most basic, which was covered in the first ever HWFO article from Medium.com in 2018.

Spike hands David this graph in the video:

If Spike had time, he could have explained that Hogg and many of the audience are misinformed because of graphs like this from Mother Jones and similar outlets.

The “Deaths” number here includes gun suicides but does not include non-gun suicides. They’re hiding a false presumption in the graph, that every gun suicide would not have happened if a gun wasn’t present. “It’s The Ropes!”

33:56

The moderator attempts to beg the question with “why does the US have this problem when the other developed nations do not?” which is intended to be a layup for David to say “IT’S THE GUNS!” Which he of course does. David then goes on to lie about several other things regarding foreign countries, and ends with an allusion to Parkland because that’s his brand, when we all know that school shootings are so rare they’re only a problem because of their sharing ratio. School shooting victimization rate is lower than rate of death from airplane crash by commercial flyers. (note: that linked analysis includes both Boeing and non-Boeing flights)

David Hogg really walks into a wall at this point though, when he says, and I quote, he really actually said this while holding up my graph,

“You wanna talk about graphs? I wish I had my own printout of a graph of the countries relationship between firearm ownership and the gun homicide rate, even putting aside the suicide rate, there is a pretty strong relationship with all these developed countries…”

Here Hogg shows he’s still literally stranded in 2018, since I included all those graphs in the same article Spike referenced. It would have been nice to get a name drop instead of Spike referring to yours truly as “a guy whose name escapes me,” but the pleasure I got when Spike handed Hogg the exact graph Hogg said he wished he had was immeasurable. It’s the best “gotcha” of the whole debate. Here’s the graph.

Then he went on to share the rest of the graphs from the article, such as this one which shows no bivariate correlation among low-homicide countries.

And this one which shows no bivariate correlation among high homicide countries.

And this one which shows no bivariate correlation among European countries.

If Spike had branched out deeper into HWFO material, he might have hit this article:

…in which we also calculated it for top twenty Human Development Index countries other than the USA, which also shows no bivariate correlation. USA is the outlier.

David Hogg has no response other than to say, “just anecdotally, the fact of the matter is…” and then rambles about how nice he feels when he visits Europe.

36:57

David Hogg says he would have gotten an F in college if he turned in my graphs because “they’re from Wikipedia.”

Well, see, it turns out there’s no one source for “list of countries by firearm related death rate” nor for “guns per capita” internationally because you need a different source for each number, and you can’t fit those all on a graph. Poisoning the well because he wanted 115 different sources listed on the side of a scatter plot is lazy, sloppy, and disingenuous, but he’d just been nailed and was grasping at straws.

The truth of the matter is that Hogg or anyone else could replicate those graphs in any way they liked, and if they do so honestly they’ll come to the same conclusions. You could do the same, and I encourage you to do so yourself. That one procedure, literally doing the mathematics myself, is what started me on my writing journey in 2018. Hogg knows Excel, he should try it. It might not fly at Harvard though because the results conflict with the Harvard Narrative.

Missed Opportunities

If Spike had time, he could have delved more into the real issues at hand, but doing so might have gotten him run out the door at Dartmouth given its campus climate. One of HWFO’s more recent RECOIL pieces:

..is a reprint of an HWFO article online:

..which contains this synthesis graph:

The U.S. white murder rate is about the same as the World Bank high income nations and the U.S. black murder rate is double that of sub-Saharan Africa. That doesn’t tell you the cause, but it does tell you where to look. For causes and cures, the same article shows this, among a bevy of other graphs:

The homicide rate racial divide remains when plotted against wealth inequality, education level, housing security, and every other socioeconomic factor except one. One factor seems to be more directly explanatory than all others: fatherlessness rate. If you want to address the murder rate in the black community to bring it down to the rates we see in peer nations, or other racial categories domestically, the data shows we must somehow address black fatherlessness rate.

But that’s far too complicated to fit into the time allotted by the Dartmouth moderator, so I doubt even I would have gone that far in the debate. Debate formats are rarely good sense-making formats.

Another universal argument Spike could have dropped is that the debate is already over, and guns won. Guns won in 2020 when the whole country went out and bought guns, and now the household ownership rates are now between 47% and 53% depending on the source. The people responsible for a year’s worth of riots, and burning police stations, businesses, and homes, and setting up “autonomous zones,” and police defunding, still haven’t apologized for their behavior. Everyone who bought a gun in 2020 and 2021 expects that might happen again, so they’re not giving their guns up. Murder rate did spike in 2020 and 2021, likely due to the riots and reduction in policing, but is currently crashing at historic rates while gun ownership numbers remain as high as ever.

Spike could have gone into these staggering gun ownership numbers purely to explain patiently to Hogg that Hogg already lost. HWFO covered that in RECOIL in print here:

And online here:

43:40

Spike rebuts Hogg on Assault Rifles:

You are more likely to be beaten to death than you are to be killed by someone wielding an assault rifle. You're three times more likely to be stabbed and you're something like 17 maybe it's 14 but it's in the teens more times more likely to be killed with a pistol. So that's really it is, and that's with any rifle including hunting rifles not just assault rifles.

Spike missed a golden opportunity to compare this to other death rates, as HWFO did here:

Relevant graph:

“Deaths by assault rifle” in the United States are so exceedingly rare they’re fewer than deaths by lawnmower or deaths by bees, and only barely more than deaths by buckets, even with tens of millions of semiautomatic rifles in circulation.

buy the author some bees

57:34

Hogg drops the “rifle rounds do more damage than pistol rounds” argument. Spike responds relatively well by referring to his prior argument, but he could have dropped a real bomb by pointing out that pistols are probably more deadly on net than rifles in mass shooting scenarios:

Magically evaporating all the AR-15s would probably make school shootings worse. Most school shooting incidents continue until the shooter runs out of rounds or the cops begin returning fire. The shooting at Parkland ran six minutes until the attacker ran out of ammo. Had he been using a pistol, he could have carried more rounds in a backpack, and more of Hogg’s friends would have been killed. He also would have been able to conceal the pistol, and potentially even walk right past the cops like the Virginia Tech shooter did between sprees.

1:02:05

The moderator asks if Spike supports gun buybacks. Spike says they don’t work, and that’s true, but he could have trotted out another HWFO graph to bang that home.

Graph:

Bottom line, we’d be on the hook to buy back around 83 million dollars’ worth of guns for every single homicide averted by the buyback, which is more money than the annual budget of many major metropolitan police departments. Spike also could have quipped that owners of large gun collections actually love voluntary buybacks because they get to unload a bunch of trash guns they can’t sell anyway and get cash for better guns or more ammo. It’s likely that gun buybacks, on net, increased the number of AR-15s in circulation because gun collectors use them like a trade-in.

1:07:09

On the question about red flag laws, mandatory background checks, minimum age requirements, and required safety courses, Spike really misses a golden opportunity because he goes with “rights” over “facts,” and he also gets some of his facts wrong.

Spike is correct that multiple studies have shown minimum age requirements and required safety courses to no effect on gun crime, so those can be dismissed out of hand, but it’s not true that background checks have no effect. It’s also not true that a universal background check would require a gun registry, so his civil libertarian argument against registry-driven universal background checks is neither technically accurate nor necessary to rebut Hogg.

The “gun show loophole” was created by the government when the government only gave Federal Firearms License dealers (FFLs) access to the National Instant Criminal Background Check (NICS) system. If I as a private seller want to check to see if the buyer is legally allowed to buy a gun, I can’t. The government literally will not let me because they won’t give me access to NICS. I can’t even tell if I’m allowed to buy a gun unless I go into a gun store and attempt to do so. All that’s needed to plug the “gun show loophole” is to allow citizens to check NICS. No registry would be required, and the statistical gains from a universal background check system would be realized by a policy that does nothing more than enhance citizen engagement and provide additional transparency. Furthermore, a savvy gun community policy negotiator might trade that concession for a repeal of some or all of the laundry list of laws which are proven to have no effect. That entire analysis, including estimates of the numbers of lives saved by doing so, is outlined here:

https://www.opensourcedefense.org/blog/gun-policy-needs-a-decision-support-system

We could have this tomorrow, but the gun control advocates refuse to advocate this without a registry, which is something Spike could have thrown back in Hogg’s face.

Spike’s characterization of red flag laws being an unchecked civil rights violation is fairly accurate, but the numbers aren’t in yet on their efficacy, nor on how systemically they’re being abused.

The arguments Spike did use, about how registries lead to confiscation and confiscation leads to genocide often fall flat with an audience who doesn’t consider genocide particularly likely. It’s incredibly disingenuous for the anti-gun crowd to include gun suicide while not including genocide, especially in reference to European numbers. Europe is a genocidal shithole, and when you decide to throw genocide in with their murder rates the numbers are simply outrageous:

If we pretend that the delta in European and U.S. homicide rate was due to gun proliferation, and then correct the average expected value of European genocide deaths per year for population differences, then European genocide chance outweighs the homicide delta by a factor of fourteen. Stated another way, as long as ubiquitous firearm proliferation in the USA reduces our genocide chance by a fourteenth, we still come out ahead of Europe in death count. And as shown above, U.S. homicide rate isn’t actually due to gun proliferation anyway.

Thoughts

Spike is a sharp dude, and he handles a lot of the historical questions and legal questions better than I could because I don’t care about them. Having spoken with Gary Johnson, I’d take Spike in a debate over Gary unless the topic was effective governorship of a U.S. state. I’m not sure I would have been able to run the same debate format as well as him. I haven’t done policy debate since high school, and that format itself was very weird. If I were to participate in one of these things at all, I think I’d probably want to be the “numbers guy” on a two-person team while passing off the “rights” discussion to my teammate. I’m one of the few pro-gun commentators I’m aware of, possibly the only one, who thinks rights literally don’t matter in this discussion anymore because guns already won.

I’m not sure if Spike will see this article, but if you know him send it his way. And Spike if you do see this, hit me up in DMs. Let’s get a beer. Thomas Massie already owes me one.

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We’re also pro-gun around here, so I thought it might be instructive to compare the “danger” of sending your child to grade school against the danger of doing something everyone seems to do with no qualms in the modern age - board an airplane.

Grade School Spree Shooter Math

Good statistics about school shootings are hard to come by, because the antigun crowd pollutes the numbers whenever possible. For instance, a widely cited website called the “K-12 School Shooting Database” has a lot of very compelling visualizations and is widely cited by blue media, but the devil is in their methodology:

The K-12 School Shooting Database is a widely inclusive, open-source research project that documents when a gun is fired, brandished (pointed at a person with intent), or bullet hits school property, regardless of the number of victims, time, day, or reason.

So they produce graphs which make it seem like there are 300+ school shooting instances per year, which are then used by antigun media to stoke fear, but they’re including things like “kid fires BB gun at possum in football stadium,” and “kid shows gun to a friend in school parking lot,” as well as “two gangs face off on school property at night instead of off school property,” as if the location of the gang faceoff mattered.

What people think of when they think of “school shooting” is unprovoked mass killing sprees of random school kids, and there are far fewer of those. Wikipedia keeps a list. Truncated to grade school shootings, the list looks like this since 2012:

In an 11 year span we have eight incidents and 99 deaths, averaging 9 deaths per year. How likely is your kid to be one of those deaths? According to the 2023 census, we currently have 54.2 million students in grade school in the United States, which means there are 1.66 spree shooting deaths per year for every ten million grade school students. That’s a hard number to understand, because nobody can visualize what ten million grade school students looks like, so instead we’ll compare to airline flights as our baseline.

Fiery Airplane Crash Math

Pulling From Statista, we have an average of 473 worldwide air traffic fatalities per year from 2006 to 2021.

Also from Statista, we can grab the yearly airline passengers across the same time span.

This gives us an average of 3.07 billion passenger trips globally across the same time span as our air traffic fatality data set, for a death rate of 1.54 deaths for every 10 million flights.

It’s almost exactly the same number.

buy the author a plane ticket to Vegas

Discussion

Sending your child to grade school in the United States for an entire year is the same risk of death as you taking one single airplane flight.

Pulling your child out of school over the risk of them dying in a spree shooting is just as irrational as never flying again over the risk of an airline crash. Some people make either of these decisions, and making decisions like that is fine, but making one while not making the other flags a person as either irrational or mathematically illiterate.

If you take forty airline flights in your lifetime, you have triple the chance of dying in an airline crash as your child has of being shot in a spree shooting, because there are only 13 grades in grade school.

The average American took 1.5 to 2.1 airline trips per year since 2015, meaning the average American is somewhere between 1.4 and 2 times more likely to die in an airline crash than a kid is to die in a spree shooting.

“Deaths per ten million” is a very very low number. Public health usually measures things in “deaths per one hundred thousand,” so to compare this with rates of other instances requires some further unit conversion. Here’s a table:

And a graph:

So the next time someone on social media indicates to you that they are in any way afraid to send their children to grade school out of fear of them being shot, ask them how often they fly. See what they say.

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CNN — 

Last month saw one of the deadliest weeks America has seen in a long time. Eighteen people were gunned down in Lewiston, Maine. The following weekend, 12 more mass shootings left at least 11 people dead and scores more injured.

Not only is this cherry picking, it’s really bad cherry picking. We are currently experiencing the largest murder rate decline ever recorded in US history. Whenever Shannon cites “mass shootings” she’s cooking the books by including any instance where four people catch bullets in street crime in her numbers, as we explained here. Whenever an anti-gun article says the words “___ Mass Shootings” they’re referring to a database that looks like this:

They’re referring to street crime. Let’s continue.

Yet, as our nation grieves the loss of so much life, the US Supreme Court could be poised to make it even easier for troubled people to access guns. On November 7, justices will hear United States v. Rahimi, a case that will decide if governments can continue to prevent those accused of domestic violence from possessing firearms. The fact that there can be any question about how the Court would rule in a case on whether accused domestic abusers can arm themselves reveals just how broken the Court has become.

That’s not what Rahimi is actually about. Rahimi is about whether someone who has a protective order called out against them can be disarmed, which is different than whether someone who has ever been accused of domestic violence can have a firearm, but whatever.

For what it’s worth, I live in Red Georgia, Red Georgia collects people’s firearms when someone calls out a TPO against them, and I have seen both sides of that in action. I saw my wife’s friend’s ex get his firearms seized rightly when she called out a TPO against him, and I also saw a buddy of mine get screwed by a vengeance TPO from a loony ex girlfriend who he hoped to never see again. These laws are complicated, I’m glad someone is going to clarify them on the national level, and I hope that by the time they’re done they make it easy for cops to take guns from dudes who get a TPO filed against them, while also punishing loony ex girlfriends for faking TPOs to use as a revenge tool.

It’s also a clear sign that the gun safety movement needs to get to work reforming the Supreme Court.

Rahimi is a direct consequence of the Supreme Court’s radical decision last year in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen to overturn a more than 100-year-old law and for the first time in American history, limit the rights of states to regulate guns in public. It was arguably the most expansive pro-guns decision ever, made possible by the supermajority of hardline conservative justices that the gun lobby advocated aggressively to create.

I’m not going to say the “history and tradition” test in Bruen wasn’t broad, because it was. But the law Bruen struck down was New York’s racist and elitist carry permit system which gave permits to rich white people and threw black males ages 16 to 24 up against walls like Nazis looking for Jewish papers. Papiere bitte. Bruen ended Stop and Frisk. New York permit law needed to be struck down and striking it down was quite possibly the only positive antiracist government correction to arise from the 2020 Floyd protests.

Predictably, the Bruen decision has wreaked havoc on laws designed to keep the public safe from guns. Lower courts have used it to rule against more than a dozen gun safety laws — not just the prohibitions on domestic abusers at issue in the Rahimi case, but also bans on assault weapons and gun safety requirements for young adults.

Assault weapon bans should have been done away decades ago even before the Bruen decision, because the government has no interest under either strict or intermediate scrutiny in regulating a firearm that only ranks between Buckets and Lawn Mowers in its national death count, well below Bees, Deer, and Autoerotic Asphyxiation.

The radical decision in Bruen and the extreme threat of Rahimi are the culmination of years of work by the gun lobby. Groups like the National Rifle Association and the National Shooting Sports Foundation have deployed campaign contributions, million-dollar ad campaigns, and shadowy back-door legal maneuvers.

What, you mean lobbying? Stop the presses, lobbyists lobbied! Bloomberg alone regularly outspends the gun lobby. In Virginia in 2019, for instance, Bloomberg spent 2.5 million dollars while the NRA spent three hundred thousand, handing Virginia over to a governor who tried to turn 140,000 law abiding citizens into overnight felons, and whose party contemplated implementing the National Guard as an enforcement vehicle. The gun lobby is often outspent by the antigun lobby. This is what lobbyists do, and both sides have them, and Shannon has a pile of them on speed dial because Moms Demand Action is a lobbying organization and Shannon is the former director of public affairs for Monsanto.

As a result, we have a Supreme Court that is radically out of touch with safety-minded Americans on this and other issues, and that has lost the trust of a huge swath of the American public.

Before accusing others of losing touch with the public, Shannon needs to realize that household gun ownership is up to 47% and there are more AR-15 owners than the entire Asian American population.

Just within the past few days, the Supreme Court said it also plans to take up laws against bump stocks — measures that aim to reduce the lethality of semi-automatic weapons that are so frequently deployed by perpetrators of mass shootings.

How frequently? I can think of one.

Notice the “mass shootings” bait and switch again. She reclassifies ordinary street crime as “mass shootings,” then claims that bump stocks are “frequently” used in mass shootings without backing that up with any data, to make the reader think that there’s an epidemic of bump stocks being used to kill people when there aren’t. I’m aware of one spree shooting with a bump stock, the Mandalay Bay one, which (A) could have been just as deadly without a bump stock, and (B) could have easily been three times as deadly if the dude took his Cessna (which he owned, he was a pilot) and 9-11ed the concert with a drum of fuel oil in the back. His bump stock jammed his gun. He did everyone a favor by using it.

It also agreed to hear an appeal brought by the NRA in which the gun lobby group alleges that the former head of New York’s Department of Financial Services tried to persuade banks and insurance companies to sever ties with it.

Even Vox agrees the NRA is going to win that case, because the New York government were acting like Mafia goons. “Hey Yo! It’d be a shame if something happened to your bank!”

pay the author protection money

It’s now clearer than ever: There has been a pronounced pro-gun shift at the Supreme Court, and it places the welfare of millions of Americans in jeopardy. It also runs counter to the urgent demands from millions of us for increased gun safety.

“Welfare of millions of Americans” is an interesting phrase to use when the murder rate is low, and has stayed low, since the 90s.

The only spike in murder rate we’ve seen this century was because of the Floyd riots and the lockdowns, and even that spike only barely cracked the US average, and it’s now cratering in 2022 and 2023. Which “millions” of Americans are in danger? She doesn’t say.

After the Sandy Hook school shooting in 2012, I started a Facebook group urging parents to mobilize and fight to prevent more senseless violence. As a mom of five, my heart broke for the families who had suffered such unimaginable loss, and I knew we could all do much more. What began as a plaintive rallying cry became Moms Demand Action — a grassroots movement with chapters in every state.

Putting her in charge of gun policy would be like putting the mother of a Bengal Tiger attack victim in charge of Bengal Tiger Conservation. I get that Sandy Hook freaked her out, but the fact that it freaked her out disqualifies her from being able to have any objective opinions on the matter, such as for instance having enough elementary school math sense to read a line graph.

Thanks to the tireless work of advocates and activists across the country, in the decade since founding Moms Demand Action, we demonstrated that Americans of every stripe want common sense gun reforms. Since our movement took off, states have signed over 500 new gun safety measures into law, including extreme risk protection orders, safe storage requirements, and background checks. In 2022, over 3,000 local, state, and federal candidates championed gun safety in their elections. And last summer, the US Congress broke through a 30-year logjam to pass the first federal gun safety bill since President Bill Clinton was in office.

What she doesn’t mention here is that most of the bevy of laws she helped pass don’t actually help anything. A multivariate, longitudinal analysis of gun control laws efficacy shows the following truths:

• Universal background checks help a little bit,

• Banning people who had prior violent misdemeanors from buying guns helps a little bit,

• Eliminating Shall Issue permitting and going to either May Issue (which is now unconstitutional) or Permitless Carry helps a little bit, and

• Literally no other law helps in any measurable way.

Based on that analysis, every state who went Constitutional Carry also reduced gun murders, so it might be fun to weigh her efforts against the gun lobby’s efforts to see who passed more efficacious laws. Her “over 500” link goes to Giffords, which claims 29 states “enacted or strengthened” background checks. But that’s stretching the truth, because only 20 states have universal background checks, and some of them have had them for years. Given that permitless carry also reduces gun crime, and there are now 27 states who have permitless carry, the gun rights movement beats the gun control movement on laws passed which actually help.

Now, we need to channel the energy of gun safety advocates into fixing our broken Supreme Court. We need Supreme Court expansion to restore balance and sanity to the Court. By passing a law to add more justices, we can give the president an opportunity to appoint four new justices who will help restore balance to the institution.

Here she shows how high she is on her own kool-aid. She identifies a problem that literally doesn’t exist, makes it seem like a problem by lying and intentionally confusing the people she’s speaking to, can’t figure out how to read a line graph, and concludes that the only way she’s going to get what she wants is to load the supreme court with partisans.

This change would not guarantee the outcome in any particular case — but it would help counterbalance the extreme-right supermajority that has made the Court such a reliable ally for the gun lobby. Fortunately, Supreme Court expansion is clearly constitutional: Congress has done it multiple times throughout American history and we can do it again.

Every time they’ve done it before it was to load it with partisans.

While no one expects us to achieve Supreme Court expansion while Republicans control the House of Representatives, there is growing support for it across the country, and it is a sensible long-term goal. A growing group of advocates within the gun violence prevention, reproductive rights and racial justice movements are calling for expansion.

She needs to be careful what she wishes for here, because if she can load it with partisans, the other side can load it with partisans too. It boggles my mind that she hasn’t thought about that yet. Then again, she doesn’t know how to read a line graph.

In Congress, expansion is supported by leaders like Sens. Ed Markey (Democrat-Massachusetts), Elizabeth Warren (Democrat-Massachusetts), and Tina Smith (Democrat-Minnesota). It has also earned the backing of House members like Rep. Jamie Raskin (Democrat-Maryland), Rep. Jerrold Nadler, (Democrat-New York) Rep. Hank Johnson (Democrat-Georgia) and many others.

Meanwhile, prominent legal experts including former members of President Biden’s commission on the Supreme Court say expansion “may be the only thing that will save our democracy for the next generation” and call it “the only hope for a cure” for the problems at the Court. We will not win this fight overnight, but taking on the gun lobby has taught me that it is possible to build a movement to take on powerful opponents who at first look unbeatable.

“Behold the partisan support for loading the Supreme Court with partisans to fix a problem that isn’t a problem.”

The battle for gun safety will need to be waged on many fronts. Expanding the Supreme Court would be yet another way we can fight the war against senseless gun violence. And while we engage in the long-term battle to structurally reform the Supreme Court, we need to continue to support gun safety candidates and demand new laws.

Increasing the number of justices will not be easy. But when it comes to protecting our kids from the scourge of gun violence, we do not have the luxury of opting out of the tough fights. It’s time for the gun safety movement to take a stand on the fight for fair courts — because lives depend on us winning.

Sound science shows that the very most number of lives you can possibly save from implementing the few gun control measures that do actually work is in the neighborhood of four to five thousand a year, and you can get that with three laws that are fully realizable at the state level no matter who is in the Supreme Court, and you can get it while repealing 90% of the rest of the laws that don’t do anything.

But she doesn’t want that, because she doesn’t care about saving lives. She cares about waging culture war.

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On June 9th, the Washington Examiner dropped a column that claimed that the ATF created 29 million felons by it’s controversial pistol brace rule. That rule will most definitely make some Americans felons, including several of my friends. But it won’t make 29 million, not even close, so the people saying it will are doing the same crap the left does in the gun debate.

Let’s be honest and get the numbers right, and call out the people who don’t.

The Story of the Rule

Herein lies the story of the rule. This story as told here is not 100% accurate, but it’s very close, and it’s easy to remember in story format.

A long long time ago Congress passed the NFA, which among other things made it so sawed off shotguns and short barreled rifles were illegal to buy or own unless you asked the ATF for special permission to own them, went through a longer background check, potentially a year long, and paid them $200. Then if you ever wanted to sell them, the buyer had to do the same thing, and you also had to ask permission from the ATF before transporting the firearm across state lines. This was a pain in the ass. And it made very little sense because nobody could figure out what the heck a “rifle” is, since the folks who wrote the law didn’t understand anything about firearms.

Nobody ever seemed to question why short barreled rifles were put on a special list, since they’re no deadlier than any other rifle, but congress are idiots so they passed an idiot law. Then the ATF had to enforce it somehow. The enforcement dialogue, which transpired over around a decade in a series of industry questions and official ATF clarifications, went something like this:

Some Dude: “What is a short barreled rifle?”

ATF: “Well, it’s a rifle with a short barrel.”

Some Dude: “What about a pistol? Is a pistol a rifle with a short barrel?”

ATF: “No a pistol is a pistol, a rifle is a rifle.”

Some Dude: “But a pistol has a rifled barrel just like a rifle, and a short barrel. What’s the difference between a pistol and a rifle?”

ATF: “Um, I guess the difference between a pistol and a rifle is that the rifle has a stock and the pistol doesn’t.”

Some Dude: “So if I put a stock on a pistol it becomes a rifle? That seems weird.”

ATF: “Yeah I guess so.”

Some Dude: “And if I pull the stock off of a rifle, then it’s a pistol right?”

ATF: “Yeah I guess.”

Some Dude: “And if the rifle is short barreled and doesn’t have a stock, that also means it’s a pistol right, and I don’t have to pay the $200 and do the background check?”

ATF: “Yeah I guess.”

Some Dude: “Okay, got it. Now what if I’m handicapped, and trying to shoot a normal pistol one handed, can I build a brace that will wrap around my arm to hold it still to compensate for my disability?”

ATF: “Sure.”

Some Dude: “Can I put that onto a short barreled rifle that doesn’t have a stock and therefore is a pistol?”

ATF: “Yeah I guess.”

Some Dude: “Sweet.”

buy the author a stabilizing brace

At this point Some Dude builds a “stabilizing brace” in the vague shape of a stock and starts using it as a stock on a short barreled rifle that’s not a rifle it’s a pistol.

ATF: “Wait you can’t do that.”

Some Dude: “Why not?”

ATF: “When you put the brace up against your shoulder like that it ceases to be a brace and is now a stock. That’s illegal.”

Some Dude: “You seriously mean that I can build and own this ‘pistol’ and that’s totally legal, but the act of shouldering it is literally manufacturing an illegal short barreled rifle from thin air on the spot? That’s fabulously dumb.”

ATF: “Yeah, I guess that is fabulously dumb, we changed our minds, it’s fine.”

Some Dude: “Ok thanks.” (goes on to buy five million more stabilizing braces)

ATF: “Okay now a Democrat is president, all those stabilizing braced pistols are now illegal short barreled rifles and you can go to jail for ten years unless you register them.”

Five Million Dudes: “No.”

Now you’re up to date.

And just for fun, here’s a youtube video that explains the absurdity.

John Lott’s Bad Math

This story is dumb, the restrictions on short barreled rifles are nonsensical and have no basis in science or reason, but the Washington Examiner and John Lott are misrepresenting the facts. HWFO as a publication sticks to facts and data, so when I saw this article I felt the need to debunk it just like HWFO debunks gun control articles that get similar facts wrong.

As usual, we’ll do our quotes in screenshot form in case they go back and change the content of their article later after they farm enough clicks like Vox does:

That’s just factually wrong.

As explained by HWFO in September of 2022, the best guess at total AR-15 (or similar) rifle ownership in the United States is about 24.6 million people in the United States:

Here’s a graph from that article:

The numbers in this graph are based on the 2021 National Firearms Survey, which was one of the most comprehensive surveys of the question ever undertaken. 24.6 million is a big number. There are more AR-15 owners than Asian Americans in the USA. There are probably a wide field of surveys that ask this question, with a range of answers. Perhaps has high as 29 million. John Lott is quoted in the article as stating this:

you are still talking about 29 million people who are committing felonies at this point.

He’s clearly referring to the total number of AR-15 or similar owners in the country, not the total number of people who own AR-15 pistols with stabilizing braces. Lott’s quote is severely out of context, but he’s specifically talking about people committing felonies, so I can’t conceive of any possible context in which that statement makes any sense. It’s not a felony to own an AR-15. The Congressional Research Service ballparked 10 to 40 million in a short whitepaper, but called those “unofficial estimates,” didn’t reference a source, and no other source as far as I’m aware corroborates that claim. It appears to be made up, and Lott should know that. If the 40 million figure were true, there would be as many stabilizing braced AR-15 pistols in the country as there are black people. Washington Examiner and John Lott appear very specifically to be conflating AR-15 “pistols” with AR-15 rifles in order to make numerical claims which are objectively false, and off by factor of around six.

Actual Math

Nobody’s sure how many “AR-15 pistols” there are in circulation. Not every pistol brace bought gets put on a rifle. Some might get put on full length rifles. Some manufacturers probably kept bad records. Who knows. The ATF thinks there are around 5 million pistol braces in circulation. Let’s just use it for the sake of argument, because the ATF’s argument against the “40 million” figure at that link (from the federal register) is surprisingly sensible and supported by industry.

If 255,162 owners of five million braces registered their braced firearms with the ATF as short barreled rifles, then that would be a compliance ratio of 5.1%, not 0.6% to 1% as claimed in the article. There would be four million seven hundred thousand people in felonious noncompliance, not twenty to forty million as claimed in the article. And Joe Biden’s ATF would be at least partially responsible for the creation of those almost five million instant felons.

The ATF creating five million felons out of thin air by waffling on a rule should be enough to alarm the public. There’s no need to pretend it’s thirty million. The gun side can win the argument on mathematics alone, but to do so we have to get the mathematics correct and quit misbehaving like the other side is prone to do.

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He said “There’s no such thing as a responsible gun owner.”

What?

We were both literally on my land while I was teaching his son safe firearms shooting protocol, and he dropped that slogan, surrounded by men who’d all just taken a turn throwing bullets down range with the scariest gun you can legally buy.

I chalked it up to garbage he’d probably heard recently on Occupy Democrats or something, chuckled internally over the knowledge that guns have already won, and that I was literally teaching his son how to shoot while he said it. Didn’t think twice about it since. But in the last month, that slogan has started to pop up everywhere, so it seems instructive to me to trace its origins and talk about exactly how wrong it is, mathematically speaking.

PETA Weirdos

If I type “no such thing as a respons…” into a google search bar, the phrase is not auto-completed with a statement about guns, but rather a statement about dog breeders.

It was a 2015 PETA Slogan…

…tied in with their official stance on breeders, that occasionally gets traffic in places like the reddit vegan forums. The reason it gets traffic is it dehumanizes (!) the opposing side of a culture war argument. And dehumanization is great clickbait.

Gun Version

The gun version of this meme owes its origins, as near as I can tell, to a Twitter parody account of Maxine Waters:

This fake tweet went viral in February of 2020 and was quickly fact checked because of its obvious absurdity. But since then, the phrase has started to gain purchase within anti-gun circles purely because of how clickbaitey it is. The phrase now appears in a Change.org petition, the Texas Observer, an ABC B-Tier Sitcom, The Atlantic, and most recently in a two part article from Washington Monthly.

Let’s take a look at the most recent incarnation and do some math with it.

Math

Mr. Berlow gives lip service to the idea that “plenty of gun owners are responsible” while bombarding us with numbers that aren’t. The first thing we need, is a baseline. If we presume 45% of households have a gun in the United States, a country of 331 million population, then 149 million Americans have access to a firearm in their home. That’s the baseline. Then we divide any number Mr. Berlow hits us with by that number to see what percentage of gun exposed Americans are not responsible on an annual basis.

We are increasingly numb to mass shootings, the destruction wrought by an alienated man (rarely a woman) who uses a weapon designed for war to kill the innocent at a movie theater or Walmart, synagogue or church, high school or elementary school. These shootings have become so commonplace that the details blur: 16 dead and injured at a Texas outlet mall; 36 at an Alabama birthday party; 14 at a Louisville bank; eight at Nashville Christian school; 21 at a dance hall in California. Just as unsettling, in some ways, are the shootings in recent weeks based on what can only be called a hair-trigger response to a perceived threat. In Kansas City, Missouri, Ralph Yarl, a 16-year-old, was going to pick up his younger twin siblings from a playdate when he went to the wrong address and was greeted by 85-year-old Andrew Lester, who shot him in the head. Yarl is Black, and Lester is white. Around the same time, across the country in New York State, Kaylin Gillis was heading to a friend’s house when her boyfriend mistakenly turned into the wrong driveway. Its owner, 65-year-old Kevin Monahan, fired at the car, killing 20-year-old Gillis. (He’s been charged with murder.) In Texas, two high school cheerleaders were shot in a supermarket parking lot after one of them mistakenly entered a car she thought was her own. Police say that 25-year-old Pedro Tello Rodriguez, Jr. fired multiple shots. Payton Washington, 18, dressed in her cheerleader outfit, was shot in the back and nearly died. These were not criminals with a history of mental illness but legal gun owners who chose to pull the trigger.  

Are most gun owners reckless and rage-filled? Probably not. But the data show that the gun lobby’s promulgated myth of the responsible gun owner is just that—a myth.

The opening paragraph lists nine irresponsible gun owners in it. If these were the only nine in the country, then the USA would have 99.99993% gun responsibility. If Mr. Berlow is going to support his statement that “responsible gun ownership is a myth,” he will have to present more data than a string of anecdotes. Let’s see what he presents.

In two weeks this spring, the country experienced at least 25 mass shootings. In addition…

He goes on to list ten additional anecdotes in this paragraph pulled from local news, for a total of 35 irresponsible gun owners. We now have a running total of 44, for a total of 99.99997% gun responsibility. He’s going to need some more. Four paragraphs later he adds to the total.

These laws—or the lack of them—matter. The young men responsible for the 1999 Columbine High School massacre, which left 13 dead, acquired their firearms at a gun show with the help of an older classmate. The gunman who shot 23 people dead at an El Paso Walmart in 2019 purchased his AK-47 and 1000 rounds of ammunition online.  

That’s two more, running total of 37, no change in the ratio. Eight paragraphs later he finally adds to the total.

To appreciate why this matters, it helps to understand that the standard measures of gun violence—homicides and suicides—vastly understate the scope of the problem. Imagine if you learned that 1,166 people had been raped, robbed, assaulted, or threatened by someone with a gun today. Well, that’s what happened every day, on average, between 2012 and 2020. That’s more than four million direct victims of gun violence in one decade. And that’s not counting homicides and suicides, which totaled 134,500 and 224,600, respectively, and the more than 192,000 injured in firearm accidents. 

Ok now we’re talking. 1,166 people per day is a lot! That’s almost half a million people per year! I wonder where he’s getting that number. Google is a complete blank on it, except for people tweeting quotes from this article, so it could be totally made up. That’s about three times more than the entire total of reported rape cases in a given year, and almost four times the number of people shot, so I presume the bulk of this number is in brandishing but there’s no way to know. Don’t care, let’s pretend this number is real and add it to the total. That huge, giant, absurdly large number of irresponsible gun owners brings us to 425,590 instances of annual irresponsibility, and a responsibility ratio of 99.71%.

If you add indirect victims of gun violence, the numbers are astronomical.

No sir, we’re not doing that, because that’s padding the numbers. If one magical Santa Claus of Gun Irresponsibility brandished a gun in front of every citizen in the United States one Christmas Eve, we would have 330 million “victims” of gun irresponsibility with only one more irresponsible gun owner. No cheating.

In a nation where as many as 81 million adults own an estimated 434 million firearms (about half of the world’s supply), the assumption that “most” are responsible and law-abiding may be accurate. But that still leaves plenty of room for bad stuff to happen, which it does, every day.

Aha. On paragraph eighteen of his article, he admits that most gun owners are responsible, and therefore that his thesis is wrong. But even then, he doesn’t seem to understand how overwhelmingly wrong it is. Let’s keep going.

He goes seven more paragraphs without any numbers, then drops three bullets from the CAP Fact Sheet we debunked here last week, and finally finds some more irresponsible gun owners.

Earlier this year, the Transportation Security Administration reported that in 2022 it had found 6,542 guns in carry-on bags at 262 U.S. airports, about 18 guns per day. That number surpassed the previous record of 5,972 guns in 2021, which was no surprise to the TSA. Except for 2020, when people stopped flying because of Covid, the numbers have increased yearly since 2009. During the past decade, the TSA confiscated 33,000 of these illegally transported firearms.  

That seems irresponsible, let’s add 6,542 owners to the list, increasing our running total to 432,178 irresponsible, but not budging the ratio from 99.7% firm. His first article ends with a bang that converts to a whimper once you do the arithmetic, but thankfully he has an entire second article with which he is sure to support his thesis.

Part II

He opens Part II like this:

It would be nice to believe that in a country with 81 million gun owners, most are “responsible” and “law-abiding.” And that may be true. Yet we are bombarded almost daily with news of mass murders and other horrific gun crimes. We also know that sizeable numbers of gun owners fail to take even the simplest safety precautions and that weak state and federal laws encourage or tolerate some of the most egregious behavior by gun owners. 

Gun owners aren’t the ones bombarding you with media. Organizations like The Washington Monthly are doing that, so if that’s the problem he’s trying to fix he’ll need to do some concerted introspection. Let’s continue to add to the running total and see where we end up.

Every year, thousands of firearms are lost or stolen. The FBI estimated that in 2020 more than 300,000 were stolen from homes and vehicles, about 68 every hour.

300,000 is a bullshit number, flat out, and completely unsourced. The ATF in 2023 stated explicitly that the number of firearms stolen from private citizens in the USA was 208,779, and showed data that ranged from 221,898 to 192,151 firearms stolen across a five year time span, but that’s not even what Mr. Berlow’s thesis is about. He’s trying to say that being a victim of a gun theft means you’re an irresponsible owner, because you didn’t secure your gun. That’s obviously not true for any gun owner who was forced by the law to leave their gun in their car outside of a gun free zone, but let’s pretend it is, and add these to the list. Across the five year ATF study, the average number of gun theft victims per year was 155,055. Add them to the list, and you’ve got 587,233 “irresponsible gun owners,” and our gun responsibility ratio plummets to 99.6%.

Unsecured weapons are also a significant factor in unintentional shootings of children and 70 percent or more of youth suicides, the second leading cause of death of teens aged 15 to 19.

Let’s skip the “children” thing and just say that all firearm accidents are due to irresponsibility. Most gun owners would agree with that. We get about 500 of them per year, so lets add them to the tally. Youth suicides are about 5,000 per year, but as we’ve discussed prior on HWFO, a third of those are women and women without access to a firearm will do it another way. Likewise some portion of men would do it another way, so when you correct for those two, the number of suicides due to “irresponsible gun ownership” is about 1830.

Our running total of irresponsible gun owners is now up to 589,533, for a gun responsibility ratio of 99.6%, same as it was before.

The NRA also opposes red flag laws designed to temporarily remove guns from people who may be suicidal or a threat to others. The NRA has attacked them as “gun confiscation orders,” “firearm surrender” laws, and “anti-gun.” Nonetheless, the laws enacted by 21 states to date appear to be effective. During the 22 months after Florida approved its law in response to the Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school massacre, which left 17 dead in 2018, 3,500 Floridians were forced to give up their guns and ammunition for up to a year. Among them was a man who told a friend, “I’m gonna be the greatest mass shooter,” a couple in West Palm Beach who shot up their home while high on cocaine, and a man accused of threatening to shoot up a Walmart near Tampa one day after the 2019 Walmart shooting in El Paso, Texas.

Mr. Berlow plays the very dirty trick of pretending those few anecdotes are applicable to the total data pool when it’s very unlikely that the 3,500 Floridians who got flagged were all that irresponsible, but let’s pretend it isn’t dirty. Let’s add them all to the tally. 593,033 irresponsible gun owners. Responsibility ratio still 99.6%.

We know that many of the 25 states that condition concealed carry permits on training typically allow a seven-hour NRA safety course to satisfy the requirement. That may suffice for someone who keeps a firearm at home for self-defense, but is it enough for those who fantasize about taking down the next mass murderer at the local supermarket? Although 60 percent of gun owners say they have had some formal training, that leaves about 32 million who haven’t—and, trained or not, millions fail to keep their skills up to date.

Formal training is not necessary to be a responsible gun owner, nor does formal training necessarily make someone responsible. The remainder of the second article is a long rant about training requirements, differing Defensive Gun Use statistics, and how many hours it takes to get a barber’s license in North Carolina, none of which supports the thesis that responsible gun ownership is a myth.

By his own numbers, it’s not a myth for 99.6% of us. If he’d like to support his thesis with data, I’d love to read it.

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On October 4, 2022, the Center for American Progress released a “fact sheet” with a wall of studies supporting the idea that weakening carry laws increases homicide. As usual, the “fact sheet” either wildly mischaracterizes the science it links to, or it plays shell games with the truth to be more persuasive than factual, and it’s such a firehose of bullshit that nobody has the brain power to swim through it all.

Truth

First, let’s lay out the truth, according to science. In 2019 Michael Siegel and others produced the gold standard research on this topic, which concluded that there are a few laws that work but most don’t. His study is here:

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11606-019-04922-x

And my treatment of that study on Open Source Defense is here:

https://opensourcedefense.org/blog/gun-policy-needs-a-decision-support-system

There are three permit regimes that states can be in:

• “May Issue,” where the government can pick and choose to whom they give a carry permit and can throw black people up against walls since they know black people can’t afford a permit,

• “Shall Issue,” where anyone who applies can get a permit provided they meet clear benchmark criteria.

• “Constitutional Carry,” which means anyone who can legally buy a gun can legally carry it.

Siegel’s 2019 study showed, among other things, that “May Issue” and “Constitutional Carry” have the same gun homicide rates, and “Shall Issue” is higher. I suspect this is for two reasons:

1. Cops in May Issue states can harass minorities about guns, and minorities are disproportionately responsible for crime,

2. In Constitutional Carry states nobody knows if grandma is packing so the higher carry rates create a crime disincentive.

These are mere suspicions of mine which happen to align with the data. Now that we know what the truth is, let’s swim through the CAP “fact sheet” in HWFO style. We’re going to do this with screenshots, in case they read this article and go back and make stealth changes to theirs, like Vox has done before.

Debunking

This is accurate. Gun rights are in fact winning.

This study focused only on violent cities, and it lumped Shall Issue and Constitutional Carry into one category for analysis. The fact that it didn’t differentiate between two different carry regimes which Siegel(2019) showed had different impacts on crime invalidates its conclusions. It lumps the higher crime rate of Shall Issue in with the lower crime rate of Constitutional Carry on purpose, to wallpaper over any positive effects of Constitutional Carry.

One aspect of the problem it did heavily focus on, however, was how firearm theft from cars increases with overall firearm carry rate. That is true, and it is true because gun free zones force firearms carriers to leave their guns in their car. If gun free zones were required to provide secure firearm lockers then this would almost entirely go away.

That study is paywalled, but it makes the same error as above - lumping Constitutional Carry and Shall Issue into the same bucket, in order to paper over the benefits of Constitutional Carry.

This study was by Siegel, so we expect it to be good, and it was. His literature review for instance was honest instead of being an advocacy platform:

The study concluded the same thing his 2019 study did - that Shall Issue was higher than May Issue. But this study didn’t analyze Constitutional Carry at all - it basically just threw that data out - an error Siegel later corrected in 2019.

That study is hilarious. Its abstract opens by citing “rapidly rising rates of violent crime,” when violent crime was very low and very flat until the 2020 Floyd Riots, lockdowns, ACABs, and police defunding, and then doesn’t control for those. Regardless, it runs the same bait and switch, comparing May Issue to Shall Issue without analyzing Constitutional Carry at all. It also only focused on policy changes that transitioned from banning perpetrators of violent misdemeanors from getting a permit, to allowing those same perpetrators to get a permit. And that result seems reasonable, and fits well with Siegel’s 2019 work which states that prohibiting violent misdemeanor perps from buying guns is a net gain, and relatively popular across all demographics.

That study was paywalled, but her comments tell us several things. One, she was using the “four or more shot” definition of “mass shooting,” which is nothing more than a generalized indicator of the rate of street violence and not an indicator of the random spree killings we see in the news. Two, nothing in the abstract or her interview indicated she controlled for race, which is the greatest flaw anyone can make in this space. Homicides are disproportionately black, and black folks live disproportionately in the south, which is red.

That study wasn’t a study at all, it was an “analysis” put together by “GVPedia” which is an anti-gun “white paper” front. It had no data, explained no methodology, and presented one hilarious graph:

They claim that they took the three years before each state passed their constitutional carry law, and the three after, and developed an average trend based on that data. Then they compare that against a grey line which is supposed to be “national average,” but of what? What years? What’s the midpoint of that line? The three years before and after the rest of the nation didn’t pass that law? Whatever weird fuckery this is, it’s obviously not apples to apples because the calculation of that grey line is literally impossible, since there’s no way to know where to set the midpoint.

That study was surprisingly not awful, but it’s studying something incredibly rare. In 2017 there were 351 workplace firearm homicides out of 325.1 million people, meaning the chances of something like that happening are literally one in a million.

That bullet cites a book called Rampage Nation by Louis Klarevas, who’s Amazon description is incredibly rife with mathematical errors.

One such error is explained by Politifact, in a surprisingly good article that pits Klarevas’s research against the notoriously (and sometimes too enthusiastically) pro-gun researcher John Lott. It’s worth the read, but the punchline is that in order to make the claim that shooting sprees don’t primarily happen in gun free zones, Klarevas included shooting sprees that weren’t random - they were in the course of committing other crimes, were in people’s homes and the result of domestic or other disputes, and similar. So that is the sort of dirty statistical trick you can expect to encounter in his book.

This is literally the argument-ad-populum fallacy, but even if we presume that it’s not, they’re playing monkey business with the language. Their reference is to a 2014 email survey of 140 people, only 14% of which were “very knowledgeable” about the topic, and only 62% of whom disagreed with the statement that reducing concealed carry requirements reduces crime.

That isn’t a study at all, it’s a quote from an article on cleveland.com which states explicitly that there is no consensus on the effects of changing gun laws, and which includes quotes from both sides of the argument. The Cleveland.com article is actually quite good, and it seems almost as if CAP stole exactly half of it while ignoring the other half, when it put together its “Fact Sheet.”

Here the “Fact Sheet” lists about five studies showing that gun theft increases when carry requirements go down. These are probably true, because an increase in the rate of firearm carry will be associated with an increase in car break ins finding guns in parking lots outside of gun free zones. The last time my car was broken into was outside the Fulton County Courthouse in plain view of the cops, because someone was hoping to find a gun that I wouldn’t be allowed to carry inside. This is an issue that is bad, and needs to be fixed in two ways. One, folks who carry need to get gun safes mounted in their cars - that’s a real thing. Two - buildings which prohibit firearms must provide secure firearm storage to get the guns out of the parking lots.

Where we will push back is the claim that they increase violent crime.

This is the same study in reference 7 above, which erroneously lumped Shall Issue and Constitutional Carry into the same category.

That’s not a study, it’s a quote from an NBC News story, and I don’t disagree that more guns get stolen when folks who carry are forced to leave their guns in cars outside of gun free zones.

This isn’t a study, it’s a link to an article by The Trace, a well known antigun media front funded by Everytown, and written by Jennifer Mascia, a well known antigun culture warrior. The entire piece centers around this graph:

The graph doesn’t go back in time enough to show a long term trend, but we do see that 2019 and 2017 were about the same, 2018 was lower than both, and it gives us the impression that these numbers are part of the overall trough of low American homicide rates we’d seen for the prior two decades:

The Trace article does nothing to disaggregate the 2020 increase in road rage deaths from the overall increase in homicide in 2020 that spilled out of the Floyd Riots, ACAB, police defunding, unemployment, and Covid lockdown anxiety.

The next two CAP citations go back to the same Trace article.

This is a link to a local news story about police breaking up a fight which involved no guns whatsoever.

This is another link to another local news article about rising crime in Savannah. Savannah Georgia is a very crime saturated place who’s local crime patterns don’t match the rest of Georgia.

This is probably true, but Maryland was May Issue until 2022, and the people he’s talking about aren’t going to abide by the current Shall Issue permit regime anyway. There are very important things to learn about this quote from this law officer - that shootings are related to beefs, that they are a result of no acceptable alternative means of dispute resolution in certain urban communities, and that the people stranded in this honor culture are disproportionately raised fatherless. All important things, all totally unrelated to the state of permit law in Maryland.

This link is to a local news story, and to a quote from 2017 about a law that’s over a decade old. A decade during which Wisconsin gun homicides were relatively flat. The below graph comes from Everytown, and you’ll notice they start the clock in 2010 when national homicide rate was at a 50 year low. Even so, rates are flat through 2019, so this particular cop is complaining about something that doesn’t appear in the numbers.

The rest of the fact sheet doesn’t really reference any studies at all - it’s just media soundbites and quotes from anti-gun individuals making assertions as if they were science, when they’re not.

These sorts of Wall of Text attack vectors on gun culture are all too common, and there are too many to debunk in real time, a technique Brian Chau calls the “Firehose of Bullshit.” But having a few debunking articles on the shelf to share, such as this one, may be helpful to you in the future as gun rights continues to win.

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Drag Queen Story Hour (DQSH) is a brutally effective culture war weapon. Dating back to 2015, this vector of attack turned into a culture war lightning rod in 2022 and 2023 because of certain evolutions within the TERF Wars, and now the practice is front and center in people’s minds.

Herein, we will set aside the issue of whether DQSH is right or appropriate, and instead examine what makes it so effective. Then we’ll make the case that gun culture could and should steal the idea part and parcel, and adapt it with almost no change whatsoever to the overall format, to be its own brutally effective weapon. We begin by looking at DQSH.

Culture War Vectors

I told a man once that “racism is going to go away once we get one good generation with no racists in it. After that all we have to do is wait for the older racists to die.” He didn’t take that statement particularly well, because he was a 2016 pre-Woke and I at the time didn’t understand the five different confusing definitions of “racism”, but I stand by the statement when it comes to the problem of individual racial prejudice.

Prejudices are almost entirely learned behaviors, either from direct bad encounters with [those people] or from your parents and peers imparting a prejudice against [those people] that they acquired, from either direct bad encounters or their parents or peers. Prejudice is like a gene that passes down, or like a virus that passes sideways. At some point in our recent past there were English settlers in the USA who were prejudiced against Irish settlers, but they basically all went away over time because eventually nobody cared. We had one good generation without that particular prejudice, and voila, up it went like smoke.

This is the culture war vector DQSH is attempting to leverage, officially at least. One good generation where nobody is prejudiced against transgenders will mean transgender prejudice goes away, and then poof, up like smoke. And the way you get that is to acclimate children to transgenders.

But transgenderism is a behavior, not a race, so people who oppose that behavior take the position that DQSH is not merely acclimating people to [those people] to reduce prejudice, but it is in fact planting mental seeds of that behavior in order to spread that behavior. It’s “grooming.”

Is it?

I don’t know how we could know for sure.

I suppose it’s possible. But the entire argument for or against DQSH revolves around this fulcrum, which creates a giant Scissor Statement, which in turn gets the drag queens more media coverage, which makes people talk about drag queens more, which is basically just free press. And largely positive press at that, because the people opposing DQSH are funneled into a “Dilemma Action,” where they are stuck with choices that are all bad for their position. Either they allow the DQs to indoctrinate children, or they oppose it with protests which make them look like bigots or laws that make them look like fascists. It’s a no win situation. Which is why gun culture should steal the idea.

AR-15 Story Hour

“Guns are normal and normal people use guns” is a regular mantra by David Yamane, sociologist professor at Wake Forest who studies the sociology of guns and has coined the term “Gun Culture 2.0” to describe how today’s modern gun owners are shifting from hunting motivations to self defense motivations. I chat with David. While he’d probably be terrified of the heat he’d pull by endorsing an AR-15 Story Hour, the idea fits right within his wheelhouse. Here’s the idea.

Get a guy in a Hawaiian shirt, a desert camo plate carrier, a helmet, night vision goggles, and an unloaded and safely carried AR-15 battle rifle, to sit on a chair in a library and read kids books to them, totally unrelated to guns. Fox in Socks, Berenstain Bears, whatever. Acclimate the kids to being around an AR-15, the way DQSH acclimates children to transgenders. That’s it. Nothing more.

buy the author a hawaiian shirt

The first DQSH was in San Francisco because it’s transgender home turf. Librarians who bought into the idea were easy to find, and nobody was going to protest it there. For the same reason the first couple of AR15SHs would need to be in Oklahoma or Alabama.

The national blue media would latch onto the thing because it outrages their base, just like the red media did with DQSH, so would turn them into national stories and culture war nexuses to farm the clickbait profits from the story. Everyone on Twitter would argue about them for two days, with public figures being forced to take a position on them they don’t want to take. The blue reaction to AR15SH would mirror the red reaction to DQSH almost perfectly. I built you a table:

If any blues decided to oppose AR-15 Story Hour, either by protest or law, they’d be in the same pickle than the reds are today reacting to DQSH. In the end, the entire national dialogue about AR-15 Story Hour would boil down to every egregore captured pundit shouting some version of the above table back and forth at each other. The net effect would be to promulgate the position that guns are normal and normal people own guns, over and over, into the collective zeitgeist of the United States.

Sweet, sweet, normalization.

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As is often the case on HWFO, we are going to begin with mathematics, and attempt to replicate this entirely unsourced graph I saw on Twitter yesterday:

Math

We begin by picking a year. I’m going to pick 2019 for several reasons. First, it was the last good year the FBI has data on, because they changed their data collection scheme in 2020 to make it so burdensome that half the police agencies in the country stopped giving them data. Second, 2020 was an outlier year, with the Floyd riots, “defund the police,” and “all cops are bastards” leading to a reduction in policing and a commensurate crime spike. Third, the residual effects of all that awful 2020 behavior have not abated, so 2019 is the last best year for an honest comparison.

Expanded Homicide Data Table 6 from the FBI website gives us our starting point. Caveats - this table only includes cases where some racial data was known by law enforcement, so if a homicide occurs where the FBI has no information about offender or victim it’s excluded from the table. It’s also only of single victim / single offender incidents, which would exclude multiple victim shootings. Because of those two things, we’re going to have to do some careful extrapolation.

Table 6 has 6,578 homicides which fit the criteria for inclusion. If we presume the ratios exhibited in this table properly extrapolate to the total sample of 16,425 US murders in 2019 and do that extrapolation, this is what we get:

This is not the exact number from the mysterious Twitter graph, but it’s curiously close. If we use 2019 numbers to replicate the Twitter graph’s nation sample, we get this:

It looks to me as if the chart I raked from Twitter is not accurate, but it’s similar. It seems that chart probably took homicide rates for other countries from the 1990s and rates for the USA from around 2014 as a way to cook the numbers. But the difference between the US white homicide rate and US black and Latino homicide rates is tremendously stark.

A broader bar graph, including not only some representative countries but also regions of the world, looks like this:

The US white murder rate is comparable to that of the World Bank High Income nations. The US Latino murder rate is comparable to that of the World Bank Lower Middle Income Nations. The US black murder rate is double the World Bank Lower Income nations and also more than double Africa. But as high as it is, it doesn’t approach the murder rate in most of the rest of the western hemisphere to the south of the USA. Mexico is worse than Black America, Brazil is worse than Mexico, and El Salvador is the nuttiest war zone of them all, almost tripling Black America.

For reference, here’s the World Bank Income Classification Map:

Further, we know that murder rate does not correlate in any way with gun ownership rate by race in the United States, because black folks own the fewest guns.

What do we take away from this, in convenient 280 character Twitter worthy snippets?

1. If US black and Latino murder rates were the same as US white murder rates, then the United States would have the same murder rate as our economic peer nations even with 400 million guns in circulation,

2. Whites own more guns per capita than black folks or Latinos and there’s an inverse correlation between ownership and murder across those demographics, so “it’s the guns” is not explanatory for the murder rate differential in these populations,

3. The racist hot-take of “it’s genetic” is also not explanatory, because US black Americans more than double the sub-Saharan Africa murder rate, and Latin America south of the border is almost six times more murderous than the Latinos here.

It’s not the guns. It’s also not the genetics. So what is it?

buy the author a beer

Economics?

Unfortunately, it’s not the economics either, at least not in the United States.

If we take the very crude and direct method, we do see that murder rate falls as average income rises in the United States, but the relationship is steeply nonlinear and we only have three data points.

You’re going to have a very hard time convincing me that a class of folks in the USA who only make $25,000 per year are going to have a murder rate of 155, so the crude analysis fails. Thankfully, Random Critical Analysis did a lot of this heavy lifting for us in 2015, by analyzing county level data:

He states, after presenting dozens of similar graphs to cover every possible economic marker available:

By now I think it should be pretty clear that the economic conditions of each group are not particularly strong predictors of their victimization rates and that they certainly don’t come close to closing the white-black gap.  Even poor “white” counties have homicide rates quite a bit lower than affluent “black” counties with low poverty rates.

I’d also note, after perusing these graphs in some detail, that white and Latino homicide rates tend to converge as the areas get poorer. So what is it? He identifies one major factor on regression analysis which ties all three of these groups together.

Boys Without Fathers

This is your money graph, from the Random Critical Analysis research:

It’s all about single moms, and boys with no fathers.

He analyzed the following:

• Median family income

• Mean family income

• Median household income

• Mean household income

• Per capita income

• Family poverty rate

• Child poverty rate

• Median worker earnings

• High school graduation percentage

• Bachelors degree percentage

• Unemployment rate

• Labor force participation rate

• Median home value

• Median gross rent

• Percentage renting

• Home ownership percentage

…and found nothing as predictive as single mother rate.

He goes on to note that single motherhood is higher in the black community than other communities, and is not predicted by income or other economic factors, even though the relationship between single motherhood and economics is very close for the white and Latino populations.

Conclusion

Sound mathematical analysis indicates that if we want to reduce murder rates in the United States, we must do two things:

1. Increase the ratio of families with a father present across all racial demographics, and,

2. Figure out why black families are disproportionately likely to have no father present as compared to other racial demographics, and fix that.

That’s the solution to homicide. The answer screams at you from the numbers. Families matter.

Did modern feminism and no-fault divorce increase the number of single mothers? Possibly. Is the increase in single motherhood in the country related to falling religiosity? Assuredly. Did falling religiosity disproportionately affect the black community? Possibly. Are there cultural pressures within the black community that leave more black women without men in the house to help raise children? Possibly. Are those exacerbated by disproportionate incarceration, the prison industrial complex, and the school to prison pipeline? Assuredly. Are they exacerbated by the drug war, by distrust of police in the black community, and by black men and boys resolving disputes directly in honor-culture style duels instead of through official channels that they don’t trust? Assuredly.

Could societal messaging praising traditional family units instead of praising go-it-alone mothers help? Possibly. Could similar messaging praising faithful fathers also help? Possibly. Could prison reform, enforcement reform, and drug law reform help? Assuredly. Could a revival of black community churches or similar institutions help, as both a way to strengthen black families and provide alternate dispute resolution for beefs? Assuredly. Should liberal organizations campaign to end the family unit? Assuredly not.

Would it help if the black community trusted the police and courts as an honorable and fair arbiter of disagreements, so they no longer resolved them in combat as honor cultures often do? Yeah, but how the hell do we do that?

How do I, a rural white dude banging away on a keyboard, affect any of this stuff?

This is the hard work nobody’s doing. This is the hard discussion nobody’s having. This is why nothing gets fixed. This is why Moms Demand Action makes all the money and nobody’s ever heard of Black Fathers Matter. Because the latter organization doesn’t exist, and if it did, the rich white female Brady Campaign donors wouldn’t donate.

“It’s the guns.” Yeah, right.

Check out: Black Man Lab

Check out: Black Men Build

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On April 10, 2023, Brynn Tannehill tagged the following New Republic article with the “hopeless” tagline:

The Grim Truth: The War on Guns is Lost

I commend her for the most honest headline in the history of The New Republic’s publication history, but as I browsed the piece, I was struck by how tone deaf its content was. Brynn, surely a devout blue triber, seemed to have no idea that her tribe’s loss in the war was their fault. Her fault, even. And I find that omission fascinating. Let’s pick through this.

Their Perspective

Most of her article is a rehashing of the usual “red tribers are evil” banality, built on the presumption that guns are the problem and that blue tribe measures would fix the problem without a true look at mathematics or policy efficacy, but certain sections of the article pop purely because of how truly brutally honest they are about the situation they find themselves in.

The war is lost. There is no conceivable way for things to change for the better within the next 20 to 30 years, short of a national divorce. There is no way to change hearts and minds of Republicans or the courts. There is no way to change who is in office in most states. There is no way to replace who sits on the courts quickly or change conservative disdain for stare decisis.

We’re seeing permitless concealed carry, open carry, allowances to carry in more places, ending gun-free zones, laws banning red-flag laws; all the while, the number of guns in circulation keeps rising by the millions, year after year after year. Republicans keep insisting that the solution to gun violence is more guns, and they’re going to keep going with that theory no matter what the results are.

This is a one-way ratchet: The path going forward has only one possible outcome. More guns, less regulation of their lethality, and less government authority over who owns them. 

Short of a national divorce, there is nothing that can be done at this point.

Brynn’s byline:

Brynn Tannehill is a Naval Academy graduate, former naval aviator, author, and senior defense analyst. She currently lives in Northern Virginia with her wife and three children.  

Tribe confirmed. And nothing is wrong with that.

Is she correct that the only way to move the national needle towards gun control is secession? Yes. Are the red tribers scared of that? No. Does Brynn realize that if a national divorce happens as she hopes it does, she will in fact very likely need to own a battle rifle of her own instead of relying on getting one from the Virginia National Guard depot? Unclear at this time. At the very minimum, her wife would probably need one.

But the biggest blind spot in the entire piece, antigun rhetoric aside, is the unwillingness to acknowledge why gun control lost. It wasn’t due to gerrymandering or political trickery. It was because so many people bought so many guns. The laws no longer matter. There are too many guns to seize. And the reason there are too many guns is because of the actions her own tribe took.

Their Fault (2020 edition)

They locked down the economy, and everyone bought guns.

They killed everyone’s jobs, and everyone bought guns.

They closed the schools, and everyone bought guns.

They created supply shortages of simple things like toilet paper, and everyone bought guns.

They tried to crash the meat supply by shutting down central meat packing facilities and not allowing locals to bypass FDA regulations, and everyone bought guns.

They rioted, and everyone bought guns.

They burned police stations, and everyone bought guns.

They said the police were systemically racist, and everyone bought guns.

They said they were going to defund the police, and everyone bought guns.

They said not to trust any vaccine developed by Trump, and everyone bought guns.

They set up autonomous zones where no police were allowed to go, and everyone bought guns.

They besieged federal buildings, and everyone bought guns.

They said Trump was Literally Hitler, and everyone bought guns.

They said the same vaccine which we weren’t supposed to trust a month before would be mandatory or you’d lose your job, and everyone bought guns.

2020 was one giant gun commercial. And by the time they were done, 2020 was the greatest gun buying spree in the history of a nation who already has more guns than God Himself, driven largely by first time owners, minorities, and women.

Liberals bought the guns.

And even three years later, no one single blue triber has ever yet apologized for any of their behavior in 2020. They have never admitted they were wrong about vaccine efficacy, wrong about Covid lethality, wrong about lockdown policy, wrong about masks, wrong to burn police stations, wrong to burn people’s homes and businesses, wrong to set up anarchy zones, wrong to defund police, wrong about the origins of the virus, or wrong to close schools needlessly when every other country in the world opened schools first. By refusing to apologize or acknowledge fault, they are saying loudly and proudly that they’d do it again.

And we all continue to buy even more guns because of that. The next 2020 could start tomorrow. Buy another gun.

Brynn’s Fault (2020 edition)

Brynn’s website is a very interesting window into the blue tribe blogosphere. Let’s focus specifically on her material from 2020.

She said the United States was headed for single party rule, and everyone bought guns.

She said Republicans were all fascist, and everyone bought guns.

She said Trump was building an authoritarian regime that would destroy democracy, and everyone bought guns.

She said Trump was single handedly responsible for the government bungling the Covid-19 response, and everyone bought guns.

She said that Trump would force the country into violent civil war, and everyone bought guns.

She said that QAnon was going to destroy LGBTQ rights, and everyone bought guns.

She said that American democracy is dying and that votes don’t matter, and everyone bought guns.

She literally actually said that following the constitutional rules for an electoral tie in the 2020 election would destroy democracy, and everyone bought guns.

She literally actually said that if Trump were to win, his win would be stolen, and the only recourse would be to revolt by setting up autonomous zones across the country, including multiple states seceding. And anyone, by which I mean anyone at all, who took that idea seriously did one and only one thing after reading that article. They bought guns. Not just any gun. They bought AR-15s and dozens of boxes of 556 to run through them. Brynn may have done so herself.

After spending a couple of hours on Brynn’s website, it would boggle my mind if Brynn didn’t own an AR-15 and two thousand rounds of ammo, particularly given her history as a military aviator. Why on earth would she go to such lengths to promulgate secessionist opinions from the blue side and not at least own a rifle? It’s hard to say.

My Opinion

I’m pro-gun for reasons that lay far outside the modern culture wars. I think the modern culture wars are ordinary and largely uninteresting window dressing on what’s to come once AI becomes ubiquitous and the transhumanists invent immortality for the rich. My opinions on that are weird and speculative. That’s fine.

But for a culture warrior like Brynn Tannehill to bemoan the proliferation of tactical gun ownership while she promulgates every reason she can think of to buy a tactical rifle, seems not only disingenuous to me, it seems ignorant. And as a one-cause writer, I almost feel obligated to mail her a fruit basket for her overall efforts to increase gun ownership in the United States. Perhaps she can share the fruit basket with all the rest of the blues who made 2020 such a success for gun culture.

Or maybe I’ll mail her a can of ammo.

buy Brynn a fruit basket

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…and its companion article:

https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/06/politics/america-mass-shootings-2023-gun-violence/index.html

…to explain in clear terms the many layers of lies that the media and the antigun activists are telling, some unwittingly and some intentionally, so we can see how those layers interact. Let’s begin.

“Mass Shooting” Semantic Fuckery

When muggles read the tweet talking about “mass shootings” they think “random spree shootings.” Their minds go back to the last bombardment of media coverage of the last spree shooting, and they are aghast that there have been 100 of them. They never open the article or read the definition of mass shooting. Here’s the definition they use:

America reached the grim number by the first week of March – record time, according to data from the Gun Violence Archive, which, like CNN, defines a mass shooting as one in which at least four people are shot, excluding the shooter.

Let’s look at the most recent mass shooting according to CNN’s graphic.

Three adults and one child caught bullets in a Memphis ghetto during a drive-by or similar, and all were in stable condition at various hospitals. Nothing like the horrific spree shootings. Certainly terrible for all involved, but it’s the sort of thing that plays out on local news every day that everyone in the country regularly ignores. Gun Violence Archive sets the bar in such a way that it will go up and down with the rates of generic violence, because it’s literally just measuring generic violence.

The first layer of the lie is they bait and switch you with the definitions.

Rigging the Clock

This is the fastest we've reached this grim milestone since @GunDeaths started tracking the data in 2014.

The year of our lord two thousand fourteen. What a convenient time to start the clock. Despite what the media tried to make you believe in the twenty teens, 2014 had the lowest murder rate since 1963. It was a historic minima.

There have only been six years in the past century where the USA had a lower murder rate than 2014. The last time we had a rate as low as 2014 was the same year NASA was doing Project Mercury.

Let’s see how the first two lies fit together. First, they index something that has nothing to do with spree killings and instead is a measuring stick for ordinary violent crime. Next, they don’t bother to start their accounting for that measure during the prohibition era, nor the rise of the cocaine in the 1970s, nor the crack epidemic in the 80s and 90s, but instead they only start the clock when the USA was in a historic murder low, to ensure that their faked up measure is “on the rise.”

2020

I do not like cops. I do not own a Thin Blue Line flag. I don’t donate to FOP. Fifty percent of my experiences with police officers have been displeasing. But I’m not stupid, and I know that there are measurable reductions in crime associated with increased police presence, which means there stand to be measurable increases in crime associated with decreased police presence, especially in inner cities where most of the “mass shootings” transpire.

I’m also not blind, so when the George Floyd riots happened in 2020, and everyone in major cities started flying “All Cops Are Bastards” flags, I knew that was going to reduce police staffing. We saw a drop in total police staffing of 1.75% in 2020, and another 1.76% in 2021.

Being a gun-adjacent writer, I talk with folks who hang out with cops and they pass the stories back to me. They said in 2020 many of the cops who didn’t quit their jobs simply quit policing in dangerous areas. The fear that they would get caught on YouTube doing their job, and then get fired from their job for doing their job, led them to the conclusion that they should just quit doing their job in areas where they might lose their job for doing it.

Which meant they intentionally reduced or ceased entirely policing in black areas. 911 calls might just not get answered. Because of ACAB. There is no doubt in my mind that that’s the largest contributor for the overall rise in crime, including murder, in 2020 and 2021. The numbers predict it. And the gun-controllers are the same people who carried the ACAB flags and burnt buildings in 2020.

These same gun-controllers want to blame the 2020 gun buying spree for the crime, as if the toilet paper hoarding Covid Karens are behind the “mass shootings,” or the ordinary and reasonable black folks afraid of dirty cops are behind the “mass shootings,” or the white suburbanites afraid of Defund The Police are behind the “mass shootings,” or the political wonks afraid that Trump would win, or Biden would win, are behind the “mass shootings.” Those are the groups who bought guns in 2020. The groups doing the shooting are the criminals, who either already had guns or picked them up on the black market they day they needed them.

Now let’s see how all three of these lies fit together.

The gun-controllers intentionally riot and degrade the police force, which increases crime relative to historic lows, which they map over to “mass shootings,” which they trick people into believing are spree shootings, which they blame on guns.

Neat trick, huh?

watch me pull a rabbit out of a hat

No Correlation

As readers of HWFO since its inception in 2018 already know, there’s no bivariate correlation between gun ownership rate and gun homicide rate, because the USA is so far beyond the saturation point that adding or subtracting a few million guns from our 400 million total no longer matters.

As HWFO readers know, even if you make the most generous assumptions possible to the gun control side, you’d have to buy back 86 million dollars worth of guns to avert one homicide - probably a lot more. As HWFO readers already know, the gun-controllers constantly hide suicides in the numbers to inflate them, creating fake correlations which aren’t there, and many gun control laws actually impede gun owners from taking the actions necessary to reduce their own suicide rate. And what does CNN do with this? It’s laughable.

Mental health challenges grew throughout the pandemic and violence increased, but an analysis from researchers at Johns Hopkins University found that guns made those incidences significantly more deadly. Between 2019 and 2021, all of the increase in suicides and most of the increase in homicides was from gun-related incidences. The gun suicide rate increased 10% while the non-gun suicide rate decreased.

Of course gun suicide rate went up and non-gun suicide rate went down. More people had guns available because they bought them during the riots. Non-gun suicides converted to gun suicides for the folks who bought guns, and they bought guns because of the lockdowns and ACAB.

That CNN poll, which was conducted a few weeks after the mass shootings at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, and at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, found that 58% of Americans believed stricter gun control laws would reduce the number of gun-related deaths in the country.

As HWFO readers know, CNN’s very behavior partially caused the Uvalde shooting because of CNN’s Buffalo New York coverage. Science shows that media behavior creates mass shooter copy cats, increasing the net number of true spree killings by 30%. As HWFO readers know, CNN avoided referencing the Greenwood Park Mall shooting because they don’t want anyone to realize that shootings ended by concealed carrying bystanders have 12 fewer victims on average. The Greenwood Park Mall shooting, for what it’s worth, didn’t make it into the “mass shooting” database even though it was a true attempt at a spree killing, because the shooter only managed to kill three people.

And the biggest reason CNN peddles the lie is right in the article:

Democratic Rep. Maxwell Frost of Florida, the first member of Generation Z elected to Congress, centered his 2022 campaign on ending gun violence in the US, finding support among young voters who grew up as part of the “mass shooting generation,” as he calls it.

“We’ve seen these things and been wondering our whole lives as young people, in high school, middle school and elementary school, why? Why is this happening? Why have we not fixed this? And now we’re at a place where we can vote and we can run, and we’re going to do it,” Frost said when he won the Democratic nomination.

As a member of Generation X, I was in high school when the violent crime rate, and therefore “mass shooter” rate as defined, was double what it was when Maxwell Frost was in high school. He’s not in “mass shooting generation” because of the number of mass shootings. He’s in “mass shooting generation” because CNN.com makes money, increases crime, and increases mass shootings themselves, by lying.

He’s in “mass shooting generation” because he believes them.

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Let’s pause here for a second.

I opened with the question “what race are mass shooters predominantly?” It answered “white male.” This was correct based on a narrow definition of mass shooting, but not at all correct based on the definition the anti-gun journos and gun control activists are use on Twitter and the blue media to try and drum up fear about guns.

I asked it some tough questions about inner city violence, and the definitions of “mass shooting,” and it admitted that black shooters are responsible for more incidents in which four or more people are killed.

Then, towards the bottom, I asked it the very same question I started with and it changed its answer. It didn’t give the correct answer (black males) but it did at least choose not to give the wrong answer (white males). Instead it dodged the question.

I don’t know if ChatGPT is intelligent, but the fact that it changed its answer at all is indicative that it is already more intelligent than most blue tribe journalists that currently write anti-gun articles.

So I figured I’d close out with one more question.

And there you have it. Not only is ChatGPT smarter than them, it knows why they won’t change their minds on the subject either.

It seems to me that one very interesting thing to do in the next few days might be to run this same line of inquiry against anti-gun attentions seeking journalists on Twitter and directly test whether they’re dumber than a robot.

And then perhaps get Jeff Foxworthy on the phone.

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Approximate AR-15 Homicide Deaths

Unfortunately the FBI changed the tracking rules in 2020, leading a lot of local jurisdictions to quit sending in their reports, so the last good year for which we have quality “murder circumstances” data is 2019. While the FBI did break these down by weapon type, they didn’t differentiate between AR-15s or similarly patterned rifles, and grandpa’s bolt action deer rifle. All told, in 2019 there were 364 rifle murders, out of a total of 10,258 firearm murders, accounting for approximately 3.5% of total firearm murders. Nobody uses rifles to murder people because they’re big, bulky, difficult to conceal, and a handgun can do the job just as well.

But that’s all rifles, not specifically AR-15s. What percentage of all privately owned rifles are semiautomatic with detachable box magazines, what the NSSF calls Modern Sporting Rifles and the gun controllers call Assault Weapons? It’s hard to say.

According to NSSF estimates, there are approximately 24.4 million MSRs in circulation today. That’s quite a lot, accounting for around 6% of all privately owned firearms in the country. They’re very common. How many total rifles are there? I can’t find a clean estimate. The NSSF probably knows, but I can’t find any published data on the subject more recent than 2009, where Gunpolicy.org estimates that there were 110 million total rifles out of 310 million total guns at that time. In 2009, 35% of all firearms in private domestic circulation were some kind of rifle. If we presume the ratio today stays the same, then we should have around 150 million rifles in 2019, meaning 16% of all rifles at that snapshot in time were AR-15s or similar.

How many of those 364 rifle murders were from AR-15s or similar? If we presume rifle murders are evenly distributed among rifles owned, we get 60 murders with a MSR / “Assault Weapon.” I don’t know of a better way to do it. Even if the rates were double an even distribution, it’s still only 120 murders. How do we visualize 60 murders in a country of 340 million people?

Visualization

We can get a better understanding of how rare these “AR-15 murders” are if we compare our estimate of “AR-15 murders” against other extremely rare sources of death. Here’s a visualization, with sources.

AR-15 murders are somewhere between “Death By Bucket” and “Death By Lawnmower” in the United States. They’re a little bit more common than getting struck by lightning, a little over half as common as “Death By Bees,” and less than a tenth as likely as “Death By Falling Out Of Bed.” Over twice as many people kill themselves during masturbation as die from AR-15 murders, and triple the number of people die by hitting errant deer with their cars at night as are murdered by AR-15. Feel free to check the sources, they’re in the graph. I have never yet heard a politician claim we were experiencing an Epidemic of Death By Lawnmower.

These weapons are mindbogglingly safe. We have over 24 million of them in circulation, and only 60 deaths a year. This has to be one of the safest consumer products in the marketplace. Way safer than cars.

buy the author a mindbogglingly safe gun

Cars

Cars are a good comparison because most of us have one, some of us have several, and nobody claims that we are living in an epidemic of car deaths. We use them all the time, and if “blaming the object for the death” is on the table then comparisons to other objects are also on the table.

There were 24.4 million MSRs / “Assault Weapons” in circulation in 2020, and 60 murders per year. That means there are 0.0000025 murders per gun, or stated another way, there is only one AR-15 murder for every four hundred thousand AR-15s in circulation.

There were 286,900,000 cars in 2020, and 38,824 motor vehicle deaths in 2020. There are therefore 0.000135 deaths per car, or stated another way, one death for every 7,390 cars.

Any given AR-15 is fifty five times less likely to be involved with killing someone than your car.

Actual Epidemics

We can also redo the first chart to include things that people should actually be worried about, instead of bees and buckets and beds.

Nobody talks about all-method suicide, and they pretend that suicide isn’t the main driver of gun deaths because doing so fits their agenda. They definitely never mention that seven out of eight firearm suicides are men. Nobody talks about obesity unless it’s to praise obese celebrities and attempt to normalize it. They spend more time talking about vaping than smoking even though vaping is 95% safer and probably the most robust way to reduce smoking deaths. They do at least talk a little about cancer.

Which of these did Biden talk about in the State of the Union speech last night? Not cancer. Certainly not obesity. Definitely not suicide. Bees? Ladders?

He talked about the one between “Death by Lawnmower” and “Death by Bucket.”

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But if you wanted to simply beat someone to death on Twitter with irrefutable math, here’s how you’d do it.

The Opener

This is how basically all modern anti-gun people open the discussion.

On HWFO we always respond with this.

From here we go different directions depending on how they respond. Rocky Mountain Views was kind enough to go many different directions at the same time, allowing us to showcase many of the different argument branches.

Path 1: Doubling down on “if no guns.”

There’s not any real direction we can go from here except to repost the fact that there is no magic gun evaporation fairy, or post the link (below) to the firearms ownership visualization article.

Path 2: Other Countries

This is part two of a two part response. Either you go with “there is no magic gun evaporation fairy” which means that comparisons to other countries literally don’t matter, or you go with the “guns are the bulwark against tyranny” argument, where you put them on their heels repeatedly pointing out what a shithole Europe actually is when it comes to gun deaths (if we also include genocide as a gun death). Or, perhaps, go with both.

Path 3: The self righteousness of not owning a gun.

Here you ask them to actually read the article linked, since it literally talks about that, and see what they do.

Path 4: Yes but suicide is bad.

We obviously can’t go any further from here, but if his response was more on-topic you’d also point out that gun control laws don’t have any impact on suicide, on a multivariate analysis, using this link.

Path 5: I just hate guns

We obviously can’t go any further from here.

Rocky Mountain News then blocked me so I couldn’t run any more argument trees off of him, but let’s highlight one more from the past few days.

buy the author a rocky mtn trip

Weaker Gun Laws create more gun deaths

Note the weaseling in the headline. It’s phrased as if there’s an association with higher rates of both homicide and suicide, but that’s not true. There’s an association with higher rates of [homicide+suicide]. In other words, it’s the same old trick yet again. So open with pointing that out.

To be explicitly clear, Everytown’s analysis actually showed that areas with more gun ownership vote for fewer gun control laws. And areas with higher gun ownership have higher rates of gun suicide and lower rates of suicide by other means, since guns are a very convenient way of committing suicide. The causality chain is backwards.

This is a pretty unhinged response from someone who’s bio claims to be Folio Award Winner. Let’s see where this goes.

Poisoning the well fallacies are apparently all you need to win a Folio Award nowadays.

At this point we could go back to the beginning, since this entire thread was spawned off of the “everyone’s lying about the relationship between gun ownership and gun homicide” article, but that would just be circular woozling.

You’ll notice a theme at this point. When you hold someone’s hand and carry them to the mathematics, they attack your value as a person because it’s all they have left to attack.

But Spree Shooters

Any time spree shooters come up, run these three in succession.

Reduce the incidence of spree shooters by 30% by making it illegal to carry them in major media outlets. Reduce the body count by 79% by going nationwide constitutional carry and getting as many people to carry concealed as possible, so there’s always someone on site ready to return fire. Now the anti-gun crowd may not like those two things, for various reasons, but those are the two things that would help.

This post is already too long for email so we’re going to cut it off here.

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We’re going to tear this tweet apart brick by brick, leaving it a heap of smoldering mathematical rubble, because that’s just how we roll around here. Then we’re going to talk about the side benefits of nuking US cities for fun and profit.

Let’s begin.

Data Check

6,919 civilians killed in Ukraine is both wrong and low. It comes from the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. It’s wrong because it was updated to 7,068 confirmed killed on January 23rd of this year, and it’s low because it’s a confirmed killed number, and it’s very difficult to confirm every civilian casualty in an active war zone. Nobody uses “confirmed killed” numbers when talking about wars unless they’re trying to downplay the civilian casualties for some reason. The Ukrainian government estimates 33,681 killed, including 25,000 in the siege of Maruipol itself, for which no “confirmations” can even be made because of the nature of the siege. Lie number one.

20,138 gun deaths excluding suicide is a number from the Gun Violence Archive, which is notorious for cooking their books. First, this number includes cases of legitimate defensive gun use and of police use, which should be stripped out. Second, the last year for which verified data is available is 2020, which had 19,384 gun homicides. I find it hard to believe that 2022 had more homicides than the Floyd Protest Summer of Love did, but let’s move forward with the Gun Violence Archive’s number as if it’s correct just for the sake of argument.

Per Capita

The first thing someone who isn’t lying must do with these two numbers, is calculate a death rate from them. The USA is far bigger than the Ukraine, so these numbers must be normalized against total population. When we do that, here’s what we get:

The Ukraine civilian casualty rate is 12.7 times higher than the USA gun homicide rate. But that’s not even a fair comparison either, because some of the gun homicides in the USA are combatants. These two bars compare innocent bystanders in the Ukraine against gang members intentionally trying to shoot each other in the USA. There’s no good way to know how many of the USA numbers come from shootouts between armed opponents (e.g. literal combatants) but the absolute floor is around 15%, which is the usual rate of known gang crime. If we correct for that, the ratio is closer to 15:1. Maybe higher. Lie number two.

Counterfactuals

I just got back from SHOT Show 2023 in Las Vegas this past weekend, the world’s largest firearms conference, and much of the buzz on the floor was about how Eastern Europe is pivoting at light speed towards civilian rifle ownership because of the war in Ukraine. Everyone can see on the ground that while Ukraine’s army is doing quite well, they are not entrusted with keeping villages safe. Their attention is fully on the front lines of that war. If a village wants to keep itself safe, they need rifles too, and they don’t have them. Poland sees this, Lithuania sees this, and every citizen on the border with Russia is arming up. Simply put, there is a significant case to be made that if Ukraine had more civilian guns they’d have less civilian war casualties. They seem to think so, at least, and I’m not one to put words in their mouth.

buy a Ukrainian a rifle

HWFO has made a similar case to this before, when comparing rates of US homicide death to rates of European genocide death.

Handwaving Freakoutery

Weighing US Homicide Rates vs European Genocide Rates

Lots of people across the social media landscape in the wake of the Uvalde school shooting are talking about banning semi-auto firearms in the United States. No serious policy maker has brought this …

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4 years ago · 30 likes · 40 comments · Handwaving Freakoutery

What we discovered there, was that the net difference in homicide deaths between the USA and Europe was 14 times smaller than the annual expected value of European genocide deaths, corrected to match the US population. Go back to the other article and check the math if you like. Europe is a genocidal shithole.

That’s a curiously similar result to the Ukraine civilian casualty ratio, don’t you think? 12:1, 14:1. 15:1, these are large numbers of dead people happening in areas without a lot of guns.

But the anti-gun crowd loves Europe, shithole genocide and all, so maybe they’re okay with genocide as a policy. Let’s play with that for a second, and see what they could do, genocide-wise, to solve the homicide problem in the USA.

Genocide to Solve Homicide

Since the anti-gun crowd is continually okay with eliminating the only bulwark against genocide in the United States, in a drive to make us more like Europe where genocide is commonplace, let’s unpack how they could just skip to the end and use genocide as a tool to reduce gun homicide here. It’s really pretty simple. Start nuking cities. The following table is built from 2019 data:

From the prior article, the expected value of annual genocide death due to European policy choices is, when corrected to match US population totals, around 95,000 per year. Year one you drop a nuke on St. Louis and reduce the overall murder rate by 1%, then year four you drop a nuke on Baltimore, and the net murder rate goes down 3%. Every few years drop another nuke, in keeping with the expected value of genocide death due to Euro style policy, and you eventually get all the way down to significant homicide reductions. It’s really pretty easy, once you decide that the only remaining bulwark against genocide isn’t important.

Conclusions

Mathematics seems to indicate the following:

1. No, we do not currently live in a warzone,

2. Converting US gun policy to match European gun policy would, in fact, convert us into a war zone,

3. If we wanted to skip to the end, we could just nuke our own cities and get the same benefits the anti-gun left want, since genocide appears to be okay from their point of view.

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To hear Sarah tell it, German Pringles tasted totally different than American Pringles because every ingredient in American Pringles is banned in Europe. I couldn’t tell you as I don’t speak German, but it seems to me they must have discovered a combination of chemicals just as perfectly awful and identically tasting.  

Sarah hated her countrymen because Germans don’t tip, among other general symptoms of what she believed to be a larger overall problem with the Kraut social zeitgeist. She lived outside of Ramstein Air Base and had quite a few American friends. Spent all her vacation flying to and from the states.

“We don’t have guns in Germany because we don’t need them, but if I lived here I’d have them because everyone else has them too.” I’d argue they do need them, of course, but at least she understands Game Theory Nash Equilibria better than half of Americans. She’ll fit in fine once she finally gets knocked up by a jarhead.

The next morning I don a partially camo Polo pullover, carefully chosen to exact the appropriate social signals. Not poor. Not interested in pretending to be rich. ‘Merica. Accessorized by a press badge that says “RECOIL.” My “signal false importance through appearance” game today is strong.

Mexican twins in their 50s run the Bally’s lobby coffee stand. I’m sure their story is every bit as intriguing as last night’s Uber driver. Everyone in Vegas has a story. Uber driver’s been in Vegas 28 years, moved from California just like everyone else around here. Moved because of the cost of living, just like everyone else around here. Frustrated about all the new Californians moving in driving up the cost of living. Just like everyone else around here. It’s not that Vegas is great, it’s that it’s no worse than California and California costs four times as much to live in. I make my twentieth mental note not to move to California.

The morning at Range Day starts with a ride in the most SHOT Show vehicle ever conceived, driven by my buddy Tom, Archmage Emeritus of The Firearm Blog. The interior gives me Millennium Falcon flashbacks. We stop to take occasional photos of dwindling Lake Mead and of anti-gun virtue signalers carpeting the route to the outdoor range with political signage soon to turn to unprocessed litter debris, protean signals tumbling like tumble weeds, lodged by the desert wind in some Bureau of Land Management scree pile at the base of the River Mountains. Liberals never clean up their trash.

I ride Tom’s coat tails through early check in despite being on a media pass because I’m “part of his crew,” which it turns out entails moving a folding table five feet and putting a tablecloth on it. TFB isn’t doing anything interesting at Range Day this year, but everyone thanks them because they provide the free WIFI. I wonder if they do it because Tom doesn’t trust anyone else to do it right.

buy the author sponsorship on toms truck

An exercise in curious desert weather ensues, the morning hours sustaining twenty mile per hour cross winds bracketed by rain showers. I shoot guns. Practice AR-15 transitions with some outfit that makes fully ambidextrous lowers. Dick around with some belt fed fully auto stuff. Ding a gong at 1000 yards on the Rise Armaments trigger group despite the cross winds, settling solidly on my next Gucci rifle purchase.

My daughter calls me to say a hawk went after one of my chickens. Buy some bad food truck spring rolls and catch a bus full of media Fudds back to the Venetian before the lightning starts.

I’m pretty sure nobody from Venice works here. I’m not convinced the architects ever visited either.

The Venetian is a microcosm of Vegas itself. It’s overpriced, lowest common denominator kitsch. Shopping malls with hotel rooms slapped on top, dressed up as resorts, the only design consideration being to vacuum up as much money as possible from a continual stream of low-grade suckers, and the suckers stand in line for it because they love their money to be vacuumed. But it’s cheap to throw a convention here, so the suckers keep flying in and lining up.

Hunter S. Thompson won’t leave my mind since the flight. I dwell on Fear and Loathing. Is the town he saw then still here now, somewhere under the stucco? If I were to take a splitting maul to the pressboard walls downstairs at the Bally’s casino, would I find the secret underbelly of beautifully corrupt True Las Vegas? Crawl through an Alice in Wonderland axe hole and find this town’s soul, long since papered over with teardowns and remodels and land development deals? Were Hunter alive today, could he carry me off on a tour through the rabbit hole to see what he saw, or would he bemoan that the city has lost it’s Fear and Loathing? If he were, would I follow him through the looking glass or would I chicken out? I’ve got two kids and a job. And chickens. At least for now. Maybe the reason Las Vegas seems soul bereft is I’m too busy or too afraid to find it. If I did, what would it be?

Oh.

Right.

It’d be the Crye Precision party.

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