A real Rolex Submariner retails for $10,050. The super clone costs $500. Some of the real Rolex’s 20x premium is explained by brand value and the fact that people like to know they own the real thing. But a lot of it is explained by the fact that Chinese manufacturing is extremely good. There is no manufacturing industry better at turning out high quality at low prices really quickly, at worldwide scale.

$500 happens to be the price of a Glock 17. What is simpler to manufacture: a pistol with 34 parts (most of which are either plastic or sheet metal), or a fake Rolex so good that you’d need a professional with a jeweler’s loupe to identify it? The gun, of course. It follows then that if the fake Rolex costs $500, the gun could cost, what, $100-150? So why doesn’t it?

Crossing a national border with a gun is hard, and selling a gun across a border is even harder. Rolex super clones are cheap because there’s a worldwide competition driving the price down. Money flows to whoever figures out how to make better watches for less, no matter where in the world they are. Guns are somewhat insulated from that because of import and export controls. By and large, guns sold in the US are made in the US, some European countries, Turkey, and a smattering of other places. Neither the Chinese nor US government would allow a Chinese factory to sell guns en masse to Americans, but if they did, the price of a Guangdong Glock would quickly converge to the cost of the raw materials.

Trade law is outside the scope of this newsletter. But whatever one thinks about rules on international trade, we all want guns to be higher quality and less expensive. Getting there is going to require more manufacturing innovation, whether that’s in the US or abroad. The American manufacturing push of the past few years has been good for competition. It would be cool to see that same spirit lead to some advances in the way guns are made.

This week’s links

Jeff Asher on 2025’s record-low murder rate

Jeff-alytics

Summarizing a Historic 2025 Crime Report with Charts & Tables

The FBI released its 2025 Crime in the United States report on a Friday afternoon which wasn’t there fault but also was super great for getting a ton of attention on the fact that murder fell at the fastest pace ever recorded to the lowest rate recorded since the FBI started its modern estimates…

Read more

8 days ago · 17 likes · 3 comments · Jeff Asher

Private air defense in Ukraine

Via Hoffnung in our Discord. “Ukraine's public-private hybrid air defense system and its growing pains.”

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1. On August 5, a federal district court judge in the northern district of Texas struck down the National Firearms Act with respect to items whose tax stamp is priced at $0. That covers silencers, short-barreled rifles and shotguns, and any-other-weapons. Congress lowered the price of the tax stamp on those items to $0 last year, and Judge Hendrix found that “because today’s NFA does not generate any revenue from untaxed firearms, its regulatory provisions cannot be upheld under the taxing power.”

2. This decision enjoined the federal government from enforcing the NFA with respect to the relevant items. But Judge Hendrix stayed the injunction for one week, to give the government time to appeal.

3. The government did not file its appeal within the week, so the injunction went into effect on August 13.

4. At 12:01 a.m. on August 13, Silencer Shop sold silencers to Brandon Herrera and Wes Virdell without filing the typically-required tax stamp paperwork.

The situation since then is complicated:

• Judge Hendrix’s injunction is in effect, but only with respect to the members or customers of the lawsuit’s plaintiffs. The Reload helpfully compiled a list of the organizations who are plaintiffs in the suit: Gun Owners of America, Gun Owners Foundation, the Silencer Shop Foundation, the Firearms Regulatory Accountability Coalition, the Texas State Rifle Association (the NRA’s state affiliate), the FPC Action Foundation, and the Citizens Committee For The Right To Keep And Bear Arms. The commercial plaintiffs are Silencer Shop, SilencerCo, Palmetto State Armory, B&T USA, and Hot Shots Custom.

• The ruling doesn’t affect any state laws, many of which require NFA items to go through the federal process. But the specifics vary dramatically between states. For example:

  • North Dakota says that a person may not possess a silencer “or any other federally licensed firearm or dangerous weapon unless that person has complied with the National Firearms Act”.

  • Oregon makes federal registration an affirmative defense to state-level prosecution.

  • Ohio’s ban on NFA items specifically exempts those registered in the National Firearms Registration and Transfer Record, the ATF’s registry of NFA items.

• Gun shops are subject to their own, less-well-known process around transferring NFA items between each other and to customers, and it’s very unclear how (or whether) that is affected by the injunction.

• All of this is predicated on the price of a tax stamp being $0. A future Congress could take a simple-majority vote to increase the price of tax stamps and undercut the logic of Judge Hendrix’s ruling. A future ATF could also suddenly decide to prosecute gray zone situations that the current ATF declined to prosecute.

The net result is that it’s hard for a regular gun buyer to know if they’re in the clear to buy or make silencers or SBRs without a tax stamp. It’s even harder for gun shops. And if they’re in the clear today, will they stay that way when a less friendly ATF is back in town? So a lot of people are taking a wait-and-see approach. For most, that’s the legally wise thing to do. The ones forging ahead are taking a risk, but think of that as a pro-social act of service:

[The principled refusal to comply with an unjust law is] controversial, because it requires people to hold two somewhat dissonant ideas at the same time:

1. It’s socially valuable to have people publicly not complying with unjust laws.

2. It’s individually costly to not comply.

This is really just a specific instance of the general concept of sacrifice. In economic terms, the name for this is “positive externalities” — an individual’s private choices creating benefits for uninvolved third parties.

The cognitive dissonance comes from the fact that while someone may recognize the social value of civil disobedience, they might not be willing to personally bear the risks of delivering that value. That’s uncomfortable, and potentially even shameful. And as each person in a community navigates that internal discomfort, they each find their own personal risk tolerance threshold. When people with different thresholds try to decide whose threshold is “right”, an argument happens.

And you know what? That’s fine. It’s good, even. People with high risk tolerance forge a path. That’s awesome. Some will pay off and some won’t. That is a discovery process to efficiently identify the best paths forward. People with low risk tolerance will fall in once effective paths are mapped. And sure, it’d be better to have more support earlier, but the other side of that coin is that people need to pick their battles. They can’t sustainably pick fights they’re guaranteed to lose.

So the optimal community-level strategy is that each person picks the (metaphorical) battle where they personally are going to be effective.

This is all happening in the midst of an unprecedented loosening of restrictions on gun rights in the US. Shall-issue concealed carry is now the law of the land. National registration of silencers and SBRs is on the way out. And by next July, the Supreme Court will probably rule that assault weapons bans are unconstitutional.

Imagine a 2D matrix of gun laws, with one axis labeled chaotic-orderly and the other labeled restrictive-permissive. That creates four possible scenarios.

1. Chaotic-restrictive: This is the situation in most third-world countries. Guns are nominally banned or heavily restricted, but also freely available to anybody with the right connections.

2. Chaotic-permissive: This is the current situation for silencers and SBRs in the US. Access is much freer than it used to be, but it’s hard to know exactly how, and the rules can change without warning.

3. Orderly-restrictive: Most wealthy countries live in this quadrant, including the US.

4. Orderly-permissive: The aspirational target.

The federal government seems to be engineering its own loss in the case that Judge Hendrix ruled in. That’s good, but the way they’ve gone about it so far has put the country in quadrant 2. Hopefully they’re working on moving quickly to quadrant 4.

This week’s links

New York Times profile of Jordan Salinas

The Times’s gun coverage continues to be very good. Archive link for those without subscriptions.

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How does that work?

In 1903, Congress was busy about the militia. The US was four years out of the Spanish-American War, America’s first major overseas war, and the government realized that if it wanted to field a worldwide military, it would need to level up its logistics and mobilization. In 1903, Congress created the modern National Guard structure, and it also authorized the War Department to set up the National Board for the Promotion of Rifle Practice. The animating spirit behind that is captured in a 1903 report by Rep. Butler Ames, a member of the House Committee on the Militia (PDF):

The inception of the national board for the promotion of rifle practice and the idea of a national trophy and other prizes had its origin in the minds of some of our most distinguished rifle shots, who, with the honorable the Secretary of War, hoped thereby to awaken the interest of the civilian element of the country to the vital importance of some instruction in rifle practice. It is contemplated that this board will make general recommendations relative to rifle shooting between the Army, Navy, Marine Corps, National Guard, and civilian rifle clubs in various parts of the country; that it will endeavor to harmonize the practice of the National Guard with the Regular Army; that it will aid in making mutually beneficial the contemplated competitions between the Regular Army and the National Guard, and that it will stimulate the formation of civilian rifle clubs, and thus aid arresting the decadence of general shooting throughout the United States.

The following is an extract from the report of the Secretary of War on this subject:

Formerly, when our population was scattered and game abundant in all parts of the country, every house had its rifle or its shotgun and every boy learned to shoot them. Now it is probable that a majority of the young men in the thickly settled parts of the country have never fired a gun and would be quite harmless to an enemy until taught to shoot. The time to give that instruction is now.

The NBPRP started setting up rifle instruction and competitions, and selling some Army guns to the general public. In 1916, Director of Civilian Marksmanship became a new position overseeing the NBPRP.

The program ran like that for 80 years, and it was small but untouchable. In the same Gun Control Act of 1968 whose central focus was banning mail-order firearm sales, Congress specifically exempted the NBPRP, allowing the program to keep sending guns directly to buyers.

In May 1990, the Government Accountability Office, the government’s internal auditor, released a report titled “Military Preparedness: Army’s Civilian Marksmanship Program is of Limited Value”. The title says it all. The Army was spending $4.3 million annually on an Age of Steam program to sell (as of 1989) 6000 M1 Garands and about 1.6 million rounds of ammo. That’s the first thing you’re going to cut if you’re looking to streamline the Army. It was politically impossible to end the program altogether, but they wanted it off of the Army’s books.

So a streamlined six years later, in 1996, Congress privatized the program. It created the Corporation for the Promotion of Rifle Practice and Firearms Safety, Inc., a private nonprofit organization colloquially known as the Civilian Marksmanship Program. It added a carveout to the Gun Control Act to allow the CMP to continue mailing guns to customers, a power no other private organization has. And it directed the military to continue to transfer old surplus guns to the CMP.

There are a few ongoing quirks:

• You may recall that a few years ago, the CMP started selling 1911 pistols. That was specifically authorized by Congress in 2015. Previously, the law had only allowed the CMP to sell “caliber .22 rimfire and caliber .30 rifles”.

• For 1911s, the CMP is not exempt from the ban on mail-order guns. You have to go to an FFL to pick up your CMP 1911.

• In almost all cases, the ATF maintains that if a gun was once a machine gun, it is always a machine gun. The M14s that are going to be sold through the CMP were machine guns, but the CMP is modifying them to semi-auto only, and the ATF has been persuaded to let it slide in this case. Senator Cynthia Lummis appears to have worked behind the scenes to make that happen.

• The 2025 National Defense Authorization Act added surplus pump-action shotguns to the list of guns the CMP can sell.

• The guns are technically still owned by the military until the moment before the buyer receives them. So legally, the CMP is a government-authorized drop shipper of surplus guns.

The CMP is still the best way to buy an M1 Garand, and soon it’ll be the best way to buy an M14. Check them out.

This week’s links

Breakdown of the federal district court ruling striking down the NFA for suppressors, short-barreled rifles, and AOWs

Good breakdown of the situation from T.Rex Arms.

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The centralization is the central point. Flock, to their credit, has been in the arena and has been forceful in making their case (their chief strategy officer did a Q&A on X recently), but ultimately their answer to “What about abuse of the system” is:

1. The system creates a papertrail to enable audits, and

2. It’s not up to tech companies to decide what powers government has. It’s up to voters.

Both of those reflect a naive view of what keeps society free.

A papertrail is important, but it’s not a safeguard. It’s an after-the-fact investigative tool. And the surveillance culture that people worry about — i.e. a culture where abuses are common — is exactly the type of culture that won’t investigate abuses. So a papertrail is like a fire department that only puts out small fires. It’s useless for the cases when you need it the most.

Explanation #2, the one about deferring to the democratic process, sounds like humility, but it’s really a form of totalitarianism. Through their private choices, companies should and do put limits on the government, and that’s a key safeguard of the American system. The idea that private individuals should deliver up their moral and contractual choices to the government is the idea that that government (euphemized as “the democratic process”) should reach into all corners of society. Isaac Botkin covered this back in 2022, in a podcast episode called “Putting the ‘Total’ in Totalitarianism”:

The textbook definition is usually this idea that totalitarianism is when one person or one party has control of the government. But that doesn’t actually hold up. A state can be assumed to have total authority over the lives of its citizens even if it is run by multiple parties or by bureaucrats, as is often the case. Totalitarianism is when the state itself has unlimited jurisdiction — when it can control the totality of life. Obviously there will always be physical limits to a state’s power, but totalitarianism is when there are no limits to the scope of its authority.

We also talked about it in OSD 359:

Government competence is the idea that when you interact with the government, it shouldn’t suck. Government empowerment is the idea that when you interact with the government, it shouldn’t end. People think totalitarianism means dictatorship, but really what it means is a totalizing state. A state involved in everything. A non-totalitarian state is one where people don’t think about the government.

What keeps society free is millions of people making their own individual choices about what to do. That includes sometimes helping the government, sometimes being indifferent to it, sometimes thwarting it, and sometimes changing your mind unpredictably. That creates a mess. Messes are hard to organize, and systems are hard to organize are hard to abuse.

Flock-type technology can be useful. Police should have modern tools, and it’s beyond dispute that Flock & co help solve crimes that would never have been solved before. But the question is how to get the benefits without incurring the downsides, and there isn’t much evidence that Flock has thought deeply enough about that.

This is something that gun rights people think about all the time, and the answer always comes back to decentralization. Dangerously powerful tech tends to work out great, as long as it’s not in one set of hands.

This week’s links

EVject

In an emergency, this breakaway adapter lets you to drive your electric vehicle away while the charging cable is still attached.

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We covered this back in 2024, in a piece about the still-hot topic of laws restricting AI development:

Heller imposed a “common use” test, saying that a gun law is unconstitutional when it affects guns that are in common use for lawful purposes. Bruen enshrined a similar test, saying that gun laws must be grounded in the “text, history, and tradition” of the country — i.e. the law stands if it has an analog in the nation’s text, history, or tradition.

What both of those do is freeze in amber the technology at time time the standard is set. It then becomes very hard to make fundamentally new technology (e.g. to explore fire-by-wire to its fullest promise) or to strike down bad laws that fell into the amber before it hardened.

Something to think about in future court cases. Bruen was a big win. But it puts into perspective how much gun regulation is already on the books — the legal standard that gun rights advocates were overjoyed to see imposed is the very same legal standard that tech folks realize would be catastrophic for innovation if applied to AI.

The logical conclusion is that the laws on the books today have hobbled gun innovation so deeply that we don’t even realize we’re missing out.

With Anthropic tacitly endorsing the latest government trial balloon about restricting access to powerful AI models, this is a good time to consider the parallels to gun laws. We can go through proposed AI restrictions one by one.

• Limits on training runs. These are assault weapons bans. The idea is that some guns (or models) are so dangerous that only the government can be trusted with them.

• KYC laws. The analogue here is the federal background check required when you buy a gun in a gun shop. But in the case of AI, it would be like your gun ran a new check on you each time you picked it up, and it could turn itself off for you any time the government or manufacturer told it to.

• Import controls, or restrictions on access to models developed outside the US. This is the tangle of laws that prevent US civilians from getting access to cheap, high-quality firearms and accessories from abroad.

• Export controls on chips or US-made models. This is basically ITAR extended to goods that have widespread day-to-day civilian use. There is an argument here for not enabling wartime adversaries, but in practice, this would look more like a regime based on executive whim. Export controls hobble domestic innovation by cutting off sales and dampening the feedback cycle that makes products better. It should take a difficult legislative process to impose them.

• Banning or restricting open-weight models. The easier it has gotten to build homemade guns, the more state governments have tried to make it harder. And it remains illegal to build a suppressor or a short-barreled rifle at home without registering it with the ATF.

• Required pre-release reviews of model capabilities. Any time someone comes up with a novel gun design, they submit it to the ATF to be told if they’re going to be allowed to sell it. Sometimes that goes well (e.g. pistol braces) and sometimes it doesn’t (e.g. the Akins Accelerator).

These are each real ideas on the table for AI. We already have export controls and pre-release model review by executive fiat. And we’re one convenient emergency away from the rest becoming law.

One way to build antibodies to that is to think about how it has gone in the past. Everything that has been proposed for AI has already been made law for guns. And how is that going? This newsletter exists to decentralize access to powerful tools. That’s hard work for guns, because the laws about them are already on the books. It’ll be a lot easier for AI if we keep freedom alive from the beginning.

This week’s links

Good piece on more parallels between guns and AI

Lupis42’s Substack

Thinking about the OpenAI/HuggingFace incident.

If you don’t know what this is, the TL;DR is still Too Damn Long, but see Zvi’s excellent summary if you have the time…

Read more

a month ago · Lupis42

“Shooting ranges go quiet luxury”

New York Times feature on the boom of high-end shooting ranges.

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Take yourself back to 2010. In most cities, there were two ways to hire a private car:

1. Call a dispatch company and arrange a time for the driver to come to you. This typically required several hours of lead time, and you would negotiate a price with the dispatcher.

2. Hail a taxi. In the US at least, New York City was and remains the only city where “just walk outside and hail a taxi” is a viable transportation strategy. And even in NYC, the strategy does not work at peak demand times (e.g. during rush hour, holidays, bad weather, weekend nights, or when taxi drivers are trying to make it back to the depot for a shift change).

Uber solved this problem by making an app to match riders and drivers in real-time. The problem is that that was illegal in pretty much every city that Uber wanted to operate in. Cars-for-hire needed a special license (which due to supply restrictions caused by regulatory capture could sometimes cost hundreds of thousands of dollars), as did the drivers.

Uber solved that problem by ignoring the law. In pretty much every city it expanded to, Uber was illegal from the day of its launch. They went ahead anyway, eventually going as far as to build software that detected undercover enforcement officers and then putting those users’ apps into an endless “driver is on the way” state.

Within a few years of launch, Uber became so popular that cities started to change their laws to get out of the way. They made new, easier-to-get licenses for drivers. They stopped trying to enforce the prior laws. And that got us to where we are today: in nearly every populated part of the world, you are never more than a few mintues away from a door-to-door ride to wherever you want to go, 24/7.

This week, in a 10-5 vote, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals struck down New Jersey’s 36-year-old assault weapons ban and magazine capacity limit. The proximate story is that a group of federal judges straightforwardly applied Supreme Court precedent, as they are required to do:

But the bigger story is that this is the tail end of a cultural transformation that has been happening since the era when New Jersey passed its bans:

With normalization of gun rights, court victories are inevitable. Without normalization, court victories are ineffective. Or as we’ve said before, courts are fine, culture is final:

We’re only just getting started. One day, after the gun bans are all gone, we’ll start working on letting New Jerseyans pump their own gas.

This week’s links

It’s happening

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There are three main possibilities:

1. The bill is allowed to remain as-is. It will pass the Senate with 50-something votes and the president will sign it into law. That will accelerate the product development feedback loop we described above in the excerpt from OSD 146. A few areas where it will make the fastest impact:

   1. Retail. Way more ecommerce around silencers and silencer accessories.

   2. Manufacturing. The door would be open for $50 cans that you use for a while and throw away. The lowered regulatory barriers would make it easier for manufacturers to experiment with new designs. And lastly it would be easier for startups to form in the space. Today, any silencer startup has to get into the top 2-3 retailers from day 1 to have any hope of succeeding. In a world without NFA rules, startups could easily sell direct to consumer with off-the-shelf FFL transfer tools on their website.

   3. Gun makers. Integral suppression will become more of a thing. Imagine if every company tried to do what SilencerCo did with the Maxim 9, but competed with each other and stuck with it for 5-10 years. Get a few iterations deep, multiply that by having the whole industry working on it, and it will become unusual for guns not to come suppressed from the factory.

2. The bill’s fallback provision is activated. If the Parliamentarian rules against full removal from the NFA, the bill contains a much-more-likely-to-be-allowed-through-reconciliation provision dropping the NFA tax on suppressors from $200 to 0. Think of that as a permanent ~25% discount on all suppressors. It would produce an initial spike in sales which would settle into a sustained baseline level of sales that’s somewhat higher than today’s — demand curves slope downward, and you’ll sell more of something when it costs $x – 200 instead of $x. It also opens the door somewhat (although not quite as much as outcome #1) to bargain-basement suppressor designs. The downside is that it risks making suppressor regulation seem like “just” some paperwork. That could take some wind out of the sails of long-term NFA reform. On net it’s still a positive development that would further entrench suppressors.

3. Neither #1 nor #2 happen, and suppressor laws stay as-is.

#2 happened, and while you’re still required to get a tax stamp, the price of the stamp went from $200 to $0. And that has indeed opened the door to super-affordable suppressor designs. FTW Arms just launched their first product, a $99 rimfire suppressor 3D-printing from PPA-CF (PPA is a high-performance nylon, and the “CF” indicates that it has tiny strands of carbon fiber in it that act like rebar).

Expect to see an explosion of new products in this space over the next year. It’s the perfect environment for innovation: a lot of pent-up demand, an under-explored area of product design, and a structural change (the new law) that for the first time ever makes it profitable to go figure out what the best designs for this new category of suppressor are.

The only brake left is the tax stamp wait time.

From 2021:

That’s where silencers have been. There are two brakes on demand for silencers: the $200 tax, and the 10-12 month wait time for the paper Form 4. The $200 tax has been getting inflated away for 87 years, and for someone spending $800+ on a silencer, it’s more a troublesome hurdle than an absolute dealbreaker. But the yearlong wait is a different story. That stops people in their tracks, and prevents the industry from getting to a healthy feedback loop of product development.

What would a healthy feedback loop look like? Industry-wide standardized mounting systems. More light-duty cans. And come to think of it, why doesn’t just every hunting rifle in the country have an integrally suppressed barrel? It’s because the yearlong wait has made that a nonstarter. Nobody’s going to wait a year to pick up their gun.

But a lot more people would be willing to wait a few weeks. That’s the promise of making this electronic. Waits will probably be substantial for the initial flood of applications, but should subside over time. And this is all just a first step. The final stop will be to do away with the NFA registry altogether. But the key to that is normalization, and that means getting silencers into millions of people’s hands. And that is what eForm 4’s are going to help do.

Here are the average eForm wait times from the ATF as of May 2026:

• Form 1 (making your own suppressor): 62 days

• Form 4, trust (buying a suppressor as a trust): 25 days

• Form 4, individual (buying a suppressor with just one individual, and their spouse, as the legal possessor): 8 days

Eight days is getting into the ballpark of no longer being a meaningful brake on innovation. Wait times are going to get worse before they get better, as all the pent-up suppressor orders work their way through the system. There’s also a court case that could become relevant: the Fifth Circuit ruled last month in US v. Comeaux that suppressors are Second Amendment arms. So there is now a circuit split on that topic with the Ninth Circuit, and if the Supreme Court reviews that split, they would likely find outright bans on suppressors unconstitutional. About 27% of the US population live in states where it’s illegal to own a suppressor. That’s 93 million people. If the floodgates open for them, buckle up.

This week’s links

TIL some guns recoil sideways

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She declares that she’ll pick a suitor once she finishes knitting a funeral shroud, but while she spends each day knitting the shroud, she spends each night unraveling it. A disloyal maidservant spills that secret to the suitors, and at that point they deliver an ultimatum to Telemachus, son of Penelope and Odysseus: we all know your mom has to marry one of us, and we’re not leaving until she does.

Odysseus was gone for 20 years, and open access to Anthropic’s Fable model was gone for 20 days. Freedom is now back, but it has not yet slain the suitors. The suitors are in fact alive and well, and Odysseus vanquishing them is not the default outcome. The Odyssey’s suitors have names like Eurymachus, Antinous, and Amphinomus. In our fable, they have names like:

1. “What about malicious uses? We need regulation to stop that.”

2. “What about inadvertently arming <outgroup> with powerful AI that they will use to undermine <ingroup>?”

3. “I’m not saying I like it. I’m saying that AI regulation was inevitable, and it’s just a question of how it happens. Did you really think the government was going to let it stay unregulated?”

The post below is a thoughtful example of #3.

This is presented as simple pragmatism. “This is extremely powerful technology, and the government always jumps into regulate such technology (the AI companies’ own CEOs compare this stuff to nuclear weapons). So we should try to make that happen in as productive a way as possible.”

But regulation is not nearly as inevitable as this viewpoint makes it sound. “Should we voluntarily cede any control of AI models to the government” is not a small thing where you say, “Sure, let’s agree to be reasonable and work out the details later.” It’s the entire game. You either die a free company or live long enough to see yourself become a telco.

All the risks of AI are ultimately technological problems.

It’s a strange model that’s so smart that it has to be locked down to prevent distillation attacks, but too dumb to know that it’s being distilled:

The decisions that the hivemind makes in the next 1-2 years are going to make either benefactors or victims out of our grandchildren. We can set innovation and freedom back by 50 years like we did with nuclear power, or we can simply let them do their thing and bask in the results. There is precedent here. The internet and the various surrounding technologies (especially social media and smartphones) have been relatively completely unregulated compared to any other industry of similar size. The result is telling: there is no industry of similar size. The result has been disruptive of course, but it’s hard to disagree that on net it has been positive. To the tune of tens, possibly hundreds, of trillions of dollars in consumer surplus. A world that looked at the promise of the web in 1995 and said, “This is extremely dangerous and disruptive. Let’s have the government license all innovation in this space” would be a sadder and poorer world.

The tricky part is that the first sentence is right. The internet is extremely dangerous and disruptive. Two things make that ok:

1. In a lot of cases, disruption and danger are a feature, not a bug. More on that argument here:
   

2. When they are a bug, the answer is to make innovation faster and easier. More on that argument here:
   

Technology being the biggest, most society-altering industry means that questions of technological freedom have high stakes. If what Anthropic and OpenAI are allowing the government to do to their models becomes the norm, it will be more destructive to freedom than any gun control law. These companies have raised $125 billion and $190 billion in funding, respectively. Companies committed to freedom would spend a few basis points of their funding to sue the government and preserve the technological freedom that the internet has forged. Instead, the current incumbents are willingly buffalo jumping away the freedom that is their birthright, trading it for a pat on the head from the US government. The steelman of their position is that if they don’t go along, they won’t have companies left to defend.

The rebuttal is that if they do go along, they won’t have companies worth defending.

People often think of tech freedom through a First Amendment lens, because that’s the only mainstream framework to articulate a technical legal argument for “The government is required to leave me alone.” But as tech becomes more dangerous — AI! drones! humanoid robots! biochemical research! — the Second Amendment is the better fit.

The Second Amendment embraces the idea that dangerous technology should be decentralized, and that the bad things about that will be solved by the good things about it. Gun rights are winning because they’ve leaned into that. AI is every bit as pivotal for individual freedom, so we should think about the rights to create, sell, buy, and possess it through the same lens.

This week’s links

The Department of Justice is suing California and Virginia over state-level gun bans

• “DOJ Sues California Over Glock Ban And Handgun Roster”

• “DOJ Sues Virginia Over AR-15 Ban Targeting Commonly Owned Rifles”

Interesting comments on this from our Discord:

• “Better the DOJ than donor money, but can those cases be wrapped up before the next election?”

• “I’m always glad for help but IMO this is a questionable focus of the DOJ’s efforts. I think their best targets would be pernicious permitting and regulatory regimes.”

• “I’d actually call this critical to what the civil rights division is all about. Right now something like 30% off the population is in a state that has an AWB, capacity ban or similar - if the DOJ ignores that, they’re implicitly communicating that those are acceptable, and not infringing. Now they could just file amicus briefs in existing cases, but this is definitely what the civil rights division is supposed to do: go after incidents where civil rights are being ignored or suppressed, especially when large numbers of people are impacted.”

• “DOJ doesn’t have to worry about standing issues, like private citizens do”

“Survey: More Americans Are Carrying Concealed Guns”

The percent who carry all or most [of] the time is virtually the same as the percent who carried similarly in December 2024. But the percent who carry at [least] some of the time or rarely has increase[d] by 5.4 percentage points (from 11.2% to 16.6%). So the total who are carrying increased by 5.5 percentage points (from 24.3% to 29.8%).

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Yet beyond [the specific rulings], the Court offered little in the way of new insights into how to apply its Second Amendment test to the litany of other legal questions that continue to pile up in its cert queue. In fact, in both opinions, the Court seemed to go out of its way to once again cabin off unresolved doctrinal questions and emphasize the narrowness of what it was holding.

For example, a major source of unresolved tension among lower courts applying the Bruen methodology is where the cutoff should be when examining historical analogues for modern gun regulations. Should they only consider the period around the ratification of the Second Amendment? Or is the period around the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment, which made the former applicable to the states, equally as informative about the scope of the right? Faced with a case in Wolford, in which the government of Hawaii attempted to cite numerous late 19th-century laws to support its vampire rule, the Court once again punted on the question.

“The Court has consistently reserved whether the relevant timeframe for assessing the Second Amendment’s original meaning, as applied to the States, is 1791 or 1868,” Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote in her Wolford concurrence. “Today’s opinion rightly declines to resolve this question.”

On the one hand, the Supreme Court found a federal law unconstitutional on Second Amendment grounds for the first time ever. That would have been unimaginable a couple decades ago.

On the other hand, the Supreme Court is still deciding on whether the relevant time frame for Second Amendment questions is 158 years ago or 235 years ago. So not to fear, answers to today’s novel Second Amendment questions (drones? AI?) will be here no later than 2261.

Strange as it sounds, that should be cause for optimism. As we’ve said before, the Supreme Court can’t swim against societal tides too hard. More than any other branch of government, it rules by the consent of the governed, and there’s no branch from whom that consent could be more easily revoked — there isn’t really anything stopping a president or the Congress from simply ignoring the Court. So if you’re relying on the Court to vindicate your issue in the face of a society who doesn’t want it vindicated, you’re usually going to be disappointed. It’s a better predictive model if you think of the Court as ratifying (slowly, sometimes in fits and starts) the direction that things were headed anyway.

It’s impossible to say what specific decisions the Supreme Court will make in the next few terms. But the overall direction that things are headed is obvious. Law is downstream of culture, which itself is downstream of technology. All of those point to more powerful tools in the hands of individuals.

We’ll talk next week about how that applies to AI and the US government’s de facto ban on Anthropic’s Fable model.

This week’s links

On all the “guntube is dead” videos

This has been a hot topic on social media for a few weeks. Quick thought: all forms of content have a lifecycle. They start out niche, get popular, become mainstream, and eventually enter senescence. Guntube today looks pretty similar to how it did five years ago. In some niches that would be fine — tech reviewers can do basically the same style of reviews year after year — but guntube’s challenge is that the products haven’t changed much either. That’s a recipe for staleness.

Guns are 19th century technology. The next generation of content is going to push into AI, drones, comms, and other things on the frontier.

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Here’s a key part about pistol braces, at 15:39 (bold emphasis added):

Right now the safest place for folks to be — and they’re not going to like this answer — is if you have a rifle and your rifle has an overall length that’s under 26” [or a barrel that is] for example 15.9”, and it’s designed to be shouldered, you are technically having a short-barreled rifle.

What I want to be clear with is ATF is not pursuing America’s gun owners who are attaching a stabilizing brace and shouldering a rifle that may or may not be a short-barreled rifle. I think people want me to give a clear answer and say, “No no, you’re good.” The problem is I can’t really do that, because the law reads the way it is. Although we will not be proactively sending agents to you, if you run afoul with the local law enforcement or federal agents … for example, you bring yourself on the radar for something else, and they end up executing a search warrant at your house, it is possible that your firearm is sent to ATF for classification. And they would review each firearm, case-by-case basis, and say it is or it isn’t [a short-barreled rifle], based on what the law defines. And you could be in a position where a US Attorney’s office would say, “Hey, we want to charge this person.”

That dovetails nicely with the biggest gun news from this past week, the Supreme Court ruling in United States v. Hemani. The Court unanimously found that “the government’s prosecution of Mr. Hemani under §922(g)(3)’s unlawful user provision is inconsistent with the Second Amendment”. Hemani had been prosecuted for being a gun owner while being a frequent user of marijuana.

But how did he get onto the government’s radar in the first place? From our piece on oral arguments in the case:

The background of the case is that Mr. Hemani was under investigation for illegal association a designated terrorist organization. The FBI never charged Hemani on that basis, but in a search of his home, they found a Glock, some marijuana, and some cocaine. So they did what federal agents often do when the original investigation fizzles. No, they didn’t charge him with wire fraud, but good guess. They didn’t charge him with lying to them either. They charged him with a gun crime 🎉, the third leg of the We’re Out of Ideas stool that every federal prosecutor gets their first day on the job.

Basically they started investigating him for providing material support to the Iranian military, then they realized that there wasn’t enough evidence of that to charge him with any crimes. That’s saying something, because federal prosecutors are always happy to indict someone on ridiculous charges that will amount to life in prison if convicted, and then they use that leverage to coerce the defendant into pleading guilty and settling for a shorter prison sentence. (Even if you’re completely innocent, it’s rational to accept a 100% chance of 5 years in prison instead of going to trial and risking a 5% chance of 100 years in prison.)

Cekada’s answer is actually excellent, and it’s the only answer an ATF director can responsibly give. He’s being direct about how federal prosecutions work: if a prosecutor wants to get you, they have a lot of tools at their disposal to nail you to the wall. Your innocence can’t stop them, and neither can the ATF. The solution is to take the tools out of prosecutors’ hands, and that means repealing vague laws. In practice, the purpose of vague laws is that everyone is guilty of a crime, and prosecutors get to pick at will who they want to send to prison.

We wrote about this back when Larry Vickers pled guilty to machine gun paperwork charges:

Since 1986, [18 USC § 922(o)] has prevented the purchase of new machine guns. Subsection (2)(A) creates an exception to that for government agencies, including law enforcement, and that’s what Vickers is charged with conspiring to violate. The way the exception works is that if you’re an appropriately licensed FFL, you can import or buy a machine gun if a law enforcement agency asks you to demo it for them. Vickers was himself an appropriately licensed FFL and had a buddy who was also such an FFL. Vickers also had some buddies who were chiefs of their local police departments.

According to the plea agreement, from time to time Vickers would text one of his chief-of-police buddies and say, in effect, “Hey there’s this cool machine gun out there. If you jump through the hoop of writing me a letter saying that you’re at least theoretically interested in testing it out for your department, then I can order it and we can play with it.”

Which seems … perfectly legal? Sure, it’s not the spirit of the law, but in court the letter of the law is what counts. As is tradition, Congress left it up to an administrative agency to write the actual details that matter. The ATF did so in 27 CFR § 479.105(d):

Subject to compliance with the provisions of this part, applications to transfer and register a machine gun manufactured or imported on or after May 19, 1986, to dealers qualified under this part will be approved if it is established by specific information the expected governmental customers who would require a demonstration of the weapon, information as to the availability of the machine gun to fill subsequent orders, and letters from governmental entities expressing a need for a particular model or interest in seeing a demonstration of a particular weapon.

So if the police chief writes you a letter saying he’s interested in demoing a particular machine gun, you can buy it. Hmm, sounds like Vickers is still in the clear.

The law is so vague that the ATF has had to release open letters explaining what they really meant when they wrote the regulation (which regulation was itself written by the ATF to explain what Congress really meant when it wrote the law). The latest open letter, from January 2023, says among other things that the police demo letter has to be “written on the government entity’s letterhead” and “dated within one (1) year of the date of the receipt of the application”. These are the formatting details that the ATF uses to discern your true intent.

Another fun fact: the letter gets submitted to the ATF along with your application to transfer the machine gun. So Vickers got his demo letters over the years, submitted them to the ATF, the ATF approved them, and then years later the ATF looked into it and decided that when the police chief said he was potentially interested in demoing the guns, he wasn’t really interested enough. How much interest is enough? How serious does the police chief have to be? How would you even measure his seriousness? Can he change his mind later? It doesn’t say anywhere in the law, but the ATF is free to decide on the answer years after your purchase and then prosecute you accordingly.

That raises the obvious question here: if this law is so indefensibly vague, then why did Vickers plead guilty?

It turns out that the better question is why wouldn’t he plead guilty. For prosecutors, the broadness and vagueness of federal law is a feature. It means that everybody is guilty of violating a bunch of laws — especially in a domain as heavily regulated as machine gun imports — and prosecutors can simply decide who to charge.

In practice, the way this works is that prosecutors get a hook into someone (for Vickers it was perhaps the sanctions violations) and then go looking for additional charges. Those will be easy to find, and then prosecutors come to the defendant and say, “We have 20 charges against you. Each one is punishable by five years in prison. You can go to trial and risk a 100-year prison term, or you can plead guilty and we’ll ask the judge to let you off with a one-year stay at Club Fed.”

Even a clearly innocent person (let alone a defendant who isn’t squeaky clean) would be crazy not to take that deal. And that’s the way it shakes out in real life — 98% of federal convictions are obtained through plea bargains. On paper there’s a right to a trial by jury. But in practice, 98% of convicts (including, now, Larry Vickers) were extorted into giving up that right. (A more famous, non-gun-related example is the celebrity college admissions scandal. Lori Laughlin of Full House fame initially refused to plead guilty, insisting on her right to a jury trial. Prosecutors then retaliated by filing additional charges against her punishable by up to 45 years in prison. Lo and behold, she then “voluntarily” forfeited her right in exchange for getting just two months in prison.)

There’s a lot of bravado in the gun community about civil disobedience. We wrote about the value of that in “OSD 114: One size fits each”. But a case like Vickers’s illustrates that in this space, the government has much more leverage than you do. It’s important to know the law and to know that even when the government’s view of the law is wrong, they have a lot of ways to win anyway.

Despite recent announcements, pistol braces are still in this liminal space. There’s still work to do.

This week’s links

Fifth Circuit rules that suppressors are protected by the Second Amendment

Ken Hackathorn says that iron sights aren’t useful on most carry guns, kerfuffle ensues

The steelman of Hackathorn’s position is that a red dot does give you faster splits and better accuracy at any range, but the difference is too small to matter inside of 10 yards, especially for casuals who might get caught with a red dot that has loose screws, a dead battery, dirt in the emitter, etc.

But it turns out that a meaningful fraction of gunfights happen beyond 10 yards. Shout out to John Correia for compiling that data.

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A quick detour:

Here is “The Kite and the Pigeons”, from an 1867 collection of Aesop’s fables:

A kite, who had kept sailing in the air for many days near a dove-house, and made a stoop at several pigeons, but all to no purpose (for they were too nimble for him), at last had recourse to stratagem, and took his opportunity one day to make a declaration to them, in which he set forth his own just and good intentions, who had nothing more at heart than the defence and protection of the pigeons in their ancient rights and liberties; and how concerned he was at their fears and jealousies of a foreign invasion, especially their unjust and unreasonable suspicions of himself, as if he intended, by force of arms, to break in upon their constitution, and erect a tyrannical government over them. To prevent all which and thoroughly to quiet their minds, he thought proper to propose to them such terms of alliance and articles of peace, as might forever cement a good understanding betwixt them. The principal of which was, that they should accept of him for their king, and invest him with all kingly privilege and prerogative over them.

The poor simple pigeons consented: the kite took the coronation oath after a very solemn manner on his part; and the doves, the oaths of allegiance and fidelity on theirs. But much time had not passed over their heads, before the good kite pretended that it was part of his prerogative to devour a pigeon whenever he pleased. And this he was not contented to do himself only, but instructed the rest of the royal family in the same kingly arts of government. The pigeons, reduced to this miserable condition, said one to the other, “Ah! We deserve no better! Why did we let him come in?”

Another detour:

On January 17, 1989, a man armed with a Norinco AK murdered five children at their elementary school in Stockton, California. A few months later, California would pass the first assault weapons ban. In an attempt to get ahead of a potential federal ban, William B. Ruger, the prodigy gun designer and cofounder of Sturm, Ruger, & Co., sent the following idea to every member of the US Congress:

The best way to address the firepower concern is therefore not to try to outlaw or license many millions of older and perfectly legitimate firearms (which would be a licensing effort of staggering proportions) but to prohibit the possession of high capacity magazines. By a simple, complete and unequivocal ban on large capacity magazines, all the difficulty of defining “assault rifle” and “semi-automatic rifles” is eliminated. The large capacity magazine itself, separate or attached to the firearm, becomes the prohibited item. A single amendment to Federal firearms laws could effectively implement these objectives.

What happened after he sent that letter is that legislators thanked him for his idea. Then they passed a magazine ban and a federal assault weapons ban. Then the executive branch spent the ‘90s extorting Smith & Wesson into co-designing its products with the government, which inflicted enough reputational damage to nearly bankrupt the company. Here’s some press coverage at the time, in case there was any doubt about the ultimate goals of the coercion campaign:

As part of the agreement, the mayors of 13 cities that have lawsuits pending against a variety of gun manufacturers agreed to withdraw those suits against Smith & Wesson, although in some cases this may require additional action by city councils.

“It was an excellent concept, a great first step,” said Mayor Marc Morial (D) of New Orleans, the first city to sue gun manufacturers, in 1998.

A total of 28 local governments have lawsuits pending against gun manufacturers, and a senior Treasury Department official predicted that others would join the agreement after studying it. “You’ll find them jumping on board,” he said.

Then a while later, the executive branch ran Operation Choke Point to effectively force all major players in the financial services industry to stop doing any business with the firearms industry.

Other than that, Ruger’s idea went great.

As Nabeel said, AI safetyism is the theory that AI companies know what regulation they want and deserve to get it good and hard.

Here’s a quainter example from 1999, when the US government classified the Power Mac G4 as a munition and banned it from export because its processor exceeded the 1 gigaflops threshold. (Your iPhone 17 has 2000x as much processing power):

Pessimists Archive Newsletter

When the Mac was a Munition

🗓️ This week the Macintosh turned 40…

Read more

3 years ago · 36 likes · 2 comments · Louis Anslow

There’s a good side to all this silliness, though. Take the example of Bill Ruger. If the US government had embraced his proposal and put forward a narrowly tailored, collaborative magazine ban, they would have gotten the firearms industry on board and we’d still be living with the ban today. Instead, the awakened Leviathan was arbitrary and capricious. That caused a backlash that almost immediately ended all industry cooperation with regulators. More importantly, it made consumers hostile to regulators. The federal assault weapons ban sunset in 2004, and the opening of those floodgates created the modern firearms industry as we know it. The AR-15 was a niche curiosity before 1994, and might have stayed that way if not for the bull-in-a-china-shop regulatory efforts of the ‘90s.

The concealed carry revolution probably wouldn’t have happened without the gun rights movement that the 1994 federal assault weapons ban created. Heller and Bruen might not have happened either.

This isn’t to say that the AWB was good for gun rights. If you can wave a magic wand, it’s better to choose freedom than to choose bad regulation. But bad regulation is better than extremely efficient regulation. If the goal is freedom, it’s better to have the entity standing in your way be a haphazard oaf than a hyperefficient machine. The oaf inspires rebellion and ultimately undermines himself. The machine inspires obedience.

The really good news about bad-faith restrictions on freedom is that they don’t have the patience to boil the frog. They snap down right away, and the targets quickly learn to stop collaborating. There is perhaps some theoretically ideal set of laws around powerful software tools. But as with guns, in the real world, that set of laws is not on offer. The actual offer is much simpler: do you invite the kite into the dove-house, or not? You will have no control over what it does when it gets in there. When rat poison is instantly deadly, the rats quickly learn to stop eating it. AI companies are learning that lesson, and gun companies learned it long ago.

This week’s links

Past newsletter on a similar topic

”Should DUIs equal disarmament? One top court thinks so.”

From The Reload. As Kostas Moros said:

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In 2018, Peter Thiel famously dropped this line in a talk with LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman: “Crypto is decentralizing, AI is centralizing. Or, if you want to frame it more ideologically, crypto is libertarian and AI is communist.”

Reality has gotten more complicated since then. The biggest crypto providers are extremely centralized, and you can run open-weight AI models at home that would have seemed like alien magic in 2018.

But there is something to Thiel’s point. You see it in people’s concerns about artificial superintelligence. Historically, the concern was rogue individuals making bioweapons and the like. That’s still a concern, but as things have actually played out, most of the attention is on the risks of centralization, not the risks of decentralization. That’s the focus of Pope Leo XIV’s new encyclical, Magnifica humanitas (“magnificent humanity”).

110. Finally, I would like to employ the expression “to disarm,” which is close to my heart. Disarming AI means freeing it from the mentality of “armed” competition, which today is not limited simply to the military context, but is also an economic and cognitive phenomenon. This entails a race for ever more powerful algorithms and larger datasets, driven by the desire to secure geopolitical or commercial dominance. To disarm means discrediting the assumption that technical power automatically confers the right to govern. To disarm does not mean rejecting technology, but preventing it from dominating humanity. It means freeing technology from monopolistic control and opening it to discussion and debate, therefore making it human-friendly and restoring it to the plurality of human cultures and ways of life. Our task today is not only ethical or technical. It is ecological in the deepest sense, for it concerns a new dimension of our common home. AI is already an environment in which we are immersed, as well as a force with which we must engage. For this reason, merely regulating it is insufficient; it must be disarmed, welcoming and accessible.

If Magnifica humanitas has one message (and at 42,000 words long, it’s admittedly a stretch to abridge it to one message), it is this one of “disarming” AI. AI should be used to empower people and make them more human. Not to empower the people who make it or control it, not to win a geopolitical battle, and not to “confer the right to govern”.

Now, no pope is going to come out swinging for the Second Amendment. But in spirit, the sentiment above is pretty close! You have a powerful new technology, governments and powerful figures want to use it to shape society to their liking, and instead the Pope is saying that the only valid use is to serve, not control, the human person.

The encyclical discusses a related concept called “the principle of subsidiarity”. That was coined in a 1931 encyclical and can be summarized as the belief that decisions should be made at the lowest possible level. A company or government shouldn’t make decisions that a smaller group could make, a group shouldn’t decide what a family could decide, and a family shouldn’t decide what an individual could decide.

From the explanation of it in Magnifica humanitas:

69. Starting with Leo XIII and the beginnings of modern social teaching, the Church has insisted that neither the individual nor the family should be subsumed by the State, but should be allowed to act freely, as far as possible, without harming the common good. Saint John Paul II took up and developed this perspective, noting that the political community is at the service of civil society and that the State must protect the common good, intervening when necessary, but without permanently supplanting the responsibilities of intermediary organizations and social institutions. Subsidiarity does not justify the State’s disengagement, but rather guides its actions. Indeed, public intervention is necessary precisely to enable all social actors to fulfill their mission without being stifled. It is the responsibility of the political community to create the conditions that allow individuals, families, associations and intermediary organizations to fulfil their mission in society, without being replaced or reduced to mere facilitators.

70. This principle encourages us to move beyond any form of paternalistic or welfare-based management of societal life, but instead to promote a culture of shared responsibility in a State that values citizens’ initiative, and a civil society capable of forging bonds and mobilizing energies in the service of the common good. In accordance with the principle of subsidiarity, decisions are made at the closest level possible to the persons involved, thereby fostering community life and avoiding people being presented with decisions that have already been taken. In this way people can participate in the decision-making process. When families, associations, local communities, volunteer organizations and those in the so-called “third sector” are recognized and supported, social life becomes more accessible to people, services become more attuned to real needs, and solutions are more creative and respectful of the dignity of each person.

That’s essentially a defense of self-determination. For anything that can be done either by an individual or by a large company or government, the Pope says you should be biased in favor of the individual. It’s not quite “the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed”, but from a pope, it’s philosophically not far off.

This week’s links

“Is there a right to own a gun?”

From 2003, a great philosophical paper by Michael Huemer.

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The panel of all-Republican-appointed judges for the conservative-leaning circuit unanimously disagreed, which suggests securing national reciprocity via judicial mandate will likely be a tougher hill to climb than doing away with carry permitting processes that aren’t open to out-of-staters.

Unlike those non-resident carry suits, which carried the day based on a thorough Second Amendment analysis informed by the Supreme Court’s Bruen decision, the challenge to Minnesota’s reciprocity limits came to a far more abrupt conclusion. In fact, the panel held that reciprocity agreements have no bearing on the Second Amendment whatsoever in a state like Minnesota that offers non-resident permits.

“Johnson’s Second Amendment challenge fails at Bruen step one because Minnesota’s reciprocity statute, standing alone, does not regulate arms-bearing conduct,” Judge L. Steven Grasz wrote in Johnson v. Jacobson.

More specifically, it held that the actual Second Amendment conduct at issue, gun carry for self-defense, is only implicated by Minnesota’s permitting system, which it makes available to state residents and non-residents alike. Furthermore, because the state issues those permits on a “shall-issue” basis, which the Supreme Court effectively approved in Bruen, the panel said it could not find a Second Amendment violation.

Judicial mandate has always been an unreliable path to safeguard any rights. It’s a tool in the kit, but more often than not, judges fail to perform in the critical moment. We wrote about this in 2022, two months before Bruen dropped when people started putting the clues together that the ruling would strike down may-issue carry permit regimes:

Tempting to start celebrating. But there are levels to this.

Level 1: 😢 five people in Washington aren’t saving gun rights

Level 2: 🥳 five people in Washington are saving gun rights

Level 3: 🤔 why should it matter what five people in Washington think?

In 2008, Heller moved things from Level 1 to Level 2. Yay, the Supreme Court was here to save the day. Systems thinkers might have contemplated Level 3 just as a fun intellectual exercise. But the 14 years since then have highlighted something else:

Level 4: 🙃 wait, does it matter what five people in Washington think?

Heller stopped Washington, D.C. from imposing an outright ban on handguns. Two years later, in 2010, McDonald v. Chicago did the same in Chicago. Those two landmark Second Amendment rulings drove the repeal of two handgun bans and then went on to achieve … pretty much nothing else.

(D.C. got shall-issue carry because of a D.C. Circuit ruling based on Heller, and in a roundabout way the Seventh Circuit did the same in Illinois. But that’s it.)

It’s easy to point to moments where the Supreme Court spectacularly discarded people’s rights — Plessy v. Ferguson, Buck v. Bell, Wickard v. Filburn, Korematsu v. U.S., etc. etc. — as the thing that allowed a terrible chain of events. But did they allow the events, or were they caused by those same events? In the case of, say, Korematsu, you had a country that was willing to force everyone on the west coast with Japanese ancestry into camps. Would that country have been stopped by a Supreme Court that in the midst of it all piped up to say, “Hey everyone, you can’t imprison people for being Japanese, ok?” And more to the point, would such an environment produce a Supreme Court that would say that?

Conversely, and less famously, it’s also easy to find examples where the Supreme Court did stand up for people’s rights … and was ignored. Re Worcester v. Georgia, there’s the Andrew Jackson apocrypha that “John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it.” In the 1950s and ‘60s, the Court’s school desegregation rulings would have been dead letters without the years of hands-on enforcement effort they were followed up with. And apart from the residents of D.C. and Chicago being able to own and carry handguns, Heller changed nothing on the ground for anybody’s gun rights.

And yet, gun rights have gotten stronger. In most of the country, they’re in much better shape today than they were in 2008. There’s a real possibility that Bruen makes shall-issue the law of the land in the next two months. But that’s on the back of a successful multi-decade effort to liberalize carry laws state by state. If 42 states were still may-issue, as they were in the ‘80s, Bruen would be a pipe dream.

But the cultural groundwork still matters more than the law. Think ahead. Suppose in a few weeks, Clarence Thomas writes a barnburner majority opinion in Bruen. Shall-issue is the law of the land. Yay.

But is it the law in practice? Some states will just go with it. But others are going to Rube Goldberg their way out of this. “Sure, you can get a carry permit. The application costs $340, plus another $88.25 for fingerprints [1]. You have to interview in person. Appointments are available from 9-9:30am on the third Monday of every month. You also can’t carry in bars, restaurants, event venues, or on public transport.”

What really keeps gun rights healthy isn’t a court coming in to save the day at the last second. It’s people liking gun rights to the point that the question never needs to go to court.

The Supreme Court can help around the edges. But it has never demonstrated an ability to turn a popular tide. It ratifies what’s coming anyway. Either the Court gets on board, or people keep trying until it agrees with them.

And in a sense, good. If you were worried about what five people in Washington think, don’t be. The good news is that in practice, they can’t tell people what to do. They can just say what people were going to do anyway.

—

[1] This is the actual current cost of a license to possess a handgun in your home in New York City.

Clarence Thomas did indeed write a barnburner of an opinion a couple months later, made shall-issue the law of the land, and here’s what has changed:

1. Residents of California, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and New York have a viable path to getting a carry permit. Fees, approval processes, and wait times vary from “tens of dollars and weeks” to “on the order of $1000 and 1-2 years”.

2. All states in the US are on the path to being required to allow nonresidents to get carry permits. California, New York, and Louisiana already have been forced to set up nonresident application processes.

This wasn’t a result of Bruen that people expected, but on the ground, #2 might affect more people than #1. In New York City, it’s actually easier to get a carry permit as a non-resident than as a resident, because the former doesn’t require in-person visits to the police station. You can imagine services spinning up to almost-automate-away the process of getting nonresident carry permits in the states of your choice.

It has never been easier to legally carry in a state as a nonresident, and it looks poised to keep getting easier over the next couple years.

This week’s links

Go to an Appleseed course

Last week we talked about the value of promoting training, not gear. A Discord subscriber offered this reminder:

On this topic, there’s a very cost-effective marksmanship education program that you may have heard of. A few of its personnel, myself included, are here in this Discord. It’s a fully-volunteer-operated 501(c)(3) called Project Appleseed. A full weekend, $85, and 400 rounds thru your rifle (even .22 LR) gets you all the info you need to make hits on man-sized targets within 500 yards without any bipod/bag/shootingsticks/etc; all ab initio. Also included is a free lesson on the history of why it is possible for ordinary people to practice this skill in these United States of America (and why they are States rather than colonies of the UK). We operate in ~46 of the 50 States and hold these weekend rifle clinics throughout the year.

Having been to an Appleseed course, this is all true!

”Collateral damage, race, and the Virginia gun control bill”

In light of Virginia’s new gun and magazine ban, here’s a prescient 2020 piece from BJ Campbell on the topic.

The 2025 murder rate in the US set a record low, and 2026 is on pace to be 10-15% lower still

Analysis from Jeff Asher.

New York criminalizes the possession of gun CAD files with intent to use them to make Glock switches or similar devices

The law also sets up a ban on the sale of 3D printers unless they’re equipped with technology to prevent the printing of firearms. No such technology exists, so the law puts itself into effect as soon as a state committee determines that the technology has been invented. Shades of New Jersey’s now-repealed smart gun mandate.

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Last week we talked about range theatrics as a form of leading others astray:

Making unsafe or ineffective gun handling look cool does a disservice to the audience. But that’s easy to spot, and it’s easy to point to others as the bad guy on that front. Looking inward, what are some other scandals of which we’ve all been guilty from time to time?

• Promoting gear over training. If we’re talking about effectiveness rather than pure collector value, you’re much better off with a $500 gun you can use well than a $5000 gun that you’ve never shot. That means spending more on ammo than on guns — and then actually shooting that ammo. If money is tight, dry fire is a free and very effective training tool.

• Glamorizing spending too much money on guns and gear. It’s fun to joke about this, and often it remains a joke. But there are people who don’t realize it’s a joke and spend thousands of dollars on gun stuff that they can’t really afford. The person who is financially healthy and only owns a Hi-Point is in a holistic sense much safer than the person stressed about money who owns a Staccato.

• Stoking fear to drive purchases. Bans are a thing, and it’s good to warn people about what they might want to secure before a ban goes into effect. But this sometimes crosses the line into hysteria, and that’s financially and mentally unhealthy.

• Legally dangerous bravado. It is a very personal decision to conscious violate a law that you believe to be unjust. Consider the barrel-length provisions of the National Firearms Act. We all find it unjust that a rifle with a 15” barrel will get you sent to prison for up to 10 years, while a rifle with a 16” barrel is perfectly legal. If someone in their indignation wants to disregard that law, they are free to make that choice. But that doesn’t mean it’s just to encourage other people to break that law: the person doing the encouragement bears no risk at all, and the person who listens to them risks federal prison. It’s hard to find numbers on how many people are sitting in prison for barrel-length felonies, but over the decades the total has to be in the thousands. Some argue that civil disobedience has social value (we’ve made that argument before in this newsletter!), and that can be true, but it’s very case-by-case. Looking at actual NFA cases, it’s hard to argue that the suffering of the people convicted under that law has had any positive effects.

This might all sound a bit sanctimonious, and it probably would be if we weren’t guilty too. The point is that it’s easy for all of us to say what other people are doing wrong, but it’s much more useful to look in the mirror and focus on what we can do better.

This week’s links

On the topic of biblical newsletters…

“Samurai vs. squatters: On the street with the hired swords reclaiming California property owners’ stolen homes”

Speaking of legally dubious advice about weapons…

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Last week we covered how trend-chasers do the valuable public service of sorting good new products and techniques from bad ones:

@Hoffnung in our Discord made the good point that the same mechanism can also spread maladaptive trends. The same way that friend groups of teens can get into self-harm spirals, gunfluencers can fall into silly or dangerous behavior that plays well with their in-group.

Dramatic examples of that are unsafe ninja moves from disreputable instructors — having novice shooters shoot past their feet from a reclined position, doing moving-and-shooting drills with people shooting past each other, and the like.

Less dramatic but more pervasive examples are the kinds of range theatrics that Pat McNamara describes here:

The good news is that on the internet, these kinds of things tend to be self-correcting. Not perfectly and not instantly, but decades ago, people could have spent their entire careers promoting theatrics that aren’t actually effective. Now, they’re one Pat McNamara video away from being steered in a better direction. Doom loops happen, but they can’t thrive for as long as they used to.

This week’s links

Thoughtful take on the evolution of guntube and what type of content comes next

“How the ACLU started defending the Second Amendment”

Jacob Sullum’s account of the surprisingly long history of this topic.

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The translation is:

I want to show the American gun enthusiasts who recently followed me what the Japanese military/firearms hobby world is like.

“An old .22 LR empty box” is selling for $40.

This is the kind of product available in this hobby in Japan.

Sure, this is ridiculous. Any gun range could export the contents of their trash can to Japan and make thousands of dollars.

But on the other hand, this is price signals at work. Any gun range could export the contents of their trash can to Japan and make thousands of dollars. That means that some of them will, and that will increase supply and bring prices down.

Ok, so collectors in Japan will pay $5 for an empty box of .22 LR instead of paying $40. Who cares?

Well, there’s a progression to how hobbies spread:

1. Early adopters are willing to take risks and/or look ridiculous in their pursuit of this new hobby.

2. If the early adopters build enough momentum, the thing goes mainstream.

3. Eventually it’s so mainstream that the early adopters come to be seen as old fogies, even though your newfangled gear only exists because their now-oldfangled gear came before it.

If gun culture progresses in Japan, it’ll be because of the life breathed into it by people paying $40 for empty ammo boxes.

We think of LARPing as being defined by the gear someone’s using. In reality, it’s defined by the calendar. In the ‘70s, rocking an Aimpoint or a flashlight would have been LARPing. In the ‘60s, firing a pistol two-handed was LARPing. In the ‘20s, a semi-auto rifle was LARPing.

Choose any point in time, and it turns out that the LARPers were actually something different: early adopters. Why would today be any different? Of course, some trends are going to seem silly in hindsight. The 10mm and visible laser aiming devices didn’t pan out either. But that’s a feature, not a bug. It’s how innovation works. New stuff comes out all the time, and early adopters try everything to figure out what’s good. Then the rest of us pile onto the good stuff. The process doesn’t work without early adopters — without LARPers — because by definition, you don’t know ahead of time what’s good and what’s not. At the beginning, it all looks silly. So if you want to create anything new, you need people who don’t mind looking silly.

This also has implications for gun rights: innovation goes hand-in-hand with normalization. Glocks, for example, are ubiquitous today despite seeming new and scary in the ‘80s. That started with the innovation of creating the design. Early adopters liked that innovation, which led to the gun being used. And use led to normalization. Everything from red dot sights to PMAGs to the thumbs-forward grip can thank that same process for its success.

Body armor and NVGs are on the vanguard today. In a few years, they’ll either be ubiquitous or they’ll be replaced by something better. And early adopters are putting in the work to figure out which it should be. That’s praiseworthy.

We wrote that five years ago, and while body armor and NVGs aren’t quite ubiquitous, they’re certainly no longer on the vanguard. They’ve been mainstreamed.

Take another example, the international martyrconvicted felon Shota Yamamoto who was caught exporting hundreds of gun parts from the US to Japan. The intent was to sell the parts to Japanese airsofters, who wanted them for their ever-more clone-correct builds. Yes, it’s foolish to risk your freedom, your assets, and years of your life just so people can build airsoft guns that look a bit cooler. But that kind of foolishness (albeit hopefully in not-quite-so-legally-precarious a way) is exactly what animates early adopters to discover cool stuff for the rest of us. They pay high prices and look silly so that you can pay reasonable prices and look cool.

We’ll leave you with this:

This week’s links

Escaping the gun debate trap

What happened to B&T USA?

Good interview with Karl Brügger

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Repeal

1140-AA98: Removing Factoring Criteria for Firearms with Attached “Stabilizing Braces”

This formally clarifies that pretty much anything goes for pistol braces. All firearms with popular braces on them will no longer live under the sword of SBRocles. Contrast that to the previous system that braces were headed towards:

1140-AB01: Revising Regs Defining “Engaged in the Business” as a Dealer in Firearms

FFLs need to have a bona fide business, and the ATF had previously been very exacting about what that means. This opens the door for people to get an FFL even for low-volume side businesses.

1140-AA60: Revising Machine Gun Definition in Response to Supreme Court Decision

No substantive change. This just codifies what the Supreme Court already ruled on in Garland v. Cargill, that bump stocks are not machine guns.

1140-A87: Removing Youth Handgun Safety Act Notice

This rescinds an ATF rule requiring all FFLs to give handgun buyers a piece of paper that warns about the physical and legal dangers of giving handguns to minors. (Full list of warnings here.)

Modernize

1140-AA82: Revising Firearms Transaction Record, “Form 4473”

Overhauling the 4473. The biggest takeaway here is that the form can be completed electronically and autopopulated with preexisting data. So think of an online checkout that autofills the 4473 for you.

1140-AA94: Firearms Electronic Record-keeping

Allow FFLs to store 4473s electronically. FFLs had previously been required to keep the paper copy, and to keep it permanently. One danger here: in practice this creates a machine-readable record of all new firearm sales. Software vendors for 4473 storage should build their systems to make fishing expeditions technologically impossible.

1140-AA95: Firearm Records Retention Periods

Today FFLs have to store 4473s permanently. This rule proposes capping that at 20 or 30 years.

1140-AA61: Licensee “eZ Check” Verification for Transfers

You know when you buy a gun online and the sending FFL wants a copy of the receiving FFL’s license? This lets them just use the ATF’s online eZ Check database instead.

1140-AB05: Revising Non-Over-the-Counter Firearms Transaction Requirements

This one is still vague, but the optimistic reading is that it will allow you to buy guns by mail from in-state FFLs.

Reduce Burden

1140-AA89: Interstate Transport and Temporary Export of National Firearms Act

Today you need to submit a form to the ATF if you want to take your non-suppressor NFA firearm out of your home state, even temporarily. And in principle your trip needs to wait until you receive an approval. This rule eliminates that notification+approval requirement for trips shorter than 365 days, and for longer trips, it clarifies that you can take your NFA item on the trip if you’ve notified the ATF, even if you haven’t yet received an approval.

1140-AB00: Joint Registration for Spouses under the National Firearms Act

Instead of creating an NFA trust, you can jointly register NFA items for both you and your spouse.

1140-AA65: Removing CLEO Notification Under the National Firearms Act

No more requirement to notify your local chief law enforcement officer of any NFA registrations that you’re filing.

1140-AA73: Clarifying Interstate Transportation of Firearms under the Gun Control Act

States like New York and New Jersey have arrested gun owners who are traveling through the states while possessing firearms, even though the federal Firearms Owners Protection Act ostensibly protects such interstate travel. This rule clarifies that the federal government’s position is “reasonably necessary activities during travel – including overnight stops, vehicle maintenance, refueling, emergency stops, and medical treatments – are considered as a necessary part of ‘transport’, and are therefore covered under [FOPA]”. This could be an affirmative defense in state-level prosecutions.

1140-AA75: Transferring Machine Guns Between Qualified Licensees

Niche one. This simplifies the paperwork for transferring machine guns between FFLs “in two specific, limited circumstances: 1) when demonstrating firearms to government entities, and 2) when a licensee is discontinuing a business.”

1140-AA76: Clarifying Special (Occupational) Tax Payments Per Business Activity

Another niche one. Suppose you have two FFL license types, and you are a manufacturer, not a dealer or importer. This rule clarifies that if you need to pay the special occupational tax, you only need to pay it once per activity, with the activities being manufacturing, dealing, or importing. So you have only up to three SOTs due. Previously, someone with two FFL licenses but only one “activity” might have had to pay two SOTs, not just one.

1140-AA74: Removing Triplicate Filing Requirement for Importing Plastic Explosives

Isn’t it so annoying when you’re importing some Semtex and you have to submit three copies of your Form 6 permit application to the ATF? Well, good news!

Clarify

1140-AA93: Firearm Activities in Foreign Trade Zones, Customs-Bonded Warehouses

This makes it clear that firearms in customs-bonded warehouses have technically not yet been imported to the US. This generally makes the import process easier.

1140-AA96: Importing Dual-Use Frames, Receivers, or Barrels

Congress has granted the ATF wide authority to ban the import of “non-sporting” guns and gun parts. This rule allows the import of non-sporting items “provided that an identified sporting configuration for the barrel or frame/receiver exists at the time of importation”. Essentially, it makes it easier to import some cool frames, receivers, and barrels.

1140-AA97: Importing Training Rounds

This clarifies that in the context of importation, “inert, marking, or simulated-projectile products used for training purposes” are not considered ammunition. Eliminates a lot of rules that such imports are otherwise subject to.

1140-AA68: Converting Temporary to Permanent Imports for Defense Articles

“Under current regulations, importers whose temporary import authorization expires must re-export, permanently reimport, or destroy the firearm — options that impose significant cost and logistical burden.” The new rule will allow them to convert temporary imports to permanent status by simply filing a Form 6.

1140-AA70: Allowing Makers to Adopt Certain Markings for National Firearms Act

When you Form 1 an NFA item, you will no longer have to engrave it with the owner’s name, city, and state if the item already has the engraving of its original manufacturer on it.

1140-AA84: Clarifying Delivery to a Common or Contract Carrier When Transporting Firearms

A common carrier is an airline, train, bus, cruise line, or similar. This clarifies that when you travel via such a service while “maintaining direct control” over your firearm, you have not delivered the firearm to the carrier. This eliminates some potential liability for those carriers that could have led their firearms to be stricter than they otherwise might be.

1140-AB04: Revising Definitions of “Adjudicated as a Mental Defective” and “Committed to a Mental Institution”

The term “mental defective”, which comes from the Gun Control Act of 1968, is not used in modern medicine or law, and it’s not clear what it means. This rule clarifies that limited guardianships do not automatically trigger the firearm prohibition. It also details when somebody would be said to have been “committed to a mental institution” without being within the definition of “mental defective”, but it’s not clear what that distinction would do in practice since the prohibitions are the same for both.

1140-AA85: Clarifying Exceptions to the Brady Act Background Check Requirement

A state-issued carry permit exempts gun buyers from a NICS check. This rule gives administrative guidance to FFLs about how to validate those state-issued carry permits.

1140-AA64: Selecting Biological Sex on ATF Forms

This proposes asking for an applicant’s biological sex on ATF forms (such as the 4473), rather than gender.

1140-AA69: Definition of Business Premises

The ATF has historically been very strict that all of an FFL’s business has to be conducted on the FFL’s premises. This rule clarifies that premises can include “properties that adjoin each other or that are adjacent to each other and share a common parking lot, sidewalk, or road”. That’s useful for FFLs with multi-building facilities.

1140-AA78: Firearms Transactions and Straw Purchases

Pretty vague. The only meaningful info in the rule is that it “is intended to provide clearer guidance for licensees, including which transactions are not considered straw purchases, thereby supporting enforcement efforts against true straw purchases.”

1140-AA88: Creating a Definition of “Willfully” for Firearms Violations

In the 1998 case Bryan v. United States, the Supreme Court ruled that to prove a “willful” violation of federal gun laws, the government has to prove an FFL knew their conduct was unlawful — but the government does not need to prove that the FFL knew the specific law or regulation being violated. This rule codifies that standard.

Align

1140-AA79: Conforming Change for Approving a Making Application

This simply codifies that the ATF performs a NICS check (i.e. background check) as part of its NFA approval process. Nothing new here.

1140-AA66: Export Control Reform – Conforming References to Department of Commerce

Some administrative changes saying that some export approval authority will move from the Department of State to the Department of Commerce.

1140-AA91: Update to Proscribed Countries for Import Restrictions

“The proposed rule would remove the existing, static list of proscribed countries from which ATF denies applications to permanently import defense articles and services, replacing it with a dynamic reference to the Department of State’s list of proscribed countries. This ensures ATF’s import restrictions remain current and consistent with State Department designations without requiring separate ATF rulemaking each time the list changes.“ Also, the ATF currently denies ~all permanent gun and ammo import applications for all former Soviet countries. This rule would leave Russia on the ban list but remove all other former Soviet countries.

1140-AA77: Adding Component Definitions Under the Arms Export Control Act

Changes terminology in the ATF’s regulations under the Arms Export Control Act to standardize on the terminology used in the United States Munitions List.

1140-AA31: Implementing PATRIOT Act Improvements: Contraband Cigarettes and Smokeless

It’s the ATF, but this list has been all F so far. Here’s a little T. “The rule reduces the quantity threshold triggering jurisdiction under the Contraband Cigarette Trafficking Act (CCTA) from more than 60,000 cigarettes to more than 10,000; extends CCTA coverage to contraband smokeless tobacco for the first time; expands recordkeeping requirements and the class of persons subject to them; imposes reporting requirements on persons engaged in delivery sales above specified thresholds; and requires that cigarettes and smokeless tobacco seized and forfeited under the CCTA be used in law enforcement operations or destroyed. The rule does not apply to electronic cigarettes or other vaping products.”

1140-AA83: Changes to National Firearms Act Tax Remittance Provisions

This just codifies changes that Congress made to the NFA last year, most notably updating the ATF’s regulatory wording to reflect that tax stamps now cost $0 for all NFA items other than machine guns and destructive devices.

This week’s links

“State of the Ammo Industry Spring 2026” from AmmoSquared

Good market analysis from a company that is quietly growing into one of the most important companies in ammunition.

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For those keeping track: these kits used to be allowed. Then the ATF raided Polymer80 in 2020 and formally banned these kits in 2022. Then last week they said they were not going to revisit their rule banning the kits. They got an earful about that, and now they said they will revisit the rule.

That is weird. The Constitution gives Congress the power to make laws. The process to make a new law is convoluted, and most of the time it fails. That is by design. But interest groups get mad when their laws don’t pass. How to resolve that problem? Well, instead of arguing about the merits of each law, Congress delegated the problem. Around the 1890s, new federal laws in the US stopped describing the details of what is illegal, and instead started spinning up federal agencies to figure out the details. The process is simple:

1. Congress gets letters about The Current Thing.

2. They write a law that says, “The Current Thing is important. We hereby create the Department of The Current Thing, which is empowered to make administrative decisions about the details of what is illegal when it comes to The Current Thing.”

3. This passes, because instead of being on the record about the actual details, everyone in Congress can say they did something. Any problems that arise are the fault of the Department of The Current Thing. If there are a lot of problems, even better — now the next Congress can create the Department of The New Current Thing to solve it.

Most of the federal government today is downstream of that dynamic, and the ATF is a good example. Founded in 1886, hitting its stride during Prohibition, and taking on enforcement of federal firearms laws a few years after the passage of the National Firearms Act of 1934, the ATF is a founding father of the administrative state. Not in scope of responsibilities, but in depth of impact.

The steelman for administrative rulemaking is that Congress passes laws and only delegates to the executive those day-to-day tasks that make the law straightforward to understand and enforce. An executive agency can’t, on paper, change the law. For example, Congress empowers the IRS to collect taxes, and the IRS gets to decide the format of the forms that you fill out. But the IRS does not get to decide the tax rates.

Federal gun laws are an extreme example of an executive agency making substantive changes. The ban on pistol kits is a good case study. The difference between manufacturing/transferring a pistol legally and doing it illegally is very simple: ten years in federal prison. Usually, it requires an act of Congress to turn something from a fun weekend activity into a federal felony. In the case of pistol kits, all it took was a couple Department of Justice employees changing their mind — and then changing it back, before changing it back to the first position again, and now maybe landing somewhere in between. Assuming they don’t discuss it again and find a new position to take.

None of this is unique to guns (just ask https://x.com/CrimeADay), but guns are a salient example because they’re at a unique intersection: extremely accessible and extremely heavily regulated. Yes, you can be charged with a federal crime if you sell bacon with an incorrectly positioned transparent preview window on the package:

But there aren’t 90 million people in the US packing bacon. There are 90 million people with guns, and unless they’re within 1 degree of separation from the people reading this newsletter, they probably have no idea about the pistol kit ban. Nor had they heard about the bump stock ban, the pistol brace ban, or any other open letters the ATF has sent declaring new crimes.

So it’s good news that the ATF might loosen the pistol kit ban a bit. But the power to loosen the laws is just the flip side of the power to tighten the laws, and that’s a power that no one entity should possess.

This week’s links

We have written a lot about the administrative state and centralization spirals

David Yamane on a Danish newspaper story about gun culture 3.0

Light Over Heat with Professor David Yamane

What a Danish Newspaper Got Right About American Gun Culture

Guntubers — firearms influencers on YouTube and other social media platforms — are reshaping who gets into guns and how. That’s the story Danish journalist Anders Tornsø Jørgensen was chasing when he contacted me recently. It’s one I’d been thinking about already in my Substack post and video…

Read more

4 months ago · 12 likes · 12 comments · David Yamane

Freedom Stencils

A recent project was a good reminder of this shop. All kinds of stencils for painting patterns onto your gun.

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• Make the guns faster to reload. Wouldn’t it be cool if you could fire shots as quickly as you wanted, instead of once every 45 seconds?

• Make the guns work in the rain.

• Add a rifled barrel so bullets are accurate at range.

• Add some kind of sighting system.

• Better gunpowder and projectiles to extend your range

The good news is all of those problems are now solved. The bad news is they were solved by 1900. In the 126 years since then, firearms have gotten more reliable, more durable, and more ergonomic. But those are refinements to a set of basic concepts that have been been the same since John Browning. There have been no fundamental changes that are anything like the evolution from matchlocks to semi-autos was.

Ok, so imagine once again that you’re an enterprising civilian defense entrepreneur. This time the year is 2026. If you could wave a magic wand, what would you make better about today’s firearms? Well, here are some ideas offhand:

• Make them not deafeningly loud.

• Make them not emit clouds of lead-filled, carcinogenic smoke.

• Today it takes thousands of rounds in training to learn to shoot a gun well under pressure. It would be really cool if you could make your weapons so easy to use that a novice could be effective within a few minutes.

• Make it harder to shoot someone accidentally.

• Gunfire is always potentially lethal. It would be cool if you could dial the lethality of a shot up or down in real time as needed.

• Guns have to be aimed manually for every shot, and you need a line of sight to the target. They cannot be used around corners or obstacles, or in any situation where you can’t stop whatever else you’re doing to aim.

• The classic “bump in the night” scenario is high-stakes. If it’s a robber breaking into your house, you’ll be glad you took a gun to investigate. If it’s the police, you’ll quite possibly be killed. And those aren’t the only two possibilities. The perfect civilian defense weapon would create time and space for you to gather info.

• Even in a martial context, firearms are showing their age. Offense and defense are both converging on “Drones. Lots of drones.” Garand Thumb’s video a couple weeks ago demonstrated that while trained shooters with special equipment can take down a drone, most of the time the drone is going to win:

Firearms are going to be part of the civilian defense starter kit for decades to come. But drones are starting to feel like a missing layer of that starter kit. Think of it as having your own personal team of first responders.

Drones are Second Amendment arms. That’s not so your neighbor can fly a shaped charge into your car. Guns being Second Amendment arms doesn’t mean that your neighbor can fire shots down the street, either. Thinking of drones this way just means that they’re becoming what guns or pepper spray or internet access already are — an important tool for you to be your own last line of defense.

We’ll leave you with a little past writing on this:

This week’s links

Intro to Meshtastic

Useful primer.

AERIS-10 on Github

The AERIS-10 project aims to democratize radar technology by providing a fully open-source, modular, and hackable radar system. Whether you’re a university researcher, a drone startup, or an advanced maker, AERIS-10 offers a platform for experimenting with beamforming, pulse compression, Doppler processing, and target tracking.

Shooters Global’s Shotisize system

Looks slick. There’s a demo video on the site.

Shotisize AI will detect the Timer start signal in a video and time codes of all of your shots and splits, and overlay all data onto the video.

ATF will slightly loosen its ban on homemade pistol kits after all

For those keeping track: these kits used to be allowed. Then the ATF raided Polymer80 in 2020 and formally banned these kits in 2022. Then last week they said they were not going to revisit their rule banning the kits. They got an earful about that, and now they said they will revisit the rule. The good news is that this is an improvement (albeit a very small one). The bad news is … why is it possible for important decisions like this (which can lead to federal prison terms for anyone caught breaking the rules) to oscillate based on the whims of a handful of people?

h/t @Chevron in our Discord.

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• A group of people were kicked out of a local bar after getting into an argument with some other patrons.

• As the ejected people were milling about in the parking lot, Cargill’s employees happened to arrive to the bar.

• The ejected people mistook the two LGS employees as being part of the group they had argued with inside the bar.

• A fight ensued. One of the LGS employees ended up on the ground and was being beaten without defending himself. The other employee then shot one of the assailants dead.

• The employee who was being beaten is in the hospital, and the one who fired the gun is charged with murder.

Here’s a local news story on the altercation, and here is Cargill’s press conference from this morning about it.

(Side note: Cargill is the owner of Central Texas Gun Works and a well-known litigant in pro-2A court cases. He is best known for Garland v. Cargill, the Supreme Court case which found that the ATF had exceeded its authority in deciding to treat bump stocks as machine guns.)

This is a good time for a refresher on what to do after using a gun in self-defense.

Two things are going to happen. First, the police will arrive. Second, you will be arrested. So all the advice you hear is aimed at navigating those two basic facts.

Re the police showing up:

• Call 911 as soon as you are safely able to. You want to be the one to report the shooting.

• Ask for police, and for an ambulance for anybody who is injured or killed. If you can safely render aid to anybody who needs it, that is the moral thing to do. But you are not required to put yourself at risk in order to do that.

• Give your name, location, and a physical description so first responders can identify you. Keep the narrative very brief, and don’t give details about how or why the altercation played out. Something like “I was in a situation where I was forced to use self-defense. One person is shot.“ Also say that you are not armed at this point.

When the police do show up, be polite but essentially repeat what you said on the phone. If they ask for any further details about what happened, say, “I will fully cooperate, but tonight I’m exercising my right to not give any statements, and I would like to speak to my attorney first.”

That is the best thing to do, but it won’t get you out of being arrested. Being arrested is not evidence that you have done anything wrong. This is the process working itself out. Don’t protest, and don’t start sharing details to try to talk your way out of an arrest. In most jurisdictions, self-defense is an affirmative defense. That means it won’t get you out of being arrested. Instead, it’s something you can bring up later to get the charges dropped, or as an argument for acquittal at trial if things get to that point.

After you are arrested, you will be questioned at the police station. Give no further information at this point, even if the detectives insist that they are trying to help or that they just want your help to understand what happened. That can be scary, because the implicit threat is that they can charge you with murder and ruin your life. Don’t respond to that. If you do things right, that threat will not materialize. Just settle in to be in jail for a few hours or even a few days, and your attorney will take over all communication.

This video has a more detailed breakdown of what to say and when:

Everybody likes to think that if a self-defense shooting is forced on them, they’ll save the day. It’s also worth spending an equal amount of time considering how to save the day in the situation’s aftermath, too.

This week’s links

Excellent video from T.Rex Arms about digital night vision

This is the definitive technical video on how to build digital night vision. And so many great production details to bring the info to life.

The Reload: “The one weird trick for upholding waiting periods”

Mandating a multi-day delay before someone can buy a firearm does not implicate the Second Amendment, a federal appeals court has ruled.

On Friday, a three-judge panel for the First Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously reversed a lower court decision that blocked enforcement of Maine’s 72-hour waiting period for gun sales. The panel determined that the law did not even implicate the plain text of the Second Amendment because it regulates conduct that “occurs before a person keeps or carries a gun,” rendering it likely constitutional.

The ATF is going to keep in place its ban on homemade pistol kits

We wrote about this in 2020, and it seems like the ATF has not adopted a friendlier stance on the topic:

About Open Source Defense

OSD Capital

Investing in decentralization and freedom. Reach out.

Reach out

OSD podcast

In-depth interviews with outstanding founders and builders in civilian defense.

Subscribe to the podcast

The company store

Grab a t-shirt or a sticker.

Shop the store

Discord server

The OSD team is there along with lots of subscribers. Become a paid Substack subscriber to join the chat.

Subscribe now