If you cook, it’s only a matter of time before you drop an egg and make a huge mess. The obvious solution is to hold onto it more firmly, but if you grip too hard, you crush the shell and get egg all over you.
This lesson in moderation-in-all-things also applies to public policy. Even when something is often harmful, overregulation or criminalization can make it even worse. We learned this from Prohibition, and then again from its unfortunate sequel, Prohibition II: The War on Drugs. Both of these have treated regular people like criminals while encouraging real crime, filling our prisons (especially with minorities) and corrupting the police. The sane alternative is a harm-reduction approach.
Policymaking is social engineering, driven by cost/benefit analysis and seeking the greater good. So unless something is inherently and necessarily harmful, it should be legal but regulated, with the regulations carefully balanced between the two possible extremes so that they neither punish the innocent nor let the guilty go free.
Nowhere is this more necessary than with firearms regulation—gun control—where we are faced with extremists who reject all regulation or demand blanket criminalization. The insanity of the former should be obvious, while the latter seems overcautious but perhaps justifiable until you consider the foreseeable consequences of enforcing prohibition in a society that fetishizes guns.
I’ve been told that nuance is dead and slogans matter more than policy, and yet this rant is an attempt at a nuanced stance on gun policy that will not please extremists of either stripe. Upon due consideration, I am strangely ok with that.
Nationwide laws
Laws regulating firearms should be consistent and uniform across the country. When they’re not, there are three major harmful effects: impaired compliance, arbitrage, and local regulatory extremes.
For the first, consider a truck driver who wants to keep a firearm in the tractor-trailer cab but passes through so many jurisdictions that it’s infeasible to obtain a permit in each. What they want is not unreasonable given that they sleep in their trucks, which often carry valuable goods that make them an attractive target, and they’re on the road in places far from police stations.
If a reasonable fear for their safety compels people who want to comply with the law to instead break it, we have failed by gripping the egg until it cracks. Rather than the de facto ban on interstate firearms possession, which only drives it underground, national laws would allow us to regulate the practice.
This is just one example of the hodgepodge of seemingly-arbitrary local laws that make compliance difficult, sometimes putting people in the ugly position of having to decide between potentially becoming the victims of criminals and becoming criminals themselves.
For the second, there is money to be made through straw purchases of firearms where regulations are lax so that they can be illegally resold where they are tighter. This accounts for the overwhelming majority of firearms that are used in crimes in better-regulated areas. Disparity drives smuggling. The only way to stop the flow is at its source, and that means removing the weak links in the chain of regulation.
For the third, there are some areas with “constitutional carry“—a patriotic-sounding euphemism for no gun control at all—and there are others where it’s extremely difficult, if not quite impossible, for a law-abiding citizen who’s not a police officer or security guard to obtain a permit for any sort of firearm, even a rifle to be used only for sport.
The lack of centralization means that the eggs are either dropped or crushed, depending. And this means that someone who could never qualify for a permit could nonetheless legally obtain firearms by shopping around for a more lax jurisdiction. Once they already have the weapon, anything we do is just closing the barn doors after the tanks have rolled out.
Nationwide laws will not please everyone, and that’s a good thing. The extremes on both sides are wrong here, and the right answer is somewhere in between. By having a single set of laws, we have a single battleground to fight over, hence some chance of attaining sanity.
Moreover, if only red states allow guns, then only red-staters will have them, and that’s not a healthy situation for America. I don’t mean that rednecks will invade the cities, armed with shotguns and flatulence. Rather, the existence of what are seen as gun-free zones feeds the paranoid mythology about the government confiscating all firearms, and this empowers right-wingers to win votes by pandering to gun nuts with promises of opposing even the sanest regulations.
Centralized registration
Every firearm should be registered to its owner. I don’t know that this needs any further justification, as I can’t think of a single plausible argument against it. If you own a gun and it leaves your hands, we should be able to track it right back to you.
The only objection I could find was the above-mentioned paranoia about the “gubmint takin’ away our guns”, mostly from the sort of people who actually deserve to have theirs taken away. Having said that, to the extent that we can make it clear that our goal is to regulate, not confiscate, we undermine their incoherent objections.
We need a computerized national registry, so that it’s efficient and accurate. All transfers, whether by sale or other means, whether in a store or between individuals, must update the registry. If your firearm gets stolen, you have to report it so that we can update the registry. And, yes, we will notice if you buy many guns that get “stolen” and then turn up at crime scenes.
For much the same reason, we should make it as easy as possible to match a weapon used in a crime to its owner, using whatever methods and technologies are feasible.
One practice is to maintain a database of striation patterns, to match the bullet to the rifled barrel. This is made more complicated by the fact that changing barrels can be very easy and barrels are not regulated, much less centrally registered. Perhaps they should be both. It also doesn’t apply to the smoothbore barrels of shotguns. Another way to match bullets is chemically, which mostly serves to narrow down and rule out, not identify.
Since cartridge cases are usually forcibly ejected and left behind, though typically not with revolvers, there are attempts to require microstamping to link them to the firearm, where each gun imprints its serial number upon firing. While, in principle, cases could come with serial numbers, keeping track of these disposable yet reusable pieces of brass seems infeasible.
One thing that sometimes goes unmentioned is that those shiny brass cases preserve fingerprints, though careful use of gloves when loading prevents that. Also, we would need to have the shooter’s fingerprints on file in the first place. This fits in nicely with the next topic.
Permit required
No one should be allowed to possess or own a firearm without a permit. Again, you would think this is a no-brainer, and yet there is controversy. It is easily dispelled.
Nobody questions the wisdom of requiring drivers’ licenses, yet a firearm is not only potentially deadly but designed to be. Requiring a person to jump through some hoops to obtain a firearm permit prevents impulsive decisions and provides us an opportunity to perform a background check to screen for reasons why they should not have access, like their history of violence.
It also gives us something to take away should they show that they can no longer be trusted with a firearm. An example of this is a red-flag law that targets those who are a danger to others, as when they have a restraining order against them. Simply put, if you scream, “I’m going to kill you”, you don’t get to keep your guns. Guns don’t kill people, people with guns who make death threats kill people.
Having said that, the goal is not a one-strike removal of a person’s ability to ever legally have a firearm again. As tempting as it seems, it goes too far, which creates political blowback due to its unfairness.
Right now, it’s pretty easy to get a restraining order applied to someone, as there’s a much lower bar than for criminal conviction. If those orders had these sort of permanent consequences, judges would be less likely to sign them, putting more people at risk. That would go against our goal of harm reduction.
Permits reduce harm another way, by allowing us to require basic safety training, which addresses the number one risk of harm from firearms: negligent discharge. This should include how to maintain a firearm safely, as cleaning accidents are a common type.
Note that the combination of centralized registration and required permits amounts to a mandatory background check on all sales.
Concealed carry
In many places, a permit lets you own a firearm and typically allows you to store it in your home and transport it to a range or to go hunting. It usually does not let you carry a pistol concealed, which is a good thing because that requires additional training. I don’t mean how to draw from a holster gripped firmly between your butt cheeks, but rather when and how not to shoot people who haven’t just kicked in your front door.
A basic firearm permit should be like a learner’s permit. All you actively have to do to get one, past perhaps having a token amount of hands-on experience, is pass a written exam showing you know the safety rules. It doesn’t mean you’re fully qualified, just that now you can be trusted enough to practice under safe, supervised conditions until you get better and can pass the “road test”.
To upgrade a learner’s firearm permit to a carry permit, you need more than just the eight hours of watching borderline-snuff films while being being repeatedly admonished not to point that gun at yourself. You need training in the practicalities and legalities of firearm use in a public setting, including when and if and how to intervene to protect yourself and others, with a focus on conflict avoidance and resolution.
The idea is that a person with a gun should remain unobtrusive and go out of their way to steer clear of trouble, not imagine themselves to be invulnerable heros or righteous vigilantes. When it’s a matter that can wait for the police to come and handle—and let’s be honest here: most are—you need to learn to reach for your cell phone, not your boom stick.
In fact, I’d argue that anyone carrying a gun should be legally obligated to carry a phone, especially since they’re going to need to use it immediately if they ever fire at anyone.
The required training should include role-playing and multiple-choice questions, as well as qualifying with the specific concealed-carry weapon on the range to prove that you’re not a danger to yourself and those you would protect, much as you need a road test to show that you can parallel park and don’t drive on the sidewalk. This includes rapidly but accurately shooting from the holster at relatively close range.
Right now, the bar is very low. While we require that drivers have 20/40 corrected vision, firearm permits have no eye test and the practical exam can be trivial. As a result, there are blind people with legal guns. Do you really want to die because you sounded like a criminal to someone?
It’s fine if concealed carry is difficult because, for most people, having a gun on them doesn’t make them any safer. They don’t need it, but the ones who do need it, need it all the time, wherever they are. The corollary is that, if you don’t need it at all times, you probably don’t need it at all.
As for open carry, to be quite blunt, it serves no legitimate purpose and should be flatly illegal. The kinds of weapons that can’t realistically be concealed, such as rifles, shotguns, and large pistols (think Desert Eagle) are also the sort that have no legitimate role in self-defense, especially outside the home.
It’s one thing to use a rifle to hunt or have a shotgun locked up in your house, another to walk the streets looking like Rambo. This policy prevents intimidation and allows us to treat revealing your weapon as brandishing. Anyone who waves their metal dick around needs to have it cut off.
Locks for Glocks
Firearms should not be left laying around where they can be used by children or stolen by criminals. If it’s not in your hands or in your holster, it has to be locked up.
This means you can’t just toss a rifle in the back of the truck or keep a pistol on the bed stand or under the pillow or in a shoebox on the top shelf of the closet where Junior probably can’t reach it. Yet.
Instead, it should be in a safe that is firmly attached to something heavy and stationary, or to the vehicle. There are safes that are designed to be unlocked rapidly and quietly, even in the dark, so there’s no excuse.
Gun locks are insufficient because, not only are they notoriously easy to pick or bypass, they don’t prevent the weapon from being taken to another location, where there is privacy and access to whatever tools might be needed to force them open. They’re the worst sort of half-measure, providing undeserved confidence. Nobody takes them seriously, so the law shouldn’t, either.
It would be nice to imagine a world where each firearm is keyed to a fingerprint on the trigger, but this does not seem to be technologically feasible, particularly since we wouldn’t want to lock out the user just because their hand is dirty or bloody. There are other possibilities, such as an RFID reader matched to a watch or ring, and standardization to these options should be explored.
Capacity limits
The ammunition capacity of civilian firearms is typically limited by a cylinder or magazine. Once it’s spent, you have to swap or reload, and that turns out to make a huge difference when it comes to mass shootings. It’s only when they’re briefly out of bullets that they can be rushed and the massacre stopped.
The magic number in many areas these days is 10, which strikes a good balance, given that a typical defensive use involves 2 or 3 bullets. But if you’re going to go on a spree, you can easily get larger magazines from areas which lack such controls, and this significantly bumps up the body count.
A Glock 19, one of the most common pistols in use, can take a 51-round magazine! Keep one more round chambered and you’ll have a bullet for each playing card in a standard deck. Have a spare mag and now your ammo count can (easily) exceed your IQ. Unless you’re under attack by a mutant zombie horde, this is ridiculous.
Nobody has a legitimate need for this, nobody should have it.
Range-only use
Many rules that make perfect sense everywhere else just don’t apply to a shooting range.
Here, that giant magazine isn’t a tool of mass murder, it’s a convenience that lets you spend your time practicing instead of reloading. Here, there’s no harm in having access to a military weapon that you have no plausible excuse to have at home, such as a machine gun. Here, it would even be ok to own such a weapon, so long as it stays here. Here, suppressors (“silencers”) are a useful safety device to protect your hearing, not something for super-spies and assassins. (Actually, more on these later.)
It’s not that anything goes, but that different, necessarily lower standards apply. While you need safety training to shoot at a range, you don’t need a permit, much less a carry permit. Besides the common-sense aspect, this encourages people not to own guns if all they want to do is occasionally plink away at some targets. Ranges typically offer gun rental at moderate rates.
A low barrier to range access lets people satisfy their curiosity and reduces the allure of the forbidden. There’s even an argument to be made for doing for guns what high-school driver’s education does for cars. The goal, besides training people to be safe, is to satiate curiosity, dispel ignorance, and make firearms less cool.
It’s a public safety win to migrate firearms from closets in homes to lockers at ranges. Guns are a perfectly fine hobby, but just as we don’t play darts on the street corner, we should encourage keeping more dangerous missile weapons where they can be played with safely.
Weird laws
There are strange and unusual gun control laws that exist for historical, political, or sensationalistic reasons and do not serve the public interest. These once again treat regular people as criminals while giving gun extremists more fodder to complain about regulation. An advantage of having one set of laws is that it becomes feasible to stamp out these local peculiarities, injustices, and absurdities.
For example, New Jersey (and only New Jersey), has restrictions against hollow-point bullets, even though these serve the legitimate purpose of limiting over-penetration and reducing collateral damage, making them standard for defensive rounds. They’re also more merciful and effective for hunting.
To make things worse, you can still buy them legally, but if they catch you with them outside your home, you’re guilty. This “gotcha” has no net benefit and has only served to make the state an easy target for criticism, not that NJ needs any help here.
Another highly-restricted firearms option is the suppressor. It’s not a “silencer” because those don’t exist outside of movies, but they’re restricted because of the Hollywood-inspired idea that criminals will use them to shoot whisper-quiet bullets which will make them uncatchable. In reality, not only does the big tube screwed onto the end of your gun make it harder to conceal, but that’s just not how physics works. Silence is golden but bullets are leaden, and LOUD.
Even the British Welrod, designed by SOE spy-boffins for the express purpose of assassination, and optimized for quiet at the cost of being bad in most other ways, is 123 dB, which is louder than an ambulance siren. That’s because a suppressor muffles the muzzle blast somewhat, but can’t do anything about the noise generated by firearm action, much less the sonic boom of supersonic bullets. And even with small-caliber, subsonic rounds, guns are deafeningly noisy; around 160 dB, louder than a jet engine at takeoff.
A suppressor can lower this by as much as 32 dB, a decrease on par with what is provided by the ear protection used at ranges. It’s still loud, but not quite as painfully and deafeningly so. This makes it possible for someone to use it in, say, a home defense situation while still being able to hear whether the “intruder” is just a neighbor looking to borrow a cup of sugar; or, if it turns out to be a real threat, not immediately deafen themselves.
Combined with regular hearing protection, it can make the range a lot safer for your ears. In an outdoor range and with the right rounds, you don’t even need the muffs. It also lowers recoil and reduces lead in the air, but it won’t turn you into James Bond.
In general, weird restrictions lead to bizarre and undesirable consequences. For example, a resident of Los Angeles can’t get a concealed carry permit, but someone who lives in a less restrictive area of the state can carry concealed when in LA. But if they go to New Mexico, their concealed carry permit isn’t honored, yet anyone can buy a gun without a permit and walk around with it in their hand.
This makes no sense. When the law is an ass, we all look like assholes.
Form vs. function
What kills is the bullet, not the bling.
Some firearms, such as “assault weapons”, are designed to look “tactical”. While that appeals to men with small, limp penises, it doesn’t improve their performance, much less their firearm’s. Despite this, evil-looking firearms are restricted on the basis of appearance while we ignore the real dangers.
If you look at the “assault weapon” law in California, you can’t help but to notice that it focuses on largely cosmetic details that don’t affect deadliness, particularly such things as grip varieties. And it’s so complicated that you need a flow chart just to figure out whether you’re legal.
Does all this help? Probably not, as it has spawned a cottage industry dedicated to crafting dangerous, scary-looking guns that are designed to skirt the law. Meanwhile, the elephant in the center of the room is being ignored. Let’s talk about that elephant.
Long guns
Firearms-control laws are largely focused on restricting access to concealable weapons. Aside from the focus on “assault weapons” outlined above, they’re much more lax about rifles and shotguns, yet these are far more dangerous.
The reason is that a boring, traditional-looking hunting rifle with an uncool, non-tactical wooden stock can fire rifle, not handgun, rounds. The difference isn’t really in the bullet, which can be pretty much the same diameter (“caliber”) and mass, but in how big a pile of explosives it sits on and how much time it spends being accelerated in the barrel.
I said earlier that it’s the bullet that kills, but lumps of copperclad lead aren’t dangerous except to the extent that they’re propelled at thousands of feet per second at your body. Rifle rounds have more boom, so they travel two to four times faster and hit correspondingly harder. (Actually, energy goes up with the square of the velocity, but only linearly with mass, so it’s even worse than you’d think.)
This makes them deadly, even when they’re small: the bullet in an AR-15 is about the same diameter and mass as one from a Saturday night special, but it’s much more dangerous. While bigger is usually better, when it comes to rifle rounds, smaller can be nastier because the bullets are more likely to tumble and fragment.
Whereas a handgun is only effective to perhaps 50 yards, at that range rifles are just getting started. They’re good to hundreds of yards, and the extreme versions can kill someone two miles away. Being able to kill at a great distance is not particularly helpful for defense, but works wonders for offense, including assassination.
The other long gun is the shotgun, and what it lacks in range, it makes up for in power. When loaded with shot, it creates a cone of death with a 40″ spread of lead pellets at 30 yards. At closer range, the spread is less, but the damage is even more substantial. And if you really want to punch a hole in someone or something, you can load a self-rifled slug, which dwarfs most conventional bullets in mass and impact.
While shotguns are traditionally touted as being good for home defense, based on the theory that they don’t require aiming and won’t go through walls (neither of which is true), that’s mostly genital size overcompensation. Shotguns are at their best when hunting small animals and birds, where the spread at a distance turns a miss on a tiny moving target into a hit, and dinner.
Should all of these large weapons be illegal? Probably not, but they need more substantial restrictions, to the point where we generally don’t want people to have them in their homes or vehicles.
A hunting rifle should be left at the range except when it’s actually being used to hunt. Likewise, shooting some clay pigeons or real ones with your shotgun doesn’t mean having it in your closet. And those fun-to-shoot military-style rifles, like the AR-15, belong permanently at the range, along with all the other weapons that have no legitimate use outside it.
This would, among other things, end the absurd legal arms race over what qualifies as an “assault weapon”. Instead, you can own the most tacticool penis substitute you like, but it has to stay locked up or else you will be. What distinguishes these range-only rifles isn’t their sometimes-daunting appearance, but how many bullets they can fire per minute.
Hunting rifles don’t need to be semi-automatic; you don’t have to be able to spray a deer with bullets as fast as you can pull the trigger. The noise accompanying a missed first shot means that you don’t get a second try. Single-shot guns, like traditional bolt-action or even break-action rifles, should be somewhat less restricted in that they, unlike your AR-15, are suitable for hunting.
Conclusion
To borrow a slogan, firearms should be safe, legal, and rare.
We can make them safer by keeping them out of the hands of those who can’t be trusted. By keeping them legal, we avoid the perils of prohibition and reduce harm instead of packing prisons. By setting reasonable limits that discourage unnecessary access, we make them relatively rare, once again making the country safer. And by doing this right, we can depoliticize gun control and prevent the right from using it as a bludgeon against liberalism.