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When I was a teen, it was called “surfing the web”, which I think was a great metaphor for the free-form movement across websites as you followed whatever path interested you. Nowadays I feel like we are (or at least I am) much more constrained to single sites that are ruthlessly optimized to keep you from venturing away. But I was surfing over the weekend, riding the big wave from the US Supreme Court’s bump stock ruling. About 2/3 of the way through I started turning it into this post due to some culture war implications, but those turned out to be false after digging deeper. So now I’m looking at this long, rambling post, which will soon expire as “old news”, and have decided to share it. Maybe someone else will learn something, at least.
In Sotomayor’s dissent in the recent bump stock case Garland v. Cargill, she writes (on page 26 of the pdf):
A guy on X/Twitter astutely pointed out:
I always had a feeling like the US has some absurd animal protection laws, especially around birds, though I never new the details. I like cats, and when I worked at Google I was part of a cat-lovers group (effectively a mailing list) that was mostly for just sharing pictures of cats but occasionally ventured into cat-activism. I wasn’t in Mountain View, but those who were had set up a catch, neuter, and release program for feral cats nearby. This also included some feeding stations. The Audubon Society got a burr in their bun that people were caring for cats somewhere, and found a few Burrowing Owls that lived near the places where the cats lived. This isn’t an endangered species, but California calls it a species of “special concern”, and that’s enough to get the State to catch and euthanize all the cats in question. Here’s how the New York Times spun the story.
So I had this feeling about stupid bird laws. Seeing the X/Twitter post led to some good ol' fashioned web surfing towards the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, including this article. Choice excerpts:
That second one seemed suspicious to me: imprisonment for rescuing a bird? Digging deeper it turns out to be true enough. News story and government release.
Incidentally, Politifact rates Republican Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner’s criticism of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s behavior here as mostly-false.
Now, the culture war angle that started me actually typing all this up. I have historically rolled my eyes at complaints that wind turbines kill birds. I don’t care that much about wild birds, and as much as I think “renewable energy” is a scam, the “it kills birds” argument seemed like a desperate attempt to find something bad about wind turbines that environmentalists would care about. Then I saw a post (that I haven’t been able to find again) claiming that enforcement of these bird laws against green energy companies sure has been a lot lighter than against everyone else. So I did some digging. The bird lovers and tree lovers use the same studies for their estimates of yearly bird deaths from turbines: between 140,000-679,000. When oil and gas businesses in North Dakota accidentally killed 28 protected birds, they got taken to court, even though it was eventually thrown out.
The wind turbine companies? Well, actually, they’re getting hit pretty regularly, too. ESIEnergy was prosecuted. Duke Energy Corp was sentenced in 2013 to $1 million in fines and restitution and five years probation following deaths of 14 golden eagles and 149 other birds at two of the company’s wind projects. PacifiCorp Energy was sentenced to pay fines, restitution and community service totaling $2.5 million and was placed on probation for five years... from the discovery of the carcasses of 38 golden eagles and 336 other protected birds.
AP whines that there are fewer criminal cases being brought against bird killers and that The Biden administration on Thursday proposed a new permitting program for wind energy turbines, power lines and other projects that kill eagles although I couldn’t find the actual proposal.
So I guess the US government is pretty consistent in flipping-the-fuck-out if you harm birds. Though there are movements towards giving green energy companies a break on these laws, it doesn’t strike me as different than all the other laws and subsidies and special treatment green companies already get.
Anyways, I’m thinking of buying a bump stock, but really want an FRT. My local Fudd gun range recently changed their rules from a complete ban to allowing automatic and simulated automatic fire as long as one of the chairmen was present “to ensure everyone’s safety”. I think the board just wanted to get to shoot automatic guns, but I’ll take what I can get. The range rules explicitly prohibit shooting birds and other animals that wander into the firing range, which I appreciate a little more now.
I know this is not at all our Constitutional system, but I half-wish the 9 justices should have just pulled an insanity wolf and mandated (hah, I know, separation of powers, I'm 60% joking) both houses of congress to take a floor vote within 14 days for the propositions:
Then there would be no case, no thousands of pages of analysis. No appeals. Congress wrote the NFA and congress can rewrite it to mean whatever.
[ Or at least the plaintiffs can try a 2A challenge, which this emphatically was not -- it was only statutory construction. ]
No, I'm glad it's going this way because now we get more focus on the currently-stupid law. I'm hoping that Republicans can find one or two full spines between themselves and actually get a real concession from Democrats in order to pass a bump stock ban: get suppressors and/or SBRs off the NFA. Reopen the machine gun registry is another reasonable step, but that's probably asking too much for this moment.
I would bet almost any sum of money the Dems would rather not fix it and just be sensationalist about the Court and the GOP in Congress.
The Senate Democratic side tried to push a bill that would have banned both bump stocks and anything that could "materially increases the rate of fire of the firearm". On one hand, they tried to push it through using unanimous consent that they definitely weren't going to get, so perhaps it is just for the sensationalism. On the other hand, they did include that portion, which might as well ban gunsmithing entirely: either they have so little familiarity with the topic as to believe that a resistance to such a ban would be just as sensational, or they actually want it, and a lot of them also say at length that they actually want it.
Why write a quality bill if you know it's DOA in the hosue. You've only got so many good legislative wizards. You don't put the A team (or even a team with a passing familiarity with a topic) on a symbolic bill that has no chance of becoming law. Those folks are working on things that might actually matter.
Trivially, because any opponents of future gun bills can credibly claim that the Democratic party wants to ban a wide variety of common semiautomatic firearm modifications, and point to this poorly written bill. Because even if you were grandstanding, it's more useful to grandstand in a way that doesn't give your opponents a ton of ammunition. And because leaving people without passing familiarity with a topic to write legal text with criminal penalties doesn't sound much better if you didn't intend for it to pass.
100% correct, but unfortunately I don't think it matters. Opponents of future gun bills are going to claim that whether it's credible or not.
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It's possible, but the problem there is that this is, long-term, likely to be a win for the Gun Culture. Gun Control is driven by sensationalized claims about the negative outcomes if the control schemes aren't implemented or maintained, and Gun Culture spreads by arguing that guns are fucking awesome, you should totally get one yourself. Gun control advocates claimed that concealed carry would result in turning our streets into warzones, but that didn't happen in the states that implemented concealed carry early, and the more states that went for it, the weaker the argument got. The same will happen with bump stocks.
The likely outcome of the decision is that the large majority of the gun culture buys one of these stocks, and then nothing statistically significant happens as a result. They get completely normalized, and banning them becomes completely impossible in any practical sense. This isn't helped by the fact that you can built an entirely-workable bump stock in about ten minutes out of cardboard and hot-glue. A motivated ten year old could do it as an arts and crafts project, it's that easy. Nor is the state of the art standing still; the gun culture is continuing to proliferate designs for pseudo-autofire, and those designs are only increasing in sophistication. As difficult as it might be to believe, the Gun Culture has not, historically, been terribly optimized for direct culture war. That is changing rapidly, and the low-hanging fruit for increased coordination and solidarity, practical lawfare, malicious compliance, and erosion of systemic control is plentiful.
Bump stocks won't proliferate too much for the simple reason that they don't work very well. I suspect that drilling 1/8 inch holes would become a popular hobby if the ATF was permanently defunded, but autofire simulators are sufficiently bad at their job for it to be unlikely for them to catch on.
I think it’s just the bump stocks that are uniquely fiddly in their use. The other ways to go full semi-auto seem to be a lot more polished (as they’re just triggers with so much extra slap they push themselves past their reset point).
I also think that most people haven’t figured out the ways to use full-auto effectively, and as people figure out what it’s actually good for and design new calibers around that system I think it’ll gain more adoption. .22TCM is perhaps the best candidate at present (not exactly widely available and it’s basically just really short .221 Fireball) but .32ACP, .30 Super Carry, and .22LR are also the most improved by being able to put half a shotshell worth of pellets into a man-sized target at 50 yards.
I’m not sure how long it’s going to take people to realize that; but I don’t think it’s that novel a proposition.
Im just going to leave this here.
One round of .22LR is just a single pellet of #4 buckshot, one round of .32 ACP is just a single pellet of #00 buckshot. Thus, anything that a shotgun is effective on can, trivially, be killed by .22LR.
The vz. 61 Skorpion is the ultimate successor to the double-barrel shotgun and it's sad that nobody really realizes it (except for Eastern European crime gangs who use it specifically for that reason). That is the PDW that should have replaced the S&W K frame in the bedside drawers of America, and I'm sure it eventually would have were it not for the NFA.
It will never cease to amaze me that the American-180 is arguably a better combat shotgun than most of what passes for "combat shotgun" today simply because you can reload it this century, where being able to put rounds exactly where you want them to go is a nice bonus (pro tip: if your shotgun doesn't have a box magazine, it's not a combat shotgun no matter how many velcro strips you put on it; Benelli/Beretta shotguns are inherently all cope guns).
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Gun Control can just do another Las Vegas, if you're of the paranoid mindset.
Even if they can get another law passed, it doesn't matter much if a huge proportion of the gun-owning population already owns bump-stocks and are not inclined to give them up. It's the same thing we saw with the assault weapons ban under Clinton; before, autoloading rifles were somewhat marginal in the culture, and a lot of gun owners weren't interested in them. By the time the ban expired, the AR-15 was America's Rifle, and adoption absolutely exploded as soon as the ban came down. They'll never get another bite at that apple.
I'd expect the same pattern to play out for bump stocks. Back when the ban was being debated, I wrote a post arguing that maybe bump stocks weren't actually something we should defend all that hard, and that maybe, just this once, we should possibly consider that the proposed restrictions might be reasonable. given what has happened since then, I will never make nor accept an argument like that ever again, and I think my experience generalizes.
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If we accept that wind energy is indeed mostly a farce, then these birds are getting killed pointlessly. Any society that causes such a massacre for no reason at all other than virtue-signalling should at least examine itself closely.
Given how stupid the COVID-19 response was, I've lost faith that anything with the slightest bit of ambiguity or cost+benefit can be handled reasonably by our society. Wind turbines generate electricity, externalities be damned. Hell, I'd label the entire anti-nuclear movement "virtue-signaling", and we haven't "examined ourselves closely" for the 80 years that's been going on. I blame it on 2 parts conflict theory, 1 part Moloch.
Killing birds is a tragedy of the commons. From my reading of history, nobody has found a good way to actually ensure a proportional response to a tragedy of the commons. We either threaten to jail people for rescuing woodpeckers, write some sad articles that change absolutely nothing, or funnel money into mismanaged non-profits. Even when a fairly simple law by Congress could save tens of millions of otherwise lost books, we can't do that because it might benefit Google.
Take the blackpill and accept that this probably won't get fixed. Ensure you and yours are benefiting from this foreknowledge. When I take my kids to see their grandfather (we're far apart so this is infrequent), we always take a walk into the nearby forest to see the family of bald eagles that have set up a nest there. And they've seen fields of flowers, and we have a huge physical collection of old books. My kids don't fully understand why their weird dad is obsessing about these particular things, but they don't need to.
I'm surprised that you are (presumably) at least 35 and can't think of a time when a tragedy of the commons was resolved or largely mitigated effectively. Off the top of my head:
DDT
CFCs
Bald eagles (no longer considered threatened or endangered)
Urban smog (largely due to car exhaust)
Actually, the example I had in mind when I wrote that was drunk driving. Our penalties for drunk driving are wildly disproportionate to the actual cost to society. We give far lower sentences to people who endanger or accidentally kill others by different means. We went with the extreme penalties to force a culture shift, and it worked. But it's not proportional. It lacks the beauty of the Invisible hand that solves so many of our other problems. It's not that we've never solved a tragedy of the commons, it's that I don't think we've ever solved it well.
No, the eggshell thinning was not a lie. It really is a great insecticide, it's a shame that's it's real bad shit for non-insects.
You'd probably lose your bet if only because it's not actually internationally banned for pest control. You just can't dump tons of it onto your crops anymore.
Yes, car regulations come with a cost - as a sedan driver I'm not happy about mega trucks sharing the road with me thanks to CAFE standards. But you can't pretend that urban smog is nowhere near as bad as it was in the 70s. That's obviously a tragedy of the commons mitigated. The mitigation isn't perfect, but that's an absurd standard.
If you're talking about hypothetical (and probably non-existent) deaths from lack of DDT you ought to weigh the people who didn't die of air pollution much more than the fact that you don't have a minitruck.
That may be because you appear to be largely unaware of the details of the examples I posted. The irony of being obsessed with showing your kids eagles that were nearly eradicated thanks to DDT crippling their eggshells while claiming that was a lie is heady stuff - history is truly doomed to repeat.
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Yeah, remember the ozone layer? In elementary school they scared us half to death with tales of skin cancer and whatnot.
Solved by a couple chemists coming up with better alternatives for a few pennies more and an international convention on switching over the course of a decade.
No one talks about solved problems (why would they) and so availability bias minimizes them in our minds.
Remember the specter of acid rain as well?
If we're on this topic, then let me link the relevant SSC post.
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And right as DuPont's patent on manufacturing R-12 was at its expiration date. Convenient.
This is the consensus among the HVAC tech community.
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R-12 was invented in the 1930s and was long out of patent. I think they DID pull that with some of the replacements -- the whole "Oh yeah we fixed that and it was no problem" story would be a lot more convincing if every few years they didn't decide the replacements are no good and now you have to replace all your equpiment AGAIN.
But not the [patents on the] processes used to make it, which expired shortly before the ban.
R-12 has been manufactured since the 1940s; manufacturing patents were ALSO expired. Dupont did not have a monopoly on R-12 (or R-22) production by 1996 or shortly before.
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Obviously, the correct move is for the Fish and Wildlife Service to ban bump stocks because the decrease in accuracy could increase unintentional bird deaths.
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The problem with the Migratory Bird Act is that it’s a strict liability law, which means you’re guilty even if you did not intend to break it. Most laws, like murder, require the court to determine if you had the level of intent required to violate it: if you didn’t intend to kill someone it can’t be murder 1, for instance. But the MBA doesn’t care. If you break it at all, you’re guilty. If you were having a cookout in your back yard and an Eagle decided to dive bomb your grill and ended up burnt to a crisp, you’re guilty. Doesn’t matter that you did not intend to kill the bird, or that no reasonable person would think that a flaming grill would be a hazard to birds flying overhead: the bird is dead, you’re going to jail.
It goes against most good ol’ English common law traditions, and makes the law have far more teeth than most laws do.
Why is that a thing? It defies all logic and common sense (which I know shouldn't be unexpected, but it still is).
The Illustrated Guide to Law has a chapter on strict liability, you may find it informative.
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Because professional hunters extirpated the passenger pigeon, and nearly exterminated a number of waterfowl species, using a bewildering variety of catch methods such that the law forbidding such things had to be written intentionally to cover loony toons scenarios. It's normal for game laws to be written to allow presumed guilt in some scenarios precisely because of prolific loophole abuse by the worst actors.
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I don't really know, but a factor is probably that it was written in the context enforcing of an international treaty focussed (mostly) on hunting practices around species that migrate between different countries. Game law do tend to be like that; not sure the ins and outs of how it got extended to fine people rescuing injured woodpeckers.
Here is a positive-bias brief rendering of bird protection, which seems to suggest that lawmakers were tired of playing whack-a-bird with state and local laws and deliberately made the law extra-strong to avoid having to revisit the issue too often. Also, at the time, many many bird species were near-extinction because of the easy availability of guns, bird feather hats being popular, etc. Like seriously, apparently passenger pigeons went from literal billions of birds to extinct. Old-timey America had a bit of a problem.
Why it's more strongly prosecuted now seems to stem more from some policy and administrative changes in the 70s and 80s.
Thank you for that link. That's a perspective I didn't have before. The development, use, and eventual banning of punt guns fits into this part of history. If they were still legal, I'm not sure whether I'd mount my 200 caliber shotgun axially on my minivan's roof or buy a truck and try to get it working on a turret.
That’s a two-inch smoothbore. Shotgun caliber is measured by the number of lead balls fitting down the barrel which would weigh one pound. Eg a 10 gauge shotgun(maximum legal size) would take ten lead balls.
Punt guns were often 2 or 4 gauge, significantly larger- and probably with a barrel diameter larger than 2 inches.
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They aren't legal? Generally punt guns were black powder muzzle loaders.
Ah, look at me getting my gun laws mixed up. They're legal as antiques if they're muzzle loading. Probably legal as a destructive device if they're breach loading. Always illegal to hunt with them.
It turns out that I spend more time stuck in traffic, dreaming of having firearms mounted on my vehicles, than actually researching what's legal and what it would take.
Ahh, a fellow Toyota owner. 😀
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