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Notes -
The Colorado Gazette reports:
It's not clear if this was the actual intent: some of the Senators that sponsored that particular amendment claim that it wasn't, and they can credibly point to Democratic concerns that school resource officer funding being used to arm on-school police. Of course, the senators voicing concerns were the supposedly pro-gun side of the legislative debate; a different sponsor considered the entire bill "an exercise in sheer brute political force".
It's also not clear that matters. Legislative intent isn't exactly in vogue, and even if it were, the structure of judicial review for funding decisions make it exceptionally difficult for a challenge to survive first contact with the courts. Congress could change the law to be more specific... but I'd bet that they won't.
ESEA funds are not the whole source of funding for local schools and other covered groups, or even the sole source of federal funding. Schools that want to keep running archery and hunter education programs might be able to redistribute state spending from other matters, though they'll face extra scrutiny. Schools that don't will have a lot of reasons to absolutely smother these programs. And there's a lot more of the latter than the former.
I've spoken before about an older version of this problem, but it's also worth pointing out that, contemporaneously to the bill's discussion, this wasn't even on the list of concerns. But it seems interesting beyond that as a boring and trite example of the by-all-means war over institutions and culture, no matter the cost to civil trust.
What makes you say so? If you assume that the intent of all firearms legislation is to antagonize political enemies, you will rarely be surprised the text of the bills or the outcomes thereof. If you try to figure out how the legislation is expected to stop bad things from happen, you'll frequently wind up puzzled by how anyone could think that's going to work. Surely there haven't been any mass bow attacks of late! Bolt-action rifles aren't exactly the ideal choice for school shootings. Passing legislation that results in doing away with helpful, pro-social hunting and marksmanship programs seems unambiguously bad, unless the goal is to antagonize political enemies, in which case it seems almost perfectly well-suited to the task.
I don't think it's actually the case. The Left wants the Right not to have guns - but not to piss them off. Of course, pissing them off is an added value, but it's not the reason. The reason, depending on the fraction, would be either nobody except the Government should have guns, because nothing good ever comes from any aspect of power not being controlled by the government, or specifically the Right should not have guns, because they are bad people and bad people having guns is scary for the good people. As for "how the legislation is expected to stop bad things from happening", remember those are people who still think socialism is going to work if only you do it right, and releasing criminals from jails is actually the best way to fight crime. Their way of making projections and conclusions is a way that allows that to make sense, so it also allows whatever they think of guns to make sense in the same way.
That said, I think this particular outcome is purely "antagonize the outgroup" scenario, but I disagree that all gun legislation is only that. A lot of it is actually much worse.
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The goal is fewer hunters and making it harder to enter the sport.
Then this is a stupid way to go about that. Hunting is mostly transmitted generationally or through person to person old boys networks, and hunting classes in schools have zippo to do with it. This makes it harder to transmit hunting generationally, but no serious person thinks it actually prevents it(and even while democrats mostly don’t like the kind of people who hunt, they generally don’t want them to actually stop hunting), it’s simply a pain in the ass.
I don’t see it necessary to prevent all transmission of the hobby for the idea to work. They just need to put friction into it such that unless you personally know a hunter willing to teach you, you won’t get exposed to it. The less exposure kids get to guns, the easier it is to convince them that they’re evil death machines. Hunting is a positive exposure to guns being used responsibly as a tool and this undercuts the “scary gun” narratives the anti-gun lobby is pushing.
And my point is that hunting is already transmitted entirely person to person. Moving some bureaucratic stuff out of schools might annoy (some of)these people, but it doesn’t actually affect the rate of transmission because hunters are willing to put up with a lot of bureaucracy to bring their sons and nephews into the hobby. The federal government has tools to seriously reduce the intergenerational transmission of hunting(namely, reducing access to federally owned land by hunters). They aren’t using them and no one expects them to.
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Enough pains in the ass, and you can reduce the number of hunters in the next generation to the point where you can ban it (or its implements) entirely.
The actual end result is that instead of taking hunter's ed classes in school, kids have to go to bass pro shop on an evening or a weekend, which is not a deterrent to serious hunters. It is merely annoying. You can do things to make hunting even more annoying, and democrats mostly don't do them. Public hunting land remains open, including federal land, and hunter's ed requirements aren't getting any longer or less... geared towards their obvious target audience.
And there are functionally no hunters lukewarm enough to be deterred by taking some classes at a sporting goods store with their sons instead of having their son’s school do it. It’s already an opt in activity requiring up-front investment.
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It is the actual intent.
Liberal white women are afraid of guns, and want to ban all of them, to include hunting and sport firearms. You can't reason them out of this, because they didn't reason themselves into it.
They know the population, to include many Democrats, won't go for a total ban, so they keep slicing the salami. Ban a trigger guard here, an archery class there, and hopefully over the decades they'll end up with a total ban.
The Red Tribe has noticed the salami slicing, and has come to the conclusion that the only way we can survive is total unity - total opposition to any restriction on anything anywhere. We assume that any such legislation is proposed in bad faith, and oppose it.
While offering broad agreement, I will offer some slight pushback on this. Liberal women have not reasoned themselves into the fear of firearms, but I will say that I've had luck persuading a couple of them to be much less afraid by having a conversation about why I have guns and taking them shooting. You can't fix everything all at once, but people can be won over on guns by being a gun nut that isn't actually a nut.
Yawn yawn yawn. Wow, sure is amazing that all of your opponents (or the women anyway) are irrational idiots who will find their way to your correct opinion with some gentle guidance. Anyway, how is 'why you have guns' at all relevant to a policy discussion. Policy is made for aggregates, no-one should care on more than a personal level why you in particular have guns.
Dial down the snark.
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True enough. I've had the same experience. A 3rd date trip to the range with white woman who is simply following her social consensus has produced many positive effects, not only in the realm of gun control. The trick is to find an upscale indoor range that is pistol-caliber only (for the noise), and bring a quiet 22LR rifle. That's not exactly reasoning them out of it, that's providing them with an alternate emotional experience to counter previous emotional experiences.
Shooting a 22LR with zero recoil, find the range half full of kindly grandpas, and interacting with aggressively helpful clean-cut millennial tacticool staff goes a long way. A positive social environment goes a long way to changing the minds of people who form opinions socially.
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Literally every single person I have ever taken shooting has gone at least 30% up the Overton Window towards gun rights after shooting them. Even the "guns should literally be forcibly confiscated from the entire populace" person moved up to "these are probably fine if reasonable checks are in place on issuing them".
This is interesting and I don’t doubt that you’re correct, but oddly enough this was the opposite of my experience with firing a gun. I’m ambivalent about gun control myself, and am certainly far from a gun-grabber, but I will say that my experience going shooting really drove home just how serious guns are and how important it is to line up incentives so that only competent and well-adjusted people end up owning them. I spent the entire time very cognizant of the fact that I had a deadly weapon in my hand and that if I did something incorrectly I could kill somebody with it.
I mean the counterpoint is that ‘lining up incentives so that only competent and well adjusted people end up owning them’ is the one outcome to the US gun debate that will literally never happen, even as it’s theoretically possible and just how things work in eg France and Czechia. The gun controllers are mostly more concerned with annoying the red tribe than keeping guns away from bad actors, civil rights lawyers will pounce on anything with a disparate impact, the red tribe hits defect on the issue because see #1, and few of the people in the gun policy space even care about the actually common bad outcomes.
I guess it's nice to fantasise that all your opponents can be easily dismissed because they just hate you, but that is almost never the case. ERPOs are precisely designed to help reduce the number of poorly-adjusted people with access to guns, but Republicans lose their shit about those too.
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It's unfortunate that the republican politicians cucked on this bill, rather than stonewalling it on principle. It did nothing good, and of course was stuffed with poison pills that will keep on appearing for years.
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Reason #9000 the red trib hits the defect button on guns.
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