Stultitia Delenda Est

First, a video:

The article mentioned in the video above made the rounds of most of the popular gun blogs a month or so ago when it was written, so any firearms enthusiasts in the audience will probably have already read it. If you haven’t, though, I highly recommend you do.

I tend to stay out of online firearms debates for the intellectually selfish reason that they got boring for me a some time ago. This is because everyone arguing on the Internet is, as a rule, already as informed as they are going to permit themselves to be. At this point, arguing about guns on the Internet can only ever aspire to a frustrated argument about priors, and that’s the extremely unusual best case.

But I think that, wherever you fall on the gun debate, you can watch the video above and marvel at the stunning ignorance of the people attempting to ban “assault-style weapons”. And while I’m absolutely okay with people on the Internet not knowing what a barrel shroud is, to see our government servants trying to outlaw them out of pure ignorance is maddening.

But what’s particularly crazy-making is that this kind of ignorance isn’t the exception, but rather the rule in modern American governance. I would be willing to bet that of all the people involved with writing the currently proposed assault weapon ban, not a single one of them could accurately describe all of the features that it proscribes. No matter how you feel about the substance of the current law, that regulations are drafted under such ignorant conditions should make you sore afraid.

Because let’s face it, the second amendment may not be an issue you care about one way or the other, but even the most apolitical among us has something we care deeply about that the government is trying to regulate. And the ignorance at work in crafting this horrid ban on “assault weapons” isn’t limited to firearms issues. The same levels of ignorance are at play screwing up the regulatory regime around whatever issue it is you do care about, whether it’s educational policy, abortion rights, immigration reform, etc. etc. etc.

So why is this ignorance able to persist? Because most people only see it when exposed to it in the context of their own area of expertise or passion. If you know about firearms, you can look at the AWB and see it for the ignorant pandering that it is. But when the same people suggest an immigration reform bill that flatters your priors, suddenly you just assume that they know what they’re talking about.

Or, to use a more current example: I have a lot of friends in the tech industry who, being fairly typical, garden-variety American liberals, are completely in favor of an Assault Weapons Ban. It seems sensible and common-sensical to them, and they have a hard time understanding how anyone can disagree with them. As such, the proposed legislation seems on-point, well-crafted, and long overdue.

But present them with the fact that it is now illegal to decouple your cellphone from your provider in the United States without express carrier permission, and they will instantly rail against the stupidity and ignorance that went in to crafting the legislation that permitted that to happen. The same legislative bodies that they assumed were well-reasoning and well-informed about gun rights, are suddenly seen for the ignorant charlatans they are.

Of course the punch line is that all topical regulation is equally bad, it’s just bad in domain-specific ways that only the informed will see or care about.

This phenomenon isn’t novel or limited to government. The name for this effect is “Gell-Mann Amnesia”, named for the physicist Murray Gell-Mann and first articulated (as near as I can tell) by author Michael Crichton in his 2002 essay “Why Speculate?”. (Note: I can’t seem to find a copy of the original essay online any longer. If anyone does track down a copy, please drop me a link to it either by comment or by email.) Crichton pointed out that he and Gell-Mann often marveled at the stupidity of newspaper articles about the areas of their expertise. Such articles were often so wrong and confused as to completely reverse causal relationships (“wet streets cause rain” in Crichton’s words) or to be so muddled as to be completely non-sensical to someone in the know. Both men would then turn to an article outside their domain knowledge and read on in happy credulity.

In the context of newspapers, Gell-Mann Amnesia might lead to a bad broadsheet surviving a few months longer than it otherwise would. In the context of modern panarchic democracy, Gell-Mann Amnesia leads bad laws, curtailed freedoms, and a regulatory regime in which good people become felons because they own politically incorrect sheet metal or twiddle the wrong bits on their phone.

I really like that he focuses on the complexities of social statistics and international comparisons. Excellent, cogent points, well expressed.

And hey, Things Are Better Than You Think: violent crime rates have dropped by half in the US in the past 20 years. In contrast to what the fear mongers in the media and congress would have you believe.

I love the post-production effects:

It takes us over an hour and a half to get home. Normally, this drive would take maybe twenty minutes.

But we have to circle round and double back countless times in order to avoid choked arteries, major intersections where madness reigns—traffic lights are ignored—and then there are unknown side streets that cause Karen to observe:

“We’ll never get out of there alive.”

Listening to the radio, we hear about the Rodney King verdict. So that’s the grievance du jour.

The fire department, we learn, is not being deployed because their men have come under intense gunfire.

We hear—and I have trouble believing this report—that the Los Angeles Police Department has been “pulled back for their own safety.”

Huh?

I thought that was part of the job description.

Dopey me.

Definitely worth reading the whole thing.

One of the things I love about working at Amazon is the sheer density of brilliant, obsessive nerds with diverse skills and passions. This translates not only into an awesome work environment and Amazon’s ability to ship some seriously cool products, but also in some incredible products bashed out on the side.

Three examples:

1.) St. Optimus of Prime.

2.) Custom robotic target holder with randomized target presentation:

3.) No link for this one, but I was talking to one of my fellow Amazonians over beer the other day, and apparently his team just got finished building out metrics, monitoring, and alarming for their kegerator. Yes, in the true “metrics or GTFO” engineering attitude, they added scales to check beer weight left in the kegs and wired it up via an Arduino processor to send an email when the beer is low. Apparently the next step is to set up a real-time metrics dashboard to track beer consumption over time and to add a way for the metrics to be content-aware so they can alert people which beers are on tap and which are running low.

Amazon has a small but devoted group of shooters and firearms enthusiasts and yesterday we hit up West Coast Armory out in Bellevue. Five of us showed up, including one person who hadn’t shot in almost a decade and another who had never fired again before in his life. Three of us being members, we grabbed three of the first few lanes of the Silver (rifle-rated) bays and proceeded to spend two hours shooting a wide variety of nice kit. I got a chance to shoot a Walther PPS, which I liked, as well as a couple of Kimbers which seemed like perfectly serviceable 1911s.

Our new shooter seemed a bit nervous at first, but he took instruction well. I’d explained the Four Rules to him beforehand and, after a brief safety primer, we started him off with a single action 22 revolver. From there, we worked him up through 9mm, .38 special, and 45, and by the end he was shredding paper with .223 rifles with a giant grin on his face. Earlier today he mentioned that he had such a good time that he was planning to get a gun of his own.

I also got a chance to try out my newly kitted up Sig-556. I recently furnished it with new Sig Diopter iron sights, Samson Manufacturing fore end, and PWS FSC556 muzzle brake. I really like the way the rifle’s coming together. I think the only change I have left to make is to swap out the stock for something a little more stable. As it stands now, the rifle is reliable, accurate, and with completely negligible recoil. (When I’m shooting, I honestly don’t notice the recoil at all.)

One other aspect of note was that I got a chance to shoot my buddy Andy’s Glock 19. I’ve often damned Glocks with faint praise by saying that if you can endure their sloppy trigger and stiff magazines, then they’re the best handgun for the money. Hardly a glowing recommendation, I know. But it was reaffirmed for me yesterday. Glocks simply aren’t for me.

All in all, it was a highly successful day at the range. WCA has weekly IDPA matches that I’m going to try and make time for in the next few months, and there’s talk by the Amazon shooters group of making our get together a fortnightly occurrence. So it looks like their might be a lot more range time in store for me in the near future.

I’m quite comfortable with this idea, even if my bank account might not be.

Tasha Hanish, who won the Championship in 2010, absolutely rocks it on stage 2:

She has a few rocky spots with the steel on both shotgun and pistol, but check out how fast she clears the spinner at 1:23. My only gripe with the video is that the cameraman spends a lot of time focusing on her back when it would have been nice to see what she was shooting at.

I’ve never been particularly covetous of Saiga shotguns, but I have to confess, this video may have changed my mind:

Video by the great Oleg Volk. Shotty and shooting by Linoge of Walls of the City.

I’ve become increasingly skeptical of Kickstarter-style distributed funding, but I have to confess, I’m rather digging this project for a minimum-recoil .308. The firearms industry is notoriously conservative with design. I think that’s partially because of regulatory hurdles, but also because of generic conservative cantankerousness. This seems to be something fairly new, so I’m interested in seeing where it goes.

So if you’ve got some spare cash and want to see the industry break out of a rut, please consider supporting Project Titan.