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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   24189 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 17, 2024

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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):

When I see a bird that walks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, I call that bird a duck. A bump-stock-equipped semiautomatic rifle fires “automatically more than one shot, without manual reloading, by a single function of the trigger.” §5845(b). Because I, like Congress, call that a machinegun, I respectfully dissent.

A guy on X/Twitter astutely pointed out:

The real irony about Sotomayor's dissent is that US law about ducks is actually incredibly specific. If anything, the adage "if it looks... etc" is the exact opposite of the statute. There is an annually updated list by which protected ducks are classified by 7-8 different parameters. It's over 1100 entries long. There's also a list of explicitly unprotected waterfowl that has hundreds of species, too.

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:

In 2002, the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia declared that members of the military violated the act by unintentionally killing protected birds that flew into a live-fire training area.

In 2011, federal agents from the Fish & Wildlife Service threatened to imprison a Virginia woman because her 11-year-old daughter had rescued a woodpecker from a cat. Following nationwide scrutiny, the Fish & Wildlife Service declared that the mother’s citation had been “processed unintentionally.”

And in 2012, several oil and gas businesses in North Dakota were prosecuted because 28 protected birds had flown into state-sanctioned pools of fluid and oil.

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.

According to WUSA, eleven-year-old Skylar came upon a baby woodpecker just before a cat was about to make the bird his next meal. The aspiring veterinarian told the TV station, “I couldn’t stand to watch it be eaten.” So Skylar asked her mother if she could care for the bird and then release it. Mom agreed, and the family went on its way, stopping at a home improvement store in Fredericksburg, Virginia. Rather than keeping the bird in the hot car, they brought the woodpecker inside the cool store.

It was there that one of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s undercover (!) agents spotted the mom–daughter crime duo. Nervously, the undercover wildlife woman held up her badge and proceeded to reprimand Alison and Skylar for illegally taking and transporting the bird.

When the Capos got home, they released the woodpecker and notified the Fish and Wildlife Service. Two weeks later that same agent, accompanied by the Virginia state trooper, showed up at the Capo residence and, according to Alison, delivered a citation stating that she violated federal law, owed the federal government a $535 fine, and could be imprisoned.

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.

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).

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.

200 caliber shotgun

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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