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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   24186 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.

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:

  • It is the intent of Congress that bump stocks are within the scope of 26 U. S. C. §5845(b)
  • It is the intent of Congress that bump stocks are not within the scope of 26 U. S. C. §5845(b)

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.

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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