Category: Politics

On gun control via government purchasing

As I do on occasion, I was perusing some of the various gun control groups sites and seeing what they were up to. In so doing, I discovered an interesting proposal that I had not previously known about: using the purchasing power of government agencies like police departments to implement gun control.
Although some people, including former Governor of New York Elliot Spitzer, have written about such strategies in the past, I’ve not heard of it before now. Gov. Spitzer’s explains the strategy:

Here is how it could work with guns: The Defense Department and the city of New York are among the largest purchasers of guns. If the president and the mayor truly believe that semi-automatic weapons should not be available to private purchasers, and that magazines with more than 10 bullets should not be sold over the counter, they should simply say that, from now on, the federal government and the city of New York, as a matter of public safety, will not buy any weapons or ammunition from companies that do not agree to pull semi-automatics from their stock and refuse to produce magazines with more than 10 rounds other than for sale to the government. President Obama and Mayor Bloomberg should announce that semiautomatic handguns with high-capacity magazines?the kind used in Oak Creek; Aurora, Colo.; Tucson, Ariz.; and Virginia Tech?can no longer be sold to private citizens by any company that wants to do business with the federal government and the city of New York.
The major gun manufacturers will agree to the limits imposed by their major customers.
Gov. Spitzer’s plan is certainly interesting, but it relies on a few key assumptions without which the entire scheme collapses:

  1. Government sales constitute a sufficiently large fraction of gun sales that manufacturers would be unwilling to lose their business, thus restricting what’s available for public sale to keep government business.
  2. No other manufacturer would step in to fill the gap left by those playing along with the government.

While point #1 may apply to certain companies that are particularly reliant on government sales (what’s the breakdown of government:civilian sales for companies like, say, Colt?), it’s unlikely to matter for a lot of the smaller companies — I doubt that Stag Arms, Mega Arms, Magpul, and other relatively small manufacturers of somewhat “controversial” things like AR-15s, magazines holding more than 10 rounds, or guns with black plastic bits really care much if the Defense Department or the government of the State of New York don’t buy their stuff because they probably don’t buy their products already. They can’t lose sales they’re not already making, so this strategy can’t apply any sort of leverage against them.
Point #1 also breaks down when you look at sales figures: sure, a government agency may be the largest single customer of a particular company, but they make up a relatively small amount of total sales. As an example, let’s be generous and say that the State of New York is a manufacturer’s largest single customer and contributes to 10% of the company’s total income with the rest coming from smaller customers (e.g. local police departments, say a combined total of 10%) and individual buyers (80%). Even if the local police departments play along with the state, why would a company eschew 80% of its sales to appease a minority of its customers? That wouldn’t be good publicity for the company, particularly when the government makes it clear that they’re doing this specifically to apply leverage — what’s to stop the government from asking for more in the future and cutting off purchases if they don’t get what they want?
Point #2 reflects the state of the market: ARs are among the most popular guns in the country for private citizens. Manufacturers have been running around-the-clock to keep up with demand and there’s still a backlog. It would be foolish in the extreme for one company to simply give up their share of that market, generate enormous customer backlash, and allow other companies to take their place. There’s plenty of competition in the market, and while there might be some disruption if one of the big contract forges/casting houses leaves the market, someone else will happily take their place. Again, while the government might be the largest single customer of certain companies, they almost certainly make up a relatively small fraction of their over all sales, and there’s plenty of companies who don’t really care about government sales and so wouldn’t be pressured at all.
This doesn’t even begin to take into account that there’s a huge number of guns that are hugely popular with private citizens but almost never purchased by government buyers — how many governments purchase imported AK clones? Saiga shotguns? Ruger Mini-14s (yes, I know they’re reasonably popular with officers in jails/prisons, but you rarely see police using them outside of that context)? How many agencies buy Kel-Tec rifles, Kahr pistols, M1As, or any of the zillions of other products that anti-gun people would restrict if they could?
Of course, the strategy doesn’t take into account the fact that the government is a purchaser of items, not a manufacturer. If the large manufacturers decided to stop selling their products to the government (Barrett was the first major company I can recall that did this, and now there’s quite a few other companies who refuse to sell guns or accessories to governments in states that infringe the rights of private citizens). I think it’s more plausible that gun companies would band together and refuse to sell or service products to governments that infringe the rights of their citizens (thus applying leverage to change policy for the better) than for governments to use their relatively minor purchasing power to influence gun companies.
As always, I welcome the thoughts and comments of readers.

Keep Up the Pressure

According to a public blog post by Moms Demand Action (I will not link there), “the other side” (i.e, pro-gun people) are calling their politicians regarding gun issues more than 5x as often as the anti-gun people, even though MDA claims there are “more of [anti-gun people]”.
Excellent. Even though things are pretty quiet right now, keep up the pressure. It’s easy to call your legislators and express your opinion. Writing a letter can also be effective. Keep things short, polite, and to the point, but take a few minutes a week to call or write and make your opinion known.

One benefit of the shutdown: Senators answering their own phones

Evidently several senators, including Sen. Manchin (of Manchin-Toomey fame), have started answering their own phones as their normal staff are not available due to the shutdown.
If you live in West Virginia you might try giving him a call. According to his Senate page, his DC phone number is?202-224-3954. This is a rather direct way of expressing your displeasure with the M-T gun control bill.
(Hat tip to Bitter.)

Exactly.

The folks spraying our cities with bullets are not NRA members or legal gun owners. And despite the tendency to tie it all together, they have nothing to do with the Adam Lanzas of the world.
[…]
This is why gun-control advocates need to abandon the routine of using mass shootings to turn law-abiding citizens into social pariahs and instead focus on something that could work.

– LZ Granderson, in this CNN Opinion piece.
Go and read the whole thing.

You’re Not Helping

The new Fox & Friends host, Elisabeth Hasselbeck (formerly the lone conservative on ABC’s The View) suggested during the Tuesday morning show that “the left” was trying to make Monday?s mass shooting at the Washington Navy Yard about “gun control.” Instead she pointed out that the country doesn’t need a national registry for guns, it needs one for to [sic] track video game purchases.

-?GamePolitics
As a gun owner and a gamer, I find remarks like this to be firmly in the “you’re not helping” category. Millions of people in the country (and many more all over the world) — including myself — enjoy playing video games, including those with violent content. The vast, overwhelming majority of gamers are ordinary people who go about their lives without harming anyone.
Is there some overlap between violent madmen and those who play video games? Almost certainly, just as there’s some overlap between violent madmen and those who use toothpaste, watch movies, hold particular religious beliefs, listen to certain musical groups, hold a specific political view, etc. However, as far as I’m aware, there’s no conclusive evidence that any of these things have a causal relationship with violent outcomes.
As fellow gun-rights supporters have pointed out, violent crime rates have dropped over the last few decades while the number of privately-owned guns has increased. Over the same time period the sale of video games, including violent ones, has also increased as has their realism and detail.
Blaming video games for violent crime is a bold claim. Is it possible? Perhaps, but if I may quote Carl Sagan, “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” Such evidence is not forthcoming. Making unsupported claims of this type is silly, counterproductive, and makes gun-rights advocates look absurd by association.

Gun Control Fails

Thanks to the efforts of Sebastian and Bitter over at SNBQ to liveblog the recent Senate vote and by streaming C-SPAN live video, I was able to watch the various restrictive gun control measures fail.
I was worried about the Toomey-Manchin amendment, as it would likely have been the basis for even more restrictive gun control, and given the momentum to the anti-gun-rights groups. Fortunately, all the measures failed, with Feinstein’s AWB and the magazine limit bill both failing to achieve even a simple majority.
Well done, everyone. The side of liberty won this time, but we must remain vigilant.

Outside the Asylum

Since I moved out of the United States I haven’t been following American politics as much as I used to. Most of the local media here is in German, which I’m not very good at reading, and I’ve been too busy to keep up on anything other than the major headlines from US and global English-language news.
Normally I’m not very involved in politics as I find the day-to-day workings of politics to be distasteful (not to mention that having political discussions with people is usually pointless and frustrating), but I had some free time recently and was catching up on news relating to the November election.
The Democrats haven’t really changed much, and have basically remained the center-right party (( For decades they’ve been “center-right” on a global scale. )) they’ve been for years. The Republicans, however, have lost their collective minds and are basically catering to the lunatic fringe. The Democrats haven’t really changed their message all that much, but the things the Republican candidates have been saying recently is downright chilling. Things really have taken a turn for the crazy recently, particularly with the Republicans. The Democrats have hardly been angels either, but Republicans at the national level have really gone off the deep end.
There has been a definite vibe of “I have to oppose $LEGISLATION, even though it may be beneficial and good, because $OTHER_PARTY suggested it!” going on in American politics, and it needs to stop. Politics should not be like supporting your favorite sports team and demonizing your favorite opponent (( My wife is a die-hard Boston Red Socks fan, and loathes the New York Yankees with the burning passion of a thousand desert suns. )) — there needs to be compromise, cooperation, and consensus from everyone involved.
Similarly, there’s a strong “Not Invented Here” thing going on: if a proposal is made based on something that’s been beneficial in Canada or Europe, it’s likely that many Americans will oppose it outright without really considering the idea. Sure, not everything that works in Europe, Canada, or other places in the world will work with the United States (( For example, high-speed intercity trains make a lot of sense in smaller, more densely populated European countries and in the Northeastern Corridor of the US, but are impractically slow for transcontinental passenger traffic in North America due to the great distances involved.)), there’s many ideas that make sense that simply aren’t considered. If the US is going to remain prosperous, we need to improve our country by considering good ideas regardless of the source.
While the two-party system that is firmly entrenched in US politics is unlikely to go away anytime soon (( Though it might be interesting if the US had a more “parliamentary-style” style of government, where the legislature is composed of many parties based on the percentage of votes and several parties need to form alliances to advance mutually agreeable causes, rather than just two parties where the “first past the post” wins. )) , this hyper-partisianship is damaging and destructive.
I recognize that politicians aren’t experts on all subjects (and that in general, experts on a particular subject would make terrible politicians), but wouldn’t it be better for everyone if politicians would consult experts before proposing legislation? It’s not necessary for someone to be an expert mechanic to operate a car, but having some basic operational knowledge about the subject (how to change a tire, knowing that it’s necessary to have the car serviced at regular intervals, etc.) is useful, as is having an expert that one can ask if one has car troubles.
Politicians shouldn’t need to be expert mathematicians, but it’s not ok for legislators to not know basic math. Similarly, I don’t expect politicians to be experts on internet infrastructure, but being proudly ignorant of how the internet works and actively shunning experts because their factual statements disagree with your ideology (or that of those who are making “campaign contributions”) is not ok.
Letting ideology and ego (not to mention corruption) get in the way of facts and good policy is terrible. Doing otherwise is an invitation to disaster.

Censorship

The House of Representatives and the Senate are considering several “internet blacklist” bills — “PROTECT-IP” in the Senate, and “Stop Online Piracy Act” (“SOPA”) in the House.
If passed, these laws would have a devastating effect on free speech, internet infrastructure, privacy, and current “safe harbor” provisions for websites all while doing little to stop the availability of pirated content.
To quote the EFF:

As drafted, the legislation would grant the government and private parties unprecedented power to interfere with the Internet’s domain name system (DNS). The government would be able to force ISPs and search engines to redirect or dump users’ attempts to reach certain websites’ URLs. In response, third parties will woo average users to alternative servers that offer access to the entire Internet (not just the newly censored U.S. version), which will create new computer security vulnerabilities as the reliability and universality of the DNS evaporates.
It gets worse: Under SOPA’s provisions, service providers (including hosting services) would be under new pressure to monitor and police their users? activities.? While PROTECT-IP targeted sites ?dedicated to infringing activities,? SOPA targets websites that simply don?t do enough to track and police infringement (and it is not at all clear what would be enough).? And it creates new powers to shut down folks who provide tools to help users get access to the Internet the rest of the world sees (not just the ?U.S. authorized version?).

I find it terrifying that the US government is even considering such a blatant censorship scheme. This sounds like something one would expect from oppressive regimes, not from a Western nation, and certainly not from the U
Please, contact your Representatives and Senators. This is a Big Deal.

Gov. Brewer Vetoes SB 1467

The Arizona Republic reports that Governor Brewer has vetoed SB 1467, citing vagueness in defining “public right-of-way”.
That said, the definition is somewhat vague. A.R.S. ? 9-461 defines “right-of-way” as “any public right-of-way and includes any area required for public use pursuant to any general or specific plan”. Somewhat circular reasoning.
Naturally, all the anti-rights folks (both on-campus and off) are focusing on unexplained statements (( For example, “Guns have no place in school!”, without explaining how it’s fine for people to carry guns on a public sidewalk on any non-campus street in the state, but is somehow worse to have the same people carrying the same guns on a public sidewalk on-campus. )), emotional claims, and irrelevant refererences to the incident where Congresswoman Giffords and others were shot (( It’s already illegal to commit murder and attempted murder, yet that law didn’t seem to stop the shooter. How are stickers declaring a campus to be a “weapon free zone” going to be any better? Criminals would ignore them; only the law-abiding would obey those rules.)) as that incident and empowering the law-abiding to lawfully carry, if they choose, on public areas of a campus have essentially nothing to do with each other. Go figure.
The Arizona Republic also provided some interesting information:

Brewer’s office was inundated with calls about the bill.
Between April 7 and April 13, the Governor’s Office of Constituent Services received 904 calls, letters and faxes in support of SB 1467 and 951 in opposition to it, a Brewer spokeswoman said.

It’s rare to get actual quantitative information about support/opposition to a bill. While it’s unlikely that the absolute number of support/opposition letters had any direct bearing on the governor’s decision, it’s still nice to get some numbers of what was received by her office. Although I oppose the governor’s veto, the fact that this information was released is a good thing. Well done!
In addition, the governor vetoed the absurd “birther” bill that the legislature sent to her desk. Again, well done. The fact that such a bill was not only proposed, but actually passed out of the legislature is quite embarrassing and reflects poorly on the state and the legislature.