By Kevin D. Williamson
Monday, March 04, 2024
Lots of gun-policy wonkery to follow—but first, a
confession and a wager.
Confession: I am that guy who has to fight the urge to
edit the entire Internet. Wikipedia articles on obscure off-Broadway shows I
reviewed for The New Criterion a decade ago? I’m still
correcting them. (No, the famous actor Morgan Freeman was not in Triassic
Parq; “Morgan Freeman” was a character in the show, a narrator who later
turned out to be a dinosaur in disguise. It made sense in the context of the
show, which was a musical version of Jurassic Park told from
the dinosaurs’ point of view. It was really good.) When Slate published
a made-up quotation erroneously attributed to Donald Trump a few weeks ago, I
bugged them about it, and
they corrected it. My contempt for Donald Trump is bottomless, but I can’t
abide a made-up quotation. I’m a writer and an editor. That’s my thing. Yes, I
am an obsessive pedant, but, deep down—in places you don’t talk about at New
York Times editorial meetings—you want me on that wall. You need me on
that wall.
I bring up the Slate example because I
know from experience that Slate will correct an
error—sometimes. And sometimes not. And—as much as it pains me to admit the
fact!—this matters. Slate is sometimes sloppy and consistently
biased (which is not the same thing as having a point of view), but when it
comes to Mark Joseph Stern and the firearms beat, Slate is
intellectually dishonest. It publishes, and stands by, falsehoods. His recent
column about the bump-stock case in front of the Supreme Court is full
of made-up nonsense, and his editors at Slate know this. I
know they know this because, me being me, I have explained it to them. I’ll get
to the details—more details than you’ll probably want—below.
But, first, I’d like to offer Slate and
Stern a wager, one in a series of similar wagers I’ve offered over the years to
people who make wild, ignorant, and factually false claims about the
capabilities of certain firearms. Often, these assertions take the form of
claims that a certain gun is capable of firing x number of
rounds in y seconds. The first of these to trigger a wager
offer from me came from a Pennsylvania state senator named Connie Williams; I
offered the contents of my bank accounts vs. the contents of hers that she
could not find a shooter walking the Earth—Olympic competitor, Philly mob guy,
trigger-happy San Francisco police officer, whoever—who could actually make a
certain gun do what she said it did. I was at the time the editor of a
small-town newspaper, and Williams is the daughter of oil magnate Leon Hess,
so, yeah, the pot was a little lopsided. But either you believe what’s coming
out of your own mouth or you don’t. (Williams’ most recent role in public life
was being
nominated to the National Endowment for the Arts advisory board by Joe
Biden.) Either facts matter or they don’t.
And I think facts matter. What does Slate think?
So, the wager: Among the other claims, Stern in his Slate article
claims that an AR-15-style rifle fitted with a bump stock can fire 800 rounds
of ammunition in 60 seconds. This is, of course, horses—t, as I have explained
to the folks over at Slate in one of my usual exasperated
emails. Before I get to the firearms-specific stuff, I should note the basic
statistical error there, i.e., the conflation of rate and total.
A cheetah can run 80 miles per hour, but that doesn’t mean that it can run 80
miles (say, from the Staten Island ferry terminal to the Rocky steps in
Philadelphia) in an hour. A cheetah can run 80 miles per hour—in short bursts,
not for an hour. Even assuming a rate of fire of 800 rounds per minute, that
does not mean that we would see, as Stern writes, “innocent civilians … torn
apart by 800 bullets in a minute” as “800 rounds spray out of the barrel in 60
seconds.”
Slate, I
read, had its best financial year ever in 2023—congratulations!—and its
parent company rejoices in about $4 billion a year in revenue. I don’t do $4
billion a year. I do have an extensive and fairly valuable collection of
firearms, and Slate has a pile of money, so I’ll bet my entire
gun collection against $5 million from Slate that it cannot
produce a shooter who can get 800 rounds out of a commercially available
AR-style rifle fitted with a bump stock in 60 seconds. (Let’s specify: any
AR-style 5.56mm semiautomatic rifle you can buy from Riflegear, Grab-a-Gun, or
Scheels, along with any number of magazines of whatever capacity you can buy
from any retailer, 800 rounds of Winchester 55 Grain FMJ M193 ammunition, and
any bump stock model legally sold in the United States prior to the current
ban. I think those are straightforward enough terms.) I’ll provide the rifles
and ammunition or buy new gear if Slate prefers. I’ll provide the
shooting range. And I’ll add to the pot: If Slate wins the
bet, I will trade in my beloved truck for a Prius, throw in $100,000 to the
gun-control advocates of Slate’s choice, and get the Everytown for
Gun Safety founder Mike Bloomberg’s face tattooed on my ass.
Because, contrary to what Slate claims,
ain’t nobody going to put 800 rounds through that rifle in 60 seconds.
Hillary Frey is Slate’s editor-in-chief. What
do you say, Hillary Frey? Do you believe what you publish in Slate,
or don’t you?
My guess: This is bulls—t, Slate’s editors
know it is bulls—t, Stern knows it is bulls—t, and they publish this bulls—t
because that is what Slate readers want. It is a combination
of laziness, pocket-lining, and intellectual cowardice.
Stern insists that a bump-stocked rifle can be used to
“kill hundreds of people in a single minute.” I’d be surprised if Stern
could put 800 rounds into a stationary person-sized target from 25 yards in
an hour, never mind a minute. But, hey, pick your
shooter.
Or, you know, fess up to pawning off meretricious bulls—t
on Slate’s gullible readers.
Alright, on to the wonkery.
I’ll get the legal bit out of the way first: I don’t
think there’s any very strong reason (and no Second Amendment reason at all)
why the federal government couldn’t ban bump stocks. Stern
argues that the Trump administration had the power to ban bump stocks and that
the Supreme Court should confirm that because a bump stock is—in a legal
sense—a machine gun in and of itself. Under federal law, a part that converts a
semiautomatic firearm into a fully automatic one is, for legal purposes, a
machine gun in and of itself, even if it is not a firearm. That’s all good and
fine, but a bump stock doesn’t do that. If you handed Mark Joseph Stern a
loaded fully automatic rifle, then, barring some malfunction, he could point it
at a target, pull the trigger, and expect it to fire until the magazine is
empty; hand him a semiautomatic rifle equipped with a bump stock and you
won’t get the same outcome. By way of comparison, the case against items such
as “drop-in
auto sears” is much more persuasive. And, indeed, the Supreme Court isn’t
reconsidering the constitutionality of the auto-sear rule, though there has
been some litigation related to questions
about when and how it took effect. The question of “forced-reset triggers,”
another shoot-fast innovation, is
currently being litigated.
Let’s look a little more at the mechanism.
When a semiautomatic rifle is being bump-fired, the
trigger is pulled each time a round is fired, whereas a fully automatic weapon
requires only that the trigger be depressed and held there to keep firing. To
put it in slightly more technical terms, the trigger of a semiautomatic
rifle—like the trigger of a revolver, a shotgun, or most common firearms—has
to reset before it can be pulled again and fire another round.
A bump stock does not bypass that process. It just helps the shooter to pull
the trigger more quickly. A fully automatic weapon doesn’t have to reset
between rounds—that’s the technical heart of the question, and it is why trying
to classify bump stocks as machine guns is wrong. If the trigger has to reset
before another round is fired, then you don’t have a fully automatic
weapon.
Put another way: The firing mechanism on a rifle with a
bump stock operates in a mechanically identical way to the way it operates
without a bump stock. There is no change to the trigger, the sear, the bolt,
etc. The trigger just gets pulled faster. To take the most relevant point
of comparison, Gatling guns, which are operated by a manual crank rather than
by a conventional trigger, are legal and are not classified as machine guns.
Not that any of this is very important in the real-world
context of American criminal violence, in which all of this exotic stuff is the
most inconsequential marginalia.
Trying to rhetorically recast bump stocks as machine guns
is the kind of half-clever thing that plagues our current policymaking. It is
also exactly the wrong approach for people who want to see bump stocks banned.
If a bump stock is a firearm, then prohibiting it implicates the Bill of Rights
even if the ban stands, as in the case of the federal ban on fully automatic
weapons manufactured after 1986; but if a bump stock is not a firearm—and it
isn’t—then it can be prohibited the same way the federal government prohibits
anything else: by passing a law banning it. Bump stocks are not a very
important issue when it comes to firearms policy or violent crime inasmuch as
they are vanishingly rarely used in shootings (if you are thinking now about
the Las Vegas massacre, in which bump stocks played a prominent role, I’ll have
a little more to say on that below), but Congress wastes all sorts of time on
things that don’t really matter very much.
I don’t want to go down a constitutional-law rabbit hole
here, but: If we take seriously the expansive view of Congress’
interstate-commerce powers endorsed by Justice Antonin Scalia (of beloved
memory, though I think he was wrong here) in the Raich marijuana case rather
than Justice Clarence Thomas’ narrower (and, in my view, more correct) view,
then banning bump stocks as a kind of potentially dangerous toy would be a
relatively straightforward use of the legislative power. Maybe you don’t think
you could get a bump-stock ban through Congress—fine. In that case, then,
take Barack
Obama’s advice and try winning some elections. How hard could it be, given
the depraved state of the Republican Party? Politics aside: Properly
understood, bump stocks are not arms and, for that reason, banning them raises
no Second Amendment issue, only issues of prudence, priority, etc.
My objection here isn’t to the prospect of banning bump
stocks: My objection is to journalists’ lying about them to the public,
undermining both journalism and the political process—while making a cynical
attack on the legitimacy of the Supreme Court, to boot.
That being written, there is another problem here. The
thing is: You can’t actually ban bump firing, you ignorant twits.
We talk about bump stocks as though the issue were buying
a firearms accessory that, as Stern wrongly puts it, effectively turns a
semiautomatic rifle into a machine gun. But that isn’t how it works. Try it,
Stern! Really. Let’s get that on camera.
Bump-firing isn’t a product—it is a technique.
If you have sufficient skill and a great deal of practice, you can bump-fire
quite effectively without a bump stock. (See this guy, for example.)
Conversely, you can put a bump stock on a semiautomatic rifle and still not be
able to bump-fire it, which is something you have to learn how to do and
practice. Why you’d want to develop that skill is unclear to me—bump-firing is
kind of a stupid party trick for mall commandos. Using a professionally
manufactured fully automatic firearm in an effective way is difficult
enough—outside of movies and a few real-world military scenarios, fully
automatic fire isn’t actually all that useful, even for nefarious mass-murder
purposes.
Not to be ghoulish, but: If you have a very densely
packed crowd of people who cannot disperse, then you might kill more of them
with a fully automatic firearm than with a semiautomatic one. But that scenario
is almost never the case. Even in that horrible massacre in Las Vegas, it isn’t
clear that the death toll was worse because of bump firing than it would have
been if the killer, who seems to have been a pretty sophisticated shooter, had
simply relied on carefully aimed semiautomatic fire. He fired more than 1,000
rounds, the majority of which hit nobody. Most mass shootings in the United
States, like most other violent crimes involving firearms, are committed with
ordinary, common handguns. As I have noted here on several occasions, the use
of any rifle, semiautomatic or other, in a violent crime in
the United States is pretty unusual, with rifles being used in around 3
percent of homicides. Bump stocks are rare enough that I haven’t been able
to find a confirmed example of one being used in a murder outside of the Las
Vegas case. I’m sure there are examples—please send them my way if you know of
any—but, as nearly as I can tell, shootings involving bump stocks are pretty
rare. But, then, there are a lot of legally owned fully automatic weapons in
civilian hands, too, and those are so seldom seen in murders that you can count
the cases on one hand. (Fully automatic weapons owned by police officers and
military personnel have been used in murders a little more frequently, but
still rarely.) It’s the usual sharks-vs.-cows thing: We get “Shark Week” on
television because sharks are terrifying and make for good drama, but you are a
heck of a lot more likely to
be killed by a cow or a bee or a dog.
Slate’s headline,
“Amy Coney Barrett Gets to Decide If Machine Guns Are Actually Legal,” is, at
best, an example of question-begging. That would be the charitable
characterization—the less charitable and more realistic one is that it is
outright, willful intellectual dishonesty, cheap fan service for Slate’s
readers, who want to be told that they are right and righteous to hate Justice
Amy Coney Barrett and others like her. In reality, the case has nothing to do
with machine guns. This is not an eccentric position of my own but also was the
view of the Justice Department under Barack Obama.
What exactly are we talking about here?
A bump stock helps a shooter pull the trigger more
rapidly—basically, it allows the shooter to use recoil to move the trigger
forward against the trigger finger rather than only moving the trigger finger
backward against the trigger. With practice, you can do the same thing by
putting your trigger-hand thumb in a belt loop and pulling forward with your
support hand. It’s a stunt. You can watch people do it on YouTube, if
you’re interested.
There are lots of ways to make it faster to shoot a gun:
A double-action revolver, for example, is typically easier to shoot quickly
than a single-action revolver, which is the old-fashioned kind of six-shooter
you see in cowboy movies. (Competitive shooters, you might be interested to
know, can fire those old-fashioned weapons with astonishing speed.)
Double-action revolvers (the modern kind with which you don’t have to manually
cock the hammer first) are typically slower to shoot than most modern semiautomatic
handguns because the trigger pull is longer and heavier, owing to the fact that
the trigger is turning the revolver cylinder and moving the hammer back. But,
again, a very skilled shooter can fire a revolver with astonishing speed: The
famous Jerry Miculek has been known to fire eight rounds in a
second from a revolver. (That’s a rate of fire of 480 rounds per
minute but, as noted above, that doesn’t mean he can fire 480 rounds in 60
seconds.) Short of registering Miculek’s trigger finger as a machine gun as in
the (fictitious) case of kung-fu masters whose hands are legally “deadly
weapons,” there isn’t anything stopping him from shooting very, very fast with
an ordinary firearm, and there isn’t anything stopping anybody who wants to
learn from bump-firing an ordinary semiautomatic rifle, with or without a
bump-stock.
Some semiautomatic firearms are faster to shoot than
others: You can, for example, shorten and lighten the trigger pull. People do
that for all sorts of reasons: A rifle with a very light trigger is easier to
shoot accurately than a rifle with a long, heavy trigger pull, which is why
some fine bolt-action or single-shot hunting rifles and target rifles have what
are known as “set” triggers, meaning a firing mechanism that can be put into a
hair-trigger state (often by pushing the trigger forward) before taking the
shot. Old-fashioned Sharps rifles (you know: the gun from Quigley Down
Under) often have set triggers. The point there is to shoot more
accurately, not to shoot faster. But in any case, a lighter trigger pull on a
semiautomatic firearm doesn’t make it a machine gun—it makes it a semiautomatic
with a light trigger. Making a firearm easier to shoot quickly doesn’t make it
a fully automatic firearm.
Stern claims that a bump stock enables a shooter to fire
“at a rate no human could achieve on their own.” But that isn’t true. Humans
can bump-fire without a bump stock, and, as it turns
out, some humans can just
shoot really, really fast.
We all know what happened with the bump stock ban: The
Trump administration did what it always did, i.e., it lurched from
position to position in response to headlines like the gang of panicky idiots
it was. Bump stocks had been sold for years with no protest from the ATF, which
had been consulted by manufacturers, until there was an entirely predictable national
moral panic following an entirely predictable episode of Americans being
Americans. The only way to make a mass murder on the Las Vegas strip more
American would be if the shooter had been firing from the shrimp trough at the
Caesars Palace buffet. Stern wants to pretend that this is Amy Coney Barrett’s
doing, because that’s what pays the bills over at Slate. It was
only a couple of years ago that Democrats controlled the House, the Senate, and
the presidency, and they could have passed a bump-stock ban if they had wanted
one. But that party is run by the same kind of half-bright, half-clever people
who write the Supreme Court commentary over at Slate—and they’re at
least as dishonest.
Again, let me reiterate: I don’t give a devil’s fart
about whether bump stocks are legal or are prohibited. I hate dishonest
journalism, and I hate the cowardice and stupidity of which it is a
product.
In Other News …
Speaking of New York Times editorial
meetings: I very much enjoyed Adam Rubenstein’s “I
Was a Heretic at the New York Times,” his very amusing account
of the ruthlessly enforced political conformism in prestige media. Good stuff.
But the honest-to-God, unbelievable chutzpah of The Atlantic to
publish it! If there were journalism gods, a lightning bolt would have taken
out Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg for even thinking about
running that piece under the flag of his magazine and the abject, knee-walking
sycophants who actually run the place.
The funniest bit about this is that when Goldberg offered
me the reporting job at The Atlantic that I held
for three days, I warned him that the calls to fire me would begin before I
wrote my first piece, which is, of course, exactly what happened. Don’t worry
about it, Goldberg said. “This isn’t the New York Times.”
No, I guess it isn’t. The Times has its
problems, but being too fearful to publish the occasional piece by your
favorite correspondent isn’t one of them.
So far!
Economics for English Majors
No! Impossible! From the Wall
Street Journal:
A Biden Subsidy Is Meant to Create
Jobs. In This Nevada Town, It Didn’t. Some Inflation Reduction Act tax credits
go to green-energy projects that would have happened anyway.
If there is an ironclad law of economics, it is this: If
you put money on the table, somebody will pick it up.
Words About Words
I know I’m heavy on media criticism this week, but, ye
gods—from the Washington
Post’s account of that terrible episode in which an Oklahoma
teenager died a day after a fight at school:
“I hope this ain’t from [Nex’s]
head,” Sue Benedict told the emergency dispatcher.
As you might have guessed, the word omitted from
the quotation above is “her.” The person known to the
newspaper reading public as the nonbinary student Nex Benedict was, as far as
her family had been concerned until quite recently, a young woman named Dagny
Benedict. According to the local news in Owasso, Oklahoma, the widespread use
of the name “Nex” for the deceased did not begin until social media accounts
began to circulate after the teenager’s death. The local media originally
reported the death of a young woman named Dagny Benedict, and then changed, as one
local news station reports: “With the growing concern over misgendering and
deadnaming Nex, 2 News placed a disclaimer in all stories and changed
references to gender neutral terms.” The family later said they’d got the
message about the deadnaming and the pronouns—boy, I’ll bet they did!—and
pleaded with gender-ideology fanatics: “Please
do not bully us for our ignorance on the subject.”
The ritual and ceremonial importance attached to pronouns
and assumed names in these situations is pure mysticism, one of the many
oddities of our time as the old religious impulse flows into new vessels, many
of them attached to sexuality and identity issues. (And, indeed, many of the
old religious vessels were attached to sexuality and identity issues; the
practice of religiously significant genital mutilation, rebirth rituals, taking
a new name—all of these are as familiar to, say, Catholics as they are to those
undergoing the transgender experience.) The hysteria surrounding this and the
way the media have allowed themselves to be bullied into abject conformity with
a highly tendentious view of the world is remarkable and distasteful.
But, as a matter of journalism per se, isn’t the Washington
Post’s alteration of that quotation malpractice? If you believe, as
transgender advocates believe, that the use of unwelcome gendered pronouns and
unloved given names is a matter of extraordinary significance, then isn’t it
extraordinarily significant that Sue Benedict, the deceased’s grandmother and
adoptive mother, chose to use the word “her” on that 911 call? But for
the Washington Post, conforming with the demands of transgender
hysteria apparently trumps reporting the actual facts of the case.
It is one thing to say, “As a matter of general practice,
we use the names and pronouns people prefer.” It is another thing to say, “We
will alter quotations if the taboos are violated.”
Whatever you call that, don’t call it journalism.
In Closing
Today is the feast day of St. Casimir Jagiellon, patron
saint of Poland and Lithuania—and of young people. Casimir was a prince who
served as Poland’s regent during his father’s absence, but, as his biographers
tell us, he had no taste for life at court or for the prestige and luxury
associated with it. He remained unmarried, slept on the ground, gave away much
of his wealth to the poor, and spent much of his time in prayer and meditation.
In our time, striving after the position and power to which Casimir Jagiellon
was born is seen by many as the highest—and by some as the only—calling
in life.
The lives of the saints are not only to be read for
inspiration—they are also a rebuke. As C.S. Lewis observed:
“How monotonously alike all the great tyrants and conquerors have been; how
gloriously different are the saints. But there must be a real giving up of the
self. You must throw it away ‘blindly’ so to speak. Christ will indeed give you
a real personality; but you must not go to Him for the sake of that.”
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