Gun control, as it is commonly described, is literally impossible.
And I don't mean literally as literally as commonly used.
Welcome back to another T-Rex Talk.
It is far, far too beautiful a day to record this podcast inside.
So apologies if the audio quality is a little lacking,
but we're enjoying springtime in Tennessee.
And I have been thinking about gun control, not just because we're in Tennessee,
but obviously it's a conversation that continues on and on and on.
But I've been thinking about the idea that gun control is essentially impossible.
And there are several reasons for that.
The first is that in the United States at least, guns are common.
Now technically guns are very common around the world.
There's only small patches of the world where guns are uncommon.
And the only guns that are uncommon are privately owned guns.
But pretty much everywhere on the planet where there are people, there are guns.
And we've seen throughout history places where privately owned guns were very rare.
But then something weird happened politically or culturally.
And suddenly all the guns that were common, but not in private hands,
were suddenly in private hands.
Now they weren't necessarily spread evenly across private hands,
but guns do tend to change hands.
But let's talk about just America for a moment,
because obviously that's where I live and most of the listenership lives.
And there's a lot of privately owned guns in the United States.
I want to recommend to you a blog called Weaponsman.
Now unfortunately the author of the blog, Kevin O'Brien, passed away a few years ago,
but even though he is no longer writing,
the archives of that blog are pretty fascinating stuff.
He had the best site on the internet there for a while.
And in addition to commenting on gun news of the day
and researching firearms of the past, he also had some very thought provoking articles,
one of which was an estimation that there were four to 600 million guns,
privately owned firearms in the United States.
Now this article he wrote nine or ten years ago, I think, if I remember incorrectly.
I should have looked it up ahead of time, but I will link to it in the description below.
The podcast notes, so you will know whether or not I was correct or not.
But at the time, mass media, regular media, almost everybody was estimating that there were approximately
300 million guns in private hands in the United States.
And Kevin O'Brien, Weaponsman, laid out the reasons why he believed that the number was actually
somewhere between four and six hundred million.
And this was many years ago, so we have had approximately 80 or 90 million nicks background check sense then,
so that's approximately 80 or 90 million guns that we know for sure have been added
to the number of privately owned guns in the United States.
And that is not counting the millions, many millions, of 80% lowers that have been sold.
And that's 80% lowers for both rifles and pistols.
There's been a sharp increase in the number of 3D printed pistol lowers as well.
So there's lots of firearms in private hands in the United States that are not part of any
nicks background check, not part of any transfer, not part of any registry that are out there.
Fully functional firearms in the hands of private citizens in the United States.
I'm going to guess we're now at five to seven hundred million privately owned firearms in the United States.
And that is with almost no insight at all into the 3D printed firearm side of things, which I'll talk more about.
But that is something that has radically increased in popularity, and mostly because it's easier than it once was.
Now, nobody has a really good idea of how many guns are out there, especially once you talk about the ghost guns.
These 3D printed guns, these 80% lowers, things like that are not tracked in any way, shape, or form.
Obviously with mass surveillance and people keeping really close track of various financial transactions, there are agencies that make assumptions about what is going on, but there are still just guesses.
We believe that the ATF is building a database of these sorts of things.
Obviously this is an illegal database.
It is prohibited by both the Constitution, but also very specifically the firearm owners protection act,
which prohibits any federal government agency from maintaining any system of registration of firearms, firearms owners, or firearms transactions.
But based on comments that the ATF has made itself to various people in publicly available letters, they have a database with 866 million records in it.
So we're not 100% sure what that is.
They claim that it's not searchable, but it's actually very difficult to make a digital database that isn't searchable in some way, shape, or form.
A government agency could probably pull that off of them now that I think about it.
So there's an attempt being made by the ATF to keep track of all of the people that own guns and all of the guns, but again, they have to start with relatively recent transactions.
So the real answer is probably somewhere in this window of 500 to 700 million firearms. Nobody can actually answer what the correct number is.
And nobody can actually answer where all of those firearms are.
That makes confiscation impossible in the United States.
Now let's just give the ATF the benefit of the doubt here.
Let's assume that they actually are as all powerful as they believe, and they could actually identify and locate everybody who has bought anything
that has anything to do with firearm manufacture.
Even then, confiscation would be impossible.
And one of the ways that we know this is true is we can look at previous gun confiscations in other parts of the world, and we can see that they were impossible.
Even in Australia, weapon confiscation was not 100% successful.
I personally know many, many people in Australia who can demonstrate that it was impossible.
But the second thing that makes a gun control impossible is that guns are really, really easy to make.
They are not unique machines, and they don't require unique machines to make them.
That means that even if right now, the ATF is able to get your credit card transactions from Visa and figure out everything that you've ever bought more or less from various firearm manufacturing or firearm accessory companies,
and make guesses and inferences as to what that might have been, and was it a new firearm part or was it a replacement for existing firearm part,
even if their guesses were really, really good.
And even if the data that they had for those official firearm parts were really, really accurate,
there still is a huge area of firearm manufacturing capability that doesn't fall into that category.
Right now, I'm walking around the T-Rex shop, which is on a little industrial road.
And on this little industrial road with us are a bunch of other little manufacturing shops.
Remember, we're in a small town in Tennessee, and on this little teeny industrial park where T-Rex is,
we have the capability to make all kinds of metal parts.
And I know for a fact that people routinely walk into these machine shops and ask for weird metal parts.
And I'm not even saying gun parts.
I'm just saying bits and pieces for cars, tractors, there are custom metal parts being made for various industries in these shops,
with no paper trail outside of whatever billing and receipt and invoicing stuff, those individual shops are doing.
And based on my conversations with people in other parts of the country, I know that a lot of people have an idea for a product,
or a accessory, or a replacement part for a thing that broke.
And rather than going necessarily to an obvious firearm parts store, they often will go to their friend who works at a machine shop
or the one across the street from them and ask if somebody can quickly throw a piece of metal into a lathe
and create a new barrel bushing, or a new thread protector, or a new whatever,
or experiment with a new adapter that goes from this thing to that thing.
And right now, all of that stuff is completely above board and legal.
I actually doubt that there's a whole bunch of illicit firearm manufacture inside of the United States,
simply because fully legal firearm manufacture is extremely legal.
And the paperwork hoops are a pain, but they're really not that much of an issue, and the parts are plentiful and they're cheap.
So I don't think there's very many people going to a machine shop and having them make a box full of AR-15 lowers.
AR-15 lowers are just too cheap to get elsewhere.
But a lot of other stuff is getting made just because, why not?
And in the future, if the hoops that people are jumping through to get these things legally become too onerous,
people will do the other thing. And we can see that happening in Europe.
In Europe, they have very strong gun control in most of the countries.
But we're starting to see very professionally made illegal firearms inside of Europe.
And because firearms are completely illegal in a lot of these different jurisdictions,
the people making these illegal firearms are not making regular handguns.
They're making fully automatic suppressed submachine guns, because why not?
If you're already breaking one massive firearm law, you might as well break all the others.
The others are all free at that point.
So the manufacturing capability that exists in the 21st century in western nations, and now eastern nations,
is high enough that any type of firearm part can be really easily built.
Even if you pick something that used to be hard to manufacture in the old days like barrels,
boy, it is just not that hard to CNC mill barrels these days.
There are a number of people making pistol barrels on really simple, flexible, commonly available CNC operations.
Now in the past, this was not the case. In fact, firearm manufacture actually pushed the envelope
of what manufacturing technology could do in the 1700s and the 1600s, and even to some extent, the 1800s.
Innovations in firearm manufacture actually drove a huge amount of manufacturing technological breakthroughs.
A lot of modern machining was driven by firearm demand, and firearm designers were pushing the envelope
of what their machines could actually do, and really pushed modern manufacture in incredibly long ways.
But today, modern firearms, like the Glock and the Air 15, can be made by really simple and really common machines.
And even residential style, like non-commercial, non-industrial 3D printers can make a lot of the plastic parts
that modern firearms require.
And if you want to work around non-fiorarm parts that are a little tricky to make at home like springs and stuff like that,
you just tweak the design so that your new weapon accommodates and off the shelf spring, and there you go.
And remember that what I'm talking about is not hypothetical. This is an extremely common practice in the United States.
And it's extremely legal. Being able to make your own firearm at home without serialization is something that has been
allowed in America from the very beginning, and it is still legal today, despite the best efforts of the Bureau of Alcohol to Back-on-Firearms.
So there's a whole bunch of people who are very publicly talking about their experiments making firearms at home
and making readily available parts, and readily available manufacturing technologies like $300 3D printers that you can buy from Amazon.
And even in places where firearms are not legal, like Myanmar, 3D printed firearms are becoming extremely common.
The materials and manufacturing technology have risen to a level, and I would say that the firearm designs themselves
have been simplified to the point where this is really, really accessible technology, that almost anybody can figure out in a garage or a basement
or the jungles of Myanmar. And this sort of technological trend is a little bit like a snowball.
Now that the AR-15 is a platform, it is more widely known, it is more widely understood.
Individual parts and design files are more widely available, and people's experiments in 3D printing the less available parts.
That's also just incredibly publicly available knowledge at this point. The experiments have been done, it's tried, it's tested.
And the Glock is now a platform as well. For a very long time, Glock has obviously been a product sold by the company Glock,
but now that some of their patents have expired and they are the dominant player in the handgun market, Glock parts are made by a huge panoply of aftermarket producers.
The third party parts market for Glock is gigantic. And with those expired patents, the number of companies that are actually making entire Glock clones is phenomenal.
I think Lone Wolf just announced this past week that they will also be selling a Glock clone, along with Palmetto State Armory,
along with Shadow Systems, along with Polymer 80, along with a whole bunch of other companies.
Lone Wolf will no longer just sell the parts, actually every single part for every single Glock ever made, they will also sell their own version of Glock, which I think is called the Dusk.
Manufacturing these firearms is extremely easy, the firearms are extremely common, and the understanding of how they work is commoner still.
But the third and most important reason that gun control will fail is the cultural normalization. Guns are just too accepted, guns are too normal.
Gun ownership is not just physically common, but the idea that gun ownership is normal is super, super common.
Now this is a really important one to talk about because this is the greatest defense against gun control, but it is also the greatest weakness.
There are parts of the world where the idea of private gun ownership is completely outside of people's understanding.
It's completely outside of their comfort zone, it's completely outside of something that they can actually envision.
The last open source defense newsletter talked a little bit about this concept.
The concept was things that are technologically possible but culturally unthinkable.
There's lots of things that are culturally unthinkable in certain places, even though there's no reason that people physically couldn't do it.
But the reverse is also true. If something is so normal, so common, so expected, so taken for granted, it's really hard to take that away.
And I'll give you another example that I was thinking about. Guns and books have a lot of similarities.
Well, they have a couple. The main one that I want to talk about is gunpowder was weaponized in the 1500s,
and mass-produced books became common in the 1500s.
Now, it's not like books didn't exist prior to that, but they had to be hand-copied.
Written languages were common before that, but books in the hands of the common man was something kind of new in the 1500s.
And we have a bunch of preconceived ideas about how people were widely illiterate in Europe prior to books coming along.
This is not entirely true because even if there aren't mass-produced books full of information,
being able to write is still really, really useful because you can write letters to other people.
You can write notes to yourself. You can make lists. You can make business documents.
And there's lots and lots of those things in the historical record, pre-1500s.
Also, the definition of literacy back then was being able to read Latin.
And the number of people who could read Latin and get their hands on hand-copied books was a pretty low number.
But being literate in the mid-1500s, once mass-produced books become both common and cheap,
goes from being a really useful skill to practically a superpower.
And now, hundreds of years later, books being available to people is such an accepted thing that we take it for granted.
And suggesting that books not be available to people is something that only dystopian science fiction writers actually discuss.
You know, Ray Bradbury in Fahrenheit 451 and things like that.
Obviously, there are examples of totalitarian governments trying to crack down on specific books and the flow of information.
But generally speaking, in the West, this idea that information will be available to people,
and that regular people will be able to buy books and will be able to read books is so ingrained in our civilization
that taking that away is a really bizarre concept.
And in a large part of the American population, that is also true about guns.
Guns are so present, historically, and also in our modern entertainment.
And guns are so available today in regular stores.
And guns are so widely owned in about 45 plus percent of American households,
this idea of taking guns away is kind of crazy, which is why most gun control advocates usually focus on a little bit here and a little bit there.
They're not going to take away guns. They're just going to take away high-capacity magazines, which you probably don't have, right?
They're only going to take away really super dangerous weapons of war, which you probably don't have, right?
This little bit of nibbling away at the edges is necessary because guns are culturally accepted in the United States.
This is also the reason that the media talks about guns as if they aren't.
They're trying to push this agenda that guns are not acceptable. Guns are not available.
And there's always going to be places where this is true.
And this was actually true of books as well.
The Islamic world banned the printing press until the 1800s with a slight short exception in Turkey.
This idea of people having access to widely printed materials was not something that was common or widely accepted in certain parts of the world.
And the same is true of guns. The idea of private gun ownership is something that is just unfathomable in certain parts of the world right now.
So I'm going to do a friend of mine who grew up in Hong Kong.
And private gun ownership is just not something that people thought about when he was growing up there.
It was something that only criminals or the government would use.
And the more disarmed the private population was, the more horrifically overmatched the criminals were and the deadlier guns seemed.
So I want to have this conversation with him at some time in the future. What it is like to grow up in a culture where guns are treated almost as if they are plutonium.
There's something that you just literally cannot touch. The danger level is so high that nobody can or should have them without horrific consequences ensuing.
Because that is the way that a lot of gun control rhetoric is trying to get to.
And a lot of the people who don't believe that guns are in common use or in private hands on a wide basis in America, they can't believe this too.
The idea that a firearm can exist in a natural normal state without causing bloodshed is very hard for a few people to contemplate.
And in a situation like, I don't know, Hong Kong in the early 2000s, that was how things were described.
And since nobody had private firearms except for criminals who did horrific things, it was really easy for the government to perpetuate this idea.
Also, I would like to point out, the government of China uses its federally owned firearms to do horrible things as well.
Now the good news is that culturally we've been building up some really significant positive momentum in the United States.
Suppressors are a good example of this.
Suppressors are technologically not new or complicated.
We have had suppressors for over 100 years.
And even after the passage of the NFA, it has been possible to buy and own and use suppressors for the last 90 years.
But it isn't really until, quite recently, that suppressors become common in the American gun-owning public.
It isn't until there's a cultural awareness that this is a thing that you can do, it is possible, and there are practical benefits to it, that it starts to really pick up some steam.
And if you look at a lot of the political stuff that's been going on, you can see that there is a groundswell of movement towards more gun ownership, but not just ownership, more practical gun usage.
The idea that you should be able to carry your gun with you even without the permission of the government is something that is widely talked about now.
And some level of permitless carry exists in now, at the time of this recording, 27 states.
So more than half of American states legally recognize that you should be allowed to carry your firearm, not just for fun, but that it is actually the best weapon for you to use to defend yourself and you're allowed to.
You're allowed to defend your own life with a firearm that you own and you carry in public.
27 states say that you can do that without special paperwork from the government.
Now, obviously some states give you more freedom than others, there's still some paperwork, there's still some hoops, but this is a trend that is going in the correct direction.
Culturally speaking, guns are more like books in the United States now than 20 years ago.
Guns are more culturally ingrained at a private ownership level and at a practical private use level.
And that is just really, really hard to push back against.
If you wanted to ban guns, the only way that you could really do it in the United States is to completely take away the normalcy that is associated with firearm ownership.
And that is what a lot of the people on the left are actually trying to do.
There is of course, talk about confiscating guns.
Of course, talk about confiscating magazines.
There's talk about all these little mechanical things, banning the files that you could use to 3D print stuff, even though there's really no physical way to do that.
There's a lot of talk about the mechanical side of things.
And they're starting to be talk about confiscation, how confiscation would physically work, even though there are potentially 700 million firearms that would need to be confiscated here in the United States.
But the big battle here is the cultural one.
And even though gun owners are winning this battle at the moment, this is the one where I think we need to spend the most focus.
Rather than let guns turn into this very private, rarely talked about sort of taboo subject that it was years and years ago, we need to make firearms as normal and as important for the preservation of freedom as books.
Because ultimately, the only way that firearms could actually be completely removed from people's homes and from people's manufacturing capability is to remove them from cultural acceptability and from this space in your brain that says that guns are an option.
In the same way that owning books and reading books is an option. Gun control is completely impossible, the way that most gun control advocates talk about it.
They talk about banning a few guns here and a few guns there and crime going magically away forever.
The only way that this would actually be possible is total control.
Total control over manufacturing capacity, but also total control over what is actually acceptable for people to talk or think about.
And that means that the only way that gun control advocates could actually achieve their goals of no crime or lower crime is by putting people in pods and making them eat bugs.
I think that's how the meme goes.
And when you look at countries or states like communist China that have managed to make private weapon ownership almost impossible to comprehend,
you see significant tyrannical overreach and control of the population in almost every other area of life.
And the consequences of that are really bad.
It isn't just the lack of self-defense tools that the Chinese people are suffering under.
It's obviously a bunch of other stuff.
So hopefully these three different categories are helpful for you as you're thinking about different aspects of firearm freedom.
I think it's encouraging to think about the three huge hurdles that would have to be overcome if somebody, anybody, were to want to exercise total gun control.
But I also think it's really helpful to think about in a proactive way.
What can we be doing to ensure that, A, weapons continue to proliferate inside of the United States among law abiding folks' hands.
This is not that difficult.
B, that people still engage in a lot of new manufacturing technology.
Find it cool, find it fine, find it interesting to be in that sort of maker space, hacker space, tinkering with 3D printed firearms, doing stuff like that.
So that the weapon manufacturing capacity of the state and the private people thereof is really high.
And then the third is, of course, that cultural one.
It needs to be understood by all free people what their freedoms actually are if they're going to maintain them.
This is the area where I believe this right to keep and bear arms, this right of self-defense, this right of self-governance, is going to be most under a threat.
So continue to talk very widely about firearms and in an extremely regular normal way.
Because firearms are in fact very regular and normal.
We've been having privately owned firearms for as long as we've had mass produced books.
And the consequences of both has actually been, I would say, really similar.
There are places where bad information in books has caused lots of pain and suffering and death.
Common is China's great example of this.
And there are places where privately owned firearms have caused a lot of pain and suffering and death.
Still no one here is much pain and suffering and death as government owned firearms, but nevertheless the point should be made.
On the flip side though, the freedom that has come from widely accessible books and the free flow of information,
the ability for people to write books about their ideas, to communicate their discoveries, to document and send out instructions for doing really important technological or scientific things,
well that's been phenomenal for the human race.
Technological growth on the planet since the 1500s has been almost astronomical.
Actually since we have sent probes out to the stars, I guess you could say that it is in fact astronomical.
And I would say that the economic improvements that people have enjoyed since the 1500s are also really high.
And the freedoms that people have been able to secure in different places, the same.
Oh by the way, we're at the range now.
That's the firing that you can hear in the background.
I had to record second half of this podcast on the range, we're testing holsters.
The same is true of guns.
Being able to have privately owned firearms is an extremely important thing for the growth of civilization,
the establishment and defense of nations, the protection of people who are doing difficult and complicated things, like homesteading.
That's the other thing that books and guns have in common.
The ability for people to be enriched when it comes to information and be better protected by their own capabilities
have been probably the two biggest factors in the growth and expansion and development of civilization in a really good way.
And when you see the opposite of that, when you see a regression of these things,
or you see a part of the world that isn't growing in the same ways,
generally you can see some level of control, some level of restriction on these two things, guns and books.
Or if you want to be really specific, information and weapons.
China is a perfect example.
China actually invented movable type printing centuries before Gutenberg got his hands on it.
But the idea inside of China at that time was that movable type printing was far too important
and special for the common people to have.
And so the purpose of movable type printing was only for the official documents of the celestial empire itself.
And the printing press in China became a tool of control over the people,
a control over the people using official documents and a restriction on what they were allowed to do and so forth and so on,
as opposed to the opposite.
And the same is true of guns.
In those states where the ruling authorities take control of the weapons
and use those weapons to disarm their own populations, you see the exact same thing.
So these are some interesting talking points, I think, for the ongoing conversation about gun control.
And some of the things that we have been thinking about.
So rest assured that gun control, as it is being discussed today, is literally impossible.
But total control, total control by a tranical state, technically that's always on the table.
That's the thing, that's the thing that you've got to watch out for.
That's the reason that we pursue the other freedoms.
Thank you.
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