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Open Source Defense Profile picture
Open Source Defense
@opensrcdefense
Making people proud to care about gun rights. Subscribe to https://t.co/l4GbgedSZo. Merch at https://t.co/pNMipQFMU4.
Mar 27, 2023 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
🧵This is a meticulously reported, well-sourced piece that teaches readers all about the criminal misuse of ARs … but leaves them at the bottom of the Dunning-Kruger trough when it comes to understanding the stated subject: "How the AR-15 emerged as an icon". Yes, ARs are used for criminal violence. How often? The piece's says there are 20M "stored and stashed" (aka owned, but hey, "stashed" does seem more fun) in the US. FBI data shows 410 rifle murders in 2021. Assume (generously) that all 410 use unique ARs.
Feb 10, 2023 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
Quick thread on how to think about the implicit premise of pistols being "transformed".

A central teaching of the Catholic Church is that during Mass, the bread and wine become literally the body and blood of Jesus. This process is called transubstantiation. The natural objection is that even after consecration, the bread and wine continue to look and taste like bread and wine.

The Church's official position is that this is a mystery that cannot be understood. But as framework, they suggest one of "substance" vs "accidents".
Jun 18, 2022 • 10 tweets • 3 min read
🧵 on today's NYT piece, a 🤌 example of gun reporting as orientalism. The factual parts of the article are pretty good, albeit incomplete. But the overall vibe is that gun owners are an exotic, potentially beguiling, and ultimately primitive culture.

nytimes.com/2022/06/18/us/… The easiest bit to dispense with is the one in the headline. It's actually just a few short parts of the article, but the claim is that the industry is built on toxic, cartoon-tough-guy masculinity. The evidence for that claim is … a few nut-picked ads over the past 20 years.
Feb 23, 2021 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Unfortunate but expected. Like the handful of other standard-cap mag bans, this'll need the Supreme Court to 👀.

Fun historical fact: in 1903 the Vermont Supreme Court struck down the state's carry permit law, making Vermont the only state in the country with permitless carry. Vermont remained the only state with permitless carry for the next 100 years, until Alaska became #2 in 2003. Carry permits had bubbled up here and there since colonial times, but didn't really become a thing until the South's post-Civil War push to disarm former slaves.
Jan 16, 2021 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
The Trace is running a hit piece soon about a bunch of big 2A social media influencers. Here's a screenshot from an email they sent to a company, soliciting comment.

It's a great example of how this flavor of reputational blackmail works.

🧵 Anatomy of a hit piece 👇 The first thing to notice is the subtle-but-sweeping category creep. In two sentences, the suspect category expands from insurrectionists to conspiracy theorists to people talking about elections and politics and finally all the way to people who warn of gun confiscation.
Dec 31, 2020 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Look at our top tweets from each quarter of 2020 and you see a microcosm of how gun rights themselves evolved this year.

Our top Q1 tweet was on Jan 13. The year had *a lot* of surprises in store, and this got swept away. But it'll be back. For Q2, our piece on the influx of new gun owners topped the charts. Look at everybody who owns a gun in the US today, and almost 10% of them bought their first gun this year. An epochal shift.
Dec 20, 2020 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
A good example of an effective meme we see pretty frequently. The reason it's effective is simple: it's true — sort of. By picking a narrow slice of the story, it misleads while seeming (to a lay audience) to inform. Short thread on "the middlebrow factoid". "Weapon of choice" is self-evidently wrong (there aren't nearly that many homemade guns in the country), but sure, criminals do use homemade guns today more than they did 10 or 20 years ago.

Naturally. Homemade guns are way easier to build today. But wait, isn't that bad?
May 1, 2020 • 17 tweets • 4 min read
Some notes on Canada's existing gun bans suddenly snapping much tighter today. Specifically:

1. What actually happened?
2. What determines whether a gun ban comes to pass?
3. What are the implications?

cbc.ca/news/politics/… 1. What actually happened?

Canada has 3 gun categories:
- Non-restricted
- Restricted (registration, paperwork++, strict transport rules)
- Prohibited (haram)

By law the gov can edit the lists at will. Today they moved ~1500 guns from the first two categories into "prohibited".
Jan 27, 2020 • 18 tweets • 4 min read
It’s perfectly normal for a person to know nothing about plenty of things. But it’s much less normal to be performative and proud of one’s obliviousness, and then to push for Dunning–Krugerocracy.

So when it comes to guns, why is this the rule instead of the exception? Thread 👉 If you think of it like “let’s figure out if gun rights are a net positive or net negative”, this makes no sense. The incentive should be to learn all the technical details you could, to be an expert on all aspects of the field. So performative ignorance would be hard to explain.
Jan 2, 2020 • 11 tweets • 4 min read
Got this excellent question about our CCW thread from yesterday. A tough but thoughtful question, our favorite kind.

Let's answer it. Thread 👉 Our starting point is (to steal from our home page) this: “We’re all born with the right of self-defense, to control our own destiny. And for that to mean anything — especially for our weakest, poorest, or most disadvantaged — it means having great tools for self-defense.”
Dec 31, 2019 • 14 tweets • 4 min read
CCW creates an empirical problem for those that made dire predictions: over the past 30 years, it swept the nation. The dire predictions didn’t come true. 2 things did:

- Millions able to carry safely
- No more police pretext (under may-issue) to frisk poor people

Thread 👉 This is a map of state carry laws from 1986 to the present.

1986: 1 state unrestricted, 8 shall-issue, 25 may-issue, 16 no-issue

2019: 16 states unrestricted, 26 shall-issue, 8 may-issue, 0 no-issue
Dec 8, 2019 • 7 tweets • 3 min read
This piece is a well-executed example of a smart strategy that gun control groups have been running for a few years. We call it “should dressed up as is”. Let’s break it down. How it works: write straight news pieces that flatly state your position is popular, irrespective of what the data says. This forces preference falsification among the laity, who are busy and don’t track the data on what’s empirically popular/unpopular. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preferenc…
Sep 3, 2019 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
He calls for repealing ~every fed. gun law other than the NFA, and *doesn’t know that’s what he’s saying*. Interesting case study: how does a former boss of the NYT publish a WaPo op-ed, and all involved—smart people, to be sure—research literally nothing about the core premise? These are very smart people at the top of their field. So it’s strange. How can the very best journalists in the world make a middle-school-level error that would have been prevented by a single google search? More to the point, what is the incentive structure that allows that?
Jun 1, 2019 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
💯. A jackhammer is ~130 dB. Suppressed gunfire is ~140 dB. Decibels are a logarithmic scale, so +10 dB is *twice as loud*. You can hear a jackhammer from blocks away, so good news, a silencer is twice as loud as that. Zero public safety danger. Also good news: silencers add exactly zero utility for a criminal. Gun still audible from blocks away, and still pops up on ShotSpotter. But less concealable, more unwieldy, less disorienting to victims (attacker can bring ear pro, victims can’t), and one more point of failure.