Author: Alan Buddug

Something needs to be done about the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF). Even though our nation’s firearm laws are clearly a disaster area, that does not mean that an executive branch agency has the right to make up laws or to violate the rights of Americans — but that is exactly what they’ve been doing since their inception in 1972.

An agency that performs all three functions of government without any supervision from voters is tyrannical by definition.

In fact, US government shenanigans involving alcohol, tobacco, firearms and explosives pre-date the formation of the ATF, but for the sake of brevity, I will only comment on the two most recent issues.

In August of 2020, the ATF sent a cease-and-desist letter to a firearm manufacturing company called Q, LLC (no relation to the conspiracy theorists). It demanded that they stop making and selling guns with a barrel under 16″ and their new pistol brace (the Honey Badger) due to the ATF’s determination that the brace was actually a stock. This meant that these guns that were being sold as pistols were (from the ATF’s perspective) actually short-barreled rifles, so they should go through the full NFA process (registration, full background check, and $200 fee) instead of the simpler background check process.

The biggest problem with the Honey Badger letter was that a “pistol brace” isn’t something that has been defined by law. Instead, it came into legal existence when the ATF made it so in 2014. The clear problem is that executive branch agencies are supposed to executive the law, not create the law or interpret the law — according to the doctrine of balance of powers, those functions are reserved for the legislature and the courts. So while the ATF might have had a noble reason for allowing pistol braces (e.g., compliance with the ADA), that was not their decision to make. Conservatives get very dramatic about the “tyranny” of the ATF, but take away the drama and you’ll find that they are factually 100% correct — so that drama might just be justified.

The latest problem is the ATF raid of Polymer80, a company that manufactures 80% receivers. The “receiver” is the part of a gun that is legally a gun. (Fun fact: It looks like the AR-15 doesn’t have a receiver according to the law, so it might not legally be a gun.) The problem with this is a variation on the Ship of Theseus problem in philosophy — namely, at what point does the steel or aluminum material “become” a receiver which must be serialized and sold through a government-licensed firearm dealer? The ATF decided that a receiver which is 80% complete is not a receiver, and a receiver that is 81% or more complete is a receiver, and they have created more specific guidelines about what 80% complete looks like for various types of guns. Again, all of these determinations were created without the assistance of the legislature or the courts.

In December of 2020, the ATF raided Polymer80 — not because they were selling 81% complete receivers, but because the ATF had suddenly changed their interpretation of the law. Now, the ATF is claiming that if you sell an 80% receiver (not legally a gun) along with all the components and tooling required to make it into a functional gun (none of these components or tooling are regulated in any way), then you’ve crossed the 80% threshold and are selling something that is a firearm. If you sell the components, tooling, and 80% receiver separately, it’s OK — only if you sell them in one box with a single part number have you violated the law.

Not only did the ATF raid Polymer80, but they are also harassing people who purchased a Polymer80 kit directly from the company and demanding that they surrender their property. To their credit, other retailers are refusing to surrender their customer lists to the ATF, but they could eventually be raided as well.

The history of American gun laws consists of panicked, low-information voters freaking out about something that was usually brought to their attention by the media, which had sensationalized the issue for the sake of attracting viewers. In 1932, the motivation for the original federal gun laws was sensational news stories about gangsters and movies depicting them as far more well-armed and dangerous than was accurate. No one ever scientifically determined that a short barreled rifle, for example, is more dangerous to the public; that would be the issue in the Q Honey Badger case.

The Polymer80 case is about “ghost guns” which are firearms that were manufactured by a person at home for their own use — more accurately called “homemade guns”. Such practice is completely legal in the United States (the guns are not required to be serialized or registered, but can’t be transferred to another person), but does create an additional opportunity for a person who would usually be prohibited from obtaining a firearm.

The question, though, is whether homemade firearms are a significant danger to the public that requires a change in the law — and the violence required to enforce that law. There’s no evidence that this is the case. The law presumes that a person who previously committed a felony but is now free (having “paid their debt”) is a “felon” and can never be trusted with a firearm again. I don’t make that presumption; however, let’s accept the idea of a “felon” for the moment. Are there other means by which a felon can obtain a firearm? Why, yes! They might purchase one through a private sale — which is specifically not regulated. They might obtain a muzzle-loading revolver — it isn’t legally a gun, so it is completely unregulated. They might steal a gun or obtain a stolen gun through a black market seller.

Is there any evidence that homemade firearms significantly increase the danger to the public? The answer is that there’s no data supporting the idea that these homemade guns significantly increase the danger to anyone. It certainly might be true, but that’s yet to be seen — 30% of guns recovered by law enforcement during investigations lack serial numbers, apparently, but so what? As with any law, we have to decide whether the harm caused by the issue at hand is greater than the violence required to enforce this potential new law, and we should do that with facts, not fear that is disconnected from reality.

Consider this, though: If homemade guns are scary because they can’t be traced, then how do we mainly know about them from all the times federal agents have traced them and arrested people? When you buy an 80% receiver kit online, the government does know about it thanks to the pervasive surveillance state we all live under now. It’s true that if you buy a kit, build it, and then sell it, the gun becomes somewhat “untraceable”, but if someone buys a lot of them, they will be investigated as an individual who is manufacturing firearms without a federal license. Everyone who tries to make a business of unserialized firearms in this manner gets caught. There is no epidemic of ghost guns. There might be an epidemic of people who think buying an 80% kit and manufacturing a firearm at home somehow protects them from government tyranny; I sincerely appreciate their optimism.

Traceability is, in fact, a bit of a joke, generally. The way gun tracing works is that first, law enforcement has to have the gun. TV fiction tells us that an expended bullet or an empty case from a 9mm can be traced to a specific gun in a computer database that will tell you the name and address of the current owner (with a photo!), but that’s not really true. (Ballistics are used during a trial to try to tie a bullet to a specific gun, but that has nothing to do with whether the gun has a serial number.)

The second step of tracing a gun is that the government requests that the manufacturer tell them which gun shop received the gun. Third, the government goes to the gun shop and has to go through their physical paperwork to find the initial purchaser of the gun. If the initial purchaser sold the gun (or says it was stolen), that is the end of the trail because only the initial purchase is regulated by US law. How is this different from a “ghost gun”?

It’s easy to get bogged down in the complexity of firearm law. The most important thing, though, is that the ATF should not be interpreting and creating law. An agency that performs all three functions of government without any supervision from voters is tyrannical by definition. It appears as if ATF’s motivation for these changes in policy is that individuals are bragging publicly about skirting the law (often on YouTube) — even though they are actually complying with the law — and that makes the ATF feel less manly, provoking the dominance display of a strongly-worded letter or raid. If you truly care about democracy, then something needs to be done about the ATF. If you feel that something should be done about US firearm law, then the correct solution is for coherent, ethical law to be created by informed individuals, rather than the incoherent disaster area that US firearm law is currently. As much as the ATF needs to be addressed, US Congress is the original source of the problem.

Related: Homemade Guns: Are They Legal? Must They Be Registered?

We all appreciate Polymer80, Brownell’s, Q, LLC and the other companies that are standing up to the ATF to the best of their ability.

Notes on my opinion of these specific laws
Mid-Missouri John Brown Gun Club is a completely non-hierarchical organization — no member’s opinion on anything is a reflection of the opinion of the club as a whole.

My opinion of the short-barreled rifle issue is that:
1. Short-barreled rifles are not more dangerous than other rifles and should not require additional hurdles for ownership.
2. A brace is a type of stock. Functionally speaking, a stock is any device used to steady a weapon.
3. A gun with a stock (or other device for steadying it) is not more dangerous to the public than a gun without a stock. Accuracy is not a problem.

My opinion of the homemade gun issue is that:
1. People should have the right to make homemade guns.
2. Felons who have served their time should have their rights restored, or there should at least be a procedure by which they might have their rights restored.
3. If guns are required to have a serial number, then all guns should be required to have a serial number.
4. The receiver is a poor choice for the part that should be serialized, if we presume that serialization is a benefit to society.
5. I do not presume that serialization is a benefit to society.

The enormous difference between liberals and leftists — and the fact that leftists have nothing to do with the near-right Biden administration — bears repeating because it is crucial to all of us finding a true path forward. Here is a commentary by Ted Rall regarding this very distinction. It’s over a year old, yet timeless.

Liberals and leftists identify many of the same problems. Only leftists understand that real solutions require serious pressure on the ruling elites.

Ted Rall’s normal job is making political comics. Here is a good one.

We do NOT believe the Trump regime or conservatives will stage a coup on Monday, December 14. But the whole possibility of a coup is certainly not over yet.

Conservative social media has been blowing up in a cacophony of terror recently. The old meme was that the Biden administration was controlled by “Marxists” within the Democratic party — even though the self-described Democratic Socialists in the Democratic party are more accurately described as centrists. The new meme, however, is that the Biden administration are puppets of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). According to this new Trumpist conspiracy theory, the CCP controls the Bidenists and (if I’m understanding the madness) they think the Chinese military is planning to physically invade our country on Monday, December 14.

Conspiracy theories are rarely explained in plain language — instead depending on the reader to fill in the gaps. This is mainly because they sound so dumb when you explain them plainly.

There are a lot of things that are dumb about this conspiracy theory. The most obvious problem is that the Bidenists are clearly controlled by American and global capitalists, not Marxists and certainly not the CCP. If we accept the grandiose overall arc of this story, then the next big problem would be that attacking the US on December 14 would be pretty stupid since the supposed puppet government doesn’t take control until January 20. So what is the purpose of this very dumb conspiracy theory? Well, according to the story being passed around by panicked conservatives, the Trump regime will declare martial law on December 14 to protect the US from this very dumb invasion attempt.

People who create conspiracy theories aren’t completely dumb — that honor is reserved for people who believe them. December 14 also happens to be the day that the electoral college is supposed to certify the results of the election. Since the US presidency is completely overpowered, it is possible that the Trump regime could declare martial law and prevent the electoral college from meeting to certify the results. Basically, the conservative conspiracy theory factory is providing an excuse for the Trump regime to use if they choose to continue with their coup.

To reiterate, the conspiracy theory — now widely believed by conservatives — is that the election was stolen by the Bidenists who are controlled by the CCP who are at any moment planning an invasion of the continental US; therefore, the Trump regime has no choice but to declare martial law, cancel the election results, and ferret out the traitors who sold our country out to China.

We’ve seen Donald Trump discover and disseminate these conspiracy theories before in service to his agenda, but we’ve never seen him act on a conspiracy theory to the degree that this one would require. He would have to commit to a coup. We still don’t think he has enough support from the GOP to go ahead with it, and frankly, we think he’s a coward.

However, some of his crew are explicitly demanding that he declare martial law and “redo” the election; e.g., Michael Flynn. Also, pro-Trump attorney Lin Wood who said, “Communist China is leading the nefarious efforts to take away our freedom.” These are public declarations by famous people using their owns names — not just paranoid, anonymous individuals in private conservative social media spaces.

Declaration of martial law isn’t the only avenue available to the Trump regime. The electoral college was created explicitly to protect the elites from the whims of the people (who were likened to a mob of idiots whose judgement can’t be trusted), and this is just the kind of situation that Republicans think deserves intervention by the electoral college system (instead of just awarding those votes to the person who won the majority of votes in a given state). Again, it doesn’t look like this will work. The courts are not supporting it at all.

The purpose of this post is just to let you know what’s going on in the minds of normal conservative US citizens right now. It’s pure panic, completely disconnected from reality. It’s both hilarious and deadly serious, and it seems likely that we could have some significant acts of “lone wolf” and small terrorist cell violence from the far right between now and January 20. But again, we do not think the Trump regime or conservative militias acting semi-independently of the Trump regime will go through with a viable coup attempt.

A study of 600 adults in the US found that many people are deciding not to have children or regret having children due to climate change, which has now gone on to become a predicament that can only be mitigated — not solved. The precipitous drop in population that comes with the fall of a civilization is mostly due to people choosing not to have children — not various causes of death.

The researchers surveyed 600 people aged 27 to 45 who were already factoring climate concerns into their reproductive choices and found 96% were very or extremely concerned about the wellbeing of their potential future children in a climate-changed world. One 27-year-old woman said: “I feel like I can’t in good conscience bring a child into this world and force them to try and survive what may be apocalyptic conditions.”

Given that the US response to climate change has so far been to elect capitalist puppets and fascists to political office, and to throw money at various pseudo-environmental corporations (e.g., Tesla), the concerns of the respondents are well-founded.

Article in the Guardian by Damian Carrington

Primary Source: Eco-reproductive concerns in the age of climate change by Matthew Schneider-Mayerson & Kit Ling Leong

There’s a big difference between “having rights” and “having power”. As I’ve mentioned before, liberals are people who believe in having rights, but not power; they are comfortable with a ruling class (be they royalty, capitalists, or a ruling party) having all the power as long as the people have a laundry list of rights. The problem is that if you have rights, but not power, you are dependent on the people who have power to honor your rights. If they don’t honor your rights, then you are stuck — you’ve got to either find the power to make those people honor your rights, or they won’t be honored.

The American system is specifically designed to give you rights that imply power while granting real power to a select few. For example, we have the right to vote, but the ruling class typically pre-selects the candidates that we may choose from (we can debate whether Trump was an exception); both HRC and Biden were great examples of that, having been chosen before the public portion of the primary process began. We have the right to free speech, which can certainly be powerful, but the ruling class has the resources available to make sure their speech is heard (and that ours is buried); the Facebook purge is a great example of that. We have the right to bear arms, but the ruling class has the power to convince the people to point those guns at each other rather than at their shared enemy; for example, the armed people who show up at protests to intimidate BLM, antifa, or Democrats.

We have that most sacred right of all — the right to buy stuff — but if we don’t have the money required, we don’t have the power to actually get that stuff. I’m being sarcastic, but for many Americans, the right to buy is the most important right there is. That includes our right to healthcare, which does not come with the power to get healthcare. Commonly, politicians won’t even promise us a right to healthcare — they’ll only promise “access” which is code for letting capital do whatever it wants in the realm of healthcare. Capital will always provide us with “access” to everything under the sun, but always prices things in a way that advantages the wealthy (sometimes pricing people out of life itself).

In short, rights are meaningless without power. Unfortunately, liberals don’t seem to understand that. Republicans do, though. They understand that the right to vote means nothing if they can find a way to use their power to invalidate the election, for example, or stop people from actually voting. They understand that the laws regarding where you can have a gun mean nothing if the police aren’t going to stop your militia from storming the state house. They understand that their enemies will not get their way if they have the power to stop them and can organize themselves to use that power.

There are different types of power.

Electoral power (voting) is supposed to be the power to participate in determining what society as a whole does. We’ve watered that down to the power to select who represents us in government, and then we’ve watered that down to choosing between the offerings of two parties that are both controlled by the rich. Liberals support this ineffectual version of electoral power because they don’t want to have power. Conservatives support this ineffectual version of electoral power because they are terrified of “the mob” — they think that if we had real democracy, people would be too free and would make immoral, destructive decisions. Honestly, I think that Democrats might have this same fear, or at least a belief that real democracy isn’t possible.

Economic power exists, but Americans falsely believe that it is inherently democratic. More than half of Americans believe if we only had a “truly free market” then that would be the maximum freedom possible. However, the American experiment has proven over and over again that economic freedom just means freedom of the rich to rule us all. That same economic freedom creates consumerism through the constant barrage of propaganda from capitalists. Consumerism is the idea that consuming is a moral good — a lie that makes the consumer into a servant of capital and an enemy to their self. In reality, economic power is like any other kind of power — without effort, it will not be granted to people democratically.

Violence is the ultimate type of power. All other types of power reduce down to violence upon closer inspection. If you use your electoral power to make a law, the enforcement of that law will ultimately come down to violence. The law itself is meaningless without the implied violence that accompanies it. Similarly, economic power is ultimately enforced with violence; for example, if you own a piece of property, your control of that property comes down to violence (usually outsourced to the state). This is a natural consequence of physical reality. If you support economic power or electoral power, but claim to be nonviolent, then you have an insincere relationship with reality.

Related: Enforcing the Law is Inherently Violent by Conor Friedersdorf — A Yale law professor suggests that oft-ignored truth should inform debates about what statutes and regulations to codify.

If we are to support democracy in a way that is sincere and effective, then we must support democratizing all types of power, including electoral and economic power — but especially violence. If democratic control of violence has been undermined, then all other types of power have been undermined.

Is your local law enforcement agency democratically controlled? Is it publicly accountable, subject to the rule of law, respectful of human dignity, and does it intrude into citizens’ lives only under certain limited circumstances? It’s very unlikely. In most places, law enforcement is protected by statutes that prevent even elected officials from having meaningful control. Even in places that have some kind of community oversight, that oversight lacks any kind of enforcement authority, making it an obfuscation of the truth — that the police can still do whatever they want. At the national level, law enforcement has become a gestapo that runs concentration camps, spies on our own citizens, and performs political kidnappings.

Related: Democratic policing: what it says about America today by Beth Daley

This is why policing is such an important issue in America today. As long as violence is not democratically controlled, we do not have any rights from a practical perspective. Police reform is a good first step, but ultimately the only way to truly democratize violence is to take the left’s interpretation of the Second Amendment seriously. This would be identical to the interpretation conservatives claim to have as well — specifically, that the American people, generally, should have the right to be armed and avail themselves of that right responsibly.

In contrast, refusing to take power — and believing that having a list of rights is sufficient — results in the people having neither power nor rights.

Today is the 79th anniversary of the Japanese attack on the US naval base in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. Please have a look at Pearl Harbor: “Japanese vs. American Civilian Perspectives” from Narratives of World War II in the Pacific at the Texas A & M – Corpus Cristi online library.

Content Warning: Racist cartoon from the historical period.

Making the Japanese attack appear random and unprovoked was an issue of extreme importance to Roosevelt and his government. American officials sought to portray themselves as completely unaware, victims of an unpredictable act of Japanese violence. The notion that the United States government was unaware of Japan’s incoming attack, falls apart under the microscope of historical scrutiny. Historians Paul S. Burtness and Warren Ober, describe the extent of the government’s involvement in “Provocation and Angst”, saying that: “Washington had sent repeated alerts to all the Pacific bases—indeed, FDR had personally ordered warnings sent on November 27 and 28, which included a note that in a confrontation, the United States would prefer to have the enemy fire first.”

American Conservatives are getting really bent out of shape about the Great Reset. I realize that — given the way conservatives have been behaving over the last 5 years — you might think that the Great Reset is a conspiracy theory or you might think the Great Reset is a good idea. Unfortunately, neither of those things are true. The thing that conservatives are mistaken about regarding the Great Reset is that it is socialism. It is not socialism, but rather another example of disaster capitalism — wealthy capitalists see a disaster as an opportunity to gather more power. The current form of the Great Reset was created in response to the climate crisis, but was quickly retooled as a response to COVID-19.

First off, the Great Reset is not a conspiracy theory. It is being discussed out in the open. There is a book about it that you can buy on Amazon by Klaus Schwaab and Thierry Malleret of the World Economic Forum. Basically, they put forward the case that the financial disaster created by COVID-19 creates an opportunity to “build back better”. The World Economic Forum is something that “engages the foremost political, business, cultural and other leaders of society to shape global, regional and industry agendas”. In short, they are the global capitalists that everyone hates, but that conservatives seem really determined to misunderstand. If you think “globalism” means “socialism” then I encourage you to read my previous post about that.

Second, the Great Reset is a project of big capitalism. It is not a socialist program. The purpose is to reform capitalism for the purpose of overcoming the challenges of climate change. Socialists want to get rid of capitalism, not reform it. It might be a bit confusing because socialists certainly want to address the climate crisis, but they want to address it using the money of the wealthy. In contrast, global capitalism wants to address climate change by using the normal tax revenue stream — i.e., the money of working people. Because the World Economic Forum is fundamentally a tool of wealthy capitalists, it will preserve the wealth of rich capitalists and throw you under the bus.

Third, the Great Reset is not a good idea. I know that when you look around at people who think Satanic lizards secretly control the world, and they tell you something is bad, that your first inclination is to think that maybe it’s actually pretty good. Global capitalism is what created this crisis, though, and those people are not willing to do any of the things required to actually address the crisis.

It isn’t a surprise that the wealthy are using this crisis to their advantage, but what they’re not telling you is that their intent is to destroy the relevance of the nation state and move governance from those semi-democratic governments to organizations controlled by extremely rich people. This makes the entire planet into sort of a Roman Republic, with these important capitalists taking the part of the patricians who make the decisions for the rest of us, the plebeians. Unlike the Roman Republic, this has layers and layers of deception designed to get you to believe you are still participating in a democracy; at least in the Roman Republic, you knew if you were a plebe.

The Biden administration is completely on board with the Great Reset. It turns out that when Biden says, “build it back better,” he means the Great Reset. Please pardon the conservative source (the author is director of the Heartland Institute), but here’s an article about John Kerry recently confirming that the Biden administration wholeheartedly supports the Great Reset. It’s a better approach to climate change than what conservatives are offering (i.e., nothing) — at least Kerry acknowledges that the Paris agreement came nowhere close to adequacy — but the Biden administration’s fundamental support for the extremely wealthy means that it cannot fully address climate change and will try to find a way to make working people pay for it.

The Green New Deal was originally a project of political centrism — a balance between the desires of the rich and the needs of working people. When the near-right Biden camp says it supports the Green New Deal, you can bet that it is a Green New Deal that puts the desires of the wealthy first — so not really a Green “New Deal” at all.

The New Deal is literally the one thing that America’s wealthy (regardless of party affiliation) are most united in opposing. Their animosity to the Sanders campaign was specifically driven by their devotion to never again allowing government to serve the people to the degree that New Deal programs (like Social Security and Medicaid) serve us. Their constant maligning of socialism is motivated by the same thing. The Green New Deal is an idea based on the New Deal. So, they may not be opposed to the “Green” part (as long as it can be made profitable), but they’re certainly never going to allow another New Deal. That means that the Biden administration’s Green New Deal will be repurposed to serve the wealthy.

However, even though the Great Reset isn’t a good idea, it is certainly better than the American conservative response to climate change, which has been to just stick their heads in the sand. Their primary motivation for that has been that they feared that any action against climate change would involve socialism. That fear is based on a complete misunderstanding of what socialism is, and a toxic belief that human nature makes goodness impossible. In reality, conservatives, leftists, and even those people who voted for Biden have a common enemy: The rich.