Slate Publishes Gun-Control Fiction

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.

Elsewhere

You can buy my most recent book, Big White Ghetto, here. 

You can buy my other books here. 

You can see my New York Post columns here. 

Please subscribe to The Dispatch if you haven’t. 

You can check out “How the World Works,” a series of interviews on work I’m doing for the Competitive Enterprise Institute, here. 

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.”

Clarification, March 4, 2024: Updated to include an omitted word and make clear the author does not view being “consistently biased” as the same as “having a point of view.”