Bump Stocks: Aiding and Abetting the Enemy

This is why we banned bump stocks: Sixty dead. Four hundred and thirteen injured. One gunman.

Again, that's why bump stocks were banned. A massacre at a country music concert. Bump stocks permit terrorists, both domestic and foreign, to modify any semi-automatic rifle to full-auto. Thus modified, they are crude and easily accessible instruments of mass slaughter.

We banned them, and the Supreme Court overturned that ban. The odd arguments offered up by members of the Court about the mechanism involved were obviously, self-evidently immaterial, and the worst form of legalism.

With no training, anyone...I mean anyone...can put an entire magazine downrange in seconds. Reload, then do so again. And then again. Before the Las Vegas massacre, I'd watch gun enthusiast videos about bump stocks, and as they dished about how badass they felt using one, I marveled that they'd not yet been used in a mass shooting. They reduce accuracy, waste ammunition, and are useless for shooting sports. A bump stock would be equally pointless for home defense. But if you're firing into a fleeing crowd, that doesn't matter.

Watching the videos produced by avid gun Youtubers, there was no question about the purpose of a bumpstock. It was a cheap way to circumvent restrictions on full auto machine guns, for funsies. Because what's more fun than blasting away at a target with a couple of hundred rounds? I mean, it would be kind of fun, honestly, in a world where terrorists and psychopaths didn't exist.

But that's not the world we live in. The video above makes that abundantly clear, without commentary or question.

Nor is the world we live in one where making meaningless, obviously specious arguments about trigger mechanisms is anything other than evil. Sure, it's "true," but in the way that willful spin is often "true." We do not limit access to full-auto receivers because we have an issue with receivers. We limit access to full-auto receivers because of what they *do*.

C4 and dynamite aren't the same chemically, but they still blow things up, eh?

A workaround that allows you to do the same thing...to pour hundreds or thousands of rounds into a crowd of warm bodies...violates the obvious intent of restrictions on automatic weapon access.

The sophistry involved in overturning that ban is crude, self-serving, and willfully ignorant. It's argumentation straight out of scholasticism, in which the letter of the law is debated and the intent of the law is ignored. It shows a complete failure to understand the purpose not just of bump stocks, but of the entire system of justice. Overturning that ban poses a threat to law enforcement professionals, to citizens, to all of us.

This is Trump's court, after all, so that should come as no surprise.

The Issue I Will Have with the Superbowl

It's not Taylor Swift.  I don't care about Taylor Swift.  I mean, not at all.  I follow her in the same way that I follow Jai-alai.  When the cameras inevitably switch to her for a reaction shot, it may as well be to a shot of any other random entertainment billionaire in the fancy one-percenter boxes.  Eh.  So what?  Big deal.  

But there is something about the upcoming Superb Owl that is going to bother me, and bother me a whole bunch.  Because something has changed, and changed for ill, both in football and across the country.

I was recently walking through my home "town" in the Northern Virginia suburbs, where I passed a little laundromat.  In that laundromat, something caught my eye.

It was filled with day laborers, more than a dozen able bodied men, because that stretch of Little River Turnpike is where such men gather for whatever work they can get. They were all staring intently at the one wall not lined with washers or dryers. Against that wall were three huge vertically oriented screens, each of which were splashing the room with a shifting array of bright colors and the simulated spinning of three sets of numbers and symbols. They were Slot Machines Two Point Oh, and all were transfixed. Three men gambled, and a room spectated, entranced by the game of chance. 

Is that legal in the state of Virginia? Not really, although as our society continues to move more and more away from the Bedford Falls of George Bailey and slouches towards the crass brassy clatter of Pottersville, I’m not sure anyone cares.

In my neck of the woods, there’s also a push to drop in a casino in the Tysons Corner area, because development business growth revenue something something. Mostly, it’s because gambling is a wildly profitable business, and gambling is happy to feed the political beast with donations and the promise of lazy, predatory revenue. This is a fat season for American gambling, as anyone who pays any attention to sports at all will know. Since the Supreme Court sided with New Jersey in a case five years ago, sportsbetting has exploded. FanDuel, the most successful of these businesses and a subsidiary of the Dublin-based multinational conglomerate Flutter, saw a 600% increase in use and a similar increase in profit between 2019 and 2022.

With FanDuel, you can gamble from your phone, gamble all the time, bet on every play in a game, never ever stop gambling, dopamine hit after dopamine hit until you’ve maxed out all your cards and drained every account. It’s wildly successful, virally successful, a perfect storm that “leverages the synergies” between gambling’s addictive qualities and the operant conditioning techniques that corporate clinical psychologists have woven into contemporary app design.

When the Superbowl is broadcast from Vegas...and there's a reason it's in Vegas, honeychild...there’ll be a great onslaught of ads telling us just how much fun it is to gamble. 

My Scots blood helps inoculate me against this siren song.  I’m cheap as dirt and have more than a wee bit of lingering Calvinist cynicism about bright lights and shiny objects.  

I can’t, however, miss the impact it has on those who get hooked on false hope and dopamine, who can’t afford to lose the money they bet, the people who’ve hit bottom, who are driving a 100% increase in calls to addiction hotlines over the last two years.  The flacks for the gambling "industry" swear up and down that this is because they inde that little warning in their ads, but c'mon.

We're not idiots.

I'll enjoy the game, although not as much as I would had either Detroit or Baltimore made it.  

But every time I see an gambling ad...for DraftKings, for FanDuel, or MGM...I'll recoil.