My college astronomy professor used to describe his craft like this: “My job is to build predictive models.” As an astronomer, you build a model of how the universe works. Your model predicts things: the position of a planet, the existence of black holes, gravitational lensing, whatever. If reality doesn’t do what your model said it would, there’s a simple rule: your model is wrong. But if your model’s predictions keep coming true, you might be onto something.

The past few months have been extreme in a lot of ways, but there’s one that people aren't grasping: we just had the most pivotal single change in gun ownership in US history, and nobody spotted it. Sure, people have written articles about the record-breaking uptick in gun sales, but the analysis tends to stop there. This is much bigger than that.

We’ll explain why an outdated — but completely ubiquitous — mental model of gun rights is making people miss the importance of what just happened. And then we’ll propose a new model that makes a prediction of its own: the last few months have altered the course of gun rights in the US for decades.

I’ll let you in on a content strategy secret that we haven’t shared before. If your goal is persuasion, you have to understand the mental frame of the people you’re trying to persuade. And while we spend most of our time on gun-curious people, sometimes we think about what gun control advocates are thinking. Here’s the secret. We have a simple heuristic to model their behavior: think of guns as a virus. If guns were a virus, how would you treat them? What would you say about them? How would you model exposure to them?

Probably something like this:

There’s a well-worn template of gun discussion that goes like this:

Alice: Why crack down further on gun ownership?
Bob: Because a lot of people get shot to death every year.
Alice: A lot of people die in car accidents, but that doesn’t cut in favor of a crackdown on car ownership.
Bob: True, but cars have a lot of constructive uses. Guns are specifically designed to kill.

Each sentence there has several essays’ worth of material to scrutinize. (We’ve written, and will write, a few such essays.) But this archetype is interesting in a way that both sides tend to miss — there’s an unspoken assumption in “guns are specifically designed to kill” which both Alice and Bob skipped over. Let’s unpack it.

The most surprising meeting we had at SHOT Show this year didn’t happen at the show. It happened in a hotel room. I went up there with Chuck Rossi (a fellow Open Source Defense cofounder) at the invitation of Rob Pincus. Rob invited us and a half dozen others up there, to tell us about a group he’s starting called the Center for Gun Rights and Responsibility.

He’s starting it with Dan Gross. Until 2017, Dan was the president of a different group. That one you’ve already heard of. It’s called the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence.

If you follow gun stuff, you've been hearing a lot about universal background checks. So let's get the lay of the land. This article is especially for people who are roughly aware of the issue but don't know the details of it, or the details of why it's a debate at all.

And yeah, why is it a debate? The question “Would you favor or oppose background checks on all potential gun buyers?” really does poll at 90% support. That's surprising. You can't get 90% of people to agree on a flavor of ice cream, let alone a gun law.

What's going on here? There are three key questions to answer:

This essay has been in my head for a long time. But after hearing about the mass shooting yesterday in Texas and then waking up to news of another just over 12 hours later in Ohio — all a week after a similar attack in California — today is a sadly apt day to write it down.

The tricky part is that discussions about this stuff almost always fail. Their stable equilibrium is usually one of a handful of failure modes that we all know (and which are mostly various shapes of "look, it's the outgroup — get 'em!").

I wrote last year about the culture war incentive structure around this, why the two sides talk past each other, and why they're at an impasse without even realizing it.

A common pitfall here is to jump right to solutions without first agreeing on the problem. So, for example, the gun rights crowd will talk about:

One standard explanation for how gun laws come about goes something like this:

1. Someone commits a mass murder using a particular type of weapon.
2. Gun control groups and some politicians study the issue and decide that that type of weapon causes more harm than it prevents, and ought to be banned.
3. A debate ensues between those parties and gun rights advocates about how much harm the weapon in question causes and prevents, and what in fact, if anything, ought to happen to it.

This view does have some explanatory power if you're trying to model gun control groups' behavior. It explains the 1989 assault weapons ban, and various state-level bans. Where it starts to falter is as these bans get further and further from targeting functional differences.

Many culture wars play out as a disagreement over where things are headed. Gay rights will fade into history vs. gay rights are the future. Governments of the future will enforce separation of the races vs. governments of the future will treat all people equally. Women should stay in their place vs. women will have no one "place" they have to stay. Etc.Guns aren't like that.