Good News: Anti-Gun Pseudo-Science Getting Reality-Checked More Often

When it comes to America’s Gun Control Industry pushing for more gun control, there’s just not much in the way of fact-based discourse to back it. So, instead of relying on facts and data, they cook the books.

Statistics? They bury anything that isn’t good for their cause. Then they push feelings when that doesn’t work. But, one of the amusing side shows of the gun control deception is to pretend that “prominsing” technologies exist that really don’t. Things like “smart guns” and microstamping have been pushed for decades.

The idea behind microstamping sounds good on the surface, of course. If your gun’s firing pin or striker can stamp a code on the primer, ejected cases can be used to identify who fired the gun. This would theoretically make it easy for cops to figure out whodunnit, which, the “thinking” goes, would then discourage the bad guys from stealing guns and using them to commit crimes. They see less crime, fewer shootings, and a better world. The sun will peek through the clouds. Rainbows will appear. Well hear the songs of angels and champagne would fall from the heavens.

But anyone who thinks about this con job for more than a minute can see the problems. The most obvious one is that criminals could run a file over the firing pin and obliterate the stamp. Or they could replace the pin. It’s not difficult.

Crooks could also run with some random brass they can pick up at any gun range and toss it as they run, littering the area with stamped cases from innocent people. Then there’s the problem of durability, with most microstamping codes only punching reliably for around 200 rounds at most before they wear down. Oh, and then there’s this doozy. The codes would be utterly useless without a registration system to back it up.

Then there’s the inconvenient truth that no gun maker anywhere in the world makes guns that microstamp ammunition. Why? First, because they’re not stupid. They’ve looked at the technology also and concluded that it just doesn’t work. Second, there’s the fact that even if they did offer models that stamp, very few buyers would want (and pay extra) for them.

In other words, like most “government solves everything” ideas, it may look good on paper at first, but it fails miserably out here in the real world. Not that any of the reasons microstamping is an utter failure stop politicians from trying to mandate it.

All of this leaves us with a bigger question: why do dumb ideas like microstamping stick around and keep getting shared and pushed for decades? Shouldn’t facts and reality push the bad bad out of the marketplace of ideas?

To answer this question, we have to look at how the media environment and propaganda work. Before the internet got popular and easy to use, there was almost no one questioning bad ideas like microstamping in mainstream media, so it never got a fair debate.

While people got a chance to question it and debate it more as the media environment became more decentralized, gun control supporters were still holding the biggest megaphones, even online. This only got worse as corporate social media proliferated and began to put its thumb on the scales of what opinions and political stances were acceptable.

One of the best ideas Twitter had, even before it was bought by Elon Musk, was its “Birdwatch” program. This has since been renamed Community Notes, and eventually strengthened by demonetizing tweets that get noted. While not a perfect system, it helps keep people from spreading popular falsehoods on Twitter (X) just to make a buck and gin up “engagement.”

It’s delicious that the tweet from the Michael Bloomberg-funded Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Control Advocacy Violence Solutions was community noted.

Whether it’s on Twitter/X or some other social media platform, we’re seeing more rigorous debate happen now. With the media environment further decentralized (and increasingly silo’d) and with people having an opportunity to respond, bad ideas like microstamping don’t get to run around unopposed like they used to.

That doesn’t mean professional gun control pushers won’t keep trying, of course. They’re paid very good money by some very wealthy donors to push the ideas they do.