- Promoting gear over training. If we’re talking about effectiveness rather than pure collector value, you’re much better off with a $500 gun you can use well than a $5000 gun that you’ve never shot. That means spending more on ammo than on guns — and then actually shooting that ammo. If money is tight, dry fire is a free and very effective training tool.
- Glamorizing spending too much money on guns and gear. It’s fun to joke about this, and often it remains a joke. But there are people who don’t realize it’s a joke and spend thousands of dollars on gun stuff that they can’t really afford. The person who is financially healthy and only owns a Hi-Point is in a holistic sense much safer than the person stressed about money who owns a Staccato.
- Stoking fear to drive purchases. Bans are a thing, and it’s good to warn people about what they might want to secure before a ban goes into effect. But this sometimes crosses the line into hysteria, and that’s financially and mentally unhealthy.
- Legally dangerous bravado. It is a very personal decision to conscious violate a law that you believe to be unjust. Consider the barrel-length provisions of the National Firearms Act. We all find it unjust that a rifle with a 15” barrel will get you sent to prison for up to 10 years, while a rifle with a 16” barrel is perfectly legal. If someone in their indignation wants to disregard that law, they are free to make that choice. But that doesn’t mean it’s just to encourage other people to break that law: the person doing the encouragement bears no risk at all, and the person who listens to them risks federal prison. It’s hard to find numbers on how many people are sitting in prison for barrel-length felonies, but over the decades the total has to be in the thousands. Some argue that civil disobedience has social value (we’ve made that argument before in this newsletter!), and that can be true, but it’s very case-by-case. Looking at actual NFA cases, it’s hard to argue that the suffering of the people convicted under that law has had any positive effects.
— Open Source Defense in The Sin of Scandal