Nope, not kidding. The confusing new law in New York that is attempting to disarm would be shooters by denying everyone body armor (not sure how that one adds up, but okay…) forgot to specify the hard armor, reported as steel plates, that the shooter used in Buffalo.

New York’s body armor rules miss vest worn during Buffalo mass shooting

ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) — New York’s new law barring sales of bullet-resistant vests to most civilians doesn’t cover the type of armor worn by the gunman who killed 10 people at a Buffalo supermarket, a gap that could limit its effectiveness in deterring future military-style assaults.

During the May 14 attack, Payton Gendron wore a steel-plated vest, an armor strong enough to stop a handgun round fired by a store security guard who tried to halt Gendron’s rampage.

A law hastily enacted by state lawmakers after the attack restricts sales of vests defined as “bullet-resistant soft body armor.”

AR500 (Abrasion Resistant) steel was a popular hard armor alternative for several years since the steel plates were much cheaper than the composite ceramic plates used in professional circles. It has some serious downsides, since it relies on shattering and deflecting an incoming round rather than catching it like a composite plate will, but it was the only way to get a vest of nominally effective armor under $1,000. That is no longer the case, level III and IV composite plates are much more affordable nowadays and anyone electing to buy steel to save money is no longer making a smart decision.

So New York banned soft body armor. Which consist of levels II and IIIA soft armors and one newly created and fairly expensive level III armor. It didn’t address plates. Level III, III+, IV, and ‘Special Threat’ hard plates are not addressed.

“Governor Hochul was proud to sign the groundbreaking new law passed by the legislature to restrict sales of body armor, and will work with the legislature to expand the definitions in the law at the first available opportunity,” said the Governor’s office in response.

Translation: “We screwed up, just like we did with the S.A.F.E Act (remember they forgot to exempt cops, whoopsie) and now we have to fix it in post because it is more important to virtue signal than get things right.”

New York’s ban is aimed at stopping criminals from gaining an advantage over peace officers, or security guards like Aaron Salter, who was killed trying to stop the gunman’s racist attack on the Buffalo supermarket.

Body armor is not magic. It’s an extra 6 seconds of life, a saving throw in gamer parlance. It’s presence did not make or break what the brave Aaron Salter was able to accomplish by resisting Gendron’s assault. It certainly didn’t help Salter, who would’ve needed the time to deliver more shots into effective unarmored areas to stop Gendron, but even had Salter fatally wounded Gendron because he was unarmored we know that a pistol wound can take time to effect the target (North Hollywood).

Of the shooters who killed four or more people in a public space since 1966, 12% wore body vests, said sociologist James Densley, a co-founder of The Violence Project, a nonprofit think tank with a database on mass shootings.

Meaning that 88% did not, and that the presence of a vest is not a substantial factor in how lethal an attack is or how difficult an assailant or assailants are to stop. Armor is a complication, but a minor one in scale. We might as well outlaw a mass shooter using cover while we are at it. Maybe Governor Hochul can put that in the law too.

No pistol armor, no rifle armor, no using things that stop bullets to hide behind so we must make sure everything is the opposite of bullet resistant.

Like most loopholes, this really isn’t one. We’re stuck arguing over what the meaning of ‘is’ is, more or less. We’re not talking about the definition of domestic violence, we are setting a new definition for what a domestic relationship is.

We remember the ‘Gun Show’ loophole, right? The panic generating fact that a private non-FFL’d individual could sell a firearm to another non-FFL’d individual, under the rules of the state governing private sales, and most of those didn’t involve a NICS check because it wasn’t a federally regulated transfer. But because it could happen at a ‘gun show’ too, as well as just about anywhere else, this was a bad thing.

This is truly more of the same.

What ‘Boyfriend Loophole’ implies is that somehow a domestic partner outside of marriage, familial, cohabitation, or other traditional definitions of domestic partner, gets special immunity during their background check for a firearm, even if they are a convicted domestic abuser at the misdemeanor level. Yes, it is weirdly specific.

Defining beyond these physical parameters is difficult, current or former cohabitation. What will constitute serious ‘dating’ that didn’t end up in a cohabitation situation and resulted in a misdemeanor violence conviction? The Senate is working hard on defining this, a crucial element in legislation. What a non-cohabitant domestic relationship would look like to trigger an appropriate domestic violence conviction and make firearm purchase prohibitive.

Again, if this seems weirdly nuanced it is. It is a serious nuance and deserves attention as dating partners, even serious ones, did not necessarily cohabitate, but it is still a very select situation.

Democratic lawmakers have long sought to expand the law to extend that coverage to dating partners, convicted stalkers and any individual under a protective order. But as of now, it doesn’t apply to other types of dating partners, hence the label “boyfriend loophole.” – CNN

People subject to a protective order are already prohibited persons, CNN. It is the question just before the domestic violence question on the 4473 form, 21 h. current version, and a yes to either (in fact a yes to ANY except the one establishing you are the transferee) is an automatic denial of transfer.

So then this becomes a reporting concern within NICS, updating federal and compelling an update to state DV conviction reporting to the NICS system and making certain that the answers on the 4473 can accurately be verified with the NICS check. This also means covering down on definitions of domestic relationships state to state, a not so simple task.

We’re talking about a dramatic change in what will be considered domestic violence base upon the expansion of the definition of what is a domestic relationship, and the equivalence of cohabiting partners who have not lived together and have no familial relationship. This is probably a relevant question in 2022, with digital communication and online harassment being what they are and the expansion of polygamous style relations, the highly complicated question is what will the new line for the digital and more socially distanced age look like?

Domestic violence isn’t changing, domestic relationship definition is. This has very far reaching implications for several other avenues of law too. Inheritance, power of attorney, and so forth.

Also important, which types of relationship are non-permanently prohibitive and which ones are able to be removed through establishment of proper behavior. This assumes a new definitive relationship, a domestic violence conviction under the new relationship, and the conviction is not otherwise covered under prohibited person definitions. This is a really narrow selection of actions.

If your answer is ‘none’ than you do not believe in a rehabilitative justice system. Permanently removing a civil right through adjudication should never be a step lightly taken. It should remain under strict and constant scrutiny, however when this question involves firearms the Democrats are willing to throw every possible variable under the denial format and damn the consequences. They very prominently disregard the negative impacts of current firearm law on poor and minority communities. This while LE branches and research consistently comeback and do not enforce or recommend enforcing these provisions, because they acknowledge they are low threat the majority of the time.

This practice consistently undermines current gun regulations. This undermining needs to stop, either by shifting the regulations back to the consistently enforceable limits or by enforcing them at their currently prescribed limits.

The new domestic relationship definition is unlikely to change much on the legal front, other than generating more court cases and NICS denials that are not followed up with even an inquiry. Again, we are talking about non-cohabitation. People who did not live together and have no other familial connection, this is a difficult relationship situation to define.

I do not know how many convictions exist which would fall under the expanded domestic relationship, as domestic violence as a misdemeanor, that are not already under a different prohibitive category. That is an important number to know as we look at the efficacy of this change. Additionally, how many estimated crimes would be intervenable upon under the new definition and vs how many have law enforcement failed to under current definitions that resulted in a serious injury or death.

Like the Red Flag language, which is the other main hangup, the expansion of relationship definition must be causative and effective if the bill is to have any positive influence. We will see, we still have not seen the text of this agreed to framework.

Here’s a bit I saved from Above The Law. I thought it was genuinely interrogative and that seems far too rare outside the “in” crowd of the firearm community. People who don’t know and genuinely want to understand ‘why’ certain things are the way they are. Such as why well educated gun owners resist so vehemently so many of the gun control proposals. Are we just “bitter clingers” or was there depth to our arguments?

This won’t be a normal fisking, this feels more genuinely intellectual in its questioning than your average anti-gunner who merely wants to hear their answer from your mouth. Something along the lines of, “Your right, angry person with no practical knowledge or experience in this field. Clearly we should turn in guns for the greater good!”

But the real first paragraph intrigued me. The second triggered me a little, but we’ll get to that.

Unspoken Thoughts About Gun Control

What do you think? And why are these issues generally overlooked?

An interesting series of questions, Mr. Herrmann. Let me endeavour to answer them.

I’m an equal-opportunity offender. Allow me to offend everyone, by offering a few thoughts (on both sides of the issue) on gun control:

Bold. Let’s see where we go from here. I promise to only be offended if it is truly well deserved.

First, shouldn’t we require the microstamping of all gun cartridges nationwide? We should require manufacturers to place a microscopic engraving on cartridge cases identifying the gun from which the cartridge case was expelled. I understand that folks want to possess guns, but I don’t understand why anyone should have the right to fire a gun anonymously. Police should be able to immediately trace a cartridge to a specific gun.

Does anyone disagree in good faith?

Yes, this one is easy.

Microstamping is straight science fiction. A totally non-viable technology. Steel, brass, and aluminum under momentary pressures varying from 24,000 to 80,000 PSI don’t work this way. Neither the firing pin nor the chamber can in any way reliably imprint a QR code or whatever else someone is thinking onto a spent case. This is basic materials sciences.

This utopian pipedream sits firmly in the realm of ‘wouldn’t it be nice if’ and it will remain there, probably until the end of conventional metallic cartridge ammunition. This suggestion also assigns an absurdly over inflated importance to ballistic matching and tracing in criminal investigations. It isn’t that important. It isn’t unimportant but it isn’t that important. Tracking down people via the social aspects of their interpersonal interactions is going to remain the most reliable method, not checking to see if a microstamp on a casehead can find an owner through a trace report (which takes a good while) to a dealer.

So no, there is no ‘right’ to fire a gun anonymously, beyond the obvious protections you have against unreasonable search, seizure, and privacy in general. There is just no way to make this magic work.

Even if we could get a reliable case print with material durability, which we cannot, a few seconds with polisher compounds or something like swapping firing pins and all the effort to imprint cases is wasted. Heck a modestly forward thinking criminal type could pick up brass from a range and leave it at the scene, or use one of the many brass catcher devices. Reloaded ammunition would carry multiple microstamps. You could make it against the law to remove stamps, like mattress tags, but what particular brand of neerdowell do you believe wouldn’t take a basic defacement step to protect themselves? They already make the attempt with serial numbers.

(I don’t want to hear that requiring microstamping would increase the price of guns or ammunition. It probably would. The Second Amendment protects the right to bear arms, but it doesn’t impose any price controls.)

Like I said, my dude. This is impossible to do reliably and not worth it. The price control is that is doesn’t work. It cannot be funded to work.

Literally not worth it, ask a ballistic lab or a detective if they need microstamping to do their jobs. They don’t. This isn’t a data pool set that would significantly impact their clearance rates, it would just be minor corroborating data. At best it would add one extra correlative point in an investigation, one which can usually be established by other means and without any serial number.

So yes, this argument is silly. We might as well go down the rabbit hole of all the ways counter gravity could help us for all the ways microstamping could.

Second, those who oppose gun control are missing a trick: Although you hear this argument all the time, the truth is that almost no one ever fires a gun in self-defense. (I know that the pro-gun folks always insist that “a good guy with a gun” could have stopped a crime, and we see occasional anecdotal reports of this having happened once in a blue moon. But the average gun owner will never in his or her life fire a gun in self-defense.)

Ah, but fire and “use” are not the same.

NCVS estimate of 116,000 DGU incidents per year almost certainly underestimates the true number…

DGU is a tricky number to pin down. However all estimates point to more DGUs, the majority of of which are non-fatal and non-injurious, than homicides.

There are also more incidents of threatened violence than carried through violence, but the DGU is lawful under the condition of life threatening harm. Threatening felonious violence is as illegal as committing felonious violence, penalties just vary.

Some people, however, probably make a “defensive display” of a gun without discharging it. For example, a john is about to assault or rob a prostitute. The pimp enters the room and displays a handgun. The john leaves peacefully; no one is hurt. This defensive display of a gun served a useful purpose, but I’d bet dollars to doughnuts incidents such as this are not reported to the police (and thus are not counted in the statistics).

Or a rancher living in a rural area hears a suspicious noise downstairs. The rancher pulls out his shotgun and chambers a round. The thief hears the round being chambered and quickly leaves the house unharmed. Again, that’s a defensive display of a gun that served a useful purpose and is unlikely to be reported to the police.

The pro-gun people never talk about “defensive displays” of guns,

Oh, but we do. Nobody listens, but we do.

We’re just gun fanatics with tiny genitals. Ask the people we’re trying to converse with, they’ll tell you. Prevented/dissuaded assaults are the majority of DGUs, we have numerous videos showing this in shops and convenience stores.

but I suspect that happens far more often than an actual “good guy with a gun” shoots a criminal in the act.

Correct.

I don’t know if “defensive displays” would tip the balance for anyone thinking about gun control,

It won’t, usually. Most have no interest in being “tipped” into a rational analysis.

but surely that’s a benefit of gun ownership that any fair person would consider when thinking about the issue.

Your error, Mr. Herrmann, is assuming they wish to be fair. They wish to be declared right. They wish to win and get the self-righteous satisfaction of having done something, regardless of actual results.

Fair never enters the equation, if it were fair we would restrain our emotive responses in favor of reasoned ones. This is one facet that is purposefully overlooked and purposefully omitted in these conversations. Of the many reasons we cannot have a “reasonable discussion” on gun control, this among the most prominent. Reasonable requires all the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ data to be laid out in context. The contexts most often omitted, and outright refused to be acknowledged, are that you as a person have that natural right to arms in your defense and that guns are used, owned, and safeguarded properly by the vast majority. In these contexts, because you have the inalienable right to protect yourself effectively, what arguments for firearms laws that do not punish a behavior (like assault) and instead prohibit a ‘bad’ gun make any sense?

Third, society has attempted to prohibit many things that people want: Alcohol, during Prohibition; marijuana, until recently; child pornography, through today; and so on. Generally, those bans don’t work; people obtain illegal things that they want.

On the other hand, society does effectively ban many things that at least some people want: Civilians can’t possess grenade launchers

Lol. Yes they can.

(although that would be fun, don’t you think?)

I do. And, again, you absolutely can. National Firearms Act, Destructive Device.

or tanks

Lol. Yes, they can.

You can also re-enable the gun, legally, again under the NFA. But tanks are expensive to run and not as practical as a personal carbine with a flashlight. We’re comparing apples to fruit orchards here.

or cruise missiles,

Using prohibitively expensive niche use items as an example is probably not the most relevant comparison.

“a US Tomahawk missile costs $2 million per shot.”

Highly impractical.

However…

Let’s not talk too loud about SpaceX. Those aren’t missiles afterall… despite their missile-y characteristics.

We can have drones though, but nobody would weaponize a guideable drone… [/sarc]

or chemical, nuclear, or biological weapons. Those bans work.

Do they? Do those bans “work” in truth?

One of the greatest fears of the 21st Century, thus far, has been a Bin Laden-alike getting their ‘private’ hands on a WMD. We also try to prohibit states from building them. How’d that work out with North Korea?

When we say ‘nobody needs a private nuke’ it’s mostly because we have a bunch of public nukes to do that job and executing warfare is a role of the state. A nuclear weapon, like large volume conventional high explosives, is a strategic weapon not an individual one. In reality a privately held nuclear weapon, by someone who could fund and store it, would be roughly as risky as state held nuclear weapons are and we already have those. Russia, China, North Korea, how are we feeling about those guys right now?

If society banned assault rifles (or handguns, if constitutionally permissible), how do we assess where that ban would fall on the spectrum?

Of? Spectrum of?

I’ll take a stab at this anyway.

Considering the autoloading rifle is objectively the most useful individual armament we have, followed closely by handguns and shotguns, they would rank at the top on the “2nd Amendment applies to me” scale.

A heavy machine gun in comparison (legal to own too by the way), which primarily rides on a vehicle or is set in a fixed position with a crew of 2 or 3 people, is used for force protection and area defense. IT requires a crew to service it properly, hence the title “crew served weapon” for the M2 or MK19 (a crew served machine gun grenade launcher, yes you can legally own one if you pay a tax). They are far less useful in the role of self preservation, but more so in community/force defense.

So if our ‘spectrum‘ is how useful a weapon is to an individual, not a group, then the AR-15 and its ilk are the most useful.

Ranking weapons by their practical strategic use level and human resource employability would be a reasonable consideration, and a nuclear weapon, a strategic bomber and munitions, a set of air superiority fighters, or even an artillery piece (you can buy those too) are all strategic combined arms level weapons to be employed in support of a large force or special missions. Private owners tend to use them at a very limited series of events for recreation because of the logistics.

A rifle, even an “assault rifle” is a personal weapon. It is the weapon you bring for yourself, not that you employ in a team in support of a larger force objective. Personal arms are the most assuredly protected by the provisions of the 2nd Amendment.

Would the ban work? And please don’t shout that you know the truth, and the truth is whatever side of the argument you favor. Think about it, and give reasonable people some way to judge the issue.

Okay. Let’s reason. Not shout. Maybe twist a little though.

Quick run down. Rough, probably low, estimate of 400 million firearms in circulation. Handguns are the most popular personal firearm, also most often used in crimes including mass shootings. Estimate a minimum 20+ million ‘assault’ weapons in circulation, meaning magazine fed autoloading firearms like the AR-15.

How popular are firearms with the general public?

424,873,463 requested, federally regulated, firearm transfers in the last 24 years, encompassing an estimated 100,000,000 people, give or take… This covers only a small percentage of private transfers that are required to pass through NICS. Demand between 2005, the first full year the assault weapon ban had expired, and 2020/2021 which is currently set to be peak demand, has more than quadrupled. 443.3% increase 2005 to 2021. These changes fueled by the Millennial GWOT crowd and the increased interest in firearms by Gen Z who are continuing the gun culture 2.0 arc.

So, you tell me. What percentage of efficacy would we need to achieve for a ban to “work”? What does “work” even look like?

Is “work” a substantive reduction in frequency of homicides or is it specific events? Considering those specific events, mass public killings, are a small percentage of homicides and year to year shifts can, and have, swallowed the totals deaths, what is our mean variation set? How will we know what is a fluke of luck and what is efficacy based?

If “work” means remove, there isn’t a snowball’s chance in hell. We can’t get people to stop overeating and start taking basic healthy steps to keep themselves alive, heart disease remains our number one cause of death.

• The US obesity prevalence was 41.9% in 2017 – March 2020.
• From 1999 –2000 through 2017 –March 2020, US obesity prevalence increased from 30.5% to 41.9%. During the same time, the prevalence of severe obesity increased from 4.7% to 9.2%.
• Obesity-related conditions include heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes and certain types of cancer. These are among the leading causes of preventable, premature death.
• The estimated annual medical cost of obesityexternal icon in the United States was nearly $173 billion in 2019 dollars. Medical costs for adults who had obesity were $1,861 higher than medical costs for people with healthy weight.

You think we’re getting the guns off the streets with a prohibition, from 100,000,000 people, when we can’t get them to make small dietary and exercise changes that could save, extend, and improve orders of magnitude more lives?

Nope.

Fourth, if society bans some category of weapons, then minority groups will pay the price.

Thank! You!

Finally, someone paying attention to laws in practice. The prevalence of folks who ignore the negative impacts of a law because it gives them the warm and fuzzies is infuriating. These are the same folks that support things like the S.A.F.E Act in New York because the acronym spells safe.

Look what happened with the war on drugs: Drugs were banned for everyone, but minorities were harassed and arrested disproportionately. Am I wrong to think that the same thing would happen if we banned some category of weapons? Maybe a ban would be worth the cost, but why don’t liberals ever mention this issue?

Because pointing out the negative consequences of your proposal could completely undermine it. If it cannot stand on its merits against its detractions it should not be policy, period. A cure worse than the affliction is no cure.

Finally, suppose 400 anti-gun Democrats bought assault weapons and then openly displayed those assault weapons (assuming this is legal in Texas; I’m really not sure) in a demonstration on the nearest public area to Gov. Greg Abbott’s house. Maybe next Saturday morning would be a good time for that protest.  Would Greg Abbott be intimidated? Might he decide that allowing the purchase or open carry of these weapons wasn’t a good idea?

Like this?

Okay, NFAC isn’t anti-gun. We just wish they we a little more clued in.

Now given that anti-gunners buying guns (an interesting hypothetical) and using them to protest lawfully, an action done peacefully many times over, defeats their own argument… I have a feeling Abbot would let that one be. If it turned into another situation with a negligent discharge like NFAC did (twice), maybe not a good idea but not illegal and certainly not worth prohibiting under the law.

Stupidity is not illegal.

The comments in the Twitter-verse and colocated spheres of commentary are not promising in this regard though. Anti-gunners regularly and vehemently push gun owners into a subhuman class where it is perfectly reasonable to wish death upon them and their families. Subhumanizing is a trait we’ve toxically adopted into our discourse and we need to exorcise it.

I’m not expressing a point of view here; I rarely do. I’m not a pundit, and I’m not crazy — I still work for a living.

I’m just asking: What do you think? And why are these issues generally overlooked?

I hope I have answered your points, Mr. Herrmann.

You asked some good questions. You made some statements that were provably false too, but that happens. We are not perfect. We learn. I think those questions show something important, it illustrates just how ignorant even a lawyer can be outside their primary areas of expertise. It voices the genuine concerns people have, often because they do not know, and instead of ridicule we need to explain. Not everyone is in the mindset to listen, but we need to explain and to continue to explain even to those unwilling to listen because somebody in the crowd is listening.

I feel Mr. Herrmann is one such person.

So, as to your final question, these issues are “overlooked” because looking at them destroys most of the narratives anti-gunners make use of. It can topple some goodly fuddlore too, something I am eminently okay with. But many anti-gun positions are built on emotive arguments and not upon a strong correlation of positive effects. They will claim otherwise with poorly crafted studies and polls and actively ignore negative effects by using emotive counter arguments about “safety” and “for the children” and so forth.

But the crux of it is that misconstruing the problems is the primary strategy of those pushing gun control, openly admitted too even back in the 90’s. They attack ‘assault weapons’ over the fear and public perception, not the actual threat they represent which would make the logical target overwhelmingly handguns. They make suspect correlations to conflate the threat, such as ‘gun deaths’ including suicide, instead of establishing the details necessary to tackle the variable individual sources of risk since an armed robbery, a revenge killing, and a terrorist attack have vastly different motivational sources.

If they are not honest about the problem(s), how can we assume they are honestly looking for an effective solution? I wouldn’t take that bet. If my mechanic couldn’t accurately describe to me the problem with my vehicle, especially if I can like I need new brake pads, and then kept arguing with me about the source of the problem and proposing insanely expensive and ineffective solutions like changing the windshield to a darker one and putting heavier body panels on the exterior, I’m going with a different mechanic.

I use the same logic to look at gun control proposals. I encourage everyone else to as well.

NSFW

Razor nicely summarizes my raw thoughts on the current bills, but it is filled with colorful language. Play with discretion.

Here is the crux of it though folks, Red Flag law, passage or failure, is about banking political leverage for an otherwise disastrous looking midterm.

The two proposals with actual teeth to move the needle on school safety and child wellbeing are the funding bills, red flags, mag bans, 80% bans, and so forth are entirely valueless in a society with 3D printing, hardware stores, and a healthy distrust of the ineptitude of government.

So tell them to vote no, and then vote them out when the clock strikes voting day in November. Put their records to task and clean house. 2022’s violence is being leveraged, successfully, because the parties that want to bank the capital rolled a “lucky” full house on two back to back exploitable incidents, while quietly letting the others get only enough attention to be counted in the tally of ‘mass shootings’ in the nation.

Mass shooting and mass killing are purposefully correlated to confuse you, remember that. A mass shooting means 4+ deaths or injuries at an incident, which will include the just about any public and many private settings. Where a mass killing equates to 4+ deaths, and a public mass killing is one in a public or semi-public space devoid of any other felonious motive. IE: A bank robbery where four people inside the bank are shot and killed in the robbery, is a ‘mass shooting’ and a ‘mass killing’ but will be reported as a fatal robbery because there was a felonious motivation separate from the killings.

I saw a comment flippantly and sarcastically stating, “Because gang bangers commit so many mass shootings…”

Yes. They do.

Between 1980 and 2005 the percentage of associated felonious actions that also resulted in a homicide went from 55% of all murders to 77% of murders. Associated criminal activity is the norm for homicides. The super majority in fact.

Do these circumstances support strong efficacy implementing Red Flag laws? Magazine bans? 80% bans? Or do they suggest criminal justice reform, prosecutorial priorities, and bail/parole restructuring? Which is it? Where do we move our efforts to actually move the needle on homicides?

The answer remains, more so than ever, in the criminal justice circuit and in who we lock up, for how long, and why we do so.

We can start by firing people come midterms.