Month: January 2022

Over and over again, the Biden administration has touted the benefits of “universal” preschool and pre-kindergarten (pre-K) education. These programs, a White House fact sheet declares, are “critical to ensuring that children start kindergarten with the skills and supports that set them up for success in school.” Indeed, they are so critical, in this view, that President Joe Biden’s stalled spending bill plans to devote what the White House calls a “historic $200 billion investment in America’s future” to expanding access to preschool and pre-K schooling. 

Biden himself has advertised the supposed benefits of the new spending, which would roll out through state-based partnerships, on his Twitter feed, with an October post declaring that “studies show that the earlier our children begin to learn in school, the better. That’s why we’re going to make two years of high-quality preschool available to every child.”

On the contrary, a recently published study of a state-run pre-K program in Tennessee found that not only did the program not produce any long-term educational gains, by sixth grade, the children who attended the state’s pre-K program were actually performing worse on both educational attainment and behavioral metrics relative to their peers. State-run pre-K appears to have entirely negative effects for children enrolled.

The new study results were based on the findings of a randomized controlled experiment that looked at nearly 3,000 children in Tennessee. Some of these children were randomly selected for the state’s pre-K program; others may have attended alternatives, like Head Start or home-based care. The children in both groups were then followed for years, allowing the researchers to track educational attainment and disciplinary issues over time. 

As public policy research goes, this sort of study design—randomized selection into a program plus years of follow-up on the same relatively large group of subjects—is about as high-quality as you’re likely to get. Indeed, this is the first randomized controlled study of state-run pre-K, lending extra weight to its findings. And that makes the results all the more devastating. 

Although the program initially produced small gains in educational achievement among students who attended pre-K, relative to their peers who did not, by third grade those gains had been wiped out, and a small decline in student performance began to show. 

By sixth grade, the difference was even starker: Students who had attended pre-K performed worse on standardized tests, had more disciplinary issues, and were more likely to be sent to special education services.

The study’s authors have not sugar-coated the results: “At least for poor children, it turns out that something is not better than nothing,” Dale Farran, a Vanderbilt University professor who worked on the study, told education news organization the Hechinger Report, in a report on the study’s findings.

Farran singled out the damage that state-run pre-K systems are doing to poor children, ostensibly the primary beneficiaries of this sort of program. In addition, Farran tells the Hechinger Report that the study design should rule out unique factors, such as program quality or parental engagement, as the primary drivers of student performance issues. 

No study is perfect. But with a large study group, random assignment, and repeat check-ins over a long period of time, this is about as close as you’ll ever be able to come to determining causality in public policy research: This is strong evidence that the long-term student academic performance and behavioral problems were a result of enrollment in state-run pre-K.  

Nor are these study results completely unexpected. As Sam Hammond of the Niskanen Center notes on Twitter, other studies, including one of a comparable early childhood education program in Quebec, have found “lasting negative cognitive and noncognitive impacts from pre-k.” This sort of state-run pre-K is bad for children. 

There was, however, one group who appeared to benefit from the program: teachers employed by the program. In the Hechinger Report article, Farran notes that the Tennessee pre-K system offered retirement and health care benefits as well as salaries to match the state’s public school teachers, making the program’s compensation relatively generous compared to many other state-run pre-K programs. As is far too often the case, especially in education, a state program benefited public employees at the expense of children. Biden’s proposed preschool program is not entirely focused on funding this sort of pre-K, but it would almost certainly end up funding more failed, flawed programs like this one. 

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One of the perennial defenses of mediocre public K-12 schools is that they just don’t have enough money to work with. Liberal groups like The Center for American Progress routinely put out videos like this one denouncing the “underfunding of K-12 schools” that call for more and more money to be spent.

I don’t know about you, but when I hear the phrase the underfunding of schools, my head explodes. Not because I dislike kids or public schools; my two sons exclusively attended public schools. What gets my goat is the demonstrably false idea that schools are being starved for resources. Tax revenue per student in public K-12 schools is up 24 percent nationally over the past two decades, and that takes inflation into account.

In New York, where I live, real per-pupil revenue has increased by a mind-boggling 68 percent between 2002 and 2019. Public schools in the Empire State are now shelling out more than $30,000 per kid. That’s more than double the national average, and it doesn’t even include the $16 billion extra that New York’s system got in combined federal and state COVID-19 relief funding.

Yet New York’s public schools are still as terrible as the Mets, the Jets, and the Giants, with only a third or fewer of students up to grade level in eighth grade reading and math, according to their scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), widely considered the gold standard for judging school outcomes. Those scores aren’t much different than they were 20 years ago.

In fact, $30,000 a year puts the lie to the argument pushed by unions and progressives that more money will fix schools. More money hasn’t helped the rest of the country boost their scores either. According to NAEP, whatever minor improvements in reading and math that were made for students ages 9 and 13 since the early 1970s have flattened since the early 2000s. We’re paying more for the same results.

None of this is a mystery. The connection between bigger spending and good outcomes is weak at best, whether we’re talking about comparisons among U.S. states or international ones. 

Certainly the new money for New York hasn’t gone to fundamentally reform what gets taught, or how, or under what circumstances. According to a report on spending trends in the 21st century by my colleagues at the Reason Foundation (which publishes this website), overall teacher compensation is way up in New York, especially when it comes to benefits like health insurance and pensions, which have grown by 147 percent. Nationwide, a dozen states increased spending on benefits for teachers by over 100 percent and only three states kept the increase below 10 percent. Costs for things like administration, support staff, and transportation are up another 24 percent. Just to reiterate: All these figures are adjusted for inflation. 

Dumping more money into a broken system is like trying to fix a leaky pipe by pouring more water into it. What needs to happen is a revolution in how education is conceived and delivered. Over the past 20 years, New York has allowed publicly funded charter schools to operate, which is a good thing because it allows for experimentation while insisting on accountability. Unlike conventional public schools that get students (and funding) assigned to them based on their addresses, charters must attract and keep students in order to stay in business. They start with zero dollars to spend. The best charters have massive wait lists even though they get less money per student than traditional public schools. Charters in New York City, for instance, get about 20 percent fewer dollars per kid than typical public schools.

But instead of expanding the number of charters, New York, like most states, caps it. According to the state’s official data, there are just 359 charters compared to 4,411 public schools. Worse, New York doesn’t allow education savings accounts (ESAs), tax-credit scholarships, and vouchers that would allow more families to escape traditional public schools and pick where their kids go to learn. 

Increasing the amount and variety of school choice, though, is exactly what New York and the country need to be doing (kudos to the 18 states that have started or expanded choice programs). We’re not going to seriously improve educational outcomes for our kids if we don’t fundamentally change how we educate them.

When you look back 20 years, virtually every other service in our lives—from coffee drinks to media to medicine—has gone through multiple revolutions in terms of what’s available and the quality of what’s being offered. Everything becomes more geared toward the individual, more responsive, and usually not just cheaper in real terms, but better too. This is obviously true when it comes to things like food and consumer electronics but it’s also true of big-ticket items like cars, which cost the same as they did 20 years ago in inflation-adjusted dollars (but are massively superior today). Overall, medical costs are up, but think about how much better the variety and quality is. 

Public K-12 education is among the very few things that is still basically the same as it was when today’s parents and grandparents were in school. The only difference is the price tag, which just keeps going up and up.

Written by Nick Gillespie. Produced by Regan Taylor.

Photo Credits: Menetekel, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons; JIM RUYMEN/UPI/Newscom; Internet Archive; Mark Hertzberg/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom; Maryland GovPics, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons; Jim.henderson, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons; Rick Davis / SplashNews/Newscom; Lev Radin/Sipa USA/Newscom; Richard B. Levine/Newscom; Sportswire/Newscom; All-Pro Reels, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Music Credits: “Baseball,” (Instrumental Version) by Dani Jalali via Artlist; “Rancid Life,” (Short Version) by The Mind Sweepers via Artlist

 

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Very few people in the U.S. have had the experience of firing a fully automatic firearm, since even in a country awash in hundreds of millions of legal firearms, only a few hundred thousand are capable of full-auto firing. For the average person to own one requires extensive government paperwork and fees on top of the artificially inflated five- or six-figure price tag for the guns themselves. Realistically, it’s not possible for all but the richest shooters.

SHOT Show, the world’s biggest gun show, descended on Las Vegas in January after a pandemic-induced year off. Before the buyers scurried around the floor of the Venetian Expo trying to secure stock from salesmen with fewer offerings than in years past, many made their way to a massive outdoor range to test out the offerings. I went along with them.

The desert range was more deserted than usual thanks to many of the biggest gun companies being scared off by the omicron COVID variant. The ammo shortage was evident too, even at the industry’s own trade show. What used to be 20- or 30-round demos were cut to five or 10.

A few of the full-autos were there as demos for law enforcement or military buyers who are, as is often the case with gun laws, exempted from the full-auto ban enforced against everyone else. Many were meant in essence to say to normal gun enthusiasts, “Hey, look at this cool gun. Don’t you wish you could own this? Anyway, when you’re done with the fun gun, here’s what you can actually buy.”

Some available to shoot are standard full-auto versions of guns that are also popular in their semi-automatic configurations—the cousins of guns like the AR-15, AK-47, or Ruger 10/22 but with that one extra position on the safety selector which lets you fire multiple rounds with one trigger-pull and thus turn the fun up to 11. Don’t underestimate how fascinating a full-auto 22 LR can be to shoot—it’s like a grown-up version of those full-auto BB guns you use to blast out the paper with the red star at the boardwalk.

Then you get into the belt-fed guns: higher-caliber machine guns designed to be fired from a bipod or tripod. These get more fun the faster the rate of fire and the bigger the round–though, in my opinion, a bigger round beats a faster rate of fire. The Minigun is hell of a lot of fun for the half second or so it takes to spit 100 rounds, but it can’t match what it’s like to fire John Moses Browning’s Ma Deuce in an enclosed range—the concussion of every round fired rattles everything in you.

But the short-barrel rifles provide the special thrill of shouldering a machine gun, and that’s how you experience the full force of what a weapon does as you hold down that trigger and blow $50 of ammunition in the blink of an eye. Shorter barrels have the added effect of making the muzzle blast bigger and much closer to you, amping up the splash of fire and heat you get to feel.

A short-barrel AR without a flash suppressor, though? That may be my dream full-auto. While my writing about guns professionally often affords me the opportunity to shoot them, a writers’ salary means I’ll likely never be able to actually own one of those guns. 

That’s because of the National Firearms Act of 1934 (NFA).

The NFA was passed in response to the crimes of famous gangsters such as Al Capone, John Dillinger, and the aptly-named Machine Gun Kelly. It was an early 20th century attempt to ban certain kinds of guns and accessories by registering and taxing them out of existence. It instituted a $200 tax—over $4,000 in today’s money—on all silencers, short-barreled shotguns and rifles, and any gun capable of fully automatic fire.

The government then created a registry overseen by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) to enforce the tax—a bureaucracy that can take upward of nine months to process an application. Anyone who does register a machine gun with the ATF must also agree to random searches of the property where it’s registered. 

The $200 tax stamp is more manageable today since Congress didn’t pin its cost to inflation. Registration of NFA items such as silencers have skyrocketed to more than 2.6 million as of last year. But a 1986 amendment has prevented the same outcome for machine guns.

That year, the Senate attached a machine gun ban to the Firearm Owners Protection Act. Newly produced machine guns can no longer be sold or transferred to civilians so that law effectively permanently restricted the available pool of transferable machine guns to a few hundred thousand.

The ATF currently reports having 741,146 machine guns in their registry. However, a 1994 Department of Justice (DOJ) report shows only around 240,000 registered machine guns nearly a decade after the new sales ban went into place. That suggests more than half a million of the registered machine guns aren’t actually transferable to normal civilians and are likely owned by law enforcement agencies or gun dealers with special licenses (some of whom will rent them out to civilians on a per-shot basis).

Severely restricting the supply has naturally sent the price of machine guns into the stratosphere. It’s extremely difficult for a civilian, even one with no criminal record and the patience to go through the monthslong registration process, to buy any fully automatic gun. The very cheapest ones on the open market go for around $10,000. A gun that’s little more than a metal tube and a spring which initially cost a few hundred dollars to produce can go for over $13,000.

A civilian can build a semi-automatic AR-15 from parts for around $600. A fully-automatic M-16 or M-4, which shares nearly the same design but has a different fire-control mechanism starts at around $25,000. Prices only go up from there. Thus a gun that costs a few hundred dollars to build can sell for as much as a luxury car or even an exotic supercar. 

As with most gun regulations, there are workarounds to get something like the full-auto experience without spending your life savings or registering with the government. Recently-banned bump stocks help a shooter harness the recoil of a round going off to more quickly press a semi-automatic’s trigger and fire rounds in much quicker succession than traditional shooting methods. Binary triggers accomplish the same effect by using both the pull of the trigger and its release to fire a round.

Each method gets closer to the firing rate of slower full-auto guns, and bump firing can even be accomplished without a stock or any specialized equipment. But neither is as controllable or, ultimately, as fun as true full-auto fire.

Explaining how fun full-auto guns are to shoot isn’t likely to convince many gun-control activists they ought to be made legal. The idea that a free citizenry should have access to the same weapons its soldiers do, at least at the individual level, is even less amenable to most who favor stricter gun regulations.

But how much good, even in gun-controller terms, has the ban on full-auto guns accomplished? That’s a lot harder to answer. I’m not aware of any data that suggest many crimes were committed with registered machine guns between 1934 and the 1986 ban. There also isn’t great data on how often machine guns, or their workaround devices, are actually used in crimes since that ban. 

The ATF doesn’t report how many crimes are committed each year with registered machine guns. Though the DOJ reported only .1 percent of traces in 1994 involved machine guns and “other” guns, even that report doesn’t separate illegally unregistered machine guns from legally registered ones. 

Similarly, the ATF told the Washington Free Beacon in 2017 there are only about 44 prosecutions per year involving silencers. This has led some within the ATF to call for removing the sound-suppressing devices from the NFA’s purview. Ronald Turk, an associate deputy director at the ATF, wrote in a 2017 internal memo leaked to the press that “given the lack of criminality associated with silencers, it is reasonable to conclude that they should not be viewed as a threat to public safety necessitating [National Firearms Act] classification, and should be considered for reclassification under the [Gun Control Act].” Since machine guns appear to be even less commonly used in crimes than silencers, his logic could be applied to them as well.

That logic can cut both ways, though. If NFA detractors can argue the lack of crime committed by those weapons is proof that the law only burdens the law-abiding, NFA boosters can say that lack of crime is proof the law’s regulations work very well and should be extended to other guns such as the semi-automatic AR-15 or perhaps even every gun. That’s despite the fact that rifles outside the NFA, which AR-15s are only a subset of, are already rarely used in crime: Recent FBI reports indicate only about 300 of the 15,000 or so murders per year involve a rifle. NFA proponents would surely argue that number could be brought down even further if fewer people owned them with far greater government oversight.

Machine guns are not commonly used in crimes, especially ones that aren’t registration violations. But they have been used in some high-profile acts of mayhem, including a pair of robbers who used ARs and AKs illegally modified for fully automatic fire in a failed 1997 bank robbery attempt in North Hollywood. The two fired 1,100 rounds and injured 20 people before being killed by police.

Full-auto workarounds were also involved in one of the most high-profile shootings in American history. A shooter used ARs equipped with bump-fire stocks to kill 58 people at a 2017 music festival in Las Vegas. It is the only instance of bump-fire stock being used to commit a crime and it’s not clear how much bump firing actually added to the carnage, but it tarnished the devices enough that Donald Trump’s administration outlawed not only their sale but also their possession.

Binary triggers and other workarounds are very likely to attract further attention during the Biden administration, which is already taking a more aggressive approach to regulating devices that operate in the NFA’s gray area. President Joe Biden is currently working toward unilaterally banning pistol brace devices the ATF used to say complied with the NFA, but now say are designed to circumvent the law’s ban on short-barreled rifles; millions of those devices must be either registered or destroyed if the proposed rule is adopted.

So, while they lack a treasured place in a crook’s arsenal, If you want to own a machine gun or even something remotely like it, it’s probably not going to happen anytime soon—even if you make a decent living and have never committed a crime.

If you can manage to get an invite to the gun industry’s next range day to experience them, this shooter advises you: Definitely take it.

The post Shooting the Guns You Can't (Realistically) Own at the Gun Industry's Range Day appeared first on Reason.com.

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