Substack.

The bill requires a psychological evaluation of a minimum of three, likely four, possibly five people before granting each license. Could be eight or more in a big household. Let’s say four on average.

There were over 100-million-gun owners in the United States at the beginning of 2020. The “Covid-19 toilet paper hoarder prepper” gun-buying-spike, the “BLM fear of police” gun-buying-spike, the “suburban fear of police defunding” gun-buying-spike, and the “fear of gun controlling politicians seizing guns” gun-buying-spike, all intersected to increase that number by an additional five million more new gun owners, most of which were liberals, some of which voted for the bill’s sponsor Sheila Jackson Lee. One in 20 gun owners today is a new owner, by conservative estimates. 105-million-gun owners at a minimum, likely more.

This bill would require the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms to perform 420 million psychological evaluations within the span of three months. A psychological evaluation takes between 30 to 90 minutes to complete, so let’s say an hour.

There are 106,000 licensed psychologists in the United States. If every single psychologist in the country were drafted into the Army and then repurposed to aid the ATF in their registration effort, each psychologist would have to perform 3,962 hours worth of evaluations in order to handle the load, or approximately two full years of 40-hour work weeks. If, on the other hand, they were required by their new ATF slave drivers to process the full load within the three-month timeframe specified by the law, they would be doing seven million evaluations per day, requiring 66 hours worth of work in each 24-hour day for three months. This is third grade math. Even kindergarteners know there aren’t 66 hours in a day.

And that’s all presuming that you even could draft every psychologist in the country into the ATF somehow, and further presuming that all those psychological patients they’re seeing and helping could be put on hold for two years without serious drawbacks, such as perhaps maybe one of them shooting up a school.

The average psychologist’s salary in the USA is $105,000 per year. There are around 1960 hours in a work year for federal employees presuming they get federal holidays off and two weeks vacation. That means 214,285 work years to process these permits just on the psychological evaluation criteria alone, at a salaried cost of 22.5 billion dollars. This is approximately the same cost as building two manned moon bases, presuming that the ATF is efficient enough to line up eight evaluations per psychologist per day, which they assuredly won’t be.

Further, we happen to already know how many people such an effort would save from homicide. A mathematical analysis I performed for Open Source Defense showed that based on solid science by Michael Siegel at Boston University, almost every gun control measure ever studied had zero impact on gun homicide. And while this bill includes plenty of elements which are scientifically proven not to work …

The absurdity of the proposal is obvious to everyone with two brain cells.  There are several possibilities.  First, this turns into a massive FedGov program designed to slow down and even stall completely the exercise of God-given rights (does a FedGov program do otherwise?).  Second, the proposal is so awful and ridiculous that gun owners nationwide give a big sigh of relief when what comes out isn’t quite as bad, with leaders jumping to the front of the line to Negotiate Rights Away.