“He really wouldn’t think he has built that gun, would he?”—Chief Justice John Roberts
In his seminal article, I, Pencil, Leonard Read shows that, “not a single person on the face of this earth knows how to make [a pencil].” Sure, the pencil maker knows how the near-finished parts are assembled, but the pencil maker does not possess complete knowledge of how those constituent parts—the paint, metal, eraser—were made. Nor does he know how the inputs to those parts were made, and so on. And the pencil maker does not even know how the machines he employs, or their constituent parts, were made. He simply knows how to utilize his capital structure in a manner that takes near-finished parts and modifies and assembles them into pencils.
This true proposition leads to its corollary: not a single person on the face of this earth makes a pencil. Some entrepreneurs modify inputs and assemble pencils, but none make them. So it is not technically correct to say the owner of the pencil factory makes pencils. He simply modifies and assembles parts—whose genesis is unknown to him—into pencils. Not only is the above corollary true, but it’s also now jurisprudence.
During oral arguments in Garland v. VanDerStok recently, Chief Justice John Roberts questioned Attorney for Jennifer VanDerStok & Gun Rights Groups Pete Patterson about ghost gun kits by asking whether a man who did some work on a gun receiver would actually think he built the gun. At issue are kits containing a gun receiver that is 80 percent finished, along with instructions and a jig (and possibly additional gun parts) to complete the construction. Of course, additional tools, such as a drill or drill press, are required, along with skill and patience. And, even then, the finished receiver has to be assembled with all the other various parts, small and large, that make up a gun, which is not a simple task.
Roberts compares completing the receiver and assembling a gun with fixing a car. When someone works on his car over the weekend, Roberts implies the do-it-yourselfer fixed his car. The kit owner didn’t make his gun, but the weekend mechanic fixed his car.
I recently “fixed” my car when the fan blower motor died. To do this, I removed 3 screws, unhooked the wire harness, pulled out the old fan, pushed the new fan in place and reconnected the wire harness and tightened the screws in 15 minutes tops. Someone could argue I really didn’t fix my car. Fixing entails pulling the engine or reconditioning a transmission. In fact, other than a lack of a running fan—an annoyance, and sometimes safety issue—my car ran fine.
So maybe I didn’t technically fix my car by myself, instead relying heavily on the work of the manufacturer of the blower fan. Maybe the purchaser of the 80 percent lower kit didn’t technically build his gun, but then no one actually builds a gun. Firearms manufacturers make some parts which they assemble with other parts made elsewhere. Possibly, if all the work was totaled, the gun manufacturer may have only done 20 percent of the total work, with the 80 percent being done by others. In essence, those manufacturers simply bought an 80 percent completed gun and finished what was left. Would Roberts ask whether manufacturers actually believe they build guns?
We’ve drifted into semantics, equivocating on the terms “build,” “make,” and “fix.” However, we can conclude two things. One, no one actually builds a pencil or a gun. In a technical sense, they modify and assemble them. Even those who melt pot metal to fashion a gun in their garage are relying on materials, tools, and parts they did not make themselves. Two, when considering the standard usage of term built, the kit purchaser may have added a greater percentage of the total effort to his gun than gun manufacturers add to theirs, yet they both built their guns. And they also didn’t.
