Things People Don't Get About the Homemade Gun Making Story
reason.com
reason.com
> By eliding what's really at stake here—more a matter of free expression than any meaningful expansion of the already existing legal ability to make a gun at home—the states suing, and alas too much of the media, are ginning up unwarranted fear to expand the government's power to restrict speech, and alas those states have had at least a temporary success for now.
This is pretty clearly a freedom of speech issue. Knock-on effects of this would be, for example, removing all of the Wikipedia articles that talk about how compounds that the government Doesn't Like.
One error the article makes is that this isn't software, this is just normal CAD documents describing the objects in question.
If we as techies don't stand up for this, we're doing ourselves and future generations a huge disservice.
A way I think about it is if I look 100 years into the future, there are energy weapons or auto tracing bullets or autoturrets with aimhax, would those be acceptable for anyone to build? Availability creates danger - someone has a psychotic break and builds up a bunch of guns in their garage and drops 200 people before they’re shot dead.
I wish we could get rid of this Wild West mentality - it is entirely possible to build a world in which guns are unnecessary in most anyone’s day to day life.
Probably because the discussion is entirely political, and political discussions on public forums rarely end well.
> This is pretty clearly a freedom of speech issue
Would you also support someone publishing instructions on building your very own nuclear weapon? If not, where do you draw the line between 'free speech' and 'free speech that is very likely to end in tears'?
I'm generally very much against limiting the spread of information, but I believe there are some things that we humans are not mature enough as a species to have freely available. Hell, we're not even mature enough when it's restricted.
Give that, there's going to be lots of debate where to draw the line, and that's ok. But arguing that there can't ever be a line is the kind of thing which gets people into untenable positions.
We're not up to our ears in homebrew nukes because making them is expensive, and that doesn't change. People have been able to make zipguns for over a century with nothing more than a few bits of pipe and fittings.
It's queer that merely the idea of knowing how to do something should be so distressing to policymakers.
AFAIK (without enough searching to land on a no-fly/watch list), those instructions are at a very high level and are not enough to produce a working bomb without further extensive research/experimentation. That at least accounts for some of the 'expensive' part, getting appropriate fuel being the other portion.
I wonder if in the future we will think back to this comment and say "man, we were so short sided to not recognize the emerging hobby of home nuclear fission!"
There's also a key difference between uncontrolled fission and controlled fission. Both are bad for your health if you are too close, but one of them is immediately bad for your entire neighborhood/district/city.
I fear the hacker ethos of the tech world, the mindset that cared about the right to tinker and to not have the government tell you what you can and cannot know, has recently become smothered under a mountain of VC cash and a stew of Bay-Area politics that is all too willing to look the other way if the outgroup is the one looking to assert their rights.
Thankfully, it seems like the EFF is making good arguments: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/wjkzz4/the-self-d...
> “The design files at issue here, for example, are not ‘functional’ software that can be ‘run,’ ‘launched,’ or ‘executed,’” the EFF wrote. “They are storage files for text, images, and three-dimensional shapes, having “functional” consequences only after a third party interprets and implements them with software, hardware (such as a 3D printer), and raw materials. Even under the government’s flawed view that ‘functionality’ diminishes First Amendment protection, files here are, if anything, less ‘functional,’ and at least as protected, as the computer instructions for encrypting data.”
I'm reminded of a fictional quote from a video game (Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri), but it seems relevant:
>Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master. --Commissioner Pravin Lal, "U.N. Declaration of Rights"