LAPD declares ‘ghost guns’ an ‘epidemic,’ citing 400% increase in seizures
latimes.com
latimes.com
The reality is that this is here to stay. The FGC-9 is not a joke, it's a powerful weapon that's impossible to effectively regulate. Let that frame the discussion. You can't get rid of this, how do you work with it?
They're way ahead of you on that one.
I would shoot you if I could afford it
But meanwhile making bullets has long been a trivial affair. And you can totally reuse spent cartridges. It's a brass jacket with a lead tip filled with gunpowder (which can also be homemade). It's 19th century technology.
This reminds me a lot of an attitude among anti-DRM people that I’ve been trying to get folks to reconsider: the “DRM is bad _and also_ useless so why bother!” stance.
The RIAA and MPAA have largely gotten their way with stuff like EME and HDCP. It’s become pretty tough to get 4K pirated versions of any but the most popular movies, and even then it’s pretty tough sometimes. While we were chuckling about that 12 digit DVD region lock code meme they were cooking up invasions of privacy that we just didn’t think they’d have the balls or the competencies to pull off.
I’m not too into guns myself, but if you are, take heed from what happened to piracy. These things are not inevitably going to propagate. If you find yourself going “but in order to stop this, they’d have to do X”, stop yourself and consider the possibility that they might try.
I'm very much into guns, co-host a pro-gun and Pro-AAPI gun ownership podcast, and personally know a lot of the people who are behind this movement. Many of them work for FAANG companies. They are aware of the challenges.
So how does a 3D printed gun give maximum freedom, especially when you can buy legal equivalents, and the real “maximums” aren’t possible?
Of the people I know manufacturing firearms, the motivation is gun laws themselves.
California laws are so completely insane [1] that many normal sane gun owners I know have just kinda thrown their hands up in the air and decided if they are going to be criminals anyways, they might as well be criminals with the stuff they want. These are tax paying, law abiding, average joes that have given up on trying to "stay legal" within their hobby.
1. Here is the flow chart to figure out if the rifle you've done target practice with for years and is legal in most of the US will get you thrown in jail: https://www.calguns.net/caawid/flowchart.pdf
This statement sounds like “I’m a responsible pro gun person, but obviously the ones who aren’t are <insert random unliked group>!!”. That’s not much of an argument?
Also yeah, furries seem to be getting into guns, and also seem to be acting with due safety, so I'm a fan of that happening.
Look, people in the 1940s were able to manufacture effective submachine guns while living in countries occupied by Nazi Germany. If it was doable with the tools available then and under the constant threat of armed soldiers legally ransacking your home or business without warning or warrant, it is doable today and in any conceivable future.
There is nothing particularly novel about the threat scenarios caused by ghost guns. The only thing that is novel is the reduced cost of obtaining an illegal gun.
Nobody's sitting around going "hmmm, I used to be a law abiding citizen, but now that I can 3D print an illegal gun instead of buying it, I will use it to go out and do crimes".
That alone puts such business far, far outside the comfort zone of any normal 3D printing hobbyist.
Under that hypothesis, shouldn't 3D printed firearms be a much larger problem in countries where access to firearms is much more restricted than the US?
There are a ton of other ways to get a gun illegally, this is just the cheapest and least reliable one. Without knowing the denominator, the numbers are useless. Also very much doubt that the traceability of legal guns is that useful.
This is generally true. Many guns used in crimes are stolen, "tracing" the gun usually means getting it back to the original owner.
Also note that seizures are the metric in the article, not acts of violence. Non-serialized guns are a no-no in CA.
Well, there’s this:
> Detectives have linked the untraceable weapons to 24 killings, eight attempted homicides and dozens of assaults and armed robberies since January, according to the report.
The 24 killings mentioned in this article would then represent about 10% of 2020 gun murders. That seems significant to me, especially if it continues increasing.
There are ways to get a gun illegally, even here. But most people do not have easy access to guns. Neither the Police expects you to have one (so they don't pull their gun on slightest pretext) nor people who are stupid can use them by accident.
There are shootings. But these are rare and usually involve only police and bad actors.
But there are no school shootings, there are no people killed by roadside because they look like they tried to pull their gun, there are no people killed by their children by accident, and so on.
The scariest thing I have seen is US Police officer pulling their gun for a regular traffic stop (because the windows were tinted) and then killing the driver (because he looked like he is "reaching" for a gun).
It is sick and it is not right and it is all caused by gun proliferation.
https://notesfrompoland.com/2020/05/06/poland-no-longer-rate...
Bringing up the democratic status in this particular conversation doesn't add to the understanding of the issue.
That doesn't say anything about guns. And the US isn't that much of a democracy either these days, despite having most of the window dressing.
If anything if an undemocratic country like Poland can make streets safer than the supposed paragon of democracy, it should be even more argument against unrestricted availability of firearms. Unless you are of the opinion that these deaths are somehow necessary for democracy.
And yes, cops are being melodramatic here. The police rebellion that started somewhere around George Floyd's murder is continuing well beyond complaining about Chesa Boudin and Larry Krasner and Tish James and heck, Bill De Blasio. It won't stop until every police budget is iron-clad by statute and oversight is one again powerless. Nobody gets an opinion on police patterns and practices other than police, lest they pout.
Most firearms manufacturers that manufacture and sell firearms for resale are bound by federal guidelines to do things like serialize them to comply with regulations that make it easier for law enforcement to trace the paper trail or ownership of a firearm. They must also have enough metal in them by law to set off a metal detector.
None of these measures cover firearms privately made, not for resale. those are not regulated. therefore it creates an extra "spooky" mystique the media likes to play up, and xertain groups wring their hands over. The fact 3d printing has made firearm manufacture that much more accessible to the everyone of course has certain political factions wanting to figure out ways to keep those pesky weapons out of people's hands.
Or a gun that has legally required markings removed (CA defines it this way, wouldn't surprise me if a few other states did).
They aren’t in any way comparable in the eyes of the law.
That's true. But some jurisdictions report all un-serialized guns as "ghost guns" in their stats because that's how they want their stats to look.
Technically true (though only some parts can be polymer, obviously) but generally it's a pain, often requiring special tools and machining experience.
This article is fairly sensational in its description of the process, honestly.
3D print a base plate for which designs are easily found online, file down a piece of thin sheet metal to the correct dimensions, and you have a fully automatic glock.
Everything up until the custom baseplate is legal to do, turning your 80% Glock in to a fully auto firearm is the only step that's against the law. (Assuming you don't have any felonies or domestic violence charges that bar you from owning a firearm in the first place)
An AR-15 80% is a little more involved, but with a jig and a router/drill you can do one in a hour and a half in your garage, the hardest part is cleaning up the absolute metric crap ton of aluminum shavings/chips the process produces.
I’ve very familiar with US firearms law, and to my knowledge no US state regulates barrels.
> So no one is printing guns in Slovakia yet (AFAIK :-))
Check out the FGC-9. The plans include instructions for creating a rifled barrel using electrochemical machining (ECM), using 3D printed tools.
False. If you can use basic hand tools like a drill and file, it takes about half an hour. 3D printing makes it even simpler.
Edit: for downvoters, this is useful information that I'm providing to someone who apparently didn't know. I know a good bit about this topic, and I'd be happy to answer any questions you might have.
Solution: write another law.
Result: politicians pat themselves on the back for doing something, non-felons can no longer build DIY firearms, felons continue to ignore the law.
Sigh.
With the amount of uppers that are in the wild, and the fact that a lower can be made from either an 80% part, or 3D printed from scratch by pretty much anyone with two working hands means trying to stop this is like pissing in to a hurricane.
Google FGC-9. Even the barrel can be made at home, rifling and everything, ivanthetroll has videos/files online documenting the process. If Henry Colt could produce a firearm using 100 year old tools and technologies, it's comical to think you can stop people doing the same using 2021 technology.
Perhaps it's time to consider bringing up the poorest members of society out of the abject poverty, that will do a whole lot more to reduce gun violence than passing even more ineffective gun control laws.
So this really isn’t as scary as it’s made out to be, numbers-wise.
Sources:
https://www.polymer80.com/pistols/80percentpistolkits
https://ctrlpew.com/file-drop-tms-94-effeeness-3d-printable-...
There is the free for all approach where we resign to accept the presence of 3D printed guns and let our county mail us instructions on how to 3D print polymer-kevlar vests
There is also a way to work within the constitution to restrict their presence. I don't think any seizure is an affective public policy measure, since that means it was already printed and subsequently found. I'm thinking a tariff on the polymer can be done but that would penalize all 3D makers although stranger things have happened, or an attestation of how the polymer won't be used, or a straight up license with reporting guidelines and a regime that requires the printers to phone home. Of course, non-licensed use being prohibited or severely restricted. And now, same result but without even brushing near the 2nd amendment, and it gives enforcement a pre-emptive reason to act on non-compliance.
Disclaimer, I'm not advocating for anything, I just know a sure-fire approach to making a prohibition stick in the US system: 1) regulate the intermediaries instead of the specific action itself. 2) deputize private individuals or a specific private sector to do the reporting and compliance for you.
Criminals would steal the polymer, and not pay the tariff.
Your scanner likely won’t scan money, photoshop may refuse to edit or print images of money (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Bank_Counterfeit_Deter...), your printer may black them out, etc (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation), all to prevent the easy counterfeiting of money.
Problem, of course, is that, for guns, the exact looks aren’t important. That’s true for child pornography and pirated movies, too, though, and those are being worked on.
So, I foresee tech in commercially bought 3D printers that attempts to disallow printing anything remotely looking like a gun or gun part, and people circumventing that by tweaking models, say by adding easily cut of images of flowers and kittens.
Even if they're in a place (like LA) where the DA isn’t trying to arrest people, they can still prioritize certain kinds of thefts
Existing laws like getting a gun from out of state and literally getting back in your car circumvent most local regulations
And yet the municipality is worried about this polymer vector
So it can be reduced by raising the compliance burden and creating other chokepoints that allow for preemptive action
I've seen a number of comments criticize the reporting, inferring that it's the press that's generating the fear and confusion here.
I think this is in error. The press may be guilty of amplifying FUD but it is obvious that the creation and shape of this particular narrative is from the LAPD.
Is the LAT guilty of parroting LEO w/o providing sufficient analysis? That sounds reasonable to me. News orgs republishing Gov/Biz/LEO PR - w/o analysis or related context - happens pretty much every day in every US town.
But criticizing the press (again, reasonably) while giving the cops who designed and crafted the FUD a pass - I think this shows us that tribalism is rating higher than fixing broken things.
You can buy a kit that isn't a functional receiver, but is 80% of the way there, you have to complete a few machining steps, which they've made VERY easy, and you've now legally made your own firearm. (by skipping almost all of the skilled part that the original intent was all about)
It turns out that if you use enough of the right kinds of plastic, you can get something that holds up reasonably well long enough to commit crimes with.
I expect this loophole to be closed somehow, fairly soon.
Also, I'm confused. I tried to look up the legal standing of ghost guns on Wikipedia, and it mentioned that regulating them would violate the Commerce Clause (since they're not articles of commerce), but there's a Supreme Court case on homemade machine guns which upheld those being illegal. What's the deal there?
There's no federal law banning 80% firearms or home manufacture. If there was, then prosecuting it would fall under the same umbrella as the NFA.
Activists love it when judges stretch words far beyond their original intent.
Same happened in Roe v. Wade, involving "due process". The majority found a meaning in words far beyond what was there previously. A dissenter said: To reach its result, the Court necessarily has had to find within the scope of the Fourteenth Amendment a right that was apparently completely unknown to the drafters of the Amendment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roe_v_wade#Dissents
No, it can’t. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Lopez
They might, since people making rifles at home aren't buying rifles from manufacturers. Licensed FFLs don't use this 'loophole', it exists for private unlicensed people to use or abuse. A common criticism of the NRA is that it prioritizes manufacturer interests. For instance, (from what I've seen, correct me if I'm wrong) the NRA doesn't seem to do a very good job at protesting import bans that harm collectors but benefit manufacturers.
Everything is made of something, and guns are made of things you can't realistically regulate.
1. https://www.80percentarms.com/products/0-billet-ar-15-lower-...
It may be politically impossible to do it in the US but it's certainly possible.
The NRA is busy trying not to be dissolved.
In the UK the pressure elements are regulated and need serial numbers whereas in the US it is the receiver, which could make creating these ghose guns easier.
Yes, the 'ghost guns' politicians fear the most are built like that. Particularly, AR pattern rifles that have printed or home-milled receivers but are otherwise build out of factory parts.
There are also some 'ghost guns' that are wholly homemade, with all the variable quality you would expect. Most of them are probably more dangerous to the user.