How 3D Printing Is Inflaming The Gun Control Debate
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It's not, really. The pro gun-control side has pretty much been routed, both in the courts and in the polls.
Is it really possible to deny the statistical links established, the correlations, existing between (# of weapons in given country) and (# of violent death), or better (# of death by gunfire), or better (# of shootings) ?
Hmmm. Well. You're probably right. If someone can deny evolution, he can deny this just as well. So let's not troll here. :)
And, as always, correlation != causation. Statistics don't take cultural differences between and within countries into account, statistics don't explain how to deal with millions of angry gun owners as the police come around to gather all the firearms, etc., so there is ample opportunity for argument there.
In my opinion, though, gun death statistics aren't the relevant statistics to look at anyway, it's violent crime statistics. Would the people who commit crimes with guns still commit them if they didn't have guns?
Anyway, the debate will become irrelevant in a few years when they're printable (I suppose they'll try ammunition control instead). So will a lot of other things. The economy is about to change again, probably as large as a change as the internet has brought.
http://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/specials/switzerland_for_the_rec... Switzerland holds the European record for rate of gun suicide, and record of guns per capita. Suicide is the leading cause of death for people younger than 35.
There's clearly a problem with the Swiss legal obligation of having a gun at home. (Mandatory for every conscript soldier, i.e. almost every swiss man, including me.)
I do believe that if I was not obligated to have a gun at home, I would not willfully buy one and thus would not have access to one.
see also: Lithuania
The misconception about it being for states only is from the clause concerning well-armed militias being good for security, that wasn't a scoped restriction concerning that right.
During the time following the articles and the constitutional convention, most eligible civilian men were obligated to keep arms, not just ones in a militia or the military.
To believe the same people who legislated this had just gotten done signing a constitution that obviated all civilian gun ownership save for those in a militia is ludicrous and painfully unaware of the history.
So the wording goes,
>the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed
If you don't like it, get the constitution amended. At least the anti-alcohol prohibitioners had enough self-respect not to try to sneak through the back-door. Otherwise, suck it up. It's the law of the land.
Also, McDonald restricted localities and states from infringing on the individual right to bear arms as much as the Federal gov't had previously been restricted, so it's no longer possible to stuff a city council to get guns banned.
I'm especially interested in the U.K. because people don't even like the idea of the police using water cannon, but if any 3D printer can produce a gun, I think they're going to need to arm all police.
How countries in that situation handle the problem is going to be really interesting. Especially how it affects 3D printing. Is it going to be dying business models all over again? Or will the countries adapt to a new reality?
It seems a relatively common technique is to rebore the barrel of a starter (blank-firing) pistol or modify an air-rifle, there was a guy caught not that long ago with his own machine shop making full-auto capable weapons, iirc.
But bullets; I'm sure they're easier to smuggle, and there are legitimate ways to get then (rifles only, pistols being banned entirely) Making your own is also difficult, although buying a sack or 2 of spent cases and a tumbler is possible, there aren't really any decent sources of propellant, nor primer/caps.
It's hard to say objectively which is the harder component to manufacture/acquire, but I'm going to go with ammo right now. Not sure where the enforcement effort will be best spent in future though. It may be that the focus is moved towards detection, perhaps with something like the directional microphone arrays that can do gunshot detection/localisation. We could even mount them on all the millions of CCTV cams we have scattered around the place, what could possibly go wrong?
My Dad and brother-in-law are both fans of black powder guns, and have made their own powder for them. But while a musket is still a solid defense against someone who isn't armed, its not much of a threat to someone wearing ballistic armor and carrying a M4.
Gun control has never been about guns anyway, it has always been about a society that thinks killing people is an acceptable way to settle disputes.
Eh?
I thought it was always about people misusing and people being afraid of big, scary, long range killing machines.
[1] Yes that is a Zoolander reference.
1) in the event that someone else has a gun and is assaulting you with one; either that, or your in a situation where the assailant is substantially stronger than you and isn't stopping (or is attacking someone you love). For example, a mountain lion or bear.
and more importantly,
2) a detourant.
* "I'm not going to steal from that guy, because he's packing and I like living."
* "It would be unwise for me to attack that car dealership, because one of the
patrons might shoot me."
* "Opening fire in this mall would be a generally bad idea, considering one in
four people in it have a glock on their hip."And of course if your society didn't think attacking people was a reasonable course of action then #1 goes away.
And as a deterrent the your three examples all presume a human out to do harm. Back to my ideological, if unrealistic, observational comment.
Does that help get my point?
With that said, I'm still very frightened by the potential of weapon manufacturing through 3D printing. If and when it becomes effective and economic at producing firearms, nefarious institutions will not hesitate to produce them in mass quantities, no matter what the law says. And I don't like it. I support gun rights for law abiding citizens, not criminals. Obviously some no-brainer laws such as restrictions due to prior felony convictions would become impossible to enforce.
I have spent some time considering how to prevent this eventual situation and am at a real loss. File sharing's history has made it very clear that laws and technology cannot stop economically interested parties from finding and exploiting loopholes and weaknesses.
Does anyone have any ideas how we could prevent this technology from being used to arm would be felons or dangerous individuals?
If this was simple to do in your own home, I'd say this might be a real issue, but it's ridiculously easy to get a black market weapon right now already; 3d printing isn't going to have a marked effect on that for a long time.
Why go through the trouble of finding an illegal weapons importer when you can just get a friend without a felony on their record to buy one for you?
I think the bigger issue would be importing large volumes of weapons which are banned for civilian use, a la drug cartels. An argument could be made that it would be a lot easier for them to switch to 3D printing the guns. Although I doubt that is really the case. Any criminal organization with any power is going to be a big player in the black market, which means they are already going to be attached to an extensive and proven-successful smuggling network.
I think it would be a much bigger deal for groups like the Michigan Militia. Whether that's a good thing or not is probably good fodder for an acrimonious debate, so I'll stay away.
3D printing may be better for one-off specialty firearms, but mass quantities are going easier with simpler processes.
I'd really like to try my hand at building -- or at least restoring -- guns. Could always use a new hobby.
Actually doing this may or may not be legal. It depends on your criminal record, mental health, the combination of parts you assemble, and where you live. There are a ton of laws related to firearm ownership, transportation, and manufacture. Even summarizing them would triple the length of this comment.
My point is that building dangerous weapons is already not particularly difficult, time-consuming, or expensive. 3D printers will make it a little easier, but not drastically so. Different parts of the firearm require different materials. The lower receiver can be aluminum, but the barrel has to be steel. The recoil buffer won't work if it's too heavy, so it has to be aluminum. But it also has to have plastic caps to avoid damaging the buffer tube. Even if you could print these parts out with the right tolerances, you'd still have to assemble them with special tools.
If it's so easy to build an AR-15, why don't we see a ton of killings with them? Simply put: because most people are sane. The vast majority of the population, given the chance, would not want to kill innocent people and spend life in prison.
If you want to dismiss AKs from consideration, making an AR15 lower out of flat chunks of aluminum and a drill press is easy enough; they aren't much for looks, but they are quite functional. [1]
This is setting aside completely home-built weapons; while unpleasant, a functioning STeN-type MG is no challenge to build from scrap.[2]
[0] http://www.ak-47.us/build/Matt_Screw_Build.php [1] I'm searching the ar15.com archives for the pictures, will edit in soon [2] http://www.thehomegunsmith.com/
Technically, it does take more work now than it would with a 3d printer. With a sufficiently advanced 3d printer, it'd probably be, download p3f (printable 3d format), open cad, click print. For you, it's probably: mill steel, inserts screws, twist screws... this is more work than a couple keystrokes and a mouse-click, technically.
A 3D printer in every home?
- The first virus that prints dangerous / obscene objects
- The toy industry facing the same challenges are MPAA/RIAA
- Printable lenses for eye glasses, contacts, cameras
- Printing keys for any lock
- Printable press plates for counterfeiting currency
- etc.An object that is dangerous just sitting inside a 3D printer seems unlikely in the near future. It would be very difficult to print something that has stored mechanical or chemical energy. Even printing something that's sharp would be a challenge. Obscene objects are not really more problematic than subjecting unwilling viewers to on-screen pornography.
The toy industry exploits peer pressure in children to make parents buy overpriced junk. It deserves to be disrupted.
Printing keys is not likely to be a significant attack vector. Most keyed locks can be easily defeated with picks or bump keys, and new keys require only a file to manufacture today. A grinder or Dremel tool makes it as quick as a 3D printer would be. Getting a good image of the key to be copied is a bigger challenge than being able to make a new key of any shape.
Printing plates are not the most significant barrier to counterfeiting modern banknotes. Other security features are harder to duplicate, and a 3D printer is unlikely to help.
A modern lens may have a large very strong front element, with a series of smaller fragile elements behind it. Each lens may have a different anti-reflective coating applied.
You may be able to 3D print a lens, but at least for high end cameras this technology is going to have very little impact.
Ammunition is also fairly easy to make. Anyone with enough knowledge of chemistry to manufacture methamphetamine could also manufacture viable propellants and priming compounds. Casting and machining brass for cartridge cases is fairly easy. Casting lead bullets is even easier.
There's no practical way to keep this stuff out of the hands of criminals if there's a demand for it.
You could absolutely make a firearm which was much easier to build at home, including ammunition (BP and some kind of shotgun or grease gun open-bolt machine gun).
Another one is mass. A plastic gun will be very lightweight, so the only mass to absorb the recoil impact is your hand. This might hurt.
Remember that there are strong ceramics and metal alloys that can be easily powder-printed or laser-sintered. There are also strong plastics and epoxies that can be produced through various curing processes that can be performed on the same level of detail as other printing techniques.
And I can imagine a gun design where a disposable/replaceable receiver and/or barrel can be designed out of weak materials and mass-produced.
You also presume that recoil impact will hurt your hand. There exist a number of gun designs that minimize recoil impact by increasing the motion of the gun or relocate/reorient the barrel to minimize the motion of the gun. See, for example, any women's purse pistol, palm pistols, or a Rhino revolver.
3D printing era will be fun, that's for sure.