Pirate Bay Takes Over Distribution of Censored 3D Printable Gun | Hacker News Reader

Pirate Bay Takes Over Distribution of Censored 3D Printable Gun

torrentfreak.com

72 pointsastaire104 comments

Guns aren't that scary. We are good at identifying and arresting/shooting gunmen, they can rarely kill more than a handful of us. Look forward enough in time and be afraid of the time when it's easy to download and print virulent pathogens or other WMDs.

As technology amplifies individuals power, it will only take one unhinged person to cause massive damage.

I don't think law enforcement/military/intelligence/censorship approaches will work when massive destructive power is in the hands of individuals.

Possible if incomplete solutions I can foresee are in the realm of genetically engineering increased empathy in humanity and eliminating psychopathic/anti-social tendencies from the gene pool. Eugenics is unpalatable and too slow, we will need an intelligent and targeted handover from evolution to engineering our DNA.

One day our civilization may wake up and realize exploiting entire classes and nations is untenable in the face of asymmetrical revenge.

This isn't at hand today, but my mind can't help but follow this trend to its inevitable eventuality. On spaceship earth we are all in this together.

EDIT: My choice of language was poor. Guns are scary, what I should have said is they are not an existential threat.

EDIT 2, this time for clarity and with feeling: When I say we are good at stopping gunmen and they rarely kill more than handful of us, I did not mean in the aggregate. I meant an individual gunmen rarely kills more than a handful of us.

A great example that underlines my point here is the North Hollywood shootout. From Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Hollywood_shootout):

"Both robbers were killed, eleven police officers and seven civilians were injured, and numerous vehicles and other property were damaged or destroyed by the nearly 2,000 rounds of ammunition fired by the robbers and police."

No one but the gunmen were killed. Of course the counterpoint to this anecdote are mass shootings like Columbine. These shootings terrorize us emotionally and destroy families, but when thought of statistically they are an extremely minor threat.

> Guns aren't that scary. We are good at identifying and arresting/shooting gunmen, they can rarely kill more than a handful of us

Guessing you're from the US - where there were 14,078 firearm related homicide deaths in 2010? I don't think that's an indicator you're any good at identifying gunmen at all. 14,000 deaths is also considerably more than "a handful".

Gun deaths in UK in 2007 totalled 51. So yes, I do feel less scared in the UK than I do in USA.

In 2010, 499 service personnel were killed in Afghanistan. I wonder what public sentiment would be if that total was closer to the 14,000 back at home.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_violence_in_the_United_Stat... http://icasualties.org/oef/

>closer to the gun death rate back at home

You haven't mentioned one rate, just totals.

Yes you're right, edited.

In the wrong direction, though; I think for your point, it's important to cite rates. If we only sent 500 soldiers to Afghanistan, but the US population was 5 billion, thoughtful people would think that the US was remarkably safe when it came to gun violence according to your totals.

"14,000 deaths is also considerably more than "a handful"."

It is also considerably less than the number of automobile deaths per year -- less than half, in fact.

"Gun deaths in UK in 2007 totalled 51. So yes, I do feel less scared in the UK than I do in USA."

The murder rate is lower in the UK for all weapons, so you are right to feel safer there.

Eh, if you are not a common criminal or associate with common criminals, then the chances that you will be shot by anyone but yourself are not really worth considering, even with the dramatically higher gun death rate in the US.

While I would be safer in the UK I wouldn't say that I would feel more safe because that would imply that I could feel more safe about my prospects of being killed by a gun than I do right now. That meter is already pegged to zero.

Comparing gun deaths with automobile deaths to show that gun deaths aren't that big of a problem is silly. Automobile deaths are caused by and counterbalanced by the extreme usefulness of cars, where guns are mostly just for sport. So gun deaths can be easily reduced by reducing the number of guns, and the side-effects would be very minor compared to taking the naive way of reducing automobile deaths. If your goal is to reduce death rates, you have to take into account not just the death rate, but how easy it is to change that death rate.

At this point, guns in the US are mainly "used" for self-defense; hunting has gotten to be a very low percentage, between 14-17% from what I've read in the last 2 years. And guns are used about 2.25 million times a year in self-defense, which I consider to meet the standard of "extreme usefulness".

But as long as we're talking automobiles, the absolute number of fatal gun accidents per year is around 600 (down a quarter during the same period the US population and number of guns owner increased by ~50%). The early estimate for 2012 car accident fatalities is 34,080 (http://www.nhtsa.gov/NCSA). Guns turn out to be a lot easier to use safely.

All the gun owners I know do almost exclusively range/target shooting, a category you seem to have ignored. And you also don't seem to have at all tried to normalize for the amount of time spent using a car versus using a gun. Are you even trying to make a valid point?

And I'm the only guy who likes to target shoot that I know (now, haven't done it in a long while).

I didn't ignore it; one of my sources, which I now see reading it is useless/I misread the headline, was a 1 to 5 ratio of hunters to gun owners, using a fairly low estimate for the latter (about 3/4th of the estimate I use; we only have hard numbers on hunters because they have to buy licenses). Many of those 5 could be target shooters ... but how many of them have them exclusively for target shooting? Ditto guns, e.g. look at Remington's hunting optimized R-15 and R-25 versions of the AR-15 and AR-10; I know one person who bought one because its also very good for self-defense.

Heck, VP Joe Biden shoots clay pigeons with a double-barreled shotgun and is full of advice about how it is great for self-defense (note, don't follow much of it unless you want to end up in jail).

Meanwhile...[1] Homicides from firearms aren't even close to the largest cause of death. More people kill themselves with firearms than they kill others (19k vs 11k--I'm not sure where that wiki page is getting its numbers since their own citation matches mine[2]). We also have 5k unspecified or non-firearm-related homicides. Across the whole world, about 1.8 people die per second, 14k is about 2 hours, spread across an entire year. All this is why 14k is a handful relative to other causes of death.

[1] http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/lcod.htm

[2] http://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/pdf/10LCID_Violence_Relate...

In American, guns are toys to make men feel strong. They are worse than useless in the hands of the untrained and unpracticed.

example:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8QjZY3WiO9s

In the US around 2.25 million times a year a gun is used in self-defense. In way over 90% of those incidents the gun is never fired, just a display of it and the willingness to use it are sufficient.

Anecdotally I'm personally amazed at how well many untrained people successfully use shoot guns in self-defense situations. I would guess that after centuries of incremental ergonomic improvements they turn out to be not so hard to use, and use safely (in terms of accidents they're lots safer than automobiles).

In USA 90+ people (including children) die EVERY DAY due to firearm accidents.

Again, these are toys to make some men feel powerful.

Not even close. The number of fatal accidents per year is ~600.

To get your 90+ number you're including suicides, which outnumber other illegal uses of guns; seeing that internationally suicide rates have no correlation whatsoever with gun ownership rates, and many developed countries have way higher suicide rates than ours, one would hope you could see gun mediated suicides don't belong in the same category.

Ah, while we're doing math, I get 6200 defense uses of guns every day.

I was wrong, that stat is for ALL firearm deaths. Only 60 Americans were accidentally killed by guns today. And yesterday. And the day before that.

http://webappa.cdc.gov/sasweb/ncipc/dataRestriction_inj.html

http://smartgunlaws.org/gun-deaths-and-injuries-statistics/

Murder is an "accident"?

(OK, one of those 2010 deaths ruled as accidental was a murder or thereabouts, certainly nothing accidental about it: http://www.joplinglobe.com/local/x1939349175/Loaded-gun-kill...)

60 accidents + 30 murders EVERY.DAY.HERE.

"One day our civilization may wake up and realize exploiting entire classes and nations is untenable in the face of asymmetrical revenge."

Good luck with that.

I heard the designer of the gun on the BBC today. He said he created the design because he is a Libertarian and is trying to hasten the time when all information is freely available. He rejects government censorship of information.

He also said that the printer used to make his gun costs about $8,000 but that people were reporting making a working gun with as low as a $2,000 printer.

http://m.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-22478310

I'm pretty sure a $2000 printer isn't necessary to print it. Printrbots are relatively cheap < $500, but you have to assemble it yourself.

PrintrBot+ printing + superfine resolutions http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jyrP4LWc0yk

Do they use the same raw material?

Yes, and they can use better material than the ABS used by Defense Distributed.

I'm not certain why he hasn't tried making them out of Nylon (of which there is filament widely available now), which has all-around better mechanical properties than ABS.

I can't imagine a $500 or even a $2000 printer can print a solid enough gun that could be reused over and over. A couple of shots, maybe.

So the same as the $8k printer then.

You would need a printer that can do selective sintering of metal dust. And I'm fairly sure you could build a gun that had an extended duty cycle.

http://gpiprototype.com/services/dmls-direct-metal-laser-sin...

It's basically a fancy zip gun (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Improvised_firearm), something people have been making ever since there were cartridges to put in them.

Like a home-made zip gun it's quite dangerous to use, and liable to malfunction in all kinds of ways harmful to the user.

It's worth noting that with a basic milling machine (about $400) an individual in the U.S. can legally manufacture for personal use an AR-15 lower receiver from either a bare or partially machined forging ($50) in as little as a few hours. Some have done the job with only a Dremel or hand drill, making the investment much cheaper.

I share this only to illustrate that this technology is not enabling a radical new ability to produce cheap personal-use weapons, but more of an (expensive) prototype evolutionary step in the process.

In addition, possibly in contrast to this printed design, a home made receiver that is properly surface-hardened after machining is fully as capable and safe as any other receiver manufactured to the TDP.

So what's the legality of distributing just the magnet link hash? That's just a 40 char string. If somebody would publish that string in this place here, is that illegal as well? It's a lot of steps removed from a crime:

1- crime where a shot is fired

2- gun

3- gun creation

4- gun 3d file

5- somebody supplying you this file

6- the magnet directory giving you a link to the file supplier

7- the link hash giving you a link to the magnet directory

Can a 40 char string be illegal?

Free speech is free speech. This is how Phil Zimmerman defeated export controls in the first place with PGP. He developed the code outside of the U.S. (where it was legal), printed books containing it (one of the best-protected free speech rights), imported the book to the U.S. (so that he's not trafficking in "munitions"), scanned in the code in the U.S., and formed a PGP in the U.S.

The U.S.-based code could then be distributed within the U.S. since ITAR is an export control only. The sheer ridiculousness of the whole thing eventually helped lead to legalizing useful crypto in the U.S. I guess we'll see what happens here.

A 3d blueprint file could be considered free speech as well, and yet it was just declared illegal. Can you explain that?

The company agreed not to release it when they were certified to do firearms design, from what I can tell from the rest of the comments. The government is still stupid for causing the Streisand effect but if the company agreed to be bound and then broke those terms that is on them.

There are, of course, other legally-granted limits to free speech (e.g. PII, classified material, customer financial passwords, etc.) that I would like to not have to itemize just because people on HN like to beat dead horses, but merely mentioning the existance of a magnet hash seems pretty unambiguous IMO.

I was under the impression that ITAR was just as applicable to individuals as to organizations. Is this not the case?

AFAIK yes, which is why I mentioned that there are categories of information not legally protected by the concept of free speech, and how Phil Zimmerman got around that.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_number

> the Government explains that it wants to review whether the designs are in compliance with arms export control laws.

I don't understand why this is so reactionary. People have been (very publicly) attempting to make a working 3D printable gun for years, and only now that it's finally happened the appropriate government agency has decided to explore the legal implications?

The government isn't pondering some philosophical question about 3D guns.

Defense Distributed has an active federal license to manufacture and distribute firearms. By posting blueprints online, it's very likely they've violated the conditions of that license.

From ITAR, what qualifies as sensitive:

    Technical data directly related to the manufacture or
    production of any defense articles enumerated elsewhere
    in this category that are designated as Significant
    Military Equipment (SME) shall itself be designated SME.

Further clarification:

    Information .... which is required for the design
    development, production, manufacture, assembly, operation,
    repair, testing, maintenance or modification of defense 
    articles. This includes information in the form of 
    blueprints, drawings, photographs, plans, instructions 
    and documentation.

How it can be in violation of law:

    An agreement whereby a U.S. person grants a foreign
    person an authorization to manufacture defense articles 
    abroad and which involves or contemplates .... The 
    export of technical data or defense articles ... 
    without first obtaining the required license or 
    written approval from the ODTC.

Possible punishment entails:

    Any person who willfully ... Violates any provision ... of 
    the Arms Export Control Act ... or ...  any rule or regulation 
    issued under either section ... shall upon conviction be
    fined for each violation not more than $1,000,000 or
    imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both.

Their blueprints clearly qualify as sensitive, any download traffic from overseas is enough to prove they distributed to 'foreign persons'. The political calculus could save them since it would appear like Obama is trying to ban guns even though Distributed Defense is clearly in violation of federal law.

I hope for their sake, there was no download activity from Iran, Cuba, North Korea, etc...

Actually I think they would hope their was download activity from Iran, Cuba, North Korea, etc... their stated goal is getting guns into the hands of oppressed citizens.

I doubt they would think that way with the possibility of a 20-year felony staring them in the face.

Besides, for Iran and Cuba at least, private gun ownership isn't even uncommon.

It seems to me that if you can afford a 3D printer, the computer to run it and the technical ability to do the printing and assembly you probably already have better options than a funky zip gun of questionable quality. I would think the money to buy the above equipment would get you a decent gun on the black market if guns are illegal in your country. And if there is no black market to speak of, then you would probably not be allowed to buy the 3D printer in the first place.

It seems like this is more of a novelty than anything useful.

You're right in that this weapon isn't really worth the effort, and if it were only about this particular file neither Defense Distributed or the US government would have cause for concern.

This is a big deal because 1) this is one of the first weapons designed from the ground up to be printed. Most printed firearms based on existing tech break easily because they weren't designed to be built with the materials you can print with. Over the next several years better and better firearms will be designed. In this way it is important the same way the very first shitty light bulb was important. 2) this addresses the still very unanswered question about what options governments have to restrict speech and international distribution of information over the Internet.

I believe the novelty is being able to get it past metal detectors.

And that's how the State Department learned there is no delete button on the internet.

I don't think people in charge are stupid. I just think they are pretty much forced to look like they are trying to act on it.

Forced by who? Whoever is doing the forcing is the stupid...

If they don't enforce blatant violations of whatever law keeps our military-industrial complex from selling U.S. arms to every even-more-evil miscreant out there then they may lose the ability to control arms sales at all, as the aforementioned exporters can then rightly say that "The U.S. let them do it, why not us?"

Plus it helps them make the case that bittorrent networks are dangerous.

Some countries like Switzerland have plenty of guns and they are pretty safe places.

Those who want to harm other people find the means to do it. Let's focus on the roots of violence, not the means.

Most of the gun proliferation behaviors in the US are rooted in a desire to hurt people. They're using plenty of other tools besides guns to do it, because ultimately, even a nuclear bomb is less efficient at screwing others over than denying universal healthcare.

Most of the gun proliferation behaviors in the US are rooted in a desire to hurt people.

I can confirm this. As an American from a family with a long history of gun ownership, and having grown up around and interacted with many others of the same nature, there is not a single doubt that gun ownership in the US can be trivially summed up in such a fashion.

There is, after all, no other reason to own guns in the US. We do not allow hunting here, target shooting is not a popular activity, and with near-zero crime rates, there is no reason anyone should consider owning a firearm for protection.

Honestly, I don't understand how some people feel justified making ridiculous claims like this.

I'm not talking about gun ownership; I'm talking about business interests.

Sometimes I think that I should increase my personal suicide risk by buying a gun just to make people like you feel less threatened by me.

WRT to those near-zero crime rates, it's also not the case that 42 states with around 2/3rd the population has de jure or de facto shall issue concealed carry regimes, along with much of rural Massachusetts (!!!) and California, and upstate New York, plus a thoroughly confused situation in Rhode Island. Nor does Illinois face a June 9th deadline to replace their no issue regime with a shall issue one, or see their law go "poof".

And it is clearly just in my imagination that I holster a M1911 almost every time I walk out the door.

I was given a shotgun for my 10th birthday. I had no idea why, we lived in a city. American gun culture is crazy insane.

I'm not sure what the big deal is. Individuals have been smithing guns since their invention. Hillbillies in the Ozarks could make rifled barrels. People with a manual or cnc mill in their garage are making ar15 lower receivers from billet aluminum. The 3d printing technique takes a lot of the skill out of it, but at the moment all you are getting is a low quality plastic gun. As a practical matter I don't think the swapping of gun part cad files is a significant vector for the creation of guns that are used to do bad things.

I'd agree with you on the model in question, but I could see costs going down, quality improving and designs shifting to cater to the limitations of the medium over time to the extent that more lethal firearms are being produced.

For this particular model, its an interesting question of margins. If you are someone who is looking to willfully harm people, you could download these CAD files, find a printer and be armed without ever showing up on enforcement radar and without the need for links to underground dealers. However, your lethality will be limited.

Given that all a 3D printer will produce is plastic (ignoring SLS as it's much further away on the radar), the number of shots is limited before it fails. That's in addition to the requirement to buy ammunition first. Something from Home Depot probably poses a greater threat and would be equally undetectable.

I can't imagine anyone opting to buy a printer, calibrate it and print a terrible gun when they could just buy a hammer (or improvise a firearm out of a piece of pipe).

Once it is on the internet it is going to hard for any government to stop it. There are too many links to sever.

I'd say impossible. Are there any similar cases where a government or a company succeeded?

They could poison the well, put nearly identical plans out there with a fatal-kill-the-shooter flaw in them.

These are too simple for intentional design flaws not to be obvious, especially since the parts need to be assembled.

Oh, I don't know. These are basically so flimsy that the barrel is only good for one shot. I imagine changing some tolerances slightly could make that less than one.

I would estimate that it would be pretty much impossible for the average internet user to find child pornography or videos of murder/rape etc. But I find it is hard to estimate if the reason for that is targeted government action, or it is because sharing those kinds of material goes against the natural moral instinct of most normal people.

Only this year Facebook refused to remove videos of a woman being killed by having her head cut off.

(http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-22368287)

They've since changed[1] their mind about this, but finding videos of real people being really killed is trivially easy for anyone. This isn't in some specialised guro community or a shock image on 4chan, these were distributed on a social network with a billion users.

[1] Weird that they had to change their mind because these clips seem pretty clearly to violate their rules already.

They are probably harder to find than other forbidden stuff, but that's because of a community effort. The Pirate Bay censors child porn as far as I know and they do it voluntarily without any external pressure.

I can understand the govermental concerns and questions I have are:

1) If such a gun was used in a crime, would bullet rifeling patterns be usable to tie up the shot fired to the plastic barrel gun and let alone the ability to dispose of said gun with a simple lighter.

2) Concerns about it only having a metal firing pin and with that how hard would it be to use say another material for the firing pin like graphite or a the like - only needs to fire one shot

I also understand why this project was done, it was a challange and we like challanges.

But as other have said, it is a simple type of gun that is the form that can be made by anybody wishing to make such a zip gun, still need ammunition.

What the concerns are is they have created a form of weapon that can be produced as easily as a photograph and that is just the tip of the concerns.

I will say that personaly whilst making a printable gun was something that was going to happen, giving out the blueprints for anybody to use and abuse was perhaps akin to writing expliot code and releaseing into the wild for any script kiddy to use and abuse with there click-run mentality.

The sad part is that people pushing out such blueprints for such printers will only mean that down the line such printers will get taxed and curtailed and effect those who mean no harm and the type of people who given a nuke button infron of them would resist in pressing it as they know the concequences.

As soon as a crime is commited with such a gun they will be banned and the 3d printer market will get more controled by legislation. Which is sad when such vigor is not bestowed upon normal guns.

Facts are guns do bad things in bad hands so the net result is they are outlawed in many countries and championed as rights in others. So if anything this highlights the issue with guns and not 3D printers, though I suspect the Rifle associations of the World will not defend 3D printers if they start to be restricted over this issue.

As an aside nukes are illegal, yet if somebody posted blueprints to make one, well that would pan out badly. Yet on some level this is just the same.

I applaud that somebody did and proved it was viable, I'm personaly not happy they gave out the blueprints in a form that enable people who do not understand the issues free access to them. Most will be good people, but not all and that is the crux of concerns however you look at them. So with that this is akin to releaseing 0-day expliot code into the wild in a point and click form.

> giving out the blueprints for anybody to use and abuse was perhaps akin to writing expliot code and releaseing into the wild for any script kiddy to use and abuse with there click-run mentality.

I am no expert, but from what I understand, 3D printing is still far from being a 'click-and-run' type of experience.

You may be right and as I don't own a 3D printer or have used one myself I could not say if it is or not, but certainly that is the level of consumer use that they will end up, and be no differnt in ease of use than a normal inkjet.

It pains me that so many people are talking about the freedom to distribute these designs without discussing the negative impact that "3D printed weapons" will have on the widespread acceptance of 3D printing in homes and communities.

I'd much rather see the world embrace 3D printing than fear it. Talk about "what we can print" after we all have access to 3D printers. We aren't there yet.

And what if each of the individual parts were distributed at different sites? I am thinking of the "world's funniest joke" sketch from Monty Python, the joke so funny it was lethal.

Would any one file describing a single fashionable part be in violation also?

This is all absurd for an important reason:

One can not create a riffled barrel out of plastic. This is a $20k zip gun.

"Within production quality firearms, pistol and rifle barrels have tiny grooves cut inside of them. The grooves do not run straight, however are curved slowly throughout the length of the barrel. This technique is called rifling. Rifling causes the bullet to spin as it passes through the barrel. The spinning assists in stabilizing the bullet and making the gun more accurate. "

http://www.gunslot.com/blog/how-make-gun-common-materials-se...

So was the original Liberator: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FP-45_Liberator

And some of the use cases are the same, e.g. you can use it to "liberate" far more useful weapons.

Only in fevered dreams. The original was a psy op against the Germans. It was also VASTLY superior to this plastic gizmo.

"Most of the cartridge's hot gas spills out of the muzzle without getting a chance to do any work on the bullet, which is the main reason the cruddy "barrel" doesn't (always) come to bits on the first shot and the cartridge case (probably) doesn't just spit backward into the user's face."

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/05/10/oh_no_its_the_plasti...

Errrm, I guess you don't know that at contact range blanks are lethal....

I was trained and licensed to carry a firearm for a job. I have probably forgotten more about gun fighting than you know.

One example:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9igSoJHEdUo

Appeal to vague authority, when you have little or no idea of my experience.

The video is good, except I've tested the "21 foot rule" myself as the attacker and the video suggests you're sort of safe at that distance, whereas the closer ones had the officer surviving by getting out of the line of the attack to give him more time (to shoot a crossing target...).

now you are debating yourself

who didn't see that coming?

They'll also be the home of plans for all copyrighted StarWars and other figurines.

Be interesting to see if they can stop the spread of those plans. I doubt it though.

Somehow this makes me sad. Guns are bad.

Additionally, this gives TPTB an excellent excuse to to crack down on 3D printing in its formative years while masquerading as a safety measure.

I think you have a bright future in the opinion pages!

Information wants to be free. Soon, technology will want to be free. And we will all work for free.

Clearly impossible to stop the spread of this information, and any attempts to make it possible would be extremely objectionable, but anyone found actually producing or using these weapons should face extreme prison terms. Mass proliferation of handguns is responsible for thousands of deaths each year in this country alone, and we should be taking all feasible steps to reign it in.

Not 24 hours ago the #1 post on HN was that gun crime has been downright plummeting for the past 20 years, despite the fact that more and more guns are being manufactured and sold.

I know it's a tired old saying, but the honest truth is that guns do not kill people, people kill people. Once you realize that, you realize that 3D printable guns are not a danger justifying "extreme prison terms".

That gun crime has been falling does not mean that proliferation of guns is a neutral proposition, it only means that other trends have been stronger.

More handguns = more dead people, period. The only people rooting for a society awash in easily obtainable handguns are criminals and delusional libertarians with adolescent Minute Man fantasies.

More handguns = more handguns, period.

Like I said before, violent crime has been falling steadily for the past 20 years despite the rise in availability of handguns. This is in direct conflict with your assertion that more handguns = more dead people.

It is a more delusional viewpoint in my opinion to think that simply reducing the availability of weapons would eliminate the criminal impulses to use them.

Zikes, let's do a simple observational experiment. Compare the rates of violent death in countries with few guns to those in countries with lots of guns. Get back to me with your next keen insight on how the number of guns in a society is a just a meaningless number that doesn't really affect anything at all.

Look at knife crime rates in the UK.

The murder rate in the UK is 1.2 / 100k, it's literally 4x higher in the US.

You've probably read that the UK is significantly more violent than the US, but the difference comes entirely from different categorizations of crime. For instance, UK violent crime stats as typically reported include such things as harassment, 'causing public fear, alarm, or distress', or 'possession of an article with a blade or point'.

Depending on how judicious you are with the categories, the UK is either safer than the US or slightly more violent, but it's very close. Combine that with 1/4 the murder rate, and I think it's clear which is performing better.

Compare the rates of violent deaths in those countries when they did have guns available to ours, and you will find out that America is just more violent period, which nobody should find surprising.

EDIT: But in better news, we are getting less violent, which is good.

As of 2007 Switzerland has the 3rd highest gun ownership rate in the world, but is number 51 on the gun homicide rate list, with a gun homicide rate of .52 per 100k. Meanwhile, Mexico's gun ownership rate is one third that of Switzerland, yet their gun homicide rate is 20 times as high (10 per 100k). Mexico's gun homicide rate is actually twice that of the United States. Note that Mexico's gun laws are considerably more strict than those in the US.

Another example is Russia. Their overal murder rate is twice that of the United States even though they have strict gun laws and a gun ownership rate that is 10% that of the US (8.9 per 100k vs 88.9 per 100).

One could look at a country like the UK where there are strict gun laws and far less gun crime in the US. However, gun crime was never as high in the UK as it was in the US, even when the UK had gun laws as loose as those in the US.

Long story short, crime is driven largely by socioeconomic factors, the criminal justice system, and culture. The availability of guns plays a part, but not a large part. Otherwise Wyoming would have the highest murder rate in the US, as it has the highest gun ownership rate.

"Note that Mexico's gun laws are considerably more strict than those in the US."

Mexico has one legal gun store in a country of 115 million people: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/12...

Gun crime has plummeted in the USA nowhere near as much as in Australia where guns are banned. Gun crime hasn't plummeted in Mexico, with the USA being a prime source of weapons.

Crime in general has plummeted across the West, the increase in firearms in the USA is not a causative factor.

Keynes made the point that it is better to be austere in a time of plenty. The time to introduce gun control is when crime is falling, not try and introduce it when crime is rising and people feel like they might want to have weapons for self defence.

So that way people can't defend themselves when the situation reverses? I don't quite get this idea that the current regime of neoliberal democracies and peace will always be so. What evidence do you have to suggest that history will suddenly stop?

Indeed; it's appalling how few have learned from the fate of a quarter billion disarmed people killed by their own governments in the 20th century.

The US does not supply the majority of guns to Mexico. We supply 17-38% depending on your source.

If you really wanted to end the crime in Mexico reevaluating prohibition would be a good start.

[1]http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/20110209-mexicos-gun-supply-a... [2] http://www.factcheck.org/2009/04/counting-mexicos-guns/ [3]http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/04/02/myth-percent-smal...

To be fair, he never said the US supplied a majority of weapons in Mexico. Only that we were a 'prime source' of weapons, which if the range is 20 - 40%, would be completely accurate.

And as the printable gun debacle mixed with the ongoing unsuccessful "War on Drugs" shows, we live in a time where it's essentially impossible to fully lock down the production of these types of things in a free society anyways.

Use the example of abstinence education: It's better to accept that guns will be made and use education and light regulation to minimize the damage than to try to squash them out completely.

If someone put a gun factory in their backyard and starting distributing guns, he has to be found liable. Why should that be different for a plastic gun?

My concern is that a printed gun is disposable and untraceable. Without ballistics, its certainly a tempting option.

Also going through metal detectors is a huge deal over security measures.

It looks like a game changer to me.

> extreme prison terms

How about reasonable prison terms?

That could end up being no time at all.

If people want to kill each other, I guess, a 3d model of a gun being available on the internet would make no difference.

All evidence to the contrary.

Unless you seriously want to claim that the number of murders and easy access to firearms are merely a matter of accidental correlation.

You're correct if you're talking premeditated killing. But most killings aren't.

"You bastard! Just you wait, in 8 hours I'll be done printing my zip-gun and THEN you'll be sorry!"

Care to mention this evidence. Just yesterday there was an article on HN showing that gun violence is down 50% since 1993. That is in the face of guns being more available than ever.

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