The guy making it easy to 3D print yourself a real gun
medium.com
medium.com
According to this article from March 2013 (http://www.solidsmack.com/cad-design-news/click-print-gun-wa...), he was seeking Class 2 SOT status at the time and anticipated getting it in early April 2013. I don't know what the outcome of that was.
However considering journalists' reputations for gun knowledge, I am skeptical as well. (I'm also not an expert on gun law, so anyone please correct me if I am mistaken.)
That said, if they have an SOT (which they were trying to get) it's entirely possible that it was made full auto from the start.
I guess it's inevitable that new and interesting creative technology such as 3D printing would be used in such a way, but always sad to see so much support for it.
I don't even understand why there is demand for this home gun manufacturing in the USA, libertarian cheer leading aside. I'm under the impression it's damn easy to get hold of weapons in the USA. And I'm pretty sure a purchased weapon will have orders of magnitude less chance of blowing your hand off in a misfire that a plastic counterpart.
(Sovietaced, your reply is [dead] for some reason, not clear why.)
HN is inundated with people living in CA, NY, the UK - All places where the right to own and bear firearms is non-existent or substantially impeded.
And very happily so. We all seem to manage to get by without them
Are you implying that most people here are in favor of gun control? Because the voting and comments in this thread disagree with that premise. Everyone expressing such a view has been downvoted.
Which I think is really one of the worse sides of HN. The score of a comment should reflect whether that post has merrit and adds to the discussion, net whether it reflects the majority opinion.
The demand for home gun manufacturing in the USA is very much related to a sizable portion of the populace looking at the changing political climate of the country and extrapolating their self defense rights meeting the y-axis at some point in their lifetime. The potential commonality of such technology makes any sort of future outright ban completely untenable. Do we not ban books anymore because our governments and societies are so much more enlightened or because the internet makes it completely useless?
The lower receiver is not a component bearing serious loads during firing and isn't really where catastrophic failures in the weapon originate.
What's your definition of sizable?
Book bans (in general, with few exceptions) have been recognized as unconstitutional far, far longer than we've had mass adoption of the internet.[1]
Here's the Supreme Court in 1982: "Local school boards may not remove books from school library shelves simply because they dislike the ideas contained in those books …"
Thats incorrect, see switzerland, they have a lot of guns there, maybe even more than america per person but their gun deaths are very low.
Your implication is incorrect. One point does not dissolve a correlation. 0 guns -> 0 gun deaths. N guns -> M gun deaths, therefore positive correlation. QED. Switzerland is an outlier in many metrics. They probably don't shoot as many of themselves because they tend to care a bit more about the well-being of their communities. Far fewer people feel the desperate need to lash out against their community.
In Switzerland guns are mostly long guns that are heavily regulated and are under very tight storage restrictions. In the US guns are mostly hand guns that are unregulated and under no very tight storage restrictions.
So if you want to make an argument from Switzerland, it would necessarily be of the form: "To reduce gun deaths in the US we should pretty much eliminate handgun ownership and require that all long guns be stored under lock and key in a specified manner, only to taken out on state-permitted occasions for military use."
Some communities in Switzerland actually offer somewhere to keep the bullets in the town hall instead of at home, reducing accidental deaths.
We've learned a lot during WWII and in the decades after, in matters of mass destruction. A modern Warsaw Ghetto would share the fate of Grozny: razed to the ground by artillery and air bombings.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grozny#First_Chechen_War http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grozny#Second_Chechen_War
> deprived of the legal ability to own firearms
There are dozens of militias around the world, deprived of the _legal_ ability to own firearms. They own arms nonetheless. Plenty of arms. When push comes to shove and it's down to a struggle for survival, who cares about legal restrictions?!
You can't solve that kind of problem by escalating firepower. I mean, even if they did have the power to fight the army to a standstill (cf: ISIS), they would be the bad guys in everyone's eyes.
History disagrees. There hasn't been a single government in the history of mankind that has not degenerated to the point where it must be removed. And no, the US government will not be the first. Even if it's a 1000 years from now, it's worthwhile to preserve the right for future generations.
Is it odd that I read this as unironic praise? Aren't there countries with oppressed minority groups that will benefit from being armed?
Maybe somewhere in the world it will have positive effects if minorities are suddenly armed. In other places of the world police suddenly has to assume that everyone could carry a weapon, potentially leading to a lot of the problems the US has with their police. It's certainly not universally positive.
I think it's a stretch to suggest that strong gun rights are what lead to police paranoia. Be reminded that many of the murders or other difficult-to-justify killings that have happened at the hands of police in the past decade have happened in cities where gun rights are essentially non-existent.
Any city in the US where gun rights are essentially non-existent is a few miles away from another city where they can get guns from, and nothing stops the guns from moving back in.
When guns are illegal in the country it becomes a lot more like trying to smuggle drugs over borders. It still happens, but not so casually.
I don't think the legality matters much. Drug prices have across the country have dropped significantly despite a ballooning war on drugs. A quick google search shows that cocaine has dropped 80% in price since the 80's.
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/20...
I'm not a big fan of American gun culture, but the reality is that we are headed toward a world where anyone will be able print a decent weapon, and nothing is going to hold back that tide because the economic advantages of 3D printing are too large even now to regulate it out of existence. Wilson's antics--and they really do look like antics to me--are forcing people to face that far earlier than they would have to do otherwise.
What Cody Wilson has done is realize the political potential of 3d printing. It's not a very good way to make a gun, but it seems to be an excellent way to get people talking about making guns.
For the 3d printed lowers: drilling out your own 80% lower will give you a superior result with far less equipment.
For the 3d printed "Liberators": a quick trip to your local Home Depot's plumbing and hardware departments will let you throw together a shotgun, not a dinky little pistol, that probably won't blow up in your hand (still possible if you choose the wrong pipe I suppose, but compared to the plastic gun?....) There are videos on youtube of teenagers in the Appalachians doing exactly this just for the hell of it. It doesn't require any real manufacturing skill.
"In October 2014 Wilson revealed his biggest project to date: the Ghost Gunner, a miniaturized CNC milling machine small enough to sit on a desktop. It’s thousands of dollars cheaper than big CNC mills—computer-programmable industrial tools for cutting away material—and capable of producing aluminum lower receivers compatible with the AR-15 rifle."
If I wanted to make my own lower, and those Ghost Gunners were being sold and shipped today, I'd personally still go the traditional 80% route.
The real part of all of this that makes me unconcerned is that these things are really only interesting for somebody who is intent on staying within the bounds of the law. If you don't care about the law, fucking around with all of this home manufacture stuff doesn't make much sense. Just find a non-felon criminally minded buddy to purchase a complete gun for you (or just do it yourself if you are not a felon). If you live in a country where that isn't possible, will it really be feasible to get the rest of the parts after you've milled your lower? Does the UK allow you to purchase all non-lower receiver parts of an AR-15? Would they allow you to receive the specialized mill in the mail in the first place? I honestly don't know.
A little sad to see Stripe being a stumblingblock for innovation in this case. But undoubtedly there's legal risk that makes it difficult for anyone to provide service to him. (similar to the burgeoning cannabis industry)
the rest of the civilised world has gun control, and with it experience of enforcing it in an environment where guns were formally unrestricted.
there is also a whole bunch of data showing that death of children by guns, and spree shootings are almost uniquely a phenomenon of countries without any real effort at gun control.
i don't see any good argument against 'less people dying horribly'
gun control doesn't mean banning guns outright. it means introducing a serious effort to keep them out of the hands of the worst of society.
I assume you're in Europe? Europe historically doesn't mind tyranny, dictators, oppressive governments and the like. I understand the current period is a bit of an aberration. You can thank the US and the USSR later. But based on your comments, if things swung back to their historical norm ... you would what? File a legal complaint?
The US government has done some horrible things in the past. It will do so again in the future. That is the nature of governments. If enough becomes enough, it is the peoples' right to choose to defend themselves against tyranny. That's at the very foundation of our country. It's how it was born. It's how we were able to fight off European tyranny and gain independence.
you might have some nice philosophical argument here, but i have data and experiments on my side.
i do appreciate your point about self defence in a harsh environment, but that is not day-to-day life in a world with gun control, or even in most places without it.
i however resent the implication that i can not defend myself and am merely going to write an angry letter in complaint. i can assure you that i am just as capable as the next man of dealing death, even without guns, but its a skill i'd rather not exercise...
Anyone soon will be able to SLS (laser sinter) guns at home. How many people can you kill with a gun? 50? 100? 200? What happens when I'm able to build viruses and bacteria at home with openly available DNA sequences?
http://www.nature.com/news/mutant-flu-paper-published-1.1055...
You can replicate DNA with this.
Of course, with the more DIY and open nature of 3D printers this might be difficult to enforce, but not impossible, at least for the average user.
But there's a huge space of possible gun designs. Don't we need a large advance in technology to be able to determine something is a gun? Especially if we don't accept a lot of false positives?
I do not know how guns are manufactured, but from the comments in this and earlier discussions of the story, I assumed that there are parts with common characteristics.
As a result, and unless the resulting 3D models are too many, or if they would result in false positives with legitimate applications, you could require that 3D printers and CAD software refuse to work with them.
Based on the couple of comments below, however, it seems that my assumption that there is a sufficiently common part among firearms is wrong, so I'll leave further comments to the experts.
You have to spend money somewhere for it to be useful. With guns, nobody has to accept being shot, they just are.
Another thing is there is no possible way this could be enforced before strong AI that can recognize a functioning gun somehow.
Some of you may have been in the audience when I moderated a panel in which he was a participant at NHLF last year. It was a great experience and made me realize that, while I have mixed feelings about his cause, he acts from the heart and has a lot of hope for the world.
This was in the news a few months ago, but I guess the hype around 3D printing in gone, because I don't really hear about it too much.