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Comment by TomGullen | Hacker News Reader

What a nice young man, virtuously punching forwards in his quest to allow everyone to make guns. The biproduct of his quest to "defend the human and civil right to keep and bear arms as guaranteed by the United States Constitution" is that countries that aren't the USA all get to benefit from his wonderful innovations.

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.

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I understand the perspective that more guns correlates positively with more deaths, therefore this use of 3d printing technology is a bad thing. However, consider historical contexts where a minority group has been incrementally and systematically deprived of the legal ability to own firearms and consequently subject to the depredations of the majority. Imagine a Warsaw Ghetto uprising but with 3D printers and these sorts of freely available prototypes. Then you get into theoretical tradeoffs - do I prefer to hypothetically reduce the number of children killed in Chicago this year versus a slaughtered neighborhood of <$localized_outgroup> in some civil conflict? Good arguments can be made on both sides.

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.

> 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

What's your definition of sizable?

>Do we not ban books anymore because our governments and societies are so much more enlightened or because the internet makes it completely useless?

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 …"

[1] http://www.firstamendmentcenter.org/banned-books

> I understand the perspective that more guns correlates positively with more deaths

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.

> 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.

As well as being a data point raised in an attempt to refute a distribution (which never works), there is a radical ambiguity you are leaning on: "they have lots of guns there" when applied to Switzerland does not mean anything similar to "they have lots of guns there" as applied to the US.

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."

People often cite Switzerland in gun arguments but leave out the fact that in Switzerland, owning a gun is an outcome of completing compulsory military service for men - Which means that they are trained in proper safety etc.. I recognise that it still raises the opportunity for crime but I believe the training is an important distinction to make.

Some communities in Switzerland actually offer somewhere to keep the bullets in the town hall instead of at home, reducing accidental deaths.

> Imagine a Warsaw Ghetto uprising.

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?!

This is a stark example of correlation not equalling causation. Yes, guns are taken from minorities when an authoritarian regime decides to turn a ghetto into a death camp. And you know why? Because they have zero power already. The system is very thoroughly rigged against them. Those guns aren't going to help them. What could a handful of rioters do? If they fight, they might win a few days reprieve. And then the army rolls right over them.

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.

I don't know this for a fact, but I think Wilson is trying to "heighten the contradictions." Everybody, government included, talks about the amazing possibilities of private drones, home 3d printing, and I suppose ecommerce (cryptocurrency/darkwallet.) He knows that there's places the government isn't going to let you go though, so he's going to force the crackdown to happen now while the enthusiasm for the good parts are fresh, rather than letting the rights degradation happen gradually after people start taking the technology for granted.

He's almost like a performance artist, making manifest the potential of nascent technologies. It's perfectly true that anyone has been able to build a sort-of-OK firearm for a century or so out of stuff you can buy at a hardware store, but soon anyone will be able to 3D print (via laser sintering) a really effective firearm.

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.

HN is not the best place for political arguments. Suffice it to say that not everyone agrees that the police and government -- especially not our police and government -- should have a monopoly on weaponry.

(Sovietaced, your reply is [dead] for some reason, not clear why.)

This is an unusually bad place for this particular category of argument, too.

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.

> 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

>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.

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.

>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.

I have this feeling as well. But then I look at other countries and it seems we take for granted the fact that our country's government is stable and will forever do a halfway-decent job protecting our rights as citizens. There's no guarantee. It might be overly paranoid to stock up your own militia in case of the government turning on us, but I can at least see where people like Cody are coming from.

The idea that the USA will descend to a level where the populous need to take to the street with weapons is largely fantasy, and a fantasy that the population pays for dearly to keep alive.

> The idea that the USA will descend to a level where the populous need to take to the street with weapons is largely fantasy

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.

> The biproduct of his quest to "defend the human and civil right to keep and bear arms as guaranteed by the United States Constitution" is that countries that aren't the USA all get to benefit from his wonderful innovations.

Is it odd that I read this as unironic praise? Aren't there countries with oppressed minority groups that will benefit from being armed?

The USA was founded on the principle that everybody should be armed to be able to defend against a corrupt state. Some other countries were founded on the principle that nobody should be armed (unless really nessesary) and that corrupt states should be dealt with in other ways. Both concepts are valid and have their unique drawbacks and advantages. The problem is that it's possible to derive a democratic society of that choice by making it even easier to circumvent gun control.

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.

> leading to a lot of the problems the US has with their police

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.

That is the reddest herring.

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.

>... 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...

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