There are times when I feel like I’m the only person in the world who fucking pays attention.
Right now, we’ve got this big debate going on here about whether or not certain guns should or should not be banned and all the wharrrggble that goes along with any time somebody tries to start a level-headed conversation about guns in this country.
Am I the only one who has been watching what people are doing with 3D printers?
Primitive “printable guns” already exist, that only require a small amount of actual metalworking to work.
I’ll repeat that with details, for those of you who seem to be missing this.
It is possible now to have only basic and rudimentary skills as a metalsmith or machinist to assemble a usable firearm using about $2,000 in computer-aided manufacturing tools one can build themselves, using plans and patterns easily obtainable on the Internet. As we move forward, the skill level required to manufacture these parts will only decrease, especially if there’s an “incentive” created by a partial or complete ban.
Go ahead, ban the “manufacture and sale” of assault weapons. The reality? In the next 2-3 years there will be an underground network of people who posses the tools to build them anyway.
And those weapons won’t be trackable, because they can be one-offs built from a machine that costs about the same as a good assault rifle costs today. Those weapons will be inherently “hackable”, coming right off the autolathe and printer as “full auto”.
Making a gun isn’t rocket science, it’s a late Renaissance invention that was made before we had computers, autolathes, 3D printers, composite plastics, and advanced metallurgy and chemistry. Even before CAD/CAM techniques anybody with a basic knowledge of machining parts could make a usable gun out of scrap metal parts probably in any metalsmith’s “junk box.” It doesn’t take a lot of technology to slam a hammer into the back of a percussive cap, detonating a small charge of powder to accelerate a metal slug to near-the-speed-of-sound, and having a long and straight enough tube to guide the bullet to it’s target.