A friend of the blog sent this news story a few days back – from the UK Register:
Plans for fully 3D-printed gun go online next week
The Liberator pistol causes political panic
Defense Distributed, the pending non-profit that plans to make 3D-printed weaponry available for anyone with such a printer, will release the blueprints for a fully-working plastic firearm next week.
The UK Register is pretty open about their bias in the story, which they at least try to make funny, but it’s on the level of McNugget jokes. But they do point out that Democrats have never seen anything they don’t wish to control.
“Security checkpoints, background checks, and gun regulations will do little good if criminals can print plastic firearms at home and bring those firearms through metal detectors with no one the wiser,” said Congressman Steve Israel (D-NY) in a statement.
“When I started talking about the issue of plastic firearms months ago,” Israel said, “I was told the idea of a plastic gun is science-fiction. Now that this technology appears to be upon us, we need to act now to extend the ban on plastic firearms.”
HotAir today has a story citing that ol’ Chuck Schumer, who’s never met a ban he didn’t like, and demands total control over you groveling peasants who need to kneel before his Ruling Class dictatorial power – because it’s what’s good for you – also wants to ban it.
Bloomberg’s own pet news agency even criticizes Schumer and thinks they need to forget about plastic guns and ban the rest first.
Should we light our hair on fire about plastic guns made with 3D printers?
Too late for Senator Charles Schumer. The combustible New York Democrat is encouraging hysteria over the prospect of criminals using 3D printers to manufacture firearms, possibly to assassinate the president. “We’re facing a situation where anyone—a felon, a terrorist—can open a gun factory in their garage ,and the weapons they make will be undetectable,” Schumer said. “It’s stomach-churning.”
Bloomberg’s own people don’t care about actual criminals, though:
…If you’ve got the skills, you can already make a gun in your basement, and there are less complicated ways to do it than using a $10,000 3D printer and computer set-up. Why would bad guys bother making comic book firearms when they can go online and order anything from a Glock 9 mm pistol to a Bushmaster military-style semiautomatic rifle with 30-round ammunition magazines?
Perhaps the evil doer wouldn’t want to leave a credit-card trail. Then he pays cash at a Main Street gun shop, a weekend gun show, or to the criminal down the block who sells black market firepower from the trunk of his car. Or the crook steals or borrows his gun.
Point being, ban real guns first. Get the “dangerous ones”, then ban all the rest.
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The plastic Liberator pistol is a very interesting thing, and not just in its mechanics.
Perhaps the most interesting is what’s in the name. A Russian professor of mine that taught Chekhov explained that Chekhov’s names always were indicative of the character; and names are often very, very important. Going a very long way back in history, true names were a method to power over someone – either due to knowing someone and being able to identify them in a time before pictures, or out of a very early belief in names as a form of magic. Here, too, in a very fascinating way, the name was chosen for a reason, and is very indicative of what this pistol really represents.
Here with the plastic Liberator, we have all that liberty and liberation connotates, that this will free the information and free the people to have the tools to arm themselves against tyranny. We also have its historical antecedent, the FP-45 Liberator pistol:
It was made on the cheap, and made to be distributed to resistance fighters.
It had abysmal accuracy, but the purpose of the pistol was very specific.
It was made to shoot occupying forces up close and personal. It was made to shoot Nazi dictator thugs at extreme close range.
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Some computer geeks at The Verge yammer on about the convergence between “crypto-anarchists” and guns, but for them, history doesn’t exist before the Palo Alto labs, apparently.
Cyberculture icon Stewart Brand’s famous notion that “information wants to be free” has been an almost ubiquitous refrain ever since utopian-minded hackers began populating computer networks in the 1980s. Today, 3D printing has given the phrase a whole new meaning, allowing raw data to become real world weapons with the click of a button. Cody R. Wilson, the antagonistic founder of Defense Distributed, is taking that idea to its logical — and hugely controversial — extreme.
Except it’s not an extreme at all…
(DefCad’s) his reasoning, he claims, isn’t really about the Second Amendment at all — it’s about technological progress rendering the very concept of gun control meaningless.
“It’s more radical for us,” he told Motherboard in “Click Print Gun,” a recent mini-doc about the dark side of the 3D printing revolution. “There are people all over the world downloading our files and we say ‘good.’ We say you should have access to this. You simply should.”
If this all sounds very similar to the good gospel spread by Brand and advanced by progressives and activists like the late Aaron Swartz, you’re hearing it right. But even without the context of Wilson’s operation, firearms and freedom of information share a strangely similar history, an oft-overlooked ideological confluence between hackers and gun advocates that seems to be gaining momentum.
Except it’s not extreme at all, as guns existed well before computers…
If you go back before 1934, there were no restrictions on guns except if you were black or another wrong color/status. There were restrictions on people, and that’s what was understood. Guns aren’t dangerous, criminals are dangerous because they don’t restrict themselves to any laws or social mores. Guns weren’t dangerous to the people in power, freed black former slaves with guns were dangerous, because guns are tools of power. Today, as then, it’s not the guns that are dangerous – Schumer and his ilk are surrounded by security with guns and send their kids to schools with guns and will come after you with guns – it’s you being armed that’s dangerous to his power. Guns are just a tool, as they always have been.
Guns used to be made by smiths, but anyone with access to some basic tools and a bit of skill can make them. Zip guns have been made out of virtually nothing for decades. Submachineguns are relatively easy to make, and some famous SMGs were even made in facilities as simple as bicycle shops.
The next leftist dictator-tyrant argument is then to control ammo and powder, which has a few major flaws. Namely, their enforcers use them, and their enforcers provide criminals with guns and ammo, so the criminal argument goes right out the window. Of course it isn’t about criminals, it’s about making you into a criminal so they can tell you how to live and make you live the right way. It’s never about the guns, it’s about the control. Components to make ammunition aren’t impossible to come by, and conventional ammunition is only needed once – until an armed instrument of the state has his tools liberated.
The entire concept of homemade guns isn’t extreme. Going back a few decades, not only could you buy a machinegun by mail, no matter who you were, but you could build whatever you liked. There was a great heyday of gun manufacturing in the early 20th century before regulations started becoming overwhelming. John Moses Browning was designing his greatest works in the early 20th Century – from pistols to machineguns, many of which are still in use today. Consider that the M2 heavy machine gun is something that’s been in service for nearly 100 years. It’s not that there aren’t more designers for weapons with better ideas, it’s that government regulations have limited the marketplace and made it more difficult to experiment. Government has stalled technological development – developments that used to be made in mechanic shops when designers and engineers and skilled craftsmen got together and designed new tools.
There were virtually no regulations or restrictions on firearms for a hundred years or more, with the exception of those laws meant to target blacks, American Indians, and other specific groups that the majority wanted to oppress; and a few local laws.
Defense Distributed to some degree is just bringing things back to how they were for generations. Before, the government trusted citizens and so it didn’t restrict citizens, soon, the government simply won’t be able to restrict citizens; and if they do restrict enough, there will be tools of liberation available.
ShortTimer
JBH
