(I thought I'd lost this post when LJ went down for maintenance, I'm glad it saved a draft!)It was a year ago this month that the world learned about guns made by 3-D printers, that is, guns made out of plastic. And the world has not stood still. A man was arrested in Japan recently for making 3-D guns, Japan has VERY tough gun laws, their police at the end of every shift have to account for every round that they were issued at the beginning of the end of their shift. People are also experimenting with making lower receivers for semi-automatic rifles. The difference between an automatic rifle, one that continues to fire if you keep the trigger depressed, and a semi-automatic, one shot every time you squeeze the trigger, is the lower receiver. It is also the regulated part of the gun. So if you can print a full-auto receiver, you can buy all the other parts needed in an unregulated fashion and have an unlicensed fully-automatic rifle.
Here's what bothers me. There's a lot of people taking a very short-sited view of history. They think that if the government isn't doing precisely what they want RIGHT NOW, then it's obviously an evil and repressive government and all of their rights are being violated. Therefore, MUST HAVE GUNS! There's going to be a lot of wingnuts making and carrying these guns that are difficult to detect, and eventually people will be killed by them.
Would everyone having a 3-D printed gun prevented Putin from re-acquiring Crimea? I doubt it. What about Franco, if the population had been fully armed? Maybe, but a plastic gun isn't going to stop a tank or a Messerschmidt. France during World War 2? The American-provided Liberator single-shot pistols killed a lot of Germans, but it didn't liberate the country.
Yes, there is a political statement to be made, but what is it?
http://www.wired.com/2014/05/3d-printed-guns/ ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
