US laws doesn't allow any way to register a firearm. Stores have to keep records, and tracing requests have to be forward to the store of purchase. There's a great documentary on this:
Not quite correct federal law provides a method to serialize a gun if you are applying a tax stamp for registering with the federal government if you are adding a NFA regulated modification.
states law as usual vary but only a few states have serial number database of guns. Ymmv if they will allow it or not.
If we are talking about the US yes and no. There is nothing illegal here about producing your own guns without any licensing until you start mass producing them to sell. It is fairly straight forward to stamp or engrave a serial number and submit the paper work of it. However we don't have a 'list of guns' to just submit some random new serial number too, they only want the serial if you are doing something not normally available like short barreled rifle, silencer, or selectfire/full auto. Technically you can even make your own machine gun legally if it is of your own design and manufacture, doesn't leave the state, and only really comes up against legal hurdles when you are producing them for the purpose of selling them to civilians (which you will of course be denied). You can however sell them to the military or law enforcement, well the prototype for the design anyways, you would still need to get federal licensing to produce them in mass to sell the actual finished product to the military but that just takes a bit of money to push the paperwork through. There is an even further legal/not-legal hole that allows you to sell that prototype machine gun you made to somebody else, you can sell it just because you don't want it any more or need the money, but only if producing it originally wasn't for the purpose of selling it which would make it illegal to even have in the first place. I don't think it has been challenged either way (I might be wrong) but the lack of legal clarification and the potential for losing all your gun rights is the only reason you don't see homemade machine guns being sold more often. If you sold more than one or two you would assuredly be investigated and likely charged.
So tl;dr, you only need register a serial if you made something like a machine gun and hold a federal firearms manufacturing license, and you can only make one or two versions of each design without changing things, and the serial number only really matters when selling or trading it, which you both are and aren't allowed to do depending on what the courts feel your intentions were. Otherwise the mechanical design of the gun can be freely sold to law enforcement or the military. Also the rules change once you actually get a manufacturing license (you are signing away some rights in the process, similar to signing away your right to not have an ID while driving when you get your driver's license) but if you get your manufacturing license you should probably have an actual lawyer.
> Technically you can even make your own machine guns legally if it is of your own design and manufacture and only really comes up against legal hurdles when you are producing them for the purpose of selling them to civilians (which you will of course be denied).
This is really poor advice. The BATF considers just having the parts without the requisite Class III license (really a tax stamp) to be a felony.
The Hughes Amendment to the Firearm Owners Protection Act of 1986 prohibits civilians from owning any machine gun manufactured after May 1986.
All the other 5 categories of Class III firearms (SBRs, SBSs, Silencers, AOWs and Destructive Devices) can still be made, even by an individual, if he/she first applies for and receives permission to do so.
To do so, they must file an ATF Form 1 (maker form) and pay a $200 make tax fee.
A civilian can still legally own any machinegun that was created PRIOR to May, 1986 as long as they get approval on an ATF form 4.
There are exceptions to the rules for producing prototype weapons, that is why you have to be made 100% of your own design for them, you can't copy another machine gun and claim it is a prototype. In order to register or sell a new machine gun design you need to have a working physical version already existing. You also need to make something that could reasonably be considered a prototype weapon you were making to legit sell to the government, some pipegun hardware store contraption obviously wasn't produced with the intention of being sold to the military or law enforcement and would not qualify as a prototype.
Regardless, you should definitely speak to a lawyer before attempting anything like this, there are tons of local laws that you can break even if you are following state and federal law. And once you break a local law it becomes an illegal weapon and negates any legal standing you had with the state or federally.
> Technically you can even make your own machine gun legally if it is of your own design and manufacture, doesn't leave the state
The only ways to legally produce a new machine gun in the US right now are to pay thousands of dollars a year for a federal firearms license and special occupation taxpayer license to manufacture, or to otherwise receive explicit permission from a US government agency to get the ATF to approve a Form 1 application to make and register an NFA firearm. See 18 USC 922 (o) regarding machineguns not registered prior to 1986. (Wickard v Filburn dispensed with the notion of claiming to avoid federal law by keeping activity within one state.)
Why be alarmed? You can do the same thing with a mill or CNC machine except its made of metal and not shitty plastic and it has been available for like 60 years. Gun technology is not secret nor are the mechanics unreasonably complicated, plans are easily available both in books and online and have been since before near everyone here was born.
You have to be an experienced metalworker to make one that way. A computer doesn't do it for you (at least not yet). Whereas any idiot can download a file and send it to a 3D printer.
I'm not sure if the entire gun can be made out of plastic without making the gun near useless or explode in your hands as you shoot it.
Usually these 'homemade' guns buy a lot of professionally made gun parts such as the rifle barrel and just make their own lower receiver, which isn't exposed to the explosive high pressure part of a gun.
DemoRanch, Taofledermaus or iv8888 fired shotgun shells bare, ICRW. They’re the lowest chamber-pressure lethal (22LR and .25 are difficult but not impossible to make lethal) rounds.
The only completely polymer gun with a chance of not killing or maiming the operator is a shotgun cartridge blunderbuss with the shell/s place far away from the hands. With enough rubber bands, it should be possible to not need a metal firing pin.
Hard to say as all detectors are different. I only know that while as a teenager I got kicked out of public school for skipping class too much and was sent to an "alternative placement center".
Everyone there had to wear a white shirt and pants. There was only one entrance and there was a metal detector right in front of it. But what all the "cool" kids were doing was seeing how big of a knife they could sneak through it. And there was a couple of 3 inchers that got through. It mattered were the knife was and how you held your hands as you went through, but can't remember the details (this was back in 2001).
'80 percent lowers' have been available for quite sometime and can be turned into a working firearm with just a Dremel tool. Very little skill required.
>You have to be an experienced metalworker to make one that way.
Well not so much. If you've got blue prints or a replica of any metal part you can go to any local machine shop have them make it for you. Of course you are going to be paying $150+ an hour for labor, but it can be done. I had to get a lot of parts machined from raw materials on an old motorcycle I restored once. There were not after market parts for it. I had to get everything that was broken or worn out made at a local machine shop. Nothing stopping me from handing them blue prints for an ak-47 receiver. Machining a gun barrel might be a little more obvious, but barrels can be bought on ebay and other online shops. Usually only receivers and frames are what is regulated, but frames can be made custom out of wood or plastic.
I think alarm is due to the fact that the expertise and training required to use a mill or CNC machine is vastly greater than a 3D printer. I’d also imagine that a 3D printer set up is cheaper (but am not sure). The result is that these unlicensed guns can become much more common.
The difference between a 3d printer and a CNC machine isn''t that much. The only real reason a CNC machine costs more is because without a beefier frame your cutting speed will be absolute shit since it can take less torque, but still possible if time isn't a factor. Add on 2-300 bucks to the cost of a 3d printer and those problems goes away though and you have a very capable cnc machine. If you can figure out how to use your own 3d printer at home then you can do the same thing with a CNC machine.
It's a symbolic victory that might have strong practical effects 10-20 years from now, when every auto repair shop will have a metal 3D printer that could be used to quickly reproduce military-grade weapons in quantity, with a few clicks.
That, of course, it's exactly what gun rights activists envision, a self-regulated militia being the best insurance and security for a free state (yes, that's a misquote).
The article says the alarm is over a perceived increase in the ease of obtaining an unregistered and untraceable gun. If that’s your goal, isn’t it still lucky easier to obtain a manufactured firearm, grind off the serial number, and then (somehow) modifying or distort the refiling? Even excluding that option, I’d imagine it’s essier for these types to find a buddy who owns a mill and lathe and make a gun the old fashioned way than it is to build or obtain a working metal-capable 3D printer (and the result will still need finish machining on a mill and large anyway, right?)
Yes, it is done very commonly although filing the number isn't 100% effective. As for changing other parts of the gun, matching the rifling on bullets or marks on the shell or primer is 99% of the time impossible unless you got some significant manufacturing defects or wear marks. They could possibly tell it came from a certain certain manufacturer's model, but mostly they just know what caliber it was, and there are tens of thousands of identical guns of that model all over too, it's like having the fingerprint of 1 of 20,000 clones. Some of them you can rule out due to unique defects or scars, but at least half of them are going to be too closely indistinguishable from another to tell.
For a semi, once you want to get rid of it, ram a file down the barrel, take a hammer to the extractor, file the surface of the fireing pin, field strip the gun and toss it in different places (preferably in salt water). That sounds like a lot of work, but without disposal it takes like 10 minutes.
For a revolver, you slam a file down the barrel, forcing cone, file the striking surface and the chamber, take that apart and ditch it separately (again in salty water).
Even if they manage the find all the parts, they will never be able to match up ballistics. And hey, somebody stole your gun, you have no idea why they would do all that.
However, I'd be more concerned about living in a society where creating and disseminating information, such that no crime is committed, is a crime in and of itself.
On a more practical note, I'd be surprised if any 3D printed gun was actually strong enough without metal components/reinforcing. I'm reasonable experienced with 3D printing... and I'd personally expect such a device to at least blow a few fingers off.
Society already criminalizes disseminating information, such as national security secrets, and nuclear weapons technology.
Though information itself wants to be free, I am very much in favor of increasing friction for world-ending technologies like nuclear weapons.
There was a good documentary on 3D printing guns a few years ago where the plastics were essentially good for a few rounds and then wear out. They've improved since then, and will keep improving.
Plastics don't need to compete directly with metal to be formidable.
>Society already criminalizes disseminating information, such as ... nuclear weapons technology
Have you ever heard of the Nth Country Experiment? Keep in mind that this was conducted in the 1960s. Suffice to say, designing a nuclear weapon is not a problem. Neither is manufacturing one. The difficulty lies in obtaining sufficient nuclear material.
If all you care about is a low-yield, wasteful, heavy bomb? Yes. If you want an advanced dial-a-yield thermonuclear device capable of leveling a city, and fitting on a missile? Not so much.
So certain things, like details of the latest US nuclear weapon designs should probably remain secret as well as the more common approaches to making a nuclear warhead.
And it's probably not too far off in the future that DNA strains of viruses like ebola can easily be replicated and constructed in someone's basement.
The founding fathers never envisioned free speech as a way to disseminate information that can be used to kill swaths of people. It was a check on the government as well as a way to preserve political speech.
Sure. But you would be hard pressed to argue that "information that could be used to build a gun" is among that category of information that the founders would be opposed to allowing people to have.
Pretty much anyone could just buy a gun back then. The founders even made sure to put this right in the Constitution.
And before someone goes on and says "but the founders never envisioned that semi automatic rifles would exist!" You should know that you are 100% incorrect.
Semi automatic rifles existed for a hundred years prior to the Constitution. Go google the "kalthoth repeater".
Not a lot of people owned them, because they were fairly expensive, but they existed, and I'm sure the founders could have envisioned them.
Guns typically kill a few people here and there. I'm talking about the deaths of large swaths of people from technology that wasn't envisioned in the 1700's.
But since you mentioned it, that's the problem with taking an originalist view of the constitution. Nuclear weapons didn't exist back then, neither did DNA sequencing. And in your view for any X it must be legal, because the founding fathers were silent about X.
I am pretty sure that if you could go back in time and ask whether George Washington whether the common man should be allowed to have and use nuclear weapons, the common sense answer would be a resounding "NO".
The standard interpretation is the 2A applies to any weapon which can be carried by a common soldier. It doesn't cover a F22, nor a battleship, nor a tank (although you can buy a tank, but for other reasons).
I'm not against that definition of the second amendment, but a nuclear weapon does not need to be a large thing at all and could be in fact carried by a soldier.
Well this thread is not about people 3d printing nukes. It is instead about people 3d printing guns.
Or in other words, the "controversy" here is entirely overblown, as firearms are very much something that everyone has been able to imagine for a long time, and this is not a "tricky situation". It is a clear and obvious situation covering rights that are clearly covered in the constitution.
> "surprised if any 3D printed gun was actually strong enough without metal components/reinforcing"
The article fails to mention that the Ghost Gunner is a CNC mill and makes the gun out of 7075 billet aluminum blocks, which is strong enough for multiple shots.
What if the plans were for home-made dirty bombs or nuclear devices? What's the different between disseminating how to make a gun and a weapon of mass destruction?
Title saids Activists Are Alarmed, but it doesn't quote or say a single activist. Also, this happened during the Obama administration (who didn't have anything to do with it) and the article trys to slam it as a Trump administration with totally separate subject.
New York Times is NOT a reputable news organization. Yes, they once were, but ever since the whole WMD 2002 Iraq war, to me, they've been horrible. Yes occasionally they might have something good, that's how propagation works: you hide your agenda with things that make it neutral so that you can't distinguish between facts and agenda narratives, it also gives plausible deniability against critics. So whatever.
It's still vastly easier and cheaper to go to a gun show and buy a gun with cash. Also the gun you will get will be more reliable than the plastic PLA that you print out.
You can pay in cash, but you're still going to get the same background check you would get at a retail location. If you're trying to do something shady you would be buying from a private individual in a parking lot somewhere.
Anyone who is in the business of selling firearms is required by federal law to have a federal license which requires them to perform a background check on all sales, whether they're at a dedicated store or a gun show. The only "loophole" is that you might be able to find a private individual willing to sell something from their closet. Some guy in an F-150 in the parking lot will sell you an old gun without a background check. An actual gun seller with stock at a gun show will perform a background check just like they would anywhere else.
We're not going to have a productive conversation if you assume anyone who disagrees with your political positions is incapable of or unwilling to read.
Yes, a private individual could liquidate their closet of guns they don't want anymore at a gun show without being legally required to conduct a background check. They can't have "stock" or "inventory" or otherwise resemble any attempt to be in the business of selling firearms or they're going to get a nasty visit from BATFE.
The gun show loophole has nothing to do with gun shows and everything to do with private sales. The vast majority of gun sales at gun shows are from licensed arms dealers and they are required to do a background check.
Requiring background checks for private gun sales sounds like a good idea until you do the research on the effort vs benefit. The effort to enforce this would be massive and virtually no gun crimes are committed with these guns anyways. In practical terms you'd have to track every firearm and figure out what to do when Grandpa does and leaves his gun to his children. A parent would have to run a background check on their own child of they buy a gun for them as a gift. Realistically, the only time it could be determined that a gun was sold in private without a background check is if the gun is eventually used in a crime and recovered. The vast, vast majority of guns that wind up in the hands of criminals are through corrupt licensed dealers and straw purchases.
If the purpose of gun control laws is to prevent violent crime, then there's no loophole here since this is not a significant source of weapons used in violent crimes.
Can you provide any evidence that suggests these private sales are a significant source of weapons used in violent crimes? If they're not a significant source of guns used in violent crime, how would you justify such a law?
>but you're still going to get the same background check you would get at a retail location
Depending on the state (I guess), private sellers are allowed their own booths at gun shows and only dealers are required to do background checks (this is part of the "gun show loop hole"). But private sellers at gun shows make up a small percent, mostly just collectors. There would be no profit to buy a gun and then try to sell it as a private sell at a gun show. "Gun people" are not stupid and the last thing that would be allowed at a gun show would be someone posing as a private seller and selling marked up firearms to people that would otherwise refuse to pay a lower price from a dealer but would have to do a background check with them....
This isn't true in the vast majority of states. Private sales, regardless of if they're at a gun show or a parking lot, only require a background check in six states (and three of those don't require a background check for long arms.)
In my opinion, the effects of this are overblown by both pro and anti-gun crowds. The gun at the core is a relatively simple mechanical device, especially manual action. Barebones essentials include just a rifled tube and a little hammer to strike the primer. Ammo is much harder to "DYI".
I'm not sure why this case even made it to the point it did. This seems in The Anarchist Cookbook or even MIT Guide to Lock Picking territory. There are probably folks on here who feel differently but in the US this wouldn't even seem to be an edge case regardless of political leanings.
The articles fails to mention that the Ghost Gunner machine which makes the new guns is a CNC mill and uses 7075 billet aluminum, which is strong enough for multiple shots.
The worry about this being a new avenue for "ghost-guns" is absurd. All you need for a gun is some metal pipe from a hardware store. These "downloadable guns" would be about as effective. Plus it's perfectly legal to make your own firearm from readily available parts. And it's not like the fed tracks guns anyway, so what's new?
The debate on this issue seems to be centered around the fact that these plans are downloadable online, which I think is silly since Google happily provides you with most of what you need already:
> make your own firearm from readily available parts
I am not a legal expert and it's not a legal advice, but in case of a bolt-action rifle, I think the action is still legally treated as a firearm. So you can buy most parts without hassle (barrel, trigger, stock), but you need to go through the FFL to buy the action.
To be a firearm dealer you need an FFL license, but there are no federal laws against making your own firearm (as long as it is not restricted by the ATF, such as select fire, or destructive device or something). States may have their own laws against firearm manufacturing.
You can still sell it. You just can't be producing guns for sale. There are limits to how many you can sell and when you can sell them, beyond which the federal government will presume that you are producing the guns for sale.
So it seems it was already fairly easy and legal to build and own a very high-quality firearm with general attention-grabbing features mentioned in the article? Not a legal advice or suggesting you should do so:
I've purchased unregulated 80% lower receivers (they're only legally "a gun" if more than 80% of the machining work is complete. At or below 80%, they're just considered a chunk of metal.) and machined them using nothing more than a woodworking router, a hand drill, a jig, and a vise in about 30-45 minutes.
The jig is the most expensive part, costing about $160 or so, but once you have it there's no wear parts and you can use the jig to build as many as you want.
so criminals steal guns and buy them black market already and (here's the key) USE them to do something illegal. Just leave us normal citizens alone please and don't punish us for people who have ill intent regardless of the tools at hand.
Say there's a class of objects that we want to prohibit to 3D printers. If not guns, then some WMD that meets whatever your risk threshold is. How, technically, do we accomplish that?
There wouldn't seem to be any algorithm that could recognize any part that could be assembled into a device. A gun for instance can take on almost infinite forms and be divided into arbitrary unrecognizable modules.
We could enforce pre-approval by a government engineer of any part that may possibly become such a device. But such an engineer would have to generate a large amount of false positives to be at all effective. And the requirement for skilled human intervention would make it slow and expensive.
Bottom line, if there exists a device that you insist must be prohibited, then you will want to ban the free use of 3D printers that can make it.
So what's that threshold for you? Keep in mind that a box cutter was used as a WMD, killing thousands. Do we ban 3D printers that can make a box cutter? Let's posit a lower limit of a box cutter and an upper limit of a fusion bomb. Are gunpowder projectile devices the right compromise?
How dangerous does a printable device have to be before we must stand athwart technology, yelling Stop?
That only works for a fixed set of items you specifically design. There is an infinite design variety of 3D-printable weapons or other dangerous items, so to prevent them all from being printed, you’d need to outright ban 3D printing.
There’s really no other way — even if we had a hypothetical omniscient AI — because you can already construct weapons from a number of harmless existing parts with nonviolent uses, there’s no way of banning ALL possible weapon parts from being printed without also banning everything.
And this isn’t even getting into inevitable circumvention of any such limitations placed on 3D printers.
The only way to entirely prevent the construction of weapons is to build everything around us out of jello or styrofoam, and box everyone inside this soft padded universe permanently. But then I bet you even then someone will figure out how to terrorize others with the tools at hand; even if all they can do is hold you down and smother you in jello, someone, somewhere will do it, and copycats will appear everywhere thereafter.
Gun don’t kill people, people kill people. Taking guns from law abriding citizen will not reduce gun violence. Criminals don’t care what your laws say.
Beside, most killing happened in schools. Still puzzled me today why don’t they remove school from gun free zone. It is a killzone.
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states law as usual vary but only a few states have serial number database of guns. Ymmv if they will allow it or not.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_laws_in_California
So tl;dr, you only need register a serial if you made something like a machine gun and hold a federal firearms manufacturing license, and you can only make one or two versions of each design without changing things, and the serial number only really matters when selling or trading it, which you both are and aren't allowed to do depending on what the courts feel your intentions were. Otherwise the mechanical design of the gun can be freely sold to law enforcement or the military. Also the rules change once you actually get a manufacturing license (you are signing away some rights in the process, similar to signing away your right to not have an ID while driving when you get your driver's license) but if you get your manufacturing license you should probably have an actual lawyer.
This is really poor advice. The BATF considers just having the parts without the requisite Class III license (really a tax stamp) to be a felony.
The Hughes Amendment to the Firearm Owners Protection Act of 1986 prohibits civilians from owning any machine gun manufactured after May 1986.
All the other 5 categories of Class III firearms (SBRs, SBSs, Silencers, AOWs and Destructive Devices) can still be made, even by an individual, if he/she first applies for and receives permission to do so.
To do so, they must file an ATF Form 1 (maker form) and pay a $200 make tax fee.
A civilian can still legally own any machinegun that was created PRIOR to May, 1986 as long as they get approval on an ATF form 4.
Regardless, you should definitely speak to a lawyer before attempting anything like this, there are tons of local laws that you can break even if you are following state and federal law. And once you break a local law it becomes an illegal weapon and negates any legal standing you had with the state or federally.
The only ways to legally produce a new machine gun in the US right now are to pay thousands of dollars a year for a federal firearms license and special occupation taxpayer license to manufacture, or to otherwise receive explicit permission from a US government agency to get the ATF to approve a Form 1 application to make and register an NFA firearm. See 18 USC 922 (o) regarding machineguns not registered prior to 1986. (Wickard v Filburn dispensed with the notion of claiming to avoid federal law by keeping activity within one state.)
[+] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Line_of_Fire
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotel_Artemis
Usually these 'homemade' guns buy a lot of professionally made gun parts such as the rifle barrel and just make their own lower receiver, which isn't exposed to the explosive high pressure part of a gun.
Disclaimer: I’m familiar with this only because I have to check my firearms when I’m flying.
Everyone there had to wear a white shirt and pants. There was only one entrance and there was a metal detector right in front of it. But what all the "cool" kids were doing was seeing how big of a knife they could sneak through it. And there was a couple of 3 inchers that got through. It mattered were the knife was and how you held your hands as you went through, but can't remember the details (this was back in 2001).
0: https://ghostgunner.net/
Well not so much. If you've got blue prints or a replica of any metal part you can go to any local machine shop have them make it for you. Of course you are going to be paying $150+ an hour for labor, but it can be done. I had to get a lot of parts machined from raw materials on an old motorcycle I restored once. There were not after market parts for it. I had to get everything that was broken or worn out made at a local machine shop. Nothing stopping me from handing them blue prints for an ak-47 receiver. Machining a gun barrel might be a little more obvious, but barrels can be bought on ebay and other online shops. Usually only receivers and frames are what is regulated, but frames can be made custom out of wood or plastic.
Today? Sure. Tomorrow? Maybe not. Given this is precedent it's perfectly apt for people to consider the future implications.
That, of course, it's exactly what gun rights activists envision, a self-regulated militia being the best insurance and security for a free state (yes, that's a misquote).
For a revolver, you slam a file down the barrel, forcing cone, file the striking surface and the chamber, take that apart and ditch it separately (again in salty water).
Even if they manage the find all the parts, they will never be able to match up ballistics. And hey, somebody stole your gun, you have no idea why they would do all that.
I generally abhor guns in society.
However, I'd be more concerned about living in a society where creating and disseminating information, such that no crime is committed, is a crime in and of itself.
On a more practical note, I'd be surprised if any 3D printed gun was actually strong enough without metal components/reinforcing. I'm reasonable experienced with 3D printing... and I'd personally expect such a device to at least blow a few fingers off.
Though information itself wants to be free, I am very much in favor of increasing friction for world-ending technologies like nuclear weapons.
There was a good documentary on 3D printing guns a few years ago where the plastics were essentially good for a few rounds and then wear out. They've improved since then, and will keep improving.
Plastics don't need to compete directly with metal to be formidable.
Have you ever heard of the Nth Country Experiment? Keep in mind that this was conducted in the 1960s. Suffice to say, designing a nuclear weapon is not a problem. Neither is manufacturing one. The difficulty lies in obtaining sufficient nuclear material.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nth_Country_Experiment
That never made sense to me.
Information desiring something of itself would imply that information is sentient.
I think it is people who want information to be free. And not all people want that, at least for not all information.
And it's probably not too far off in the future that DNA strains of viruses like ebola can easily be replicated and constructed in someone's basement.
The founding fathers never envisioned free speech as a way to disseminate information that can be used to kill swaths of people. It was a check on the government as well as a way to preserve political speech.
Pretty much anyone could just buy a gun back then. The founders even made sure to put this right in the Constitution.
And before someone goes on and says "but the founders never envisioned that semi automatic rifles would exist!" You should know that you are 100% incorrect.
Semi automatic rifles existed for a hundred years prior to the Constitution. Go google the "kalthoth repeater".
Not a lot of people owned them, because they were fairly expensive, but they existed, and I'm sure the founders could have envisioned them.
But since you mentioned it, that's the problem with taking an originalist view of the constitution. Nuclear weapons didn't exist back then, neither did DNA sequencing. And in your view for any X it must be legal, because the founding fathers were silent about X.
I am pretty sure that if you could go back in time and ask whether George Washington whether the common man should be allowed to have and use nuclear weapons, the common sense answer would be a resounding "NO".
The standard interpretation is the 2A applies to any weapon which can be carried by a common soldier. It doesn't cover a F22, nor a battleship, nor a tank (although you can buy a tank, but for other reasons).
Or in other words, the "controversy" here is entirely overblown, as firearms are very much something that everyone has been able to imagine for a long time, and this is not a "tricky situation". It is a clear and obvious situation covering rights that are clearly covered in the constitution.
I even clarified the question to "large swaths of people" which exempts plastic guns from the question.
Next time, please read the full comments.
The article fails to mention that the Ghost Gunner is a CNC mill and makes the gun out of 7075 billet aluminum blocks, which is strong enough for multiple shots.
New York Times is NOT a reputable news organization. Yes, they once were, but ever since the whole WMD 2002 Iraq war, to me, they've been horrible. Yes occasionally they might have something good, that's how propagation works: you hide your agenda with things that make it neutral so that you can't distinguish between facts and agenda narratives, it also gives plausible deniability against critics. So whatever.
If you know of a news organization where every article is high quality, I'd love to hear about it!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_show_loophole
Private people can have stock at gun shows and not be required to have a Federal Firearm License.
I'll put a link here, not that you'll check it.
http://www.governing.com/gov-data/safety-justice/gun-show-fi...
Yes, a private individual could liquidate their closet of guns they don't want anymore at a gun show without being legally required to conduct a background check. They can't have "stock" or "inventory" or otherwise resemble any attempt to be in the business of selling firearms or they're going to get a nasty visit from BATFE.
Requiring background checks for private gun sales sounds like a good idea until you do the research on the effort vs benefit. The effort to enforce this would be massive and virtually no gun crimes are committed with these guns anyways. In practical terms you'd have to track every firearm and figure out what to do when Grandpa does and leaves his gun to his children. A parent would have to run a background check on their own child of they buy a gun for them as a gift. Realistically, the only time it could be determined that a gun was sold in private without a background check is if the gun is eventually used in a crime and recovered. The vast, vast majority of guns that wind up in the hands of criminals are through corrupt licensed dealers and straw purchases.
If the purpose of gun control laws is to prevent violent crime, then there's no loophole here since this is not a significant source of weapons used in violent crimes.
Your argument that it is silly hinges on the idea that parents wouldn't ever do that. But they would.
Those background checks in total would have little impact, but it's not a good argument against requiring background checks.
Depending on the state (I guess), private sellers are allowed their own booths at gun shows and only dealers are required to do background checks (this is part of the "gun show loop hole"). But private sellers at gun shows make up a small percent, mostly just collectors. There would be no profit to buy a gun and then try to sell it as a private sell at a gun show. "Gun people" are not stupid and the last thing that would be allowed at a gun show would be someone posing as a private seller and selling marked up firearms to people that would otherwise refuse to pay a lower price from a dealer but would have to do a background check with them....
https://www.csgv.org/issues-archive/gun-show-loophole-faq/
The Ghost Gunner machine mentioned in the article is actually a CNC mill using 7075 billet aluminum blocks.
The plastic in a 3D printer is surely, by design, very malleable. That's the opposite of the material needed for an effective gun.
The debate on this issue seems to be centered around the fact that these plans are downloadable online, which I think is silly since Google happily provides you with most of what you need already:
https://patents.google.com/patent/US984519A
https://patents.google.com/patent/US6279258
https://patents.google.com/patent/US4539889A
https://patents.google.com/patent/US5827992A
I am not a legal expert and it's not a legal advice, but in case of a bolt-action rifle, I think the action is still legally treated as a firearm. So you can buy most parts without hassle (barrel, trigger, stock), but you need to go through the FFL to buy the action.
Reference: https://www.brownells.com/aspx/general/faqdetail.aspx?fid=10...
Anyone is allowed to manufacture a gun, as long as they don't sell it. If you want to sell it, you'd need a license.
1. CNC the Remington 700 action: https://www.practicalmachinist.com/vb/gunsmithing/making-rem... . This is the hard part and would probably need a week of dedicated work...
2. Buy barrel, trigger and stock.
3. Everything mostly just fits into the action, so assembly is just like putting lego pieces together.
The jig is the most expensive part, costing about $160 or so, but once you have it there's no wear parts and you can use the jig to build as many as you want.
There wouldn't seem to be any algorithm that could recognize any part that could be assembled into a device. A gun for instance can take on almost infinite forms and be divided into arbitrary unrecognizable modules.
We could enforce pre-approval by a government engineer of any part that may possibly become such a device. But such an engineer would have to generate a large amount of false positives to be at all effective. And the requirement for skilled human intervention would make it slow and expensive.
Bottom line, if there exists a device that you insist must be prohibited, then you will want to ban the free use of 3D printers that can make it.
So what's that threshold for you? Keep in mind that a box cutter was used as a WMD, killing thousands. Do we ban 3D printers that can make a box cutter? Let's posit a lower limit of a box cutter and an upper limit of a fusion bomb. Are gunpowder projectile devices the right compromise?
How dangerous does a printable device have to be before we must stand athwart technology, yelling Stop?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation
There’s really no other way — even if we had a hypothetical omniscient AI — because you can already construct weapons from a number of harmless existing parts with nonviolent uses, there’s no way of banning ALL possible weapon parts from being printed without also banning everything.
And this isn’t even getting into inevitable circumvention of any such limitations placed on 3D printers.
The only way to entirely prevent the construction of weapons is to build everything around us out of jello or styrofoam, and box everyone inside this soft padded universe permanently. But then I bet you even then someone will figure out how to terrorize others with the tools at hand; even if all they can do is hold you down and smother you in jello, someone, somewhere will do it, and copycats will appear everywhere thereafter.
Beside, most killing happened in schools. Still puzzled me today why don’t they remove school from gun free zone. It is a killzone.