CZ makes damn fine guns, so this seems like one of the better outcomes--better than being bought by a maker of crap who wishes to apply a veneer of respectability through the Colt name.
Indeed. Their 17 HMR with varmint barrel is a whole lot of fun and really accurate. (Same caliber as a BB gun but with a lot more powder, in case you’re not a gun geek)
Got a CZ455 varmint with interchangeable 22LR and 17HMR barrels. Good for practice shooting and hunting small game. The weight of the rifle also gives me good training as it’s heavy as my bigger 308 rifle (Sauer 202).
It really is a damning indictment of how badly Colt has been mismanaged over the past few decades, what with firearms sales in the US at all-time highs starting with the Obama administration. They have unbelievable brand value, probably #1 in the world, but they failed so spectacularly to capitalize on it that they went bankrupt 5 years ago.
There's a lesson here that's universally applicable well beyond gun manufacturers: You can't rest on your laurels and attempt to coast on brand value, even #1 brand value. You still always have to be competing.
Colt has basically been milking the 1911 and AR-15/M-16 for decades. And they lost the M-4 contract to FN a while ago, so they have very little going for them but the name.
I'd think so given the number of Government Contracts. Looks like this includes things like Colt Canada which is the provider of small arms to the armed forces. C7, C8 etc.
Apple could just have bought the music industry when they launched iTunes. The value, and in some cases the profit, of tech companies are weird outliers in the business world.
Incorrect: They also changed the 30pin standard while keeping it 30pin. Many people found that they could not charge or play music with their new iDevice when plugging it in to a factory-wired (and non-removable) 30pin cable in their car.
Even if detachable magazines were legal (which it now looks like they soon will not be, with the possible exception of grip magazines in pistols), an Apple firearm won't include one. If the gun ever jams you have to take it to a Genius Bar to get it unjammed. Because it features Touch ID, it will be the only firearm to comply with Biden's proposed smart gun requirement at the time the requirement passes, and thus the only legal gun in America until other manufacturers follow suit -- but a gunOS mandatory security update causes the gun to squirt water instead of firing ammunition.
Wait, really? I had to look that up. From their share price chart, get AAPL as being ~0.33/share then vs ~133 now and market cap $2.2T, which backs out to ~$5-6 billion in mid-2001.
I can't easily find the valuation of Sony BMG or EMI at the time.
Yup. The largest ones could afford to buy a mid-size country. (AMZN revenue = $386B, AAPL revenue = $274B, GOOG revenue = $182B, Norway GDP = $366B, Vietnam GDP = $340B, Chile GDP = $245B).
Note also that SpaceX has more accurate ballistic missiles than the U.S. and Russia (PeaceKeeper CEP = 40M, while SpaceX routinely lands rockets upright within a ~10M radius on a drone ship), and Google has more data than the CIA & NSA (why else did the NSA try to wiretap them?). The microchip revolution put enormous capabilities in the hands of those organizations that know how to code effectively, such that Silicon Valley startups can often do things that were the sole province of national governments for decades.
That's revenue <=> GDP, and roughly earnings <=> tax revenues. I believe those are equivalent comparisons: revenue and GDP both include all internal transactions, while earnings and tax revenue reflect what's available for management/government to spend at their discretion.
If a tech company were buying the country, market cap would be the appropriate metric, and market caps for those tech companies are in the $2T range, more than enough to pay a few times annual GDP.
Agreed with the sentiment that modern companies are capable, but disagreed on the rocket comparison -- the comparison is difficult at best.
One is travelling at tremendous speed (Mach 5 or something?) and has milliseconds for course-corrections, the aspires to come to a gentle halt and can close some feedback loops over and over again for thousands of milliseconds.
Edit: If you wish to make a weapons comparison, one might note that SpaceX can launch the mother of all MIRVs over and over again. The lower cost-to-orbit changes the economic calculus of rods-from-god, opening a possibility of a conventional-weapons bombardment from the other side of the planet for the first time.
ICBM's also can't use GPS or equivalent navigation satellites, as those will likely be the first to be taken out in a nuclear exchange. They use inertial guidance (https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/30254/this-isnt-a-sci-... ) maybe together with some star navigation system for mid-course guidance.
An ICBM hitting a target purely on internal guidance is an entirely different level of problem from what SpaceX is doing with cooperative positioning systems at the target. Also keep in mind that the "wikipedia numbers" for classified weapons systems are usually "at least" numbers, not exact.
It's not at all clear who has more data between GOOG and NSA. Both don't exactly declare the numbers, but it is known that in several recent years NSA has been the largest single buyer of spinning disks in the world.
Tech companies have indeed become powerful, but let's not get hyperbolic. The world hasn't become shadowrun quite yet.
"in several recent years NSA has been the largest single buyer of spinning disks in the world."
The rest of the world moved to SSDs in ~2010. Google's been storing the whole web on flash since then. (I guess if you're archiving for slow-speed retrieval disks are still useful, but if that's your use-case, why wouldn't you use tape?)
Because there are many orders of latency magnitude between spinning rust and tape.
We still use a lot of spinning disk for precisely this reason - you get roughly 5x the online capacity for the same cost and automation does not whine about wanting the new shiny.
That was why I mentioned SSDs - there are orders of latency magnitude between SSDs and spinning disk.
I guess it fits the NSA's use-case though, where they have ~thousands of analysts running complex queries but no external users, rather than ~billions of external users running well-defined queries.
I left the storage industry about 5 years ago, but at least as of then the big cloud providers were still buying lots of spinning rust and showed no signs of stopping. These companies store a lot of long tail data which needs to be available but doesn't need super low latency access. It's still much more economical to store such data on disks than in flash.
I wasn't really trying to get into some sort of debate about storage technologies, just illustrating that the NSA does have a whole lot of data.
Spinning disk is cost competitive with tape robots these days, while offering much better access performance. There's a few different vendors that supply this sort of setup, or you can build your own backblaze style. The core idea is you build storage servers that can hold more disks than can be active at any given moment. Powering up a drive and doing a seek is a lot faster than a tape robot.
I’ve worked on infrastructure (design) engineering teams at a very large company that still does their own datacenters. I can confirm that spinners are still very much in use and are not used for archival purposes - that’s what tapes are designed and used for.
Their bankruptcy several years ago kept them alive but didn’t really solve their problems. They’re little more than a brand (not an entirely positive one) and manufacturing capacity. Their revenue is offset by their expenses.
I'd argue it's still a little high, most of these companies are on the wane.
Guns in the US are near saturation from a market perspective and regulatory changes will eventually kick the floor out. Time to cash out... It's like when Phillip Morris bought Kraft and General Foods in the 80s to spin them off later when tobacco regulation came.
Like with tobacco, big studies have been suppressed. Guns are far from a well-ventilated issue, they're just well-entrenched.
The Dickey amendment got clarified in 2018, and the first earmarks for research were for FY2020 - so, I'd say we wait with those proclamations a few more years.
What difference are those studies going to make? If Columbia University in the City of New York discovers you can use guns to kill people, are voters suddenly going to go "oh, well then!"
That's clearly not the kind of research that's going to be done.
Funding of gun studies means we can make arguments backed up by data instead of partisan bickering. Calls to arm teachers in classrooms or mandate trigger locks on guns have real world effects, and both sides think they're right about it. Funding for studies of specific actions and policies help us as a society make more informed decisions.
You will find that many of us gun rights supporters don't care what data comes out. I don't support 2a because fewer than n people die per year from guns.
That is a needless personal attack, and I notice that you fail to make a coherent argument against what I said. Do you favor protections against unreasonable search and seizure only until too many criminals benefit from it? My point is that some people value liberty higher than life. If you think I'm wrong, feel free to say why, though I honestly don't know that you'll change my mind on that.
> Psychopathy is a condition characterized by the absence of empathy and the blunting of other affective states. Callousness, detachment, and a lack of empathy...
That doesn't seem like a personal attack so much as pointing out that this belief lacks empathy and is callous, which I tend to agree with. The standard argument, which I'm sure you're aware of, is that some controls and regulations on the ownership of firearms is a net good for society by reducing accidental deaths, suicides, and murders.
Guns aren't responsible for any of those things, people are. But guns dramatically change the scale at which they happen. Ignoring that because of a belief in absolute freedom from regulation for machines designed to kill is callous and un-empathic. Or, to use a synonym, psychopathic.
> Being principled and having higher ideals is not callous. It's the most noble thing a person can do.
Having ideals is exactly noble, or ignoble, as the ideals. There is nothing noble about devotion to ideas independent of the ideas one is devoted to.
“A world free of Jews” is an ideal people have been devoted to. People who were more devoted to that idea and willing to sacrifice more for it are not more noble than those less devoted by reason of their devotion.
That's a straw man. At the macro level causes may be unjust sure.
But at the micro or individual level...sacrificing onesself for higher ideals/principles is the least psychopathic thing one can do
..one makes the ultimate sacrifice for what they believe is the betterment of OTHERS.
People may be misguided and some causes unjust, but they sacrificed themself for an ideal that they believe in.
It's the opposite of psychopathy.
Everything that you are and have is due to the sacrifices of many millions of people for principles they believed in. It's a shame modern society has become so ungrateful,materialistic, and distant from what so many people have sacrificed so much for.
That's not cool, it's not psychopathic to hold a different principle.
IMO, this is similar to things like unreasonable search and seizure, where there is a robust set of laws, regulation and court judgements to guide government activity.
Until relatively recently, the notion of having a well regulated environment in this area was broadly accepted. But... many of the pro-gun-sales crowd peddles in doom in the name of selling stuff.
Flag away, it's a free country. I don't think it's a personal attack to call a sentiment psychopathic that values one's unfettered freedoms to be more valuable than human life.
See calling a SENTIMENT psychopathic is more coherent than calling a person (a human being) psychopathic. The world is bigger than your views/ideas about it. And you may be wrong. Please focus on the ideas from here on out instead of people. Your ideas may be incorrect.
- Are there correlations between outcomes and specific brands, configurations, or other attributes of firearm?
- Are there correlations between sales at specific outlets and outcomes?
- Is age and/or experience correlated with negative outcomes?
The assumption is that studying this would negatively impact gun ownership. I don't think that's true. Consider that anti-gun rhetoric over the .50 Barrett rifle. You may find that it's really a collector's item that isn't associated with crime. I'm sure there are many examples similar to this, that are blocked by black and white opinion on the matter, fueled by mutual ignorance.
The Dickey Amendment didn't ban any studies or doing research, it banned the CDC from advocating gun control policies at a time when the administration was pushing it to use its authority/reputation to do so. It would be like me saying you can do all the research you want on teenage pregnancy and the like, but we're not funding your department to do political advocacy campaigns for abstinence. Stick to the science.
You've been repeatedly and blatantly lied to by the media and politicians about the CDC being "banned" from researching gun violence. The ban was on the use of public funds to advocate for specific gun laws/policies, not on research into the subject itself.
And covid has made the mass shooting argument irrelevant. It's killed about ten times as many americans. The US can sustain 10k gun casualties a year without moving the politics at all.
Even smartphone demand slows down. And that's a device with daily utility with a 2-5 year life.
Seriously, I'm coming at this from a perspective of a country boy who went shooting 3-4 times a month as a teen, and earned a bounty for shooting pigeons on a farm. How much more demand can be filled for more guns the mostly sit around and gather dust? It's a market driven by ignorance and fear -- folks are treating these things as investments for a doomsday that will never come.
I'm not an anti-gun guy... I own two shotguns, a hunting rifle and a .22. What's the point of adding more? Pistols, AR-15 fetishization, etc aren't for me. What I have will probably be in great shape beyond my lifetime; if anything I might trade up if I got into skeet again.
Say you are right and no regulatory changes take place.... you're still going to have a cohort of old people who hit the gun hoarding profile start to die off and flood the secondary market with estate sales. My parents have a neighbor in the country that probably has >250 rifles, and there are way more people like that than the WW2/Korea generation that has mostly left us. What's the collector value of yet another AR-15 clone?
Population continues to grow, and there are many Americans who don't own guns who represent a big market. Many have purchased their first in the past year. And yes, lots of people like collecting a shooting a wide variety of guns. Most of then do it for reasons other than or in addition to prepping. The new firearms market is not going to die; the idea that it will is fudd nonsense.
The point is that manufacturers aren't really producing a wide variety of guns. I wouldn't be surprised if 3/4 of new guns in the country are black polymer-and-aluminum AR-15s or black polymer-framed tilting-barrel striker fired pistols.
Gun ownership in the US has gone down over the past ~30-40 years, but the number of guns per capita has gone up, which indicates that fewer people are buying guns but that those who do are buying more guns than they used to.
Ownership estimates are based on survey data, not registration data. Gun owners are far, far less likely to be honest about ownership with some rando survey taker than they were 40 years ago.
The immigrant population particularly. There’s a lot of suppressed interest overseas that gets exercised upon arrival, whether visiting or immigrating.
> Even smartphone demand slows down. And that's a device with daily utility with a 2-5 year life.
How many people do you know who collect smartphones? Also, waaaaaay more smartphones are sold per year in the US than guns (it's roughly two orders of magnitude difference), so if that represents some kind of ceiling, then it's a very high one that guns are nowhere near.
Although I find firearms a bit scary in practice, I've been around enough gun nuts to get where they're coming from, and also been around to hear voices from different countries with different rules...and I agree that there is a "gun pollution" problem here that deserves a different framing from the form that has been around in the US my whole life.
If you have two guns, it's simple to keep them maintained, cleared and secured when not in use. If you have 250 guns, you are extremely likely to lose track of them. And when you lose track, accidents happen. That's nothing to do with crime or responsibility or freedoms or the design of the gun - it's there in the statistics that country by country, there are more accidential gun deaths when there are more guns, and bringing our market to saturation is not serving anyone.
Guns in the US are near saturation from a market perspective
The statistics show record gun sales. More and more Americans are becoming firearms owners for the first time, and existing owners are expanding their collections.
What's interesting (to me) about this stat is that retail sales are up, meaning mostly newly manufactured firearms, at a time when we're seeing a "rolling over" of one generation's possessions to another - baby boomers are actively passing their collections on (or selling) to the next generations in private transactions. So there are a lot of firearms changing hands to new owners now (for the last and next 5 years) that are unseen by these retail stats. Guns are a very durable good.
at a time when we're seeing a "rolling over" of one generation's possessions to another - baby boomers are actively passing their collections on (or selling) to the next generations in private transactions. So there are a lot of firearms changing hands to new owners now (for the last and next 5 years) that are unseen by these retail stats. Guns are a very durable good.
It’s a matter of changing tastes as well. A Gen Z would cherish her mom’s old M1911A1 as a family heirloom but she’ll want a tricked-out Combat Master for her own use cases.
From my anecdotal observation this is true. Gun sales are also growing among demographics not typically associated with gun ownership (non-white, non-conservative.)
There were between 2 to 5 million new gun owners (fbi and atf cant agree on much) in 2020. Legal gun ownership in the US is around 20+ million now.
Where do you get your ideas that the market isnt interested in guns? The issue with colt and Remington has been zero innovation and updating with the times. At bass pro shop, you could take a brand new Remington bolt action and need a sledge hammer to pull the bolt. A same class benelli needed barely a pinkie's worth of strength to do the same. Buttery smooth while the new Remingtons were already acting rusty.
The market has been going striker fire as well. I haven't noticed a big push from colt or rem before they shut down. Maybe they did, but it was too little too late.
Theres a lot more going on than just gUnS bAd. I'm happy for the hit on chemicalized tobacco. Makes it easier for the organic, natural market, mostly cigars and cigarillos. Let that marinate.
The dream of every gun nut is to imagine they live in a world where they gotta pack that go bag and ammo and head down to the Capitol to stop the steal.
And as inequality grows here in America and we slowly but surely descend back to what has been the default state of humanity for thousands of years...with a few rich and powerful with their neck on the rest of society who is poor...we'll be glad the average citizen has guns to fight back at some point.
They do, but in practice they don't. Many European countries which don't have a right to bear arms still manage to have better gun laws than those three Latin American countries (and I should add, a number of American states).
Actually, I live in the UK. Here the police are mostly not armed, and still manage to prevent other people from having guns. But yes, in principle I'm perfectly happy with the setup where one specialised group holds the power of military force
The UK is a bigger surveillance state than China.
They have one of the worst levels of inequality in the Western World.
You have ASBO's which are basically just a blank slate for people to be punished for the vague idea of 'anti-social behavior.'
Also, your violent crime rate is the 3rd worst in Europe.
The U.K. has a homicide rate of 1.2 per 100k while the U.S. is 5 per 100k.
Meanwhile there are 400 MILLION guns in America.
So your government is repressive and the citizens are violent. Few countries need guns more the U.K.
I'm sorry your gov't has defanged it's citizens so much with minimal benefit and has citizens that actually fight against their best interest.
So you're saying there are 4x as many murders in the US? There are definitely lots of problems in the UK: over surveilance and inequality are two of them. But I fail to see how guns would help either of these.
Because then "some" people could live their video game fantasy life of an existence in a Mad Max landscape where the job description is to roll into town in a souped up 1974 Ford Falcon XB GT and solve all problems down the barrel of a gun. So many people want revolution but they only imagine it in a universe where they themselves are holding the stick and not the ones being beaten with it.
Revolution should be the last resort not the first.
And to expand on this, there's a reason why even Karl Marx understood the necessity of an armed working class: "Under no pretext should arms and ammunition be surrendered; any attempt to disarm the workers must be frustrated, by force if necessary."
In the UK the Monarchy was stripped of powers by other nobles, not regular citizens. I'm not sure about other places, but I wouldn't assume it was always a popular revolution of some sort. I would guess in many cases it was slowly ceded to other parts of the government.
Of course they had military might. But the point is it wasn't exactly "citizens", and whether regular citizens can bear arms has little to do with whether the standing armies of nobles can. The nobility of that period is not what I would consider regular citizens. The original assertion I replied to is obviously not as absolute as it was presented.
I am not sure if you consider soliders to be "regular citizens" but many of the troops would have been been subjects or lower nobles. If strictly the nobility (without their troops) were going against the king he may have been able to resist if he had his own troops.
I am not sure how possible it would have been to run England without the nobility so it is possible that troops were not strictly needed, but I am guessing the threat of the use of the nobility's troops at least made the whole process easier.
It of course wasn't a civilian uprising or something like that which may have been more of your point?
The Monarchy, like all rulers, is able to rule because they have the backing of powerful factions. No matter how powerful you think a ruler, ultimately they have to delegate a lot of control to those they want to carry out their orders. There is no difference in any country. Even in the US, were the DoD and some other departments able to successfully coordinate, they could easily take over the government, at least for a short while. That they don't is more a nature of how problematic it would be to do anything useful after that was accomplished, and that it would likely be short lived.
My minimal understanding of the Magna Carta, as taught to an American in middle school, is that the Nobility forced the monarchy to sign a document ensuring they are subject to certain laws like others are (but not necessarily all the laws the average citizen is subject to), which in essence increased the power of the Nobility. They were able to do this because most the military might of the time was in the hands of the nobles. The Monarchy might have had a larger army than any single noble, but the combined military strength of the nobility dwarfed the Monarchy (wars were generally fought by calling on the nobility to supply soldiers).
My point was though that the loss of powers of the Monarchy in the UK had little to do with the citizens, it was a power grab by the nobility. And then I assume eventually much of the strength of the nobility was ceded to parliament and then parliament was eventually opened to commoners (I'm getting into speculation here, but speculation based on snippets of history I do know so I think is likely not far off the mark).
In the end, the ability of the citizens to have guns specifically had very little to do with it I think. AIUI, there are other countries with mostly figurehead monarchies which I suspect had a more gradual shift in power as well, and wasn't explicitly at the threat of violence. It may have been spurred by the sight of that happening in other countries, but really that's more a realization that the populace is learning that they have power in quantity, guns or not, and those ruling them needed to contend with that reality.
Attributing it all to guns is a vast oversimplification in my eyes. It may have had far more to do with the printing press.
> Western democracy wouldn't exist without citizens who were armed to the teeth.
Citation needed. I can't think of any good examples, except maybe for the Revolutionary French "Sans-culottes", who, as the name suggests, were _famously_ well-equipped.
Carroll Quigley makes a convincing argument early in Tragedy and Hope that democratic governments tend to replace authoritarian governments when "amateur weapons" (e.g. rifled musket and pistols of the 19th century) are the pinnacle of weapons technology and the standard of living is high enough for the citizens to readily purchase those weapons, and vice versa when "specialist weapons" (e.g. tanks and airplanes of the 20th century) become the pinnacle of weapons tech.
> when "specialist weapons" (e.g. tanks and airplanes of the 20th century) become the pinnacle of weapons tech.
I will certainly agree with that, in the sense that the idea that armed civilians (even if they have some automatic assault rifles) posing an internal threat to a modern, well equipped military; is laughable, and is likely advanced for disingenuous propaganda purposes.
The last person to successfully invade Switzerland was... Napoleon?
Likewise, while it may not be to your taste, Afghanistan's polity has spent the last 200 years stubbornly being Afghan, to the surprise and annoyance of the British, Russians, Americans, etc.
Who has tried since? I understood that in WW2 for instance it was their strict policy of neutrality that kept them from invasion, and the fact that Germany thought it was more beneficial to have them as a neutral rather than occupied country.
Keeping Zurich industrialists on their side was essential to helping supply German war efforts-that's how Dehomag laundered its purchases of Hollerith cards from IBM, and I think how GM Europe's part-ownership of Ethyl Inc.facilitated getting TEL to the Luftwaffe.
In addition to losing all that, it would be a costly and drawn-out war against an entrenched enemy on hideously unsuitable terrain. The desire was absolutely there, Hitler hated Swiss Germans, but cooler heads prevailed, apparently.
They didn't try though, that's the point. You have to try in order to succeed or fail. I mean, the USA famously had a plan to invade Canada - but they never did.
Industrial-age warfare has a different scale of opportunity costs associated with it than, say, agreeing to have dinner at the new Thai place down the street, to see if it is any good.
Invading someplace just to discover if it is or isn't invade-able hasn't been a workable strategy since Franciso Pizzaro tried it on Atahualpa.
> The last person to successfully invade Switzerland was... Napoleon
While I understand the idea of deterrence, your statement certainly implies the existence of unsuccessful attempts, but I don't think any attempts have even been made since.
Edit: all I am saying is that if you'd originally said "the last person to invade Switzerland ..." we wouldn't be having this exchange.
Yes, my use of the infinitive "to invade" was in the sense of the consummation of the invasive act itself; and not contingent upon the invader's assessment of the success or failure of their primary military objective, hence the adverb in the middle.
Now that we have that out of the way, IIRC there was an Austrian army mountaineering patrol on a winter training mission that got lost on the border near Liechtenstein. They ended up on a hillside in Grisons, just over the border, where a shepherd informed them that they were in the wrong country.
After some debate about proceeding further down the valley in the hope of finding a bar or restaurant, they decided that it was too cold and wet, so they marched back the way they came && called for a helicopter to pick them up.
There you go, a relatively recent but unsuccessful invasion of Switzerland.
Point of order on both nations: They also have protective geography that helps a great deal. The Afghani culture and being very well armed does contribute though, but IDK that we can say it's the sole reason.
Switzerland has been a neutral state during the entirety of modern aerial warfare era, so I'm going to put that less on the guns and more on the "why would I want to attack Switzerland?" attitude of the last ~100 years.
Belgium was neutral in WW1 but that didn't stop the Germans from invading it im order to try and circle around the French frontline. Switzerland being a mountainous hellhole (from a military perspective) is probably a big part of why, but it's also perfect terrain for an armed insurgency.
I just read this comment and I'm horrified that I posted this. I don't even remember writing it. I had way too much sake at dinner. It really truly sneaks up on you. Sincere apologies for the rudeness.
She died because she broke a window to the US Senate chamber floor during a proclaimed riot on the US Capital. She was shot once, center mass by a trained US Secret Service officer. She died because of her belief that her white privilege would save her. She died because of her poor judgment of her own actions. Nobody told her she has a right to storm the US capital and attempt to break into the US Senate chamber. There are consequences for your actions. She died because of her actions, it's not the US Secret Service officers fault for doing what he was trained for, swore duty to and paid to do. Do not attempt to glorify stupidity.
A tyrant and despot doesn't have to decrease your "martial capacity" but simply make sure theirs is more than yours. If a tyrant/despot secures control of economic resources this isn't overly difficult.
Furthermore: rising up against a tyrant/despot is only possible if the population is very united; but a tyrant/despot, with enough economic power (or oppression of others) can make sure a population is ideologically or otherwise fractured/disunited and cause infighting.
This will actually make benefits of being well armed a liability as now you have a tyrant/despot and also can't walk safely in your neighboorhood.
well..by your logics the US founding fathers should just gave up 'cause at that time, the British Empire is stronger than whatever two-bits army that the founding fathers can scrap together.
In my view, that's survivor bias. I think that an insurrection can render a country or region un-governable, even with a numerical disadvantage. But it can't necessarily establish a new government, either a good one or a bad one.
The two-bits army was ideologically and organizationally aligned with an already functioning colonial government. But that's survivor bias too. I don't know if there are any reliable rules for the long term outcome of a successful insurrection.
The British didn't need to be defeated, they only needed to realize that they could no longer govern the colonies.
> A tyrant and despot doesn't have to decrease your "martial capacity" but simply make sure theirs is more than yours. If a tyrant/despot secures control of economic resources this isn't overly difficult.
And one major way of doing this is by reducing your combat power, and by securing control over the means of providing defense.
> Furthermore: rising up against a tyrant/despot is only possible if the population is very united;
Historical counterexamples proliferate.
> This will actually make benefits of being well armed a liability as now you have a tyrant/despot and also can't walk safely in your neighboorhood.
Fortunately possession and carriage of armaments mitigates both those ills.
I guess giving money to the people selling a gun company, then firing most their workers just sets up a situation where they can rehire them all, and use the money you just spend on making more guns.
“Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.” With 3d printed guns already a reality (I have seen designs for completely printed models, including the bolt carrier), the cat is out of the bag.
No, actually, they don't. Typically the barrels are machined using electricity and the pressure-sensitive parts are hardened steel. Many firearms are made out of plastic anyway (Glocks, to name one you might be familiar with).
It's not hard to build a reliable firearm with fairly little skill. In the United States, it's not even illegal to do so.
I think we have a lot of people having very different discussions about what "3D printed gun" means. This can be anything from a fully plastic weapon like the Liberator to what you're describing (more 3D components and home assembled traditional components coming together which really just feels like the "80% receiver" style ghost guns) to a fully metal 3D printed 1911 off a machine that itself costs at least half a million dollars to acquire.
Point being: Yes they do, but also no they don't, because you're having different conversations about different types of weapons. Are fully plastic weapons commonly used for anything? Doesn't seem to be, and I would suspect the reason is because they'd be inclined to blow up/warp after a single fire.
The fact that it is possible to make a gun using 3D-printed parts does not make it a significant contributing factor to the prevalence of guns (for non-recreational use) in the US.
Correction: it's not a significant contributing factor yet. It takes a pretty advanced case of myopia to not be able to foresee home firearm manufacturing growing.
At the current rate of development, I give it 10 years, tops, before European and Australian gun control measures are effectively meaningless.
But they're not "meaningless", because the average person in Europe and Australia has no interest in owning a gun, never mind figuring out how to print one, and even the average hardened criminal has to consider the possibility that since it isn't necessary for them to preemptively shoot anybody who challenges them, possessing guns might not be worth the risk of additional penalties. Those are much bigger factors in low gun deaths somewhere like the UK than the difficulty of obtaining one on the black market
Nope on the first part. 8M adults, 300k gun permits. And that's including almost 100k active police/military. As for the latter part, maybe, but there is way more guns in US than in CZ. And last time I checked.. Let's say I don't think there is any correlation between the two statements.
You're right about the stats, the news article I was referring to was wrong. It's not including police/military service permits though, the 300k is purely private permits (which can have overlap with police/military - they can't use guns for private purposes without a private permit); and there are 900k private guns.
> But they're not "meaningless", because the average person in Europe and Australia has no interest in owning a gun
You've just described yet another reason why gun control measures are meaningless. The desire to kill oneself and/or others (with or without a gun) doesn't exist in a vacuum; guns don't magically make people suicidal or homicidal. That desire happens due to a combination of socioeconomic pressures and inadequate mental healthcare - two angles that gun control proponents chronically ignore, instead pushing for band-aids like gun control because those band-aids are "easier" and don't involve confronting the painful realities of socioeconomic inequality.
Hence, my point: as home manufacturing of firearms proliferates, that band-aid loses whatever tenuous effectiveness it has. People concerned about "gun violence" are then forced to consider why people are killing themselves and each other (hint: because the average person is broke and depressed).
Guns don't magically make people homicidal, they just make it magically easy and efficient to kill people in the heat of the moment, or by mistake, or because they fear if they don't pull the trigger first the other person might, or when too mentally ill to know what is going on.
The actual difficulty for a sufficiently motivated person to obtain a gun (legal or otherwise) under gun control in the UK is not that high, but the incentives to do so are reduced, the disincentives increased, and the average person with the potential to carry out non-premeditated shootings never considers buying one. The ability to learn all about how to 3D print a gun instead of learning how to license and modify a shotgun or how to find black markets that will sell you illegal firearms does not change that calculus very much.
If the guns themselves become easy to manufacture I think that there will be more emphasis on controlling and tracing ammunition, including primers and propellants for handloading. Making stable, uniform smokeless propellant starting from raw cellulose and over-the-counter chemicals is a huge investment of skill and effort. Making black powder is more tractable but still a lot of effort.
Most aspiring firearm enthusiasts who are not criminals could get legally permitted in Europe if they were willing to invest as much effort as it would take to make their own guns and ammunition from scratch. Most criminals who want guns just as crime accessories don't have the discipline and drive to make weapons that they can't buy. (Thank goodness, or homemade bombs with wireless command detonation would already be common instruments in areas with gang rivalry.)
> Making stable, uniform smokeless propellant starting from raw cellulose and over-the-counter chemicals is a huge investment of skill and effort. Making black powder is more tractable but still a lot of effort.
Re: black powder, I think you're overestimating the level of effort a bit. It certainly hasn't gotten harder to make it after the Industrial Revolution. Hell, there are even WikiHow articles on it: https://www.wikihow.com/Make-Black-Powder
It's the primers that are, from my understanding, the tricky thing to replace. I suspect that if push came to shove, though, a primer shortage/restriction would lead to designs of new cartridges and firearms built around spark plugs or some other alternative source of ignition. 3D printing would enable the sorts of quick prototyping necessary to rapidly iterate on unconventional firearm designs like that.
> Most criminals who want guns just as crime accessories don't have the discipline and drive to make weapons that they can't buy.
Well that's the thing: they don't have to be the ones making them, just like how drug dealers are not usually the ones themselves making the drugs. This is something that could very well be the purview of some black market cottage industry.
> (Thank goodness, or homemade bombs with wireless command detonation would already be common instruments in areas with gang rivalry.)
I mean, bombings are pretty common in a lot of places. See also: Ireland during the Troubles, the Middle East today, etc. And with quadcopters being widespread, it's probably only a matter of time before we start seeing drone bombings.
Cat's pretty much out of the bag. Pandora's opened the box. The only viable approach to stopping violence is to end it at its source: by addressing the reasons why people commit violence in the first place.
People who commit violence out of ideological devotion may rise to the level of competence required to assemble weapons from over the counter components. It already happens occasionally, like with the 2005 London bombings. I very much doubt that the typical gun toting criminal of today will rise to that level of competence. I wouldn't expect the median member of the law abiding public to successfully make a rifled firearm and ammunition given a machine shop, a shed full of agricultural chemicals, and a year to practice. My expectations are even lower for the median armed criminal. Most will get distracted or injure themselves before reaching success.
I don't think that a cottage industry of weapons-for-criminals is going to spring up in the same way as illicit drug production. The drug trade is nearly impossible to vanquish because so much of it is victimless; neither the seller nor the consumer attracts much attention in the usual case. But if you're dealing weapons specifically to people who can't get them by legal means, that's much riskier. Most would-be attackers who meet with a "bomb seller" are actually meeting with LEO.
The novelty factor of "3D printed" firearms leads to law enforcement worrying about them disproportionately to their actual significance. They're mostly an exotic hobby.
I think the point was to note that shutting down manufacturing us no longer a useful way to prevent firearms from being made. They don't need to be 3D printed right now because there are factories. If all the factories shut down tomorrow, that wouldn't stop new guns from being produced.
Or you could simply add additional penalties for commiting actual violent crimes with weapons, which we already do. See, for example, strongarm robbery vs armed robbery. That way criminals are punished for misuse of firearms while law abiding owners don't have their rights infringed.
And how is that working out? Last time i checked, the US was leading in violent crime, death and suicide by guns, mass shootings, etc. among developed nations, by a lot.
Why does it matter if someone is murdered by a gun vs. cut into cubes by a cartel or brained with a hammer or anything else? If you don't limit it to murders and suicides by guns, your claim is flatly untrue. Japan's suicide rate is greater than the US's murders and suicides combined. Russia has far more murders despite having fairly restrictive gun laws.
In any case, the US is inherently more violent and criminal than other nations in general independent of guns. It also has extremely violent subpopulations centered in major urban centers that tilt the numbers significantly. Outside of a few specific cities like Baltimore, Detroit, Chicago, etc. the US is extremely peaceful and low in crime.
I'm not sure what this has has to do with what I said. To me it appears to be a non-sequitur, so I suspect either I and completely missing what you're trying to express, or you misunderstood what I was.
> I think the point was to note that shutting down manufacturing us no longer a useful way to prevent firearms from being made.
And I'm saying that's incorrect. It's not wrong in the binary sense of "no firearms made" vs "some firearms made", but rather in the sense that if the mass-production output were to drop significantly, prevalence and use would also drop significantly (although this would be mitigated by there being a huge stock of existing guns).
And just to clarify - I'm not saying that this is the way to "solve the gun problem" in the US though.
> if the mass-production output were to drop significantly, prevalence and use would also drop significantly
I'm not sure that can be assumed anymore. The 3D printer market has been absolutely exploding. I and my siblings got one as a present from my father for Christmas in 2020. Some reports[1]state there was a 68% increase globally in personal desktop 3D printer units in 2020, and that's after there were manufacturing problems to overcome.
If if shutting a factory today might suppress supply slightly in the future, I suspect that within 5-10 years the point will be mostly moot.
> I have seen designs for completely printed models, including the bolt carrier
Are these parts functional? I would be literally stunned if you could 3D print a bolt carrier group that lasts more than a clip.
The last I looked (and it's been a couple years), the designs exist, but are largely non-functional and/or still require several parts to be made of steel.
The barrel is another problematic piece. I get that with enough plastic, you might be able to make it handle the pressure (and that's a pretty big might). Even presuming you do, plastic is not hard enough to allow rifling, so we're back to smoothbore rifles, which practically haven't been seen since the Civil War. Worse yet, every time you pull that trigger, the heat and pressure will blast more of your plastic out the end of the barrel. That's going to ruin your accuracy, and at a certain point, you'll start losing muzzle velocity because the barrel no longer seals around the bullet.
Let's put it this way: producing the parts of a gun which simply must be made of metal, in a machine shop, is substantially easier than synthesizing methamphetamine.
3d printing everything except the parts you mentioned is quite tractable, and constantly improving from an already acceptably-high standard.
No, the chokepoint here is primers. Which are scarce on the ground at the moment, and I expect will receive significant regulatory encumbrance in the near future.
In addition to priners, smokeless powder is also difficult to home manufacture. Black powder is easy enough, but it's not powerful enough to cycle most modern semi-automatics and fouls up the barrel something awful.
Something like ammonpulver would be comparable in power and cleanliness to modern smokeless powder, but is pretty corrosive and gets ruined if it absorbs too much water.
The same types of people eho develop 3d gun models are also putting effort into developing alternatives for primers, powder, and cases. Homemade metal barrels were an issue a few years ago but ECM barrels made it easy to make them at home with only a couple hundred dollars in tooling.
My observations of how 3D printing is evolving doesn't align with OPs. Why go to great lengths to print pressure bearing parts while many of them can be crafted from off the shelf parts from your local Home Depot? Stock steel, a welder, and some airsoft parts can all be used as functional substitutes and a lot of creators have functional models from these methods.
In most parts of the United States a barrel (or anything other than the frame/receiver for that matter) is not a regulated part. You can order it online and have it show up at your door without ID or signing for it. Even in areas where barrels are regulated it only requires a few materials to electrochemically machine a barrel.
There's been a lot of progress doing home ECM rifling of metal barrels. The objective is accessible firearms personal sovereignty, not specifically plastic barrels necessarily.
Current 3D printed guns like the FGC-9[1] make use of standard metal parts that can be bought at a hardware store. The bolt requires a single weld, though people have made weldless bolts[2]. The barrel is a metal tube that you can buy at a hardware store and rifle with ECM. Ammunition can be manufactured from blanks or deactivated ammo (both of which are legal in many parts of the EU).
The end result is a firearm built entirely with parts that are legal to purchase in the EU.[3] This will only get easier as 3D printers improve and weapon designs are refined.
You have no idea how capitalist markets work apparently. If the DEA decided to buy up all the street drugs and burn them it would create a million new drug dealers overnight as the prices would spike. Less guns is not the solution. The solution is to round up all the humans and cut their thumbs off so they can’t use tools to kill each other.
We've all grown so comfortable in modern America that we forget that default state of human nature is subjugation and repression and has been for thousands of years.
Modern America is a historical anomaly. The powerful aren't peaceful by choice.
It's the SECOND amendment in the constitution for a reason.
There are a lot of countries where the populace isn't generally armed and they are doing just fine. It's not like America is the only free country out there.
The number of laws that can put you in prison in America is an impressive anomaly as well.
There was a commission from he government to find out how many laws existed in America and after years of looking into it they gave up and the final conclusion was that no one knows.
Everyone looks to the government to solve their problems instead of solving it themselves.
If the defenseless had guns they would be able to protect themselves. I am not sure if that would result in more peace or more war, but it would definitely be a more just world.
It's funny that you think it would somehow come out to less guns in the world, when in reality it would just mean that the rest of the companies which still exist would take up the slack.
No it's not. The British disarmed colonial India to make it easier to control. This resulted in tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths in Bangladesh, when the Pakistani army was able to commit genocide against a disarmed populace: https://www.thedailystar.net/backpage/bangladesh-liberation-...
> Most of the weapons used by the Mukti Bahini were taken from defeated soldiers. Then, there were homemade bombs, knives and even instances of the use of bows and arrows.
> Walking along the gallery of the Liberation War Museum in Dhaka where a number of weapons, including rifles and machineguns used in the Liberation War of 1971, had been put on display, Shahzaman Mozumder Bir Protik, a guerrilla freedom fighter, reminisced saying “They had to earn their weapons.”
It seems incredibly optimistic to assume that one gun company shutting down would meaningfully change the number of guns available. The demand is still sky high; at best this would delay consumption until other manufacturers add more capacity.
More realistically it would change what type of guns people own. Fewer Colts, more Glocks, I presume. From a public policy perspective that’s no change at all.
That would have been interesting for many, many reasons, the poetry of which being the least interesting. They're a sovereign nation so what happens when you manufacture guns in Indian country? How beholden are you to the BATF's regs, assuming you build with the intention of the firearm never leaving the res?
That is an interesting question... Not sure what the answer would be. But I'm pretty sure they are still under federal law, just not individual states. So probably personal manufacturing fine, for sale (even on the res) would require an FFL.
Seems the BATF thinks tribes are under their thumb, but then, that’s no different than how they regard everyone. These aren’t exactly applicable but seem to demonstrate that BATF has no problem enforcing its regs and the federal laws in Indian Country.
“tribal police departments generally do not qualify for the exemption from payment of the transfer tax for NFA firearms, are not eligible to receive firearms interstate, and can not possess a ‘post-1986’ machinegun.”[0]
“federal authorities alleged Ho-Chunk Inc. and its subsidiaries had violated federal tobacco laws by shipping and selling “untaxed, unstamped cigarettes to businesses in Nebraska other states.”[1]
CZ has handled it's past mergers pretty well. I was pretty bummed with the Dan Wesson purchase, but overall I don't think much changed other than the logo.
Can someone more familiar with this world explain where the law ended up on building your own guns? I recall a controversy around whether you can even share open source 3D printing plans (which to me felt like a violation of the first amendment) but leaving that aside, I've also heard that it is possible to do so using more traditional methods.
In a majority of states you can manufacture your own firearms as long as you didn't build them with the intent to sell. To do that would require an FFL.
I can't remember exactly, but in California you can make your own, but it has to have a serial number. I can't remember what other restrictions they have.
I have a memory that around 10 years ago, Australia banned the very act of downloading and possessing 3-D files to make firearms. Theoretically, if your computer is seized and found to contain the SolidWorks files to make a Ruger, for example, you can be prosecuted. However I don't know that this was enacted into national law or later struck down.
A man in Queensland was given a suspended sentence for printing parts of a gun that did not together constitute a usable gun without some additional pieces[1].
Apparently there have been efforts there to ban 3-D printing of guns but so far they have not been successful.
In the U.S., while it is physically possible to do anything within the privacy of one's home, it is technically illegal to print a gun if you are not legally permitted to possess one.[2]
There are also existing laws on the books against plastic/undetectable guns which presumably would apply as well to resin/PETG/PLA printed firearms that have few or zero metal parts. Actually, one wonders why there haven't been more incidents of plastic guns smuggled onto aircraft in recent years, perhaps because K9 teams of bomb sniffing hounds are randomly used to detect bomb-making ingredients while standing in line at security. They are trained presumably to smell gunpowder as well as other chemicals. Leave your "Gunpowder Solid Men's Cologne" at home.
Well it'd be almost impossible to sneak brass or steel cased cartridges through a metal detector (also the copper jacket on the bullet itself). Not to mention that you need a metal firing pin to hit the primer.
> Actually, one wonders why there haven't been more incidents of plastic guns smuggled onto aircraft in recent years
The root cause of this is that very few people want to smuggle guns onto aircraft. I think the biggest group of gun smugglers at this point are TSA penetration testers.
The State department tried to ban the exchange of digital plans for very simplistic, rudimentary 3d-printed pistols under ITAR regs. It was an over-reaction to an exaggerated fear that everyone could print guns out of plastic now, and I think the last administration (Trumps') finally revoked the rule. You can, in fact, print a gun out of plastic that will work, but it may be cheaper and more effective to build one out of parts from home depot if you're so inclined.
For the most part it's always been legal to build a firearm for your own use (not to sell - that would be regulated under the Fed's commerce powers). Some states make it more burdensome than others. Making a high quality anything requires skill, but guns are very primitive mechanical devices, so the bar is very low to make something of effective working order. You won't be hitting a gong at 1000 yards, but you'll hit a pie plate at 20 pretty easy.
> You won't be hitting a gong at 1000 yards, but you'll hit a pie plate at 20 pretty easy.
Depends on what you're building. If you're making your own AR-15 lower, there's no detrimental impact on accuracy - all of those parts are contained within the 'upper', which (in the US) is not regulated as a firearm.
If you're building from scratch, though, accuracy is really not going to happen. Not unless you have actual machine tools and training.
This is very true - it’s not hard for a practical man to build a quality piece — my reference to the twenty yard pie plate was more a Home Depot pipe and nail model.
YouTube censored the vids of casting your own AR lower out of beer cans, but it’s still online[0].
If you have a modicum of skill in the garage you can also fashion an AK receiver out of a shovel (or so I am told).[1]
“So, there you have it. In 2012, a drunk guy named “Boris” -who lived in what he refers to as “Communist Massachusetts”- built an AKM from an old $2 field shovel and a bunch of parts kits that can be found all over the country. His total cost was $232.”
Honest question: How is this relevant to Hacker News? As a non-American i was rather bewildered to find this here. Is there a serious overlap between gun enthusiasts and the IT community in the US?
I think this is part of being very systems-oriented and technically-minded. Appreciating the liabilities and brittleness of systems but also the fallibility of men and their aspirations/intentions. The focus on garbage-in/garbage-out, the primacy of an “RTFM” ethos of learning and understanding obscure phenomenon that affect outcomes. Probably some degree of being perpetually frustrated with a “user community” that can’t be bothered to really appreciate how things work spills into policy discussions.
I don't doubt that you've seen examples of that, but I've seen plenty that go the other way. Heavily downvoted comments that are only slightly defensive of him, and others that rise to the top for bashing him when it isn't even relevant to the conversation. It really depends on the thread. Different topics attract different crowds.
I saw a lot of downvotes and defenses like you say, but the down votes, as far as I have seen, were on rants or reddit type blurbs about Trump which people do not like here. And the defenses were well thought out. Anyway that is what I have seen; i started checking because I thought it weird there are so many Trump supporters on here (might still be the case: as eu person I also find it strange there are a fair amount religious people on here; I do not mind, I am just curious to things I do not expect to find).
The average vocal HN commenter on these matters are much more likely to be a fairly conservative techno-republican than elsewhere on the internet e.g. nearly every thread I've seen on the Capitol Riots (apart from the main one, which after being flagged and restored had an influx of fresh blood) has some kind of smarmy "ah yes but what about the (black people) looting and murdering in the summer".
Similarly any thread on gun control shows just how much some Americans view gun violence as a mere cost of doing business so they can own an assault rifle.
You can put this question pretty much under every 2nd post on the front page
Anyways there are lot of SV entrepreneurs on HN so an (old) american company sold to a European (especially from the former Eastern block) is always relevant.
Also HN is much more than an "IT community" I think, much more diverse
I'm originally from the Great Plains area (center of the US and, in fairness, a rather conservative region) and work IT. I'd say about half of my American coworkers were some level of gun user (from "I own one and know how to use it" to "don't tell my wife I bought another one").
I would probably fit the description of "typical West Coast liberal" were it not for the Colt 1991 factory customized we have in the gun locker (along with a couple other boom sticks). Reformed Midwesterner who didn't sell all of the guns after the conversion. Don't carry that Colt, and don't even shoot it much anymore, but the story does interest me because I can admire fine mechanical things, and it is good to know that Colt isn't going to some private equity firm like Remington.
I’m so torn on guns. If you had asked me about them when I was younger, I would tell you that I don’t think they have a place in society and that we should ban them.
But as I’ve aged, I see class structures and the power of the elites much more clearly. I see how systems can be more violent than people. And that individuals do not have a lot of power these days because society is filled with so many systems.
Owning a gun returns some power to the individual. I don’t want my power for defense given to the police, I want to control that power. I don’t care if the situations I want it for will never happen, I want the comfort of having that power.
> Owning a gun returns some power to the individual. I don’t want my power for defense given to the police, I want to control that power. I don’t care if the situations I want it for will never happen, I want the comfort of having that power.
This, exactly. But also:
> we should ban them.
That “we” does a lot of heavy lifting to obscure that fact that the prohibition of guns consists of people with guns telling other people when they may and may not have guns.
I do think there is a large overlap with American IT workers and gun enthusiasts. I happen to be one of them. But I do agree with your comment. As much as I may find the topic "Czech gunmaker CZG buys Colt" interesting, I believe it does not belong on Hacker News. Little by little Hacker News is turning into reddit. There is a reason why I come here and not reddit. The mods should take this post down to ensure the integrity of Hackers News.
"IT" is an overloaded term, so I don't blame the confusion. When I say IT, I am referring to jobs like Software Development, sysadmins, technicians, data scientists, etc.
I'm an American working as a software engineer for a tech company and I'm a gun enthusiast.
Do I carry one with me? No. Do I have any set up for home defense? No. Do I enjoy shooting high power rifles at the range on the weekend? You bet I do.
FWIW I own more tech stuff by value than guns, so, there's that.
I don't think it matters where you're from, I don't see how hackers/start up entrepreneurs would be particularly interested in this story or how this even gratifies one's intellectual curiosity, either. But I feel that way about many articles that find their way to the front page. I checked the comments expecting that I missed some interesting context, but I didn't. In any case, it's not too much of a burden to flag/hide and move along.
In my opinion Hacker News isn’t strictly an IT community but a platform that focuses on technology, startup culture and entrepreneurship that allows followers with a mix of technical obsession, business ambition, and aspirational curiosity to discuss among themselves to have some sort of intellectual reasoning.I may be wrong.
Hackernews definitely has a political angle to it as well. It's hard to nail it down but the idea that HN is a totally free of groupthink is really dumb.
There is a large overlap between any serious engineering discipline and firearms enthusiasts.
The engineering and physics involved in building/tuning guns and shooting accurately is very interesting.
Furthermore, the "renegade" spirit required to reject the status-quo and push the envelope in science and engineering attracts quite a few of the same types of people.
Finally, the idea of "banning" guns -- which every basically qualified engineer or physicist should be capable to building from readily available materials and tools -- makes them even more interesting. If for no other reason than to illuminate preposterous and insulting nature of the idea.
Canadian. I think it's interesting. Canada buy some stuff from Colt Canada, apparently, occasionally require designs to be manufacturered by Colt Canada for service rifles, such as the one used by the Rangers in the North.
If CZ ends up picking up Colt Canada too, seems like they'd be in good hands.
Some European countries have more guns than you’d think. Iirc it’s estimated that some countries like Switzerland have more guns per capita than some US states (New Jersey is usually the lowest per capita).
The difference is in gun culture. Very few Europeans identify with guns as much as Americans occasionally do.
> The difference is in gun culture. Very few Europeans identify with guns as much as Americans occasionally do
It’s an issue that’s become culturally politicized. I bet folks in Switzerland don’t say stuff like “people in other cantons cling to their guns and religion.”
I believe gun ownership in Switzerland is very closely tied to compulsory military service. It's very much an outlier as statistics go - issuing every adult male a rifle isn't so much a gun culture as a military strategy.
(Czechia does has a strong civilian ownership, however)
Finland also has a lot of guns, about 1.5mil out of a population of 5.5mil. Compare this to the 57,000 registered guns among New Jersey’s 8.8mil residents. It’s not just military service, even if that explains Switzerland specifically.
Europe is a more diverse place ideologically and socially than most Americans tend to imagine it. The place is bigger and more complex than just Paris or Berlin, just like how America is not just NY or Houston.
The reasons and culture vary. Finns go hunting, Americans going to a gun range is a sport. And most of those finnish guns are probably decades old and long out of use.
And going back to Switzerland, I was at a festival a few years back which was almost cancelled due to potent protesting by several neighboring towns since the main sport-shooting range was at the same location as the festival's HQ. Thankfully the organizer was able to talk the mayor out of it. We later heard that a neighboring town was able to accommodate the sudden influx.
I've heard from friends there is a similar passion in many towns in Germany and Austria. I would venture a guess that outside many European cities shooting for sport is much more commonplace.
I think schuetzen or schützen is kind of generic for a shooter/marksman. I don’t know about Anschutz - I always associated with the particular rifle maker/style and the associated matches but I know it’s a surname as well.
I own no firearms, but I’ve gotta admit that Sako does some really good advertising to connect their firearms to everything you just mentioned. I don’t even hunt and it makes me want one.
That NJ number is misleading, as you're not actually required to register guns in NJ. I am quite sure there are far more than 57k guns in NJ, as you can watch the NJ NICS updates daily and it's been like "1500 in the queue, 2500 in the queue" every day for the past 11 months.
I am betting that 90% of those are hunting rifles, and the overlap between computer geeks and people who hunt these days is pretty low based on my personal experience.
It's growing though! Growing right alongside the Farm to Table movement is the Catch, Clean, Cook movement.
There's also a significant, separate overlap between computer geeks and people that like to exercise their rights (See: Crypto Wars) which results in non hunting gunowners.
in the US maybe? My comment was in the context of Europe.
In my father's generation there were a ton of hunters (something like 70% of my in laws), but I have met a single person who hunts in my career in IT in Europe.
Guns for personal defence/sport are just not common on this side of the pond, I think.
Heh. Purely coincidentally, the only people I've known to have any guns were my engineering schoolmates (brought them to school -- apparently that would be a cause for panic and a SWAT deployment in the US but it's kind of a "meh, whatever" thing around here in .cz.)
Depends which part of the U.S. you're talking about. In 10 states campus carry is allowed. In a number of other states, the campuses can choose to allow it.
There's also some overriding laws, depending on the state. For instance, some states consider dorm rooms or personal vehicles to be an extension of ones private residence, and therefore not subject to firearm restrictions.
Yeah, Czechia is full of surprising moments. I remember my classmate bringing knife that could reliably kill somebody to school and spreading butter on his bread with it. The teachers noticed, made some stupid joke about it, and continued lecturing.
Are you sure? Most gun enthusiasts at tech companies are in the closet. Had I known just how much my bosses hate guns (all the way up to the CEO), I would have kept my mouth shut about my hobby.
It would be an amazing coincidence if none of your coworkers were interested in guns. Around 30% of Californians have at least one gun in their home. Naively extrapolating: that means if you have 15 coworkers, there is a 99.5% chance that at least one of them owns a gun. Even if only 10% of bay area techies have guns, the odds that at least one of your coworkers has a gun is still over 80%.
When my hobby became publicly known at work, I suddenly discovered I had quite a few coworkers who liked guns. They were quiet about it at work because they were afraid (rightfully) of hurting their careers.
Back in the early 2000s I worked at a company where we did a fun “Bring Your Gun to Work day” on Wednesdays. Instead of going to a restaurant at lunchtime we went to the shooting range instead. Was a really popular activity, probably 1/3 of the office participated. Some people brought several guns to try.
Good times! Could never do this these days in Silicon Valley though :(
Honestly I would rather there wasn't a "bring a lethal weapon" to work day. How very American.
If you want to go down to the range after-work, by all means do so, but the way you Americans trivialise a toy good for nothing but war in many cases is really fascinating.
Trivialize is probably not the right word. Exercising our right to bare arms is built into our constitution.
Firearms are most definitely not toys. A bring your gun to work day is a way for coworkers to bond outside of work as well as a great learning experience for the ones without much knowledge on how to safely and responsibly handle a firearm. It’s also a lot of fun shooting targets.
"but the way you Americans trivialise a toy good for nothing but war in many cases"
Ever heard of hunters? A LOT of people hunt. Also, until relatively recently it was common for american kids to bring guns to schools, and leave them in their car until after school so they could go hunting, etc. Instead of addressing things like mental health issues, it's easier to demonize guns because the politicians don't actually have to do anything other than introduce token legislation.
It's a right written in the constitution, and only referring to guns as "weapons of war" is political rhetoric. And hunting is not the only reason to own a gun- that's also political rhetoric.
Anecdote: I went to science/tech magnet school, and quite a few of us were interested in guns. Same thing in engineering school (though that was GA Tech, so kind of a gimme).
> Finally, the idea of "banning" guns -- which every basically qualified engineer or physicist should be capable to building from readily available materials and tools -- makes them even more interesting. If for no other reason than to illuminate preposterous and insulting nature of the idea.
By this logic, almost nothing should be banned, do you endorse that position?
Something to note is that most physical things that are banned are one-time-use (drugs, organs, etc), whereas the shelf life and resale value of the gun are much longer. Also the classification of "gun" is much wider than classifications of most other illegal things
Trivial counterexample: I can't make an Apple M1 chip in my garage. I can't make (good?) LSD in my garage. I can put a metal pipe on a board with a nail and have a simple, reliable 12ga shotgun. I can 3d print a 22LR pistol, or even a 9mm subgun (just add pipe for barrel, weight for bolt, and some common springs).
I assume your response was probably born out of some political frustration, and I respect that. Happy to discuss specifics of the this position on the practicality and effectiveness of gun bans.
Where are you going to get the bullets from? Or for a shotgun, where is the powder from, the pellets etc.
I live in the UK, I quite like clay pigeon shooting, would it be a shock to you that American mass shootings basically aren't news worthy anymore unless they are more than 2 dozen people now?
That's not correct, if you want a rifled barrel, you do need to electro-machine it, and you might want some airsoft parts, but everything else is bolts and printed parts.
I don’t think my response was born of political frustration. I think most existing gun control legislation does nothing but annoy legal gun owners. Though I would support things like universal background checks, cool down periods, and price floors to make it harder to get the cheap handguns that are used for most gun crimes. I’m not super informed on gun issues though, and I’d be interested in learning more.
I just think “an expert can make this in their garage” is a really bad reason to legalize something. I don’t think IEDs or street meth should be legal. (Apple M1s and LSD are probably fine though.)
The issue is "banning" something which those versed in the art know is impossible to ban -- thereby only removing it from the law abiding, and not from the abusers of said item. (proof: Research how cartels get weapons produced under such a "ban". TL;DR: Trivially, by contract engineers w/ basic modern milling machinery.)
Frightened, ignorant (of the state of the art) people are led to believe "banning" is helping them "making them safe", when instead it is harming them: nobody law-abiding remains to come to their aid, while abusers and thugs wield powerful weapons, unopposed. Instead, benighted government officials ban common farmer livestock varmint rifles by the hundreds of thousands (see: Canada, just now).
So, no -- if someone wants to ban something, then they should darn well consult with anyone who knows something about that item, to see if A) it makes sense, and B) if it will actually prevent the violent from obtaining/using it.
As a frequent HN user living in Canada, our country ranks in the top ten of (legal) gun ownership (34/100 people own a gun). Building/buying/customizing gun is a lively market, with strong crossover into the the geek community of all political stripes.
Plus it's a story about a finical acquisition of a famed American brand so its a trisect of "interesting to hackers" of the HN sort.
Not to mention the very fast growing 3d-printed gun parts and DIY smithing groups within these committees where it gets technical very fast.
> Finally, the idea of "banning" guns -- which every basically qualified engineer or physicist should be capable to building from readily available materials and tools -- makes them even more interesting. If for no other reason than to illuminate preposterous and insulting nature of the idea.
This makes no sense. Assaulting someone is illegal, but anyone can do it. It's still illegal.
That's a cop out. Literally all of our laws exist because some portion of the population are shitheads who can't be trusted. Who cares if the thing we're banning is intrinsically bad or not. Phrasing it in Latin doesn't make it any more compelling either.
We also ban nuclear and biological weapons for good reason. Does it really matter that they are harder to obtain? (Tip: They won't be in the long run, there was a time when guns were hard to make too).
> Who cares if the thing we're banning is intrinsically bad or not.
I’m sure you would care if the thing we’re banning is something you like that doesn’t hurt anyone.
> We also ban nuclear and biological weapons for good reason.
Do we? I thought we built them and kept them ready to use.
> Phrasing it in Latin doesn't make it any more compelling either.
Those are legal terms because actual judges, lawyers, law enforcement officers, and others have discussed this extensively and determined that the distinction is relevant.
As a Brit, our gun controls work quite well. It basically means the idiot down the pub is not allowed to have a rifle/pistol. It's not like they cease to exist - we're still the world's #2 arms exporter.
Dont forget the hundreds of years of engineering required just to get to the 1911. It's not like the 1911 was pooped out one day. Pistol and revolver engineering is amazing for the fact reliability and predictability are the forefront of needs. Everything else is technically optional. It's and industry that's standing on the shoulders of giants without a doubt.
To be faaaaaair, without Colt's revolutionary wheely gat, the 1911 may not have happened when it did. Let that marinate.
For certain, but let’s not forget that the time period of the late 19th-early 20th century represented a flowering of innovation and invention across all areas of life and tooling that is arguably very unique in human history. That spirit and the thinking that was applied in such diverse areas is staggering, and as I read more about it (say, 1868-1915ish?) the more I’m convinced it’s very under-appreciated.
>That spirit and the thinking that was applied in such diverse areas is staggering, and as I read more about it (say, 1868-1915ish?) the more I’m convinced it’s very under-appreciated.
HELL YEA! Seriously, that time period was just dumped with brilliance in its own right, especially in engineering. It's so amazing what accomplishments were made with such basic tech. I mean seriously, the basic machine shop these days is FAR more advanced than what was available to the engineering cats back then. But those folks were spitting out brilliance like we use toilet paper after a pre-pandemic taco Tuesday.
There's a part of me that thinks our general mindset to engineering, learning and research is fundamentally different compared to that golden era of science and engineering. Honestly, I think it's for the worst. We're too subservient to technology rather than being the ones holding the chains and whips to the machines. That's going to be our downfall. Being switches to the machines and not knowing when to switch them off.
> Is there a serious overlap between gun enthusiasts and the IT community in the US?
Anecdotally, but yes. Same with cars, AV & musical gear, other technical-ish stuff.
I chalk it up to technical / engineering mentalities, disposable income, and US culture. Give nerds money and the ability to blow stuff up... and they'll blow stuff up.
B) A pulse on who is opening their purse and looking
C) National security implications from the foreign purchaser of American munitions creator
D) C but with Eastern Europe. A lot of Silicon Valley is funded by funds with Russian general partners using British Virgin Islands entities which have Russian limited partners who made all their money with all the underpriced public assets in Russia, aka Oligarchs. Our salaries in a lot of startups come from Russian oligarchs. We consider that controversial because so much energy is also spent vilifying Russia and their money and its also hilarious that we are making them wealthy too, while they provide the capital to make us wealthy. So people pay attention to other constructive ways of getting Russian money into US assets. Soviet Union and satellite states are just too obvious. Even though one might as well use the Cayman Islands or British Virgin Islands.
E) No national security implication and just liking CZG and their quality control, and how that affects the general Czech gun image and brand.
F) Americans have a general consensus in favor of gun use, gun trading, gun modification, for vary wide ranges of reasons. Similar to computers and tinkering. So it will be rare to find a US-centric forum that fairly often posts culture related articles that would ignore this.
So this headline is a perfect storm. To the top, boys!
Early computers were created to calculate ballistic tables for artillery fire support in military.
Most of the innovations in computers and tech are direct results from military arms research.
Silicon Valley didn’t just sprout from nothing. There were lots of engineers in the area that worked to support military contract making weapons, and their kids started computer companies.
I'd say $220 mil is a pretty good price for a company that hasn't introduced an innovative product in 50 years. Colt's main products are the AR-15 (introduced ~1963), the various 1911 models (introduced in—duh—1911), and the single action army revolvers (introduced in 1873). It must be a hell of a marketing effort to keep flogging 50–150 year old products.
Can you name any small arms manufacturer who has introduced a successful, innovative design in the past 50 years? The design space seems pretty well explored at this point.
Sig's recent P320 system is another obvious example, where they've completely modularized the fire control group, allowing that to be swapped freely between multiple grips, calibers, and even form factors.
The Glock 17 was introduced 39 years ago, not quite 50 years but still.
It's also worth pointing out that while the manufacturing techniques used by Glock were new the actual design is essentially identical to the browning hi-power.
Materials are an incredibly significant element of design. Some of the most significant innovations of the AR-15 were in terms of materials. The Hi-Power also uses a single-action hammer rather than a striker, so I'm not sure how the striker-fired Glock is "essentially identical" to it.
Sig p365, ultra compact with 10 round capacity, hadn’t been done before.
Any of the suppressor manufacturers.
Ultra long range bolt guns from a variety of manufacturers (notably not Remington, colt, etc).
Several novel application PDW systems (personal defense weapon). B&T, FN, Sig, HK, and others.
Optics have rally stepped up. Always on 8 year battery life 300ft submersible red dot sights from aim point. Crazy precision scopes from vortex, nightforce, a few others.
It’s certainly a hobby that you can spend $100k on really easily exploring a variety of styles of defense and sport shooting.
This is likely a move so they can continue to either a) import firearms from outside of the US for sale or b) to gain traction and tooling to produce CZ products domestically in the case that the Biden Admin actually gets some form of "assault weapon" ban passed. It's important to note, they'll include pistols that hold more than 15 rounds as "assault weapons".
I'm so happy to see this posted here along with the lively and mostly civil discussion.
There is a lot of crossover between the tech and firearms community and for good reasons. The engineering and design of the firearms, gear and especially optics is fascinating. The external ballistics and math involved to hit targets at 1000 yards and beyond with all of the apps and sensors required. The breathing, aiming and movement techniques brings a nice physical element as well.
I've taken several firearms classes over the years and I'm amazed at how many hardcore tech people I meet there - top engineers at top companies (Uber, Google, etc.). These aren't mid-level PMs or entry-level script kiddies either; these are the top guys solving for the hardest engineering problems.
Despite the stereotypes, the tech community as with all other communities is not a monolith that walks in lockstep. It's disappointing that some of us need to hide our hobbies from those who would unfairly pass judgment because of their own phobias and biases. The firearms community is no different than the people who are into fast cars, motorcycles, beer making, wine tasting, maker faire, etc.
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[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 341 ms ] threadThere's a lesson here that's universally applicable well beyond gun manufacturers: You can't rest on your laurels and attempt to coast on brand value, even #1 brand value. You still always have to be competing.
220 mil is a lot. Most companies won't be worth this much.
Except for the US, guns are mostly sold to governments (policy, military) so the gun market isn't that large, and there is lots of competition.
(Sorry if the changed magasine design was about something else.)
But only at the Turks!
I can't easily find the valuation of Sony BMG or EMI at the time.
Note also that SpaceX has more accurate ballistic missiles than the U.S. and Russia (PeaceKeeper CEP = 40M, while SpaceX routinely lands rockets upright within a ~10M radius on a drone ship), and Google has more data than the CIA & NSA (why else did the NSA try to wiretap them?). The microchip revolution put enormous capabilities in the hands of those organizations that know how to code effectively, such that Silicon Valley startups can often do things that were the sole province of national governments for decades.
If a tech company were buying the country, market cap would be the appropriate metric, and market caps for those tech companies are in the $2T range, more than enough to pay a few times annual GDP.
One is travelling at tremendous speed (Mach 5 or something?) and has milliseconds for course-corrections, the aspires to come to a gentle halt and can close some feedback loops over and over again for thousands of milliseconds.
Edit: If you wish to make a weapons comparison, one might note that SpaceX can launch the mother of all MIRVs over and over again. The lower cost-to-orbit changes the economic calculus of rods-from-god, opening a possibility of a conventional-weapons bombardment from the other side of the planet for the first time.
Much higher, about mach 20 to 25. They are moving seriously fast.
That does a great job of placing the accuracy problem in context: That's ~7 km/second, or perhaps a mile per eyeblink.
It's not at all clear who has more data between GOOG and NSA. Both don't exactly declare the numbers, but it is known that in several recent years NSA has been the largest single buyer of spinning disks in the world.
Tech companies have indeed become powerful, but let's not get hyperbolic. The world hasn't become shadowrun quite yet.
The rest of the world moved to SSDs in ~2010. Google's been storing the whole web on flash since then. (I guess if you're archiving for slow-speed retrieval disks are still useful, but if that's your use-case, why wouldn't you use tape?)
Because there are many orders of latency magnitude between spinning rust and tape.
We still use a lot of spinning disk for precisely this reason - you get roughly 5x the online capacity for the same cost and automation does not whine about wanting the new shiny.
I guess it fits the NSA's use-case though, where they have ~thousands of analysts running complex queries but no external users, rather than ~billions of external users running well-defined queries.
Spinning disk is cost competitive with tape robots these days, while offering much better access performance. There's a few different vendors that supply this sort of setup, or you can build your own backblaze style. The core idea is you build storage servers that can hold more disks than can be active at any given moment. Powering up a drive and doing a seek is a lot faster than a tape robot.
In particular, Colt may have substantial liabilities, making the cost of the purchase to CZG larger than the amount of money that changed hands.
Sounds like me.
Guns in the US are near saturation from a market perspective and regulatory changes will eventually kick the floor out. Time to cash out... It's like when Phillip Morris bought Kraft and General Foods in the 80s to spin them off later when tobacco regulation came.
As to regulatory changes: support for a handgun ban is the lowest its been since Gallup started tracking the statistic in 1959: https://news.gallup.com/poll/150341/record-low-favor-handgun.... It's just 26% today, versus 60% in 1959.
Unlike with tobacco, there's no big scientific study or educational campaign that's going to drop. Guns are a well-ventilated issue.
The Dickey amendment got clarified in 2018, and the first earmarks for research were for FY2020 - so, I'd say we wait with those proclamations a few more years.
Funding of gun studies means we can make arguments backed up by data instead of partisan bickering. Calls to arm teachers in classrooms or mandate trigger locks on guns have real world effects, and both sides think they're right about it. Funding for studies of specific actions and policies help us as a society make more informed decisions.
More info: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5993411/
That is a needless personal attack, and I notice that you fail to make a coherent argument against what I said. Do you favor protections against unreasonable search and seizure only until too many criminals benefit from it? My point is that some people value liberty higher than life. If you think I'm wrong, feel free to say why, though I honestly don't know that you'll change my mind on that.
That doesn't seem like a personal attack so much as pointing out that this belief lacks empathy and is callous, which I tend to agree with. The standard argument, which I'm sure you're aware of, is that some controls and regulations on the ownership of firearms is a net good for society by reducing accidental deaths, suicides, and murders.
Guns aren't responsible for any of those things, people are. But guns dramatically change the scale at which they happen. Ignoring that because of a belief in absolute freedom from regulation for machines designed to kill is callous and un-empathic. Or, to use a synonym, psychopathic.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/psychopathy
Being principled and having higher ideals is not callous. It's the most noble thing a person can do.
The fact that people view it this way is very bad sign for how selfish and callous Americans have become.
Having ideals is exactly noble, or ignoble, as the ideals. There is nothing noble about devotion to ideas independent of the ideas one is devoted to.
“A world free of Jews” is an ideal people have been devoted to. People who were more devoted to that idea and willing to sacrifice more for it are not more noble than those less devoted by reason of their devotion.
But at the micro or individual level...sacrificing onesself for higher ideals/principles is the least psychopathic thing one can do ..one makes the ultimate sacrifice for what they believe is the betterment of OTHERS.
People may be misguided and some causes unjust, but they sacrificed themself for an ideal that they believe in.
It's the opposite of psychopathy.
Everything that you are and have is due to the sacrifices of many millions of people for principles they believed in. It's a shame modern society has become so ungrateful,materialistic, and distant from what so many people have sacrificed so much for.
IMO, this is similar to things like unreasonable search and seizure, where there is a robust set of laws, regulation and court judgements to guide government activity.
Until relatively recently, the notion of having a well regulated environment in this area was broadly accepted. But... many of the pro-gun-sales crowd peddles in doom in the name of selling stuff.
Millions of men died for their principles so you could sit here, and call having principles psychopathic.
Are the millions of men who purposefully sacrificed their own lives for this idea we call liberty psychopaths?
Modern Liberty is an anomaly in human history where the rule has been repression and subjugation for millenia.
People forget so easily. The decisions we make when we're comfortable will comeback to haunt us when things get uncomfortable.
Also, I'm flagging you for blatant personal attacks which violates like every HN guideline.
Without a coherent argument it's just an emotional attack.
You need to think about how unaware you are and maybe get some principles yourself.
Please keep the personal attacks to yourself and discuss ideas.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Examples:
- Are there correlations between outcomes and specific brands, configurations, or other attributes of firearm?
- Are there correlations between sales at specific outlets and outcomes?
- Is age and/or experience correlated with negative outcomes?
The assumption is that studying this would negatively impact gun ownership. I don't think that's true. Consider that anti-gun rhetoric over the .50 Barrett rifle. You may find that it's really a collector's item that isn't associated with crime. I'm sure there are many examples similar to this, that are blocked by black and white opinion on the matter, fueled by mutual ignorance.
https://www.nap.edu/read/18319/chapter/1
You've been repeatedly and blatantly lied to by the media and politicians about the CDC being "banned" from researching gun violence. The ban was on the use of public funds to advocate for specific gun laws/policies, not on research into the subject itself.
Until it comes to the Capitol, I suppose.
Seriously, I'm coming at this from a perspective of a country boy who went shooting 3-4 times a month as a teen, and earned a bounty for shooting pigeons on a farm. How much more demand can be filled for more guns the mostly sit around and gather dust? It's a market driven by ignorance and fear -- folks are treating these things as investments for a doomsday that will never come.
I'm not an anti-gun guy... I own two shotguns, a hunting rifle and a .22. What's the point of adding more? Pistols, AR-15 fetishization, etc aren't for me. What I have will probably be in great shape beyond my lifetime; if anything I might trade up if I got into skeet again.
Say you are right and no regulatory changes take place.... you're still going to have a cohort of old people who hit the gun hoarding profile start to die off and flood the secondary market with estate sales. My parents have a neighbor in the country that probably has >250 rifles, and there are way more people like that than the WW2/Korea generation that has mostly left us. What's the collector value of yet another AR-15 clone?
How many people do you know who collect smartphones? Also, waaaaaay more smartphones are sold per year in the US than guns (it's roughly two orders of magnitude difference), so if that represents some kind of ceiling, then it's a very high one that guns are nowhere near.
If you have two guns, it's simple to keep them maintained, cleared and secured when not in use. If you have 250 guns, you are extremely likely to lose track of them. And when you lose track, accidents happen. That's nothing to do with crime or responsibility or freedoms or the design of the gun - it's there in the statistics that country by country, there are more accidential gun deaths when there are more guns, and bringing our market to saturation is not serving anyone.
The statistics show record gun sales. More and more Americans are becoming firearms owners for the first time, and existing owners are expanding their collections.
It’s a matter of changing tastes as well. A Gen Z would cherish her mom’s old M1911A1 as a family heirloom but she’ll want a tricked-out Combat Master for her own use cases.
Where do you get your ideas that the market isnt interested in guns? The issue with colt and Remington has been zero innovation and updating with the times. At bass pro shop, you could take a brand new Remington bolt action and need a sledge hammer to pull the bolt. A same class benelli needed barely a pinkie's worth of strength to do the same. Buttery smooth while the new Remingtons were already acting rusty.
The market has been going striker fire as well. I haven't noticed a big push from colt or rem before they shut down. Maybe they did, but it was too little too late.
Theres a lot more going on than just gUnS bAd. I'm happy for the hit on chemicalized tobacco. Makes it easier for the organic, natural market, mostly cigars and cigarillos. Let that marinate.
Modern America is a historical anomaly.
And as inequality grows here in America and we slowly but surely descend back to what has been the default state of humanity for thousands of years...with a few rich and powerful with their neck on the rest of society who is poor...we'll be glad the average citizen has guns to fight back at some point.
There's a saying: History repeats itself.
Also, your violent crime rate is the 3rd worst in Europe.
The U.K. has a homicide rate of 1.2 per 100k while the U.S. is 5 per 100k. Meanwhile there are 400 MILLION guns in America.
So your government is repressive and the citizens are violent. Few countries need guns more the U.K.
I'm sorry your gov't has defanged it's citizens so much with minimal benefit and has citizens that actually fight against their best interest.
As benevolent with good intentions?
It's been a thousand years since the battle of Hastings and these same families still own 2/3s of the land.
And the inequality is just getting worse!
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/commentisfr...
Although if someone's in the beneficiary of that they wouldn't see the issue.
Revolution should be the last resort not the first.
The nobility violently won their land at the Battle of Hastings a thousand years ago and nothing has changed in the UK.
Is history taught so poorly in schools nowadays?
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.pbs.org/newshour/amp/econom...
The people living out fantasies are the people who are ignorant of human history.
Do you think the monarchys would have happily and peacefully turned over their power because of the power of love?
Because someone said please sir?
Any educated person who looks at cumulative human history can see this.
History as a rule is filled with subjugation by the powerful for thousands upon thousands of years.
There's the argument that policy cant reduce inequality, only plague, revolution, war, and state collapse, have ever reduced this.
What we have now in modern America is an anomoly... and if one looks carefully at the growing inequality...we're moving back towards equilibrium.
Wish history was taught better in schools.
I am not sure if you consider soliders to be "regular citizens" but many of the troops would have been been subjects or lower nobles. If strictly the nobility (without their troops) were going against the king he may have been able to resist if he had his own troops.
I am not sure how possible it would have been to run England without the nobility so it is possible that troops were not strictly needed, but I am guessing the threat of the use of the nobility's troops at least made the whole process easier.
It of course wasn't a civilian uprising or something like that which may have been more of your point?
My minimal understanding of the Magna Carta, as taught to an American in middle school, is that the Nobility forced the monarchy to sign a document ensuring they are subject to certain laws like others are (but not necessarily all the laws the average citizen is subject to), which in essence increased the power of the Nobility. They were able to do this because most the military might of the time was in the hands of the nobles. The Monarchy might have had a larger army than any single noble, but the combined military strength of the nobility dwarfed the Monarchy (wars were generally fought by calling on the nobility to supply soldiers).
My point was though that the loss of powers of the Monarchy in the UK had little to do with the citizens, it was a power grab by the nobility. And then I assume eventually much of the strength of the nobility was ceded to parliament and then parliament was eventually opened to commoners (I'm getting into speculation here, but speculation based on snippets of history I do know so I think is likely not far off the mark).
In the end, the ability of the citizens to have guns specifically had very little to do with it I think. AIUI, there are other countries with mostly figurehead monarchies which I suspect had a more gradual shift in power as well, and wasn't explicitly at the threat of violence. It may have been spurred by the sight of that happening in other countries, but really that's more a realization that the populace is learning that they have power in quantity, guns or not, and those ruling them needed to contend with that reality.
Attributing it all to guns is a vast oversimplification in my eyes. It may have had far more to do with the printing press.
Citation needed. I can't think of any good examples, except maybe for the Revolutionary French "Sans-culottes", who, as the name suggests, were _famously_ well-equipped.
How about the American revolutionaries?
They literally set the standard for modern democracy.
Every other country kisses America's ass.
America's defense budget is more than most countries GDP.
They should be grateful instead of hostile.
Hostility is allowed thanks to the FREEDOM OF SPEECH that America allows.
You're welcome.
I will certainly agree with that, in the sense that the idea that armed civilians (even if they have some automatic assault rifles) posing an internal threat to a modern, well equipped military; is laughable, and is likely advanced for disingenuous propaganda purposes.
Likewise, while it may not be to your taste, Afghanistan's polity has spent the last 200 years stubbornly being Afghan, to the surprise and annoyance of the British, Russians, Americans, etc.
In addition to losing all that, it would be a costly and drawn-out war against an entrenched enemy on hideously unsuitable terrain. The desire was absolutely there, Hitler hated Swiss Germans, but cooler heads prevailed, apparently.
Invading someplace just to discover if it is or isn't invade-able hasn't been a workable strategy since Franciso Pizzaro tried it on Atahualpa.
> The last person to successfully invade Switzerland was... Napoleon
While I understand the idea of deterrence, your statement certainly implies the existence of unsuccessful attempts, but I don't think any attempts have even been made since.
Edit: all I am saying is that if you'd originally said "the last person to invade Switzerland ..." we wouldn't be having this exchange.
Now that we have that out of the way, IIRC there was an Austrian army mountaineering patrol on a winter training mission that got lost on the border near Liechtenstein. They ended up on a hillside in Grisons, just over the border, where a shepherd informed them that they were in the wrong country.
After some debate about proceeding further down the valley in the hope of finding a bar or restaurant, they decided that it was too cold and wet, so they marched back the way they came && called for a helicopter to pick them up.
There you go, a relatively recent but unsuccessful invasion of Switzerland.
You misspelled despite has hence
They have laws REQUIRING able bodied males have a gun.
Also, The Swedes inteternally had a coup to overthrow the monarchy.
I can't imagine the monarchy turned over it's power due to love or because someone asked nicely.
I imagine there's a significant possibility the threat of weapons may have been present.
Switzerland has been a neutral state during the entirety of modern aerial warfare era, so I'm going to put that less on the guns and more on the "why would I want to attack Switzerland?" attitude of the last ~100 years.
I'm more interested in the list of countries that prevented their downfall despite their civilians not being armed to the teeth.
But she was shot and killed for breaking a window.
Thank God she was put down before more glass was harmed!
Oh wait, actually they're unrelated and you're being stupid.
Furthermore: rising up against a tyrant/despot is only possible if the population is very united; but a tyrant/despot, with enough economic power (or oppression of others) can make sure a population is ideologically or otherwise fractured/disunited and cause infighting.
This will actually make benefits of being well armed a liability as now you have a tyrant/despot and also can't walk safely in your neighboorhood.
The two-bits army was ideologically and organizationally aligned with an already functioning colonial government. But that's survivor bias too. I don't know if there are any reliable rules for the long term outcome of a successful insurrection.
The British didn't need to be defeated, they only needed to realize that they could no longer govern the colonies.
And one major way of doing this is by reducing your combat power, and by securing control over the means of providing defense.
> Furthermore: rising up against a tyrant/despot is only possible if the population is very united;
Historical counterexamples proliferate.
> This will actually make benefits of being well armed a liability as now you have a tyrant/despot and also can't walk safely in your neighboorhood.
Fortunately possession and carriage of armaments mitigates both those ills.
Guns are legal in America and it's safe to walk in my neighborhood.
Seems like a big commitment to using one.
It's not hard to build a reliable firearm with fairly little skill. In the United States, it's not even illegal to do so.
Point being: Yes they do, but also no they don't, because you're having different conversations about different types of weapons. Are fully plastic weapons commonly used for anything? Doesn't seem to be, and I would suspect the reason is because they'd be inclined to blow up/warp after a single fire.
At the current rate of development, I give it 10 years, tops, before European and Australian gun control measures are effectively meaningless.
This assumes that everyone carrying a gun has a permit to do so.
You've just described yet another reason why gun control measures are meaningless. The desire to kill oneself and/or others (with or without a gun) doesn't exist in a vacuum; guns don't magically make people suicidal or homicidal. That desire happens due to a combination of socioeconomic pressures and inadequate mental healthcare - two angles that gun control proponents chronically ignore, instead pushing for band-aids like gun control because those band-aids are "easier" and don't involve confronting the painful realities of socioeconomic inequality.
Hence, my point: as home manufacturing of firearms proliferates, that band-aid loses whatever tenuous effectiveness it has. People concerned about "gun violence" are then forced to consider why people are killing themselves and each other (hint: because the average person is broke and depressed).
The actual difficulty for a sufficiently motivated person to obtain a gun (legal or otherwise) under gun control in the UK is not that high, but the incentives to do so are reduced, the disincentives increased, and the average person with the potential to carry out non-premeditated shootings never considers buying one. The ability to learn all about how to 3D print a gun instead of learning how to license and modify a shotgun or how to find black markets that will sell you illegal firearms does not change that calculus very much.
Most aspiring firearm enthusiasts who are not criminals could get legally permitted in Europe if they were willing to invest as much effort as it would take to make their own guns and ammunition from scratch. Most criminals who want guns just as crime accessories don't have the discipline and drive to make weapons that they can't buy. (Thank goodness, or homemade bombs with wireless command detonation would already be common instruments in areas with gang rivalry.)
Re: black powder, I think you're overestimating the level of effort a bit. It certainly hasn't gotten harder to make it after the Industrial Revolution. Hell, there are even WikiHow articles on it: https://www.wikihow.com/Make-Black-Powder
It's the primers that are, from my understanding, the tricky thing to replace. I suspect that if push came to shove, though, a primer shortage/restriction would lead to designs of new cartridges and firearms built around spark plugs or some other alternative source of ignition. 3D printing would enable the sorts of quick prototyping necessary to rapidly iterate on unconventional firearm designs like that.
> Most criminals who want guns just as crime accessories don't have the discipline and drive to make weapons that they can't buy.
Well that's the thing: they don't have to be the ones making them, just like how drug dealers are not usually the ones themselves making the drugs. This is something that could very well be the purview of some black market cottage industry.
> (Thank goodness, or homemade bombs with wireless command detonation would already be common instruments in areas with gang rivalry.)
I mean, bombings are pretty common in a lot of places. See also: Ireland during the Troubles, the Middle East today, etc. And with quadcopters being widespread, it's probably only a matter of time before we start seeing drone bombings.
Cat's pretty much out of the bag. Pandora's opened the box. The only viable approach to stopping violence is to end it at its source: by addressing the reasons why people commit violence in the first place.
I don't think that a cottage industry of weapons-for-criminals is going to spring up in the same way as illicit drug production. The drug trade is nearly impossible to vanquish because so much of it is victimless; neither the seller nor the consumer attracts much attention in the usual case. But if you're dealing weapons specifically to people who can't get them by legal means, that's much riskier. Most would-be attackers who meet with a "bomb seller" are actually meeting with LEO.
The novelty factor of "3D printed" firearms leads to law enforcement worrying about them disproportionately to their actual significance. They're mostly an exotic hobby.
In any case, the US is inherently more violent and criminal than other nations in general independent of guns. It also has extremely violent subpopulations centered in major urban centers that tilt the numbers significantly. Outside of a few specific cities like Baltimore, Detroit, Chicago, etc. the US is extremely peaceful and low in crime.
And I'm saying that's incorrect. It's not wrong in the binary sense of "no firearms made" vs "some firearms made", but rather in the sense that if the mass-production output were to drop significantly, prevalence and use would also drop significantly (although this would be mitigated by there being a huge stock of existing guns).
And just to clarify - I'm not saying that this is the way to "solve the gun problem" in the US though.
I'm not sure that can be assumed anymore. The 3D printer market has been absolutely exploding. I and my siblings got one as a present from my father for Christmas in 2020. Some reports[1]state there was a 68% increase globally in personal desktop 3D printer units in 2020, and that's after there were manufacturing problems to overcome.
If if shutting a factory today might suppress supply slightly in the future, I suspect that within 5-10 years the point will be mostly moot.
1: https://www.tctmagazine.com/additive-manufacturing-3d-printi...
Are these parts functional? I would be literally stunned if you could 3D print a bolt carrier group that lasts more than a clip.
The last I looked (and it's been a couple years), the designs exist, but are largely non-functional and/or still require several parts to be made of steel.
The barrel is another problematic piece. I get that with enough plastic, you might be able to make it handle the pressure (and that's a pretty big might). Even presuming you do, plastic is not hard enough to allow rifling, so we're back to smoothbore rifles, which practically haven't been seen since the Civil War. Worse yet, every time you pull that trigger, the heat and pressure will blast more of your plastic out the end of the barrel. That's going to ruin your accuracy, and at a certain point, you'll start losing muzzle velocity because the barrel no longer seals around the bullet.
3d printing everything except the parts you mentioned is quite tractable, and constantly improving from an already acceptably-high standard.
No, the chokepoint here is primers. Which are scarce on the ground at the moment, and I expect will receive significant regulatory encumbrance in the near future.
Something like ammonpulver would be comparable in power and cleanliness to modern smokeless powder, but is pretty corrosive and gets ruined if it absorbs too much water.
The same types of people eho develop 3d gun models are also putting effort into developing alternatives for primers, powder, and cases. Homemade metal barrels were an issue a few years ago but ECM barrels made it easy to make them at home with only a couple hundred dollars in tooling.
In most parts of the United States a barrel (or anything other than the frame/receiver for that matter) is not a regulated part. You can order it online and have it show up at your door without ID or signing for it. Even in areas where barrels are regulated it only requires a few materials to electrochemically machine a barrel.
The end result is a firearm built entirely with parts that are legal to purchase in the EU.[3] This will only get easier as 3D printers improve and weapon designs are refined.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FGC-9
2. https://imgur.com/gallery/xZqXXuE
3. The FGC-9's designer lives in the EU. He manufactured the gun & ammo himself and shot it in his basement: https://twitter.com/freegunzone/status/1309896256760709128
Not to mention kicks, slaps, and karate chops.
as for guns, the solution is societal change.
However removing handguns, and limiting the legal reasons to be wondering around the streets with a gun would also help.
Modern America is a historical anomaly. The powerful aren't peaceful by choice.
It's the SECOND amendment in the constitution for a reason.
If anything, a lot of nations were subjugated with the help of or by the US.
Start here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_NATO
or here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pax_Americana
And sure..America's not perfect... but it's a hell of a lot better than the alternative!
There was a commission from he government to find out how many laws existed in America and after years of looking into it they gave up and the final conclusion was that no one knows.
Everyone looks to the government to solve their problems instead of solving it themselves.
If the defenseless had guns they would be able to protect themselves. I am not sure if that would result in more peace or more war, but it would definitely be a more just world.
> Most of the weapons used by the Mukti Bahini were taken from defeated soldiers. Then, there were homemade bombs, knives and even instances of the use of bows and arrows.
> Walking along the gallery of the Liberation War Museum in Dhaka where a number of weapons, including rifles and machineguns used in the Liberation War of 1971, had been put on display, Shahzaman Mozumder Bir Protik, a guerrilla freedom fighter, reminisced saying “They had to earn their weapons.”
More realistically it would change what type of guns people own. Fewer Colts, more Glocks, I presume. From a public policy perspective that’s no change at all.
https://www.historyandheadlines.com/march-5-1836-god-created...
“tribal police departments generally do not qualify for the exemption from payment of the transfer tax for NFA firearms, are not eligible to receive firearms interstate, and can not possess a ‘post-1986’ machinegun.”[0]
“federal authorities alleged Ho-Chunk Inc. and its subsidiaries had violated federal tobacco laws by shipping and selling “untaxed, unstamped cigarettes to businesses in Nebraska other states.”[1]
[0] https://www.atf.gov/rules-and-regulations/nfa-transfers-trib...
[1] https://www.indianz.com/News/2019/02/04/winnebago-tribe-stil...
https://old.reddit.com/r/czscorpion/
One of my favourites almost has that sci-fi look too https://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/...
I can't remember exactly, but in California you can make your own, but it has to have a serial number. I can't remember what other restrictions they have.
A man in Queensland was given a suspended sentence for printing parts of a gun that did not together constitute a usable gun without some additional pieces[1].
Apparently there have been efforts there to ban 3-D printing of guns but so far they have not been successful.
In the U.S., while it is physically possible to do anything within the privacy of one's home, it is technically illegal to print a gun if you are not legally permitted to possess one.[2]
There are also existing laws on the books against plastic/undetectable guns which presumably would apply as well to resin/PETG/PLA printed firearms that have few or zero metal parts. Actually, one wonders why there haven't been more incidents of plastic guns smuggled onto aircraft in recent years, perhaps because K9 teams of bomb sniffing hounds are randomly used to detect bomb-making ingredients while standing in line at security. They are trained presumably to smell gunpowder as well as other chemicals. Leave your "Gunpowder Solid Men's Cologne" at home.
1. http://www.australasianscience.com.au/article/science-and-te...
2. https://thefederalistpapers.org/us/legal-3d-gun
The root cause of this is that very few people want to smuggle guns onto aircraft. I think the biggest group of gun smugglers at this point are TSA penetration testers.
For the most part it's always been legal to build a firearm for your own use (not to sell - that would be regulated under the Fed's commerce powers). Some states make it more burdensome than others. Making a high quality anything requires skill, but guns are very primitive mechanical devices, so the bar is very low to make something of effective working order. You won't be hitting a gong at 1000 yards, but you'll hit a pie plate at 20 pretty easy.
Depends on what you're building. If you're making your own AR-15 lower, there's no detrimental impact on accuracy - all of those parts are contained within the 'upper', which (in the US) is not regulated as a firearm.
If you're building from scratch, though, accuracy is really not going to happen. Not unless you have actual machine tools and training.
YouTube censored the vids of casting your own AR lower out of beer cans, but it’s still online[0].
If you have a modicum of skill in the garage you can also fashion an AK receiver out of a shovel (or so I am told).[1]
“So, there you have it. In 2012, a drunk guy named “Boris” -who lived in what he refers to as “Communist Massachusetts”- built an AKM from an old $2 field shovel and a bunch of parts kits that can be found all over the country. His total cost was $232.”
[0] https://forum.full30.com/t/ar15-made-from-beer-cans-complete...
[1] https://warisboring.com/extreme-diy-man-makes-akm-from-a-sho...
Anyways there are lot of SV entrepreneurs on HN so an (old) american company sold to a European (especially from the former Eastern block) is always relevant.
Also HN is much more than an "IT community" I think, much more diverse
But as I’ve aged, I see class structures and the power of the elites much more clearly. I see how systems can be more violent than people. And that individuals do not have a lot of power these days because society is filled with so many systems.
Owning a gun returns some power to the individual. I don’t want my power for defense given to the police, I want to control that power. I don’t care if the situations I want it for will never happen, I want the comfort of having that power.
This, exactly. But also:
> we should ban them.
That “we” does a lot of heavy lifting to obscure that fact that the prohibition of guns consists of people with guns telling other people when they may and may not have guns.
The prior things pay the bills. Guns are for pleasure. Long range shooting beats meditation and yoga.
(The term "IT worker" doesn't translate well globally.)
But yeah, the in-industry definitions are that "IT" is business-side support & project roles, while CS / Dev are coders.
Do I carry one with me? No. Do I have any set up for home defense? No. Do I enjoy shooting high power rifles at the range on the weekend? You bet I do.
FWIW I own more tech stuff by value than guns, so, there's that.
The engineering and physics involved in building/tuning guns and shooting accurately is very interesting.
Furthermore, the "renegade" spirit required to reject the status-quo and push the envelope in science and engineering attracts quite a few of the same types of people.
Finally, the idea of "banning" guns -- which every basically qualified engineer or physicist should be capable to building from readily available materials and tools -- makes them even more interesting. If for no other reason than to illuminate preposterous and insulting nature of the idea.
IMHO. ;)
Again, surely you mean in the US? All engineers I have ever worked with or met are almost the exact opposite of this.
IMHO ;-)
If CZ ends up picking up Colt Canada too, seems like they'd be in good hands.
The difference is in gun culture. Very few Europeans identify with guns as much as Americans occasionally do.
It’s an issue that’s become culturally politicized. I bet folks in Switzerland don’t say stuff like “people in other cantons cling to their guns and religion.”
(Czechia does has a strong civilian ownership, however)
Europe is a more diverse place ideologically and socially than most Americans tend to imagine it. The place is bigger and more complex than just Paris or Berlin, just like how America is not just NY or Houston.
I've heard from friends there is a similar passion in many towns in Germany and Austria. I would venture a guess that outside many European cities shooting for sport is much more commonplace.
https://blog.westernpowders.com/2017/11/schuetzen-the-purest...
There's also a significant, separate overlap between computer geeks and people that like to exercise their rights (See: Crypto Wars) which results in non hunting gunowners.
In my father's generation there were a ton of hunters (something like 70% of my in laws), but I have met a single person who hunts in my career in IT in Europe.
Guns for personal defence/sport are just not common on this side of the pond, I think.
Can confirm we love our guns from the engineering aspect among other reasons
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Campus_carry_map_of_US_st...
It would be an amazing coincidence if none of your coworkers were interested in guns. Around 30% of Californians have at least one gun in their home. Naively extrapolating: that means if you have 15 coworkers, there is a 99.5% chance that at least one of them owns a gun. Even if only 10% of bay area techies have guns, the odds that at least one of your coworkers has a gun is still over 80%.
When my hobby became publicly known at work, I suddenly discovered I had quite a few coworkers who liked guns. They were quiet about it at work because they were afraid (rightfully) of hurting their careers.
Good times! Could never do this these days in Silicon Valley though :(
If you want to go down to the range after-work, by all means do so, but the way you Americans trivialise a toy good for nothing but war in many cases is really fascinating.
Firearms are most definitely not toys. A bring your gun to work day is a way for coworkers to bond outside of work as well as a great learning experience for the ones without much knowledge on how to safely and responsibly handle a firearm. It’s also a lot of fun shooting targets.
Ever heard of hunters? A LOT of people hunt. Also, until relatively recently it was common for american kids to bring guns to schools, and leave them in their car until after school so they could go hunting, etc. Instead of addressing things like mental health issues, it's easier to demonize guns because the politicians don't actually have to do anything other than introduce token legislation.
It's a right written in the constitution, and only referring to guns as "weapons of war" is political rhetoric. And hunting is not the only reason to own a gun- that's also political rhetoric.
By this logic, almost nothing should be banned, do you endorse that position?
I assume your response was probably born out of some political frustration, and I respect that. Happy to discuss specifics of the this position on the practicality and effectiveness of gun bans.
Where are you going to get the bullets from? Or for a shotgun, where is the powder from, the pellets etc.
I live in the UK, I quite like clay pigeon shooting, would it be a shock to you that American mass shootings basically aren't news worthy anymore unless they are more than 2 dozen people now?
I just think “an expert can make this in their garage” is a really bad reason to legalize something. I don’t think IEDs or street meth should be legal. (Apple M1s and LSD are probably fine though.)
Frightened, ignorant (of the state of the art) people are led to believe "banning" is helping them "making them safe", when instead it is harming them: nobody law-abiding remains to come to their aid, while abusers and thugs wield powerful weapons, unopposed. Instead, benighted government officials ban common farmer livestock varmint rifles by the hundreds of thousands (see: Canada, just now).
So, no -- if someone wants to ban something, then they should darn well consult with anyone who knows something about that item, to see if A) it makes sense, and B) if it will actually prevent the violent from obtaining/using it.
I am glad this article was posted. Thank you.
Plus it's a story about a finical acquisition of a famed American brand so its a trisect of "interesting to hackers" of the HN sort.
Not to mention the very fast growing 3d-printed gun parts and DIY smithing groups within these committees where it gets technical very fast.
This makes no sense. Assaulting someone is illegal, but anyone can do it. It's still illegal.
What?
We also ban nuclear and biological weapons for good reason. Does it really matter that they are harder to obtain? (Tip: They won't be in the long run, there was a time when guns were hard to make too).
I’m sure you would care if the thing we’re banning is something you like that doesn’t hurt anyone.
> We also ban nuclear and biological weapons for good reason.
Do we? I thought we built them and kept them ready to use.
> Phrasing it in Latin doesn't make it any more compelling either.
Those are legal terms because actual judges, lawyers, law enforcement officers, and others have discussed this extensively and determined that the distinction is relevant.
As a Brit, our gun controls work quite well. It basically means the idiot down the pub is not allowed to have a rifle/pistol. It's not like they cease to exist - we're still the world's #2 arms exporter.
To be faaaaaair, without Colt's revolutionary wheely gat, the 1911 may not have happened when it did. Let that marinate.
HELL YEA! Seriously, that time period was just dumped with brilliance in its own right, especially in engineering. It's so amazing what accomplishments were made with such basic tech. I mean seriously, the basic machine shop these days is FAR more advanced than what was available to the engineering cats back then. But those folks were spitting out brilliance like we use toilet paper after a pre-pandemic taco Tuesday.
There's a part of me that thinks our general mindset to engineering, learning and research is fundamentally different compared to that golden era of science and engineering. Honestly, I think it's for the worst. We're too subservient to technology rather than being the ones holding the chains and whips to the machines. That's going to be our downfall. Being switches to the machines and not knowing when to switch them off.
Anecdotally, but yes. Same with cars, AV & musical gear, other technical-ish stuff.
I chalk it up to technical / engineering mentalities, disposable income, and US culture. Give nerds money and the ability to blow stuff up... and they'll blow stuff up.
A) A pulse on market frothiness
B) A pulse on who is opening their purse and looking
C) National security implications from the foreign purchaser of American munitions creator
D) C but with Eastern Europe. A lot of Silicon Valley is funded by funds with Russian general partners using British Virgin Islands entities which have Russian limited partners who made all their money with all the underpriced public assets in Russia, aka Oligarchs. Our salaries in a lot of startups come from Russian oligarchs. We consider that controversial because so much energy is also spent vilifying Russia and their money and its also hilarious that we are making them wealthy too, while they provide the capital to make us wealthy. So people pay attention to other constructive ways of getting Russian money into US assets. Soviet Union and satellite states are just too obvious. Even though one might as well use the Cayman Islands or British Virgin Islands.
E) No national security implication and just liking CZG and their quality control, and how that affects the general Czech gun image and brand.
F) Americans have a general consensus in favor of gun use, gun trading, gun modification, for vary wide ranges of reasons. Similar to computers and tinkering. So it will be rare to find a US-centric forum that fairly often posts culture related articles that would ignore this.
So this headline is a perfect storm. To the top, boys!
(From my experience, I don't think US IT workers are particularly pro-guns any more than average Americans.)
Most of the innovations in computers and tech are direct results from military arms research.
Silicon Valley didn’t just sprout from nothing. There were lots of engineers in the area that worked to support military contract making weapons, and their kids started computer companies.
Seems more relevant than the homeless grant article tbh.
For the record I don't mind either article and clicked on both.
The FCU concept would still have value were the legal framework less Byzantine, but its practical benefits would be significantly diminished.
It's also worth pointing out that while the manufacturing techniques used by Glock were new the actual design is essentially identical to the browning hi-power.
BHP is hammer-fired, Glock safe-action is striker-fired.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heckler_%26_Koch_VP70
Any of the suppressor manufacturers.
Ultra long range bolt guns from a variety of manufacturers (notably not Remington, colt, etc).
Several novel application PDW systems (personal defense weapon). B&T, FN, Sig, HK, and others.
Optics have rally stepped up. Always on 8 year battery life 300ft submersible red dot sights from aim point. Crazy precision scopes from vortex, nightforce, a few others.
It’s certainly a hobby that you can spend $100k on really easily exploring a variety of styles of defense and sport shooting.
Colt didn't introduce the AR-15, either. That was ArmaLite, who then sold the rights to the design to Colt.
There is a lot of crossover between the tech and firearms community and for good reasons. The engineering and design of the firearms, gear and especially optics is fascinating. The external ballistics and math involved to hit targets at 1000 yards and beyond with all of the apps and sensors required. The breathing, aiming and movement techniques brings a nice physical element as well.
I've taken several firearms classes over the years and I'm amazed at how many hardcore tech people I meet there - top engineers at top companies (Uber, Google, etc.). These aren't mid-level PMs or entry-level script kiddies either; these are the top guys solving for the hardest engineering problems.
Despite the stereotypes, the tech community as with all other communities is not a monolith that walks in lockstep. It's disappointing that some of us need to hide our hobbies from those who would unfairly pass judgment because of their own phobias and biases. The firearms community is no different than the people who are into fast cars, motorcycles, beer making, wine tasting, maker faire, etc.