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Interestingly, the guns keep getting easier to make at home, but the ammo is still too challenging, as handmade powder and primers are really unreliable / dangerous.
Of course lots of people made ammo at home using off the shelf components, but if you have access to primers, powder, etc. you'd probably just smuggle the bullets themselves.
Like Chris Rock said: "We need bullet control" - ie it's actually harder to make ammo than the guns themselves.
Blackpowder is dead simple to make yourself. Makes cycling semi-autos harder/less reliable and less powerful, and mesns a lot more cleaning, but if "bullet control" succeeded in the US I think we'd see a mass switch to blackpowder and electrical ignition replacing primers.
Home-made black powder cartridges aren't too bad. The caps are hardest to make but easy enough to hide as they are really fucking small and you only need 6 to fill a black powder revolver. A black powder revolver legit is good enough for self defense and almost as useful as a modern revolver if you maintain the load everyday. Also a good 'felon carry' as black powder revolvers are unregulated federally in US.
Also little known but fun fact. Flintlocks aren't considered guns in Canada. You can buy the flintlock, and make the powder all without any scrutiny.
A guy I used to work with came from a South American country where shotgun shells and ammo were at a premium, among other goods, which were common here in the USA. He setup a smuggling operation that was half legal: he put shot gun shell and bullet parts like casings, primers, and so on and hide them inside of appliances he was legitimately exporting second hand.
He wound up making enough money to quit and run that operation full time. Haven't spoken to him in years though.
The nature of something that has an inelastic demand, like guns or drugs (for very different reasons) is that by increasing the scope of regulated exchange or outright bans, you just create pressure for creativity and innovation to solve the problem that it's "too hard to make at home".
Yes, regulating ammo will make it harder for the average person to access.
But, it will also drastically increase the amount of people experimenting with making powder at home and/or develop novel solutions to weapons making that are even harder to control, like very high power air rifles or electrically driven railguns.
The pressure for this kind of innovation currently doesn't really exist, because ammunition is readily accessible. If we want to start regulating it, we have to acknowledge that we may be creating pressure to develop a future where alternative solutions that can't be easily controlled have flooded the black market.
Ultimately, bullet control is the same problem as gun control. It's treating a symptom rather than the disease. Since the symptom of gun violence is not an existential threat to our society, it absolutely seems like a waste of effort and political capital that should instead be targeted at the root reason for eruptions of deadly violence, whatever the tools.
>you just create pressure for creativity and innovation to solve the problem that it's "too hard to make at home".
As shown by "what about ammo" guide by IvanTheTroll et al, by which europeans are producing 9mm ammo economically at scale with completely unregulated components. Europeans trivially have a gun and full magazines of modern ammo within a couple weeks never leaving the Schengen area and without any black market interaction nor permits/licenses.
It's not a problem in the sense organized crime buys manufactured guns with ease and the people making these weapons are likely primarily hobbyists or people merely seeking self defense unconnected to larger organizations.
That's half the picture. The other half is that the average European is less motivated toward violence or suicide than, say, the average American - and is therefore less motivated toward acquiring the tools for violence or suicide, by whatever means necessary.
Basically: it's the intersection of ease v. motivation that's at play, not just the ease alone. Once that's identified, it becomes immediately obvious that there's a whole cornucopia of options besides trying to minimize ease (and failing, due to technological advances making it easier to sidestep artificial obstacles - 3D printing being the topical example).
The goal of gun control (et al) isn’t to eradicate the problem entirely but rather to reduce its effects substantially by making it harder.
This has been proven a successful approach in a multitude of countries.
Now I’m not disagreeing that you also need to solve the other side of the problem but it’s not an either / or scenario. You can tackle the problem from both sides.
FYI, it isn’t actually harder to make ammo than the gun. I have a decent amount of experience reloading and machining (including machining parts that could easily be guns, but weren’t). I also have quite a bit of experience with muzzle loading/black powder, etc.
It’s just not something that is currently optimized to make in an improvised way, because ammo is normally the easy, bulk, part. It does require a decent amount of expertise, and ability to pay attention to detail though.
If someone was so motivated, metal slugs + compressed gas can make a far more than adequate weapon (semi-auto too!), and would 3D print quite nicely. If someone was going to go that way, 3D printing a suppressor would be trivial too.
And those slugs could be easily cast in any kitchen using commonly available materials (zinc, for instance, if lead was controlled).
The underlying reason this isn’t really a problem is due to motive, economics/payback, etc.
It’s solidly in the ‘but why?’ category for pretty much everyone, but if someone had a reason, I bet they could make a 3D printable design with a couple pages of directions and almost anyone could do it.
The local scuba shop would have quite the run on pony bottles though!
> A variety of longitudinal studies describe the association between the simultaneous implementation of laws targeting multiple elements of regulations and firearm deaths. Despite their limitations, specifically on the identification of which laws are more likely to be effective, these studies inform on the potential synergistic effects, or the aggregated individual effects of multiple laws, when they are simultaneously implemented within a narrow time window. The Australian NFA provides a good illustration of this. Following the implementation of the NFA, a decline in firearm deaths and firearm suicides, as well as an absence of mass shootings, occurred.
The issue I have with such studies is they focus on "gun-related injuries or deaths". Has any study ever shown an overall decrease in deaths or injuries from any type of gun control legislation?
> does reduce the amount of gun-related injuries or deaths though
> a decline in firearm deaths and firearm suicides
That's... to be expected. I don't think someone needs a college degree to figure that out. The majority of gun injuries and death are self-inflicted [0]. Removing access to firearms just means that people will turn to other means. It's also why suicide rates in the US and Canada are comparable despite the huge disrepectancy in gun availability. South Korea has a much bigger suicide rate than the US and Canada despite having strict gun control.
In Canada the Government will grant you the right to commit suicide (yes, you read that right) through the taxpayer funded healthcare system [1].
Might this be the unintended consequence of banning the sales of handguns in Canada recently? Canadians have always been well armed but now there are more handguns moving from the U.S. into Canada and it seems like 3D printing would be the natural evolution of this path as border checks are increasing.
Handguns have always been extremely tightly controlled in Canada.
Even before the recent sales ban you couldn't have one at home unless it was locked away - it's not like you can have it in your bedside drawer. The only time you can transport it anywhere is to/from the gun range. In transit it must be locked away, and you have to get a permit to make that drive.
Also note you're in big trouble if you get caught buying groceries on the way to/from the gun range and you have the handgun locked in your trunk.
It has always been illegal to carry a handgun on your person, and you can't hunt with them either.
Note: I have a "non-restricted" firearms license, which means shotguns & long rifles (bolt action, small magazines), and it's fairly straightforward to get the license to own those weapons. They dropped the "long gun registry" a few years back because stats show crimes are not committed with long guns. That means long guns are no longer registered, the government has no idea who owns what in terms of long guns. Handguns are a WHOLE different story.
If someone doesn't drive in the US their chance of being caught with a handgun is basically zero unless they pull it out (which they shouldn't be doing unless their life is in danger and legal issues are the least of their worries). I wonder how often pedestrians/passengers get patted down in Canada.
The US/Canada border is incredibly porous. There is so much area to cover, along with numerous communities that practically sit on top of the border, native reservations, and bodies of water. Any attempt to seriously crack down on smuggling would be prohibitively expensive and politically unpalatable. 3d printing is advancing among enthusiasts, but when it comes to the black market, illegal importation from the US is still by far the easiest and cheapest option.
The choice of language around firearms is always interesting. Instead of using a descriptive term like "homebuilt firearms", communications on this topic use an editorialized description like "ghost guns".
There are paper records for all dealers sales in the US, they're just not electronic. So they are traceable, it just requires manual human effort to pick up telephones and read paperwork out of a filing cabinet.
Edit: although, the cheapest and easiest way for a criminal to get an "untraceable" gun in the US is probably to bust out the window of a pickup truck, steal the gun out of the glove box, and file off the serial number.
Which would be dumb, because the serial number can easily be recovered in a lab and is an easy 10 years in jail and way to get feds to pick up the case.
It depends on many factors. But there's a lot of forensic techniques that could potentially be used to catch perpetrators of gun crimes. If they were smart they wouldn't do it at all.
The background check just verifies a person's eligibility to purchase a gun. If the background check is approved, the record of the sale is recorded on form 4473, which goes in your dealer's records. If the next day, the ATF wants to perform a trace, they call the dealer, who then has 24 hours to produce the records for them. This was a compromise at the time the law was passed to avoid "the federal government having a database of gun owners"
The law requires NICS to delete records about approved transactions within 24 hours:
Oh yeah, it's a lot of paperwork, because Americans buy a lot of guns. But the ATF only has to manually look up the records for dealers that are out of business. For dealers still in business, the dealer has possession of the records and must perform the lookup on request within 24 hours.
Yes, but the point is: it's paperwork. Or microfilm work.
> The National Tracing Center is not allowed to have centralized computer data.
> That's been a federal law, thanks to the NRA, since 1986: No searchable database of America's gun owners. So people here have to use paper, sort through enormous stacks of forms and record books that gun stores are required to keep and to eventually turn over to the feds when requested. It's kind of like a library in the old days—but without the card catalog. They can use pictures of paper, like microfilm (they recently got the go-ahead to convert the microfilm to PDFs), as long as the pictures of paper are not searchable. You have to flip through and read. No searching by gun owner. No searching by name.
Privately made firearms and in-state sales are completely legal in the United States, enshrined as an enumerated Constitutional right. No serial numbers required.
Sale of firearms may be regulated if crossing state lines, hence the Gun Control Act of '68, but a federal database of firearms / firearm owners would of course be completely unconstitutional.
In my opinion, CBC consistently puts out some of the lowest-quality and least-objective "news coverage" that I've seen from the major and minor news providers in Canada.
Ok that is, by far, the most incredible, weird, brilliant, cannot stop watching piece of cinema / art / just how much effort did you put into a throw away joke ... I mean they actually had a divemaster for an underwater sequence, ... just brilliant :-)
Thank you for introducing me to this. I hope to pay it forward.
The proliferation of 3D printed firearms completely changed my opinion on gun control a few years ago. I used to think that getting rid of guns was a great first step. But, it seems like it's not really feasible to do that. Now my opinion is that maybe it should be the last step, after addressing the causes of gun death (suicide and the drug war are at the top of the list). But at that point, if we'd actually fixed those problems, I wonder if there would be much of a pressing need to get rid of guns at all.
Even if you solved that, you'd still have problems with knives (you can't outlaw kitchen knives), homemade explosives, sticks, screwdrivers, acid, etc.
Mental health, crime, and drugs (also, again crime related to those), and you've solved most of the problems. Just legalizing some drugs would probably solve more than half of the issues in some places.
Watching Americans try to justify gun culture and why it isn't the real problem is always baffling to me. I do wonder if you're expressing genuinely held beliefs or if your head is wilfully in the sand.
The irony of your "head is willfully in the sand" remark in the context of an ever-widening hole in the effectiveness of gun control is thick enough to spread on toast.
"Gun culture" (whatever that actually means) is not the problem. The fact that the US is the least-developed of the "developed" world is the problem. The fact American income disparity and mental health are both deteriorating at a rapid pace is the problem. People kill each other (or, more commonly, themselves) here in the US - with or without guns - because they're broke, stressed the fuck out, and so desperate for any semblance of relief that they're driven to either put themselves out of the misery our capitalist system has thrust upon them or else lash out at the rest of the very society disenfranchising them.
Have you looked into the statistics of how many people succeed in suicide, world-wide, from knives, homemade explosives, sticks, screwdrivers, vs. how many succeed in suicide from firearms?
I mean, have you?
If you haven't, then why would you bring them up as "problems"?
I don't understand this importance of that metric. The US has a high suicide rate but there are EU contries with a much lower guns per capita that have similar suicide rate.
Sweden has a rate of 12.4 vs 14.5 suicides in the US per 100k people [1], yet the guns-per-100-persons in Sweden is 23.1 vs 120.5 in the US [2].
An undeducated glance of the numbers shows that people tend to hang themselves when guns are not readily available like in the US [3].
How much do you think suicide will drop in the US if you removed all weapons overnight?
You haven't answered my question. What is the suicide rate from knives? You specifically brought up knives as a "problem." Your word.
What is the suicide rate from homemade explosives?
Sticks?
Screwdrivers?
You brought those up as "problems."
The evidence I have seen makes me believe that suicide in otherwise healthy individuals seems to be a fleeting goal. It's not as though someone becomes set upon their decision, and continues attempting it until they succeed, for the vast majority of people.
Thus, when someone has the temporary motive of suicide, and they have a firearm available, they tend to succeed. When they have a temporary motive of suicide, but they don't have a firearm available, they succeed less often.
I get that the burden would be on me to argue that perspective with evidence, and I'm not going to be able to provide it any time soon, and I apologize for that.
But since you brought up the "problems" of knives, homemade explosives, sticks, and screwdrivers, again, I have to ask - do you have any evidence that those are worth being described as "problems"?
I failed to mention that I was not the original commenter.
> Thus, when someone has the temporary motive of suicide, and they have a firearm available, they tend to succeed. When they have a temporary motive of suicide, but they don't have a firearm available, they succeed less often.
To my, I repeat, uneducated eyes, the statistics I posted seem to show that people simply hang themselves when they don't have guns, but I cannot say with any kind of guarantee that this is correct. I don't like drawing such strong conclusions because I know it's not that simple to read statistics. If you can support your claims with data I'd love to read it.
That to me shows that 82.5% of those who attempt suicide by firearms succeed, whereas the next causes are drowning 65%, hanging 61%, gas 41%, jumping 34%, then all the way down to drugs 1.5%, cutting 1.2%.
As I said, short of "explosives" which IEDs need. And yes, IEDs are rarer than gun shootings pretty much everywhere, because explosives are a lot better restricted, even in the otherwise completely insane US. I guess some control works??
There are explosives, as in actual regulated explosives, and then there are IEDs, which can use anything from repurposed old artillery shells, to stolen construction explosives, to mixed kitchen chemicals and fertilizer.
IEDs are not rarer than shootings because of controls, most likely. A Timothy McVeigh style attack is still very doable with off the shelf stuff.
Explosives were never okay in Iraq either, post-Saddam (or guns, for that matter). It didn’t stop IEDs being the #1 threat. Same with Ireland during ‘the troubles’. Guns are direct in application, limited in impact, and expose the wielder to direct harm. Explosives, don’t.
Explosives do require a degree of planning that a gun doesn’t though. And tend to be clearly ‘terrorist’/‘terrible’ in nature.
The crazy just hasn’t been bottled up enough for it to get there in the US. Yet, anyway.
Look up vehicle ramming attacks. Easy to commit, hard to prevent, very effective from the mass murderer's perspective. For example, in 2016, an attack with a truck killed 86 people and wounded 458 in Nice. You can't stop people from mass murder if they have their mind set on it.
The best prevention would be figure out why they want to kill and solve the underlying issue, but that's too hard I guess. Strategies like "ban X" are an admission that we're not interested in root causes. Instead we pretend that removing the instruments or making the penalties worse will work. Predictably, all that will happen is people who want to commit mass murder will find other ways to do it.
Not true. Such ramming attacks are actually quite rare. And even when they do occur, they usually cause far fewer accidents. It takes quite a bit of planning or even luck to pull off a significant victim count. In "practical terms" a lot can go "wrong", like people running or jumping away or obstacles stopping the vehicle. And even if not, the victims are rather random, which is often not what amok runners want.
Restricting access to guns has worked remarkably well pretty much everywhere. Turns out, the easier you make it to kill people, the more people get killed. And it's not like firearms have remotely as much legitimate use for average people like cars.
One guy in Nice, France killed 86 and injured over 400 in a single attack. That's more deaths than every school shooting in the US since at least 2000, and 10x more injuries.
France also saw 128 dead in one night in nightclub shootings, so all their gun laws didn't do jack.
It is simply false that outlawing guns has reduced these deaths.
> It's much harder to kill people with a knife than with a gun.
This seems like a reasonable statement, but I don't think it's true.
If I had to be shot with a handgun from close range or stabbed with a kitchen knife, I would absolutely choose being shot. You're statistically far more likely to survive a shooting than an attack with a bladed weapon.
There haven't been 641 "mass stabbings" in 2022 in the US. Plenty of people also get killed by shotgun. Still, shotguns probably aren't the worst offenders and that sounds like a total red herring when school children get dismembered by assault style rifles somewhat regularly.
Yes, you can jump straight to the one incident that caused more victims than an average mass shooting. Do you know any others? Why is that incident already 6 years ago? They seem to be few and far between... globally.
Because causing a high victim count with a vehicle attack is not impossible but hard. Which was my point, had you bothered to read my comment properly.
You are making my point: You are cherry picking incidents while ignoring the vast number of mass shootings. All I'm saying is it is easier to kill a lot of people with a proper gun. All the "counter examples" you give are everything but "easy". They take planning and a lot of effort. Mass shooters sometimes buy their gun on the day of the attack. Then all it takes is pulling a trigger.
And no, "all you need is a vehicle and a crowd" isn't true. In reality, most of these incidents end up with very few victims if at all. Turns out, a lot can go wrong with that "plan". There can be a lot of obstacles between a car and a crowd that make charging into it harder. Any bump and the car looses speed. Cars get stuck. Bigger vehicles aren't as easy to get a hold of or drive. So no, it's not as easy as with a gun, and that's why in actual reality, in the US amok runners choose firearms over vehicle pretty much every time, and everywhere else man slaughter by car isn't exactly an epidemic either.
Also, the Happy Land perpetrator literally walked down to the corner gas station and bought a gas can and a gallon of gas. No waiting. No ID. No background check.
Yet, somehow all of these methods get used orders of magnitude less than firearms to commit mass murders. Both in the US and elsewhere.
The US isn't really my standard. In sane jurisdictions you actually need a special license for bigger vehicles. And those still aren't as easy to control as smaller cars, so I suspect you highly underestimate the difficulty involved in committing mass murder with a vehicle. Sure it's not impossible, but pulling a trigger is one heck of a lot easier.
People who try to commit amok runs with cars or trucks actually do get stuck quite often.
You keep shifting the goalposts -- your original post specifically mentioned the US.
The issue here is that you think the problem is "this guy has a gun" rather than "this guy wants to kill a bunch of people". It's like trying to combat alcoholism by banning shot glasses.
Canada has already the filters for legal gun owners; we are not the states the amount of hoops that legal gun owners have to go through.
Anyone that owns a restricted firearm; like handguns or rifles under certain length is added to a database and their name is daily checked for felonies, domestic abuse, etc.
In order to get a permit, you have to get sign of your spouse or if you are under 2 years divorced from the previous partner.
Mandatory training and course certification is part of it. We don't have open carry here.
Restricted can only be used on ranges. We have transport permits; etc etc etc
80% or more or guns used in violent crime are illegal and coming from the US border. Why? Harder to trace, don't any of the magazine or automatic restrictions that there are in Canada.
>Even if you solved that, you'd still have problems with knives (you can't outlaw kitchen knives),
There are many pictures with labels in the uk saying you have to be over 18 to buy plastic utensils, because there's a knife.
This is why the UK had more homicides after banning firearms.
Homicides up, gun related homicides down. Turns out, you have some gangster shoot up a place. They land perhaps a couple shots and run off. The victim is rushed to hospital where they are saved.
Chef knife victim on the otherhand will die.
So the politicians who banned guns in the UK are morally responsible for more deaths occurring. They could have addressed the actual reason the homicides were occurring but failed to do so.
Unfortunately, Mental illness is largely not the cause of gun violence like the media says it is, the issue is that there are so many guns out there that are so easy to get a hand on by anyone, that gun violence is so bad. And since JFK got rid of sanatoriums and expected the private companies to pick up the slack, 60 years ago, there will never be enough care as proven by the lack of care today. Sorry, we don't, nor will we ever, prioritize it enough to have any meaningful impact on gun violence. You take the weapons out of reach of people who would use them to do harm to others _first_, and only then can we make any progress on the issues. But too many companies and unscrupulous people are out there and they actively block and write legislation to make gun violence a certainty. Bad advertising and death is still good advertising to these people. As for 3D printed guns, we have a whole ATF bureau that should be on this just like they are on the illegal fully auto gun mods.
Not true. A 3d printed gun won't do you any good unless you at least test it and probably not until you carry it around outside your home. Plenty of chances to get caught with an illegal firearm.
Between firearms being easier to detect than pirated media and police being a lot more motivated to go after them, 3D printed guns are quite controllable...
Completely irrelevant response. Restricting access to guns has worked remarkably well to reduce loss of life virtually everywhere it has been tried and enacted somewhat competently.
Europe doesn't regularly see school children getting dismembered by assault-style rifles. Neither does Australia, and they tightened up their gun regulation relatively recently after they figured out they had a problem.
Try to legally get a handgun or semi-automatic rifle in the u.s. walk me through that process. You may be surprised to find that it's much harder than you claim it to be.
My neighbor has been waiting since Dec 20th for his background check to complete, so he can get his new shotgun (not a handgun, not even a semi-automatic). Given how far back he is in line, and how much it moves in a day, he is looking at mid-february to get his shotgun. Our state is intentionally slow-walking all background checks while they try to win some court cases centered around some recent gun control ballot measures.
He has a concealed carry license, which means he already completed a very detailed background check within the last 2 years in our state, and usually, approval takes something like 10 min for concealed license holders since the already have your info.
Note that the federal law says if a background check takes more than 3 days, the dealer MAY give you the weapon, but most retail chains will not honor that, since they are worried about liability. That wording was put in to make sure that states and the FBI would not try to slow-walk things, under-hire, etc.
OP is likely from Oregon and it sounds like it could be very hard, as the delay may be imposed in association with needing further licensing after he misses the cutoff. It is my understanding there may not even be a way to get the license yet after he misses the cutoff.
AFAIK the new ballot approved scheme requires this currently unobtonium new permit even for those with a CCW, and this delay may push him into unobtanium being in force.
My friends ex husband works at OSP’s firearms bg department. They’re being told (not in writing) to GO VERY SLOWLY. Like 1-2 per day, vs the 400 that is possible.
Would you feel the same way if you were a petite 20-year-old woman who was just threatened by your husband after filing for divorce and being granted a temporary restraining order against him?
I am not sure if buying a gun is the adequate answer to this threat. However I am not a US citizen and I get the point. Sometimes, I guess, it's a good thing to delay the checks to let the people chill a bit until they get their gun. Also letting the 20-year-old woman buy a gun with no proper training might likely result in two casualties.
Yes: someone in that situation is far more likely to be the victim of gun violence (the attacker can pick the time and place, everyone has to sleep, etc.). Having that violent ex unable to get a gun because the review process determined they were a high risk would save many lives in the U.S. every year.
Like, I am normally very anti-gun, but I do accept the premise that the cat is out of the bag in case of the US.
But why not stick to small pistols for self-defense? Ok, let’s have some shooting range that has shotguns and whatnot in an ultra-secure manner for “fun”, but otherwise why would you need anything else at home?
Huh? I have a sporting goods store in my neighborhood that I've bought a few from. You walk in, say I want it, fill out the form and pay your money. The checks add a few minutes, but it's not much different from buying a barbecue which they sell a few aisles down.
Interestingly in my state, scientific glassware was more restricted for a few years than guns were. I believe this law has been deprecated, probably in no small part due to irony.
> Unfortunately, Mental illness is largely not the cause of gun violence like the media says it is, the issue is that there are so many guns out there that are so easy to get a hand on by anyone, that gun violence is so bad.
This is close to the position I used to take. I now believe it's incorrect, mostly because (I am speaking of the United States in particular) you aren't going to get people to give up their guns. It's just not going to happen on a foreseeable timeline. Add in the existence of 3D printed firearms, and it becomes a laughable prospect. If you accept that as a premise, what do you do next if you want to reduce gun deaths? Probably what you should have done in the first place, which is to attack the cause rather than the method of death.
> you aren't going to get people to give up their guns
This is often overlooked in discussions around gun control on this board.
There are at a bare minimum tens of millions of gun owners in the US. A lot of them will simply not allow them to be taken, and will use whatever level of response is necessary to prevent that from happening.
I count myself among that group. I would rather die preserving the right to privately-owned weapons than willingly live in an environment where that right is not recognized. To be clear - that is not a figurative statement for me. I'm an extremely peaceful person who is deeply empathetic and do my best to help the people around me. I see violence as a last resort, but an option that is justified when there is no other alternative. In my experience, this is an extremely common perspective in "US gun culture".
If your motivation is to reduce violence and preserve human life, I am extremely confident that attempting widespread confiscation of firearms in the US would not be an effective strategy.
> You take the weapons out of reach of people who would use them to do harm to others _first_, and only then can we make any progress on the issues.
Translation: "we'll disarm who we please and demand that you wait until we're satisfied before we start tackling the actual issues driving violence and suicide"
Nah, that ain't how this works. We as a society can and should be addressing the systemic causes of violent crime and suicide now; punting on that on the basis of "but bad people still have guns" is reprehensible.
This is about Canada; I know is shocking but is a different country than the US. The gun regulations and laws and culture is very different from the good ol' USA.
Tried to illegalize alcohol - failed.
Tried to illegalize drugs - failed
Trying to illegalize guns - failing.
Today's progressives are tomorrow's conservatives. Yesterday's progressives wanted drugs to never be spoken of or taught. Today's progressives never want guns to be spoken of or taught. Everyone thinks they're special and more moral, but they're just the same human condition.
In so far as it was tried. The assault rifle ban had some positive impact, its revocation certainly made school shootings more deadly.
There is a long history of gun control in the US actually. The 2nd amendment originally was only meant for well regulated militias to carry simple rifles. Not for disgruntled white males to dismember school children.
It's totally possible to control 3D-printed guns. Perfectly? Maybe not. But it helps if guns are illegal, so police can stop people who go around carrying them.
The way of manufacturing the gun really doesn't matter. Tons of "legal" guns get stolen, misplaced or sold illegally. Gun control is much more about restricting access as much as possible and making it hard for people to have an opportunity to use a gun. If you can just carry one around casually in your every day life, there are just too many opportunities for something to go badly.
> Now my opinion is that maybe it should be the last step, after addressing the causes of gun death (suicide and the drug war are at the top of the list).
That, unlike gun regulation, would actually save lives. Keep in mind The US has a much lower suicide rate than South Korea, despite South Korea having extremely strict gun control, for instance.
In countries where guns are unavailable, people simply resort to other means. But their casualties aren't aggregated under the "firearm death" column.
To me, gun control is about political gains. Not saving lives.
If 3D printed firearms made gun production so accessible, then why aren't we seeing a proliferation of gun usage in countries where gun controls and purchase requirements are much more strict than the USA? Is it just because those are stronger societies so people are more apt to follow the law even if it technically easy to break those laws?
Backyard gun production has been something done in China for a couple of decades now, but you still see very little gun usage in that country where it is otherwise banned (backyard gun production is also a death penalty crime, so there are strong disincentives).
Other than the occasional mass genocide hardly anyone dies from guns in China!
On the plus side, most modern day peace-time gun deaths being caused by suicide, the state will just execute you to save the danger of you having a gun to commit suicide with!
We are seeing a proliferation of craft built firearms (some 3D printed) in Myanmar. Gun controls and purchase requirements are very strict there, but it's somewhat of a failed state with ongoing insurgencies. You can find plenty of videos of those weapons online; quality looks close to low-end factory products.
I predict we'll see the same thing happen in China in about a decade when Xi Jinping dies and the central government starts to lose control over the southern regions. There was a already a lot of local workshop firearms manufacturing in China during the Warlord Era before the Communist Party consolidated control over the mainland so history may repeat itself.
> Now my opinion is that maybe it should be the last step, after addressing the causes of gun death (suicide and the drug war are at the top of the list). But at that point, if we'd actually fixed those problems, I wonder if there would be much of a pressing need to get rid of guns at all.
I've given myself plenty a sore throat stating and restating this exact point over the years. Even waving a magic wand that magically erases the very concept of a firearm from existence would do precisely nothing to address the underlying causes of violence and suicide - and actually addressing said underlying causes would be far more effective in reducing (if not outright eliminating) said violence and suicide (not to mention the myriad other societal benefits!) than said gun-erasing magic wand (let alone any less-stringent form of gun control).
Unfortunately, said underlying causes - in particular, socioeconomic inequality and mental healthcare inaccessibility - are notoriously difficult to address without pissing off the people largely in control of the world's governments/economies/societies. Said people also happen to not like it when their serfs have the means to fight back against that control - and therefore have a vested interest in convincing us serfs to demand our own disarmament instead of demanding they pay their fair share toward actual solutions.
(In case anyone thinks I'm being too coy: yes, I'm referring to the ownership class - i.e. the beneficiaries of capitalism, i.e. the ones who subsist primarily/entirely on the profits skimmed from the rest of our labor. You don't have to be a full-blown Marxist or whatever to understand the age-old adages of "money is power" and "power corrupts".)
Is gangs shooting each other, (usually family) homicides and school shootings not big enough problems? Because we have plenty of countries with similar social problems, yet they have much much lower deaths per capita, so it is safe to conclude that guns are a problem. (Nonetheless, I won’t pretend to know a solution, the car is out of the bag and the US is not easily fixable. But stricter gun control is definitely a good way ahead)
> Is gangs shooting each other, (usually family) homicides and school shootings not big enough problems?
They are symptoms. People don't join gangs or shoot up schools for the hell of it. They do those things because either their material conditions drove them to that point or they failed to receive the mental help they needed before it was too late (respectively).
> Because we have plenty of countries with similar social problems, yet they have much much lower deaths per capita
The ones with lower deaths per capita also typically have lower degrees/magnitudes of said social problems. The correlation is with socioeconomic stability and equality, not with any particular tool.
That is:
> it is safe to conclude that guns are a problem
No, that ain't a safe conclusion, and does not logically follow. If that was a safe conclusion, then countries like South Africa - with far stricter gun laws and far fewer guns per person - would have lower homicide rates, and that is rather evidently not the case.
Socioeconomic problems correlate with gun crimes, but it is absolutely naive to think that we can achieve perfect mental health/material conditions. Even if we managed to get UBI for everyone and in a strictly theoretical sense solved these issues and everyone is well off, doesn’t have to work etc, we would still have mental health issues, psychopaths, etc (as even the best medical care will fail plenty of times). I see no evil in limiting their reach of destruction, plus healing symptoms is just as important even in actual medicine as they can just as well kill you. Of course it is not exclusive-or, we have to do plenty to better the mental health of basically every country’s population.
Prohibition = Black Market without elimination. Trudeau got rid of cannabis prohibition because the black market simply ran through the Canada Post.
Gun control has an end goal of "If we banned guns worldwide, the supply would eventually dry up." But this is entirely unrealistic.
Regardless of gun control this will never change anything like the number of homicides. All the recent shootings in Toronto were from guns which were never legal in Canada.
Even in the USA with right to bear arms. It's really 50,000 suicides out of 300,000,000 population consisting of the vast majority of gun crime. Trying to help prevent suicides by gun control is ridiculously bad policy to ignore suicides.
In Europe, the regulated part of the gun is typically the high pressure components, i.e. the barrel and bolt. In the US and I guess Canada, it's the receiver. The thing is, machining the former is much more difficult and involved than printing / cutting / grinding / assembling the latter — unless you're making a single use weapon, in which case any old steel tube of the right diameter will do anyway.
The problem is not 3D printed guns, it's inadequate regulation.
Following the introduction of the Firearms Directive, pretty much every part of a firearm is regulates in the EU:
> For the purposes of this Directive, “part” shall mean any element or replacement element specifically designed for a firearm and essential to its operation, including a barrel, frame or receiver, slide or cylinder, bolt or breech block, and any device designed or adapted to diminish the sound caused by firing a firearm.
The 3D printed gun debate and how it applies to gun control misses a few important things.
- Most countries that have gun control, have strict control of ammunition. It may be possible to 3d print a "gun", but it is going to be hard to find ammunition for it, unless you go the home made route for that too.
- Domestic or hobbyist 3d printing is not going to produce a particularly strong gun, it's most likely going to only work once or twice before it blows itself apart. There is a good chance the person using it will significantly hurt themselves.
- They will have very poor accuracy, it won't be possible to rifle the barrel on a 3d printed gun in a way that will spin the projectile.
- You don't need 3d printing to make a rudimentary gun, one can be fabricated relatively easily by a somewhat competent DIYer in a home workshop. It would probably be better than a 3d printed one too.
The point is, the arguments around 3d printed guns are mostly media driven, if someone is intent on hurting someone else, they will find a way to do it. 3d printing or the availability of designs is not enabling that.
See "ButWhatAboutAmmo" by IvanTheTroll et al. Places where people are well enough off to afford 3d printers haev already found ways around the ammo issue.
>it's most likely going to only work once or twice before it blows itself apar
LMAO see FGC-9.
>it won't be possible to rifle the barrel on a 3d printed gun in a way that will spin the projectile.
But it is possible to 3d print a mandrel for ECM machining, in a way that basically anyone can easily rifle for very low cost. See ECM machining guide as part of FGC-9 build. This sounds complicated but in practice very simple, print the part and attach a pipe along with pumped water/electricity and you get very nice accurate rifling tested to perform about as well as glock oem barrel.
>It would probably be better than a 3d printed one too.
Not typically at least using the most popular expedient arms manuals. The magazine and feeding typically performs much poorer than say modern 3d printed like FGC-9. Repeatable in-tolerance magazines/feeding have always been the weak point of most home machine shop made stuff and 3d printing has mostly solved that problem.
Every one of your points is extremely wrong, except the first. We don't live in 2014, and we aren't talking about the Liberator anymore. Electrochemical machining means that anyone can rifle a barrel in their closet, there are tons of designs that are fully DIY without any metalworking capabilities. The glass filled nylon polymers people are using now are equivalent to many of the polymers used in industry. The last moat truly is ammunition and frankly that is a matter of time.
That's a bit of a stretch. I think you and a lot of other people underestimate how expensive it is. The people actually doing this are doing it just because they can. Still easier, faster and cheaper to buy a ghost gun in a state with more lax rules.
> A hydraulic piston, which can be a hand powered jack, and a rifling button makes it possible to easily rifle most any metal pipe.
That's not my experience at all.
You have to have a means of rotating the button rifling tool consistently as it is pulled through the bore - for an m1911, probably the most common .45 ACP pistol, that's 1 revolution per 16" of barrel.
Because it will take multiple passes to cut the rifling, you'll also need a way to index the tool for each pass.
> Plus in 99% of shootings the targets are fairly short range where rifling isnt even very important.
If you're making a gun to shoot someone, that makes sense. The far more typical case is that you're making it because you are interested in making a gun, and rifling is a requirement in the US to comply with federal law for a pistol[1].
1: The term "pistol" is legislatively defined, but broadly speaking it's anything designed to be fired with one hand and <26" in overall length.
Unless you're going for sniper level accuracy a barrel can be rifled with just the button because the die will cause its own rotation as you push it down the barrel, this is because of the trailing part of the button.
The reason rifling machines do it is to ensure minimal wear on the die, and for speed of operation but that's an optimization more than a requirement. This is also the reason why the cutters on a typical button are as long as they are: to ensure that it rotates.
You also don't need to index it for the same reason: the tool will seek the grooves made by the previous pass (except for point cutters).
It's basically just a very coarse inside thread cutter, where the thread is so steep that it will drive the tool to rotate much as the bullet will rotate when passing through. This will work with any thread that is more than 1:1.
What you are saying is mostly irrelevant. Access to ammunition is usually easier and cheaper, even illegally. Modern designs for 3D printed guns can be quite powerful and a lot more capable than what you seem to be assuming. Quite a few designs contain a metal barrel which isn't regulated.
There aren't that many "somewhat competent" DIYers with appropriate milling equipment and skills. It's a lot easier to 3D print a design than use manual tools to precisely manufacture something. Making it easier to kill people usually means more people get killed. A basic observation in criminology.
Obviously 3D printed guns are getting produced and are being used in crimes. The article also says that Canada has a bigger problem with guns smuggled from the US.
That would be a much less useful gun than a lot of the modern 3d-printed designs. You'd want some kind of a handle and some way of injecting the pin into the bullet and some kind of a breach (informally speaking). Now we are talking some manufacturing, be it milling or drilling or sawing or whatever. If the result supposed to be as small and convenient as some 3D printed designs are, some metalworking or very precise woodworking is required.
The article is about Canada. And apparently there is a niche for some people who'd rather produce and sell 3D printed guns than "tubes and pins". And I pointed out some of the reasons. A 3D printer reliably produces parts that are quite precise with a lot less effort. That is worth a lot of tradeoffs, even if traditional craftspeople scoff at the properties of the plastic.
On HN there will always be people nitpicking on every detail left out...
> Domestic or hobbyist 3d printing is not going to produce a particularly strong gun, it's most likely going to only work once or twice before it blows itself apart. There is a good chance the person using it will significantly hurt themselves.
While this is true for 100% printed guns, most fosscad folks will have core components that are metal. Barrels, firing pins, etc will be metal in most designs.
Some folks claim their guns can shoot thousands of rounds with no issue.
> They will have very poor accuracy, it won't be possible to rifle the barrel on a 3d printed gun in a way that will spin the projectile.
Folks literally etch their gun barrels with the same specs as commercially available barrels. Here is one such example from the /r/fosscad community: https://www.reddit.com/gallery/106u7au
While the fear is mostly media driven, the stuff folks are making now is a little alarming. Claymores, grenade launchers, etc. If you are interested in learning about this community, check out /r/fosscad on reddit.
> Some folks claim their guns can shoot thousands of rounds with no issue.
For context, I have an AR with a printed lower that I've put ~1k rounds through without issue. In the US that's the only serialized part, and therefore the only part that would be typically purchased from a dealer and able to be "traced".
> Folks literally etch their gun barrels with the same specs as commercially available barrels.
I've made a couple of pistol barrels with ECM, and they're no less accurate than commercial stuff.
It might be interesting to know that I made those specifically in order to comply with US law - not to "evade" it. Even a single-shot rimfire pistol falls under the National Firearms Act unless it has a rifled barrel. It would have been much simpler to just use a metal tube, but I didn't want to deal with filing the forms, paying the tax, and waiting months for approval before putting together a random project that I started on a whim.
I've said it before, but this isn't stopping with guns. One fallout of the availability of 3D printing is the ability of anyone to construct high precision parts, specifically ones needed for weapons. If AQ Khan was still operating today I'm certain this would have been a large component of his operation.
The cool thing about 3D printed guns is they don’t have to look like conventional guns. I saw someone make a gun that was like a little box with a hole in it.
FWIW, that's illegal in the US by default. You have to file an ATF Form 1, pay the $5 tax under the NFA's "Any Other Weapon" classification, and wait months for approval before manufacturing one.
I've been following this community out of general curiosity since its inception, and I have to say that they're hackers in the purest form. Clever, technical, collaborative, playful, ideological, subversive. There are amazing technical accomplishments happening regularly over there. Every time the topic comes up, you'll see the same comments you saw a decade ago - you'll blow your hand off, you can mill something better, how is this any different than a Home Depot slamfire - but those commenters haven't been keeping up with developments.
It's an inevitable shame that they're being misused for violent crimes, though, but I don't think you can ever put this cat back in the bag.
""Anyone can go online, they can purchase a computer, a laptop.… They can buy [a 3D printer] for $300 and now they're printing firearms," said acting Staff Sgt. Lawson, with the Calgary police.""
Total non sense. You could only do the polymer housing, not the most important things, aka all the metal interior parts (if you want that shots more than once).
I think some people have already hit the nail on the head, but I wanted to chime in with a few thoughts.
There have been several news stories spun to make it seem like Canada needs more gun control. I don't know if that actually solves anything, it just forces the sales of weapons underground. Canada is already pretty restricted with guns (at least in comparison with the US), with the government wanting more and more restrictions.
The problem is restrictions hurt enthusiasts who go through the proper channels, and force bad actors to use more ingenious/underground methods of obtaining weapons.
This article doesn't even mention how/why the 3d printed firearms were seized, but one thing appears clear, the "100" is actually various smaller police confiscations.
One thing is clear, though; this article's main goal is to promote removing rights of law abiding citizens, both with firearms enthusiasts, and potentially 3d printing enthusiasts.
160 comments
[ 5.7 ms ] story [ 428 ms ] threadOf course lots of people made ammo at home using off the shelf components, but if you have access to primers, powder, etc. you'd probably just smuggle the bullets themselves.
Like Chris Rock said: "We need bullet control" - ie it's actually harder to make ammo than the guns themselves.
Also little known but fun fact. Flintlocks aren't considered guns in Canada. You can buy the flintlock, and make the powder all without any scrutiny.
He wound up making enough money to quit and run that operation full time. Haven't spoken to him in years though.
Yes, regulating ammo will make it harder for the average person to access.
But, it will also drastically increase the amount of people experimenting with making powder at home and/or develop novel solutions to weapons making that are even harder to control, like very high power air rifles or electrically driven railguns.
The pressure for this kind of innovation currently doesn't really exist, because ammunition is readily accessible. If we want to start regulating it, we have to acknowledge that we may be creating pressure to develop a future where alternative solutions that can't be easily controlled have flooded the black market.
Ultimately, bullet control is the same problem as gun control. It's treating a symptom rather than the disease. Since the symptom of gun violence is not an existential threat to our society, it absolutely seems like a waste of effort and political capital that should instead be targeted at the root reason for eruptions of deadly violence, whatever the tools.
As shown by "what about ammo" guide by IvanTheTroll et al, by which europeans are producing 9mm ammo economically at scale with completely unregulated components. Europeans trivially have a gun and full magazines of modern ammo within a couple weeks never leaving the Schengen area and without any black market interaction nor permits/licenses.
Basically: it's the intersection of ease v. motivation that's at play, not just the ease alone. Once that's identified, it becomes immediately obvious that there's a whole cornucopia of options besides trying to minimize ease (and failing, due to technological advances making it easier to sidestep artificial obstacles - 3D printing being the topical example).
This has been proven a successful approach in a multitude of countries.
Now I’m not disagreeing that you also need to solve the other side of the problem but it’s not an either / or scenario. You can tackle the problem from both sides.
It’s just not something that is currently optimized to make in an improvised way, because ammo is normally the easy, bulk, part. It does require a decent amount of expertise, and ability to pay attention to detail though.
If someone was so motivated, metal slugs + compressed gas can make a far more than adequate weapon (semi-auto too!), and would 3D print quite nicely. If someone was going to go that way, 3D printing a suppressor would be trivial too.
And those slugs could be easily cast in any kitchen using commonly available materials (zinc, for instance, if lead was controlled).
The underlying reason this isn’t really a problem is due to motive, economics/payback, etc.
It’s solidly in the ‘but why?’ category for pretty much everyone, but if someone had a reason, I bet they could make a 3D printable design with a couple pages of directions and almost anyone could do it.
The local scuba shop would have quite the run on pony bottles though!
It's almost as if the guns themselves aren't the problem; it's the crimes committed with these that are.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6283012/#s4titl...
> A variety of longitudinal studies describe the association between the simultaneous implementation of laws targeting multiple elements of regulations and firearm deaths. Despite their limitations, specifically on the identification of which laws are more likely to be effective, these studies inform on the potential synergistic effects, or the aggregated individual effects of multiple laws, when they are simultaneously implemented within a narrow time window. The Australian NFA provides a good illustration of this. Following the implementation of the NFA, a decline in firearm deaths and firearm suicides, as well as an absence of mass shootings, occurred.
Why is there so much gun violence in Illinois despite the strict gun control?
Do you support gun control in Ukraine?
That's... to be expected. I don't think someone needs a college degree to figure that out. The majority of gun injuries and death are self-inflicted [0]. Removing access to firearms just means that people will turn to other means. It's also why suicide rates in the US and Canada are comparable despite the huge disrepectancy in gun availability. South Korea has a much bigger suicide rate than the US and Canada despite having strict gun control.
In Canada the Government will grant you the right to commit suicide (yes, you read that right) through the taxpayer funded healthcare system [1].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_violence_in_the_United_Sta...
[1] https://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/cj-jp/ad-am/bk-di.html
Even before the recent sales ban you couldn't have one at home unless it was locked away - it's not like you can have it in your bedside drawer. The only time you can transport it anywhere is to/from the gun range. In transit it must be locked away, and you have to get a permit to make that drive.
Also note you're in big trouble if you get caught buying groceries on the way to/from the gun range and you have the handgun locked in your trunk.
It has always been illegal to carry a handgun on your person, and you can't hunt with them either.
Note: I have a "non-restricted" firearms license, which means shotguns & long rifles (bolt action, small magazines), and it's fairly straightforward to get the license to own those weapons. They dropped the "long gun registry" a few years back because stats show crimes are not committed with long guns. That means long guns are no longer registered, the government has no idea who owns what in terms of long guns. Handguns are a WHOLE different story.
A recent HN thread:
The US-Canada border cuts through the Haskell Free Library and Opera House
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34138863
Probably doesn't help when Cody Wilson is selling a CNC called the Ghost Gunner.
Aren't many guns in the US untraceable even though they have serial numbers because of the lack of a proper database? So in effect also ghost guns?
Edit: although, the cheapest and easiest way for a criminal to get an "untraceable" gun in the US is probably to bust out the window of a pickup truck, steal the gun out of the glove box, and file off the serial number.
Which would be dumb, because the serial number can easily be recovered in a lab and is an easy 10 years in jail and way to get feds to pick up the case.
The law requires NICS to delete records about approved transactions within 24 hours:
https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/28/25.9
> The National Tracing Center is not allowed to have centralized computer data.
> That's been a federal law, thanks to the NRA, since 1986: No searchable database of America's gun owners. So people here have to use paper, sort through enormous stacks of forms and record books that gun stores are required to keep and to eventually turn over to the feds when requested. It's kind of like a library in the old days—but without the card catalog. They can use pictures of paper, like microfilm (they recently got the go-ahead to convert the microfilm to PDFs), as long as the pictures of paper are not searchable. You have to flip through and read. No searching by gun owner. No searching by name.
FWIW, this was entirely the point of the compromise.
Sale of firearms may be regulated if crossing state lines, hence the Gun Control Act of '68, but a federal database of firearms / firearm owners would of course be completely unconstitutional.
Ideologically, CBC has tended to be very far to the left, and over time has become even more extreme.
About a year ago, a journalist who'd worked at CBC discussed the situation:
https://tarahenley.substack.com/p/speaking-freely
In my opinion, CBC consistently puts out some of the lowest-quality and least-objective "news coverage" that I've seen from the major and minor news providers in Canada.
Although this is by far my favorite method of killing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9VDvgL58h_Y
Thank you for introducing me to this. I hope to pay it forward.
Mental health, crime, and drugs (also, again crime related to those), and you've solved most of the problems. Just legalizing some drugs would probably solve more than half of the issues in some places.
"Gun culture" (whatever that actually means) is not the problem. The fact that the US is the least-developed of the "developed" world is the problem. The fact American income disparity and mental health are both deteriorating at a rapid pace is the problem. People kill each other (or, more commonly, themselves) here in the US - with or without guns - because they're broke, stressed the fuck out, and so desperate for any semblance of relief that they're driven to either put themselves out of the misery our capitalist system has thrust upon them or else lash out at the rest of the very society disenfranchising them.
If you don't have a gun you're not a citizen, you're a subject.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...
I mean, have you?
If you haven't, then why would you bring them up as "problems"?
Or are you just spit-balling?
I don't understand this importance of that metric. The US has a high suicide rate but there are EU contries with a much lower guns per capita that have similar suicide rate.
Sweden has a rate of 12.4 vs 14.5 suicides in the US per 100k people [1], yet the guns-per-100-persons in Sweden is 23.1 vs 120.5 in the US [2].
An undeducated glance of the numbers shows that people tend to hang themselves when guns are not readily available like in the US [3].
How much do you think suicide will drop in the US if you removed all weapons overnight?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_r... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated_number_of_civilian_g... [3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2649482/
What is the suicide rate from homemade explosives?
Sticks?
Screwdrivers?
You brought those up as "problems."
The evidence I have seen makes me believe that suicide in otherwise healthy individuals seems to be a fleeting goal. It's not as though someone becomes set upon their decision, and continues attempting it until they succeed, for the vast majority of people.
Thus, when someone has the temporary motive of suicide, and they have a firearm available, they tend to succeed. When they have a temporary motive of suicide, but they don't have a firearm available, they succeed less often.
I get that the burden would be on me to argue that perspective with evidence, and I'm not going to be able to provide it any time soon, and I apologize for that.
But since you brought up the "problems" of knives, homemade explosives, sticks, and screwdrivers, again, I have to ask - do you have any evidence that those are worth being described as "problems"?
> Thus, when someone has the temporary motive of suicide, and they have a firearm available, they tend to succeed. When they have a temporary motive of suicide, but they don't have a firearm available, they succeed less often.
To my, I repeat, uneducated eyes, the statistics I posted seem to show that people simply hang themselves when they don't have guns, but I cannot say with any kind of guarantee that this is correct. I don't like drawing such strong conclusions because I know it's not that simple to read statistics. If you can support your claims with data I'd love to read it.
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/means-matter/means-matter/case-...
That to me shows that 82.5% of those who attempt suicide by firearms succeed, whereas the next causes are drowning 65%, hanging 61%, gas 41%, jumping 34%, then all the way down to drugs 1.5%, cutting 1.2%.
In the US, mass shooters have killed a dozen or more victims in a minute or two. Very hard to achieve with anything else short of explosives.
IEDs are not rarer than shootings because of controls, most likely. A Timothy McVeigh style attack is still very doable with off the shelf stuff.
Explosives were never okay in Iraq either, post-Saddam (or guns, for that matter). It didn’t stop IEDs being the #1 threat. Same with Ireland during ‘the troubles’. Guns are direct in application, limited in impact, and expose the wielder to direct harm. Explosives, don’t.
Explosives do require a degree of planning that a gun doesn’t though. And tend to be clearly ‘terrorist’/‘terrible’ in nature.
The crazy just hasn’t been bottled up enough for it to get there in the US. Yet, anyway.
The best prevention would be figure out why they want to kill and solve the underlying issue, but that's too hard I guess. Strategies like "ban X" are an admission that we're not interested in root causes. Instead we pretend that removing the instruments or making the penalties worse will work. Predictably, all that will happen is people who want to commit mass murder will find other ways to do it.
Restricting access to guns has worked remarkably well pretty much everywhere. Turns out, the easier you make it to kill people, the more people get killed. And it's not like firearms have remotely as much legitimate use for average people like cars.
One guy in Nice, France killed 86 and injured over 400 in a single attack. That's more deaths than every school shooting in the US since at least 2000, and 10x more injuries.
France also saw 128 dead in one night in nightclub shootings, so all their gun laws didn't do jack.
It is simply false that outlawing guns has reduced these deaths.
This seems like a reasonable statement, but I don't think it's true.
If I had to be shot with a handgun from close range or stabbed with a kitchen knife, I would absolutely choose being shot. You're statistically far more likely to survive a shooting than an attack with a bladed weapon.
There haven't been 641 "mass stabbings" in 2022 in the US. Plenty of people also get killed by shotgun. Still, shotguns probably aren't the worst offenders and that sounds like a total red herring when school children get dismembered by assault style rifles somewhat regularly.
That is absolutely not true.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Nice_truck_attack
86 dead, 458 injured.
Because causing a high victim count with a vehicle attack is not impossible but hard. Which was my point, had you bothered to read my comment properly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_Land_fire (gasoline)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_11_attacks (box cutters and airplanes)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rwandan_genocide (some firearms, but mostly machetes).
There are plenty more, including a bunch of genocides that took place before firearms were even invented.
> Because causing a high victim count with a vehicle attack is not impossible but hard.
Sorry, that's simply not true. All you need is a large vehicle and a crowd.
And no, "all you need is a vehicle and a crowd" isn't true. In reality, most of these incidents end up with very few victims if at all. Turns out, a lot can go wrong with that "plan". There can be a lot of obstacles between a car and a crowd that make charging into it harder. Any bump and the car looses speed. Cars get stuck. Bigger vehicles aren't as easy to get a hold of or drive. So no, it's not as easy as with a gun, and that's why in actual reality, in the US amok runners choose firearms over vehicle pretty much every time, and everywhere else man slaughter by car isn't exactly an epidemic either.
Nonsense.
There's nothing hard about renting a truck and driving it into a crowd.
> Bigger vehicles aren't as easy to get a hold of or drive.
Nonsense.
https://www.uhaul.com/
https://www.pensketruckrental.com/
Also, the Happy Land perpetrator literally walked down to the corner gas station and bought a gas can and a gallon of gas. No waiting. No ID. No background check.
The US isn't really my standard. In sane jurisdictions you actually need a special license for bigger vehicles. And those still aren't as easy to control as smaller cars, so I suspect you highly underestimate the difficulty involved in committing mass murder with a vehicle. Sure it's not impossible, but pulling a trigger is one heck of a lot easier.
People who try to commit amok runs with cars or trucks actually do get stuck quite often.
The issue here is that you think the problem is "this guy has a gun" rather than "this guy wants to kill a bunch of people". It's like trying to combat alcoholism by banning shot glasses.
I think we're done.
¿Por qué no los dos?
At the very least having a filter so that not just any rando can walk around packing heat would probably be helpful:
* https://www.autoblog.com/2022/01/31/florida-man-road-rage-sh...
If you want it at home for whatever reason, have fun. Though some safe storage laws may be a good idea (and strong liability):
* https://www.cbsnews.com/news/first-grader-allegedly-shot-tea...
Anyone that owns a restricted firearm; like handguns or rifles under certain length is added to a database and their name is daily checked for felonies, domestic abuse, etc.
In order to get a permit, you have to get sign of your spouse or if you are under 2 years divorced from the previous partner.
Mandatory training and course certification is part of it. We don't have open carry here.
Restricted can only be used on ranges. We have transport permits; etc etc etc
80% or more or guns used in violent crime are illegal and coming from the US border. Why? Harder to trace, don't any of the magazine or automatic restrictions that there are in Canada.
There are many pictures with labels in the uk saying you have to be over 18 to buy plastic utensils, because there's a knife.
This is why the UK had more homicides after banning firearms.
Homicides up, gun related homicides down. Turns out, you have some gangster shoot up a place. They land perhaps a couple shots and run off. The victim is rushed to hospital where they are saved.
Chef knife victim on the otherhand will die.
So the politicians who banned guns in the UK are morally responsible for more deaths occurring. They could have addressed the actual reason the homicides were occurring but failed to do so.
We keep a gun behind every blade of grass for a reason.
Between firearms being easier to detect than pirated media and police being a lot more motivated to go after them, 3D printed guns are quite controllable...
Europe doesn't regularly see school children getting dismembered by assault-style rifles. Neither does Australia, and they tightened up their gun regulation relatively recently after they figured out they had a problem.
He has a concealed carry license, which means he already completed a very detailed background check within the last 2 years in our state, and usually, approval takes something like 10 min for concealed license holders since the already have your info.
Note that the federal law says if a background check takes more than 3 days, the dealer MAY give you the weapon, but most retail chains will not honor that, since they are worried about liability. That wording was put in to make sure that states and the FBI would not try to slow-walk things, under-hire, etc.
AFAIK the new ballot approved scheme requires this currently unobtonium new permit even for those with a CCW, and this delay may push him into unobtanium being in force.
Like, I am normally very anti-gun, but I do accept the premise that the cat is out of the bag in case of the US. But why not stick to small pistols for self-defense? Ok, let’s have some shooting range that has shotguns and whatnot in an ultra-secure manner for “fun”, but otherwise why would you need anything else at home?
https://www.homebrewtalk.com/threads/texas-brewers-erlenmeye...
This is close to the position I used to take. I now believe it's incorrect, mostly because (I am speaking of the United States in particular) you aren't going to get people to give up their guns. It's just not going to happen on a foreseeable timeline. Add in the existence of 3D printed firearms, and it becomes a laughable prospect. If you accept that as a premise, what do you do next if you want to reduce gun deaths? Probably what you should have done in the first place, which is to attack the cause rather than the method of death.
This is often overlooked in discussions around gun control on this board.
There are at a bare minimum tens of millions of gun owners in the US. A lot of them will simply not allow them to be taken, and will use whatever level of response is necessary to prevent that from happening.
I count myself among that group. I would rather die preserving the right to privately-owned weapons than willingly live in an environment where that right is not recognized. To be clear - that is not a figurative statement for me. I'm an extremely peaceful person who is deeply empathetic and do my best to help the people around me. I see violence as a last resort, but an option that is justified when there is no other alternative. In my experience, this is an extremely common perspective in "US gun culture".
If your motivation is to reduce violence and preserve human life, I am extremely confident that attempting widespread confiscation of firearms in the US would not be an effective strategy.
Translation: "we'll disarm who we please and demand that you wait until we're satisfied before we start tackling the actual issues driving violence and suicide"
Nah, that ain't how this works. We as a society can and should be addressing the systemic causes of violent crime and suicide now; punting on that on the basis of "but bad people still have guns" is reprehensible.
Today's progressives are tomorrow's conservatives. Yesterday's progressives wanted drugs to never be spoken of or taught. Today's progressives never want guns to be spoken of or taught. Everyone thinks they're special and more moral, but they're just the same human condition.
Gun control even worked in the US until some people redefined the 2nd amendment and drank the NRA koolaid.
There is a long history of gun control in the US actually. The 2nd amendment originally was only meant for well regulated militias to carry simple rifles. Not for disgruntled white males to dismember school children.
That is your opinion, and it is very wrong.
The way of manufacturing the gun really doesn't matter. Tons of "legal" guns get stolen, misplaced or sold illegally. Gun control is much more about restricting access as much as possible and making it hard for people to have an opportunity to use a gun. If you can just carry one around casually in your every day life, there are just too many opportunities for something to go badly.
That, unlike gun regulation, would actually save lives. Keep in mind The US has a much lower suicide rate than South Korea, despite South Korea having extremely strict gun control, for instance.
In countries where guns are unavailable, people simply resort to other means. But their casualties aren't aggregated under the "firearm death" column.
To me, gun control is about political gains. Not saving lives.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Nice_truck_attack
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shafia_family_murders
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London,_Ontario_truck_attack
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Calgary_stabbing
https://nypost.com/2020/11/03/quebec-police-release-new-deta...
https://www.the-sun.com/news/2445508/toronto-van-attack-ince...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_London_Bridge_attack
Backyard gun production has been something done in China for a couple of decades now, but you still see very little gun usage in that country where it is otherwise banned (backyard gun production is also a death penalty crime, so there are strong disincentives).
On the plus side, most modern day peace-time gun deaths being caused by suicide, the state will just execute you to save the danger of you having a gun to commit suicide with!
I predict we'll see the same thing happen in China in about a decade when Xi Jinping dies and the central government starts to lose control over the southern regions. There was a already a lot of local workshop firearms manufacturing in China during the Warlord Era before the Communist Party consolidated control over the mainland so history may repeat itself.
I've given myself plenty a sore throat stating and restating this exact point over the years. Even waving a magic wand that magically erases the very concept of a firearm from existence would do precisely nothing to address the underlying causes of violence and suicide - and actually addressing said underlying causes would be far more effective in reducing (if not outright eliminating) said violence and suicide (not to mention the myriad other societal benefits!) than said gun-erasing magic wand (let alone any less-stringent form of gun control).
Unfortunately, said underlying causes - in particular, socioeconomic inequality and mental healthcare inaccessibility - are notoriously difficult to address without pissing off the people largely in control of the world's governments/economies/societies. Said people also happen to not like it when their serfs have the means to fight back against that control - and therefore have a vested interest in convincing us serfs to demand our own disarmament instead of demanding they pay their fair share toward actual solutions.
(In case anyone thinks I'm being too coy: yes, I'm referring to the ownership class - i.e. the beneficiaries of capitalism, i.e. the ones who subsist primarily/entirely on the profits skimmed from the rest of our labor. You don't have to be a full-blown Marxist or whatever to understand the age-old adages of "money is power" and "power corrupts".)
They are symptoms. People don't join gangs or shoot up schools for the hell of it. They do those things because either their material conditions drove them to that point or they failed to receive the mental help they needed before it was too late (respectively).
> Because we have plenty of countries with similar social problems, yet they have much much lower deaths per capita
The ones with lower deaths per capita also typically have lower degrees/magnitudes of said social problems. The correlation is with socioeconomic stability and equality, not with any particular tool.
That is:
> it is safe to conclude that guns are a problem
No, that ain't a safe conclusion, and does not logically follow. If that was a safe conclusion, then countries like South Africa - with far stricter gun laws and far fewer guns per person - would have lower homicide rates, and that is rather evidently not the case.
Gun control has an end goal of "If we banned guns worldwide, the supply would eventually dry up." But this is entirely unrealistic.
Regardless of gun control this will never change anything like the number of homicides. All the recent shootings in Toronto were from guns which were never legal in Canada.
Even in the USA with right to bear arms. It's really 50,000 suicides out of 300,000,000 population consisting of the vast majority of gun crime. Trying to help prevent suicides by gun control is ridiculously bad policy to ignore suicides.
The problem is not 3D printed guns, it's inadequate regulation.
> For the purposes of this Directive, “part” shall mean any element or replacement element specifically designed for a firearm and essential to its operation, including a barrel, frame or receiver, slide or cylinder, bolt or breech block, and any device designed or adapted to diminish the sound caused by firing a firearm.
- Most countries that have gun control, have strict control of ammunition. It may be possible to 3d print a "gun", but it is going to be hard to find ammunition for it, unless you go the home made route for that too.
- Domestic or hobbyist 3d printing is not going to produce a particularly strong gun, it's most likely going to only work once or twice before it blows itself apart. There is a good chance the person using it will significantly hurt themselves.
- They will have very poor accuracy, it won't be possible to rifle the barrel on a 3d printed gun in a way that will spin the projectile.
- You don't need 3d printing to make a rudimentary gun, one can be fabricated relatively easily by a somewhat competent DIYer in a home workshop. It would probably be better than a 3d printed one too.
The point is, the arguments around 3d printed guns are mostly media driven, if someone is intent on hurting someone else, they will find a way to do it. 3d printing or the availability of designs is not enabling that.
>it's most likely going to only work once or twice before it blows itself apar
LMAO see FGC-9.
>it won't be possible to rifle the barrel on a 3d printed gun in a way that will spin the projectile.
But it is possible to 3d print a mandrel for ECM machining, in a way that basically anyone can easily rifle for very low cost. See ECM machining guide as part of FGC-9 build. This sounds complicated but in practice very simple, print the part and attach a pipe along with pumped water/electricity and you get very nice accurate rifling tested to perform about as well as glock oem barrel.
>It would probably be better than a 3d printed one too.
Not typically at least using the most popular expedient arms manuals. The magazine and feeding typically performs much poorer than say modern 3d printed like FGC-9. Repeatable in-tolerance magazines/feeding have always been the weak point of most home machine shop made stuff and 3d printing has mostly solved that problem.
That's a bit of a stretch. I think you and a lot of other people underestimate how expensive it is. The people actually doing this are doing it just because they can. Still easier, faster and cheaper to buy a ghost gun in a state with more lax rules.
Plus in 99% of shootings the targets are fairly short range where rifling isnt even very important.
That's not my experience at all.
You have to have a means of rotating the button rifling tool consistently as it is pulled through the bore - for an m1911, probably the most common .45 ACP pistol, that's 1 revolution per 16" of barrel.
Because it will take multiple passes to cut the rifling, you'll also need a way to index the tool for each pass.
> Plus in 99% of shootings the targets are fairly short range where rifling isnt even very important.
If you're making a gun to shoot someone, that makes sense. The far more typical case is that you're making it because you are interested in making a gun, and rifling is a requirement in the US to comply with federal law for a pistol[1].
1: The term "pistol" is legislatively defined, but broadly speaking it's anything designed to be fired with one hand and <26" in overall length.
The reason rifling machines do it is to ensure minimal wear on the die, and for speed of operation but that's an optimization more than a requirement. This is also the reason why the cutters on a typical button are as long as they are: to ensure that it rotates.
You also don't need to index it for the same reason: the tool will seek the grooves made by the previous pass (except for point cutters).
It's basically just a very coarse inside thread cutter, where the thread is so steep that it will drive the tool to rotate much as the bullet will rotate when passing through. This will work with any thread that is more than 1:1.
There aren't that many "somewhat competent" DIYers with appropriate milling equipment and skills. It's a lot easier to 3D print a design than use manual tools to precisely manufacture something. Making it easier to kill people usually means more people get killed. A basic observation in criminology.
Obviously 3D printed guns are getting produced and are being used in crimes. The article also says that Canada has a bigger problem with guns smuggled from the US.
A gun is a tube and a pin. No milling is required.
The article is about Canada. And apparently there is a niche for some people who'd rather produce and sell 3D printed guns than "tubes and pins". And I pointed out some of the reasons. A 3D printer reliably produces parts that are quite precise with a lot less effort. That is worth a lot of tradeoffs, even if traditional craftspeople scoff at the properties of the plastic.
On HN there will always be people nitpicking on every detail left out...
While this is true for 100% printed guns, most fosscad folks will have core components that are metal. Barrels, firing pins, etc will be metal in most designs.
Some folks claim their guns can shoot thousands of rounds with no issue.
> They will have very poor accuracy, it won't be possible to rifle the barrel on a 3d printed gun in a way that will spin the projectile.
Folks literally etch their gun barrels with the same specs as commercially available barrels. Here is one such example from the /r/fosscad community: https://www.reddit.com/gallery/106u7au
While the fear is mostly media driven, the stuff folks are making now is a little alarming. Claymores, grenade launchers, etc. If you are interested in learning about this community, check out /r/fosscad on reddit.
For context, I have an AR with a printed lower that I've put ~1k rounds through without issue. In the US that's the only serialized part, and therefore the only part that would be typically purchased from a dealer and able to be "traced".
> Folks literally etch their gun barrels with the same specs as commercially available barrels.
I've made a couple of pistol barrels with ECM, and they're no less accurate than commercial stuff.
It might be interesting to know that I made those specifically in order to comply with US law - not to "evade" it. Even a single-shot rimfire pistol falls under the National Firearms Act unless it has a rifled barrel. It would have been much simpler to just use a metal tube, but I didn't want to deal with filing the forms, paying the tax, and waiting months for approval before putting together a random project that I started on a whim.
Recommended reading:
https://twitter.com/navigoboom
https://twitter.com/SuckBoyTony1
The scofflaws that are the main threat shall doubtless have other arrangements.
This report details real world examples of 3d printing being used in several weapon systems https://nonproliferation.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/NDS_...
It's an inevitable shame that they're being misused for violent crimes, though, but I don't think you can ever put this cat back in the bag.
Total non sense. You could only do the polymer housing, not the most important things, aka all the metal interior parts (if you want that shots more than once).
There have been several news stories spun to make it seem like Canada needs more gun control. I don't know if that actually solves anything, it just forces the sales of weapons underground. Canada is already pretty restricted with guns (at least in comparison with the US), with the government wanting more and more restrictions.
The problem is restrictions hurt enthusiasts who go through the proper channels, and force bad actors to use more ingenious/underground methods of obtaining weapons.
This article doesn't even mention how/why the 3d printed firearms were seized, but one thing appears clear, the "100" is actually various smaller police confiscations.
One thing is clear, though; this article's main goal is to promote removing rights of law abiding citizens, both with firearms enthusiasts, and potentially 3d printing enthusiasts.