Very different, given what a member of the group "anybody" can do with open-source software, compared to what they can do with a gun. Both to themselves and to other people. Both the advantages and the disadvantages.
I can envision multitudes of scenarios where the free proliferation of source software to "anybody" with an Internet connection can be far more deadly.
Cody Wilson is a very interesting activist. Manufacturing your own guns at home has been trivial for about as long as hardware stores have been selling standardized metal parts, but many people seem to be unable to wrap their minds around it, or consider the implications of it.
What Cody Wilson has done is realize the political potential of 3d printing. It's not a very good way to make a gun, but it seems to be an excellent way to get people talking about making guns.
There's an analogy to computers here. Anyone could build a computer at home in 1975. You can also build one in 2015, and it is a whole lot easier and can be done by a lot more people.
The issue is that it is easier to do it the old-fashion way than to dick around with a 3d printer. The result will be far superior as well.
For the 3d printed lowers: drilling out your own 80% lower will give you a superior result with far less equipment.
For the 3d printed "Liberators": a quick trip to your local Home Depot's plumbing and hardware departments will let you throw together a shotgun, not a dinky little pistol, that probably won't blow up in your hand (still possible if you choose the wrong pipe I suppose, but compared to the plastic gun?....) There are videos on youtube of teenagers in the Appalachians doing exactly this just for the hell of it. It doesn't require any real manufacturing skill.
He's not just doing 3D printing anymore. From the article:
"In October 2014 Wilson revealed his biggest project to date: the Ghost Gunner, a miniaturized CNC milling machine small enough to sit on a desktop. It’s thousands of dollars cheaper than big CNC mills—computer-programmable industrial tools for cutting away material—and capable of producing aluminum lower receivers compatible with the AR-15 rifle."
Yeah, that is a pretty neat idea, and a great deal more practical than his printer ideas, but you don't exactly need a big CNC mill to make a lower receiver from an 80% receiver (80% because 80% of the machining is already done for you when you get it in the mail.) You can finish them out with the sort of 1950's era drill press you might find in any highschool's shop classroom.
If I wanted to make my own lower, and those Ghost Gunners were being sold and shipped today, I'd personally still go the traditional 80% route.
The real part of all of this that makes me unconcerned is that these things are really only interesting for somebody who is intent on staying within the bounds of the law. If you don't care about the law, fucking around with all of this home manufacture stuff doesn't make much sense. Just find a non-felon criminally minded buddy to purchase a complete gun for you (or just do it yourself if you are not a felon). If you live in a country where that isn't possible, will it really be feasible to get the rest of the parts after you've milled your lower? Does the UK allow you to purchase all non-lower receiver parts of an AR-15? Would they allow you to receive the specialized mill in the mail in the first place? I honestly don't know.
As an Austinite, startup guy, gun owner, and libertarian... his demeanor is going to make the already-difficult fight, that much harder. Be bold but be tactful about it.
Without getting too much into the politics of the Second Amendment, let me say that he seems like quite a character, he made me laugh, and I like him.
A little sad to see Stripe being a stumblingblock for innovation in this case. But undoubtedly there's legal risk that makes it difficult for anyone to provide service to him. (similar to the burgeoning cannabis industry)
I really want more clarification on the first paragraph. From the author's awkward lingo ("safety key") I get the impression that they do not grasp the technical or legal differences between a semi-automatic AR-15 clone and a fully-automatic M-16. I have a hard time believing that Wilson manufactured a functional M-16 lower, assembled it with a full-auto bolt carrier and had a journalist fire it. That is an unequivocal violation of federal law (since no new machine guns have been allowed for Form 1 manufacture since May of 1986) as opposed to constructing a semi-automatic firearm for personal use. Such confusion in the opening paragraph makes me heavily discount the rest of the article.
According to wikipedia, Cody Wilson has a Type 7 FFL. If he then acquired Class 2 SOT status, he personally would be able to manufacture his own machine guns (but not transfer ownership of them to the general public).
However considering journalists' reputations for gun knowledge, I am skeptical as well. (I'm also not an expert on gun law, so anyone please correct me if I am mistaken.)
That is a very helpful clarification - I was aware of this tax exemption but didn't realize that Wilson was jumping through the hoops to obtain one. That's something that would be rather germane to the article, especially dramatically opening with a "university dropout" showing off the "M-16" he manufactured. If Wilson has the special occupational taxpayer status then that makes the article even more misrepresentative.
The firearm in question would have to have been in very poor condition, causing it to slam fire, or have been modified for that to happen (or caused by ammo with really unusually sensitive primers, but that seems even less likely). The differences are key enough that it's really hard to do accidentally and I imagine that one prepared for a journalist would not have had its fire control parts mangled ahead of time or its firing pin jammed forward.
That said, if they have an SOT (which they were trying to get) it's entirely possible that it was made full auto from the start.
The ability to synthesize arbitrary chemicals is unlikely to come from 3d printers. Significant developments there will be seen coming a long way off in university laboratories, with equipment advertised in places like Nature.
Anyone soon will be able to SLS (laser sinter) guns at home. How many people can you kill with a gun? 50? 100? 200? What happens when I'm able to build viruses and bacteria at home with openly available DNA sequences?
Somewhat related is the recent controversy about whether or not to publish a paper that shows how easy it is to produce a variant of avian H5N1 influenza that can spread between mammals:
What a nice young man, virtuously punching forwards in his quest to allow everyone to make guns. The biproduct of his quest to "defend the human and civil right to keep and bear arms as guaranteed by the United States Constitution" is that countries that aren't the USA all get to benefit from his wonderful innovations.
I guess it's inevitable that new and interesting creative technology such as 3D printing would be used in such a way, but always sad to see so much support for it.
I don't even understand why there is demand for this home gun manufacturing in the USA, libertarian cheer leading aside. I'm under the impression it's damn easy to get hold of weapons in the USA. And I'm pretty sure a purchased weapon will have orders of magnitude less chance of blowing your hand off in a misfire that a plastic counterpart.
I worked for cody for 6 months. He is brilliant and his real cause is a political one. You can gather this by watching his talks and even observing his videos. He just happens to like guns and understands that the gun is an excellent catalyst for his political ideas because of how much attention it grabs.
HN is not the best place for political arguments. Suffice it to say that not everyone agrees that the police and government -- especially not our police and government -- should have a monopoly on weaponry.
(Sovietaced, your reply is [dead] for some reason, not clear why.)
>HN is inundated with people living in CA, NY, the UK - All places where the right to own and bear firearms is non-existent or substantially impeded.
Are you implying that most people here are in favor of gun control? Because the voting and comments in this thread disagree with that premise. Everyone expressing such a view has been downvoted.
>Everyone expressing such a view has been downvoted.
Which I think is really one of the worse sides of HN. The score of a comment should reflect whether that post has merrit and adds to the discussion, net whether it reflects the majority opinion.
I understand the perspective that more guns correlates positively with more deaths, therefore this use of 3d printing technology is a bad thing. However, consider historical contexts where a minority group has been incrementally and systematically deprived of the legal ability to own firearms and consequently subject to the depredations of the majority. Imagine a Warsaw Ghetto uprising but with 3D printers and these sorts of freely available prototypes. Then you get into theoretical tradeoffs - do I prefer to hypothetically reduce the number of children killed in Chicago this year versus a slaughtered neighborhood of <$localized_outgroup> in some civil conflict? Good arguments can be made on both sides.
The demand for home gun manufacturing in the USA is very much related to a sizable portion of the populace looking at the changing political climate of the country and extrapolating their self defense rights meeting the y-axis at some point in their lifetime. The potential commonality of such technology makes any sort of future outright ban completely untenable. Do we not ban books anymore because our governments and societies are so much more enlightened or because the internet makes it completely useless?
The lower receiver is not a component bearing serious loads during firing and isn't really where catastrophic failures in the weapon originate.
> sizable portion of the populace looking at the changing political climate of the country and extrapolating their self defense rights meeting the y-axis at some point in their lifetime
>Do we not ban books anymore because our governments and societies are so much more enlightened or because the internet makes it completely useless?
Book bans (in general, with few exceptions) have been recognized as unconstitutional far, far longer than we've had mass adoption of the internet.[1]
Here's the Supreme Court in 1982:
"Local school boards may not remove books from school library shelves simply because they dislike the ideas contained in those books …"
> Thats incorrect, see switzerland, they have a lot of guns there, maybe even more than america per person but their gun deaths are very low.
Your implication is incorrect. One point does not dissolve a correlation. 0 guns -> 0 gun deaths. N guns -> M gun deaths, therefore positive correlation. QED. Switzerland is an outlier in many metrics. They probably don't shoot as many of themselves because they tend to care a bit more about the well-being of their communities. Far fewer people feel the desperate need to lash out against their community.
As well as being a data point raised in an attempt to refute a distribution (which never works), there is a radical ambiguity you are leaning on: "they have lots of guns there" when applied to Switzerland does not mean anything similar to "they have lots of guns there" as applied to the US.
In Switzerland guns are mostly long guns that are heavily regulated and are under very tight storage restrictions. In the US guns are mostly hand guns that are unregulated and under no very tight storage restrictions.
So if you want to make an argument from Switzerland, it would necessarily be of the form: "To reduce gun deaths in the US we should pretty much eliminate handgun ownership and require that all long guns be stored under lock and key in a specified manner, only to taken out on state-permitted occasions for military use."
People often cite Switzerland in gun arguments but leave out the fact that in Switzerland, owning a gun is an outcome of completing compulsory military service for men - Which means that they are trained in proper safety etc.. I recognise that it still raises the opportunity for crime but I believe the training is an important distinction to make.
Some communities in Switzerland actually offer somewhere to keep the bullets in the town hall instead of at home, reducing accidental deaths.
We've learned a lot during WWII and in the decades after, in matters of mass destruction. A modern Warsaw Ghetto would share the fate of Grozny: razed to the ground by artillery and air bombings.
There are dozens of militias around the world, deprived of the _legal_ ability to own firearms. They own arms nonetheless. Plenty of arms. When push comes to shove and it's down to a struggle for survival, who cares about legal restrictions?!
This is a stark example of correlation not equalling causation. Yes, guns are taken from minorities when an authoritarian regime decides to turn a ghetto into a death camp. And you know why? Because they have zero power already. The system is very thoroughly rigged against them. Those guns aren't going to help them. What could a handful of rioters do? If they fight, they might win a few days reprieve. And then the army rolls right over them.
You can't solve that kind of problem by escalating firepower. I mean, even if they did have the power to fight the army to a standstill (cf: ISIS), they would be the bad guys in everyone's eyes.
I have this feeling as well. But then I look at other countries and it seems we take for granted the fact that our country's government is stable and will forever do a halfway-decent job protecting our rights as citizens. There's no guarantee. It might be overly paranoid to stock up your own militia in case of the government turning on us, but I can at least see where people like Cody are coming from.
The idea that the USA will descend to a level where the populous need to take to the street with weapons is largely fantasy, and a fantasy that the population pays for dearly to keep alive.
> The idea that the USA will descend to a level where the populous need to take to the street with weapons is largely fantasy
History disagrees. There hasn't been a single government in the history of mankind that has not degenerated to the point where it must be removed. And no, the US government will not be the first. Even if it's a 1000 years from now, it's worthwhile to preserve the right for future generations.
> The biproduct of his quest to "defend the human and civil right to keep and bear arms as guaranteed by the United States Constitution" is that countries that aren't the USA all get to benefit from his wonderful innovations.
Is it odd that I read this as unironic praise? Aren't there countries with oppressed minority groups that will benefit from being armed?
The USA was founded on the principle that everybody should be armed to be able to defend against a corrupt state. Some other countries were founded on the principle that nobody should be armed (unless really nessesary) and that corrupt states should be dealt with in other ways. Both concepts are valid and have their unique drawbacks and advantages. The problem is that it's possible to derive a democratic society of that choice by making it even easier to circumvent gun control.
Maybe somewhere in the world it will have positive effects if minorities are suddenly armed. In other places of the world police suddenly has to assume that everyone could carry a weapon, potentially leading to a lot of the problems the US has with their police. It's certainly not universally positive.
> leading to a lot of the problems the US has with their police
I think it's a stretch to suggest that strong gun rights are what lead to police paranoia. Be reminded that many of the murders or other difficult-to-justify killings that have happened at the hands of police in the past decade have happened in cities where gun rights are essentially non-existent.
Any city in the US where gun rights are essentially non-existent is a few miles away from another city where they can get guns from, and nothing stops the guns from moving back in.
When guns are illegal in the country it becomes a lot more like trying to smuggle drugs over borders. It still happens, but not so casually.
>... it becomes a lot more like trying to smuggle drugs over borders. It still happens, but not so casually.
I don't think the legality matters much. Drug prices have across the country have dropped significantly despite a ballooning war on drugs. A quick google search shows that cocaine has dropped 80% in price since the 80's.
I don't know this for a fact, but I think Wilson is trying to "heighten the contradictions." Everybody, government included, talks about the amazing possibilities of private drones, home 3d printing, and I suppose ecommerce (cryptocurrency/darkwallet.) He knows that there's places the government isn't going to let you go though, so he's going to force the crackdown to happen now while the enthusiasm for the good parts are fresh, rather than letting the rights degradation happen gradually after people start taking the technology for granted.
He's almost like a performance artist, making manifest the potential of nascent technologies. It's perfectly true that anyone has been able to build a sort-of-OK firearm for a century or so out of stuff you can buy at a hardware store, but soon anyone will be able to 3D print (via laser sintering) a really effective firearm.
I'm not a big fan of American gun culture, but the reality is that we are headed toward a world where anyone will be able print a decent weapon, and nothing is going to hold back that tide because the economic advantages of 3D printing are too large even now to regulate it out of existence. Wilson's antics--and they really do look like antics to me--are forcing people to face that far earlier than they would have to do otherwise.
You're thinking of darkwallet, https://www.darkwallet.is/ a browser-based bitcoin wallet that uses coinjoin to obscure transactions, rather than darkcoin, which is an altcoin that has built in obfuscation based on coinjoin so it happens by default.
Setting aside legality and technical issues for a second, in some respects this seems similar to regular printing of currency bills: I find it very likely that the (any?) government would require that 3D printers refuse to print "crucial" parts of a weapon either at the software or at the firmware level.
Of course, with the more DIY and open nature of 3D printers this might be difficult to enforce, but not impossible, at least for the average user.
Currency blocking is fairly straightforward though. A banned set of images, perhaps some blocked color values or whatnot.
But there's a huge space of possible gun designs. Don't we need a large advance in technology to be able to determine something is a gun? Especially if we don't accept a lot of false positives?
Special features in currency make it relatively easy the detect when an image is of currency; there's no such equivalent for detecting weapon parts and even if there was you could just 3D print a version lacking those features since your goal isn't forgery, it's functionality.
With the small difference that printing currency bills can be made very hard for individuals. A regular Euro note is made of special paper, has raised print, a watermark, a security thread, a hologram, micro-perforations, colour-changing numbers, microprint and magnetic ink. You can't make mashining an assault rifle out of a block of metal artificially harder as tools get better.
That's not what I was referring to though. I was talking about how detecting the EURion constellation causes Photoshop and printers to not work.
I do not know how guns are manufactured, but from the comments in this and earlier discussions of the story, I assumed that there are parts with common characteristics.
As a result, and unless the resulting 3D models are too many, or if they would result in false positives with legitimate applications, you could require that 3D printers and CAD software refuse to work with them.
Based on the couple of comments below, however, it seems that my assumption that there is a sufficiently common part among firearms is wrong, so I'll leave further comments to the experts.
I'm curious when these will actually ship (the "Ghost Gunner" mill; I ordered one of the first ones, promised for delivery by the end of 2014, and no signs it will actually be here in Q1).
Cody is a solid human being. I have enjoyed my every contact with him.
Some of you may have been in the audience when I moderated a panel in which he was a participant at NHLF last year. It was a great experience and made me realize that, while I have mixed feelings about his cause, he acts from the heart and has a lot of hope for the world.
i really don't understand the love of guns in the US.
the rest of the civilised world has gun control, and with it experience of enforcing it in an environment where guns were formally unrestricted.
there is also a whole bunch of data showing that death of children by guns, and spree shootings are almost uniquely a phenomenon of countries without any real effort at gun control.
i don't see any good argument against 'less people dying horribly'
gun control doesn't mean banning guns outright. it means introducing a serious effort to keep them out of the hands of the worst of society.
> i really don't understand the love of guns in the US.
I assume you're in Europe? Europe historically doesn't mind tyranny, dictators, oppressive governments and the like. I understand the current period is a bit of an aberration. You can thank the US and the USSR later. But based on your comments, if things swung back to their historical norm ... you would what? File a legal complaint?
The US government has done some horrible things in the past. It will do so again in the future. That is the nature of governments. If enough becomes enough, it is the peoples' right to choose to defend themselves against tyranny. That's at the very foundation of our country. It's how it was born. It's how we were able to fight off European tyranny and gain independence.
its not just europe... its a pretty global phenomenon.
you might have some nice philosophical argument here, but i have data and experiments on my side.
i do appreciate your point about self defence in a harsh environment, but that is not day-to-day life in a world with gun control, or even in most places without it.
i however resent the implication that i can not defend myself and am merely going to write an angry letter in complaint. i can assure you that i am just as capable as the next man of dealing death, even without guns, but its a skill i'd rather not exercise...
73 comments
[ 7.1 ms ] story [ 137 ms ] threadWhat Cody Wilson has done is realize the political potential of 3d printing. It's not a very good way to make a gun, but it seems to be an excellent way to get people talking about making guns.
For the 3d printed lowers: drilling out your own 80% lower will give you a superior result with far less equipment.
For the 3d printed "Liberators": a quick trip to your local Home Depot's plumbing and hardware departments will let you throw together a shotgun, not a dinky little pistol, that probably won't blow up in your hand (still possible if you choose the wrong pipe I suppose, but compared to the plastic gun?....) There are videos on youtube of teenagers in the Appalachians doing exactly this just for the hell of it. It doesn't require any real manufacturing skill.
"In October 2014 Wilson revealed his biggest project to date: the Ghost Gunner, a miniaturized CNC milling machine small enough to sit on a desktop. It’s thousands of dollars cheaper than big CNC mills—computer-programmable industrial tools for cutting away material—and capable of producing aluminum lower receivers compatible with the AR-15 rifle."
If I wanted to make my own lower, and those Ghost Gunners were being sold and shipped today, I'd personally still go the traditional 80% route.
The real part of all of this that makes me unconcerned is that these things are really only interesting for somebody who is intent on staying within the bounds of the law. If you don't care about the law, fucking around with all of this home manufacture stuff doesn't make much sense. Just find a non-felon criminally minded buddy to purchase a complete gun for you (or just do it yourself if you are not a felon). If you live in a country where that isn't possible, will it really be feasible to get the rest of the parts after you've milled your lower? Does the UK allow you to purchase all non-lower receiver parts of an AR-15? Would they allow you to receive the specialized mill in the mail in the first place? I honestly don't know.
A little sad to see Stripe being a stumblingblock for innovation in this case. But undoubtedly there's legal risk that makes it difficult for anyone to provide service to him. (similar to the burgeoning cannabis industry)
According to this article from March 2013 (http://www.solidsmack.com/cad-design-news/click-print-gun-wa...), he was seeking Class 2 SOT status at the time and anticipated getting it in early April 2013. I don't know what the outcome of that was.
However considering journalists' reputations for gun knowledge, I am skeptical as well. (I'm also not an expert on gun law, so anyone please correct me if I am mistaken.)
That said, if they have an SOT (which they were trying to get) it's entirely possible that it was made full auto from the start.
Anyone soon will be able to SLS (laser sinter) guns at home. How many people can you kill with a gun? 50? 100? 200? What happens when I'm able to build viruses and bacteria at home with openly available DNA sequences?
http://www.nature.com/news/mutant-flu-paper-published-1.1055...
You can replicate DNA with this.
I guess it's inevitable that new and interesting creative technology such as 3D printing would be used in such a way, but always sad to see so much support for it.
I don't even understand why there is demand for this home gun manufacturing in the USA, libertarian cheer leading aside. I'm under the impression it's damn easy to get hold of weapons in the USA. And I'm pretty sure a purchased weapon will have orders of magnitude less chance of blowing your hand off in a misfire that a plastic counterpart.
(Sovietaced, your reply is [dead] for some reason, not clear why.)
HN is inundated with people living in CA, NY, the UK - All places where the right to own and bear firearms is non-existent or substantially impeded.
And very happily so. We all seem to manage to get by without them
Are you implying that most people here are in favor of gun control? Because the voting and comments in this thread disagree with that premise. Everyone expressing such a view has been downvoted.
Which I think is really one of the worse sides of HN. The score of a comment should reflect whether that post has merrit and adds to the discussion, net whether it reflects the majority opinion.
The demand for home gun manufacturing in the USA is very much related to a sizable portion of the populace looking at the changing political climate of the country and extrapolating their self defense rights meeting the y-axis at some point in their lifetime. The potential commonality of such technology makes any sort of future outright ban completely untenable. Do we not ban books anymore because our governments and societies are so much more enlightened or because the internet makes it completely useless?
The lower receiver is not a component bearing serious loads during firing and isn't really where catastrophic failures in the weapon originate.
What's your definition of sizable?
Book bans (in general, with few exceptions) have been recognized as unconstitutional far, far longer than we've had mass adoption of the internet.[1]
Here's the Supreme Court in 1982: "Local school boards may not remove books from school library shelves simply because they dislike the ideas contained in those books …"
[1] http://www.firstamendmentcenter.org/banned-books
Thats incorrect, see switzerland, they have a lot of guns there, maybe even more than america per person but their gun deaths are very low.
Your implication is incorrect. One point does not dissolve a correlation. 0 guns -> 0 gun deaths. N guns -> M gun deaths, therefore positive correlation. QED. Switzerland is an outlier in many metrics. They probably don't shoot as many of themselves because they tend to care a bit more about the well-being of their communities. Far fewer people feel the desperate need to lash out against their community.
In Switzerland guns are mostly long guns that are heavily regulated and are under very tight storage restrictions. In the US guns are mostly hand guns that are unregulated and under no very tight storage restrictions.
So if you want to make an argument from Switzerland, it would necessarily be of the form: "To reduce gun deaths in the US we should pretty much eliminate handgun ownership and require that all long guns be stored under lock and key in a specified manner, only to taken out on state-permitted occasions for military use."
Some communities in Switzerland actually offer somewhere to keep the bullets in the town hall instead of at home, reducing accidental deaths.
Thats incorrect, see switzerland, they have a lot of guns there, maybe even more than america per person but their gun deaths are very low.
We've learned a lot during WWII and in the decades after, in matters of mass destruction. A modern Warsaw Ghetto would share the fate of Grozny: razed to the ground by artillery and air bombings.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grozny#First_Chechen_War http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grozny#Second_Chechen_War
> deprived of the legal ability to own firearms
There are dozens of militias around the world, deprived of the _legal_ ability to own firearms. They own arms nonetheless. Plenty of arms. When push comes to shove and it's down to a struggle for survival, who cares about legal restrictions?!
You can't solve that kind of problem by escalating firepower. I mean, even if they did have the power to fight the army to a standstill (cf: ISIS), they would be the bad guys in everyone's eyes.
History disagrees. There hasn't been a single government in the history of mankind that has not degenerated to the point where it must be removed. And no, the US government will not be the first. Even if it's a 1000 years from now, it's worthwhile to preserve the right for future generations.
Is it odd that I read this as unironic praise? Aren't there countries with oppressed minority groups that will benefit from being armed?
Maybe somewhere in the world it will have positive effects if minorities are suddenly armed. In other places of the world police suddenly has to assume that everyone could carry a weapon, potentially leading to a lot of the problems the US has with their police. It's certainly not universally positive.
I think it's a stretch to suggest that strong gun rights are what lead to police paranoia. Be reminded that many of the murders or other difficult-to-justify killings that have happened at the hands of police in the past decade have happened in cities where gun rights are essentially non-existent.
Any city in the US where gun rights are essentially non-existent is a few miles away from another city where they can get guns from, and nothing stops the guns from moving back in.
When guns are illegal in the country it becomes a lot more like trying to smuggle drugs over borders. It still happens, but not so casually.
I don't think the legality matters much. Drug prices have across the country have dropped significantly despite a ballooning war on drugs. A quick google search shows that cocaine has dropped 80% in price since the 80's.
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/20...
I'm not a big fan of American gun culture, but the reality is that we are headed toward a world where anyone will be able print a decent weapon, and nothing is going to hold back that tide because the economic advantages of 3D printing are too large even now to regulate it out of existence. Wilson's antics--and they really do look like antics to me--are forcing people to face that far earlier than they would have to do otherwise.
This was in the news a few months ago, but I guess the hype around 3D printing in gone, because I don't really hear about it too much.
Of course, with the more DIY and open nature of 3D printers this might be difficult to enforce, but not impossible, at least for the average user.
But there's a huge space of possible gun designs. Don't we need a large advance in technology to be able to determine something is a gun? Especially if we don't accept a lot of false positives?
I do not know how guns are manufactured, but from the comments in this and earlier discussions of the story, I assumed that there are parts with common characteristics.
As a result, and unless the resulting 3D models are too many, or if they would result in false positives with legitimate applications, you could require that 3D printers and CAD software refuse to work with them.
Based on the couple of comments below, however, it seems that my assumption that there is a sufficiently common part among firearms is wrong, so I'll leave further comments to the experts.
You have to spend money somewhere for it to be useful. With guns, nobody has to accept being shot, they just are.
Another thing is there is no possible way this could be enforced before strong AI that can recognize a functioning gun somehow.
Some of you may have been in the audience when I moderated a panel in which he was a participant at NHLF last year. It was a great experience and made me realize that, while I have mixed feelings about his cause, he acts from the heart and has a lot of hope for the world.
the rest of the civilised world has gun control, and with it experience of enforcing it in an environment where guns were formally unrestricted.
there is also a whole bunch of data showing that death of children by guns, and spree shootings are almost uniquely a phenomenon of countries without any real effort at gun control.
i don't see any good argument against 'less people dying horribly'
gun control doesn't mean banning guns outright. it means introducing a serious effort to keep them out of the hands of the worst of society.
24 in over one hundred years.
Here's the list for the US:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_the...
I assume you're in Europe? Europe historically doesn't mind tyranny, dictators, oppressive governments and the like. I understand the current period is a bit of an aberration. You can thank the US and the USSR later. But based on your comments, if things swung back to their historical norm ... you would what? File a legal complaint?
The US government has done some horrible things in the past. It will do so again in the future. That is the nature of governments. If enough becomes enough, it is the peoples' right to choose to defend themselves against tyranny. That's at the very foundation of our country. It's how it was born. It's how we were able to fight off European tyranny and gain independence.
you might have some nice philosophical argument here, but i have data and experiments on my side.
i do appreciate your point about self defence in a harsh environment, but that is not day-to-day life in a world with gun control, or even in most places without it.
i however resent the implication that i can not defend myself and am merely going to write an angry letter in complaint. i can assure you that i am just as capable as the next man of dealing death, even without guns, but its a skill i'd rather not exercise...