• Let's Debunk The Misleading Panic Over 3-D Guns - The fearmongering ove

    From Ubiquitous@21:1/5 to All on Wed Aug 1 21:05:08 2018
    XPost: alt.guns, alt.politics.guns, alt.politics.usa.constitution.gun-rights XPost: talk.politics.guns

    The newest bugaboo of the gun control crowd is the bloodcurdling “3-D
    printer gun.” Or, as Alyssa Milano, a self-styled expert on these
    matters, might call it: “downloadable death.” Reporters at CNN ask,
    “3-D guns: Untraceable, undetectable and unstoppable?” Even President
    Donald Trump tweeted that “he’s looking into 3-D Plastic Guns being
    sold to the public. Already spoke to NRA, doesn’t seem to make much
    sense!”

    It makes plenty of sense.

    First of all, “3-D Plastic Guns” aren’t being sold to the public. Nor
    are “downloadable firearms” or “ghost guns.” These things don’t exist.
    Data, code, and information is being sold to the public. There is no
    magical contraption that creates a new gun on demand. Sorry.

    Even if such a machine existed, however, the Trump administration
    hasn’t suddenly begun “allowing” Americans to fabricate guns in the
    comfort of their homes, as so many stories have intimated. It’s never
    been illegal to make your own (non-NFA) weapons in the first place.

    The pretext for this freakout is news that the State Department
    reached a settlement with Cody Wilson and his company, Defense
    Distributed, which offered digital designs for 3-D printed guns, not
    guns. The Obama administration had maintained that the company’s
    printer code violated the International Traffic in Arms Regulations,
    which had little to do with a law-abiding hobbyist milling a lower
    receiver for a commercially popular civilian firearm in his suburban Pennsylvania garage.

    (As of this writing, a federal judge in Seattle has issued a temporary restraining order stopping release of downloadable blueprints for 3-
    D-printed guns. This prior restraint on speech won’t last long if the
    First Amendment still means anything.)

    Milano may not be aware that Americans have been building their own three-dimensional guns since before the revolution. The Kentucky rifle
    was created by German and Swiss blacksmiths living in Lancaster,
    Pennsylvania, and not one of them owned a computer.

    Today, life has become far more convenient, and schematics that offer
    hobbyists plans for assembly or creation of firearms can be found
    across the Internet. Although a person might need a high degree of
    proficiency to pull off making one, they certainly don’t need a 3-D
    printer. Here, for instance, is a video of an industrious fellow
    turning hundreds of cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon into an AR15. All of it,
    already permissible.

    Still, Milano contends that the administration’s decision now means
    that “felons, domestic abusers, terrorists, those adjudicated too
    mentally ill to own guns and any other person unable to legally
    purchase firearms will be able to print one at home.”

    Guess what? If you’re unable to legally purchase firearms, you are
    already prohibited from making a gun in your home, just as you are
    prohibited from buying a gun through a straw purchase or stealing one
    from your neighbor or smuggling one into the country. That’s settled
    law. Good work.

    Censoring code on the Internet simply because you find guns
    objectionable, though, is another story. As Wilson notes in Washington
    Post, code “is the essence of expression. It meets all the
    requirements of speech — it’s artistic and political, you can
    manipulate it, and it needs human involvement to become other things.”
    How can the state ban the transfer of knowledge used to help someone
    engage in an activity that is completely legal? Scratch that — to
    engage in an activity that is constitutionally protected?

    As a practical matter, the perception created by Ed Markey and the
    anti-Second Amendment organizations pushing this 3-D-printer code
    scare—that Joe Criminal can now merely push a button and “print one at
    home” with his 3-D applications and PC-connected milling machine—is
    purposely misleading.

    You might wonder why criminals would bother spending thousands of
    dollars to create a one-shot plastic gun (that probably won’t work)
    when they can walk into a store and buy a reliable shotgun for a few
    hundred dollars, or procure a weapon illegally for far less?

    Well, I’m assured by Milano these 3-D-printed plastic guns are
    undetectable and easy to make. Both neither of these things are true.
    It’s already illegal for Americans to possess weapons that are
    undetectable to metal detectors (even if metal detectors aren’t used
    at airports anymore). So don’t make one. But the Defense Distributed
    plans for a complete AR-15 include 72 parts, some of which are
    comprised of metal to prevent catastrophic malfunctions. Is a
    mastermind criminal going to 3-D-print or mill all those parts
    himself, a task that requires not only considerable knowledge, skill,
    and experience, but also a costly printer and custom machine shop?
    This technology has been available for years. Has there been a crime
    wave of undetectable AR15s?

    What Markey wants to do is pass legislation that curtails the rights
    of law-abiding citizens by fearmongering over a settlement that had
    nothing to do with the legality of homemade guns in the first place.
    As always, he—and other gun restrictionists in states contemplating
    increased oversight of a nonexistent problem—are interested in
    adopting incremental steps towards more obstructive gun laws. In this
    case, they are aiming to limit hobbyist manufacturing, in general.

    The entire case against 3-D guns is propelled by the notion,
    normalized over many years, that access to firearms is problematic,
    even though the presence of guns doesn’t equate to increased violence.
    And who knows, perhaps one day, as machines evolve and become more
    reliable and powerful, it won’t be prohibitively expensive or
    inaccessible for the average law-abiding person to make his own AR15
    or 1911. Whether that’s a positive or negative development is
    debatable. But gun-control activists are trying to dictate what that
    future looks like now.

    --
    Obama’s legacy is President Trump.

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