Saturday, October 8, 2011

Technology, the universal solvent

Clark over at Popehat channels his inner James Burke in a manic, side splittingly funny, and absolutely dead-on tour of how technology has made gun control entirely irrelevant:

…or, if you prefer metal over plastic, download the plans for a a full AR-15 lower that you can crank out with your fresh-from-the-box $1k Sherline CNC milling machine and $15 worth of aluminum, then kit it out with $410 worth of barrel, shoulder stock, and such.

Due to forces of technology (CNC controlled machine tools, cheap computation, open source ethics, and social sharing of designs) gun control is utterly dead. It’s a corpse, staggering along, not yet aware that it’s been gut shot, it’s blood pressure has dropped to zero, and its brain (such as it is) is about to die the True Death.
The only thing that would make it even cooler would be if he'd mentioned Steganography hiding firearm designs in pictures of the Dear Leader.  But he does get to the inevitable Epic Fail of control efforts:

Try to outlaw gun powder and we’ll move to railguns and big capacitors. Try to outlaw primers and we’ll see plans for electronic ignitions up on wikileaks by the end of the day.

Go back a step and outlaw the sparkplugs and the capacitors and …yeah, it’ll work as well as the restrictions on cold syrup have ENTIRELY shut down meth production.

Gun control will stagger on for a bit, but there’s no putting some genies back in their bottles, and home printed firearms are one of those genies.

One hundred years from now everyone from Chinese peasants to American bankers (or do I have that backwards?) will have all the firearms and ammo they want, in the same way that 15 year old have all the hot monkey sex pr0n they want today.
Awesome.  It's a good day to be alive.

3 comments:

SiGraybeard said...

My homebuilt AR-15 used a cast aluminum lower so it's not quite the same, but this looks like fun. Using CNC to drill holes is dead simple. And aluminum plate is even more anonymous and untraceable.

Anonymous said...

And with this, my 'Gun Fund' has instantly become a 'mini CNC' fund.

perfidy said...

What's the legal situation regarding homebrew firearms? If you had a CCW and a do-it-yourself revolver, would you be in the clear?

I had this thought a while back, when I pondered the extreme prices on authentic 44 Walker Colts, and the rumored bad quality of the repros. You could probably get the actual plans from the interwebs somewhere, and just take it and have it manufactured to any desired degree of quality. A smart guy might even be able to change it so it could fire .45ACP or something more usable than cap and ball.

Coming up with a least-manufacturing-effort design for a simple revolver would not be that big a deal for someone with the right skills. Zip guns that don't explode in your hand, and completely untraceable - that'd be a huge advance for certain elements.