TheRomulanRepublic
The difference between distributing plans for guns and distributing plans for nuclear bombs is that nuclear bombs are not something that the average person can whip up in their garage even if they do have the plans. It takes vast amounts of money, time, and access to radioactive materials that are, if not easy to regulate, at least easier to regulate than the internet.
Except this has absolutely nothing to do with my point.
My point is this: the knowledge on how to create the most destructive device known to humanity is impossible to erase and contain. Why do you expect it to work with something that is even more widespread, more easy to understand and more basic? In the information age?
The djinn is out of the bottle. You can admit reality and handle it as it, or you can delude yourself thinking that you can just legislate it back into the bottle.
Whereas anyone with enough money for a 3D printer (a few hundred dollars, right?) can use these plans to make a completely unregulated firearm, regardless of whether they have, say, a criminal record, or a history of violent mental instability.
The problem is that anyone already can do that without a 3D printer with access to well-stocked hardware store and a little metalworking. See the video I linked earlier.
3D printers are a problem in that they lower the bar even further. There are ways to handle that. Simply saying that the files used to make guns should not exist by law is just delusional and useless.
No, we won't be able to completely eliminate the information. Just like the police will not be able to catch every child pornographer, or arrest every murderer or thief for that matter. We still make those things illegal, both to send a message that society does not condone these destructive acts, and to allow law enforcement to take action to reduce the number of them, to keep a lid on them, even though we'll never realistically prevent them altogether.
In other words, you really do not understand the concept of "unenforceable".
Unenforcable does
not mean that it is
difficult to enforce or the enforcing entity (that has both the legal tools and authorization to enforce it) is insufficient/inadaqvate/fledgling. That can be fixed by giving more funding or providing the necessary legal tools.
It means that the only way to enforce the law would require divine powers to do it. As no government has divine powers, the law has as much bearing on reality as if it did not exist. You are not reducing anything because no enforcer of the law will bother or care or even know. The sole purpose of such laws is to make yourself feel better while archiving nothing.
Why?
Because what you want is the same as those that want to stop internet piracy. Yet internet piracy is alive and quite well. This is billions of dollars of lobbying, ridiculously harsh penalties (fining children thousands of dollars or more for downloading mp3s), new laws and ever-growing cancer of a legal powers desperately trying to control the Internet.
Books like the Anarchist's cookbook, a book deliberately written to contain tools for revolution/terrorism that includes recipes for things like nerve gas and various bombs, could not be suppressed. You can download it after some googling. It's that simple. If you know how to use p2p and that is so simple that children can do it. Because children regularly do it.
What you are proposing is trying to do that. This is not to mention that the Anarchist's cookbook was a compilation of a series of other books that the author got from a library.
Some laws may just not be practically enforceable, and not worth trying to enforce. But the simple fact that we won't be able to completely stop something is not an argument against making it illegal- because by that reasoning, we should have no laws at all.
No you dump, tryannical shit, it means that you should make laws that are
actually enforceable instead.
Furthermore, you should make laws on careful consideration of a problem rather than impulse and delusional thinking that making something illegal makes it disappear. You know, base laws from the lessons taught by history and centuries of experiences in making laws (and more importantly, how not to make laws). Rather than what you dislike.
For example: a law that punished people that
actually made 3D-printed firearms is enforcable. Which in turn requires figuring out how to seperate a 3D printed gun from a toy gun. It is something that previous legal tools, such as a warrant to search a place, can find and can display evidence for.
But as I said, my main issue with this thread is not whether plans for printed guns should be banned. You can probably make a reasonable argument that the cost of trying to enforce such a ban, politically and financially, would outweigh the risk of simply allowing the information to be out there.
The problem is that
there is no way to enforce the law. I don't have to make a reasonable argument because there is no argument to be had. You don't control information.
My problem is with the ridiculous argument some of the posters in this thread employed, which amounted to suggesting that any regulation of information whatsoever will lead to despotism.
Because it has and will through history. Because that's what RIAA and the like have done. Because that's what despotic governments do today. They try to control the internet and actually are succeeding.
Formless:
I can probably make dozens of functional primers out of one good sized box of matches, possibly cheaper even than buying commercial primers. The main problem is one of reliability and if I recall they are a bit corrosive, but even the risk isn't that much higher than handloading commercial primers.
My problem is the bolded parts. What is the practical experience?
Furthermore, if it requires a would-be criminal gang to learn handloading to make their guns, as opposed to just buying ready-made cartridges, that too increases cost required for the gang to use firearms as well as risks. While also ensuring (to an extent) that they have inferior firearms.
There will be a point where a sufficiently large criminal organization can buy both the tools and expertise to make proper firearms and ammunition (as opposed to just smuggling them in). But I really wonder of how the economics of that work out.
Of course, the question is whether the turning point can ever be archived. 3D printed firearms and homemade ammunition may end up not mattering at all in a world where properly-made firearms and ammunition are still abundant.
And again, this is assuming chemical primers remain the go-to method of setting off gunpowder charges, but with the existence of electrical and pneumatic priming methods that primacy may be challenged in the future. It depends on how compatible any given priming technology is with future manufacturing technology.
For our discussions, it also assumes that given technology will be sufficiently cheaply and easily available.
? Even effective printable black powder firearms would make their lawmakers shit bricks.
The question is whether would criminals actually resort to it? This is what I have severe doubts about. The components of homemade ammunition is, as you pointed out, already exists and existed for decades. Yet the use of blackpowder ammunition seems to be rare event in gun violence. There is
some evidence for this. Which may indicate that
However, all it would take to flip that around would be if someone resurrected the old Gyroget concept and could make the ammo economic to manufacture. Sure, rocket bullets had accuracy issues stemming from inconsistent manufacturing and inherent problems with wind, but their one advantage is that they could be fired from guns that were built like toys.
So your solution to the problem of inadaqvate technological infrastructure is even higher, more advanced technological infrastructure?
You do know one of the big reasons the gyroject failed is because each cartridge was a miniature, solid-state rocket? The design tolerances for that are seriously high, as it would be for creating something that can withstand and direct a continuous explosion. If you realize that, then you realize why the ammunition was ridiculously expensive compared to regular ammunition. The incandescence of home-made ammunition? Logically increased by order of magnitude for miniature rockets.
And that the problems of accuracy stemmed from badly-made rocket-cartridges? Was due to a professional ammunition manufacturer's failures to ensure consistent quality. You see why I have doubts about this being a thing for homebrew guns for gangs?
Yes, rocket bullets allow much simpler and lower-tolerance firearms. Because it shifts the pressure on tolerances and good materials entirely on the ammunition. Yes, it would be easy to make weapons that fire rocket-bullets. As long as you have rocket-bullets. Which are necessarily costlier and more difficult to make than regular bullets.
A spark gap can be fired ten thousand times and the most you would have to do to maintain it is lengthen or replace the electrodes. Its a super simple, super reliable technology, and people use it all the time in potato cannons. Alternatively, another electrical firing method is basically a resistor that explodes when current is passed through it. A bit finicky in comparison, but the technology can set off modern smokeless powder (or even high explosives) and the resistors have other legitimate uses.
My question isn't whether it exists. The question is whether the resulting product is necessarily inferior to legally-made firearms.
Not all firearm designs require standardized ammo, or even use cartridges. I already posted one such example.
My point was that it would result in further lack of reliability and performance. As well as the fact that the problem of different homebrew labs.
If rocket bullets ever became a thing, they could also probably be fired through an oversized bore and the only problem would be the potential for further accuracy reduction.
Rocket bullets are already a thing. The technology was not lost, it is simply ignored and right now not much more than a curiosity among hobbyists. The learn question is whether the technology is really the low-hanging fruit you say it is. After all, this and other methods are not used widely in real firearms and there may be more reasons for that than convention.
