‘Downloadable Gun’ Clears a Legal Obstacle, and Activists Are Alarmed
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
The debate on this issue seems to be centered around the fact that these plans are downloadable online, which I think is silly since Google happily provides you with most of what you need already:
https://patents.google.com/patent/US984519A
https://patents.google.com/patent/US6279258
I am not a legal expert and it's not a legal advice, but in case of a bolt-action rifle, I think the action is still legally treated as a firearm. So you can buy most parts without hassle (barrel, trigger, stock), but you need to go through the FFL to buy the action.
Reference: https://www.brownells.com/aspx/general/faqdetail.aspx?fid=10...
Anyone is allowed to manufacture a gun, as long as they don't sell it. If you want to sell it, you'd need a license.
1. CNC the Remington 700 action: https://www.practicalmachinist.com/vb/gunsmithing/making-rem... . This is the hard part and would probably need a week of dedicated work...
2. Buy barrel, trigger and stock.
3. Everything mostly just fits into the action, so assembly is just like putting lego pieces together.
The jig is the most expensive part, costing about $160 or so, but once you have it there's no wear parts and you can use the jig to build as many as you want.
Usually these 'homemade' guns buy a lot of professionally made gun parts such as the rifle barrel and just make their own lower receiver, which isn't exposed to the explosive high pressure part of a gun.
Disclaimer: I’m familiar with this only because I have to check my firearms when I’m flying.
Everyone there had to wear a white shirt and pants. There was only one entrance and there was a metal detector right in front of it. But what all the "cool" kids were doing was seeing how big of a knife they could sneak through it. And there was a couple of 3 inchers that got through. It mattered were the knife was and how you held your hands as you went through, but can't remember the details (this was back in 2001).
Well not so much. If you've got blue prints or a replica of any metal part you can go to any local machine shop have them make it for you. Of course you are going to be paying $150+ an hour for labor, but it can be done. I had to get a lot of parts machined from raw materials on an old motorcycle I restored once. There were not after market parts for it. I had to get everything that was broken or worn out made at a local machine shop. Nothing stopping me from handing them blue prints for an ak-47 receiver. Machining a gun barrel might be a little more obvious, but barrels can be bought on ebay and other online shops. Usually only receivers and frames are what is regulated, but frames can be made custom out of wood or plastic.
Today? Sure. Tomorrow? Maybe not. Given this is precedent it's perfectly apt for people to consider the future implications.
That, of course, it's exactly what gun rights activists envision, a self-regulated militia being the best insurance and security for a free state (yes, that's a misquote).
I generally abhor guns in society.
However, I'd be more concerned about living in a society where creating and disseminating information, such that no crime is committed, is a crime in and of itself.
On a more practical note, I'd be surprised if any 3D printed gun was actually strong enough without metal components/reinforcing. I'm reasonable experienced with 3D printing... and I'd personally expect such a device to at least blow a few fingers off.
Though information itself wants to be free, I am very much in favor of increasing friction for world-ending technologies like nuclear weapons.
There was a good documentary on 3D printing guns a few years ago where the plastics were essentially good for a few rounds and then wear out. They've improved since then, and will keep improving.
Plastics don't need to compete directly with metal to be formidable.
Have you ever heard of the Nth Country Experiment? Keep in mind that this was conducted in the 1960s. Suffice to say, designing a nuclear weapon is not a problem. Neither is manufacturing one. The difficulty lies in obtaining sufficient nuclear material.
That never made sense to me.
Information desiring something of itself would imply that information is sentient.
I think it is people who want information to be free. And not all people want that, at least for not all information.
And it's probably not too far off in the future that DNA strains of viruses like ebola can easily be replicated and constructed in someone's basement.
The founding fathers never envisioned free speech as a way to disseminate information that can be used to kill swaths of people. It was a check on the government as well as a way to preserve political speech.
Pretty much anyone could just buy a gun back then. The founders even made sure to put this right in the Constitution.
And before someone goes on and says "but the founders never envisioned that semi automatic rifles would exist!" You should know that you are 100% incorrect.
Semi automatic rifles existed for a hundred years prior to the Constitution. Go google the "kalthoth repeater".
Not a lot of people owned them, because they were fairly expensive, but they existed, and I'm sure the founders could have envisioned them.
But since you mentioned it, that's the problem with taking an originalist view of the constitution. Nuclear weapons didn't exist back then, neither did DNA sequencing. And in your view for any X it must be legal, because the founding fathers were silent about X.
I am pretty sure that if you could go back in time and ask whether George Washington whether the common man should be allowed to have and use nuclear weapons, the common sense answer would be a resounding "NO".
The standard interpretation is the 2A applies to any weapon which can be carried by a common soldier. It doesn't cover a F22, nor a battleship, nor a tank (although you can buy a tank, but for other reasons).
Or in other words, the "controversy" here is entirely overblown, as firearms are very much something that everyone has been able to imagine for a long time, and this is not a "tricky situation". It is a clear and obvious situation covering rights that are clearly covered in the constitution.
I even clarified the question to "large swaths of people" which exempts plastic guns from the question.
Next time, please read the full comments.
The article fails to mention that the Ghost Gunner is a CNC mill and makes the gun out of 7075 billet aluminum blocks, which is strong enough for multiple shots.
There wouldn't seem to be any algorithm that could recognize any part that could be assembled into a device. A gun for instance can take on almost infinite forms and be divided into arbitrary unrecognizable modules.
We could enforce pre-approval by a government engineer of any part that may possibly become such a device. But such an engineer would have to generate a large amount of false positives to be at all effective. And the requirement for skilled human intervention would make it slow and expensive.
Bottom line, if there exists a device that you insist must be prohibited, then you will want to ban the free use of 3D printers that can make it.
So what's that threshold for you? Keep in mind that a box cutter was used as a WMD, killing thousands. Do we ban 3D printers that can make a box cutter? Let's posit a lower limit of a box cutter and an upper limit of a fusion bomb. Are gunpowder projectile devices the right compromise?
How dangerous does a printable device have to be before we must stand athwart technology, yelling Stop?
There’s really no other way — even if we had a hypothetical omniscient AI — because you can already construct weapons from a number of harmless existing parts with nonviolent uses, there’s no way of banning ALL possible weapon parts from being printed without also banning everything.
And this isn’t even getting into inevitable circumvention of any such limitations placed on 3D printers.
The only way to entirely prevent the construction of weapons is to build everything around us out of jello or styrofoam, and box everyone inside this soft padded universe permanently. But then I bet you even then someone will figure out how to terrorize others with the tools at hand; even if all they can do is hold you down and smother you in jello, someone, somewhere will do it, and copycats will appear everywhere thereafter.
For a revolver, you slam a file down the barrel, forcing cone, file the striking surface and the chamber, take that apart and ditch it separately (again in salty water).
Even if they manage the find all the parts, they will never be able to match up ballistics. And hey, somebody stole your gun, you have no idea why they would do all that.
Private people can have stock at gun shows and not be required to have a Federal Firearm License.
I'll put a link here, not that you'll check it.
http://www.governing.com/gov-data/safety-justice/gun-show-fi...
Yes, a private individual could liquidate their closet of guns they don't want anymore at a gun show without being legally required to conduct a background check. They can't have "stock" or "inventory" or otherwise resemble any attempt to be in the business of selling firearms or they're going to get a nasty visit from BATFE.
Requiring background checks for private gun sales sounds like a good idea until you do the research on the effort vs benefit. The effort to enforce this would be massive and virtually no gun crimes are committed with these guns anyways. In practical terms you'd have to track every firearm and figure out what to do when Grandpa does and leaves his gun to his children. A parent would have to run a background check on their own child of they buy a gun for them as a gift. Realistically, the only time it could be determined that a gun was sold in private without a background check is if the gun is eventually used in a crime and recovered. The vast, vast majority of guns that wind up in the hands of criminals are through corrupt licensed dealers and straw purchases.
If the purpose of gun control laws is to prevent violent crime, then there's no loophole here since this is not a significant source of weapons used in violent crimes.
Your argument that it is silly hinges on the idea that parents wouldn't ever do that. But they would.
Those background checks in total would have little impact, but it's not a good argument against requiring background checks.
Depending on the state (I guess), private sellers are allowed their own booths at gun shows and only dealers are required to do background checks (this is part of the "gun show loop hole"). But private sellers at gun shows make up a small percent, mostly just collectors. There would be no profit to buy a gun and then try to sell it as a private sell at a gun show. "Gun people" are not stupid and the last thing that would be allowed at a gun show would be someone posing as a private seller and selling marked up firearms to people that would otherwise refuse to pay a lower price from a dealer but would have to do a background check with them....
The Ghost Gunner machine mentioned in the article is actually a CNC mill using 7075 billet aluminum blocks.
New York Times is NOT a reputable news organization. Yes, they once were, but ever since the whole WMD 2002 Iraq war, to me, they've been horrible. Yes occasionally they might have something good, that's how propagation works: you hide your agenda with things that make it neutral so that you can't distinguish between facts and agenda narratives, it also gives plausible deniability against critics. So whatever.
If you know of a news organization where every article is high quality, I'd love to hear about it!
states law as usual vary but only a few states have serial number database of guns. Ymmv if they will allow it or not.
So tl;dr, you only need register a serial if you made something like a machine gun and hold a federal firearms manufacturing license, and you can only make one or two versions of each design without changing things, and the serial number only really matters when selling or trading it, which you both are and aren't allowed to do depending on what the courts feel your intentions were. Otherwise the mechanical design of the gun can be freely sold to law enforcement or the military. Also the rules change once you actually get a manufacturing license (you are signing away some rights in the process, similar to signing away your right to not have an ID while driving when you get your driver's license) but if you get your manufacturing license you should probably have an actual lawyer.
This is really poor advice. The BATF considers just having the parts without the requisite Class III license (really a tax stamp) to be a felony.
The Hughes Amendment to the Firearm Owners Protection Act of 1986 prohibits civilians from owning any machine gun manufactured after May 1986.
All the other 5 categories of Class III firearms (SBRs, SBSs, Silencers, AOWs and Destructive Devices) can still be made, even by an individual, if he/she first applies for and receives permission to do so.
To do so, they must file an ATF Form 1 (maker form) and pay a $200 make tax fee.
A civilian can still legally own any machinegun that was created PRIOR to May, 1986 as long as they get approval on an ATF form 4.
Regardless, you should definitely speak to a lawyer before attempting anything like this, there are tons of local laws that you can break even if you are following state and federal law. And once you break a local law it becomes an illegal weapon and negates any legal standing you had with the state or federally.
The only ways to legally produce a new machine gun in the US right now are to pay thousands of dollars a year for a federal firearms license and special occupation taxpayer license to manufacture, or to otherwise receive explicit permission from a US government agency to get the ATF to approve a Form 1 application to make and register an NFA firearm. See 18 USC 922 (o) regarding machineguns not registered prior to 1986. (Wickard v Filburn dispensed with the notion of claiming to avoid federal law by keeping activity within one state.)
The plastic in a 3D printer is surely, by design, very malleable. That's the opposite of the material needed for an effective gun.
Beside, most killing happened in schools. Still puzzled me today why don’t they remove school from gun free zone. It is a killzone.