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Comment by nostromo | Hacker News Reader

"While I am as impressed as anyone with 3-D printing technology and I believe it has amazing possibilities," said California state senator Leland Yee (D-San Francisco/San Mateo), "we must ensure that it is not used for the wrong purpose with potentially deadly consequences. I plan to introduce legislation that will ensure public safety and stop the manufacturing of guns that are invisible to metal detectors and that can be easily made without a background check."

Why are even bay area politicians so completely dumb about tech. Why can't we get a Jared Polis?

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Don't usually link to Reddit, but this is worthy of note. In a thread with 3600 comments and 3000+ upvotes was the following exchange:

http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1e0ybl/3d_gun_bl...

  I'm sorry, I seem to have stumbled into bizarro-reddit. On 
  that other reddit they want to ban guns completely.

  No, what's happening is that the government just made 
  reddit choose between guns or the internet. Guess which 
  reddit chose?

The US government is run by people who just don't understand the internet.

"stop the manufacturing of guns that are invisible to metal detectors"

Hate to interject a fact here, but this is one of many reasons RKBA types don't respect gun grabbers: their gross ignorance, of which Yee is a choice example. There's already a Federal Undetectable Firearms Act (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Undetectable_Firearms_Act_of_19...):

"The Undetectable Firearms Act of 1988 (Pub.L. 100–649, H.R. 4445, 102 Stat. 3816, enacted November 10, 1988) makes it illegal to manufacture, import, sell, ship, deliver, possess, transfer, or receive any firearm that is not detectable by walk-through metal detectors or has major components that do not generate an accurate image when subjected to inspection by airport x-ray machines."

ADDED: and I've read the design includes a metal insert to satisfy this law.

Because people vote for them. People like politicians that say words like "common sense measures" and "ensure public safety" while taking away rights and freedoms. Who needs those rights and freedoms anyway? Think of the children!

If you think Bay Area people smarter in this regard that any other people, you have to only look up what politicians are doing with budgets, local regulations, pensions, public welfare, public transportation, etc. around Bay Area and you'd see that knowing tech is not the only area politicians are failing.

What would be a better way to handle this situation?

(edit) I'm not saying that this is the best option. The government is tasked with ensuring public safety and this is an issue with major public safety repercussions. They cannot just sit and watch this unfold, and what this guy said is basically the most obvious way of dealing with the situation.

Reconciling themselves to the inevitable, perhaps? That is too much to expect from any government, however.

Elaborate, please. In practical terms.

  A month from now here are the measures in place to 
  reduce the public safety risk of this development: 

  *write here*

Here you go:

A month from now here are the measures in place to reduce the public safety risk of this development:

None needed.

It is not. Nobody was threatened with this, nobody will ever be threatened with this. This thing is un-concealable and unusable as a real-life weapon in any public safety scenario. If you think anybody with this prototype can threaten public safety you are badly mistaken.

The idea that any time anything new happens the government should jump in and prohibit it until it is proven safe is exactly why politicians like this thrive. Instead, people should use their brains and let the government intervene only when actual threat is there, not theoretical lets-cover-our-asses invented threat is touted by politicians.

I'm guessing that one can carry it through the airport security easily enough. It's not that it's printed, it's the fact that it's printed in plastic.

Have you been to any US airport recently? These guys grab my freaking nuts and touch me in places that usually only myself and my wife are allowed to access. And you say it'd be easy to get through them a piece of a size of a large brick without them noticing? Do you know what mayhem an explosive of a similar volume could create? Something does not add up here with your theory.

You put it in a bag, obviously.

As a bonus, you redesign it into larger number of smaller pieces and spread them over several bags.

You can stick your head in a sand as much as you want, but this is a game-changing development. If one can print a working gun, one can conceivably print other interesting things that to date were assumed to only exist in metal, the assumption that was the foundation of respective detection technology. The assumption that is no longer valid.

You put it in a bag, obviously.

You mean the bag that goes through an X-Ray scanner which detects high density objects?

Indeed, the same bag that is mysteriously devoid of valuables after it has arrived at its destination.

How many other things would it be possible to print? I do think you are right about it being a game-changing development, but at this moment I don't think there is a lot of threat from it. I think for the next couple of years, we can assume that respective detection technology will be fine.

Are you kidding? Airport security breaches are so commonplace that they don't always merit news coverage anymore. Here, another TSA pen-test failure. http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/03/08/us-usa-security-ai...

These are just the ones we hear about, and don't include incidences of undetected contraband carried by passengers, unwittingly and intentionally.

So the argument is that since you already can bring a real bomb into the airport, creating one-shot un-concealable weapon that is useless in any practical scenario is a huge security threat requiring the government to ignore both 1st and 2nd amendment because of it? Could you expand this argument a little more, I don't see how exactly it plays out.

Check out its namesake: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FP-45_Liberator

There have been plenty of "practical scenarios" where access to very minimal handguns has been used to gain access to more. E.g. handguns were quite significant in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

And its certainly concealable; a bit thick for my tastes, but otherwise almost every time I walk out the door I'm carrying concealed a 4" barrel standard length magazine M1911, which is not a whole lot different in the other dimensions, and plenty of people are able to conceal revolvers with thick cylinders or semi-auto handguns with double stack magazines.

Have you ever personally carried concealed?

You can use bare hands to gain access to handguns. Just surprise any armed person, hit him over the head with anything massive (or just with your bare hands if you're strong enough) and take his weapon. If you have a couple of accomplices you don't even have to be that strong - 2-3 reasonable strong men can hold a person down long enough to take his/her personal weapon, which is usually readily accessible. What plastic gun changes here? The idea of the FP-45 gun wasn't of course to be battlefield weapon - it was to convert unarmed population into armed and dangerous one. In the US, it doesn't change anything as whoever wants to be armed already is armed.

>>> Have you ever personally carried concealed?

No I have not, but from the dimensions of this one I don't see how you can reasonably keep it concealed on your person without people trained at detecting concealed things easily noticing it. You could of course disassemble it and hope nobody figures it out, but it's nothing new. If you don't need the weapon to survive more than a single shot, there are a lot of things that can be converted to a gun.

My argument is that airport security is useless and ineffective. I said nothing about the gov't enacting even more bad legislation on top of the already bad response to the "terrorism threat".

How do you transport the bullets?

That's a different issue. Smuggling a small bullet past any security has got to be way easier than an entire gun.

Apart from the fact they're metal. I don't think (but I could be wrong) that a design for a plastic bullet has been perfected.

Rubber bullets have killed people before, and I reckon rubber bullets would be as deadly as any other at close range.

Good point, and a blank is deadly at contact range. And the gun is aptly named after the WWII Liberator: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FP-45_Liberator

The objective of such crude and limited guns is to enable you to procure better ones, although of course this one is also an initial proof of concept, plus I gather intended to work though such issues as this takedown (I've read the guy or people behind this believe they've jumped through the required hoops to allow Internet publication).

Although I'll note conventional ammo needs a metal case; there has been work on caseless ammo but it's not gotten beyond R&D, the G11 probably went the furthest: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heckler_%26_Koch_G11.

But you can't fire a rubber bullet from a plastic gun. That gun as designed needs a propellant (cordite/gunpowder) to fire the metal slug at the end. And if you need a propellant, you can't use a plastic cartridge case.

If you have a plastic "thing" firing a rubber projectile using a plastic spring or similar, then it is more like a crossbow than an actual gun.

Why not? I bet I could cast the charge out of an explosive resin.

Useful bullets are dense. X-rays, essentially, scatter off density. Building a useful bullet that's relatively transparent to X-rays may be an impossibility.

How is it not a threat to have guns that can go through metal detectors, which we use in all sorts of government and transportation locations to prevent shootings? Even if this particular prototype is bulky, clearly the technology will advance. The idea that we should only act when there is an "actual threat" when a threat is clearly on its way is absurd. Good government anticipates and prevents threats to public safety, while respecting of course its role and the rights of citizens.

That said, there is nothing the government can do to prevent individuals printing guns and distributing plans, and the first amendment concerns are real. They can make it difficult and unacceptable to profit or engage in commerce related to weapons manufacturing, much like child porn. Without laws, there will be weapons plans widely accessible and the technology will advance more rapidly.

Bullets are metal.

Bombs can already go through metal detectors. There are knives that can go through metal detectors. There are hundreds of other things that can hurt you and go through metal detectors. Many of them aren't huge and one-time use. This thing is huge and is one-time use.

>>> The idea that we should only act when there is an "actual threat" when a threat is clearly on its way is absurd.

No, it is not absurd. Actually, for regular citizen it is the law - you can apply self-defense only when actual threat is clearly on its way. How comes the government - which is much more dangerous and prone to abuse than regular citizen, and can do much more harm if mistaken - is held to a lower standard and is allowed to violate the right of citizens on imaginary "threats" completely invented out of the blue? Where this right comes from - is it from fear or from belief government agents somehow so much more trustworthy than ordinary people and would never abuse their powers?

You sound like a tea party Republican. Of course the government has to jump in when a 3D gun is being printed, whether it's safe or not!

He does sound quite sane on how the US government should act. Too, bad they spend so much time on theater as opposed to actual risks (heart disease, cancer, public debt, etc.).

I agree, but 11,000 people dying a year sounds like an actual threat/risk to me. Your list can be modified to: heart disease, cancer, public debt, guns, etc.

The number of people killed in violent crimes by guns in the US is continuing to trend down. This is via the CDC. Why screw with that?

Second, the US government does not have to the money or constitutional authority to "fix" all things. It has a budget and income which should start to match.

11,000 people taken over the whole US is not much of a risk. If you look at the CDC stats, it is very far down on a long list.

"Why screw with that?"

Exactly. This period of decreasing violent crime is correlated with a massive, near nationwide relaxation of gun controls that go back to the post-Civil war period. Correlation does not suggest let alone prove causation, but desiring a reversal in a trend that correlates with what in theory is your objective should give one pause.

There are couple of things that suggest correlation: Chicago and DC.

I wonder if you realise city-wide laws don't matter: you can drive 30 minutes from DC in Virginia and get a rifle...

Do you actually believe this? This makes me laugh... I think we need a psychological study to see what is this filthy obsession with guns people have here in the US.

Do you deny either of the facts cited?

The crime decrease was extensively discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5674263

The most visible and perhaps biggest of the relaxations of gun control is the nationwide sweep of shall issue concealed carry regimes, now around 42 states and 2/3rds of the population, see this for more details: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concealed_carry_in_the_United_S...; the recovery through political means of the fundimental right to bear arms is no small thing. You may laugh about my "filthy obsession", but the facts on the ground are that every time I exit my residence, I can carry a concealed handgun, and almost every time I do. That wasn't true here in my home state before 2004.

As for a study, not only are there plenty, but since you've made up your mind, for what purposes do you desire one?

I can show you 10 studies to counter each study you just posted, so all these "studies" are useless. At the end of the day, 11,000 people are dying in the US per year vs. only tens or hundreds in other countries where they have proper gun laws. I know the US population is higher, so let's take it by ratio: the rate per 100,000 population per year in the US is 10.20. The US ranks 57 in the world. In the UK, the rate is 0.25, and they rank 5. Japan ranks 1st with a rate of 0.07. It doesn't look like you care about ranking high with the rest of the civil societies in the world. I frankly couldn't care less about the "right to bear arms". A right made in the 1700's when militias were there to fight the British. You don't realise we're 300 years ahead now, do you?

And yes, I did make up my mind a long time ago. I simply can't wrap my head around two things: guns & death penalty. To me, these are primitive issues that if we're really a civil society, we really shouldn't be discussing them in 2013.

I think we should end the argument. A HN discussion will not stop you from carrying a concealed weapon, nor will it alter my views.

"Facts are stubborn things", and I was quoting facts, not "studies" in the sense of the word as we've been using it. E.g. the fatality data comes from the CDC, and the sources are, per http://www.cdc.gov/ncipc/wisqars/fatal/help/faq.htm#Where:

"Where does WISQARS get its data?

"Death data come from a national mortality database compiled by CDC's National Center for Health Statistics. This database contains information from death certificates filed in state vital-statistics offices and includes causes of death reported by attending physicians, medical examiners, and coroners. It also includes demographic information about decedents reported by funeral directors, who obtain that information from family members and other informants. Population data come from the Bureau of the Census. These data are based on information gathered in censuses and on estimation procedures conducted in non-census years."

Similarly, it is a hard fact, based on legislation enacted, that shall issue concealed carry has swept the nation 1987 (Florida) to 2011 (Wisconsin and Iowa).

That you dismiss these as "studies" is about as disturbing as you dismissing the rule of law, which after all is the only thing that stands between you and the barbarians....

I believe it. I also have a cousin who is only alive because he had a gun (wild dogs[1]). I think we need a psychological study to see what is this filthy obsession with authority figures anti-gun folks seem to have.

1) Once again, if you don't want the dog, drop it off at a no-kill shelter - not out in the country. Dogs will turn feral, group up, and try to kill livestock and people. Life isn't a fairy tale.

http://www.examiner.com/article/la-pit-bull-attack-shows-sav...

"LA pit bull attack shows savage consequences of citizen disarmament"

"What this means is, top LA law enforcement knows perfectly well that savage beasts are preying on peaceable citizens, they are unable to stop it from happening, they know what will give those being attacked a fighting chance, and they deny them that option under force of state arms. Through their mandates, they confirm that they would rather see a 63-year-old woman mauled to death, ripped apart in the most horrible, agonizing and terrifying way conceivable, than simply have the choice to the means of defense."

> This thing is un-concealable and unusable as a real-life weapon in any public safety scenario

True. My worry is that this is just the v0.1 and it is the shape of things to come. Desktop CNC milling machines are also getting better rapidly and can make metal parts. ( http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/otherfab/the-othermill-c... ).

Designing this gun was clearly an asshole move, but how do you prohibit it now? Cory Doctrow said something along the lines of DRM is "allowing a general-purpose computer to run any program except for the ones that I don't like". (http://boingboing.net/2012/08/23/civilwar.html )

A 3d printer or cnc mill that can make anything "except for the shapes that I don't like" is equally laughable.

Designing this gun was clearly an asshole move

I, for one, welcome any asshole moves that make governments afraid of their citizens.

DefDist's Bitcoin: 1Gb5GNxrVGMT8e9uoJ8CmamrdVz9o8fAEa ( http://defdist.org/bitcoin/ )

A typically and uniquely American response. The main problem that you have now is that your citizens are afraid of each other's sidearms. The government, not so much.

This is so silly. If the country ever comes to the point where only you and your 3D printed gun stand between freedom and the government's tyranny, you'll just be obliterated by a Predator drone.

Advances in and proliferation of 3D guns will only endanger innocent citizens. Thinking that it's any kind of check on government power is a childish fantasy.

You really ought to read about the namesake of this gun: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FP-45_Liberator

If it comes to that, it's merely a tool to get better guns.

Interesting link, thanks.

"General Eisenhower's staff never saw the practicality". And I don't either.

Perhaps all of the above are lacking in imagination---and/or the staffs didn't want masses of soon to be liberated people to be armed. Since mass distribution would have consumed precious air transport/bomber resources, we don't know if their tradeoff was correct. The one thing we can say is that the proposition was not put to the test.

This stupid argument is reiterated again and again and doesn't become less stupid. There are about 100 millions of gun owners in the country. Do you think any government can wage war with 100 million armed citizens, drones or not? Do you read newspapers, do you know how successful the war in any territory where the population is hostile, noncooperative and armed? Do you think US tried to find local allies in Afganistan and Iraq because they didn't think of using drones? Drones aren't some magic wand that makes you invincible, and no government can remain in place if 100 million armed people want it out, drones or not.

Buddy, if it ever comes to pass that fully 1/3 of the population rises up in armed rebellion against the government, equipped with the kind of military-grade weaponry and foreign backing that sustained the Afghan/Iraqi insurgencies, then the USA has become a dystopian warlord state and freedom and democracy are dead letters for the next dozen generations.

Get real. These kinds of justifications are just completely absurd fantasies, for people who want to picture themselves as the heroes of another "Red Dawn" remake.

Are you familiar with the concept known as an insurance policy?

So you acknowledge that the government can not rule over non-consenting armed population, yet call this idea "absurd".

>>> for people who want to picture themselves as the heroes of another "Red Dawn" remake.

Nobody wants it. But the option is there, and was there from the start. Just as no responsible person wants to kill other people, but if these people break into his house and threaten his life... And yes, this is an unrealistic scenario which never happens to vast majority of people. But if it does, some people want to be prepared. Given how many times defense against completely imaginary scenarios was brought in this topic, as justification for government doing anything, I don't see why this concept is so hard to understand when it's not the government that is doing it.

> So you acknowledge that the government can not rule over non-consenting armed population

Unarmed non-consenting populations can and have brought down governments. e.g. in Egypt and in the Czech republic. But if the government is determined not to let go at any cost at all, side-arms won't help you against a decent army. Protesters with guns is nothing more than a good excuse to send in the tanks/drone strikes/etc.

So the presence or absence of civilian guns are not the issue that you make them out to be.

>>> Unarmed non-consenting populations can and have brought down governments. e.g. in Egypt

In Egypt, the power was actually taken by the military after Mubarak has resigned. If the military had supported Mubarak, you can look in Libya and Syria how it would play out.

>>> side-arms won't help you against a decent army

Depends what you mean by "help". You can destroy a city with a bomber, but you can not actually govern the city with a bomber.

>>>> So the presence or absence of civilian guns are not the issue that you make them out to be.

It is. If the population is disarmed, the only force who decides if the government is to survive or not is the military. It's good if the military is on your side, if it's not you're in for a long and unpleasant ride.

> It is. If the population is disarmed, the only force who decides if the government is to survive or not is the military.

What I and others are saying above is that with handguns in the population, the situation is much the same.

The modern experience teaches us that it is very hard to subdue and keep under control a noncompliant and armed population, even if the army has vastly more powerful arms.

Which modern experience would that be? Citation needed.

This is not the point. I'm looking at the bigger picture. At its current form the US government attempts to take away individual liberties from its citizens.

Guns are polarizing, but the same goes for the TSA/Security Theater, Online Privacy/Anonymity, and so on. What child pornography is for Internet censorship, terror threats for public security measures, are mass shootings for gun control.

It is a strategy of spotlighting extremely rare exceptions in order to justify the reduction of individual liberties on a large scale.

Therefore I am welcoming any attempts that balance the powergame - no matter how small they are. If you are going to develop an app that allows me encrypt all my mobile phone traffic you deserve the same level of applause as that guy who developed the gun.

> My worry is that this is just the v0.1 and it is the shape of things to come

I don't see how 3D printers will be able to make undetectable bullets. There are not many ways to do a bullet that doesn't involve metals. Maybe a two-stage self-propelled plastic bullet could do the trick.

> I don't see how 3D printers will be able to make undetectable bullets

They can't, and I didn't think that was implied. I think it was assumed that bullets would come from the usual sources.

Still, a CNC mill could probably fashion bullets (not undetectable ones) and their casings from metal. Explosives required are still a problem, so you'd probably be better off not doing this.

Oh, he's savvy on tech. Just not the way you want him to be.

Leland Yee is a heavy, outspoken critic of the ESRB and was one of the most vocal politicians during the "Hot Coffee" debacle. Not a fan of video games.

Are you saying he's dumb for wanting to restrict gun fabrication , or dumb for thinking that legislation will work when the information is already on the net?

Can I have both please?

"I will ensure we stamp out and remove those things that we can't detect that can be made with off-the-shelf goods."

Uh huh.

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