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.
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.
It’s called technology, and it’s the universal solvent.
Clark
October 6, 2011
The Third Wave, CNC, Stereolithography, and the end of gun control
[I have nothing to say except H/T to Mad Rocket Scientist.—Joe]
Makes me wonder, how will technology improve gun control? Not ‘gun control’ as a proxy for the desire to control other people for the sake of power, but ‘gun control’ in the sense of making people safer from criminals.
1 – as internet-based education improves, learning will be easier. If fewer schools are places for criminals to learn their trade, less crime. To the extent that crime correlates with lack of education, less crime.
2 – if technology makes prisons cheaper, society can lock up criminals longer.
3 – technology that helps establish guilt or innocence will make society more comfortable with locking criminals up longer.
4 – body armor that is good, cheap, light, and flexible enough to be convenient. Science-fiction shields preferred.
5 – robots with guns. Because part of the anti-gun argument is laziness (learn to shoot, learn and remember about safety, get a gun, remember to store it safely, learn how to clean it, etc.). When there is an i-bodyguard robot, every hip anti-establishment protester will have the latest robot with the most advanced guns installed.
6 – teleportation, or the feasible equivalent. Makes travel safer.
7 – the opposite of teleportation – rich people never leaving home. If everything comes to them, then where they are can be secured. Never crossing paths with a criminal would make living safer. Rich liberals would have fewer problems with guns if they were assured of their gun-free zones.
Rich liberals already have few problems with guns. They have this great desire to “help” others that leads them to infringe upon the rights of everyone.
My first response to the idea of home-CNC-machining guns is that this is not really a new thing.
I passed on an opportunity to do it a few years back, but it’s still feasible to buy a bunch of parts and a piece of stamped steel, and turn them into a working AK. No CNC machine required.
Now, home-CNC-machining will make that proposition different. And the new-tech aspect of this will get lots of press. But this is not a change in the easy availability of guns to home builders.
Not mentioned in the article, but home-CNC tools may be a change in the easy availability of handguns to home-builders. (My impression is that handguns may be more complex mechanically, but are definitely more complex in fab/construction/mechanical-fit.)
But that would give an entirely new meaning to the phrase ‘Saturday Night Special’.
CNC has of course been around for a long time. Before that we had milling machines for a very long time. Before that guns have been made in small shops for many hundreds of years. If all one has is a 19th century lathe, some rod stock and some music wire, one can crank out slamfire sunmachine guns by the hundreds. “High capacity” magazines could be made from steel can stock.