Quote of the day—John Lott

3-D printers mean an end to any gun control. The government is not going to be able to ban magazines for guns, or ban guns themselves, and the notions of background checks would be even more impossible to do. Anyone with access to a 3-D printer can make guns functionally and indistinguishable from a gun that can be bought in a store. I don’t know how the government will stop people from obtaining a printer.

Just look at the illegal download of television shows and movies. Millions of copies have been downloaded and the government has been unable to stop it. Why would the government be successful in stopping other information like these files from being downloaded?

John Lott
May 7, 2015
Why Gun Control is Ultimately Doomed to Fail
[Well… the government can ban magazines and guns but they can’t effectively enforce the ban. It will be incredibly obvious it is like banning alcohol in the 1920s. Or even banning sex outside of marriage. It will be trivial to supply the black market and people will mock those who attempt to support it.—Joe]

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9 thoughts on “Quote of the day—John Lott

  1. You are missing an obvious application of an unenforceable ban – selective prosecution.

    Get pulled over for expired registration, and if you aren’t in the correct party it is 5 years behind bars when they notice the gun under the car seat. And if you don’t want to spend 5 years incarcerated, maybe you can support the correct party by infiltrating the other party and entrapping the members in similar doubleplus ungood deeds. Or donate to the correct party. Or stop protesting the correct party. The possibilities are endless, and if you are David Gregory you are free to have a printed gun, but if you aren’t, then watch yourself!

    • Alternately, you could take that gun and shoot the brownshirt trying to arrest you.

      • While in some circumstances that is certainly morally justifiable, it’s likely not technically legal, and as such they can come after you with much more force, and better PR because you are now a deranged right-wing wako cop-killer.

  2. It’s more than just printed guns. For example, the 922(r) import regs, that state you can only have X number of imported parts in a rifle, lest it become a dreaded “assault weapon.” For years, when I was building various guns from imported kits, I’d send off to Tapco to buy all the needed parts to make my guns legal. It always seemed a waste to toss perfectly good parts and replace them with identical ones, stamped “USA.”

    However, I’ve never, ever read of a situation where someone was stopped and their AK disassembled to see if the operating rod or trigger or mag follower had “USA” engraved on them. In fact, I’m not even sure it would be legal to do such a check – what’s the probable cause for demanding such a search: I don’t think “I had a hunch that the defendant had an illegally-assembled gun.”

    Like Washington with I-594, Oregon just passed a UBC law. How much of an increase do you think we’ll actually see in background checks being made? It’s all “feel good” for the hoplaphobic, and an entangling yet ineffective PITA for those who own and acquire firearms.

  3. Lott makes a good point, but it certainly doesn’t start with the 3D printer. Having a forge two or three hundred years ago would have been similar, or a milling machine and a lathe 100 years ago, or a CNC shop ten years ago (whereupon you could exchange CAD files over the internet). The 3D printer makes it a bit easier, but people could make their own guns for as long as there have been such things as guns. The required skill sets change, but the political concept does not.

    Regardless; the game being played by government is, through intimidation and force, demoralization and logistic obstacles, to maintain fire superiority (or something like it) over the general population. It need not work 100%, or anywhere near 100%, to achieve its objectives. It only needs to work a little bit, here and there, to de-stabilize the whole country.

    Alcohol Prohibition worked beautifully, you must understand. Please! It demonstrated the tremendous amount of chaos that can be obtained from one little law. The Progressives lost Prohibition, but they now have several more such chaos engines. They’re far more advanced now.

    • Prohibition worked fine for politicians, who ended up providing large profits to their criminal friends and benefiting from the resulting bribes.

  4. True…..the trend in home production of goods will only expand as the equipment improves. However…..as long as arms are dependent on ammunition there is a method of control. Not as easy or efficient but still possible. To date the manufacture of primers and modern powder is difficult, much much more difficult than making old fashioned black powder and percussion caps. As long as that is a factor ammunition could be targeted so that we can own all the guns we want but have nothing to load into them. Wouldn’t be hard for the EPA to finagle an excuse to ‘coal mine’ the ammo makers into bankruptcy save one or two that were given special dispensation and ONLY allowed to sell to .gov.

    The arms race between 2A supporters and 2A haters is an ever evolving never ending battle.

    • I wonder about 3d printed ammo. Cases, check. Empty primer caps, check. Bullets? Perhaps. Imagine a length of metal rod inside a printed jacket. Or even a non-metallic rod (tungsten carbide?).
      That leaves primer and propellent, both of which can be made in a garage chemistry lab, though admittedly I’m a bit nervous about propellent.

  5. A technical question that I don’t have the knowledge to answer: how difficult would it be to design and manufacture a firearms using something like modern propellants in a cartridgeless system? (I say “something like” because the currents ones may not be optimal in the situation.)

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