Quote of the Day
Gun laws in the United States are an unmitigated disaster. The amount of asinine minutiae that can send you straight to jail is downright embarrassing, and it requires a conscious effort to believe we’re in this situation because of incompetence rather than malice. All this to say: I’ve made a genuine effort to work on this project without running afoul of any state or federal gun laws, like Tom Frickin’ Cruise navigating a hallway of laser tripwires.
Evan @ Cottage Arms
Posted in 2022
Meet Shirley: The .22LR built for the year 2022 from Cottage Arms on Vimeo.
It’s a zip gun. People have been making those out of common every day parts for…well…probably since guns were invented.
My particular favorite involves two properly sized pieces of pipe that fit into each other, an end cap and a screw. Add shotgun shells and you’re ready to go.
The thing is, when things deteriorate to the point where otherwise law abiding citizens have to resort to zip guns, I don’t think we’re going to be concerning ourselves with minor details like following the letter of the gun laws. By that point, it will be clear that our society is broken and it’ll be “do what you have to do”.
I always like to remind people of the website “thehomegunsmith.com” created by the late Philip Luty, persecuted by the UK government for the crime of thinking Britain has freedom of speech.
Your “favorite” sounds like the device described by Tom Clancy in “Without Remorse”.
I don’t remember that from “without remorse”, but my memory sucks so I’m not doubting you. I do clearly remember a character in one of the “Death Wish” movies using a zip gun made that way.
It just always seemed to me to be the quickest and easiest way to make an effective firearm out of commonly available materials and very few tools.
I don’t know about Clancy, but Home Depot shotguns (two pipes, a chunk of 2×4, and some nails — $5-10 in parts, total) have been turned in at “gun buybacks” in exchange for $50 gift cards because they ARE functional and WILL fire a shell.
Or you could 3D-print “receivers” and — functional or not — trade them in for gift cards. One guy claims to have made $21k doing that with a $200 3D printer and probably a few rolls of filament. (The NY AG has since updated the rules of gun buybacks, but you’d think a career lawyer would write better rules to begin with.)
Once upon a time, you could do it with real receivers, too, back when a stripped AR lower ran about $50 but could be traded in as a “semi-auto rifle receiver” for $200. If you were willing to part with a perfectly good receiver, that is.
But if anyone ever feels like making a bit of cash by following the rules of a useless anti-gun scheme to the letter, there are options.
Brandon Herrera made a luty, and made a YouTube video about it.
A single-shot .22 pistol doesn’t sound like much — a glorified derringer — but if they’re that quick and easy to build, what’s stopping someone from building a few more of them? Say, five? Or a dozen or two?
Shoot, drop, pick up another.
“New York Reload” on steroids.
In WW2, the US made millions of single shot pistols in .45acp, intended for use in Europe. They planned on dropping crates full of them. The hollow frame held a handful of cartridges for reloads. The idea was to use them to kill soldiers up close, so their weapons could be taken for more efficient killing of the enemy.
They were never distributed in Europe. Apparently the idea of the peasants all armed with a pistol frightened the powers-that-be more than being under the heel of the occupying Germans.
Supposedly some were shipped to the Philippines and actually distributed, but I’ve never seen any other mention of this.
They were made by a division of GM.
“FP-45 Liberator”, also see the “CIA deer gun”.
For something much higher quality, the “ASP pistol” is a good story to read.
The issue wasn’t arming Euro-peons, it was that it was considered to largely be waste of money and effort to send them. Distributing the million Liberators would have required hundreds or thousands of bombers dedicated solely to that, taking them away from their real mission of bombing the crap out of the Germans.
Each pistol weighed 1 lb, slightly more for the entire package which contained a few rounds of ammunition plus the packaging. Call it 1.25 lbs. That doesn’t include packaging into containers to be dropped. Short range internal bomb load for a B-17 was 8,000 lbs, so it would have required a bare minimum of 1,250,000 / 8,000 = 15,625 B-17 sorties dedicated solely to distributing all of the Liberators into occupied Western Europe. And it gets worse if you want to drop them in farther areas like Germany and to the East.
Sending them in with air dropped agents (or the resupply thereof) would have been doable, but that’s a very limited and expensive pipeline, better served to sending guns like the Sten which have actual military utility.
So the tl;dr version is that it wasn’t anti-gun politics, it was logistics/economics that prevented their deployment in Europe.
Your plan about distribution was not how they were expecting to deliver them to the subjugated populations. Your heavy bomber loads sounds like what a politician would present as an excuse to stop the project, not someone familiar with actual aircraft use over the occupied territories.
More than one story I have read about plans to drop these, and other hand held weapons to random locations for civilian use had pointed out that Charles DeGaule and others of his ilk were horrified at the prospect of having what were essentially an assassination tool readily available to the population before and after the end of the war. France, and ALL the other countries were actually fighting internal wars against other political groups, the Germans were just the biggest, most organized of the bunch.
Unfortunately, the US mostly ended up supporting the communists (probably due to our State Dept being overrun by commie lovers). The political landscape might have looked a bit different if we had followed through with littering most, or all, of the world with those Liberator pistols.
Quite interesting. At first blush, it appears the trigger spring is a flexure, so I wouldn’t want to use MDF for that, or even plywood, given how the pieces are cut out of a sheet. Using the wing nuts to double as a crude front sight is a nice touch.
Errrr — “sear spring”.
“Gun laws in the United States are an unmitigated disaster. The amount of asinine minutiae that can send you straight to jail is downright embarrassing.”
Not that any one person was responsible. But I’m pretty sure that is a feature of the system. Not a bug.
And all of it patently illegal. As in, if it infringes, it’s not-with-standing.
We have always had the right to make our own guns.
Oh, and on a semi-related side note about gun laws.
To the governor/crime boss/commissar of Illinois;
BFYTW, you over-stuffed gelatinous bowel full of communist excrement,,, excuse of a human. satan raping you over a barrel? Enjoy, this is as good as it gets.