AR Lower Receiver

Whenever a murderous shooting spree like the recent movie theater massacre in Aurora, Colorado hits the news, liberals don their tall, pointed thinking caps and start prescribing more gun control.

It escapes the liberal thought processes that disarming peaceful law-abiding citizens is pointless, and anyone prepared to violate laws against homicide is going to be willing to ignore laws prohibiting firearms possession as well. Liberals theorize in an imaginary setting, completely different from the real world, in which it is only necessary to adopt a regulation or pass another law, and “So let it be written, so let it be done!” Pharoah’s will is totally effective and accomplished. No one simply ignores it.

In the real world, of course, banning things that people want, liquor, drugs, gambling, prostitution, cheap immigrant labor, or guns, never works at all because people then go and buy the illegal good or services on the black market. Large American cities with the strictest gun control laws typically also have the highest crime rates.

People like NYC Mayor Bloomberg believe that the problem is that their authority just isn’t wide enough. If their gun bans could only be spread across the country, then there wouldn’t be any guns. It escapes Mayor Bloomberg’s attention that drugs are banned across the country, and you can still find plenty of illegal drugs in NYC.

A universal gun ban would be widely resisted and evaded. People would hide guns in their houses and bury them in their backyards. You’d have to invade and search every house, office, factory, and garage in the country to search for and confiscate guns, and you’d still never successfully get them all.

Liberals do not seem to realize that you can make a primitive gun which will actually fire from an old automobile antenna, a board, a rubber band and a couple of nails. In Afghanistan, in primitive village operations, people successfully fabricate working copies of bolt action Mausers and Enfields, full-auto-capable M-16s and AK-47s, grenade launchers and full-sized machine guns using simple hand tools, producing most parts by hand filing. An American with a garage workshop and Dremel tool set could do even better.

Mark Gibbs, in Forbes, however, reports that notions of restricting access to guns by fiat have just lately become even more preposterous and out-dated than ever. We have reached the tipping-point of technology in which the ability to produce physical objects like the receiver of the AR assault rifle will soon become effectively within everybody’s reach.

A fellow writing as Have Blue used a readily-available and not-terribly-expensive 3D printer to produce the lower receiver (the part that counts as the machine gun, the part that you have to register and pay tax on to the BATFE) of an AR in plastic resin. His example was scaled down in size to .22 caliber, and he may only have printed the semi-auto version receiver not requiring the full-auto federal registration and tax, but the principle has been demonstrated.

We are momentarily going to be living in a world in which it will be perfectly possible for the private individual at home to produce the same fully automatic weapons which once required factories to manufacture using a personal computer, a 3D printer, and a few dollars worth of materials.

Hat tip to Glen Reynolds (who is still the best in the business).

RifleGear.com responds to so-called assault weapon phobia, leading so frequently to state and municipal bans on ugly military-looking long arms, with a new design: the California-legal “Hello, Kitty” AR-15.

Mouseguns has an anonymous humor item comparing the AK-47, the AR-15, and the Mosin-Nagant.

It reads to me like it was written from a Russian perspective. An American would use the Garand as the older comparison. A really sophisticated connoisseur (i.e., somebody old, like me) would compare the 1903 Springfield.

Hat tip to Steve Bodio.