Category Archive 'Gun Registration'

30 Jul 2012

These Days You Can Just Print Your Own Gun

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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).

13 Apr 2009

Nancy Pelosi Wants Guns Registered

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As the Washington Times explains, registration isn’t really about crime, it’s about future confiscation.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, California Democrat, announced last week that she wants to register guns. Her next move will be to try to confiscate them.

The speaker picked a television show with a viewership of 4.6 million to float the Democrats’ coming gun-control push. Questioned on ABC’s “Good Morning America” about the prospect of new gun-control laws now that “it’s a Democratic president, a Democratic House,” she responded, “We don’t want to take their guns away. We want them registered.”

Politicians and bureaucrats routinely claim that registration helps solve crimes. If a registered gun is used in a crime and left at the crime scene, registration supposedly lets the police trace the gun back to the criminal. Though this turn of events might work on fictional TV crime shows, it virtually never occurs in real life. Criminals’ guns are rarely left at crime scenes. When guns are left behind, it usually is because a crook has been seriously injured or killed and the police are poised to catch him anyway.

The few guns left at crime scenes rarely – if ever – are registered to the perpetrator. If they are registered at all, it is to someone else, whose piece was stolen. Despite what Mrs. Pelosi might think, those who use guns to commit major crimes such as robbing and killing are unlikely to respect her request to file paperwork so the government can catalog the tools of their trade.

Numerous examples disprove gun-control propaganda. Hawaii has had licensing and registration of guns for about 50 years. After all of the administrative expenses and inconvenience imposed on gun owners, police there cannot point to a single crime that has been solved as a result of those programs. Given Hawaii’s remote island geography, this should be an ideal place to keep track of guns because movement in and out of the state is limited and legal importation is controlled. If registration is going to work anywhere, it should work there. Unfortunately, criminals seem to be able to get their hands on guns virtually anyplace in the world.

Other jurisdictions with a history of strict handgun bans, such as the District of Columbia and Chicago, have even required registration of hunting rifles and shotguns for more than 20 years. Neither the District nor Chicago can point to any crimes that have been solved using registration records. …

Because registration doesn’t help solve crime, it is important to ask why government wants to register the people’s firearms. History provides the answer. In countries from Australia to England, registration has been used to create lists of guns that later were confiscated by their governments. Despite Mrs. Pelosi’s assurances to the contrary, Americans’ fear that registration will lead to confiscation is well-founded. Indeed, Mrs. Pelosi’s own state of California already has used existing registration lists to confiscate so-called assault weapons just a half-dozen years ago.


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