Not a very pretty lower receiver

Andy Greenburg tried making his own completely-unregistered AR-15 lower receiver (the part that the BATF counts as the gun) in a backroom of WIRED’s San Francisco offices.

He found that making one using a drill press and one of those 80% receiver kits out there was beyond his own slender mechanical abilities.

He also tried the 3-D Printing approach, winding up with another receiver rejected by his gunsmith as needing several more hours of clean-up work.

Defense Distributed‘s software and Ghost Gunner $1500 CNC mill worked much better. And with roughly $700 of added mail-order parts, Greenburg had a working unregistered AR-15.

Naturally, as soon as he assembled it, fired it to prove that it worked, and wrote up his feature, breathing heavily with excitement all the way, he went right over to a San Francisco police station and turned in all three (two duds, one working) lower receivers.

The moral? Unregistered AR-15s are awfully expensive. Greenburg’s three efforts cost: $1334 for the failed drill press kit version, $3604 for the 3-D printed version (including printer), and a mere $2272 for the Ghost Gunner version. You can go out and buy a more powerful, more accurate used bolt action sporter for $400-500. You can buy a Ruger Ranch Rifle semi-auto in the same .223 caliber for $650-750.

So why do you need an unregistered AR-15 anyway? Only goofy metrosexual libtards think that the crucial essence of firearms ownership and usage has to do with the ability of the authorities to identify some particular firearm and to trace its ownership.

In reality, after a crime has been committed, it is frequently perfectly obvious that the firearm that was used is that one there, the one lying on the ground. And the provenance of a particular firearm after it has already been used criminally is generally not all that interesting. Commonly, the perp just bought it legally.

Liberals all seem to be living in some odd old-fashioned Agatha Christie mystery in which the identity of the criminal and his motives are completely bound up with the chain of possession of the weapon he used. If Inspector Poirot can find out exactly which pistol was used to dispatch Colonel Mannering in the library, only thus can it be demonstrated that the butler did it, it being the butler’s gun!

Myself, I was over at my local gunsmith’s shop recently, and on the counter were several piles of AR-15 lower receivers. The prettier ones (much nicer than Greenberg’s) were selling for $49. There were less attractive ones for $39. (They would have been registered at the time of sale, of course.)

I thought of buying one, but reflected that I would then need to buy the better part of a thousand bucks worth of barrel, stock, upper receiver, sight, handguard, and trigger group, and came right back to my senses and concluded that I did not need any $49 paperweight.

Last December, a member of the Chaos Computer Club claimed to have replicated the fingerprint of German Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen using photographs of the politician’s thumb.

Wired puts a nice “Justice was done” spin on the story, but gets the identity of the Minister wrong.

A few years ago the German Minister of Justice—kind of like the Attorney General here in the United States—he was pushing very hard for Germans to have biometric data on their national ID cards, and he wanted all Germans to be fingerprinted. And the Germans pushed back, particularly privacy advocates and those in the Chaos Computer Club. And so what they did is when the German Minister of Justice was out at a restaurant, they went ahead and after he left they got the glass that he had left behind, and they were able to lift his fingerprint off of the glass. They then took a photograph, brought it into Photoshop, cleaned it up, and then were able to replicate it on 3D printers, in latex. … [They] included it as a handout in their Chaos Computer Club magazine that went out to 5,000 people, and they encouraged their readers to leave the Justice Minister’s fingerprints at crime scenes all over Germany, which they did.”

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The BBC has the correct story.

A member of the Chaos Computer Club (CCC) hacker network claims to have cloned a thumbprint of a German politician by using commercial software and images taken at a news conference.

Jan Krissler says he replicated the fingerprint of defence minister Ursula von der Leyen using pictures taken with a “standard photo camera”.

Mr Krissler had no physical print from Ms von der Leyen.

Fingerprint biometrics are already considered insecure, experts say.

Mr Krissler, also known as Starbug, was speaking at a convention for members of the CCC, a 31-year-old network that claims to be “Europe’s largest association” of hackers.

He told the audience he had obtained a close-up of a photo of Ms von der Leyen’s thumb and had also used other pictures taken at different angles during a press event that the minister had spoken at in October.

Mr Krissler has suggested that “politicians will presumably wear gloves when talking in public” after hearing about his research.