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Czech gunmaker CZG buys Colt in cash and stock deal

reuters.com

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Re: Czech gunmaker CZG buys Colt in cash and stock deal

#191

Post by barnaclejive »

pjkundert wrote: post #162
lutoma wrote: post #102

Honest question: How is this relevant to Hacker News? As a non-American i was rather bewildered to find this here. Is there a serious overlap between gun enthusiasts and the IT community in the US?

There is a large overlap between any serious engineering discipline and firearms enthusiasts. The engineering and physics involved in building/tuning guns and shooting accurately is very interesting. Furthermore, the "renegade" spirit required to reject the status-quo and push the envelope in science and engineering attracts quite a few of the same types of people. Finally, the idea of "banning" guns -- which every b…

That is an interesting anecdote. Here is another - No engineers I've worked with cared about guns at all.

Re: Czech gunmaker CZG buys Colt in cash and stock deal

#192

Post by sorokod »

Pet_Ant wrote: post #169
lazycrazyowl wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my opinion Hacker News isn’t strictly an IT community but a platform that focuses on technology, startup culture and entrepreneurship that allows followers with a mix of technical obsession, business ambition, and aspirational curiosity to discuss among themselves to have some sort of intellectual reasoning.I may be wrong.

I think the link is startups and the closely related libertarianism which then spills into gun ownership

Only in US

Re: Czech gunmaker CZG buys Colt in cash and stock deal

#193

Post by jhgb »

barnaclejive wrote: post #191
pjkundert wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a large overlap between any serious engineering discipline and firearms enthusiasts. The engineering and physics involved in building/tuning guns and shooting accurately is very interesting. Furthermore, the "renegade" spirit required to reject the status-quo and push the envelope in science and engineering attracts quite a few of the same types of people. Finally, the idea of "banning" guns -- which every b…

That is an interesting anecdote. Here is another - No engineers I've worked with cared about guns at all.

Heh. Purely coincidentally, the only people I've known to have any guns were my engineering schoolmates (brought them to school -- apparently that would be a cause for panic and a SWAT deployment in the US but it's kind of a "meh, whatever" thing around here in .cz.)

Re: Czech gunmaker CZG buys Colt in cash and stock deal

#194

Post by da_big_ghey »

wing-_-nuts wrote: post #180
da_big_ghey wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You will find that many of us gun rights supporters don't care what data comes out. I don't support 2a because fewer than n people die per year from guns.

Your honesty is refreshing, and psychopathic.

> psychopathic

That is a needless personal attack, and I notice that you fail to make a coherent argument against what I said. Do you favor protections against unreasonable search and seizure only until too many criminals benefit from it? My point is that some people value liberty higher than life. If you think I'm wrong, feel free to say why, though I honestly don't know that you'll change my mind on that.

Re: Czech gunmaker CZG buys Colt in cash and stock deal

#195

Post by HideousKojima »

wing-_-nuts wrote: post #175
aksss wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Dickey Amendment didn't ban any studies or doing research, it banned the CDC from advocating gun control policies at a time when the administration was pushing it to use its authority/reputation to do so. It would be like me saying you can do all the research you want on teenage pregnancy and the like, but we're not funding your department to do political advocacy campaigns for abstinence. Stick to the science.

...and yet, where are these publicly funded studies on gun violence since? It's a ban in fact, if not a ban in law.

Here's a CDC-funded study on gun violence from 2013:

https://www.nap.edu/read/18319/chapter/1

You've been repeatedly and blatantly lied to by the media and politicians about the CDC being "banned" from researching gun violence. The ban was on the use of public funds to advocate for specific gun laws/policies, not on research into the subject itself.

Re: Czech gunmaker CZG buys Colt in cash and stock deal

#196

Post by elsonrodriguez »

blisterpeanuts wrote: post #134
throwawaysea wrote: post #98

Can someone more familiar with this world explain where the law ended up on building your own guns? I recall a controversy around whether you can even share open source 3D printing plans (which to me felt like a violation of the first amendment) but leaving that aside, I've also heard that it is possible to do so using more traditional methods.

I have a memory that around 10 years ago, Australia banned the very act of downloading and possessing 3-D files to make firearms. Theoretically, if your computer is seized and found to contain the SolidWorks files to make a Ruger, for example, you can be prosecuted. However I don't know that this was enacted into national law or later struck down. A man in Queensland was given a suspended sentence for printing parts…

> Actually, one wonders why there haven't been more incidents of plastic guns smuggled onto aircraft in recent years

The root cause of this is that very few people want to smuggle guns onto aircraft. I think the biggest group of gun smugglers at this point are TSA penetration testers.

Re: Czech gunmaker CZG buys Colt in cash and stock deal

#197

Post by HideousKojima »

samatman wrote: post #99
curryst wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have seen designs for completely printed models, including the bolt carrier Are these parts functional? I would be literally stunned if you could 3D print a bolt carrier group that lasts more than a clip. The last I looked (and it's been a couple years), the designs exist, but are largely non-functional and/or still require several parts to be made of steel. The barrel is another problematic piece. I get that wit…

Let's put it this way: producing the parts of a gun which simply must be made of metal, in a machine shop, is substantially easier than synthesizing methamphetamine. 3d printing everything except the parts you mentioned is quite tractable, and constantly improving from an already acceptably-high standard. No, the chokepoint here is primers. Which are scarce on the ground at the moment, and I expect will receive signi…

In addition to priners, smokeless powder is also difficult to home manufacture. Black powder is easy enough, but it's not powerful enough to cycle most modern semi-automatics and fouls up the barrel something awful.

Something like ammonpulver would be comparable in power and cleanliness to modern smokeless powder, but is pretty corrosive and gets ruined if it absorbs too much water.

The same types of people eho develop 3d gun models are also putting effort into developing alternatives for primers, powder, and cases. Homemade metal barrels were an issue a few years ago but ECM barrels made it easy to make them at home with only a couple hundred dollars in tooling.

Re: Czech gunmaker CZG buys Colt in cash and stock deal

#198

Post by einpoklum »

kbenson wrote: post #109
einpoklum wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that it is possible to make a gun using 3D-printed parts does not make it a significant contributing factor to the prevalence of guns (for non-recreational use) in the US.

I think the point was to note that shutting down manufacturing us no longer a useful way to prevent firearms from being made. They don't need to be 3D printed right now because there are factories. If all the factories shut down tomorrow, that wouldn't stop new guns from being produced.

> I think the point was to note that shutting down manufacturing us no longer a useful way to prevent firearms from being made.

And I'm saying that's incorrect. It's not wrong in the binary sense of "no firearms made" vs "some firearms made", but rather in the sense that if the mass-production output were to drop significantly, prevalence and use would also drop significantly (although this would be mitigated by there being a huge stock of existing guns).

And just to clarify - I'm not saying that this is the way to "solve the gun problem" in the US though.

Re: Czech gunmaker CZG buys Colt in cash and stock deal

#199

Post by HideousKojima »

goles wrote: post #125
curryst wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have seen designs for completely printed models, including the bolt carrier Are these parts functional? I would be literally stunned if you could 3D print a bolt carrier group that lasts more than a clip. The last I looked (and it's been a couple years), the designs exist, but are largely non-functional and/or still require several parts to be made of steel. The barrel is another problematic piece. I get that wit…

My observations of how 3D printing is evolving doesn't align with OPs. Why go to great lengths to print pressure bearing parts while many of them can be crafted from off the shelf parts from your local Home Depot? Stock steel, a welder, and some airsoft parts can all be used as functional substitutes and a lot of creators have functional models from these methods. In most parts of the United States a barrel (or anyth…

That's why instead of 3d printing barrels, diy gun enthusiasts have been making them out of metal using ECM (with a 3d printed mandrel).

Re: Czech gunmaker CZG buys Colt in cash and stock deal

#200

Post by notahacker »

yellowapple wrote: post #178
notahacker wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But they're not "meaningless", because the average person in Europe and Australia has no interest in owning a gun, never mind figuring out how to print one, and even the average hardened criminal has to consider the possibility that since it isn't necessary for them to preemptively shoot anybody who challenges them, possessing guns might not be worth the risk of additional penalties. Those are much bigger factors in…

> But they're not "meaningless", because the average person in Europe and Australia has no interest in owning a gun You've just described yet another reason why gun control measures are meaningless. The desire to kill oneself and/or others (with or without a gun) doesn't exist in a vacuum; guns don't magically make people suicidal or homicidal. That desire happens due to a combination of socioeconomic pressures and i…

Guns don't magically make people homicidal, they just make it magically easy and efficient to kill people in the heat of the moment, or by mistake, or because they fear if they don't pull the trigger first the other person might, or when too mentally ill to know what is going on.

The actual difficulty for a sufficiently motivated person to obtain a gun (legal or otherwise) under gun control in the UK is not that high, but the incentives to do so are reduced, the disincentives increased, and the average person with the potential to carry out non-premeditated shootings never considers buying one. The ability to learn all about how to 3D print a gun instead of learning how to license and modify a shotgun or how to find black markets that will sell you illegal firearms does not change that calculus very much.

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