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I Built This AK-47. It's Legal and Totally Untraceable

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Re: I Built This AK-47. It's Legal and Totally Untraceable

#141

Post by ianstallings »

glurgh wrote: post #131
ianstallings wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of us believe that we shouldn't need to convince you of anything. There is no such thing as "pre-crime". I have the liberty to do as I please as a human being on this planet so long as it doesn't hurt you. Simply claiming that I might hurt you or someone else might hurt you with a rifle is dubious logic at best.

I have the liberty to do as I please as a human being on this planet so long as it doesn't hurt you. No, you don't. There is such a thing as exposure to risk. Otherwise anyone would have the liberty to build a toxic waste processing plant by your back yard because, hey, that's not hurting you. Yet. Strangely, this is not the established way of things in any actually functional society.

The beauty of liberty is I don't care what you think about me exercising it. That's kind of the point I was trying to make. That whole "give me liberty or give me death" thing really means something to some of us and we really don't care what others think. They have a name for us actually - Americans.

Re: I Built This AK-47. It's Legal and Totally Untraceable

#142

Post by hga »

glurgh wrote: post #67
presidentender wrote: post #3

This has been legal for a very long time, and is the cause of approximately no violence. Much as with the discussion of 3d printed firearms, it's not so much that the behaviors of gun owners and gun builders has changed as it is that the prevailing discourse in the political arena and the news is different. The author refrains from espousing an opinion in the piece, but only just, and frankly I disagree with him. The…

the prevailing discourse in the political arena and the news is different. The prevailing argument of gun advocates, at least in the US, is that "it's not our guns. it's those other, bad people's guns". It would probably help their case if they stopped arguing that owning a potentially deadly piece of gear is some universal human right not subject to regulation like, say, owning a car. Most car owners cause approxima…

Your whole premise is false: keeping and bearing arms is much safer than driving cars. I can go into details as to why I believe that's the case, but to start with, whenever I walk outside the door I put my carry gun into a holster, and then never take it out until I return home. So it's just sitting there on my hip under my shirt or vest, not much of a danger to anyone as long as I keep it away from an MRI machine's strong magnet.

But the raw facts speak for themselves; off the top of my head, the latest available numbers are 33,000 or so vehicle accident fatalities per year, 600 with guns.

Lots more car owners accidently kill than gun owners, and as I've mentioned elsewhere, the proper analogy to a drivers license is a concealed carry licence, and I'd add for hunting a hunting licence, which nowadays requires proof of taking a hunter's safety course (unless you're an old guy like me and are grandfathered).

As far as "convincing" "the rest of us", we simply don't have to do that any more than I have to convince you that I can use a printing press without prior restraint, its an enumerated Constitutional right. Want to change that? The Constitution has a mechanism.

Re: I Built This AK-47. It's Legal and Totally Untraceable

#143

Post by Cushman »

mikeash wrote: post #135
Cushman wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My thoughts on this article are roughly equivalent to my thoughts on my hypothetical Vanity Fair piece, which I think I made clear. Since your questions don't seem to relate to that hypothetical, I don't have much to add.

I guess I passed that over because I couldn't see the point to your hypothetical. No, I don't see how such an article would be at all "disingenuous". What is the hypothetical supposed to illustrate? I imagine a "kit-built cars are perfectly legal to build at home with no oversight" article would be interesting to read too.

But you wouldn't consider it to have any relevance to the broader cultural problem of traffic fatalities and vehicle registration? Or you don't think others would?

Or you think that any misleading effect is regrettable, but not a reason to alter the tone of the article?

Re: I Built This AK-47. It's Legal and Totally Untraceable

#144

Post by [deleted] »

hysterix wrote: post #69
reader5000 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually society would be much better off if the government tracked such devices. A lot of people interested in gun culture have severe inefficiencies in their cognitive abilities. Almost all mass killings are perpetrated by individuals with severe cognitive disabilities or are on some sort of prescription psychoactive. As a prominent role of government is to protect its citizens from danger, the active tracking of m…

Wow, where to begin with biased posts like these? >A lot of people interested in gun culture have severe inefficiencies in their cognitive abilities. First off you start off insulting a large group of people, painting broad strokes of assumption. You've already lost the majority of all your credibility (what little you had that is) at this point. >gun culture represents a small and decreasing minority of Americans Th…

[deleted]

Re: I Built This AK-47. It's Legal and Totally Untraceable

#145

Post by hga »

lifeguard wrote: post #84
lifeguard wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

@at-fates-hands I bet you didn't know 60 people were accidentally killed by firearms yesterday. And the day before that, and the day before that. About 30 people are killed in attacks -- every day. And another thing, why is it gun patriots never give a fig about the other rights in the Constitution, like freedom of speech, religion, and assembly? I think you guys just like to play with guns. It takes a cold dead hand…

Talk is cheap. I never see gun nuts do anything promoting civil rights. EDIT: I did once meet a militia member at a non-gun civil rights event.

I guess you don't realize that we believe the Right to Keep and Bear Arms is a civil right? And in our view, no right is under greater attack than it (even after all the IRS abuse that has recently come to light)? And that therefore we're rather busy protecting it from people like you?

And we're most certainly interested in other civil rights, ranging from freedom of speech (Citizens United, McCain hates us with a passion and were were one of the groups he and Feingold aimed to silence), to the abuses of SWAT raids. Read our stuff and you'll find your opinion to be ill founded.

Re: I Built This AK-47. It's Legal and Totally Untraceable

#146

Post by homeomorphic »

jerrya wrote: post #16

Substitute "Homebuilt PC without DRM" for AK-47, pretend it was written in 2023, not 2013, and then reread the article as well as the comments at Hacker News.

I'm a European who for a long time had a hard time understanding liberal American gun laws. Then one day by chance I constructed something similar to the argument you sketch. I've looked at the (gun) issue differently ever since.

It also opened my eyes to the simple arguments "I like shooting guns" and "it's not the government's business", which I had dismissed so easily it's scary. I like to think the experience improved my ability to seriously consider opposing arguments.

Re: I Built This AK-47. It's Legal and Totally Untraceable

#147

Post by glurgh »

presidentender wrote: post #126
glurgh wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, we don't see that all the time - we see it sometimes. The only reason some people can drive with neither is because most people don't. I don't think it's merely a solution in search of a problem because we seem to spend an enourmous amount of political energy on the topic in the way we don't on 'who gets to own a Ferrari'. Ferrari owners pay the exorbitant insurance fees for the privilege. You're a firearms ent…

Actually, the higher-energy cartridges like .303 Brit and .30-06 are used even more rarely in crime than other rifle cartridges. Intermediate cartridges, which came into military favor following the second world war, allow the user to carry more ammunition per unit of weight, and to manage the recoil of the rifle more easily. It's also easier to manufacture an autoloading rifle to reliably fire a cartridge like 5.56…

Ferraris aren't very common as bank robbery getaway vehicles either. My point was that it should be possible to come up with some sort of regulatory regime that reasonably covers the entire range of uses - from personal safety to collection of exotica.

This isn't possible if one side's position is 'I get to have whatever I want, because'. You can't buy a thing that plugs into your wall socket that isn't UL certified, what exactly, is so uniquely special about firearms, of all things.

Re: I Built This AK-47. It's Legal and Totally Untraceable

#148

Post by hga »

angersock wrote: post #122
minamea wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What, aside from the obvious reason? Someone in the military follows orders and serves the nation while someone with a gun will probably do whatever he/she feels with it and nothing actually useful. How is that?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Lai_Massacre http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_State_Shootings http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campbell_v._City_of_Oakland http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Hampton#Assassination_by_C... And for you fans of enterprise solutions: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dresden_firebombing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_hiroshima http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warsaw_Ghetto_Uprising ~ Your mora…

More generally, at least some of us have taken note of the lessons learned from around a quarter billion disarmed people being killed by their own governments in the 20th century (and rather obviously most of that was done by the Only Ones you enshrine, the police and military with I suppose some paramilitaries in the middle).

Good luck convincing us to willingly give up another inch on this issue.

Re: I Built This AK-47. It's Legal and Totally Untraceable

#149

Post by salgernon »

bifrost wrote: post #86

So the part that makes this guy a derp - he built what could have been a fully legal weapon, except that he didn't install the magazine lock correctly. What is a magazine lock? Its a device that lets politicians pretend that they're "doing something" when in reality it just makes them look stupid. Mag locks serve no purpose in crime prevention because they don't have some sort of magic anti-criminal switch, they just…

I think they're probably more intended to keep the five year olds from shooting their sisters.

Re: I Built This AK-47. It's Legal and Totally Untraceable

#150

Post by hga »

gosu wrote: post #99
duck wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want to make it as hard as possible for crazy people or people on a power trip to be able to fashion machines designed to efficiently kill people like me. I would worry more about cars, corporations, and governments. :)

None of those were designed to efficiently kill people like me. The OP's point is that I should be worrying more about handguns, and he's right - but that doesn't mean I can't worry about other things designed to pose a threat to my person too.

As the quarter billion disarmed people killed by their own governments in the 20th century, plus all the combatants killed in two "World Wars" and many many others show, there is no single better instrumentality for "efficiently" killing people than governments. In more than a few cases, and most of the deaths, this is by design (Communists and Nazis).
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