My main concern is, how long is it before you can't print a replacement part for something you bought because it looks too similar to an OEM part and the manufacturer doesn't think you should be able to do that so they throw a little money to the right politician.
I remember ~10 or 15 years ago, I had concerns about drones becoming illegal due to FAA. I was assured by the internet, I was paranoid, blah blah safety... Then a few weeks ago something about Minnesota and ICE making drones illegal to fly or something... The weird part is that, in that 15 years, I've become more moderate and pro-democratic rule of law... but I was right about my previous concerns. Not that I believe…
"This is how its always been" is one of the banes of my existence. It explains why we're here, but not how to do better. There are ways to do better. A national holiday for elections has been mentioned countless times. We could do like Australia and mandate required voting. Prisoners should be able to vote. But this country is too hell-bent on punishment. Registration can be made on the same day of voting, rather tha…
> mandate required voting I don't see how forcing a person to vote will result in carefully considering what to vote for. A right to vote includes the right to not vote.
Sure, and countries with "compulsory voting" embrace the right to Donkey vote, pencil in whatever candidate you choose, criticise the government in a short haiku, and otherwise exercise freedom.
It's more a compulsory show you're still a citizen day. The making a valid vote part is down to personal choice.
They also appear to have generally better general political awareness and engagement in policy.
People print guns and gun parts. More than you think. Now even more since metal printing is starting to become affordable. I print grip and grip attachments for my 9mms and my AR15, trigger guards, barrel clamps, etc. I also find it stupid since, as the article suggests, what kind of algorithm can you implement to do smart detection of something that could be potentially dangerous? Will it also detect negative space?…
> Sadly, instead of having better laws we get fallacy rhetoric by people who probably have never touched, much less fired a gun in their lives. Why is this the litmus test for being qualified to write gun legislation? Do we also expect our lawmakers to have tried heroin or downloaded child porn so that they can regulate those activities?
> Do we also expect our lawmakers to have tried heroin or downloaded child porn so that they can regulate those activities?
It would be nice if they delegated to experts, instead of think tanks or populism, when it came to dealing with these. Both are examples of rampant regulatory failure.
Every time I see one of these stories I wonder how many tools I would have to remove from my garage to make it impossible to build a primitive gun in there. With enough ingenuity I'm really not sure there would be anything left.
Do potato cannons count?
I had friends who would scour the produce isle to find potatoes they could cut down to fit their potato gun with a rifled barrel.
This is insanely stupid stuff. Even the UK with our weird panic over Incredibly Specific Knives hasn't tried to do this kind of technical restriction to prevent people printing guns. Why not? Because nobody is printing guns! It's an infeasible solution to a non-problem! Someone should dig into who this is coming from and why. The answers are usually either (a) they got paid to do it by a company selling the tech, whi…
Does the UK ban shows like Forged in Fire that teach you how to make all sorts of specific blades?
I could understand these laws more if the majority of gun related deaths were from ghost guns. But they simply aren't.
If anything, ghost guns should be decriminalized to protect people from the rising danger of ghost-related deaths in NYC. Now that is a startup idea I can get behind.
not a gunsmith, but cast iron manages to be both soft and brittle at the same time. and the barrel and bearing parts would have to be machined anyways. you have to try to harden it too. its probably easier to just machine the whole thing out of decent quality steel. just guessing.
really? they didn't have machining in the 1700s. how about a good'ol musket? or a bit more modern: a gatling gun. I always thought those were made under coarse conditions. I mean, people just need something that makes a spark against gun powder,goes boom and shoots really fast projectiles. If a shotgun is possible, then an automatic shotgun doesn't feel like it's a stretch. I would think the firing mechanisms might n…
They certainly didn't have mills as we know them in the 1700s, but lathes, drills, and subtractive manufacturing had been in practice for millenia. You could say they were "machined by hand". Most early firearms (barring large-bore guns like cannons) were made from forged steel or iron, which is significantly stronger than cast iron due to its lower carbon content and regular grain structure. These forged parts were then worked on by gunspiths with cutters and abrasives to produce parts in tolerance for their mechanism. Cast iron (or more typically in early warfare, bronze) was suitable for cannons and large-bore guns due to the mass of the finished gun; more metal meant that the gun could withstand more shock, but even then they could fail catastrophically due to material fatigue or failure.