Slashdot Mirror
Of 1000 Americans Polled, Most Would Ban Home Printing of Guns
An anonymous reader writes "In results that may signal some discomfort with the enormous DIY promise of 3D printing and similar home-manufacturing technologies, a new Reason-Rupe poll finds that an otherwise gun control-weary American public thinks owners of 3D printers ought not be allowed to make their own guns or gun parts. Of course, implementing such a restrictive policy might be tad more difficult than measuring popular preferences." This poll is of only 1000 people, though; your mileage may vary.
Watch out for the guy printing a pointed stick...
Whatever happened to the concept of Personal Responsibility? Of being held accountable for your own actions, instead of the knee-jerk reaction of "it's the firearms fault, ban them everywhere we can." This mass punishment, this taking away of people's ability to use their time and money as they see fit, is crazy. If someone proves that they can't handle a level of responsibility, then I can understand rights being taken away, but to punish everything, to take away abilities from everyone? I find it insulting, that I am automatically assumed to not be responsible off the bat.
Good for them. I want a unicorn, and I'm not going to get that either.
I want a new quote. One that won't spill. One that don't cost too much. Or come in a pill.
Manufacturing your own guns is not illegal in the US, as long as you don't sell it nor produce certain forbidden pieces/materials.
I don't care if I'm wrong. I only care about everyone obtaining something from the discussion.
Thankfully my rights aren't governed by popular opinion.
Dallas Real Estate
You're guessing wrong. Provided you are legally able to own a firearm, federal law does not prohibit you from making your own gun. You do, however, require a permit to sell it.
I want a new quote. One that won't spill. One that don't cost too much. Or come in a pill.
have you seen home chem labs recently? they really are garbage compared to when i was a kid.
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
And after 9/11, you could probably have gotten the same results for warrantless wiretapping, indefinite detention, etc. This is why we have a republic, not a democracy. The rightness of a public policy is not measured by popular support. The only real reason to go by what is popular is that if you constantly ignore the popular will on things that are neutral or right, you risk delegitimizing the government.
Guys and gals, we made zip guns in Jr. high shop in the 1950s. They might not have been very accurate, but guns they were, and shoot they did. Any attempt to keep people from building and owning guns is a waste of time and money. We do have the right, not priviledge, to keep and bear arms. Just how many tax dollars are we going to spend to deny rights?
Printers are sold with an embedded chip that prevents the printing of currency. From what I understand, the chip is typically buried so deep into the printer that they simply can't operate if you could find it and remove it. We could attempt a similar requirement on a 3D printer.
However, gun parts can vary wildly. And, a part for a gun could conceivably be used as a part for a completely different, legal machine. I don't see a practical means of programming such a limitation.
It doesn't need to cover all walks of life. It only needs to cover a representative sample of them.
There's no such thing as an AK-47 permit in Texas or elsewhere in the US, assuming you're referring to the semi-auto variant.
Assuming that one is not otherwise prohibited from possessing firearms (e.g. not a criminal), it's perfectly legal to make any otherwise-legal firearm for personal use in the US. For example, if one wished to build a semi-auto AK-47, that's fine (here's a guy making one from a shovel he bent into the appropriate shape, while here are the stamped/punched flats that you'd need to bend, drill, and heat-treat to make your own semi-auto AK receiver, the only regulated part). If you wanted to build a full-auto one, that's forbidden. You can make silencers, short-barreled rifles/shotguns, etc., but ONLY after getting the appropriate tax stamp from the ATF.
A Grizzly gunsmith lathe and mill combo costs around $4000, less than a 3d printer. The steel and aluminum rods and blocks are also cheap and available. Anyone can machine a REAL gun cheaper than they can make a plastic one. You make bullets out of lead/tin tire rim weights. If you use an older cartridge that was originally a block powder round like .45 colt or 45-70 govt. you can make your own powder. The only part that I'm not sure of is how one would make brass shell cases or primers.
Wasting mod points to post, but: US Americans are not that heterogenous. What specific groups (with dissenting views relevant to the matter at hand) are systematically excluded from the sample?
They offer up their sampling procedures and methodology here.
A larger sample size is not inherently better. 1000 isn't much different from 10,000 or 10 million. If the sampling method would be unrepresentative with 1000 cases, it wouldn't be any better with more.
semantics are everything!
WHO THE FUCK IS "WE"
Why do you get to control us?
You control what we print, our children (mandatory schooling, cps, etc etc), age of girls we can marry.
Fuck you.
A well done poll of a 1000 people is actually pretty acurte. The Law of Large Numbers kicks in well shy of that. Apparently a stats class is not necessary to be a Slashdot editor.
I know photoshop does that, and that most printers have dots whose stated purpose is to track counterfeiters.
https://www.eff.org/pages/list-printers-which-do-or-do-not-display-tracking-dots
http://petapixel.com/2011/08/09/heres-what-happens-when-you-try-to-edit-photos-of-money-in-photoshop/
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Interesting. I wondered why Photoshop took so long to start up. I wonder which of the many probably pointless plugins this is.
29% of people are just idiots.
Did we get it down to 29%?
This is exactly why we have a constitution. The fear of the framers was that a "passing majority" could remove our freedoms/rights out of fear or anger.
Are you kidding me? You can't get from county to county, let alone state to state with any hope of finding a uniformity between them that could be construed as an average. You couldn't poll 1000 homeowners out of 750000 in a city over taxes and have it work. This is the equivalent of closing your eyes and tossing a dart over your shoulder to win the teddy bear.
Just because they offer up their cockamamie methodology, doesn't make it any the less; smoke pumped up your butt.
Interesting theory about sample size,let me make it clear for you. Take a digital picture with the same number of pixels as the adult population(we'll even narrow it down to adults) then, pick a thousand random pixels to represent the picture. Hell, I'll make it even simpler, squeeze that same picture down to 1000 pixels. Whadda ya got? Crap. What did Rationalize-Ruse produce? Crap. What happens when you digest their info? Disgusting picture isn't it? Another good reason to question everything by those professing to be experts.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
There is a "public interest" in meddling in the affairs of others. Whether or not that is consistent with our founding ideals is another matter entirely.
Most busybodies are just idiots manipulated by the media to fear the wrong thing and ignore the real problem.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
considering that out of the 1000 people 75% probably didn't hear about 3D printers before the news talked about 3D printed guns then yea there is a sample bias.
3D printers are a niche. they aren't talked about very often. Most people don't realize that you can upload a design and have a computer build a plastic model of something in an hour. Even things like CNC machines and laser cutters in the minds of average citizens are more hollywoodized than reality.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
Printers are sold with an embedded chip that prevents the printing of currency. From what I understand, the chip is typically buried so deep into the printer that they simply can't operate if you could find it and remove it. We could attempt a similar requirement on a 3D printer.
I don't think that is even remotely technically feasible. The govs of the world avoid currency duping by making their paper currency designs very specific and difficult to replicate. cotton paper, the internalized vertical stripe, under a magnifing glass there is no dot pattern visible.
it is even less technically feasible to do with 3d printers for a few reasons
a) a rediculously large library of illegal shapes would need to be made. sold with every printer, this also won't work because slight deviations would make the shape not match a fingerprint and it would be just as functional.
b) the kind of people who are interested in 3d printing and home cnc typically reject the idea of unnecesary technical limitations in their tools. they would rip out all the controller circuitry and install their own. or strip the machine for its linear actuator armature and make their own box.
so basicaly, outside of orwellian home searches...any laws will have no efficacy.
Here's a video of a homemade 12 gauge zip gun, better then anything from a 3d printer. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1wV3lmbSv4
Actually if you have a woodworking shop you have everything you need to make a submachine gun that would make this "printed" hand exploder look like the toy it is. I am not saying it would be easy nor look good when you were done. It would however be full auto/select fire and hold as many rounds as you want (and be able to slap in more quickly). Metalworking is easy, fine metalworking, like fine woodworking is hard.
Slashdot, where armchair scientists get shouted down and armchair theologians get modded up.
Nobody is trying to say if you print a gun and use it, it's the gun's fault. The blame still falls wholly on the person who committed the crime. What you don't seem to understand is that laws are meant to keep people safe and secure, not just punish people after the fact. Nobody needs to prove they can't handle drinking and driving to be told not to do it, there's no reason to wait until people get hurt to stop something. Treating rules and regulations as an attack on your person is just being childish. As for 3d printing guns in particular, I'd support a method of stopping it as long as it didn't interfere with anything else, I just don't know if that's even possible. The reasoning is straightforward: Guns are regulated, making them at home bypasses regulation. Nobody would think twice about shutting down a lab producing alternatives to prescription drugs, it's really the same thing. Somehow with guns people get it in their heads the rules should all be different, that because they're mentioned in the constitution we can't regulate them. This is not the case. Even freedom of speech is regulated to some degree, primarily to keep people from inciting violence. Laws are not there because somebody assumes you can't be responsible, laws are there because it's been proven time and time again that in a group as large as this country, there are enough people who can't be responsible to justify regulating dangerous things. If that wasn't the case, we wouldn't have crime, everyone would just be good and responsible because it's what's right.
Perhaps it's worth noting that, when the Second Amendment was instituted, gunsmithing and the manufacture of firearms was a cottage industry. On the flip side, it's probably fair to say the founders were most interested in the protection of long arms, not handguns. The pistol was developed for the sole purpose of the destruction of human life; not so with long arms, though initial development mainly concentrated on that purpose. .
1. Most polls are only of around 1000 people are so, they are done statisticly to reflect the demographic they are meant to represent.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sampling_%28statistics%29#Sampling_methods
2. Speaking of 1, given the poll was done by "reason.com" themselves, i want to know the sampling method used and its error rate.
3. the results of the poll where 53-44, so the reality is public opinions are really "mixed".
There's already SCOTUS precedent protecting the implements of rights: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minneapolis_Star_Tribune_Company_v._Commissioner Bans and taxes on ammo would be unconstitutional for the same reason. Additionally, no one believes they would do anything but punish lawful gun owners. Your criminals who commit almost all of the gun crimes don't go to the gun range and shoot 300 rounds in an afternoon practicing, and they don't join their local IDPA league and shoot 5000 rounds over the course of a season. Instead they shoot whatever was in the gun when it was stolen and sold to them out of the back of a van. An ammo tax would ONLY hurt people using guns for lawful purposes.
if your survey includes mostly people who do those things you'll get different answers but this survey was almost entirely of people who don't print 3D guns.
I wouldn't be surprised if surveys found that 53% of the population said any of these if the survey is mostly of people who don't do them
I don't buy 16+ ounce sodas. Nobody should.
I don't drink. nobody should.
I don't smoke. nobody should.
I don't vote republican. nobody should.
I don't get food stamps. nobody should
I don't own a gun. nobody should.
I don't send my kids to private school. nobody should.
You seem well-meaning, but misinformed.
Please, go read about the definition of "well-regulated." (It doesn't mean what it means today)
Go read about the success of "gun-free" zones where almost every one of these shootings has taken place. (Newtown, Aurora, Ft Hood, Columbine, Virginia Tech.. all of them were gun-free zones)
Go read about how often these "high capacity assault weapons" are really used in murders. (less often than hands and feet and hammers)
And go read about crime statistics in the UK and Australia: after AND before their bans, gun crime AND all violent crime. (crime was decreasing before, and continued to decrease after with no uptick in the rate of decrease. Gun crime went down, and other violent crime went up because there were fewer guns available and fewer people able to defend themselves)
Your arguments are appealing on the surface, but every one of them breaks down under scrutiny. Take some time to read and become informed.
Why predict when you can just do?
Here is a totally hacked-together and very poorly written JS implementation. It'll constantly take 1000-sample surveys of a 315m population. The actual distribution of the population is printed at the top, and the results of the surveys are printed underneath, color-coded to make it easier to spot the results.
It's kinda slow and may well need a 64-bit browser, so I also made versions with 100m population size, 31.5m and 3.15m. If you're going to argue that those are too small a population size, then suck it up and wait for the 315m version to finish. You can always just fiddle with the values yourself by saving the page; the population and sample size variables are at the top. I only tested on Firefox 24.0a1.
(To anybody who reads this post after the above links break: sorry. Slashdot wouldn't let be inline the data: URIs, so I had to use tinyurl.)
Have a look, it is not hard to see once you know it is there.
You can see it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurion_constellation
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
I know the gun thing is the big boogieman now in regards to 3-D printers, but I can't help but think there's more mundane things that a 3-D printer can do that the powers-that-be are afraid of. It sure would be nice to print out a new head light bezel for my truck for ten bucks instead of paying over $200 from the dealership.