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In a Security Test, 3-D Printed Gun Smuggled Into Israeli Parliament
GenieGenieGenie writes "After all the talk of printed guns and the problems they pose to traditional methods of perimeter security, we get a live demo courtesy of some rather brave journalists from Israel's Channel 10, who took the plastic weapon known as the Liberator past security into the Israeli parliament, and held it within meters of the Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. I say brave because had they been caught pulling this stunt, which involved taking their toy out of the bag while sitting in the audience of a speech by the prime minister, they would have faced some real steel. Haaretz has the video (sorry, Hebrew only at the moment) [Google-translated version of the article -- Ed.] where you can follow the breach (from ~6:30) and see them pass the metal detector and the moment when the gun comes out. The movie also shows some testing of the gun in a police-supervised weapons range. Parliament security officials said that 'this is a new phenomenon and they are checking the subject to give it a professional solution as quickly as possible.' I hope this doesn't mean we will now officially face an era of ever more intruding security checks at entrances to events like this." Would-be Liberator printers, take note: the testing shows the barrel violently separating from the rest of the gun.
Which is part of a broader idea... whose idea was it to use metal detectors as gun detectors?
Sure it made sense a while back, the same way that assuming computers would remain analog, that the locomotive was the most reliable way to travel long distances, or investing in Zeppelin futures was a sure fire win.
Time & technology change... and detection methods must change with them.
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Or you could have a chat with EL AL who despite being the target of multiple hijacking attempts... has only been successfully hijacked once. An airline that once on board and inflight... you can expect to be handed a steak knife to go with your dinner because they know you not to be a threat.
I'll tell you the dirty little secret to improving security... profiling.
*gasp*!
Far too many items can be legitimately purchased off a shelf, built or crafted into a potential weapon than can be detected. The goal is not to prevent them from being carried on an aircraft (or to be in the proximity of a high ranking government official)... but instead to identify the person who is a threat and is likely to use such an instrument (or worse) against a target.
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whose idea was it to use metal detectors as gun detectors? Time & technology change... and detection methods must change with them.
If non-metallic guns were truly viable, they would have been used 20 years ago to sneak past metal detectors and kill judges and politicians and airplane pilots. Plastic manufacturing has been around for a long time, the only thing 3D printers do is reduce the cost. There are well-funded spy agencies and a few individuals who would have paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for a single gun. And yet none has materialized: [1] [2] [3]
While they do have profiling, it is not the profiling people in the US think of. It is not religious or racial profiling. It is proper profiling based on real factors that make professional, trained profilers think you need extra scrutiny. They don't mark muslims for extra scrutiny because they are muslims. They mark people who act nervous and like they have something to hide for extra scrutiny.
There is nothing wrong with proper profiling. It is a very useful tool. Unfortunately in the US, profiling means having a poorly trained, poorly paid TSA agent check anyone who is brown. To proper profile you need intelligent, well trained profilers, which the US won't pay for.
"Information wants to be expensive" - Stewart Brand, the same guy who said "Information wants to be free"
At any given point in the technology curve, it's going to be easier to make a plastic gun in a real factory with a $10 M research budget than with a 3D printer. Yet there are no plastic guns. I've heard of mostly-ceramic uppers with steel springs, but a good spring is a requirement even for a revolver.
What you get with plastic is what we see: a zip gun that's good for 1 shot if you're lucky. You can make a wooden cannon too, but I wouldn't recommend it.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
An Israeli style system will NEVER be implemented in the US because it runs totally contrary to the politically-correct postmodernist identity politics narrative that drives our current political monologue (no, not dialogue).
Suggesting it will be met with screeches of "RACISM!", the person suggesting it will forever be chased and shamed from the limelight, and we will continue staffing our airport security with fat, sticky-fingered illiterate highschool dropouts that barely speak understandable english and use their union to protect their do-nothing jobs while extorting more and more taxpayer money from the very people subjected to them.
That's asinine conservative clap-trap. What you are discussing is typical LEO profiling in the USA where dark skin is used as a cheap and poor substitute by the lazy and incompetent, which blinds us to very real threats (Timothy McVeigh anyone?). Racism doesn't just harm minorities, it also blinds us to both the potential achievements/contributions of the minority group *and* makes us ignore the threats that look like the majority.
An Israeli-style system requires a literal army of very personable, often friendly, intelligence officers who walk around both in plain clothes and uniforms, chatting people up about their life, their family, their trip. That's true profiling. You have to get a feel for the person and whether they are being evasive or acting nervously. Red flags mean extra screening. As others have pointed out, they use tricks like having an attractive woman chat up a single man, without him even being aware that he's being profiled (at least at first). This means you can't pay crap wages and demonize them as tax-sucking leeches; you need decent pay and benefits.
Typical conservative nonsense... cut taxes, use the resulting deficit to justify cutting workers, hours, and benefits, demonize government employees, then point to an under-staffed and demoralized agency as proof government doesn't work, thus justifying cutting back even further. Use the small surplus in boom times to justify another tax cut, then wait for the inevitable downturn and temporary deficit to justify repeating the cycle all over again. Make sure to throw in rants about political correctness, drum up a fake "war on Christmas", etc for good measure. It would be laughable if it weren't so predictable.
Natural != (nontoxic || beneficial)