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UK Police Seize 3D-Printed 'Gun Parts,' Which Are Actually Spare Printer Parts
nk497 writes "Police in Manchester have arrested a man and seized what they claim are 3D printed components to a gun. They made the arrest after a 'significant' discovery of a 3D printed 'trigger' and 'magazine,' saying they were now testing the parts to see if they were viable. 3D printing experts, however, said the objects were actually spare parts for the printer. 'As soon as I saw the picture... I instantly thought, "I know that part,"' said Scott Crawford, head of 3D printing firm Revolv3D. 'They designed an upgrade for the printer soon after it was launched, and most people will have downloaded and upgraded this part within their printer. It basically pulls the plastic filament, and it used to jam an awful lot. The new system that they've put out, which includes that little lever that they're claiming is the trigger, is most definitely the same part.'"
FTFA: "The man was also arrested on suspicion of making gunpowder"
He was probably making coffee...
...the U.K. has found another moral panic. Everybody pop some popcorn, asinine laws are about to get passed and massive propaganda campaigns will be starting. Fun for the whole family, as long as you don't live there and as long as it doesn't spread here.
Last time I remember one of these "weapons" related knives, it was during the post-handgun knifing sprees, and the gov't managed to spin up its citizens so much with their knife amnesty programs that people were turning in unsharpened movie prop fantasy knives, kitchen utensils, and yard tools afraid they were going to get prosecuted for owning lethal weaponry.
We'll see what they come up with for 3D printers. Maybe plastic/printer amnesty days
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
...a 3D gun is much more likely to be viable than a picture of a gun.
"During the searches, officers found a 3D printer and what is suspected to be a 3D plastic magazine and trigger which could be fitted together to make a viable 3D gun.
It they are found to be viable components for a 3D gun, it would be the first ever seizure of this kind in the UK."
No, your children are not the special ones. Nor are your pets.
Bigger authoritarians than the "gun nuts". Hopefully this shit stays on the other side of the pond.
In the internet age where transferring music and media without destroying the original copy has predominated retail acquisition, 3D Printers have the potential to reduce nearly every object imaginable to information about fabrication, effectively IP. The prospect of being hypothetically capable of 3D printing a gun seems to be almost as frightening to authorities as the finished product itself. Will we see more 'confusion' by authorities who have trouble discriminating between legitimate uses and those that make them paranoid? It does seem like this would have an intimidating effect on people considering a purchase of a 3D printer.
So what they're saying is that we can use replacement printer parts to make guns?
Summation 2
I love that the Greater Manchester Police site has suffered the curse of slashdot. :)
Sounds like another case of the WMD aluminum tubes they found in Iraq, which were way too weak to be used for a centrifuge for enriching uranium. But it was a good enough excuse for the US to go to war.
"But we have tubes!!!"
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Except it's missing the hook that catches the trigger. I understand that UK cops don't really carry firearms, so they may not really be trained in the inner workings of different guns. I don't know much about what their training standards are, but I'd say it's an easy mistake to make for those who don't disassemble firearms very often. See below:
http://www.joeboboutfitters.com/product_p/jp-sh-1a.htm
"Now, I doubt any of you would prefer a rolled up newspaper as a weapon against a dictator or a criminal intruder."
Luckily, they didn't go all Amercian on his ass and shot him on sight http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-24648974
Is there really a risk of "organised crime groups" making plastic guns? My understanding is that the ones that have been made are more proof of concept than something that would actually be particularly useful. On the other hand, there are plenty of places in Europe where guns are available, and hundreds of people take the ferry (or Le Shuttle through the tunnel) to and from Europe every day so if you really want to get hold of them, it's not going to be difficult.
Do wonder why the police raided this guy in the first place. I assume they didn't just pick a house at random hoping they might find soemthing they can chage someone with.
Article slashdotted - alternate story including updates below. Despite the obvious evidence, police continue to wave their arms wildly. http://gigaom.com/2013/10/24/uk-police-seize-3d-printer-and-printed-gun-components/
Sure, the parts are not part of a 3D printed gun, but of the 3D printer itself, but with these parts the printer can be used to print a gun, which is what makes them so dangerous.
They punish someone with the legal process, knowing they can't convict, but sending a message to anyone with a 3D printer that 3D printer owners can expect trouble from the state.
Police seized $1000 dollars in cash due to the possibility of obtaining a gun with said cash.... source: future...
Week later: 20 kids gunned down in another school massacre in USA. "Crazy" depends on what you want laws to achieve.
Personally, I'd compare it more between C++ and visual basic scripting. While it does indeed take more knowledge to operate the lathes and such, currently that tool set can produce far more capable devices, and I'd imagine that at least the CNC cutter shouldn't be that much more complicated to program than the printer.
With the printer you can make a 'liberator' type firearm - a single shot weapon that you MIGHT be able to reuse the trigger group for.
With the machine shop equipment you can churn out full auto M-3 'grease guns' for not much more money than the plastic in the liberator.
I don't read AC A human right
Also, if a plastic trigger is illegal, that would make every plastic toy gun, every water pistol, every cap gun, illegal. And every seller, maker, importer guilty of manufacturing/importing/distributing illegal firearm parts.
Nearly every cleaner, weed-spray, bug-spray bottle in my laundry has a trigger on it.
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
Unfortunately you can't just legislate it away. That doesn't work, has never worked, and will never work. Doesn't stop them from trying, though.
I'm not going to get into it beyond that though - I'm not an expert, but it doesn't take an expert to recognize that something is broken. I really don't think just taking them away is the answer. As other incidents have spotlit, the act will not change, only the tools. Children (and adults too) committing violence against their peers and authority figures is the symptom, the gun (or knife etc) is just the vehicle, and the real problem is something else that I can't really identify personally. People are losing hope, getting restless, frustrated, and angry. We need to determine (and fix) the cause of that, not the results. But good luck with that, because the people in charge only care about looking like they are fixing things. Which only compounds the problem.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Happy I live in te US, you need a warrant to arrest someone here. Oh, wait, we arrest without warrants too.
It's easy to make the ammo (and the gun) from readily available materials found at your local hardware store.
The garden department has the three ingredients for black powder and the plumbing department has most of the rest . A few items like springs come from the hardware section.
Ammo is short piece of copper tube from plumbing, filled with black powder mixed in gardening, topped with whatever little chunk of metal - a short hex bolt would do fine.
I think it was just last week a 14 year old shot another student, a teacher, then himself. Parents gun that wasn't properly stored or locked that a kid had access to. Negligence causing death, I hope it means jail time for both of the parents.
Is printing gun components illegal in the UK?
In the US, the only part of a gun that is controlled is the receiver. What are the laws in the UK?
It's hard to believe that making or owning a trigger is illegal in the UK since low-power pellets guns (which use triggers) are legal. That said, UK gun laws are so restrictive, that I am sure they try to control high-capacity magazines. (UK high-capacity meaning more than two rounds.)
Clearly the only answer is 'more guns'. If other 14 years olds (hell, why not start at 8 years?) all were carrying, this tragedy could be avoided.
Meanwhile, the same police will call their own actual incendiary grenades "smoke grenades" which, oops, "may have accidentally caused a fire" (and burned the body of the shot suspect and most of the evidence re: the police shooting.)
And the media will go along with it. Which is the problem. Reporters trust police statements to be roughly factual, so police quickly learn they can get away with saying almost anything.
[Note the phrase the UK police are hammering in every release in TFA, "The next generation of firearms". (Which involves "technology being acquired by the organised crime groups, which they supply to criminal gangs, which are causing misery in our communities".)]
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
Unfortunately you can't just legislate it away. That doesn't work, has never worked, and will never work.
Well, it works very well in Europe. So while this particular case is example of police idiocy, the law in UK is not crazy. But I agree that it would be extremely hard to do in USA.
Doesn't stop them from trying, though.
I'm not going to get into it beyond that though - I'm not an expert, but it doesn't take an expert to recognize that something is broken. I really don't think just taking them away is the answer. As other incidents have spotlit, the act will not change, only the tools. Children (and adults too) committing violence against their peers and authority figures is the symptom, the gun (or knife etc) is just the vehicle, and the real problem is something else that I can't really identify personally. People are losing hope, getting restless, frustrated, and angry. We need to determine (and fix) the cause of that, not the results. But good luck with that, because the people in charge only care about looking like they are fixing things. Which only compounds the problem.
With that logic every kind of weapon should be legalised. Why bother banning nerve gas and explosives ? After all this will only change tools, not the act itself.
I have been secretly designing upgrades to all the popular printers that also double as gun parts. This way in the future when there is an apocalypse I can salvage all the 3d printers and make guns
I do not understand this hysteria over 3d Printers and Guns. You can make a plastic gun using other tools too like a drill press, milling machine and lathe. The quality of guns built that way would be much much higher than 3D printed guns. With a little effort someone could use modeling clay silicon rubber and polyester resin to make a plastic gun. If you added some fiber reinforcing it would probably hold up very well. Much better than 3Dprinted guns.
Here is the statistic that should shut people like you up for good. Suicide and Murder Rates for the US and Great Britain are about the same. One has strict gun control laws and the other does not. Suicide by guns in the US far outpace Suicide by guns in the UK, yet the overall rates are almost identical. The same is true for murder rates. In fact, if you exclude the cities in the US with the strictest gun control laws (DC, Chicago etc) which also happen to have the highest murder rates by guns, the murder rates in the US is actually LESS than most other countries.
The problem is, the facts don't line up with the Liberal Logic. Less guns do not produce less violence. This means people are violent with whatever tool they find handy, just like killing themselves. We should address the reasons for violence, not the method.
I mean just recently, you had a trained military person beheaded in broad daylight by a couple guys with knives. AND nobody stopped them. Nobody could. In America, you would have had someone (or a few someones) kick the shit out of the guys before they could finish cutting the soldiers head off.
Sorry, I don't want to live in a Society that is so scared of everything that people don't step up and face evil directly. Call it "Rugged Individualism", something Liberals can't understand and therefore despise.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Another teacher was killed this week with a box cutter. Clearly we need to rid the world of these devices of death.
Got Code?
But if he did it with a box cutter would you blame the parents for leaving the box cutter out? Because that also happened just this week. Is that "negligence causing death" too? Do you want those parents jailed then?
Perhaps it isn't the tool that caused the violence, it is the person using the tool!
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
A Manchester plumber was arrested for having a van full of "bomb" making material.
His pleas of "It's just pipe for a sink" went unheeded.
"Grab them by the pussy" -- President of the United States of America
You are wrong.
US: 4.7 per 100,000
UK 1.2 per 100,000
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate
There is steel scaffolding pipe which is exactly the right inner-diameter to hold a standard 12-guage shotgun shell. It's also usually pre-threaded off-the-shelf.
So buy or cut a half a metre (a couple of feet) of unthreaded pipe that neatly holds a shotgun shell. That's your barrel. Then cut around 15cm (six inches) of a larger diameter pipe that slides over the first pipe, this should be threaded at one end. Get a standard end-cap that fits the larger diameter pipe. Drill a pilot hole in the centre of the end cap, screw in short screw, so a few milimetres (errr, not much of an inch) of the point is poking through the inside. Size the pilot hole so that the screw is in tightly, it's your firing pin.
Screw the end-cap on the larger pipe, also tightly. Load a shotgun shell in the small (long) pipe, put the larger pipe over the back, and pump it sharply against the shotgun shell to fire. (Like using a bike pump.) Pull the "pump handle" off, flick the spent shell out, load new one, repeat. If you want to get fancy, you can make up a stock, springs, catch and trigger, etc, to make it more "gun-like". While making it, use a spent shell cartridge to see if your firing-pin lines up and is the right length. And the first time you fire it, it's worth removing out the shot and test firing a blank cartridge. Look for cracking or warping between every shot.
Do not point directly at face. Do not fire at humans or pets. Do not pass go. Do not collect $200. No responsibility is taken by FLM Co or its parent company for any damage or injury caused by...
Seriously, making zip-guns is dangerous, and typically illegal outside of the United States. The point is that it's easy, even without skills, and yet outside of hobbyists (and prisons), you don't see criminals using one-shot zip-guns for their crimes.
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
Here is the statistic that should shut people like you up for good. Suicide and Murder Rates for the US and Great Britain are about the same.
By "here" you mean in your head? Only total moron would post lie that can be disproved by 30 second search in google. Here is source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate . USA - 4.7 homicides /100 000 vs 1.2 in UK. Almost 4x difference is 'about the same' ? Go back to polishing your penis enhancer^W^W gun and leave discussion to others.
One has strict gun control laws and the other does not. Suicide by guns in the US far outpace Suicide by guns in the UK, yet the overall rates are almost identical. The same is true for murder rates. In fact, if you exclude the cities in the US with the strictest gun control laws (DC, Chicago etc) which also happen to have the highest murder rates by guns, the murder rates in the US is actually LESS than most other countries.
Exclude cities with highest murder rate and murder late drops a lot ... thank you captain obvious! You can't exclude any cities, because people are free to move between them without any border control.
The problem is, the facts don't line up with the Liberal Logic. Less guns do not produce less violence. This means people are violent with whatever tool they find handy, just like killing themselves. We should address the reasons for violence, not the method.
Considering that you started your rant with total nonsense, your conclusions are not any better.
I mean just recently, you had a trained military person beheaded in broad daylight by a couple guys with knives. AND nobody stopped them. Nobody could. In America, you would have had someone (or a few someones) kick the shit out of the guys before they could finish cutting the soldiers head off.
Sure they would. That's why every other month another guy has ample time to shoot 20 people and off himself.
Sorry, I don't want to live in a Society that is so scared of everything that people don't step up and face evil directly. Call it "Rugged Individualism", something Liberals can't understand and therefore despise.
Your 'rugged individualism' exists only in Hollywood action flicks. Your are living in society of sheep scared half to death of 'terrorists' and everything else.You do know that majority of US citizens actually supports TSA ass-groping because it makes them feel safer? On Slashdot it might look differently, but slashdotters are tiny minority. If you want example of actually brave society, then look how Norway handled Breivik incident. They prosecuted, sentenced and chucked him into a prison then got on with their lives. No PATRIOT acts, no crazy witch hunts, all civil liberties retained - just business as usual.
I find your post most amusing, simply because it ignores the "Gun killed a teacher, guns bad" vs "box cutter killed teacher, student bad" doesn't compute with people like you. My point, which you OBVIOUSLY missed, was student kills teacher in both cases, in one you blame the gun on the other you don't blame the box cutter. Why the difference?
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
If the same thing happened on the streets of the US, chances are people would pull out their cell phones and record rather than help. I hope that I am wrong. A lot of jurisdictions have done away with good samaritan laws and the US is law suit happy. It's enough that I'd hesitate to act as I have personal net worth in the 7 figures and a family.
And I say this as someone who also has a CCW and carries daily. Bob Costas made fun of the people who "Check if they have wallet, phone, keys, and Glock before leaving the house". Well I do check to se if I have wallet, phone, keys, Walther, and spare mags before leaving the house.
While in my state it would be legal to intervene with force to stop such an attack on another it doesn't grant me any legal immunity from civil action unless happening on my personal property. I step in and pull the trigger, it's going to to cost me at least $50,000 to lawyer up. And that's if I win. If the attackers turned and come for me or my family, all bets are off. I'll pay the $50,000 in a heartbeat. Am I going to risk $50,000 to intervene on the part of a stranger when I don't know the situation. Probably not.
It may be harsh to say, but another man's life is not worth $50,000 to me.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
a good start, but your need to justify legalizing weapons make you look silly when you assert that nobody could stop a couple of guys with knives, but in the grand ole USA they coulda kicked da shit outta dem. Really? So, only in the US is someone brave enough to assault another person? Is that what you are trying to say. You forgot to include the part about shooting the knife wielding guys with their duly authorized concealed carry hand guns.
The hardline rhetoric is silly enough in its own right, but when you weaken it by recognizing that possession of firearms (or any weapon) is not necessary for resistance its even worse. Is it intended as a jingoist statement without meaningful content?
I'd rather not live in a society that is so petrified of itself that its members feel a need to constantly carry handguns for use on other members of the society. Regretfully, it sure seems like your POV is winning as the "gun rights" nuts insist you have to carry and kill to protect yourself while the "gun restriction" nuts insist that firearms are too scary for anyone other than law enforcement to possess. Both sides convey their message through fear.
Just so you don't get the wrong idea, this "liberal" owns multiple weapons ranging from those used up close and personal to killing at a distance. That's what weapons are *for* but it doesn't mean it is the only way that they can be *used*. Just like a screwdriver isn't *for* killing, but they can certainly be *used* in such a fashion.
Unless they accidentally shoot themselves, or get extremely angry and without thinking pull their weapon on someone who is then entitled to kill them in self defence.
I think you were being sarcastic, but I just wanted to add that.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I didn't read anything from the AC that said who or what should be held accountable, just that it's silly logic to say because X does Y and Z does Y we should ban Z. It's an obvious misdirection to take focus from whatever X is. In either case the person should be held accountable, all I said in my original statement was the parents should be held accountable in this situation because they were negligent by allowing their kid to have access to an unlocked gun.
I was blaming the gun owners, not the gun, but you felt the need to throw in some silly logic anyway. Someone left a box cutter out where a minor had access to it, same rule applies. It's negligence on the owner, or last user, of the box cutter and murder on the part of the teen.
If someone hot wired my car and stole it I wouldn't expect to be found guilty of negligence, but if I left the keys in my car and some teen jumped in it and started mowing people down should I not be charged with negligence for failing to properly secure my vehicle?
Same applies here, parents legally own a gun, fine and dandy. Parents leave said gun and ammo out where a minor that shouldn't have access to gun can get it. Minor kills people. Minor is guilty of murder, parents are guilty of negligence.
Unfortunately you can't just legislate it away. That doesn't work, has never worked, and will never work.
Well, it works very well in Europe. So while this particular case is example of police idiocy, the law in UK is not crazy. But I agree that it would be extremely hard to do in USA.
Doesn't stop them from trying, though.
I'm not going to get into it beyond that though - I'm not an expert, but it doesn't take an expert to recognize that something is broken. I really don't think just taking them away is the answer. As other incidents have spotlit, the act will not change, only the tools. Children (and adults too) committing violence against their peers and authority figures is the symptom, the gun (or knife etc) is just the vehicle, and the real problem is something else that I can't really identify personally. People are losing hope, getting restless, frustrated, and angry. We need to determine (and fix) the cause of that, not the results. But good luck with that, because the people in charge only care about looking like they are fixing things. Which only compounds the problem.
With that logic every kind of weapon should be legalised. Why bother banning nerve gas and explosives ? After all this will only change tools, not the act itself.
Read the Wake Forest Law Review document "Imagining Gun Control In America" that goes into depth about why "just ban them" won't work.
Here is the link if you want it: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1326743
One would think though that a bunch of people saying "we'll kill you if you try" running around would be enough to make it clear it won't work. Here in the US, trying to ban them, is essentially starting a war. Which is a good thing in my opinion.
Murder Rates for the US and Great Britain are about the same
UK murder rate: 1.2
US murder rate: 4.7
(per 100k inhabitants)
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate
I mean just recently, you had a trained military person beheaded in broad daylight by a couple guys with knives. AND nobody stopped them. Nobody could.
He was not beheaded, he was stabbed and hacked to death. It happened without warning and so quickly that it is unlikely anyone could have stopped them, armed or otherwise. A woman did actually confront them, as it happens, despite being unarmed. By then the guy was dead though and the police on their way, so there was little point fighting them.
In any case, that sort of thing is 4x more likely to happen to you than it is to me, despite you being armed. You seem to be really worried about people trying to murder you, to the point where you feel the need to be armed, but most people here are not concerned with being randomly attacked.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I just decided to fact check the first thing you wrote there, and boy was it bullshit, so I'm just going to assume that reality is the exact opposite of everything that you wrote.
Figure 5 Homicides per million people 2009, selected countries
Homicides per million people
Germany 8.6
Spain 9.0
Italy 10.4
Netherlands 10.9
France 11.2
England and Wales 11.2
EU 12.2
Australia 13.3
New Zealand 15.1
Canada 18.1
United States 49.7
Source: Eurostat
While this is true, there is also a clear difference between a knife and a gun which is important to consider. A gun can kill someone from a distance with little risk to the attacker. A knife requires the user to get close to their victim, where they risk being injured or killed themselves.
It's rather obviously really. Guns are hard and expensive to get compared to knives, so if knives were just as good people would prefer them over guns. The stats say that they very clearly don't.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
You've utterly missed the country with the highest percentage of households with guns: Switzerland. Not only in Europe, but also has an exceedingly low rate of gun crime.
The problem is cultural. Get in line at the Windsor Tunnel on the Detroit side of the Saint Claire River and check out the hookers and crack dealers. Come out of the Tunnel a few minutes later on the Canadian side and you're in a different world. (Haven't been there in a number of years, but I'd be surprised if it has changed much.)
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
I grew up in northern Michigan in the 1960s and '70s. Almost everyone in our town had guns at home, even if they didn't use them they had their grandpa's guns laying around. And not just "a gun", but multiple. We had six shotguns of various sizes and ages and two rifles and multiple boxes of ammunition for all of them, and were in no way unusual. The only gun safe that I knew of in the city was at Hampel's Gun Shop, where they locked up stuff brought in for repair (mostly so that it wouldn't get sold by accident). You could buy any kind of gun at Ace Hardware, and ammunition was available at gas station mini-marts and supermarkets.
The problem isn't the presence of guns, the country with the highest percentage of gun-possessing households is Switzerland. The issue is cultural. The only solution for gun violence is to fix our culture.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
I'd rather not live in a society that is so petrified of itself that it doesn't trust its members with handguns.
So I don't anymore.
I think you need to do some more research on Switzerland before you use them as a model that guns in the home provides access. They do actually have very strict gun laws.
In Switzerland you have a gun, but you can't have ammunition. Ammunition is stored at central arsenals in case for some reason it's needed. When you go to a shooting range you buy your ammo there, but you have to use it all, you can't take it out with you. Also there's compulsory military service for all male Swiss citizens, where they're trained to use weapons properly, a cultural difference as you pointed out.
If military service was required in the US and there were sticker gun laws (like in Switzerland) school shootings would be a much less frequent occurrence, but merely suggesting either of those would get you shot, metaphorically, in the states.
I remember a number of years ago a prisoner in Michigan made a gun of paper mache, match heads, aluminum foil, and the metal eraser clasp from a pencil. When it was found the guard staff fired it into a telephone book, and it penetrated over an inch.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
"If what we have seized is proven to be viable components capable of constructing a genuine firearm, then it demonstrates that organised crime groups are acquiring technology that can be bought on the high street to produce the next generation of weapons," he said in a statement.Even if they were gun parts, this statement is bullshit.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Umm, the murder rate for the US is about 4.7 intentional homicides per 100 000 people, while for the United Kingdom it's 1.2. So almost 4 times more murders per capita in the US.
Source:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate
Unfortunately, your "statistic" to "shut people ... up for good" isn't actually true.
According to the United Nations (warning, .xls file), the intentional homicide rate in Great Britain (the UK collects different data for England and Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland, so I've combined the E+W and Scotland data to get a GB one) in 2011 was 1.1 per 100,000. In the United States it was 4.7. The suicide rates are similar, but the intentional homicide rates are way off; over four times as high.
That said, according to the FBI about 69% of homicides in the US in 2012 involved the use of firearms. So ignoring all firearm-related homicides, the US's homicide rate is about 1.4 per 100,000, so still higher than Great Britain's.
But none of this means anything on its own, as far as policy implications go. Working out whether bans on certain classes of firearms are necessary and/or proportionate is a very complex task, and a couple of statistics are hardly conclusive.
Your "statistic" was still wrong, though.
-----------------------
On the murder of Lee Rigby, there are a few subtleties you may have missed. First the assailants killed him by hitting him with a car, and then stabbing him with knives (apparently unable to decapitate him) before anyone could react, even if they were armed - it's unclear if there were even people nearby at the time (one of the first 'witnesses' got involved after thinking it was an accident and trying to give the victim first aid). The assailants had a revolver, so it wasn't just knives; it is possible that if they had anticipated resistance from someone with a firearm, they would have shot him (rather than stabbed) and may have shot others nearby.
The suggestion that anyone would have "kicked the shit" out of them is rather ludicrous in any event. As it happened, after their attack the suspects waited calmly for the police to arrive (talking to passers-by); when the police did approach, they charged them ineffectually, were shot, and taken into custody.
I fail to see how widespread access to firearms would have made the situation any better, or how passers-by beating them up would have furthered the interests of justice.
Do you equally blame the box cutter owners for their not locking up a the box cutter?
The analogy is X used Y to do Z, in one case you want W to be charged for allowing access to a Y, but not in the other.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Are you incapable of reading? I specifically said the owner of the box cutter is responsible. Stupidity is only hurting your cause.
...(UK high-capacity meaning more than two rounds.)
Rule 4: Double tap
True. For muzzle loaders, they just use a metal (lead?) ball. A fishing weight is lead, or a steel ball bearing would work fine.
In that case, "making" the ammo is simpler than a one-step process - it's a zero step process.
The same is true for murder rates. In fact, if you exclude the cities in the US with the strictest gun control laws (DC, Chicago etc) which also happen to have the highest murder rates by guns, the murder rates in the US is actually LESS than most other countries.
Unfortunately that is not actually true:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate#By_country
US: 4.7 per 100,000 inhabitants
EU Average: about 1 per 100,000 inhabitants.
(Russia is not part of the EU so the figure for Europe on the page above is not the same as the EU)
There might be plenty of countries who have a higher murder rate than the US, but most the western europe or the rest of the developed world is way below you. If you filter the list of countries linked above to only include developed countries with stable democratic governments the US is suddenly fares pretty badly. I mean sure, you do have a lower murder rate than El Salvador, but the UK, Italy, Germany, New Zealand, France, Israel, Australia, Denmark, Japan, Spain, etc are all about 5 times lower.
Seriously, have a good long look at the list of countries above you on the list above and see if you can find anywhere which had a comparable standard of living to that of the US which has the same or similar murder rate.
I dont read
>the magazine on the otherhand... a box, a spring, and a plate... now THAT is truly terrifying!
Putting a Miss Piggy head on top was a clever disguise, Mr. Terrorist, but we recognize a .22 short magazine when we see one. Come along quietly now before we get upset and have to beat you senseless.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
*One* person beheaded. It's still one too many, but the fact is that two people armed with assault rifles and a desire to kill innocent people would almost certainly have managed to do an awful lot more damage, even if passers by were similarly armed.
Also, given that the US murder rate including Chicago and DC is pretty much 4 times the UK rate, but without them is less? Well thank you for informing me, I'm heading to America next year, but there's absolutely no fucking chance I'm visiting cities with those sorts of murder rates - I hadn't realised those US crime dramas were non-fiction!
UK is not really Europe though, and definitely not typical for European countries.
I mean just recently, you had a trained military person beheaded in broad daylight by a couple guys with knives. AND nobody stopped them. Nobody could. In America, you would have had someone (or a few someones) kick the shit out of the guys before they could finish cutting the soldiers head off.
You know they ran him over first to make sure he could put up any resistance? And you should just shut the fuck up to be honest as you have had plenty of incidences of similar crap in the US, did anybody stop them?
In fact, if the two muslim nutjobs who atacked that soldier were in the US instead of here they would have shot a whole bunch of people instead thank to the ease with which they could have gotten firearms. Then again, in the US there might have been somebody walking down the street with a concealed carry permit who could have played rambo and started a firefight in a public place and killed a bunch more people in the crossfire.
Also, do read my other post where I actually post some figures calling you out for the absolute bullshit you posted about murder rate by country. Maybe then you will pull your head out from Wayne LaPierre's ass.
I dont read
It still doesn't explain why murder and violent crime rates vary so widely even between the states in US, with seemingly zero correlation between those and gun control. And we're not talking just urban/rural here - compare the rates in e.g. Texas vs Oregon.
In truth, the difference in numbers between US and UK (or any other two countries) doesn't really tell you anything other than there is a difference. It's certainly not enough to ascribe that difference to a particular factor X, because there are so many other factors that are different. To remind, US is the only Western country with no public healthcare system; it has highest poverty rates and lowest social mobility. Is it that surprising that it has more social tension and crime?
Relying on people's technical ignorance is catching, it appears...spare printer parts are named weapons components (undoubtedly as a prelude for a campaign to make the printers themselves illegal)...and here in America, a $294 million (!!!!) secure website, the private contractor explains, cannot possibly be expected to work as it was never tested end to end...
And of course nobody says "What! $294 million (!!!) for a secure website, and you couldn't spare a few millions for unit testing?"...because they - both the American public and our Congress - either don't know any better or would find the truth to impair their intended political narrative.
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
There are a lot of people dying to start a "war on 3D printing", soon there will be more cases where 3d printing will be associated with all kinds of nasty things...
So box cutters should now be kept locked up at all times? Purchase restricted to those who pass a background check and so on. Your ignoring the comparison does not detract from it's validity. Two teachers were killed last week: one with a gun = immediate calls for more gun control and condemnation of parents for not locking up the gun. One with a box cutter = oh how tragic and too bad. But not a single call for box cutter control (remember these weapons of mass destruction were also the primary weapons used in the 9/11 attacks) nor for mandating blade locks or secure storage for all box cutters.
You can walk into any Walmart plop down your cash and walk out with a box cutter regardless of age.
Also why must guns be kept locked up? Because holophobes are afraid of them? Many across this country have grown up with firearms in the home, firearms that until the last couple decades were most commonly stored unsecured. The kids knew how to use the firearms and where they and their ammo were stored, but the kids were also taught firearm safety and knew not to play or touch them. It was like that in my parents home, not one of those firearms was ever used to harm anyone, we knew they were not toys and that we were not to touch them without permission.
I'm too lazy to compose a creative sig.
If you take out all the cities with crime problems the statistics are almost the same as another country? Wow. That's some fantastic analysis there, Mike.
Besides, those cities with strict gun control laws got them because of all the gun violence. Admittedly when you have prohibition combined with porous borders you will probably have more problems, but that doesn't even go close to making a case against a country wide prohibition. It's similar to the climate change argument that "we won't do anything until China does".
Also the unusually high suicide rate by guns never comes into question, because people killing themselves is seen as acceptible somehow, yet there's a lot more suicides per capita in the USA than in the UK too. None of those would be misclassified murders, since you know, murder stats and suicide stats are treated as equal levels of failure in police juristictions. Yeah, that passes the laugh test.