The $1,200 DIY Gunsmithing Machine
An anonymous reader writes: You may recall Cody Wilson as the man behind the world's first 3D-printed gun. He built a company behind the ideals of DIY gun-making, and now he's come back with another device: the "Ghost Gunner," a CNC mill designed to create the lower receiver of an AR-15 rifle. "That simple chunk of metal has become the epicenter of a gun control firestorm. A lower receiver is the body of the gun that connects its stock, barrel, magazine and other parts. As such, it's also the rifle's most regulated element. Mill your own lower receiver at home, however, and you can order the rest of the parts from online gun shops, creating a semi-automatic weapon with no serial number, obtained with no background check, no waiting period or other regulatory hurdles. Some gun control advocates call it a "ghost gun." Selling that untraceable gun body is illegal, but no law prevents you from making one." Wilson's goal is still to render government gun regulation useless, even as debate rages on banning this kind of manufacturing.
Ban "Assault Lathes"!
I have a small CNC and with a few tool changes and some time i've been making 1911s and ar15s for years...
this isn't new or exciting this is the way ar-15's and 1911s are made
cast rough shape machine to precise specs...
I'm not sure why this is a big deal, its still REALLY hard to build a barrel and chamber so you still need to buy them, honestly making the receiver the registered part is silly most people could build a receiver with time and effort few people could make a decent barrel or precise chamber.
is the only thing he did to make this special is provide the right tooling in the box? and a pre-installed set of gcode big fucking deal it takes 2 seconds to get the gcode for an ar of the net
Really government over reach is a huge problem and I like the idea of people being able to make their own guns. I know a lot of people want to blame guns for many problems but that is a rather cheap excuse and avoidance of the fact that the public needs improved living conditions so that there are less violent people who act out irrationally. Without much hope of a decent future we do have far too many people who act out. We also have prisons that make only token gestures at rehabilitation of inmates and a mental health system that is a national disgrace.
But precisely finishing the last 20 percent of a lower receiver has still required access to a milling machine that typically costs tens of thousands of dollars.
Whatever. I made mine with a $350 micro milling machine from Harbor Freight. The template kit to mill & drill the other 20% of the incomplete lower receiver was about the same cost as the 80% complete lower receiver. So all of the parts & tooling in sum total less than $550. Plus I use the mill for other things and the template has resale value. Also FTA:
Defense Distributedâ(TM)s machine canâ(TM)t carve pieces as large as its competitors, but its small size makes it more rigid and precise, allowing it to cut an aluminum lower receiver from an 80 percent lower in around an hour. Thatâ(TM)s a task Wilson says would still be impossible with todayâ(TM)s cheapest hobbyist mills but doesnâ(TM)t require five-figure professional tools. âoeWeâ(TM)re making this easier by an order of magnitude,â he says.
I think that they meant to quote him as saying it is POSSIBLE. An order of magnitude is a gross overstatement, given that this was the 3d milling version of trace paper.
Subversive ambitions aside, Wilson doesnâ(TM)t hide the fact that the Ghost Gunner is also a money-making project.
Indeed.
Why would you want an untraceable computer? I cannot think of any ethical reason
1) Are too big to easily hide, attracting the attention of cops. So crooks don't like to carry them.
2) Are too big to easily commit suicide with.
3) Are too big for young children to easily play with.
As a direct result of this, long guns kill less than 500 people a year.
Pistols, however, are used by criminals, by people committing suicide, and by kids playing around with them. As a direct result, over 30,000 people die every year after being shot with a pistol.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Good. As a libertarian, driver, voter, and not insane person, I understand that there needs to be SOME government regulation of cars. There is no reason not to try something to prevent insane people from getting cars. They're going to murder anyway, but a car makes it simple.
Ban high capacity assault cars- you don't NEED to go faster than 15 mph. You don't NEED to be able to haul a boat.
An AK-47 receiver made out of a rusty shovel:
http://thechive.com/2012/12/06...
Perhaps the problem is that the receiver is the legally-controlled part of the gun. Everything else is spare parts. Making receivers is easy now.
I'm no expert, but it seems to me that making a barrel is the hardest part. Why isn't the barrel the controlled part?
Actually, the "gun show loophole" has been shown not to be the problem as only a small percentage of guns obtained this way end up being used in crimes. And all FFLs at all gun shows in the US must "background check". The "loophole" you're trying to sniff out here are private sales.
Wilsons goal of enabling anyone to privately fabricate an untraceable gun is part of a larger anarchist mission: To show how technology can render the entire notion of government obsolete. Hes spent the last two years developing firearms designed to be printed as easily as ink on a page, neutering attempts at gun control. 'This is a way to jab at the bleeding hearts of these total statists' Wilson says. 'Its about humiliating the power that wants to humiliate you,' he says.
I'm all on board the maker train (I own a makerbot at home) but Jesus tap-dancing Christ...Anarchy? You dont need to make "ghost" guns to skirt gun control. After 4 major shootings in the US in 2 years, lawmakers themselves refuse to enact any sort of gun control. Hell, getting a gun in america is as easy as filling out a form. the biggest hurtle is the waiting period and even that is only a sometimes kind of thing. We cant even use serialized guns to independently track homicide rates in our country unless we get a FoIA from the ATF, which incidentally hasnt had a full time director in years. News reports routinely redact the make and model of firearms used in shootings out of fearfulness they'll incur a defamation lawsuit from the NRA. if you really want to "humiliate the power" and "jab at hearts" you leak confidential information. Hell, Bradley Manning and Julian Assange are national treasures and they did it without a gun.
my prediction is the homemade printable gun will be outlawed not from some evil 'obama gunna take muh gunz" scheme but by lobbying pressure from the NRA, who represent weapons manufacturers profit margins (not you.)
Good people go to bed earlier.
It seems like this guy is TRYING to get 3-d printers, CNC machines, and other manufacturing techniques heavily regulated/banned to the public.
Perhaps he is trying to get stupid attempts at firearms regulations banned.
Have gnu, will travel.
it is against the law to transport it across state lines though
Does it or its owner become suddenly more dangerous after crossing a state line?
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
Both of my AR's were obtained without a background check. I bought both from a private seller. 100% legal.
Honestly this is all mental masterbation. You can easily build an AK47 lower without a milling machine and just some hand tools and a old shovel.
In fact.... here you go....
http://www.northeastshooters.c...
The AR15 is not the best platform in the world, it's just popular. if you really want a gun that can take insane abuse and easily built with hand tools.... AK47 is the gun to build to be subversive..
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Your attempt to include links to such statistics failed.
I did not include the link in an attempt to provide statistics.
Please, try again.
No, I won't. This shit is clear as daylight. I have lived in the flesh. People "see it" or they "don't see it."
If it were "clear", you would've had no problems substantiating it with links to evidence..
We could extend that statement to say if the statement "Jim Crow laws are bad" weren't clear in the past, we wouldn't have needed a whole goddamned Civil Right Movement to make the case for it.
For something like this, with so much evidence that had been published in so many years, "clear" is firmly in the eye of the beholder.
You see it or you don't. I am not going to debate you, and if that gives *you* the impression of winning the point, go ahead and do your victory dance.
First, guns don't protect, never have, never will.
The first eight of your 457 word wall of text shows you're so out of touch with reality that there's no point in reading the rest.
The primary function of guns in private hands is to protect those who carry them. They do that exceptionally well. In criminal attacks, resistance with gun is the most effective way to avoid injury or death. It's substantially more effective than the second best - knuckling under completely - and beats the pants off everything else, from running away, to trying to talk your way out, to resisting with bare hands or other tools. (Resisting with knife is about the worst.)
Research on self-defense is hard, because faiures leave tracks in crime stats while successes usually don't (and often leave the self-defended victim with an incentive to keep quiet about it). Nevertheless, even the first well-run projects were able to put a lower bound of guns preventing or aborting more than six times as many crimes as they aid in committing.
In private hands they're safer than police, too. A defense-with-gun is usually effected by no more than brandishing or occasionally getting off a round in the general direction of the perp. But of those instances where a victim or a policeman shoots someone believed to be a perpetrator, the cop is over 5 1/2 times as likely to erroneously shoot an innocent than an armed private citizen.
My family has substantial personal experience with armed self defense. For just a few examples on my wife's side: In college she was accosted by the rapist in the window, who was dressed in just running shoes and a dirty knife. Fortunately there was a hunting rifle behind the bed: She actually had to go as far as cocking it before he stopped trying to get her to drop it and jumped back out the window - apparently to take it out on another girl a few blocks away, with over 130 cuts while raping her. Her mother defended self and family against a Klan attack with a pistol. (Her granddad was caught away from his gun, though, and had to do his anti-Klan defense with a hammer.) Then there was the aunt, the uncle, ...
At the larger scale it's hard to argue with the fact that the US, founded in a revolution (by religious nut with guns) against their self-admitted "legitimate government" and with over half the adult civilian population armed, has now gone over two centuries without a substantial attack from abroad and only one major internal war, while Europe continues to suffer from genocidal wars, often with multi-million body counts. (With the exception of Switzerland, of course: Every adult citizen there is armed and has had military training. Even World Wars go around them.)
It's also hard to argue with the fact that the US is multi-ethnic, and the common denominator of each of its ethnic groups is that their members' murder victimization rate is substantially less than that of contemporary members of the same ethnic group still residing in their land of origin.
As for resisting an oppressive regime if push comes to shove: We have experiences like "The Battle of Athens" just after WWII, and the documented question from Nixon to a thnk-tank about what would happen if he suspended the presidential election. (Answer: That would precipitate an armed rebellion, and the population was well enough armed that it would succeed.) Uprisings aren't always successful and small or UNarmed uprisings are often put down, sometimes with lots of deaths. (Witness the Bonus Marchers' Massacre.) But recent decades of world politics have shown how effective a popular uprising can be, against even a coalition of world powers and superpowers.
If it came to that in the US, you can expect a substantial amount of the military (especially retirees) to be on the side of the people, along with lots of military equipment raided from armories. (You can see that now in the Middle East. The big difference between Al Queda and ISIS/ISIL is that the latter has bunch of col
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way