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Online Payment Firm Stripe Boots 3D Gun Designer Cody Wilson's Companies
SonicSpike writes with this news from Reason magazine: Cody Wilson, famous for making the first usable fully plastic 3D printed handgun and for his new project "Ghost Gunner" which mills metal lower receivers (the milling machine itself is of course not a weapon, and what it makes is not itself legally a weapon) for AR-15s, [informed me Monday] that his online payment processor Stripe has decided that his companies, all of them, qualify as forbidden "weapons and munitions; gunpowder and other explosives" services. This includes the Ghost Gunner and Defense Distributed.
Because I'm 100% sure that a couple of government 'visitor' types stopped by to help Stripe make this decision.
I'm not sure of the specifics of this case, but legally you can sell an 80% completed lower that isn't classified as a weapon in the US because "significant" work still needs to be done to make it a usable lower receiver
BUT BUT BUT I thought Companies don't have the right to deny people's rights simply because they don't agree with them.
Substitute Gay Marriage for Guns in this case and see if your position changes.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Well, people don't like being told that the best way to control their government is to actually go out and meet local candidates for their school boards, city councils, county boards, and even homeowners associations and to actually listen to what those candidates have to say on issues other than abortion, firearms, religion, and sex. That takes too much work. Unfortunately for all of us, the people that start out in school boards, city councils, county boards, and even homeowners associations are the larval form of what become our representatives, senators, governors, and presidents and their cabinets.
I don't think that owning firearms would stop a government from being tyrannical or from attacking the population. I don't think that a lack of firearms in the population would mean that the population can't rise up. For the former, look at Iraq, which is loaded with weapons and had abuse by the government in Baghdad, and for the latter, look at the fall of the Berlin Wall, where the East German Communists didn't have the stomach for shooting tens of thousands of their own people when they interpreted an off-the-cuff comment about easing border controls as freedom to cross now.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
In Federal law, homosexuals are not a protected class. State laws vary.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Except that the laws regarding home-built firearms are very well established and have been well fleshed-out. Believe me, a lot of the corner cases have been adjudicated. Wilson is selling a milling machine. People put hunks of metal in it. A CNC program runs on it. A home-built firearm comes out. That makes Wilson's machine no different from any other CNC milling machine. Look, illiterate craftsmen in Pakistan build AK-47's from scrap metal with hand tools. Are you going to require licenses for metal files now?
Having never been in a firearms store, let alone purchase one, what do "real" firearm shops use as a payment processor? Surely they take credit cards, don't they?
Stripe makes it clear that they don't want to participate in transactions for regulated products and services. I don't see what the problem with that is.
The only people who lose here are stripe
You think they lose? Let me introduce you to a little concept called contingent liability. They are making the perfectly sane decision that the potential liability and government scrutiny that could arise from facilitating these payments is not worth it. Honestly I might have made the same decision. Has nothing to do with approving or disapproving of the product being sold. It's simply an actuarial analysis that says the costs outweigh the benefits. They are in business to make money, not to facilitate business models that could cause them legal heartburn later.
That argument would be a lot stronger if there were a pattern of payment service providers being held liable for damages due to criminal acts performed with firearms purchased with payment via their services. AFAICT, not only is there no such pattern, there isn't even a single example. There are a small number of examples of gun stores being sued (with little success except where the gun store broke the law), but no case where payment providers were even named in the suits, that I can find, anyway.
Given that, this decision seems more politically than fiscally motivated.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
I would much rather see the government drop marriage from teh language and develop domestic partnerships. Essentially contracts between people, regardless of whether or not they wish to engage in a religious ceremony or have sex with each other, that are stating that they are coming together for the purpose of maintaining a household. There should be different types of contracts, for instance, one could be just for people that wish to be room mates and would like to jointly file tax returns or share some of the benefits. Another could be for people that wish to combine assets, declare that one will inherit the goods of the other, and other such things that you now have with a marriage. Each could be easily dissolvable and should include set automatic expiration based on the level, but be as easy to renew as your car registration
This way the government no longer cares about who is in love with who, or what happens behind closed doors, and they can stick with what they should be regulating, while letting the religious leaders say who can and cannot get married within their own religion, and leave everybody else alone.
XDInd