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Making an AR-15 In the Wired San Francisco Office
An anonymous reader writes: Wired's writer Andy Greenberg writes about his experience fabricating an AR-15 lower receiver with the Ghost Gunner CNC mill. (That's the same device that was demoed in a Slashdot video earlier this year.) Greenberg points out that CNC millng isn't new, but reports nonetheless: "Aside from a single brief hardware hiccup, it worked remarkably well. In fact, the Ghost Gunner worked so well that it may signal a new era in the gun control debate, one where the barrier to legally building an untraceable, durable, and deadly semiautomatic rifle has reached an unprecedented low point in cost and skill."
The whole discussion about making your own guns, sort of reminds me of the day I realized how easy it was to make beer. So easy that any 14 year old can walk into any random supermarket and buy everything they need to make a couple gallons of beer for less than it costs to actually buy the beer (as it should be!).
So all these prohibitions against selling alcohol to people under 21 are all pretty pointless, even kids without friends older than 21 can get their hands on unlimited supplies of the stuff with just a little thought and effort.
So the latest hopla about making guns is sort of a resurgence of the zip gun culture. Only the results are probably more accurate on the whole.
Especially surreal when my wife learned to shoot same weapons in PRC at 12 years of age as part of the school curriculum, when around here we'd probably try to bring someone up on charges for doing that. Sometimes the gun control side sounds like the "abstinence only" education argument. Both seem to think lack of knowledge and superficial fixes will solve unrelated problems (i.e. sociopaths running amok).
Whoever thinks that making guns cheap and easy to fabricate without skills is a good idea, is nuts.
It doesn't matter if it's a good idea or a bad idea. It's the world we live in now.
It was probably not a good idea to let murderous dictators and their regimes know about the equation E=MC^2. We would definitely be better off if crazy people lacked the information to make nuclear weapons. But that's not even a question worth considering, because that information is already out there. We live in a world where the knowledge of how to make a nuclear weapon can be found on wikipedia.
There is no good way to keep bad people from owning cars, cell phones, computers, kitchen knives, baseball bats, etc. Now guns are in this category as well. It is just a fact that in the 21st century, making a precise replica of a simple physical object is no longer hard nor expensive. Arguing whether it should be is pointless.