Facebook Bans Sites That Host Blueprints of 3D-Printed Guns (cbsnews.com)

Yesterday, Facebook said it's banning websites that host and share blueprints of 3D-printed guns. "Sharing instructions on how to print firearms using 3D printers is not allowed under our Community Standards," said a spokesperson in an email statement. "In line with our policies, we are removing this content from Facebook." BuzzFeed was first to report the news: The move comes amid a rush by states to block these instructions from being posted. A July settlement between the State Department and Defense Distributed, an open-source organization that created the first completely 3D-printed gun, cleared the way for the group to publish the gun code. However, that was stalled when a federal judge on July 31 granted a temporary nationwide injunction that prevented Defense Distributed from uploading the plans. The injunction prevents Defense Distributed from publishing the plans. But the instructions are widely available online, on sites such as CodeIsFreeSpeech.com -- which hosts plans for parts of an AR-15, a Beretta, and Defense Distributed's Liberator. Attempts to post the site on a user's News Feed, through Facebook's Messenger app, or on Instagram (which Facebook owns) produce a variety of error messages. Other sites that host the files can still be posted through Facebook. Specifically, Facebook says that 3D-printed guns violate the regulated goods section of the social giant's community standards, which limits gun sales and exchanges to licensed dealers.

Comments

Yawn.

[Alypius]

More posturing by SJWs who think their opinion is important. The plans have been out for a while now and we hardly need FB's help to find them. Alternatively, we can go to an actual dealer and get blanks to make our own non-novelty gun.

Re:Yawn.

[CrimsonAvenger]

Committing murder has never been easier or more convenient

And for all that, the murder rate in the USA is about half what it was 50 years ago....

Re:Yawn.

[ShanghaiBill]

And for all that, the murder rate in the USA is about half what it was 50 years ago....

The murder rate is irrelevant. Gun control is about culture, not "saving lives".

In many ways, gun control is the mirror image of abortion. Liberals are often perplexed when conservatives dismiss their argument that we could save way more babies by sex education, access to contraceptives, better prenatal care, nutrition supplements for pregnant women, and streamlined adoptions, than by banning abortions. That is all true, but is missing the point. It is not about "saving babies" but about a culture of people behaving irresponsibly and then flushing the consequences down the toilet.

Similarly, gun violence dramatically declined over the past few decades mostly because of a big reduction in environmental lead pollution. There is much more we could do: black children still have twice the blood lead levels of white children, and prison inmates have three times the average level. Yet there is WAY more passion about closing the "gun show loophole", something that would have a negligible effect, than about not poisoning kids, which would likely save thousands of lives annually. Likewise, gun control advocates focus on school shootings and "assault weapons", not because these represent a lot of deaths (school shootings are less than 0.05% of gun deaths, and handguns kill a thousand times as many people as assault rifles), but because they represent "gun culture".

Re:Yawn.

[ShanghaiBill]

I remember reading a thread about Venezuela's crime rate going down by a factor of 1000 when they enacted a global ban on private, non police/military gun ownership.

Then something is seriously wrong with either your memory or your critical thinking skills. This never happened, and is so completely implausible that only a fool would believe it.

Re:Yawn.

[BlueStrat]

it's a METAL BLANK that is where the serial number would go on the "legal" firearm you described. It omits that serial #.

It's perfectly legal to make yourself a firearm and there is no legal requirement for a serial number to be applied nor registered. As long as the firearm you manufacture would be legal for you to posses otherwise (not a restricted type like fully-automatic/select-fire, sawed-off shotgun under 18 inches in barrel length,, etc) you are free to make one for personal use without serial numbers or registration of any kind, only rules about who may legally possess apply as long as you don't sell/trade it to another party.

TPTB over the decades have worked to chip away at our educational systems, our mental health systems, our criminal justice system, and our common shared beliefs using propaganda involving the pushing of identity politics and intersectionality that has it's roots in Post-Modernism. This has naturally eventually resulted in a dumbed-down, fractured/divided., frustrated, and angry population. Then TPTB step in to "solve" the problem *they created* by removing liberty and personal freedom.

Don't be their willing tool of your own enslavement.

Strat

Re: Yawn.

[blindseer]

The USA is the only developed nation that has a firearm crime rate equivalent to third world nations or war zones.

But what are the TOTAL crime rates? I keep hearing about "gun crime" but I don't care if people are getting shot, clubbed, stabbed, or throttled to death.

Here's another problem with comparing murder rates in the USA with other nations, the USA is a federation. Like the European Union the USA is a collection of independent states. Each state has their own rules on guns. The USA does have some terrible murder rates, but you can't blame the laws in Utah for crimes in New York. Putting all the states in the same umbrella as an example of "gun crime" is about as sensible as blaming Spain for crime in Germany. Also remember the scale of this, there are more people in US states that a lot of people around the world don't even think about, like North Carolina, than in some European nations, like Sweden. If you want to compare apples to apples then you need to compare individual states within the US to other nations.

The murder rate in New Hampshire is 1/10th that of Louisiana. Go compare the gun laws in both those states. Here's a hint, one state requires a permit to carry a concealed handgun, and the other does not.

Gun laws have very little to do with crime rates. Look at Missouri, very lax in gun laws and lots of crime. Vermont also has very lax gun laws, but yet 1/4 the murder rate of Missouri. It's almost as if there is no correlation between gun laws and crime rates.

Here's an idea, if you want to stop crime then put criminals in prison. That seems to be working for a lot of places. If gun restrictions stopped murders then Venezuela would be the safest place on Earth.

Re:Yawn.

[Anonymous Coward]

We could save six times as many innocent lives banning alcohol, or three times as many including suicides, yet you seem to not give a shit. 40% of all violent crime has an alcohol component. The majority of domestic violence, assault, battery, DWI, and rapes are attributable to the presence of alcohol. Yet you seem to not care.

This was never about saving lives.

Re:Yawn.

[ShanghaiBill]

Dude, if your "culture" is dependent on schoolchildren being massacred and gang-bangers spraying bullets, you've got a fucked-up culture.

You are missing the point. The culture of urban gang-bangers and rural gun owners couldn't be more different. Gun control advocates are mostly opposed to the latter culture, not the first. Rural whites join the NRA, and are politically active on gun rights. Urban gang-bangers are not.

Do you seriously believe that closing the "gun show loophole" will make a non-negligible difference? Yet it gets way more attention than urban handgun shootings.

It wasn't always thus. You might want to read up on the history on the gun control movement in America. In the 1980s, there was a strong advocacy movement for restrictions on handguns (responsible for 75% of gun homicides and even more gun suicides), and HCI and the Brady Campaign made it clear that they were not after "long guns" used for hunting. Their proposals were sensible. Their influence was growing.

That came to an abrupt end on the morning of January 17th, 1989, when Patrick Purdy walked onto a school playground in Stockton, California, opened fire with an SKS semi-automatic rifle, killing five children and wounding 32 more. The advocates took advantage of the publicity and outrage to completely abandon their assurances of focusing on handguns, and called for bans on "automatic rifles" (already illegal), and "AK-47s" (also already illegal). They got their "assault weapons" ban, but alienated millions of hunters and others that had supported them. The backlash swept dozens of gun control advocates from public office in the 1994 Republican mid-term landslide. The ban expired. NRA membership ballooned. Trust was gone. Willingness to compromise was gone. Any sort of new restriction on gun ownership is unthinkable in today's political climate.

Re:Yawn.

[PopeRatzo]

The "well regulated militia" was intended to be a guard against the spilling of children's blood.

And yet, look at what it's become. You're very close to an epiphany here.

We can't stop people from getting guns any more, this development of 3D printed guns is just the latest means for people to skirt the law.

You really don't understand what your insistence on unregulated gun ownership is going to cost all of us, do you? You think government can't get more tyrannical? It can, and it will be because people didn't voluntarily understand that reason puts limits on rights. Learning to behave is a necessary part of a free society. Alex Jones didn't learn that, and now we have monstrous giant corporations bringing down the heavy hammer. Because Alex Jones couldn't behave himself/em.

Yes, it's true. A free society is dependent upon citizens fucking learning that there are limits. When enough people forget that, we end up with tyranny. And the gun lobby forgot that decades ago.

Re:Yawn.

[ShanghaiBill]

We could save six times as many innocent lives banning alcohol

We tried banning alcohol, and deaths went up, not down.

Re:Yawn.

[blindseer]

I'm now convinced that you are not arguing with me, you are arguing with some construct of your imagination. I already agreed with you that the right of self defense does not mean people can murder without punishment. I'm trying to make it clear to you that gun control in the USA has gone one step too far with these recent blocking of sharing 3D printer files. That's not 2nd Amendment territory any more, this is infringement on the 1st Amendment.

Here's another thing, I'd like to see where you get this idea of an overwhelming dislike of the NRA. I saw a recent fundraiser for a march against the NRA. Go have a look on how much money they raised for the protest.
https://www.gofundme.com/natio...

A whole $70 on a national fundraiser. The NRA likely makes more money on a single order of overpriced t-shirts and "tactical" pants on their website.

I don't care what you say, the National Rifle Association is not the bad guy here. Perhaps you could start understanding this by reading some of the things that the NRA has written. This might be a good place to start:
https://www.nraila.org/article...

Many anti-gun politicians and members of the media have wrongly claimed that 3-D printing technology will allow for the production and widespread proliferation of undetectable plastic firearms. Regardless of what a person may be able to publish on the Internet, undetectable plastic guns have been illegal for 30 years. Federal law passed in 1988, crafted with the NRAâ(TM)s support, makes it unlawful to manufacture, import, sell, ship, deliver, possess, transfer, or receive an undetectable firearm.

The NRA supports laws barring people from producing undetectable firearms. It's already illegal to make an undetectable firearm. It's illegal for felons, drug dealers, illegal aliens, and others law breakers like them, to possess any firearm. It's illegal to murder people. It's illegal to threaten people with a firearm. It's illegal to carry a firearm into a school. I don't know what you want because it seems that what so many claim we need in laws restricting gun ownership and use already exists. What I don't want to see is a law barring the posting of drawings on the internet, that's simply a step too far.

Re: Yawn.

[drinkypoo]

No it really isn't. You're already putting more criminals in prison than anywhere else on earth.

That is caused by criminalizing victimless interactions, especially drug-related offenses which are in fact not offenses against anyone. Since no one is harmed in them, there is no legal justification to making them crimes at all, especially not felonies.

More incarceration in "the land of the free" a.k.a. "the most heavily incarcerated country on the planet" is not the solution.

That's true. It's not about incarcerating more people, it's about incarcerating the correct people. But that alone won't solve the problem, because prison also has to be rehabilitative instead of a rape factory.

Re:Yawn.

[BlueStrat]

TPTB over the decades have worked to chip away at our educational systems, our mental health systems, our criminal justice system, and our common shared beliefs using propaganda involving the pushing of identity politics

What utter bullshit: the problem is entirely people like you. The criminal justice system has many deep problems relating to the lack of funding for public defenders, zero reprecussions for criminal actions by prosecuters (see how many convistions for witholding evidence there have been), a system stacke towards the prosecution, and the entire plea bargaining system.

Yet morons like you whitter on about "identity politics" when the foundations of your country are on fire. And while the politicians realise they can get your vote by demonising the other tribe rather than fixing the actual problems nothing will ever get fixed.

The problems you mentioned are all, every one, simply results and follow-on consequences of the issues I listed.

All you're discussing is re-arranging deck chairs on the Titanic. But yeah, sure, *I'm* the moron, here.

Stop being part of the problem.

Right back at you. Those problems you mention will never be fixed until the cultural and societal problems I talked about are effectively addressed. Until that happens there simply will not be enough informed & educated people who care enough pushing to correct those problems to force a change.

And please, if you don't have any respect for me, at least have enough respect for yourself to refrain from infantile name-calling. It doesn't help your arguments.

Strat

Re: Yawn.

[serviscope_minor]

You've repeatedly refused to give a choerent reason why.

That's what's known as "a lie". I have given reasons repeatedly. I don't want this guy in the ladies toilets:

https://www.gaystarnews.com/wp...

The question is why do you?

these guys are morons. however...

[Anonymous Coward]

all of us libtards who were up in arms over DeCSS, free speech flag, 'illegal prime numbers', wtc, we have to realize that essentially, a 3d printed gun file is simply a number. in other words, its just another kind of illegal number, along with the Playstation encryption keys or decss code or whatever. at some point we have to face the fact that information in pure form can be deadly , thats what a virus is basically, just DNA inside of a dumb casing. like the flu pandemic that killed tens of millions of people... thats technically just a number, not a very big one, GATCTCTAGC etc etc. its not enough to decry gun nuts as moron wackjobs. we have to deal with the fact that our society has evolved to a point, our species, where it could more easily wipe itself out than ever before. solving nuclear weapons proliferation was not the end. it was the beginning. we have no idea what we are doing and no idea what will happen next.

Re:Only Children Censor

[Brett Buck]

It's scummy, anti-American, and highly partisan, but Facebook is a private entity and can do what it pleases with its platform. This is not a First Amendment issue.

Of course, you are also entitled to take your business elsewhere, which I highly recommend.

I'll wait for the 4D Printed guns

[jfdavis668]

3D is old hat. 4D is the future. Then I will be able to shoot into enclosed spaces without hitting the walls or roof.

Re:I'll wait for the 4D Printed guns

[Noishkel]

Yeah I think I saw that upside of DS9. Some shell shocked Vulcan decided to off people using a rifle with a transporter built into it.

Stop the Moral Panic

[toupsie]

Please folks, let's get back to reality. First, it is completely legal in the United States to build your own firearms ( https://www.quora.com/Is-is-tr... )-- anyone with access to basic machinery tools can do it -- think Zip Guns created by prisoners for the ease of creation. Second, plastic 3D gun are terrible.I would rather have a 1700s musket instead. The 3D printed guns have more in common with ancient firearms than modern firearms. It is cheaper and simpler to buy a fully built AR-15 than it is to "print" your own firearm from files downloaded off the internet. And if you really want to make your own M16 based pistol, Google will provide you detailed plans from their own servers: https://patents.google.com/pat.... You provide the tools and skill, Google will provide the detailed schematics. Will Facebook now block Google?

Re:Stop the Moral Panic

[Actually, I do RTFA]

It may be legal to make your own guns, but it is illegal to make guns out of non-ferrous materials, because of metal detectors.