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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.
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.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
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.