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Wednesday, July 25, 2012

Making Guns Is Not Rocket Science

The aurora shooting has re-inflamed the gun-rights versus gun-control debate.  There's one part of the gun-control advocates' position that I've never understood.

Let's say that somehow, via legislation and enforcement, every single existing civilian gun was removed from the face of the earth, and all military and police weapons were perfectly safeguarded.

What on earth would stop people such as criminals from building their own guns?

Guns were invented hundreds of years ago.  Many very lethal versions are extremely low technology items.  They were specifically designed to be easily built with minimal equipment.

I just did a google search with the terms "build your own gun" and got 126,000,000 hits.  That's a lot of hits.

An example link shows detailed plans on how to build an AK-47 style machine gun (and/or fully automatic handgun) in 24 hours or less using parts available at Home Depot and the like and tools you have at home.  Sure, you might only get a few thousand rounds off with such a weapon before it falls apart, but for a criminal or rampaging psychopath, it will probably do just fine.

Willing to engage machine shops and get parts built according to CAD drawings freely available on the Internet?  Well, then it might take several days to get your gun built, but it will be as accurate and reliable as a professionally manufactured weapon, because, well, it is professionally manufactured - you're only doing the final assembly.  Use several machine shops for the different parts and nobody will have any idea what you're building.

There's just no way to rid the earth of guns without also ridding the earth of metal.  Criminals will always have unfettered access to them.

This makes the concept of gun-control to be so utterly pointless as to be absurd.

Update: Via Instapundit, forget the machine shops, just use a 3D printer to print the gun.

5 comments:

Bret said...

I'm rather guessing that the gun-control advocates, being overwhelmingly left-wing elitists, have no idea how to get their hands dirty and actually build something, anything at all, so they couldn't imagine someone building a gun either.

Anonymous said...

Heh. Because how could you possibly build something without the government helping / supervising? Even if you got it working, "you didn't build that".

P.S. You have to consider gunpowder too - even the best gun is of somewhat limited utility without ammunition.

Bret said...

That's pretty funny. Yes, I guess it would be pretty tough to actually build something without the governments help.

I agree that if all civilian ammunition disappeared from the face of the earth, that would prevent a harder challenge to a criminal who wanted to arm himself with a gun. Creating the brass casings for the bullets would require significant equipment and more expertise than manufacturing a gun. I suspect that someone would figure out how to do it if ammunition disappeared though. The rest of building bullets if one isn't too terribly worried about consistency and accuracy or using smokeless powder is pretty straightforward using widely available materials.

The problem is that bullets for hunting or range shooting can be the same bullets used in a machine gun, so you would really have to eliminate all access to bullets.

If one has access to casings, a google search on "how to make ammunition at home" yields 94,000,000 hits.

Hey Skipper said...

Creating the brass casings for the bullets would require significant equipment and more expertise than manufacturing a gun. I suspect that someone would figure out how to do it if ammunition disappeared though.

I'm just guessing, but I think the hardest part would be the primer.

As for the cartridge, here is how a coke can is made.

I don't think any step is outside the realm of a competent machine shop.

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In the real world, guns cannot be wished away. And the confiscationists haven't yet come to terms with the fact that outlawing guns means giving all power to predators.

Beyond that, it would be nice if they would come clear and admit it: they don't believe you have any right to self defense.

Bret said...

Yeah, okay, the primer is hard too. It may not be hard to machine a single brass casing, but it would be expensive.