"Gun" "Control"

As found in the NY Times today regarding this subject:<p>"In Australia in 1996, a mass killing of 35 people galvanized the nation’s conservative prime minister to ban certain rapid-fire long guns. The “national firearms agreement,” as it was known, led to the buyback of 650,000 guns and to tighter rules for licensing and safe storage of those remaining in public hands.<p>The law did not end gun ownership in Australia. It reduced the number of firearms in private hands by one-fifth, and they were the kinds most likely to be used in mass shootings.<p>In the 18 years before the law, Australia suffered 13 mass shootings — but not one in the 14 years after the law took full effect. The murder rate with firearms has dropped by more than 40 percent".<p>It was legislation, intelligent legislation, that worked. It did not advocate the complete abolishment of firearms, which many pro-gun advocates seem to be making the mental leap towards when any discussion of gun "rights" is brought up. Thinking this problem isn't partially-solvable is ignorant.

The failed drug war has taught us you can regulate and draft laws until it's illegal to even think about making a gun let alone get a hold of one without the appropriate credentials, but it won't change a thing at the end of the day. While it can be argued that we might see people printing their own guns in the future when 3D printing becomes affordable, what's stopping people from printing knives and other sharp pointy objects that could be used to kill or maim someone else? If someone wants to get hold of a gun, they will and no amount of laws or enforcement will ever change that. If someone doesn't get hold of a printed weapon, they'll get their hands on a legitimately made metal one (or whatever material it is they build guns out of these days).<p>The benefit of 3D printing is that at least you have a better chance tracing a home printed weapon than you would an illegally purchased street firearm with no serial number.

This just amplifies the fact that the conversation shouldn't be about gun control and should be about mental health.

Printing guns is curious, but irrelevant for the stated purpose - "gun" "control". Various resistance movements mass-produced guns under Nazi regime. If the regime as brutal as Nazis was unable to prevent it in 1940s, how much chance any modern democracy has to prevent it in 2010s and beyond?<p>Obviously the point is not to completely eliminate guns, that is too stupid even for public politics. The point is to scare the average citizen so much and to distance them so much from the guns that if he wants to commit a crime, he would be too scared of the guns to find one, and others around him would be too scared of the guns too much to provide it for him. We can see that works well because the same works quite well with drugs, which are not available to ordinary citizens and only available to hardened criminals via their underground criminal networks. Oh wait, that's wrong - anybody who cares knows where to get some pot, and anybody who cares enough knows where to get stronger stuff - or knows somebody who does. However, for some reason people think with guns it would work differently. Even though making a primitive gun takes only basic knowledge in material working and basic metalworking tools sold in any hardware shop and all over the internet. Of course, you may go the way of the drugs and severely restrict even basic chemicals and tools under the pretense they could be (and are) used to manufacture drugs. And you'd end up exactly the same place as with drugs - nowhere. With only exception that drugs are consumable and guns can be bought once and remains with you - so you'd need much less production capacity to reach the same level of saturation.

CAN SOMONE PLEASE KILL-OFF THIS THREAD BEFORE HN BECOMES ANOTHER HOME FOR LOONIES? JUST MAKE IT GO AWAY.<p>I am an American. I don't own any guns. I have lived in other parts of the world, sometimes under military regimes. I have never --EVER-- felt the need to own firearms in order to feel secure, protect my family or defend myself from a rogue government.<p>I do enjoy an occasional trip to the shooting range where we rent the weapons and have a good time shooting at metal targets or clay pigeons. Then I go home and that crap stays behind. I don't need it. I know with 100% certainty that none of my kids will ever have an accident in my home with a firearm 'cause there isn't one to be found.<p>I don't have any particular issue with the idea of people owning guns. Artillery and mass-killing weapons are a different story. There have to be sensible limits and strict rules. I don't know what these limits and rules might be. There are experts who have studied this far and deep. I'll defer to them.<p>To be sure, there's a mental health issue that must be dealt with as well. Don't know the answers.<p>Still, I think this thread needs to be shut-down before the nut-cases who think they are going to have to defend their homes from hordes of their own neighbors after each power outage take over.

I see two problems with the article:<p>1. For the foreseeable future there will be no 3D printer which can print explosives. Therefore it seems hard to actually print ammunition.<p>2. Guns have rather many parts which are under high mechanical stress. Therefore 3D printable gun designs will be rather crappy for quite some time.<p>Both of these points render the problem of 3D printable weapons rather smaller than the control of carbines.

Fact checking of some assumption of existence.<p>* «MPEG 3»: Yeah, sure.<p>* «We can print working guns right now»: No, you cannot, neither you will be able in the foreseeable. Please prove otherwise.

related hn discussion here: <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3019163" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3019163</a>

Let me point out some interesting issues that are related to this, just so that we can have something beyond the normal gun/anti-gun rhetoric:<p>1. If we legislate 3D printing to prevent weapon manufacture, we run directly counter to the idea of "Print anything you need at home!". How do we reconcile these two ideas?<p>2. If we want to fingerprint, say, a lower receiver and identify which machine made it, how would we do so? (My hunch would be looking for misalignments in the fill pattern, but that's just a first guess).<p>3. What sort of technology would be required to automatically detect the production of a weapon? Could we identify a pressure container, for example, for use in holding a shotgun shell for firing? Could we distinguish that from something else?<p>4. Taking (3) a step further--this technology could obviously also have applications in preventing patent infringement. Is it desirable to require that 3D printers can recognize infringing mechanisms? Why or why not?

guns are not the key here, it is ammunition. chris rock made a great argument about it, no clue if he re-hashed an old saying or came up with it himself:<p>make ammo really expensive. make ammo really regulated.<p>ammo contains explosives. it can be used to build bombs. bombs equal terrorism. so, get the whole wrath of homeland security upon buying, selling, handling live ammo upon it. make it so unbelievably complex that people simply give up.<p>oh, you want to buy 9mm? sure, please apply for a 9mm cartridge license, that's forms 12, 3274234, 423-1836, t5 and 0815. process takes a year, is valid for 5mins and usually ends with you on a no fly list. you don't wanna know what you need for 5.56. and <i>selling</i>? oh boy.<p>no need to ban anything. bureaucracy was invented for exactly this. crowd control. just look at how it was applied in the austro-hungarian monarchy, kafka's process is exactly that.<p>guns don't kill little kids. bullets do.