My theory is these guys will be abducted by drug gangs and forced to produce untraceable weapons.

Untraceable except for who is buying all this printing powder.

You'd be amazed at how you can overlook things that seem commonplace only to have the pol -- hang on, I gotta get the door

He's only printed the magazine. I assume he is making the point that the recent suggestion, headed up by Feinstein, to outlaw "high capacity magazines" is pretty dumb and will have no effect on the real problem of criminals and crazies with guns. A magazine is a box with a spring in it. I doubt you even need a 3D printer to make one, if it came down to it.

Not that he, or any like him, are offering solutions... but sometimes trolling does serve to make a point.

As 3d printer technology improves I'm pretty sure that you could eventually fabricate an entire weapon, on the fly, using nothing but high-quality plastic.

There's already an open source 3d printable gun in the works (featured on here, I think), but the printing technology isn't at a point where it shoots yet.

No one is going to be printing an entire gun any time soon. You're always going to need some kind of metal barrel.

You could probably print one of those one or two shot, close range only, barelless plastic pistols that you see being smuggled through metal detectors in 80s spy movies.

A cartridge without a barrel is a brass fragmentary grenade. See Mythbusters.

I'm reading a rather dense and rambling Semiotext(e) book -- by which I mean, a Semiotext(e) book -- that is arguing that Cyberpunk was the last utopian vision. Nothing has replaced it, the concept of "the future" is dead. We don't expect technology to save us, we sit around and wait for the next disaster to confirm our the bleak prognosis of the human animal bequeathed by the terrible 20th century.

It sounds about right.

hate to tell ya, but that has been every generations feeling for the last 200,000 years as they pass 40

I hate "Transhuman" as a buzzword. Transhumanism was invented with "I wish I had kickass giant fangs like that sabretooth", and peaked with "I can tie this rock to a stick and use it as a prosthetic fist". We're a tool using species, and when old folks die, if their bodies just disappeared like if they got ate up by Langoliers or something, there'd be a bucket full of shit left over that someone put in their teeth, joints, bones, injected in our boobs, implanted in the heart etc. Fake-ass heart valves, dialysis shunts, maintenance ports, vestigial body parts, tanks of liquid oxygen, with wifi and motors and and wheels like unarmored Daleks... "transhuman" makes me think of Walmart and old people, not Dorcutus the singularity nerd.

Don't hold your breath.

Mistake #1 - assuming anyone who has guns is irresponsible with them. I've gotta say considering how many gun owners there are, the statistics are definitely not on your side for this one.

The statistics game is not one that you can win. Canada has a quarter of the homicides per capita that the US has. They have a comparable concentration of guns and their only additional restriction in comparison to the US is a ban on rifle mags of greater than 5-round capacity. Of course, education and social services are more important to reducing violece, but in the short term a hi-cap mag ban would reduce the severity of mass shootings greatly. The fight over implimenting such measures has taken over the cultural dialogue and distracted us from the piecemeal distruction of the rest of the Bill of Rights, as if assault rifles are some kind of totem for repelling tyranny. Modern tyranny CARRIES an assault rifle, and an armed populace can be a tool of tyranny as easily as it can be a liberatory revolutionary force. So where were the minutemen when Citizen's United happened? When the Patriot Act was signed into law? Isn't that what The Militia was for? By the time the 14th amendment was signed into law,

(cont.)militias were already an outmoded method of state defense, being replaced by the professional armies of the Nepoleonic era. The 14th established that the right to bear arms was an individual right, to facilitate self-defense. This right has had limitation put on it since then. The 1920's saw restrictions of personal ownership of machine guns and destructive devices. Most people want to limit private owership of heavy artillery or hellfire missles, I think. This is not an attack on the freedom to kill, just a scaling down of that killing capacity, and I think it would do a lot of good. Nearly every modern liberal democracy that has enacted gun bans has seen a drop in homocide. You should try getting your talking points from something other than the editorials in Shotgun News.

The War of 1812 proved pretty conclusively that militias are useless. Here in the US, we don't talk about the War of 1812 much; we even saw its bicentennial last year but nobody spoke of it. Canadians love to talk about it, though, because for them it was a rousing success. We sent some militias up into Canada to take on the British (we had grievances), and our militias got their asses handed to them. Sometimes our militias would even fight each other while the Brits sat back, ate scones and tea, and said things like "pip pip" and "cor blimey".

Eventually we started using professional armies and they held their own pretty well. Unfortunately, by about that time the British were starting to get sick of our shit and sent forces into the US, and even burned down the White House.

But anyway, my point: militias have been officially useless for over 200 years now.

Cena_mark is the only poster here to have a character arc.

I think it was a pretty standard heel/face turn situation.

Yeah, Mark has come a long way, baby.

My concern is that they all seem too willing to pull the trigger on another human being. Its not that they lack testicular fortitude its that they're all fucking cowards. They're driven by fear and its that fear that makes them carry guns and pull triggers. These guys are all a bunch of George Zimmermans.

Please don't forget the valiant efforts of Obama's negro coast guard.

guns are a cowards weapon

Legs are a cowards weapon, and you don't need a permit. It's why I go running several times a week. Let the nuts with a gun who think they are Rambo shoot it out with crazies. I am outta there.

I've been saying it for years: outlaw guns, make swordplay a legal possibility for settling disputes. It would be illegal to use a sword on an unwilling person, but if we bring duelling back as a possibility, the more lunkheaded sectors of society will kill each other off fighting over Facebook slights and the rest of us can go on with our lives.*



*Also, it would be a good idea to make it perfectly legal to shoot a Nerf ball at a public figure with no legal repurcussions whatsoever. 99% of gun nuts fantasize about shooting politicians they don't like, so give them an out to do so with no actual violence as a way to release pressure AND make a really instantaneous point about a public figure's particular demographics in a highly visual way.

Cognitive, that would make a great Onion article.


Cena, forgot all about the negro Coast Guard. Sorry :(

Every political meeting would just turn into a nerf war.

...okay I think i'm coming around to the idea.

You do realize you're being incredibly naive and pretty much just generalizing a very large demographic of people, right?

So I guess it's only okay when YOU do it.

Well, since the sunset of the 1994 AWB, owners of assault rifles have completely failed to rise up and defend democracy from plutocracy so fuck 'em. They're worthless.

Ownership of high capacity magazines is not some kind of totemic defense against tyrany. The feds can outgun you in every way imaginable and then some. People with guns are not facilitating freedom at this point in history and hi-caps are only serving to facilitate an occasional mass murder.

Hi-caps also serve as an excuse for an increasingly militarized police force. Of course, as this video suggests, technological progress may render all of these arguments moot.

So it this Gurts or who?

"Hey, you going to run over some joggers late at night?"

Why would you even? You can use your printer to upgrade your AK-47 and shoot them.