So basically you're convinced that a government determined enough to grab all firearms won't bother to do any other kind of investigative work on you?

For example, a simple warrant for all credit card records relating to defense distributed would get all the guys who bought that mill. If they have the votes to ban AR-15s, they have the votes to ban the Mill. If the mill is banned, and they know you bought one, they have probable cause for a warrant to search your house.

And now you're in jail, and all your guns are grabbed.

But they're not explosives. One of the packages looks like explosives, which could trigger the refusal, but the second package is just a package. If they can refuse to ship a package that's just a package from AQ, they can do it to anybody.

And you're ignoring the actual PR and potential legal costs associated with shipping the devices. Sure federal law says you can't be held liable if a weapon you made yourself legally is used to turn a kindergarten class into dog-food by your insane son, and Defense Distributed can also not be held liable, but it doesn't explicitly say anything about freight companies. And Juries are not known for being particularly rational when following the law means some pretty upper-middle-class white mom can lose her son to a brutal murderer and nobody can be punished. At a minimum shipping these things has a very good chance of being a PR nightmare.

As for the rest, you've managed to ignore my point. The printer company does not give two shits about your rights as an American, US Law, the Constitution, Apple Pie or the baby Jesus. It is a for-profit business and your rights as an American apply to a minuscule part of the global target market. It does give a shit about the likely reaction of politicians in countries that are reflexively anti-firearm to some asshole ion the internet declaring that he has created a program that will allow little old ladies to 3-D print enough materiel for a company of soldiers in their spare time.

Note that, given that this is about politicians, a logical reality-based argument is only relevant to precisely the extent the politician concerned agrees with a) logic and b) reality.

I gave two possible interpretations of the Amendment. You have explained the pro-gun rights interpretation quite well, but have neglected to provide any proof that the anti-gun rights interpretation is incorrect. Which means you haven't actually disagreed with anything I said, you've merely explained one side of the debate.

The anti-gun-rightsd position is that the Amendment allows states to create, regulate, and train militia forces. But that's a state right, not a personal right. The personal right is entirely dependent on the condition in the first half of the sentence. All of which means you (as an individual person) have no inalienable right to bear arms unless you are part of the organized militia (the disorganized militia we're all members of by statute is not "regulated" in the 1789 sense of the term) of your state. Mostly that's the National Guard, but almost half the states have their own separate militia organized around Title 32, Section 109 of the US Code.

To actually contradict my case you'll have to prove one of several very difficult things: Conditional clauses don't exist; This particular clause cannot (for some grammatical reason) be conditional; etc.

To figure out the exact implication for those folks you'd have to get a finance guy and a lawyer to read the bill.

I suspect that the applicability would depend on how easy it was to turn those dollars into real money (i.e.: if you can withdraw Linden Dollars as USD it's a problem), and how common hacks around the system are. So if people start using their Second Life accounts to wire money to the cousins in Peru it's likely Second Life will have to comply.

Regardless, if you're as rich as Blizzard you damn well better have the budget to pay for regulatory compliance that most check-cashing places do. If you're a start-up and you don't have that budget things will be complicated, but more then one startup has managed to avoid paying to deal with some regulatory hurdle until they were rich enough they had no excuse.

Because historically the alternative to having a rabid bear in your capital is having somebody else impose their rabid bear on you. Native Americans, for example, had no governmental institutions with coercive authority at all. The Chief could not tax your ass, he could not stop you from killing that one white guy who was pissing you off, he could not arrest you after you did it, all he could do was take his loyal section of the tribe to the local US Army Fort in hopes that the Star-Spangled-Rabid Bear would only eat your dumb ass.

You can limit your rabid bear in certain ways and still survive. But you really, really need an entity with significant powers to restrict your own personal rights or those rights become obsolete.

It's so interesting how when people think of government-oppression scenarios like this they don't think things through.

If the government has passed a gun confiscation act they have changed the law including the Constitution. That means they can easily change the rules defining what a gun is to include the rest. If they don;t think of this the first time they can go back and amend it.

Quick grammar lesson:
In the English language a sentence is a complete thought. They are started with a capital letter and end with a period. The bit of text you quote is not a complete sentence, because it does not start with a capital letter. The actual sentence includes another clause "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State,..."

If that clause is a conditional clause, then the bit you quoted is only true to the extent keeping and bearing arms is necessary to maintain the militia.

If it's an explanatory clause then the first bit functions as an explanation of the second bit.

If you think it's clear which type of clause the Founders intended you are a textbook example of motivated reasoning. The Founders were dealing with a completely different military situation, the Federal Army was only 8 companies (about 1,000 men), and they only anticipated going above that number in war-time. State Armies were supposed to be a bulwark of the Armed Forces. Moreover individuals needed the ir own weapons to hunt, defend themselves from Indians, attack Indians, protect themselves from crime (which was orders of magnitude worse back then), etc. Given that state governments tended to be elected annually, by the people, and most of the Federal government was elected for much longer terms indirectly (i.e.: Senators chosen for six years by the State Legislature, and Presidents chosen by an elaborate Electoral College voted on by state legislators) it would probably take you days of explaining to a revived founder the difference between an individual right to bear arms and a state militia's right.

Depends on the political point of view.

Do you think there's any chance at all that a group called Al Qaeda in America could FedEx a box that looked like a letter-bomb? Let's say it doesn't look like a bomb, but a FedEx guy notices the return address before accepting the package. That ain't getting shipped.

Remember what happened when one idiot decided to have an open carry demonstration in front of a polling place and said he was a Black panther?

Wilson's problem here is that a political-point-of-view that's relatively mainstream in America (very few people will agree that hobbyists should not have the right to make their own weapons) is one of the bannable ones in much of the world. The Mexicans are not gonna say "gee, this 3D printer technology is so amazing, it will allow every Mexican (including the cartels) to own the weapon of his choice with a mere few hours tinkering, let's subsidize the shit out of it so everyone can have guns." They are going to ban the import of everything related to the printer platform that Defense Distributed uses.

Most of Latin America has experienced at least one coup d'tat against an elected government that happened because the right-leaning conservatives have greater access to firearms due to their control of the military. In a country with a per capita income under $10k, where almost nobody has a full-sized computer much less a paper printer, a technology which turns a $15k printer into a gun factory is not gonna be seen as democratizing. It's gonna be seen as a really good way for Machiavellian rich guys to stage coups.

And much of the rest of the world is slightly less paranoid about weapons, but still extremely uncomfortable with private ownership of them, which means that if you sell Defense Distributed shit, and they put on their website "this company is great, you can use them to make REALLY COOL DEADLY GUNS!!!" whoever is unlucky enough to be this company will probably be banned from doing business in something on the order of half the world.

Depends on the ideology, and the justification for not giving them business. Gay husbands are not gonna use their wedding photos as offensive weapons, and their is very little business reason for a photographer to turn down a wedding, so it's really hard for me to side with the photographer.

OTOH, if the "KKK Make This County Lily-White By Any Means Necessary" coalition is probably not a non-profit you should sell shit. Unless can prove, in both the Courts of Law and public opinion, they're hipsters being ironic or something.

In this case they seem to have excellent business reasons for turning this guy down. If you're a 3D printer manufacturer, and you want to sell printers in Latin America, it's probably a really bad idea for you to be associated with a right-leaning American group who can turn any home into a gun manufacturer with a $15-$20k printer. They have had experiences with the wealthy using private armies to destroy their governments, so they are highly unlikely to deb cool with that shit, which means there will be an entire continent on which your printer is illegal. Given that African states have problems with foreigners donating $20k to some crazy asshole who then turns it into a massive rebellion that kidnaps entire schools full of girls, that's another continent you're banned on. Add in the Chinese and Indians and you've risked being banned by half the human fucking race to sell printers to a population roughly the size of Canada (American gun hobbyists are only about 10% of our population).

I strongly suspect that a) the printer company does not give a shit about the Second Amendment, but nonetheless b) their next model will have firmware that bricks it if you try to print out a Defense Distributed design, and auto-updates when new designs are made, and phones the manufacturer if it's altered in any way by the end-user.

The guy who wrote the original piece does not understand the Legislative process. He does not understand bills.

This particular law is supposed to make any BTC-based business acting like a wire-transfer service follow the same laws dollar-based-witre-transfer-services follow. Since paying for things, and accepting payments, do not result in you having to register you McDonald's as a wire transfer service and comply with financial regulations; most BTC-using businesses will be fine.

If you were setting up a newer, better Mt. God, or a tumbler, or something like that you've got extra paperwork.

Or is so unfamiliar with the US Political process they really shouldn't be commenting on bills. In Westminster-style democracies a bill being introduced by the government has a virtually 100% chance of becoming law, so it's very important when such a bill is introduced. But in the US there is no body in the state Legislature with the same role as the Prime Minister and his Cabinet, so all bills are the equivalent of Private Member's Bills in Canada/the UK/etc.

Which means that it's very important to know who sponsored this bill? Are they a Republican or a Democrat? What's their political point of view on the issue? What are their relationships with the rest of the State Assembly? The Senate? The Governor? These are all very important facts that the original story does not tell you, probably because the author does not know how the US Legislative process work.

The answers seem to be this was authored by Matt Dababneh, who represents a slice of the "Valley Girls" Valley in greater LA. He's a Democrat. The latter is good for the bill's odds of passage, the fact he has no Senate cosponsor is not because if it's not introduced in the Senate it can't become law. His point of view seems to be that you can use Bitcoin as a money-transfer service so any business based on changing dollars into BTC should follow the same banking rules that write-transfer services do.

It's much different if you're trying to live your life in a foreign country. You can't get your non-USD salary direct deposited to Chase. You need a local bank, and you need one which is willing to deal with the IRS. This account needs to be reported to the IRS. At one point quite a few Canadians were actually being told that half their Canadian retirement accounts were US Government property because they spent a lot of time in the states (and were thus "American persons" according to the IRS) and hadn't reported those accounts to the IRS every year.

The Canadian government has managed to negotiate an end to that particular stupid thing, but everything's still a huge pain in the ass.

It's slightly different now. Obama cracked down on US Citizens hiding their income abroad (part of Mitt Romney's sweet tax deal is that all the income runs through a corporation headquartered on a Caribbean island that doesn't have an income tax), so it's very hard to not file taxes. Since you're in Australia/Peru/etc. there's no local H and R Block or Jackson-Hewitt to fill out the forms for you, and it's not like an Aussie corporation is gonna issue a W2 with total taxable income in Box 1. You can still do it, and once you figure it out once it's pretty easy and you probably don't owe the IRS money due to the foreign income exclusion. But you ain't gonna get Turbotax's free internet deal because the IRS requires you attach extra forms to exclude income, and the number you calculate on their form goes on a full 1040. Their free deal only applies to 1040EZs, and they'll probably charge you extra on top of their full 1040 fee for the 2555.

Moreover getting a bank account is more difficult then you'd think, because there's also a requirement that any bank attached to the international banking system must report all account activity by US Citizens to the IRS. On the plus side that means no more rich guys hiding income in Switzerland, on the minus side it's a huge pain in the ass for a bank to comply,. Some of them would have to hire an English-speaker just to read the forms. So quite a few simply refuse to do business with citizens.

Agreed on most issues, but to my knowledge there are zero states who say a college kid with a part-time job at an out-state school has a different tax situation then anyone else who worked out-of-state. You may not end up owing them money (Ohio, for example, won't collect income tax if you live here but work in a bordering state), but all that's up to the state.

As for moving to the UK, most states also do this. One reason many military families take up official Texas residence is that Texas has no income tax.

He probably meant homicide. If one person kills another person it's always homicide, regardless of accidents/self-defense/etc.