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Comment Re:Peaceful Printers (Score 1) 273

Uh...no.

Remember Sophie Scholl? I don't think she consented...or the Jews...or the gays...or the gypsies. A scared person nodding along in agreement to the gun-toting stormtroopers is not consent.

The "loosening" of gun control in 1938 added more groups to the prohibited list, including Jews. Additionally, it limited firearms ownership to persons whose trustworthiness is not in question and who can show a need for a (gun) permit . How many dissidents' gun license applications do you think the Nazis signed off on? Zero? Nada? None? The only "loosening" was that loyal nazi party members were able to get permits more easily.

And I clearly was talking about 3D guns, not 1D guns (How would that even work?). But hey, since you weren't able to refute the idea of armed thugs being more afraid of armed citizens than unarmed ones, it's much easier to pretend.

Comment Peaceful Printers (Score 1, Insightful) 273

If Ghandi had been able to print guns, maybe the Indians would have been able to eject the British sooner, and with fewer innocent Indian deaths.

Mother Teresa would not have printed anything to help people. She spent most of the money she raised on building convents, not on the poor. Mother Teresa wanted the poor to suffer, because she thought it made her closer to Jesus.

I have a great suggestion for using 3D printers to promote peace: build guns, since the worst violence of the 20th century was from authoritarian governments against their own disarmed populations. Nazi, Commie, Fascist, etc. thugs are a lot more hesitant to go into a town, if they're not sure who in the town might have a gun, or worse, if they suspect everybody in the town has one.

Comment Re:The NRA will stomp on this (Score 1) 551

The NRA is not a "gun manufacturer lobbyist" group. It's a club of shooters. Most of what the NRA does is training for skills and safety. One of the group's branches (the NRA-ILA) lobbies for gun rights. The gun manufacturer lobbyist group is the NSSF.

But hey, anti-gun idiots like you haven't been concerned about factual accuracy in the past, so why start now?

Comment Cost Comparison (Score 1) 551

High end custom .308 with 6-24x scope & AAC suppressor: $5000

Magpul Dynamics Precision Rifle Class: $750

Travel, hotel, food, etc. for class: $500

500 rounds of match ammo: $350 (I handload)

Kestrel wind/temperature/pressure meter: $200

Total: $6800

And I can stack shots at 100y (my three-shot groups are under 0.5"), and hit a 10" steel plate at 1km all day long. And unlike the $17k rifle, I can observe the wind at a distance, and account for it. Oh, and the class is a load of fun!

Comment So frustrated... (Score 2) 618

We're so frustrated that we keep buying more and more iPads thinking it will fix the problem.

And of course, we would never do anything a stupid as use an iPad for what it's good for and a notebook or desktop for what they're good for. Nope. We assume every electronic device should do everything that our other electronic devices do. What I'm really frustrated about with the iPad is its inability to make toast or wash my clothes.

Comment Political Ignorance and Bias in TFA (Score 1) 717

The article quotes a politician from Queens (making me very glad I live on the good coast, with the smart people, who aren't completely clueless about guns) who is worried that if the untraceable firearms act expires, terrorists will start smuggling guns on planes. Am I the only one who realizes that a criminal with a 3D printer building a gun for criminal purposes probably won't worry about the untraceable firearms act?

It would be far easier just to smuggle a standard gun through the TSA checkpoint, given that the TSA has failed every single security audit they have ever had, and has failed to detect knives and guns, until the owners were stupid enough to go back and inform the TSA agents.

Also, I noticed that they tried to imply in the article that Cody was building semi-auto AR-15 rifles out of plastic, by intermixing text about the plastic gun and his work with AR-15 parts. The printed gun is a single shot .380ACP, lethal to about 10 feet, if you aim well. Way to go media neutrality.

Comment Re:Ultimately we do need more government intervent (Score 4, Insightful) 717

How the hell did this pile of garbage get modded as "informative"? Let's examine the bullshit, shall we?

The guys who wrote the Second Amendment were very clear in their other writings that it was about letting communities (not states, and certainly not the feds) organize their own militias. In 1789, there were no national guard units. Regardless of the introductory phrase, the second part is pretty clear that no government, at any level, can restrict the rights of the people to own or carry firearms. No taxes, no bans, no magazine restrictions, nothing. Additionally, since the main body of the Constitution explicitly defines the finite powers that the states and people grant to the federal government, and none of those powers mention the ability to restrict firearms ownership, there is no such power to begin with.

The NRA is not a sportsmen's association. A handful of Union Civil War veterans founded the NRA, because they realized that the Union soldiers were horrible shots compared to their Confederate counterparts. They founded the NRA to improve the general firearms skills of the population, in preparation for defensive readiness.

I've purchased three firearms so far this year. They were all about the same price as a year ago. Ammo is definitely up though. Part of this is civilians buying up civilian production, but a bigger piece is the government buying up hundreds of millions of rounds. Additionally, commodity prices are up. Ammunition is mostly processed metals, so when the metal gets expensive, so does the ammo. Also, given the depression that is now finally kicking in (notice the world-wide drop in commodities last month, and the increasing number of bank panics) will probably not be over in 2016, because government idiots will try to legislate it away, which will only worsen it, I doubt a democrat will get elected in 2016. That would be almost as bad as electing a Republican.

Now I'm sure you have a source for your claim that over 50% of these firearms will end up stolen (perhaps your ass?), but the number of stolen firearms in the US is actually pretty low. As is our crime rate, including our gun crime rate. Yes other countries have an even lower rate, but if you take out the drug smuggling related crimes, our murder rate is pretty low.

Comment Re:I won't be buying one... (Score 2, Insightful) 632

Whether or not you're safer with a gun in the home is controversial and heavily written about, the risks of being shot by your gun vs the likelihood of you shooting a would-be-attacker. I don't have an opinion on the subject as I'm not prepared to wade into the literature, but it seems like this tech would avoid the chance of the former while still giving you the chance at the latter.

I'm not disagreeing with your post, quite the opposite. I just want to point out that the Kellerman study (which you allude to) that claimed a gun was 2.7 times more likely to be used against a resident of the house than against a non resident was horribly flawed.

The claim of the paper was that people who have a firearm in the home are more likely to die from their own guns. Don Kates proved that most of the victims in the study were shot by guns from outside the home, which makes the presence of the homeowner's gun independent of the death.
Kellerman also "proved" X -> Y, using data that actually proves Y -> X, by introducing a selection bias. Most of the victims in the study regularly engaged in criminal behavior. Criminals have a much higher probability of meeting a violent death, so murder victims are predominantly criminals, or their friends, family, or other associates. Criminals are also more likely to have guns in the home (which is strange given that it's illegal...).
What the study actually showed was a high correlation between being a murder victim and having a gun in the home. It did not sample gun owning households at random and determine how many suffered a shooting with a gun from that household.
Some Data

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