At 14, I did know what the authorities, including parents & teachers, thought was right or wrong, including sex drugs & rock’n’roll. I definitely did not comprehend consequences & the way they would follow me for life.
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Assessing legality and “ability to know right from wrong” are two different things, though. And of course, there are plenty of grown adults arguing the Second Amendment trumps the gun control laws on both legal and moral grounds.
I’m reminded of William Powell and The Anarchist Cookbook (The Anarchist Cookbook - Wikipedia), as a dramatic example of a teenager whose technical reach exceeded their moral grasp.
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Playing with processing parameters - that gets deep dark places in me stimulated!
Are “completed” lowers that are fabbed for testing counted legally? Once you have all of the features and characteristics of a lower necessary for further assembly I understand that you have a newborn weapon regardless of downstream intent.
That makes me wonder about my numerous colleagues that have done the “bits and beers” group-machining of 80% AR lowers. At least more than one did it just for giggles and never have assembled the (legally heavy) paperweight.
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This is the tip of the proverbial iceberg… more to follow, one hopes.
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I don’t know how people get the confidence to fire a printed gun.
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Ah, but you are peripherally involved. You set up his debit card and his bank accout. Minors generally cannot open a bank account by themselves (unless the are emancipated). State statutes may not prohibit this, but CUs and individual banks generally do because it’s a huge risk. (I’m sure they make exceptions for extremely wealthy minors.)
I had a checking account when I was 16 (debit cards were nonexistent until I was 19 or 20), but my parents had to cosign for the account. I only received my own CC from my CU when I turned 18, and that’s only because I had a large 36-month CD from my dad’s SS death benefits that my mom handed over to me when I turned 18.
I guess that I’m perplexed that there wasn’t an adult or guardian who knew what the hell he was doing. Even with a debit card, the money has to come from somewhere and his parents need to cosign.
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He’s 14, but I wouldn’t be surprised if an older co-conspirator(s) had gotten some or all of the logistics of the operation set up and is letting the minor who won’t do hard time house and run it.
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Maybe the parents were fully aware. But just helping a kid to establish a bank account doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re actively monitoring all their spending. (I don’t micromanage my own 14-year-old’s spending on his debit card because it’s his own money and I trust him.)
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Jesus fucking Christ, There’s an awful lot of speculation going on here about a 14-year old kid, and all based on a picture. That is pretty wild, I must say.
Just to pick one obvious example: it’s so simple to order stuff from China without a credit card. You can pay via Paypal, crypto (e.g. via Telegram), or via any kind of gift card. So if you have a bit of cash on hand, you can do it.
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… if they were more myelinated then that would also illustrate how their brains were deficient
Phrenology with a microscope — biochemical mumbo jumbo that proves whatever we already wanted to believe about a particular group 
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I’ve seen your posts with your kids. I have no doubt that if a 3-D printer was suddenly delivered, you’d probably ask questions, and even trying it out. (My guess is that you may already have one.) I also suspect that you would be puzzled if he suddenly began receiving small packages from China. Curiosity isn’t necessarily micromanaging.
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So a 14-year-old is independently flushed with cash?
I believe in free range kiddos, I was one of them; but free range child rearing doesn’t mean parents and/or guardians abandon their parental responsibilities. I feel like we have a bunch of feral parents out there, ignoring their kids and buying them whatever they want.
I remember hiring the 15-year-old across the street to feed our cats one weekend. When we paid her $60 for five feedings, I thought her parents were going to have a fit (they thought it was too much in 2004) and they got super involved with how she’d allocate her money (tithing, savings, and a movie I seem to recall).
Somewhere between that and I don’t give a fuck about my child seems to be the sweet spot.
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Your posts above were very specifically saying that you were perplexed about the kid being able to make the financial transactions without the parents knowing, so that’s what I was responding to. Maybe your parents monitored all spending from your checking account when you were a minor, and that’s fine I guess, but I still consider monitoring every purchase that a child makes to be micromanaging.
And since you brought it up, my kid does model plane building and receives small packages with components from China all the time. I don’t open those up to check what they are either because I trust him.
Obviously some kids are not worthy of that kind of trust, and parents should have good communication with their children and have some idea of what their children are up to, but to me that’s mostly a separate issue from the specific questions you had raised about “how could the kid have possibly made this kind of purchase.”
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The plastics used for consumer-grade 3D printing aren’t what I would call … robust … in any sense of the word. I sure as shit wouldn’t trust it to contain a explosion of gunpowder or the other internal mechanical gubbins.
There was an interesting article in Wired published back in 2015 about the author’s attempts to make a ghost gun. Outside of using an expensive CNC mill specialized for finishing lower receivers, the results were pretty disastrous when inspected by a gunsmith.
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I had forgotten about prepaid gift cards. For all we know, the enterprising teenager could have presold his guns to pay for a future product. If this was the case, this shows serious planning by the 14-year-old and that doesn’t look good for the teen.
Exactly. One can tell by reading your posts that you have a fantastic relationship with him. I think it’s safe to say that he probably won’t be mass producing ghost guns.
I just feel terrible for a lot of the pre-teens/teenagers out there. Parents with zero inkling of something like this going down, it’s just bewildering.
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Sorta. Yes, he knew it was wrong. No, he didn’t know it was “put him in prison until he has gray hairs” wrong. Teenagers do even stupider shit than toddlers, at least in terms of the scale of the damage caused. The parents have to face some consequences, too. How does a 14 year old have a high-end 3D printer and the ability to order gun parts without oversight?
Nope. This traces through from the cellular biology to functional MRI and PET studies to behavioral psychology to “common sense.” Teenagers don’t have the same decision-making capability as adults as a population. There are good reasons why there are age-related restrictions to all kinds of grown-up potentially-dangerous things. Science backs this up all the way. If anything, it indicates that 25-ish is probably the best age to demarcate childhood development and adulthood.
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Yeah, I don’t disagree in general but, again, I think that is more in the nature of mitigation than a defence, here.
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With JIT manufacture, I’d expect any completed weapons to quickly be moved.
Now, that doesn’t mean he did complete any, but it does mean that lack of evidence isn’t great evidence of absence.
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Absolutely right, but the onus will be on the police/prosecutors to prove that he made weapons if they’re looking to convict on that charge, so the matter of whether or not there’s evidence will matter a lot.
But maybe as @Mister44 mentioned purchasing the Glock Switch from China is enough to get him convicted on a pretty serious charge even if they can’t prove that he manufactured any completed weapons yet.
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As someone else said in other words, stressing other aspects: lack of inhibition has to do with tolerance for risk-taking, not for moral judgement. Plenty of adults take risks I would never take (and vice-versa).
(And I would expect lack of inhibition would correlate more with different size and development of brain structures; not myelination all by itself. Just about all decisions are balancing different stimuli, and all else being equal, even myelination wouldn’t affect that – it’s primary thing is just making those parts work better.
Now, if the myelination is uneven (which appears to be true), hitting the so-called “primitive” parts first (plausible, but haven’t seen that spelled out), that might be an argument for impulsivity as the so-called “higher” parts can’t use higher reason to quickly enough override decisions of the lower parts. But I don’t think you need to dive in to myelination at all – it’s well known that teenagers have poor impulse control.)
But impulsivity is only a good excuse for things that happen quickly. (Which I think is why several people have pointed out the length of time of the scheme. There were apparently plenty of opportunities to reconsider whether this was a good idea at leisure.
In any case, for good reason, the legal defenses around morality center around “did you know or should you have known that society considers this wrong”.
