Last year’s news, today!
2 Likes
You mean like under $1K?
AFAIK yes but the size of things to be made on them is rather limited.
The word “right” is generally considered to be universal. You have the right to vote for your leadership, whether your government recognizes it or not.
There isn’t any broad agreement that one has a right to a gun.
1 Like
Although I don’t know anything about guns, I would imagine such parts need to be made very precisely with very hard metal. So I wonder, is a CNC mill capable of working under such constraints a good deal at this price?
Something like $3,000, IIRC. As opposed to the $50,000+ for the previous commercial equivalents.
As has happened with 3-D printing, I’d expect the price to continue to fall dramatically over the next decade.
1 Like
Considering that ammo is around $13/round it costs $910 per second to fire. I wouldn’t worry about it. Anyone with that kind of money has plenty of other ways to cause mayhem.
3 Likes
Just precisely enough to work as many times as needed. An AK47 will last years and years, but if you’re intending only brief usage, durability isn’t too much of an issue,
You know, I contemplated buying one of these. Not because I want to make guns, but because $1500 for a decent little metalworking 4-axis CNC mill? Fuck yeah, I’m into that.
Mythbusters showed that you can fire a bullet with 200 amps from a battery, so your gun just needs to be a tube, two wires, a switch and a pack of NiCds. It doesn’t give you a mechanism to feed your ammunition in but with such a cheap arrangement, you can just have lots of one shot tubes. The real question is: why is it so easy to buy ammunition in the US?
1 Like
That’s a meaningless “right,” then. “Vote” all you want, but it’s not really a vote if it isn’t counted, it’s just, like, your opinion, man.
How those natural rights are enumerated remains a subject of contentious debate, and there’s no real ultimate authority to appeal to. One god says you can own slaves, the other says you can have multiple wives. This philosopher says you have self-determination, that one says free will is an illusion so the whole thing is moot.
Rights aren’t “natural” and they aren’t immutable and they aren’t bestowed upon us by a creator, they’re fundamental social principles that groups of humans have come to an agreement on. #notallhumans
4 Likes
Of course there is. The United Nations.
Which only rogue nations refuse to obey.
The U.N. is very much a group of humans.
1 Like
So is everyone.
1 Like
The first one was not single purpose, it had two firmwares that you could switch between, one was a normal cnc mill software, the other was the AR mode, which, as the WiReD article says, walks you through machining one.
Now, a pricey printer can print a 1911 45 pistol that works just fine (so, we can laser sinter metal as well as they could mass produce it 100 years ago).
1 Like
Ammo is cheap to make, and would be easy to smuggle. Also, manufacture is not all that hard. The hardest thing about making powder is charcoal, which is part art and part science. Primers require a little chemistry knowledge and safe practice.
But the people who need tons of ammo are target shooters and hunters who go to the range to practice. Criminals only need the ammo they will use in their crimes. That is a relatively small amount, And ammo lasts forever if stored properly.
2 Likes
Rights are considered to apply universally, which is very different than saying that they need to have universal support.
1 Like
I have a spent round from that cannon. A guy I briefly worked with a guy who worked on them in the Air Force. Learned 2 things:
-
The case is aluminum. I would imagine that the weight savings on how many many thousands of rounds it carries over brass would be significant.
-
They SAVE each round, housed in the airplane instead of having it fall to the ground.
Also I met a lady A-10 pilot at target a year or so ago, and she gave me her squadron patch.
6 Likes
I wouldn’t mind living on the street and eating garbage if I knew our Second Amendment was protected.
I’ll remember that when I get the drop on you and force you to eat garbage off the street at gunpoint.
Nah brah, just kidding. But it’s funny how often you run into this particular sort of sticking point on the subject of guns. The bad consequences I can envision for the person on the other side of the argument are precisely the ones I’m least willing to see happen.
Every time I see someone open-carrying–which thank goodness isn’t often–I have this powerful urge to sneak up behind them, poke them in the back of the head with my fingers, and say “bang!” Sort of like counting coup on them. What good was your lethal fashion accessory if you were so (reasonably) complacent about your own safety you weren’t paying any attention to the guy walking up directly behind you?
Except, of course, that powerful urge is suppressed by the vastly MORE powerful urge not to get shot, or get innocent bystanders shot. So in a weird way the gun-fondler “wins” the “argument” I was having with him in my mind. His gun really did prevent my “crime!”
8 Likes
