This man is building the business of DIY assault rifles

[enso]

@L_Mariachi

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

Hear hear.

[enso]

@Mister44

Also I met a lady A-10 pilot at target a year or so ago, and she gave me her squadron patch.

No challenge coin?

[bobechs]

@semiotix

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… 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.

All very true.

I guess I see quite a few more open carriers than you do, replete with homemade SWAT-ish accessorization, and my strong urge is to leave the local area with no unseemly delay.

I don’t necessarily think they are going to go off any second, but I can see the trend line and don’t want to be anywhere around when it reaches the critical point.

So, they have secured themselves from the danger I pose to them, anyway.

[gellfex]

@bobechs

guess I see quite a few more open carriers than you do, replete with homemade SWAT-ish accessorization, and my strong urge is to leave the local area with no unseemly delay.

There’s a lot to criticize in my state of NJ, but at least we don’t have that kind of terrifying nonsense here.

[Mister44]

I don’t think they give those out willy-nilly.

I was shocked she gave me the patch!

[enso]

@Mister44

I don’t think they give those out willy-nilly.

True. It is supposed to be after you give them aid, do them a solid, etc. It is a nice patch.

[kid_entropy]

In this case, the receiver can be made of common 6061 aluminum, the vanilla of aluminum alloys. It’s about 50-65% as hard as a regular steel alloy. Also, the tolerances between the lower receiver and upper receiver tend to be fairly loose due to these things being designed to be mass produced by a large number of manufactures.

The upper receiver and other parts that attach to and go in the lower receiver have tighter tolerances but aren’t regulated and can basically be bought off the shelf.

[kid_entropy]

Meanwhile, you can hammer a AK-47 receiver out of a old shovel on a tree stump…

[enso]

Apparently you can make an AK-47 out of just about anything (25 Photos)

[semiotix]

@bobechs

I guess I see quite a few more open carriers than you do,

Where I see them tends to be in a city I travel to where the laws permit it, but the culture of that city is EXTREMELY biased against it. So they’re mostly just driving trollies the hippies (like me) which I think is somewhat less dangerous than the person who actually imagined situations would unfold around him where he’d need his gun.

But I totally get your reaction. A gun radically changes the dynamic in the room, and not for the better, even when you know there’s an innocuous reason for it to be there (e.g., a cop walking into a restaurant on a lunch break).

[Brainspore]

@L_Mariachi

But at least they have to really work for it.

Exactly. One of the main reasons we don’t see a lot of mass shootings in other first-world countries isn’t that getting one’s hands on such weapons is impossible, it’s that it’s non-trivial. The kind of violent psychos who shoot up schools and movie theaters and nightclubs usually don’t have the resources, skill sets or dedication to build their own weapons, or even seek them out on the black market.

Same goes for bombs. A skilled and dedicated mass-murderer could make their own, but few actually do. If C-4 and dynamite were sold over the counter we’d see a lot more people getting killed with them.

[enso]

@Brainspore

Same goes for bombs. A skilled and dedicated mass-murderer could make their own, but few actually do. If C-4 and dynamite were sold over the counter we’d see a lot more people getting killed with them.

Like back when the Weather Underground and other groups used to just buy it by showing a fake ID at a counter and signing a form?

[Brainspore]

Yes, good example. It was easier to get explosives then, and domestic bombings were more frequent. They would have been even more frequent if the “ID” requirement hadn’t been there. Whereas a nut job doesn’t even need a fake ID to buy an assault rifle.

[enso]

In fact, they traced bombers by where they got explosives. Eventually, they had to steal them from construction sites.

[Trenien]

So. Not such a really interesting tool to repurpose toward other endeavors, then.

[nimelennar]

@Brainspore

Whereas a nut job doesn’t even need a fake ID to buy an assault rifle.

Okay, can we please stop conflating mass shooters with the mentally ill? It doesn’t help fix either issue.

[Brainspore]

I’m not using “nut job” in any kind of medical sense. I don’t pretend to understand the mindset that motivates people to commit mass shootings.

[Mangochin]

@fuzzyfungus

A lot of the iconic designs are WWII or older; and were introduced under the requirement that they be simple enough to cheaply stamp out in ‘total war’ quantities with whatever industrial capacity was available.

The Sten gun was meant to be so easy to manufacture that French Resistance members could make them in a basement.

[nimelennar]

I get that. It’s common usage today for “crazy” (and similar words) to mean “I don’t understand what they’re thinking.”

I just don’t particularly like that usage, as it lumps people that the speaker disagrees with along with those people who have real psychiatric problems. This trivializes mental illness to the point where pretty much everyone would be considered “mentally ill” by someone, and it’s also a handy tool for putting people whose viewpoint the speaker doesn’t understand into the category of “they’re fundamentally irrational, therefore I shouldn’t bother making the effort of trying to understand them.”

I’m not saying you’re doing either of these things. I’d just like to try to steer the conversation about the mentally ill towards sympathy and getting better treatment for their illness, and to steer the conversation about the not-mentally-ill towards understanding why otherwise-rational people would do horrible, irrational-seeming things. The term “nut job” really isn’t conducive to either.

[just_labels]

@gellfex

I suppose if controlling the receiver no longer works, we can move on to controlling barrels, no? They’d be a lot harder to wack up at home.

A high-quality barrel would be hard to wack up at home, but a serviceable one wouldn’t be. In at least one European country I’ve visited, the barrel, lower receiver and bolt all have matching serial numbers stamped on them and are controlled individually as the “gun.” So regardless of the ease or lack of ease of doing it, it’s not unheard of and the three components together sure are a lot harder to throw together with basic machine tools.