Second United
Something that has always fascinated me is the how every single gun control push seems to be designed around controlling the means of production and the methods of acquiring guns.
The gun control advocates, they see the solution to gun crime as a simple one: limit who can access/possess guns and limit what kinds of guns they can own.
This is obviously a very naive approach. Ask any gun owner how hard it is to create a gun and they will be able to point you towards any number of ways to make home-made guns.
The days of zipguns and the “anarchist cookbook,” however, are over. Yes, you can still go down to your local hardware store and buy the materials to make a single shot, slam-fire shotgun for under-$20. Yes, people still do this.
But just as the 21st Century has brought tremendous advances in information sharing, allowing free people to share ideas and upending the traditional media establishment, these technologies have also eliminated the traditional barriers to entry for gunsmithing and enabled free citizens to build their own legal, modern firearms without having to purchase any registered or regulated parts.
With the click of a button, Americans can now access hours of tutorials to learn how to mill out an AR-15 80% lower, for example, or weld and rivet together a STEN receiver tube. Not only that, but crowd sourced design files now allow anyone with a 3D Printer (now priced as low as $300) to press [Print] and create a firearm through additive manufacturing.
With these advancements, the line separating the 1st and 2nd Amendments is starting to vanish. It is one thing to restrict gun purchases, it is an entirely different matter to limit what sorts of information Americans can consume about building guns.
Present it like this to even some of the staunchest gun control supporters and while the former may seem “common sense,” the latter feels like something straight out of Orwell’s 1984.
That is what this project will be all about. Not only proving the futility of gun control measures that target the means of acquisition, but also to force people to view the 1st and 2nd Amendments as, largely, one in the same.
I have never welded or milled a piece of metal in my life. Never worked with CAD files. I anticipate that won’t matter.
Over the next few months, I will document the entire process – from start to finish – of building different types of firearms. Using just information readily available on the internet, I am setting out to see whether the information age has advanced enough to make traditional gun control irrelevant.
Disclaimer: Every firearm we make will be 100% legal, at both the State and Federal levels, and will be looked over by a gunsmith before being fired. Please don’t try this at home.
