I saw this posted around in Facebook and I figured I can’t avoid addressing Biden’s Gun Control agenda anymore. I really did not want to do this, but I guess I do have responsibilities.
I want you to digest for a moment what Bide is promising: You will need to pass a background check to download for the Internet. That is is a 3D printing code is irrelevant, he will actually end the free transfer of private information in the Internet. This is not a slippery slope but a frigging Olympic bobsled run smacking right in both the faces of the First and Second Amendment.
Obviously it is not a mistake but a carefully laid out plan to try to control this free flow of information without the sanctioning of the government. We can’t have people smart enough to do stuff on their own, specially if it helps them NOT to depend from the government.
People who do not like the Second Amendment, are usually not very fond of the rest of the Bill of Rights either.
Joke’s on him: no one purchases the “3d printing code.” It’s specific to every printer.
They might mean the 3D models, which, again, no one purchases. They’re free.
Oh and most of the really good stuff comes from European basements.
Anyone else remember the “This shirt is classified as a munition” T-shirt?
Knowledge and tools are dangerous! That’s why we must send everyone to modern universities to have their heads filled with negative knowledge, and to teach them that working with their hands is beneath them.
The shirt was cool. It was protected as a first amendment protected speech. The same characters in a text file was a ITAR controlled arms. And ITAR said you couldn’t have it on a web page.
PGP for the win.
There were also PGP and the DES cracking machine in the form of printed books. That was done specifically because government attempts to prevent the export of printed books would be too easy for the courts to reject.
It would be easy to take the G-code for several interesting ghost gun parts and print them in the same way. The introductory material (which facilitates the scanning process) could be copied from the earlier books — it’s in the public domain by explicit declaration. Sending those books all over the world would be a lovely notion. Never mind the exploding US leftist heads — imagine what it would do to the control fiends in Europe.
The key to the PGP hack for getting the code out of the country was that they printed it in OCR font. This font is particularly easy to scan and convert back to text.
There is nothing that says that you can’t take a STL model and print the JSON encoded data in an OCR font and bind it before exporting it.
The guy running the original 3D liberator distribution website wasn’t getting in difficulties with the ATF. He got nailed by the ITAR regulations. Just read some of the things that J.Kb has to say about ITAR to get a small sample of just how bad it is.
To put it in perspective: You want to sell guns. You fill out some forms, send it to the ATF, you are investigated and they assign you an FFL. Follow the paper work requirements, allow the government to intrude on your life when and where they want, and you can sell guns to your little hearts content.
Decide you want to make AR15s for your friends from raw castings or 80% lowers. You have to do all of the above paper work. Go a step further and get permission to be a manufacturer. Make sure you put serial numbers on everything, do all the same ugly paperwork and you can make and sell guns, right?
Wrong! Because you are now an arms manufacturer, you have to get a certificate from ITAR saying you won’t ship arms to any of those bad people. So pay your $3000+ for that certificate. Now make sure you do everything right, because next year you have to re-apply for the ITAR certificate and pay another $3000+ for that years certificate.
Just looking on line:
20% lower (raw casting) runs about $23.00
It takes about 2 hours of manual machining time to turn that into a finished receiver. Add another 2 hours to anodize or Cerakote it to make it pretty.
Total time: 2.25 hours (bulk on the coatings). Machinist time runs around $85/hour. Cost to manufacturer is $214.25 per lower receiver. Use CNC and you can drop this a bit but your initial investment goes from $3000 for machines up to around $15,000.
Standard profit of 10% so $21.50/receiver and you are selling each for $235/each.
If you sell a 100 of them, you have to add $30 to that. If you sell a thousand, then it is only $3. You can see that for a low production house, it just isn’t worth that ITAR fee.
Oh, and all the while you are trying to make some sort of profit on turning raw forgings into lower receivers, you have to remember you are competing with people like PSA with a complete lower receiver, fully populated with milspec fire control group, buffer tube, buffer, buffer spring and stock for $190.
This is what Joe and the Ho want to control. https://www.80percentarms.com/products/0-billet-ar-15-lower-receiver/
If you buy it from that link with some other pieces of steel it is a ghost gun, you can just put the kit together. I can pick up the phone and order that same chunk of aluminum from four metal supply houses within 50 miles of me or just ask a fab house here in town to order a stick (20 ft) of it for me to pick up later this week.
The only thing that makes that thing a regulated firearm is the magic point where ATF says it is. There is no legal definition of 80% lower or frame. It is ether a firearm or it is not, all according to a decision from ATF that they can change at anytime they want.
I once went to a presentation where a local ATF agent said that 80% lowers were actually machine guns, because “its not that much more work to drill an extra hole.” When challenged on that, he said “You’re already machining it. Once you start machining, if it takes less than 8 hours to make it a machine gun, it’s now a machine gun.”
To take a perfectly legal, no 4473, no FFL required 80% lower and make it an NFA controlled (and illegal for you or I to possess) machine gun is to make a little mark 0.4980 up from the hammer pin and 1.9608 south (towards the stock) from the hammer pin.
Not a hole, not a dimple, just a mark.
The difference in machining an 80% lower into an AR receiver vs an M4/M16 receiver is to drill one extra hole and maybe make part of the fire control pocket a little deeper. That’s it.
If it is just that one hole, that adds a grand total of 5 minutes to the machining time on a manual mill. If you have the jig, it adds about a minute.
https://maksecgroup.selz.com/item/56eb4b796edca009447de64e
Yes I’m aware of that.
But it’s not a machinegun until you make that mark.
This agent was arguing that once you started milling the 80%, that made it a machinegun because you could drill the third hole while milling out the pocket and it would only take an extra couple of minutes.
The original “it is a machine gun if…” rule of thumb was if it took less than 8 hours in a machine shop to do the work, it was a machine gun. They had to move away from that at some point. I believe that you can take a hunk of 6061 and turn it into a completed lower receiver in much less than 8 hours in a modern CNC shop, today.
Your ATF agent reminds me of the joke about a mother taking her son fishing. They are out on the lake, she’s lazing back reading a book, her son is fishing and the game warden shows up. He demands to see their fishing licenses. Son shows is. Mom says “I’m not fishing, I don’t need a license to read a book.”
Warden gets all huffy, points to the fact that there is more than one fishing rod in the boat and therefore she did need the license. “You have all the equipment to fish, therefore you ARE fishing.”
So she quietly agreed and asked for the ticket or whatever it is that game wardens hand out. After she got it she looked up at the warden and said, “Thank you, when we get back to shore I’m going to file a rape charge against you.” “WHAT!” screamed the warden, “I didn’t touch you!”
“Yeah, but you have all the equipment.”
In British Palestine, pre-partition, the Jewish underground had illegal factories making STEN gun copies, and ammunition under the noses of the British Army. With a little knowledge, and a hobbyist machine shop set-up, anyone can make a full auto machine gun out of material you can get at an industrial supply warehouse, home depot and a metal supply house. Books, not the interwebz, are your friends in this endeavor.
For that matter, I remember seeing videos of Khyber Pass gunsmiths making AK clones, working on a piece of steel with a file, held in a vice between their feet.
And there was the guy who made an AK lower out of a shovel, with ordinary garage tools.
And then there’s Philip Luty’s “home gunsmith” website, which got him jailed in England where freedom of expression doesn’t exist.
Slight correction @pkoning. Luty was jailed for making one of his guns and shooting it. He was arrested after he was seen filming/videoing himself shooting his SMG, not for the book.
Unfortunately, that book is very difficult to find. Amazon no longer carries it and most other online sources no longer have it either.
Unfortunately, his design is just fine for people that have access to a copying machine and plan to make a one off. The basic method for making the receiver is to take a copy of a page from the book, glue it to a piece of square tubing, drill some hole and then file to the lines.
It works, but when you have access to a milling machine, it would be very nice to know were those freaking lines actually are in reference to any datum.
Gerard Metral’s book is a better option in my opinion. It actually has all the dimensions called out. Only issue is that the book (and PDFs) have some poor images so you have to sort of guess what the call out dimensions actually are. You can figure them out, but expect to take a bit of time to get it right.
As I’ve said a number of times to a number of people, making a simple blow back operated machine gun is a heck of a lot easier than making a semi-auto version. If I was to work on either of those firearms today, the one major change I would make is to try and get a magazine well that held Glock mags and which fed reliably from Glock mags.
Isn’t it already illegal to build a gun from a parts kit unless you are a properly licensed manufacturer? I thought a firearm had to have a serial number, etc, to be legal? In any case, it’s stupid. I seriously doubt many criminals are getting their guns made from parts kits (let alone 3D printed). Most people capable of doing such work legally are not criminals. Those doing it illegally are already breaking the law, and aren’t going to be stopped by background check requirements. These are things that people build (when we aren’t talking law abiding hobbyist) because they CANNOT legally go into a store and buy a gun, and can’t even convince someone else to sell them one. Since the major market is already people who can’t legally own a firearm, I don’t see how making it even MORE illegal is going to help.
Of course they don’t intend it to help. The idea is to create a fake “issue” that doesn’t exist, generate some panic over it among people who have no clue what the reality is, and then promise to ‘fix” the problem if you get elected.
What, didn’t you KNOW that there was a loophole, and that anyone can just go and buy a parts kit and build a gun, no matter what their record is, without any sort of background checks? We promise to close that loophole by mandating background checks.
Maybe those crooks who were brazen enough to go out and buy parts to build a gun because their felonies prevent them from doing it legally in a gun store will think twice before breaking THIS law. Because now they will not ONLY be felons in possession, but they will ALSO be guilty of illegal aquirement. That’ll scare them away, for sure!
You are wrong. It is perfectly legal to make your own guns at a federal level. In free states it is also legal. It is only in states that have infringing legislation where there is any legal issues.
“Ghost gun” and “assault weapon” are both made up terms designed to invoke an emotional response.
The number of people that have strong opinions about guns and gun laws that are ignorant sheep is astronomical.