A surge of illegal homemade machine guns has helped fuel gun violence in the US

Ultimately, guns are not very complicated machines. I'm making a semi-automatic rifle in my home office right now out of stuff you can get at a hardware store & some 3D printed parts, and I'm amazed at how simple it all is.

A lot of proposed gun control feels like trying to put the genie back in the bottle. Even states with hefty assault weapon bans like California and Maryland still have plenty of legal loopholes allowing people to own semi-automatic guns, and gun manufacturers are finding more all the time. I honestly think that anything short of straight up banning the sale of gunpowder will have a temporary at best effect on gun violence, and do less than nothing at worst.

The fact of the matter is that gun control bills at the federal level will cost a lot of political capital. A federal challenge to the 2nd amendment will rally conservatives in the same way that the recent overturning of Roe caused a surge for liberals. This is to say nothing about enforcement: it's a common position among gun owners that they would simply refuse to comply with a gun confiscation / surrender, and I believe a significant chunk of them would follow through with that. See the recent ATF rules about pistol braces for an example of mass non-compliance.

So, we can fight the uphill battle of gun control for perhaps marginal returns, or we can try to address the things that drive people to violence in the first place. And I'm not just saying "muh mental health" either; we need to address housing costs, healthcare costs, education costs, wages stagnating behind inflation, broken-windows policing, the war on drugs, the mainstreaming of far-right propoganda, the decay of public schooling, white supremacy, queerphobia, misogyny, climate change & doomerism, corporate personhood, and a fuckload of other things making people angry and desparate and hopeless enough to kill people & themselves.

I firmly believe that addressing the material conditions that create killers will prevent more murders than any gun control bill, especially in the USA.

we need to address housing costs, healthcare costs, education costs, wages stagnating behind inflation, broken-windows policing, the war on drugs, the mainstreaming of far-right propoganda, the decay of public schooling, white supremacy, queerphobia, misogyny, climate change & doomerism, corporate personhood, and a fuckload of other things
This is basically what they've done in most European countries. Plus, they have very strict gun laws and no gun culture. All of that equals close to no gun violence.
- Yeah but the violence we do see in europe is typically widely spread knife crime and chemical attacks on people. The most complicated and unique terrorist attacks I have ever seen happen on European soil.
- I'm European and we don't do near enough on like half of those points.
This is the truth, thanks for saying it.
honestly think that anything short of straight up banning the sale of gunpowder
There's hand-loading, and I strongly suspect that gunpowder is not the hardest component to manufacture.
- Potassium nitrate and sulfur.
  Gunpowder is the easiest part. The casing will be the hardest as you need pretty tight tolerances, but anyone who cares could have 50 trash cans full of cases in a week for a lifetime of reloading.
  And if you don't have cases for reloading, you can always use a case less design, then it's just a matter of sourcing the projectile.
  Of course there is always black powder, ball and cap, etc.
- I have heard it before that the hardest part is getting access to reliable chemical primers. But I think if you were looking at all available options on an equal footing, you'd probably be more likely to go with some sort of electronic ignition system, or something of that nature.
- Guns are ~~harder~~ easier to manufacture than cartridges. Honestly, when civil war finally does break out it will be ammunition, not guns, that the government restricts access to because that's way easier to control and way harder to manufacture. Reloading still needs brass and primers, and those are hard to make for anything outside of a shotgun.
  Edit: said exactly the opposite of what I intended to say.
I honestly think that anything short of straight up banning the sale of gunpowder will have > a temporary at best effect on gun violence, and do less than nothing at worst.
Even that won’t have an effect for long
https://youtube.com/@styropyro?si=pHDZxrbvONLxENCa
https://youtu.be/crBqplCIZoA?si=chovNs5707OHq7mU
Energy weapons may not be far enough along now to be of much practical use, but ban gunpowder and we will see what horrors are possible.
- Also, while air rifles aren't really as effective today as chemically-powered guns, they were used by militaries in the past, and if you increase the pellet size, they can put out quite a bit of energy.
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1jTnrjVxtVo
  That's a 20mm pellet. The muzzle energy from that is about four times NATO 5.56, what a typical issue rifle will put out.
I honestly think that anything short of straight up banning the sale of gunpowder will have a temporary at best effect on gun violence, and do less than nothing at worst.
I don't even think that would really help all that much. You would maybe increase the relative complexity required to build a gun, but I think you'd still get plenty of people who are able to utilize improvised home explosives in their homemade firearms designs. Of another variety, you'd also probably see a rapid influx and growth of the airgun market, which is already pretty far along in it's ability to substitute and even outclass normal firearms, in some respects (mostly in cost, and consistent shot over shot accuracy, rather than in "combat efficacy", depending on what you mean by that). I'm also sure you'd see designs that adapt more mundane forms of explosives. Propane strikes me as a particularly good candidate, but you could also probably just use normal gasoline as a propellant, hydrogen peroxide, H2O2, butane, you could probably even use wood gas.
I think there are too many machine shops in america to realistically stop america's position globally as a firearms manufacturer, in a vacuum. As you say, you'd need to more combat the external factors going into it, rather than trying to kind of, try to make sweeping bans around it. Especially as those sweeping bans can be more selectively applied to particular communities, to increase their criminalization, as we've seen time after time.
The caveat I would place around that, is that handguns are a pretty terrible suicide vector, I think it's something like half of all gun deaths are suicides. Of suicides generally, about a third will never try again, and it's a spur of the moment decision, and about a third will repetitively try over and over, with the remainder falling somewhere in the middle of multiple attempts. So preventing guns from falling into those, at least third, of hands, could be a good form of regulation. Though, that point is somewhat unrelated to the conversation at hand, here, I just think it's a pretty good point I don't hear people bring up a lot.
Frankly even if the bans did work, people wouldn’t want them. The US does not care about gun violence because the people in power are pandering most to people unaffected by it since they’re who vote in the primaries. The US cannot and will not address its gun violence in the near future and it will not address the fundamental needs of its people if conservative leaders continue to get elected.
Basically, the US is probably screwed and is due for increased violence one way or another. Especially since we’re all allowed to own a deadly weapon and yet a good portion of us aren't even literate.
This is to say nothing about enforcement: it’s a common position among gun owners that they would simply refuse to comply with a gun confiscation / surrender, and I believe a significant chunk of them would follow through with that. See the recent ATF rules about pistol braces for an example of mass non-compliance.
Then they need to be arrested. Noone should be trusted with guns and other dangerous weapons or machines if they deliberately break the laws surrounding the ownership of them. We don't let people drive after they lost their licencse.
- The estimates for the number of pistol braces out there ranged from 3 million on the low end, to 40 million on the high end. During the grace period to register braced firearms as SBRs without having to pay the tax stamp, the ATF received 255,162 applications to do so.
  Even if we take the low number & account for folks destroying or converting their firearms, we can reasonably estimate a rate of non-compliance in the hundreds of thousands of people, if not millions. There is a very real possibility that arresting all those people would literally double the already ludicrous US prison population overnight. In a country that already has a worryingly militarized police force, I cannot imagine the mass arrest of millions of armed people will reduce gun violence.
- In the early 1900's Roosevelt sent federal officers to try to assess and deal with a form of slavery called "peonage" that was pervasive in the South. These officers were shot at and ultimately chased out. Roosevelt gave up on enforcing the law.
  The US government has failed multiple times to enforce laws that law enforcement agreed with. Overwhelmingly, law enforcement does not agree with outright firearm bans. Why do you believe that firearm owners could be arrested for refusing to give up firearms? Like, from a logistical perspective, how would that work exactly?

Sure yeah, THAT'S the problem

Right now the Second Amendment is untouchable to regulate and expanding its coverage.
- The problem is the convert to automatic things and not the motivation to kill a bunch of people that has been apparently increasing and almost always carried out with legal and far too easily available non-converted semiautomatic weapons.
  It is the scary looking things.
  Edit: added text in italics since I left out an obvious detail

This reads like pig-induced hysterics.

I'm not anti-gun myself, but there are far better arguments for the anti-gun crowd to use than this.

Calling a modified handgun a machine gun is some pretty impressive hyperbole, yeah.
- I mean it's a gun that fires continuously with a single trigger pull. How is that not a machine gun? Yeah it's a machine pistol that'll spend a clip in 3 seconds, but it's still a machine gun.
It's not an anti-gun argument.
The theory is that you CAN'T regulate guns because people will just 3D print inferior copies.
- Ding ding. "3d printers must be regulated for safety and copyright protection "

And yet we're seeing a drop in gun related deaths after it spiked during the pandemic:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6b/1999-_Gun-related_deaths_USA.png

It's too early to call this a trend, but assuming home conversion to full auto is getting common, it has not yet correlated with a rise in gun deaths.

I don't think it will for an important reason: full auto actually sucks. Most people don't know how to use it and tend to spray bullets while hitting nothing. Even the AR15, which has relatively low recoil, is not very accurate when you hold down the trigger like that.

One exception is the 2017 Las Vegas shooting (which was a bump stock, but effectively the same end result). He was shooting into a large crowd where every bullet was all but guaranteed to hit someone. Most mass shootings aren't like that.

The way the military uses full auto isn't necessarily to hit anyone, either. It's to force the enemy to keep their heads down so your side can maneuver into a better position. That's not how a lone mass shooter would operate. They don't have a team where that tactic makes sense.

If I was told correct info I think even the armed forces dont like full auto outside of specific use cases like mounted guns with hundreds to thousnads of rounds in boxes and for supressing fired from rifles with detachable mags. If you really wanted to mow through a crowd for some ungodly reason a semi auto (not pump) shotgun with buckshot shells and a detachable mag would work as well as full auto rifle in an intermediate cartridge.
The way the military uses full auto isn’t necessarily to hit anyone, either. It’s to force the enemy to keep their heads down so your side can maneuver into a better position
The military from what I heard doesn't. They use burst mode to improve the chance of hitting something, but not waste too much too easily.
- It depends
  Not all weapons have a burst mode. Often though, militaries prefer controlled bursts of full auto, but it depends on the role and weapons system. Machine gunners are more likely to go full hog than a rifleman for example, but that's assuming that all soldiers do the most optimal choice in any given situation, which just isn't true.
I'm not sure what your point is. So what if gun deaths are down since the pandemic? Viewing the chart you submitted as evidence we can pretty much just trace a continuation of the trajectory in gun deaths straight to where they would have been from before the pandemic to after - so they're still trending upward overall. Also, the article doesn't postulate an increase in gun deaths, just that modded guns are likely being used in crimes.
Who cares what the military does? These aren't military users, and they're using automatic fire to spray bullets in gang turf wars or whatever. They're not known for taking the time to aim, and are just fine with taking out little kids or bystanders.
Overall, I have no idea what you're trying to prove except "Look over there!!" and your points ramble all over the place.
Fact is that if more bullets fly probability says more people are gonna get hit. Maybe not today, but tomorrow.
Guns with conversion devices have been used in several mass shootings, including one that left four dead at a Sweet Sixteen party in Alabama last year and another that left six people dead at a bar district in Sacramento, California, in 2022. In Houston, police officer William Jeffrey died in 2021 after being shot with a converted gun while serving a warrant. In cities such as Indianapolis, police have seized them every week.
So again, not sure what you sound like you're tying to minimize or dismiss. Full auto isn't a problem? I can assure you that you'd feel differently if you were downrange in a shopping mall and someone decided to fire one up.
- Overall, I have no idea what you’re trying to prove except “Look over there!!” and your points ramble all over the place.
  I'm not the person you're talking to, but this sentence makes you an imbecile saying that if somebody's smarter than you, it's their problem.
  You might consider that if you just discard opinions of people competent in the subject, such as military and, well, usual gun nuts, the end result is not worth much.
- The conclusion is that mass shooting deaths would actually go down if we just let people use full auto. It's a counterintuitive result, but it's all there.
Yes, there are fewer gun related deaths. But there are more mass shootings and guns have become the # 1 killer of children and teens. Source
- this is false, this stat deliberately counts 18 and 19 year olds as “children” and purposefully includes gang related violence. great example of using statistics to sell a story.
  how many gang members are going to surrender their firearms after a ban?

Gun violence is a symptom of socioeconomic inequality and a lack of mental health care. We could ban all guns today and while I'm sure there would be a reduction in violent events, people wanting to cause harm would switch to bladed weapons (see knife crime in the UK and axe attacks in China).

- And even if he were right, when was the last time you heard of someone in the UK stabbing a hundred people at a concert, or thirty kids in an elementary school?
- Yeah no it's not. You're try to compare a place with social safety nets to a country that doesn't have any.
  Trying to compare the EU to the USA for anything gun wise is pointless.
If somebody is going to try and kill me, I'd prefer they at least break a sweat in doing so.
- Also there is empirical evidence that people are less "empathic" the further away they are from you. Shooting someone is psychologically much easier than stabbing someone.
Which leads to hundreds/thousands of people not dying every year due to being shot.
- Even if it's only one life saved, that's great. But can't we want to fix the systemic problems that lead to gun violence as well? It also fixes a lot of other bad things that don't lead to gun violence, like homelessness, depression, preventable deaths, inadequate health care, etc.
  What I'm saying is that guns aren't the problem. They make the problem worse. I'd like to see us try to fix both instead of a half measure of different gun laws.
You're not completely wrong. But (1) guns make it sooo much easier to cause a lot of harm, and (2) a gun gives you so much more confidence than a knife. Also: you can run from a knife, you can't run from a gun
- you can run from a knife, you can't run from a gun
  Ahh, not handicapable, I see.
  But unintended ableism aside, you'd also be surprised, if you can get upwards of 25yrd away from the shooter, they probably can't hit you for shit (doubly so if they have a glock switch, they reduce accuracy). Most criminals don't train at all, much less for distance.
A knife battle sounds kinda better. I'll have a greater chance to survive and some bad-ass scars.
- The loser of a knife fight dies in the parking lot, the winner dies in the ambulance.
- Keep thinking that. Meanwhile most people here wouldn't be able to fight off someone with a knife.
  It takes size and muscle, shooting the attacker takes a single trigger pull.
  You may not like to hear it, but guns aren't going anywhere. Maybe if we stop making out gun owners to be some raging lunatics. Then they may be more likely to give them up.
  This is all pointless anyway.
Knife crime in UK is still lower than knife crime in US. You've been drinking some weird kool-aid without faxt checking.
- Sounds like I should stay strapped so I don't get poked
Its more like there are already hundreds of millions of guns in the US. Criminal element and the scum of society would keep theirs while the law abiding surrender theirs. Society would get worse and less safe.
- But the so-called law abiding didn't surrender their altered guns, did they?
I'd say its a symptom of our police and justice system being completely ineffective at cleaning up our cities and locking away violent offenders to keep them out of society. They're more interested in milking the taxpayers for stupid shit that doesn't require any effort like traffic tickets or massive amounts of overtime for doing nothing. There's too many violent people out there and no one is doing anything to neutralize the threat to law abiding society.
🤡
Pure and unadulterated bullshit.
(Also the US has more knife crime than the UK as well).
I totally agree. The anti-gun crowd is just a bunch of useful idiots who refuse to tackle problems at their roots.
They're also usually city-folk who don't understand that people living in rural America only have guns to defend themselves. No cop is going to protect their farmhouse from robbers, lol.
- So the pro gun in the US are just farmers that need to defend their farmhouse from robbers? You might want to sit down and think who the useful idiot is here.

Maybe, just maybe guns are actually the problem.

- You know they're not illegal in the majority of states, right? The main thing limiting access is cost, but even then it's no more than a used car. Yeah, you have to go through the NFA, but that's hardly more difficult than a normal NICS check, just pay the $200 and wait for the okay.

Gosh, I mean what could guns NOT fix?!??

I dunno, throw more guns in, I guess...
Guns can not fix the darkness I feel. Yet. I'll keep buying them until they do.

I wonder how quickly can the Glock switch be destroyed, like after using it. It's just plastic/filament, right?

gun thread, lemme hit you with some easy unsourced stats real quick.

About a third of all people who attempt suicide will never attempt it again, about a third will attempt it pretty repetitively, and about a third fall somewhere in the middle, where they engage in multiple attempts, but stop after the 5th or whatever. This is to say that suicide is mostly a spur of the moment decision and most people who attempt suicide aren't completely committed to it as a course of action. It's mostly a decision that's made as a result of being kind of fed up and believing you have no other options in your life, it's not a conscientious, committed kind of philosophical position, most of the time. I think there's some sort of minor study about a bridge in, I wanna say canada, where they set up a net underneath one bridge, and another bridge about 20 minutes away didn't have a net set up underneath it. Still, the suicides went down by about the amount you would expect to see, had you just eliminated all the suicides taking place on the bridge with the net. The people committing suicide weren't willing to drive about 20 minutes to dive off of a different bridge, it was just something they sort of did in the moment.

So, that's all a pretty good indication that limiting gun access to the suicidal would be a relatively helpful thing to do. The most counterargument I've heard against this is that, regardless of that, we should still have free access to guns, and they shouldn't be regulated by the government, because our right to guns trumps everyone else's right to not be successful in killing themselves. I don't think I need to tell you that this is a kind of disgusting viewpoint.

I think we can also probably say that the same would be true of gun crime broadly. There are multiple factors going into gun crime, like housing prices, redlining, drug trafficking, mental illness, sure. One of these factors is also guns. Taking away any of these factors, including guns, not just lead to a reduction in gun crime, but would probably lead to a reduction in crime overall. A reduction in crime overall with no substitution in the form of increase knife violence or other forms of violence or crime.

It's much harder to secure your illegally owned high value property, in drugs, if it is more expensive and harder to access a gun. If it's more expensive, that eats into your profit margins. This alone would probably cut down on violent gun crime, and drug related violent crime more broadly.

I also feel like I'm taking crazy pills whenever people talk about how if you limited access to guns, people would just switch over to knives, and knives would be equally as effective. No they wouldn't! You have to be extremely fit and trained properly to wield a knife effectively, and even then, two or three people can easily overwhelm you and jump on top of you. People can more easily outrun you. If you wanted to try and make the leap from one technology to the other, I would think people would compare guns more to IEDs, since there's obviously more of a similarity there in terms of effectiveness, but obviously it's much harder to secure your drugs with IEDs, or to rob someone with a pipe bomb.

The most compelling argument against gun regulations, and especially more extreme gun regulations, is that it's really hard to get them passed, and especially at the federal level, which is what would really cut down on their trafficking. You also have a problem with law enforcement, since most law enforcement, and probably federal law enforcement, wouldn't really be willing or effective in stripping americans of most of their guns. You'd probably see more success with something like limiting ammunition sales or gun manufacturing, but you'd obviously expect to get lobbied against pretty hard, and, at least if you were to limit gun manufacturing, you'd only expect to see results on that maybe 10+ years down the line, in decades, and, depending on how that was passed, you might just see it get repealed before you could see anything from it.

Of course, the caveat with all of that is that most americans are actually perfectly willing to conform to, and vote for, reasonable restrictions on guns. This includes universal background checks, mental health checks, wait periods, obviously limiting things like automatic capabilities and magazine size (though to what extent this limits unlawful use, I'm not quite sure). Probably at the farther end I'd guess americans might vote for requiring licensing from gun owners, and secure handling and transportation, like most european countries, which might limit unlawful use by limiting theft.

I think also lots of gun owners are straight delulu when it comes to how effective their gun might be. They come up with lots of little hypotheticals and heuristics to try and train for, but in a gunfight, it is usually the person who shoots first who wins, the person who has the element of surprise. If you're getting robbed at gunpoint, you've already lost. You almost have to wield your gun like a lunatic, brandishing it at people for intimidation, in order for it to be an effective form of self-defense (this is illegal in most places). There's also the idea that open carry can prevent crime, but that it might also mark you as an easier, higher priority target, so I'm kind of skeptical of it. Maybe it's better for home invasions or something, but that's not a particularly high likelihood anyways, and you have problems with wall penetration and such. Most home robbers are going to want to hit your place when you're not in it anyways.

I'm a gun owner who carries a firearm. I think different people and areas have different needs.
There are no children in my household, fist off. If there were I wouldn't have guns and ammo in the same house. It's just not safe. If a child comes to my house, the ammo goes to the car.
But I live over 30 minutes from the nearest police station. We have firearms for defense from predators, invasive animals (e.g. hogs), etc.. Yeah, they could be used against people, but that's not really something we're worried about. We don't even lock our doors.
That being said, I do carry in town. I also have a spare set of clothing, full set of mechanics tools, a fire extinguisher, first aid kit, and an AED in the van. I like to be prepared wherever I go, and other than the AED all of those tools have come in handy in an emergency.
I don't like going into details about the time I had to pull my gun because I hate how right-wing nut jobs seem to celebrate the fact that I needed one as justification for all the other hateful things they do. Suffice to say I was being assaulted and the gun ended the situation without me having to shoot the assailant.
Yeah - I don't carry the toolbox or fire exringuisher my body, but a handgun is almost never necessary in a few minutes. And of course if someone breaks into my van and steals my impact wrench it's annoying. If they steal a gun that's much more serious.
I think we have some major work to do to cut back on violence, and some gun reforms are part of the answer. The things that I think would have a lot of impact on gun crime with minimal impact on lawful gun ownership are improving NICS and opening it up for civilian use. Right now if I want to sell a gun to a friend or relative I can't run a check to see if they're legally allowed to own one. This would also be the first step towards universal background checks.
But background checks aren't enough. There need to be record-keeping laws for individual sales that are no different than those from a dealer. The idea is kill straw purchases while improving traceability, which is the biggest issue we have with the current system.
What we have now is half of a brilliant compromise. A federal gun registry is a red line that gun owners will not cross. It's the most important necessary precursor to mass firearm confiscation, and it's a hard no. The fight over that is why it took so damn long to get background checks in the first place.
But we want to be able to trace guns used in crimes, so we require manufacturers and dealers to track the sales. If a gun is used in a crime, law enforcement can get a warrant and go to the manufacturer who can look it up and point them to the distributor who can point them to the retailer who can point them to the buyer. It's a system that allows any specific gun to be tracked, while preventing the government from having a registry.
The problem is that record ends at the first sale. The buyer can sell, trade, or gift that gun without a background check and without keeping a record. It's the major way that guns illegal in a given state get there.
It also eliminates the "gun show loophole" which is a very misleading name, since it's actually just a "private sale loophole." Licensed dealers are still required to do a background check and 4473 for gun show sales.
Waiting periods don't do much. Someone wanting to commit suicide can rent a gun at the range more easily, and it happens more than you think. The federal waiting period from the 80s was simply a placeholder until NICS got up and running that gave more time for background checks.
One issue that needs resolving is NICS needs to finish background checks. There are 3 standard results when running a background check: Approve, Deny, and Delay. Approve and Deny are self-explanatory. Delays occur when there's a partial match. Since NICS just uses 3 items (name, date of birth, and state of birth) for the check partial matches can occur, especially if the buyer has a common name - it's especially common with Hispanic last names since there's a lot of Raul Hernandezes out there.
When there's a delay, the gun can be sold without a response in 3 days, though more and more stores are instituting a policy that it needs an approval before the sale. This is because most Denys are initially a Delay, and sometimes (rarely) it takes a week.
But the rub is half the time NICS simply doesn't follow up on a Delay, or they do it in 6 weeks. Any firearm transaction must be finished within 30 days of the initial background check, so if they take 6 weeks a new background check has to be started. I had a friend named David Jones who couldn't purchase a gun from lots of dealers because NICS always took longer than 30 days to respond.
And finally the biggest issue with NICS - Identity Verification. NICS needs to be able to verify that a person exists. Right now a fake or mispelled name (whether the misspelling is in the database or on the 4473) will work 100% of the time since all it checks against is a blacklist. A $50 fake ID shouldn't allow someone to buy a gun.
- Totally correct and a pretty good solution, I wish more gun owners were as responsible as you sound, and I wish we could take more steps towards a reality in which they are. Realistically, I don't really want to eliminate guns altogether, I like guns perfectly fine, they're great plinking devices, they're great for controlling the populations of invasive species, they're mechanically, and sometimes historically, fascinating devices. What I prefer more is just a world in which those are the roles that guns take, rather than guns having like, such a fucked up pretense of reality, a pretense of utility, in self-defense. Rather than being an economic engine of political fearmongering. Mostly, I find this type of shit to be incredibly annoying, because my small town is constantly flooded with people who wholeheartedly believe the militarized self-defense chaff around this stuff, but have also never been to any large city in america, and are totally incurious about what the root causes of crime might be. Their concern for the world stops at the end of their fingertips, anything out of reach for them. Anything that doesn't directly intersect or connect to them, is something they don't give a shit about at all. It's myopic, it's selfish, it's a mentality that is not conducive to a good society, much less, a society at all. That's it, that's my little spiel on that.
  I didn't think much about gun rentals at ranges, that's a pretty good point. It is still probably the case that waiting periods, I suspect, would cut down on suicides for the same reason I stated previously, right, making guns harder to access for the suicidal will cut down on, not necessarily even suicide attempts, but suicide lethality. Being able to walk into any walmart in the 40's and blow your brains out with a shotgun for probably less than 20 bucks is kind of, a very convenient method of suicide. It's like the suicide booth from futurama, almost. Still, the point is taken well, and it's probably a better point for more stringent precautions at rental ranges to prevent such outcomes. I don't really know what those would end up looking like. I'd imagine a lot of those generally would end up falling into the middle and latter categories anyways, of suicide, and I would assume they'd be more due to things like ptsd and stuff like that.
  I'd also imagine a lot of that is just from NICS being kind of an underfunded thing, but a more thoroughly automated and more publicly accessible database would be a pretty good solution to that, I would think. I'd also think that, more than being totally publicly accessible, it would probably need to be accessible more to local law enforcement and local government, and maybe between private parties if it were verified by credentials, more for protection of personal privacy. Sort of in the same way that buying a used car works out, in lots of states. God damn if that isn't super inconvenient when you buy a car from the 1970's with the original title, though. Certainly there's quite a lot of room for improvement with NICS, but yeah, it's very hard to kind of, push in any direction, in that respect, because it's hard to move away from the propaganda about whatever you might pass being a violation of personal freedom and privacy and yadda yadda ya.
So... What's your plan for any of those scenarios where someone wants more than just to run off with your phone/wallet/car?
(Keeping in mind the that cops have zero obligation to stop a crime in progress if there's any potential risk to them, leading to scenarios like this: https://youtu.be/jAfUI_hETy0 )
Edit: to be clear I'm NOT denying any of what you said, just want to know "and then what" from a person who so passionately tries to convince others that the idea of armed self defense is wrong and not worth considering.
- I'm not the person you're replying to, but: there are defense tools that are simultaneously less lethal than firearms, while actually more effective than firearms for self defense.
- Probably not shoot them in the back, I'd imagine? If I hit them, then that's some poor fucker who might be dead cause of me, and if they're robbing me I'd expect them to not have medical coverage so secondary effects might also fuck them over even harder. It's easier for me to just take the L on my phone, wallet, or, I guess car? But I'm kinda not seeing carjacking that I might notice as much. In any case, it's easier for me to just use my car insurance, if they happen to destroy my car or it becomes unrecoverable, goes to a chop shop, what have you, it's easier for me to get a new government ID, and freeze my credit card and get a new one, and buy a new cheap-ass phone. And maybe be out the 20 bucks in my wallet, which is why you shouldn't carry large amounts of cash.
  It's much easier for me to just, confront the problem through these secondary inconveniences that it causes me, rather than trying to like, "pull a hero", and shoot someone in the back. I'm not particularly educated on the intricacies of state-by-state self defense law, either, right, but I also wouldn't be surprised if it was unjustified to shoot someone in the back.
  I'm also not totally unconvinced of the idea of armed self-defense, right, it can be totally viable in certain situations.
  Say, someone is robbing a store with a gun, and their attention is on the cashier, and not on you, or, say, you're outside, right. Now you're totally free to pull your firearm and engage your off-duty brazilian police officer fantasy, for sure. That's, debatably, a useful scenario for a gun. Maybe a more useful scenario might be an in-progress rape, or assault, or something to that effect, though I'd imagine that most gun owners would not be proficient enough with their weapon to cleanly hit one person wrestling or engaged with another person at any more significant distance, and maybe at close distances depending on the shooter and how engaged the two people are. That's on the shooter, though, that's why regular training is necessary (even better if it's baked in as a requirement of ownership, as I said). I think in these cases it's probably somewhat likely that even the presence of the gun itself could serve to dissuade further engagement, which is a valuable function for it to serve beyond shooting.
  So basically, for property crime, it's easier to just deal with the property crime as it has occurred, since usually nobody's been hurt. With interpersonal violent crime, it's still a very highly contextually dependent solution, rather than a kind of, one-size-fits-all solution that everyone makes it out to be.
  I would say, if people are super concerned about self-defense, they'd probably want to take some first aid classes, they'd probably want good cardio, they'd probably want to carry pepper spray and maybe more easily know where medical supplies are located, or otherwise have some easily accessible to them within about a minute. They also might want to take some sort of martial arts class, which might also be good for their cardio, and good for fitness in general. Knives are not a good idea, since they remain dangerous and unpredictable, even with training, and guns aren't all that useful in a grappling scenario (and could also potentially injure you), or when you've not seen them coming. I could be persuaded on the position of a taser.
  I'm also not going to discount the idea that someone might get a gun and still brandish it as a form of intimidation, illegally, in order to accomplish other goals, right, the law isn't, total morality, it's just not a good idea to do for the vast majority of people. I think the black panthers standing outside the california state capitol is an effective form of protest, and is especially effective given their smaller numbers. It's more efficient, in some ways, than a mass march.
  I can also imagine scenarios where people live in circumstances where the police and law won't help them (lots of people), and would probably find it necessary to stay strapped up, if for nothing else than the fact that it's kind of just another minor tool at their disposal. I dunno, there's maybe something to be said there of possession of a gun, again, marking you as a threat, not only to criminals, but to police, but I've also seen lots of body cam footage where police just shoot a guy regardless. Because of an acorn, maybe. So, I'm not sure it matters too much.
  Basically my problem with guns is that they rely too much on the ability of the end user to correctly discern the situation at hand before they begin to use them. Oh, is this person about to stab me, pull a gun on me, whatever? It's usually pretty much impossible to know. If it's impossible to know, it's usually not a good idea to pull a gun on someone, and it's usually a much, much worse idea to shoot someone. You've just shortcutted the logical chain of events, there, right? Like the guy in the video says, there are plenty of instances where crazy drugged up homeless people on the new york subway walk around screaming obscenities, even saying stuff like "you're going to die", and shit like that, and they never do anything at all. Certainly, me personally, I find it to be a more moral position, getting stabbed to death, or getting hospitalized and treated by my shitty medical provider, rather than choke, maybe more probably, strangle, someone to death, because they were making a ruckus.

America is the land of mad max.

Good. If a beligerent has one of these we can at least do something about it, as opposed to "legal" weapons of mass murder.

It will only get worse as batteries improve and printed rail guns become trivial to make and difficult to detect.

So cool, always wanted one. They are not very energy-effective though.

Are semi-automatic 3d printed guns legal in the US?

In most states. It's no different than doing it with a mill legally.
Yes, although iirc you are required By law to embed a metal plate for your serial number.
Also on a practical level, you need metal parts of the thing falls apart pretty immediately. 3d printed gun parts can be useful, but 3d printed guns are basically tech demos at this point.
- By federal law, you are not required to serialize it (unless you plan to sell it, but if you do that too often then you're a manufacturer and need a license). Some states may require serialization for homemade firearms.
For personal use, yes. You are required to add some metal to it though I believe.
- You have to have a metal barrel for it to function. You might get a single shot of .22lr with a printed barrel.

So a criminal about to get involved in a very high risk situation is going to depend on 3D printed parts for the only thing that could possible help him get the thing done.....what happened to Joe schmoe? Oh his Prusa didn't print correctly so he go shot by the popo..... 🤔 Sounds controversial.

If people with criminal records and a history of mental illness can't buy firearms, maybe they should also be barred from buying 3D printers or fabrication technology which could be used to build weapons. Surely that's a better alternative than dead kids.

.../s? 🤨

No one likes the truth. But you either need to ban, no guns, all guns, or everything other than bolt action restricted rifles, break open shotguns, and single action revolvers.

There is no middle ground. Any laws that try to drive down a middle ground are doomed to failure. There is very little difference a mini-14 Ruger which typically looks like any other "hunting rifle" and an assault rifle.

ban... everything other than bolt action restricted rifles, break open shotguns, and single action revolvers.
Well, okay then. There's your middle ground. Even if you don't go quite that far, one of the low-key wins the gun lobby has had is in reframing assault rifle bans as bleeding heart pansies who are afraid of a Red Rider and want to ban "scary black guns" without knowing what they are.
In reality, it's simply not difficult to define what an "assault rifle" should be with sufficient certainty to make end-runs complicated, expensive, and relatively simple to nail down later:
Semiautomatic (or burst or full-auto, obviously).
Can be chambered in a round with ammunition that has energy "X" with effective range of "Y" when manufactured using materials readily available to the industry, with that term subject to regulations promulgated and revised by the ATF.
Has a magazine larger than "Z" rounds or has interchangeable magazines, particularly if they can be made an arbitrary size. An integrated tube or box magazine is very different from an AR-15 mag that can hold as many rounds as the product designer and materials engineer can make work, and that was specifically designed to be changed in a couple of seconds.
Those are the things that make a "hunting rifle" into one that's mostly suitable for hunting humans, regardless of what material the stock is made from.
- That will never fly as a "middle ground" because the second amendment was never written as a hunter's law. It's a Revolutionary, shooting-at-people law that didn't take into account advances in technology because they didn't matter.
  What they had different were people upset with a government across the ocean and soldiers in their homes, and the only people upset with the colonists were slaves that weren't allowed guns, education, or freedom. So that made the problem we face way less likely.
  Any middle ground like you suggest would take a constitutional amendment and mass adoption, and the ones with the guns that aren't likely to shoot up the place (Jan 6th excluded) are not keen on either.
- "We want less effective guns! Disarm yourselves!"
  "The Christo-facists are taking over!"
  "They be starting trains for LGBT people!"
  I'm a peaceful man, I am not harmless. You keep on being harmless. It's your right and I fully support it, and I mean that. Just not for me and mine.
  things that make a "hunting rifle" into one that's mostly suitable for hunting humans
  Did you know AR-15s are illegal to hunt with in some states because the rounds aren't lethal enough? LOL, a .223 or 5.56 looks like a BB gun vs. a 30.06 or .308. But you're OK with the hunting rifles!
  As a liberal gun nut, I'm constant looking and asking for ideas on this issue. And BTW, you have sane ideas, kinda. But they won't pass 2A muster in the courts. So keep stumping for lost causes I guess?

Well as soon as you invent a time machine we'll get right on that, but currently there's over six hundred million guns with no registry to know where/who, a culture of reluctance to relinquish their arms, and the knowledge of how to make more with ~$100 in parts and pipes from a Home Depot, Pandora's box is so open we lost the lid.

Where's politicalagitator, who swears I'm wrong about this because gun laws are effective?

The (ATF) reported a 570% increase in the number of conversion devices collected by police departments between 2017 and 2021, the most recent data available.

What's the increase in gun violence due to these weapons?

I fucking hate anti-gun reporting. It's all biased shit for tribalistic morons.

If only we could collect more accurate gun violence data.
I wonder why that's not possible?
Must be those anti-gun people.
Here's the anti-gun people making it much harder in 2014- https://www.propublica.org/article/republicans-say-no-to-cdc-gun-violence-research
Here are those gun haters doing it in 2018- https://www.politico.com/story/2018/07/11/gun-violence-research-714938
And here's those second amendment ignorers doing it again last year- https://giffords.org/articles/house-gop-just-voted-to-ban-cdc-gun-violence-research/
In fact, I hear those horrible gun grabbers have been doing this since the 1990s. https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2024/03/06/1235409642/gun-violence-prevention-research-public-health
Thank god for gun advocates who would never be in favor of such a thing or vote for anyone who would be in favor of such a thing!
- This is actually a bit of a misrepresentation, The Dickey Amendment says they are allowed to study gun violence data, but not allowed to advocate for gun control. Congress further clarified this in 2018, because the CDC had decided that studying is too close to advocating and they were scared of getting in trouble, and earmarked $25 million for the study of gun violence - just not the advocation of gun control.
  Of course, there's also no shortage of groups that are allowed to push an agenda, like Giffords', Everytown, Mom's Demand Action, etc.

we need less non bolt action guns please.

Bro I saw this show called Dr Stone and they legit show you how to make a gun in that show. It's fucked up that they're showing that in cartoons

People want to watch things other than Teletubbies