If you watch the video clip below—and there may be reasons not to—you may have the opposite effect than the title suggests. The video is called “The Liberator,” but might better be called ‘The Enslaver.”
The worlds of technology and computing have merged into something truly frightening: the world’s first printable, plastic gun. Yes, you can now download the file for printing a gun from the website…nah, you won’t get it here.
You may be wondering how a “printer” can print a gun. Well, it seems that there are printers that lay down threads of melted polymers—basically liquid plastic—in precise patterns. It’s just like a regular printer, except this one is 3D, with the layers being placed on top of each other; instead of ink, the printer uses plastic.
So a 25-year old law student at the University of Texas got it into his head to create the thing, and joined up with a young engineer to do so. And as you can see in the video below, it worked. So now, anybody with 8,000 bucks to buy a 3D printer from eBay, can download the file for creating the device, which has one metal part, completely inessential but placed there for the purpose of triggering metal detectors.
This is hogwash, of course: anybody who wishes to avoid detection would be able to do so in seconds.
You could also point out that $8000 will buy you a lot of guns more powerful than a plastic gun, but that isn’t the point. Sure, it’s 8000 bucks now, but in five years time? We’ll probably be making our kids’ dolls at home from files downloaded from Mattel, not running out to buy Barbie at Toys ’R Us.
So that means that anyone, any man / woman / and-especially-worrisome-child will be able to get a cheap, lethal, anonymous gun. And that means forget gun control, because there won’t be a chance of that happening. In fact, here is the (un-named) website’s comment on the impact of this gun:
This project might change the way we think about gun control and consumption. How do governments behave if they must one day operate on the assumption that any and every citizen has near instant access to a firearm through the Internet? Let’s find out.
“Hey, dude, let’s make a cheap, lethal weapon available to absolutely everybody, and see what happens!”
“Cool, dude!”
I would call this attitude irresponsible, but to Cody Wilson, the 25-year old mastermind of this affair, it’s not. It is, in fact, all very cozy with his radical libertarian / anarchist beliefs. Everyone, you see, should have a gun because the government can come at any moment and infringe on our God-given rights.
Oh—just one problem. Having all the guns in the world is useless, because the government has far more, and far more resources. Remember the Branch Davidian Siege in Waco in 1993? Guess who won?
Several thoughts come to mind. Readers will thrill to hear—the “30,000 Lives Project,” debuted in New York City’s Central Park last Sunday, with five volunteers and me reading names and distributing flyers. It was a beautiful spring day, and I felt a little bad about intruding my agenda into it: isn’t it enough to have survived a grueling, cold, dark winter? Can’t a person enjoy the sun and flowering trees without some guy putting gun control into my face?
But we did, and one of the volunteers got a hostile reaction—a gun nut who was completely against the project. But she’s a tough and persuasive woman, that volunteer, and she prodded the guy gently, and told the story of her husband’s nephew, who had used his father’s gun to shoot himself. The family, as you can imagine, was not distraught but destroyed. And in the end, the guy came around—he began thinking.
Unlike John and I, who stopped thinking after we saw a piece on the plastic gun—as well as the video below—on the McNeil Lehrer News Hour.
“You know what,” said John angrily, “Let’s all just fucking arm ourselves! Let’s completely fucking forget about gun control, because these bastards have completely changed the game, and if we don’t arm ourselves we’re just poor sacks of shit waiting to get snuffed out!”
Or words to that effect…..
At least John could speak, I was stunned into wordlessness (not a common state for me….).
Well, I looked it up today, and I’m happy / sad to report that research done at my very own alma mater—the University of Wisconsin—that just by seeing a gun, test subjects react more aggressively than others who have seen a neutral object. And in another experiment, drivers honked more at a van with a visibly loaded rifle rack stalled at a green light than a van without the rifle. Which is crazy—logically, drivers should honk LESS at a load vehicle than a (presumably) unloaded one. Oh, and a further thought—it seems that the human eye can detect snakes and spiders—potentially venomous agents—faster than we detect other stimuli.
But guess what?
We also detect guns at the same speed as the snakes and spiders. So it may not be the case that we evolved to detect the snakes / spiders. Or it may be that we have evolved to include guns as well.
I think I have my answer, now, to my question—why am I spending two hours a week reciting names in public places? I wanted to know what was behind this weird American obsession with guns.
A Dutchman explained it to me in Central Park last Sunday.
“We’re sill getting used to the American obsession with the three G’s.”
And that would be?
“Guns, God, and Government,” he replied.
And it was true, I thought. Some of us are pretty crazy on all three—they believe that the government is going to tyrannically enforce their Godless agenda on them, and the only chance of keeping that from happening is…
…a gun.
Actually, a lotta guns.
Because I’ve come to believe, guns are a positive feedback cycle. Like pornography, they’re addictive. The number of gun-owners may be down, but the number of guns those owners possess is way up.
I guess I should be used to living in my nutty country, afflicted with its obsession with the 3 G’s.
Cancel, I am used to it.
The question is how much longer can anyone live with it.
