“Ignoring The Real While Fighting The Imaginary”: The Dangers Of The Right Wing Panic Machine
It should’ve been the shot heard around the world. Chances are, you didn’t hear it.
An ominous sort of history was made last week near Austin, Texas, but it seems to have largely escaped notice. There was some media coverage, yes, but less than, say, Lindsay Lohan’s latest stint in rehab, certainly less than you’d think for something whose ramifications will likely shadow us for years.
On May 2, you see, a group called Defense Distributed, led by law student and self-described anarchist Cody Wilson, accomplished what was apparently the first successful firing of a gun “printed” entirely by a 3-D printer. According to Forbes reporter Andy Greenberg, who witnessed the test, the gun is made almost entirely of plastic, the only metal in it being the nail that served as a firing pin and the bullet it fired.
A 3-D printer, for the benefit of those who remember when the mimeograph machine was the cutting edge of duplication technology, is a device that can download computer blueprints and use them to manufacture complex physical objects right on your desktop.
The one Defense Distributed used is said to have cost $8,000. Amazon has one listed for $1,299.
So we now have technology, largely unregulated, with the potential to turn every desktop into an armory. Forbes reports that, in just two days, 100,000 blueprints were downloaded.
Hold that thought as you ponder another recent headline. It seems one Adam Kokesh, an Iraq War veteran and activist, is organizing an armed march on Washington for Independence Day. Participants — he claims 2,500 so far — with loaded rifles slung across their backs plan to march into the nation’s capital to protest the “tyranny” of the federal government.
While D.C. residents are allowed to have registered firearms on their property, they are not allowed to carry them in public. Police Chief Cathy Lanier has said marchers will be met at the border and if they break that law, “we’ll take action.”
Kokesh, apparently delusional, promises to turn back peacefully if confronted, but says it is his hope the city will suspend the law for him and even provide his group a police escort.
You will not be surprised to learn that, by “tyranny,” Kokesh means the duly elected (not a hanging chad in sight) president of the United States going about his job. Thing is, if you don’t like the way he does his job, you get a chance every four years to make a change. People in North Korea would doubtless love to live under that kind of “tyranny.”
Because it isn’t. Kokesh’s march is just the latest product of the great American panic machine, the mechanism by which the extreme right works itself into spasms of apoplectic terror over threats that don’t exist.
“We’re going to be under Sharia law!”
Except, we’re not.
“We’ve become a socialist country!”
Except we haven’t.
“There’s a War on Christmas!”
Except there isn’t.
“They’re trying to take our guns away!”
Except that it is now theoretically possible for a mental patient to manufacture his own gun in the comfort of his aluminum foil-lined basement. That’s a sobering development with far reaching implications barely considered, much less addressed, by lawmakers though this technology has existed for over a decade. Since Wilson’s test, there’s been a flurry of calls for legislation. On Friday, the federal government ordered Wilson to remove the blueprints from his website. All of which is the very epitome of locking the garage after the Hyundai has been hotwired.
It’s a pity some of the energy that has gone into fighting imaginary tyranny did not go into pondering this real and eminently predictable threat. But, then, we are unserious people in a very serious age.
And therein lies the danger of the panic machine. We spend so much time fighting threats that do not exist, we are left ill-prepared for the ones that do.
By: Leonard Pitts, Jr., The National Memo, May 12, 2013
“Pretty Frightening Possibilities”: You Think We Have Lots of Guns Now?
There’s even more exciting gun news today, coming from a small nonprofit organization called Defense Distributed. They announced that they have successfully test-fired a gun made almost entirely in a 3-D printer. The only part that wasn’t 3-D printed was the firing pin. And the bullet, of course. Now previously, people had made gun components in 3-D printers, but prior tests of entire weapons had been unsuccessful. This raises some rather troubling questions, which we’ll get to in a moment. But first, here’s their short video, which shows the firing and construction of the gun, inexplicably interspersed with shots of World War II-era bombers: http://youtu.be/drPz6n6UXQY
They may call this thing “The Liberator,” but it’s a little too impractical to be able to liberate anyone at the moment. It’s probably highly inaccurate, and it holds only one bullet. But this is more a proof-of-concept than anything else, and if you want to, you can go to their website and download the plans, then print one out on your own 3-D printer.
Defense Distributed is run by Cody Wilson, a 25-year-old law student, gun enthusiast, and libertarian. There’s a Q&A with him from a few months ago here, and if you read it you’ll see he sounds pretty much like any Ron Paul acolyte. His motivations aren’t all that important, because if he didn’t do it, it was only a matter of time before someone else did. You may be asking, is this legal? And the answer appears to be yes. There is a law called the Undetectable Firearms Act which prohibits the manufacture, sale, or possession of any gun that won’t show up on a metal detector, but Defense Distributed handles that by including in the design a piece of metal in the gun’s body. You can figure out how tough that would be to get around.
As it happens, the Undetectable Firearms Act is expiring at the end of this year. There will be an effort to renew it, particularly in light of this development, and it would certainly be interesting to see the NRA try to argue that being able to print out a plastic gun in your basement is the very essence of the liberty for which the Founders fought so bravely. But you know what? I’m guessing the NRA won’t oppose a renewal of the UFA at all. They’ll be happy to support it.
And why would that be? Well, who’s the most threatened by the idea of people making their own guns in large quantities? The gun manufacturers, that’s who. And in recent years, the relationship between the NRA and the manufacturers has grown so intertwined that there’s virtually no distinction between them. So don’t be surprised if we see the NRA come out in full-throated support of new restrictions on 3-D printed guns.
Now, let’s address the technological question. Even if there isn’t much point in 3-D printing your own gun right now, the technology is in its very early stages. If you want to get a 3-D printer today, you can pay $2,000 for one from MakerBot, the most popular brand, or you can get one for as little as $400 from some other companies (the one Defense Distributed used was a used industrial model, somewhat more expensive). 3-D printing boosters predict that as the technology improves and prices come down, before long—maybe 10 years, maybe 15—3-D printers will be as common a household appliance as microwave ovens. And let’s say the technology does improve, to the point where you could print out a full, working version of a Glock or, if you had a huge printer, an AR-15. And instead of paying $500 for the former or $1,000 for the latter, it’d cost you maybe five or ten bucks for the material and that’s it. Why not make a hundred of them? Or a thousand?
MakerBot doesn’t allow plans for guns on its Thingverse, the biggest forum for trading 3-D printing plans. But that doesn’t matter; if it’s on the Internet somewhere, people will find it if they want to. And even if we made them illegal, you could break that law without involving any accomplices. If you had a gang, you could outfit them with more guns than they could possibly want. The technology may be just developing, but the possibilities are pretty frightening.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, May 6, 2013
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