Bad/Good Guys With Guns
Technology truly is amazing. We've heard for some time now of the future efficacy and convenience that awaits us when three-dimensional printers become mainstream. No home will be without one. All one need acquire is the pattern to feed into the printer, and viola! replacement parts for all manner of household items, large and small, available at the push of a button.If 'Wiki Weapons' project leader Cody Wilson has his way, the trip to the local gunshop and the need to fill out state applications for gun acquisitions will also be a thing of the past. Want to whip up a cool new model of a semi-automatic rifle? Download the pattern from the Internet, feed it into your home three-D printer and go to it.
It's a free world out there, leaving us happily capable and [ir]responsible for whatever appeals.
A group naming itself Defence Distributed claims it has created downloadable weapons parts to be built using the new generation of printers, using plastics along with other materials to create 3-D objects with moving parts. Bearing in mind that a scant few decades earlier the Internet didn't exist, and since then the world of communications, information, education, science and technology has been turned upside down and inside out, anything is possible.
As incredible as instant mass communication was forty years ago, the possibility of creating just about anything in your home, instantly, with the use of a printing device has certainly become credible enough. But do we want to? If that era becomes reality there will be no control of anything; gun control advocates will have realized that the genie really did escape its confines, never to be shoved back in again.
And would any of us be any the better for that?
In the United States (where else?) federal firearms regulators already wrestling with the monstrous task of trying to regulate runaway gun ownership entitlements (Second Amendment rights!), aware of the growing technological capabilities, resist the thought of such a weapon having been accomplished. But University of Texas law student Cody Wilson claims his group test-fired a semi-automatic AR-15 rifle, built with some of its key parts created on a 3-D printer.
"What's chilling is that last month a group of kids (!) used a 3-D printer to actually manufacture (key parts) of the AR-15 and fire six bullets. When the (act) was last renewed in 2003, a gun made by a 3-D printer was like a Star Trek episode, but now we know it's real", stated Rep. Steven Israel agitating for the renewal of the Undetectable Firearms Act, which would make the building of such guns illegal.
Labels: Armaments, Culture, Human Fallibility, Marketing, Security, Technology, United States
posted by Pieface @ Saturday, December 22, 2012
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