9 ms·

LAPD declares ‘ghost guns’ an ‘epidemic,’ citing 400% increase in seizures

35 points by hbcondo714 5y ago

miohtama 5y ago
For the ghost guns, do you still need to have professionally manufactured elements standing pressure, like a barrel, or are ghost guns, in practice, made 100% with home made elements? In the UK the pressure elements are regulated and need serial numbers whereas in the US it is the receiver, which could make creating these ghose guns easier.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- sgtnoodle 5y ago
  I'm speculating, but in the US it seems like the easiest thing would be to just fabricate the lower receiver and buy all the rest of the parts.
- speedybird 5y ago
  > For the ghost guns, do you still need to have professionally manufactured elements standing pressure, like a barrel, Yes, the 'ghost guns' politicians fear the most are built like that. Particularly, AR pattern rifles that have printed or home-milled receivers but are otherwise build out of factory parts. There are also some 'ghost guns' that are wholly homemade, with all the variable quality you would expect. Most of them are probably more dangerous to the user.
- vincnetas 5y ago
  as article mentioned i browsed one of suppliers polymer 80. looks like its like lego for guns where you buy pieces of guns. reminds me of CS:GO weapon skins but IRL. https://www.polymer80.com/partsandaccessories/pistolbarrels https://www.polymer80.com/partsandaccessories/pistolbarrels
- rpmisms 5y ago
  Not in all cases. Check out the FGC-9. It's a pretty standard carbine, but it's designed to use parts that are generally unregulated worldwide.
ARandomerDude 5y ago
> The weapons typically are made of polymer parts created with 3D printing technology and can be assembled using kits at home. Technically true (though only some parts can be polymer, obviously) but generally it's a pain, often requiring special tools and machining experience. This article is fairly sensational in its description of the process, honestly.
- pope_meat 5y ago
  You can finish an 80% Glock kit with a pair of snips, file, and something sturdy to hammer the 3 pins in. After you have your 80% lower done, the rest of the parts are unregulated, and can be freely purchased either online or locally. 3D print a base plate for which designs are easily found online, file down a piece of thin sheet metal to the correct dimensions, and you have a fully automatic glock. Everything up until the custom baseplate is legal to do, turning your 80% Glock in to a fully auto firearm is the only step that's against the law. (Assuming you don't have any felonies or domestic violence charges that bar you from owning a firearm in the first place) An AR-15 80% is a little more involved, but with a jig and a router/drill you can do one in a hour and a half in your garage, the hardest part is cleaning up the absolute metric crap ton of aluminum shavings/chips the process produces.
  - Daniel_sk 5y ago
    Are gun barrels unregulated in most US states? E.g. in Slovakia a barrel is considered a main weapon part, and case of short arms the slide is considered another main weapon part. So a Glock has serial numbers on the barrel, slide and also the body. You can buy the rest without any license or manufacture it if you want, but no one will sell you a barrel or slide unless you have a purchase permit. You can't sell it to someone else, you need to transfer the ownership. And making a good and safe barrel and slide is the most complicated part, you can't just easily print this at home. So no one is printing guns in Slovakia yet (AFAIK :-)). And just for comparison - we have less strict rules than California (concealed carry is possible for regular citizen. Not limits on calibers or magazine capacity yet).
    - 5y ago
extropy 5y ago
IMHO this is sensationalist "think of the children" piece. There are a ton of other ways to get a gun illegally, this is just the cheapest and least reliable one. Without knowing the denominator, the numbers are useless. Also very much doubt that the traceability of legal guns is that useful.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- rpmisms 5y ago
  > Also very much doubt that the traceability of legal guns is that useful. This is generally true. Many guns used in crimes are stolen, "tracing" the gun usually means getting it back to the original owner. Also note that seizures are the metric in the article, not acts of violence. Non-serialized guns are a no-no in CA.
  - loeg 5y ago
    > Also note that seizures are the metric in the article, not acts of violence. Well, there’s this: > Detectives have linked the untraceable weapons to 24 killings, eight attempted homicides and dozens of assaults and armed robberies since January, according to the report.
    - rpmisms 5y ago
      And what are they measuring against? What percentage of murders is that? My guess is not many for LA.
      - loeg 5y ago
        LA saw about 343 murders in 2020 of which 73% (about 250) were from guns. The 24 killings mentioned in this article would then represent about 10% of 2020 gun murders. That seems significant to me, especially if it continues increasing.
- lmilcin 5y ago
mach1ne 5y ago
For a non-native this headline was initially confusing; spectral weapons capable of causing seizures?
- epistasis 5y ago
  This is also a very confusing headline for a native speaker. It makes almost no sense, nobody I have ever met has ever mentioned a "ghost gun," it's not really a concern that affects daily life.
  - snypher 5y ago
    Not much more confusing than "Redis Cluster Re-Implemented in Rust"! I've never met anyone who talks about that either :)
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - eurasiantiger 5y ago
    It’s FUD. Those ”guns” are more dangerous to their operator than anyone else. They look the part, though, and that’s what’s scary.
  - salawat 5y ago
    A "ghost gun" is a political buzzword for "gun not manufactured by someone the local government has leverage over". Most firearms manufacturers that manufacture and sell firearms for resale are bound by federal guidelines to do things like serialize them to comply with regulations that make it easier for law enforcement to trace the paper trail or ownership of a firearm. They must also have enough metal in them by law to set off a metal detector. None of these measures cover firearms privately made, not for resale. those are not regulated. therefore it creates an extra "spooky" mystique the media likes to play up, and xertain groups wring their hands over. The fact 3d printing has made firearm manufacture that much more accessible to the everyone of course has certain political factions wanting to figure out ways to keep those pesky weapons out of people's hands.
pope_meat 5y ago
Problem: Felons are ignoring the law. Solution: write another law. Result: politicians pat themselves on the back for doing something, non-felons can no longer build DIY firearms, felons continue to ignore the law. Sigh. With the amount of uppers that are in the wild, and the fact that a lower can be made from either an 80% part, or 3D printed from scratch by pretty much anyone with two working hands means trying to stop this is like pissing in to a hurricane. Google FGC-9. Even the barrel can be made at home, rifling and everything, ivanthetroll has videos/files online documenting the process. If Henry Colt could produce a firearm using 100 year old tools and technologies, it's comical to think you can stop people doing the same using 2021 technology. Perhaps it's time to consider bringing up the poorest members of society out of the abject poverty, that will do a whole lot more to reduce gun violence than passing even more ineffective gun control laws.
- eurasiantiger 5y ago
  But what about the upper class violent drug criminals?
  - speedybird 5y ago
    They can afford better guns.
    - eurasiantiger 5y ago
      And after we bring the poorest members of society out of abject poverty, they too can afford better guns!
      - rpmisms 5y ago
        This but unironically.
      - speedybird 5y ago
        TBQH, even poor people in America can afford better guns from a store than homemade guns. The main exception to this is people who aren't permitted to buy guns. Wikipedia says the infamous FGC-9 costs "less than $400" to make if you already have the printer. You can easily buy a better gun cheaper than that in just about any gunstore.
vmception 5y ago
I'm trying to think of a crafty was to respond to this. There is the free for all approach where we resign to accept the presence of 3D printed guns and let our county mail us instructions on how to 3D print polymer-kevlar vests There is also a way to work within the constitution to restrict their presence. I don't think any seizure is an affective public policy measure, since that means it was already printed and subsequently found. I'm thinking a tariff on the polymer can be done but that would penalize all 3D makers although stranger things have happened, or an attestation of how the polymer won't be used, or a straight up license with reporting guidelines and a regime that requires the printers to phone home. Of course, non-licensed use being prohibited or severely restricted. And now, same result but without even brushing near the 2nd amendment, and it gives enforcement a pre-emptive reason to act on non-compliance. Disclaimer, I'm not advocating for anything, I just know a sure-fire approach to making a prohibition stick in the US system: 1) regulate the intermediaries instead of the specific action itself. 2) deputize private individuals or a specific private sector to do the reporting and compliance for you.
- rpmisms 5y ago
  The real answer is that you'd have to essentially ban the internet to keep this from happening. As the recently deceased JStark, designer of the FGC-9, said: "Can't stop the signal".
- Someone 5y ago
  > I'm thinking a tariff on the polymer can be done Criminals would steal the polymer, and not pay the tariff. Your scanner likely won’t scan money, photoshop may refuse to edit or print images of money (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Bank_Counterfeit_Deterrence_Group https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Bank_Counterfeit_Deter...), your printer may black them out, etc (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation), all to prevent the easy counterfeiting of money. Problem, of course, is that, for guns, the exact looks aren’t important. That’s true for child pornography and pirated movies, too, though, and those are being worked on. So, I foresee tech in commercially bought 3D printers that attempts to disallow printing anything remotely looking like a gun or gun part, and people circumventing that by tweaking models, say by adding easily cut of images of flowers and kittens.
mikewarot 5y ago
It's a loophole in the law defining what a firearm is. You're allowed to make your own weapon for yourself. It turns out you can buy almost everything that constitutes an AR-15, except for the lower receiver that holds all the other pieces together, with little to no restriction. You can buy a kit that isn't a functional receiver, but is 80% of the way there, you have to complete a few machining steps, which they've made VERY easy, and you've now legally made your own firearm. (by skipping almost all of the skilled part that the original intent was all about) It turns out that if you use enough of the right kinds of plastic, you can get something that holds up reasonably well long enough to commit crimes with. I expect this loophole to be closed somehow, fairly soon.
- sterlind 5y ago
  There's no way the NRA would let this loophole get closed, right? Also, I'm confused. I tried to look up the legal standing of ghost guns on Wikipedia, and it mentioned that regulating them would violate the Commerce Clause (since they're not articles of commerce), but there's a Supreme Court case on homemade machine guns which upheld those being illegal. What's the deal there?
  - foota 5y ago
    The Commerce Clause can do anything. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickard_v._Filburn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickard_v._Filburn
    - dragonwriter 5y ago
      > The Commerce Clause can do anything. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickard_v._Filburn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickard_v._Filburn No, it can’t. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Lopez https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Lopez
    - PhantomGremlin 5y ago
      This can't be upvoted enough. Activists love it when judges stretch words far beyond their original intent. Same happened in Roe v. Wade, involving "due process". The majority found a meaning in words far beyond what was there previously. A dissenter said: To reach its result, the Court necessarily has had to find within the scope of the Fourteenth Amendment a right that was apparently completely unknown to the drafters of the Amendment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roe_v_wade#Dissents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roe_v_wade#Dissents
ur-whale 5y ago
https://archive.vn/hAKyF https://archive.vn/hAKyF
mogadsheu 5y ago
I think AR related murders per annum are lower than the number of pneumonia, which is around 1000/year. Pistols are much scarier and commonly used for crimes because they can be concealed. So this really isn’t as scary as it’s made out to be, numbers-wise.
- rpmisms 5y ago
  Pistols are easy and popular 80% guns to finish, as well as being extremely easy to 3d print. Sources: https://www.polymer80.com/pistols/80percentpistolkits https://www.polymer80.com/pistols/80percentpistolkits https://ctrlpew.com/file-drop-tms-94-effeeness-3d-printable-fns40-fns9-frame/ https://ctrlpew.com/file-drop-tms-94-effeeness-3d-printable-...
rpmisms 5y ago
This article is simple fearmongering. Yes, "ghost guns", or homemade firearms are growing in popularity, and of course LAPD is seizing them: they're illegal in CA. If you know a weed dealer in the US, I promise it's easier to get a gun through them than by printing one. The reality is that this is here to stay. The FGC-9 is not a joke, it's a powerful weapon that's impossible to effectively regulate. Let that frame the discussion. You can't get rid of this, how do you work with it?
- buro9 5y ago
  Make selling bullets illegal or tax bullets in some extreme way
  - the-dude 5y ago
    Chris Rock's $5000 bullet control : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2Uqq9Bz-WU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2Uqq9Bz-WU I would shoot you if I could afford it
  - chrisco255 5y ago
    That proposal itself is illegal in the U.S. But meanwhile making bullets has long been a trivial affair. And you can totally reuse spent cartridges. It's a brass jacket with a lead tip filled with gunpowder (which can also be homemade). It's 19th century technology.
    - Blackthorn 5y ago
      Acceptable primers are not easy to manufacture at home.
      - rpmisms 5y ago
        A dude I know is working really really hard on piezoelectric ignition. So far he's had great results.
        5y ago
fhackenberger 5y ago
To me it's obvious that the increase in homicides et.al. is very likely rather due to the increased psychological issues due to the covid-19 restrictions on people...
- rpmisms 5y ago
  This is the right answer, but nobody wants to talk about it. We didn't have mass shootings 70 years ago, it's obviously a growing psychological issue.
sparrish 5y ago
I can't seem to find the report that is referenced in this article. Anyone got a link?
WarOnPrivacy 5y ago
A final note to this thread I've seen a number of comments criticize the reporting, inferring that it's the press that's generating the fear and confusion here. I think this is in error. The press may be guilty of amplifying FUD but it is obvious that the creation and shape of this particular narrative is from the LAPD. Is the LAT guilty of parroting LEO w/o providing sufficient analysis? That sounds reasonable to me. News orgs republishing Gov/Biz/LEO PR - w/o analysis or related context - happens pretty much every day in every US town. But criticizing the press (again, reasonably) while giving the cops who designed and crafted the FUD a pass - I think this shows us that tribalism is rating higher than fixing broken things.

35 points by hbcondo714 5y ago

For the ghost guns, do you still need to have professionally manufactured elements standing pressure, like a barrel, or are ghost guns, in practice, made 100% with home made elements? In the UK the pressure elements are regulated and need serial numbers whereas in the US it is the receiver, which could make creating these ghose guns easier.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
sgtnoodle 5y ago
I'm speculating, but in the US it seems like the easiest thing would be to just fabricate the lower receiver and buy all the rest of the parts.
speedybird 5y ago
> For the ghost guns, do you still need to have professionally manufactured elements standing pressure, like a barrel, Yes, the 'ghost guns' politicians fear the most are built like that. Particularly, AR pattern rifles that have printed or home-milled receivers but are otherwise build out of factory parts. There are also some 'ghost guns' that are wholly homemade, with all the variable quality you would expect. Most of them are probably more dangerous to the user.
vincnetas 5y ago
as article mentioned i browsed one of suppliers polymer 80. looks like its like lego for guns where you buy pieces of guns. reminds me of CS:GO weapon skins but IRL. https://www.polymer80.com/partsandaccessories/pistolbarrels https://www.polymer80.com/partsandaccessories/pistolbarrels
rpmisms 5y ago
Not in all cases. Check out the FGC-9. It's a pretty standard carbine, but it's designed to use parts that are generally unregulated worldwide.

ARandomerDude 5y ago

> The weapons typically are made of polymer parts created with 3D printing technology and can be assembled using kits at home. Technically true (though only some parts can be polymer, obviously) but generally it's a pain, often requiring special tools and machining experience. This article is fairly sensational in its description of the process, honestly.

pope_meat 5y ago
You can finish an 80% Glock kit with a pair of snips, file, and something sturdy to hammer the 3 pins in. After you have your 80% lower done, the rest of the parts are unregulated, and can be freely purchased either online or locally. 3D print a base plate for which designs are easily found online, file down a piece of thin sheet metal to the correct dimensions, and you have a fully automatic glock. Everything up until the custom baseplate is legal to do, turning your 80% Glock in to a fully auto firearm is the only step that's against the law. (Assuming you don't have any felonies or domestic violence charges that bar you from owning a firearm in the first place) An AR-15 80% is a little more involved, but with a jig and a router/drill you can do one in a hour and a half in your garage, the hardest part is cleaning up the absolute metric crap ton of aluminum shavings/chips the process produces.
- Daniel_sk 5y ago
  Are gun barrels unregulated in most US states? E.g. in Slovakia a barrel is considered a main weapon part, and case of short arms the slide is considered another main weapon part. So a Glock has serial numbers on the barrel, slide and also the body. You can buy the rest without any license or manufacture it if you want, but no one will sell you a barrel or slide unless you have a purchase permit. You can't sell it to someone else, you need to transfer the ownership. And making a good and safe barrel and slide is the most complicated part, you can't just easily print this at home. So no one is printing guns in Slovakia yet (AFAIK :-)). And just for comparison - we have less strict rules than California (concealed carry is possible for regular citizen. Not limits on calibers or magazine capacity yet).
  - 5y ago

extropy 5y ago

IMHO this is sensationalist "think of the children" piece. There are a ton of other ways to get a gun illegally, this is just the cheapest and least reliable one. Without knowing the denominator, the numbers are useless. Also very much doubt that the traceability of legal guns is that useful.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
rpmisms 5y ago
> Also very much doubt that the traceability of legal guns is that useful. This is generally true. Many guns used in crimes are stolen, "tracing" the gun usually means getting it back to the original owner. Also note that seizures are the metric in the article, not acts of violence. Non-serialized guns are a no-no in CA.
- loeg 5y ago
  > Also note that seizures are the metric in the article, not acts of violence. Well, there’s this: > Detectives have linked the untraceable weapons to 24 killings, eight attempted homicides and dozens of assaults and armed robberies since January, according to the report.
  - rpmisms 5y ago
    And what are they measuring against? What percentage of murders is that? My guess is not many for LA.
    - loeg 5y ago
      LA saw about 343 murders in 2020 of which 73% (about 250) were from guns. The 24 killings mentioned in this article would then represent about 10% of 2020 gun murders. That seems significant to me, especially if it continues increasing.
lmilcin 5y ago

mach1ne 5y ago

For a non-native this headline was initially confusing; spectral weapons capable of causing seizures?

epistasis 5y ago
This is also a very confusing headline for a native speaker. It makes almost no sense, nobody I have ever met has ever mentioned a "ghost gun," it's not really a concern that affects daily life.
- snypher 5y ago
  Not much more confusing than "Redis Cluster Re-Implemented in Rust"! I've never met anyone who talks about that either :)
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- eurasiantiger 5y ago
  It’s FUD. Those ”guns” are more dangerous to their operator than anyone else. They look the part, though, and that’s what’s scary.
- salawat 5y ago
  A "ghost gun" is a political buzzword for "gun not manufactured by someone the local government has leverage over". Most firearms manufacturers that manufacture and sell firearms for resale are bound by federal guidelines to do things like serialize them to comply with regulations that make it easier for law enforcement to trace the paper trail or ownership of a firearm. They must also have enough metal in them by law to set off a metal detector. None of these measures cover firearms privately made, not for resale. those are not regulated. therefore it creates an extra "spooky" mystique the media likes to play up, and xertain groups wring their hands over. The fact 3d printing has made firearm manufacture that much more accessible to the everyone of course has certain political factions wanting to figure out ways to keep those pesky weapons out of people's hands.

pope_meat 5y ago

Problem: Felons are ignoring the law. Solution: write another law. Result: politicians pat themselves on the back for doing something, non-felons can no longer build DIY firearms, felons continue to ignore the law. Sigh. With the amount of uppers that are in the wild, and the fact that a lower can be made from either an 80% part, or 3D printed from scratch by pretty much anyone with two working hands means trying to stop this is like pissing in to a hurricane. Google FGC-9. Even the barrel can be made at home, rifling and everything, ivanthetroll has videos/files online documenting the process. If Henry Colt could produce a firearm using 100 year old tools and technologies, it's comical to think you can stop people doing the same using 2021 technology. Perhaps it's time to consider bringing up the poorest members of society out of the abject poverty, that will do a whole lot more to reduce gun violence than passing even more ineffective gun control laws.

eurasiantiger 5y ago
But what about the upper class violent drug criminals?
- speedybird 5y ago
  They can afford better guns.
  - eurasiantiger 5y ago
    And after we bring the poorest members of society out of abject poverty, they too can afford better guns!
    - rpmisms 5y ago
      This but unironically.
    - speedybird 5y ago
      TBQH, even poor people in America can afford better guns from a store than homemade guns. The main exception to this is people who aren't permitted to buy guns. Wikipedia says the infamous FGC-9 costs "less than $400" to make if you already have the printer. You can easily buy a better gun cheaper than that in just about any gunstore.

vmception 5y ago

I'm trying to think of a crafty was to respond to this. There is the free for all approach where we resign to accept the presence of 3D printed guns and let our county mail us instructions on how to 3D print polymer-kevlar vests There is also a way to work within the constitution to restrict their presence. I don't think any seizure is an affective public policy measure, since that means it was already printed and subsequently found. I'm thinking a tariff on the polymer can be done but that would penalize all 3D makers although stranger things have happened, or an attestation of how the polymer won't be used, or a straight up license with reporting guidelines and a regime that requires the printers to phone home. Of course, non-licensed use being prohibited or severely restricted. And now, same result but without even brushing near the 2nd amendment, and it gives enforcement a pre-emptive reason to act on non-compliance. Disclaimer, I'm not advocating for anything, I just know a sure-fire approach to making a prohibition stick in the US system: 1) regulate the intermediaries instead of the specific action itself. 2) deputize private individuals or a specific private sector to do the reporting and compliance for you.

rpmisms 5y ago
The real answer is that you'd have to essentially ban the internet to keep this from happening. As the recently deceased JStark, designer of the FGC-9, said: "Can't stop the signal".
Someone 5y ago
> I'm thinking a tariff on the polymer can be done Criminals would steal the polymer, and not pay the tariff. Your scanner likely won’t scan money, photoshop may refuse to edit or print images of money (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Bank_Counterfeit_Deterrence_Group https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Bank_Counterfeit_Deter...), your printer may black them out, etc (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation), all to prevent the easy counterfeiting of money. Problem, of course, is that, for guns, the exact looks aren’t important. That’s true for child pornography and pirated movies, too, though, and those are being worked on. So, I foresee tech in commercially bought 3D printers that attempts to disallow printing anything remotely looking like a gun or gun part, and people circumventing that by tweaking models, say by adding easily cut of images of flowers and kittens.

mikewarot 5y ago

It's a loophole in the law defining what a firearm is. You're allowed to make your own weapon for yourself. It turns out you can buy almost everything that constitutes an AR-15, except for the lower receiver that holds all the other pieces together, with little to no restriction. You can buy a kit that isn't a functional receiver, but is 80% of the way there, you have to complete a few machining steps, which they've made VERY easy, and you've now legally made your own firearm. (by skipping almost all of the skilled part that the original intent was all about) It turns out that if you use enough of the right kinds of plastic, you can get something that holds up reasonably well long enough to commit crimes with. I expect this loophole to be closed somehow, fairly soon.

sterlind 5y ago
There's no way the NRA would let this loophole get closed, right? Also, I'm confused. I tried to look up the legal standing of ghost guns on Wikipedia, and it mentioned that regulating them would violate the Commerce Clause (since they're not articles of commerce), but there's a Supreme Court case on homemade machine guns which upheld those being illegal. What's the deal there?
- foota 5y ago
  The Commerce Clause can do anything. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickard_v._Filburn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickard_v._Filburn
  - dragonwriter 5y ago
    > The Commerce Clause can do anything. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickard_v._Filburn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickard_v._Filburn No, it can’t. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Lopez https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Lopez
  - PhantomGremlin 5y ago
    This can't be upvoted enough. Activists love it when judges stretch words far beyond their original intent. Same happened in Roe v. Wade, involving "due process". The majority found a meaning in words far beyond what was there previously. A dissenter said: To reach its result, the Court necessarily has had to find within the scope of the Fourteenth Amendment a right that was apparently completely unknown to the drafters of the Amendment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roe_v_wade#Dissents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roe_v_wade#Dissents

ur-whale 5y ago

https://archive.vn/hAKyF https://archive.vn/hAKyF

mogadsheu 5y ago

I think AR related murders per annum are lower than the number of pneumonia, which is around 1000/year. Pistols are much scarier and commonly used for crimes because they can be concealed. So this really isn’t as scary as it’s made out to be, numbers-wise.

rpmisms 5y ago
Pistols are easy and popular 80% guns to finish, as well as being extremely easy to 3d print. Sources: https://www.polymer80.com/pistols/80percentpistolkits https://www.polymer80.com/pistols/80percentpistolkits https://ctrlpew.com/file-drop-tms-94-effeeness-3d-printable-fns40-fns9-frame/ https://ctrlpew.com/file-drop-tms-94-effeeness-3d-printable-...

rpmisms 5y ago

This article is simple fearmongering. Yes, "ghost guns", or homemade firearms are growing in popularity, and of course LAPD is seizing them: they're illegal in CA. If you know a weed dealer in the US, I promise it's easier to get a gun through them than by printing one. The reality is that this is here to stay. The FGC-9 is not a joke, it's a powerful weapon that's impossible to effectively regulate. Let that frame the discussion. You can't get rid of this, how do you work with it?

buro9 5y ago
Make selling bullets illegal or tax bullets in some extreme way
- the-dude 5y ago
  Chris Rock's $5000 bullet control : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2Uqq9Bz-WU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2Uqq9Bz-WU I would shoot you if I could afford it
- chrisco255 5y ago
  That proposal itself is illegal in the U.S. But meanwhile making bullets has long been a trivial affair. And you can totally reuse spent cartridges. It's a brass jacket with a lead tip filled with gunpowder (which can also be homemade). It's 19th century technology.
  - Blackthorn 5y ago
    Acceptable primers are not easy to manufacture at home.
    - rpmisms 5y ago
      A dude I know is working really really hard on piezoelectric ignition. So far he's had great results.
      - 5y ago

fhackenberger 5y ago

To me it's obvious that the increase in homicides et.al. is very likely rather due to the increased psychological issues due to the covid-19 restrictions on people...

rpmisms 5y ago
This is the right answer, but nobody wants to talk about it. We didn't have mass shootings 70 years ago, it's obviously a growing psychological issue.

sparrish 5y ago

I can't seem to find the report that is referenced in this article. Anyone got a link?

WarOnPrivacy 5y ago

A final note to this thread I've seen a number of comments criticize the reporting, inferring that it's the press that's generating the fear and confusion here. I think this is in error. The press may be guilty of amplifying FUD but it is obvious that the creation and shape of this particular narrative is from the LAPD. Is the LAT guilty of parroting LEO w/o providing sufficient analysis? That sounds reasonable to me. News orgs republishing Gov/Biz/LEO PR - w/o analysis or related context - happens pretty much every day in every US town. But criticizing the press (again, reasonably) while giving the cops who designed and crafted the FUD a pass - I think this shows us that tribalism is rating higher than fixing broken things.