
Things People Don't Get About the Homemade Gun Making Story - masonic
https://reason.com/blog/2018/07/31/3-things-people-dont-get-about-the-homem
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angersock
I don't understand why this hasn't been all over the front-page of HN. This is
_huge_. The article in closing summarizes it neatly:

 _> By eliding what's really at stake here—more a matter of free expression
than any meaningful expansion of the already existing legal ability to make a
gun at home—the states suing, and alas too much of the media, are ginning up
unwarranted fear to expand the government's power to restrict speech, and alas
those states have had at least a temporary success for now._

This is pretty clearly a freedom of speech issue. Knock-on effects of this
would be, for example, removing all of the Wikipedia articles that talk about
how compounds that the government Doesn't Like.

One error the article makes is that this isn't _software_ , this is just
normal CAD documents describing the objects in question.

If we as techies don't stand up for this, we're doing ourselves and future
generations a _huge disservice_.

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craftyguy
> I don't understand why this hasn't been all over the front-page of HN

Probably because the discussion is entirely political, and political
discussions on public forums rarely end well.

> This is pretty clearly a freedom of speech issue

Would you also support someone publishing instructions on building your very
own nuclear weapon? If not, where do you draw the line between 'free speech'
and 'free speech that is very likely to end in tears'?

I'm generally very much against limiting the spread of information, but I
believe there are some things that we humans are not mature enough as a
species to have freely available. Hell, we're not even mature enough when it's
restricted.

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angersock
We _already_ have instructions in widespread circulation about how to build
your own nuclear weapon--the googling for it is pretty trivial.

We're not up to our ears in homebrew nukes because making them is expensive,
and that doesn't change. People have been able to make zipguns for over a
century with nothing more than a few bits of pipe and fittings.

It's queer that merely the idea of knowing how to do something should be so
distressing to policymakers.

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craftyguy
> We already have instructions in widespread circulation about how to build
> your own nuclear weapon

AFAIK (without enough searching to land on a no-fly/watch list), those
instructions are at a very high level and are not enough to produce a working
bomb without further extensive research/experimentation. That at least
accounts for some of the 'expensive' part, getting appropriate fuel being the
other portion.

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jasongill
Not to be pedantic, but 20 years ago the idea of having a microwave sized
device on your desk that could make anything you wanted out of plastic seemed
so impossible that someone could have (and probably did!) published firearm
CAD files online and people would have laughed it off as well.

I wonder if in the future we will think back to this comment and say "man, we
were so short sided to not recognize the emerging hobby of home nuclear
fission!"

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craftyguy
You do bring up an interesting point, but I think there's a key difference
between posting instructions that require unavailable/unproven technologies
and technology that is widespread. If I posted plans on how to build a warp
drive, it probably won't enable you to build a warp drive, even in the
theoretical future when the necessary materials/technologies might exist.

There's also a key difference between uncontrolled fission and controlled
fission. Both are bad for your health if you are too close, but one of them is
immediately bad for your entire neighborhood/district/city.

