> argued that the potential increase in accessibility of ghost guns presents “a serious threat to public safety” and noted that the weapons have been linked to several mass shootings.
This reasoning is completely irrelevant as the law in question concerns international arms trafficking, not availability of guns to domestic criminals.
Nor did this ruling have anything to do with the Second Amendment or its interpretation. The question was whether or not guns could be exported from the country via the Internet. The State Department exercised its unilateral foreign policy prerogative to remove these prints from the US Munitions List as part of its role in implementing arms treaties. Other state and federal laws regulate who can actually make these guns and what they can do with them.
What a lot of people don't understand is that these are freedom of speech concerns, not second amendment concerns.
As an aside, it is already legal in the US to manufacture your own gun at home. There are countless sources of information in printed form that show you how to do that -- gun manufacture for personal use is 100% unregulated by any existing federal law and, as of 2018, in states other than California (Updated - see https://www.criminaldefenselawyer.com/resources/homemade-gun....). It is the sale and distribution of guns that is regulated at the Federal level, and in states other than California.
The issue here is whether the state department can take down websites that show instructions for gun manufacturing, whereas no one is arguing that printed books with the same information would be subject to similar bans. But something about the internet makes a lot of regulatory bodies think that freedom of publication and prohibitions on prior restraint just don't apply there, and this ruling is one small step to setting that straight.
"Because the Undetectable Firearms Act makes illegal any firearm that cannot be detected by a metal detector, every firearm must contain some amount of metal. This means that a plastic 3D printed firearm must have a metal plate inserted into the printed body"
If you're running a gun without a metal chamber, you're probably going to have a bad time (unless it's a very small caliber such as .22LR). I would argue that if you're going to require metal in a gun at all, might as well require it to be the chamber to prevent catastrophic failures.
It's definitely not 100% unregulated to produce your own firearm in the United States. It can be very very illegal to do so and it's a really dangerous piece of advice to be giving a bunch of hackers. You must obey state and municipal laws regarding your eligibility to own a firearm at all. The firearm itself must be legal according to your state law. In the entire country, you must apply to the DOJ for a serial number before completion of the firearm and you must have it permanently engraved or imprinted upon the receiver or a piece of embedded steel.
> In the entire country, you must apply to the DOJ for a serial number before completion of the firearm
This is incorrect and is itself "bad advice". You do not need a serial number from the DOJ if you are not selling. But as has been stated in the comments, CA does have more stringent local rules and I'll update my comment to reflect that. I also added a link that explains the situation.
You're correct on the facts here as they relate to federal law-- I was reacting to the post's previous mention that firearm manufacture for personal use was 100% unregulated by any existing law. You've since edited it to be much more accurate and my comment isn't necessary.
The serial number part of this comment is only true if you want to sell a firearm you've made. If you built it for yourself undersized is perfectly fine (at the national level).
You also only have to apply for anything unless you become a manufacturer.
In California you have to buy serial numbers from the government, even if the manufacturing is just for personal use. There's also laws that make it illegal to make guns out of certain materials, and any pistol/handgun is basically required to be single shot/bolt action.
"Ghost gun" is an extremely loaded term. It's built on the premise that authorities should approve and track firearm ownership, as if it is a privilege and not a right. It makes discussions very difficult. (Similarly, it would be difficult to discuss this if the headline referred to the DOJ as "the fun police".)
A neutral term would be "blueprints for 3d printable firearms".
Exactly. "Ghost gun" is a political term used for political purposes. Making guns at home is legal in the US. It just has to be detectable in a metal detector according to federal law.
Why is it "loaded"? Is there no precise definition of that term?
> It's built on the premise that authorities should approve and track firearm ownership
Assuming the definition would be "A gun without serial numbers, that cannot be easily tracked", as Wiktionary tells me, I don't see how that supposed premise is connected to it. To my knowledge, historically, weapons manufacturers marked their products regardless of the involvement of the authorities.
This story seems complicated - could someone correct my understanding if it's incorrect?
From the article:
* In 2015, federal courts stated that plans for weapons posted online needed State Department approval (I assume this is referred to as "export controlled weapons"?).
* In 2018, the State Department settled a lawsuit by ordering the removal of these plans from the list of export-controlled weapons?
* Directly after this settlement, 22 states (and D.C.) sued to keep those plans on the list of export-controlled weapons.
* In 2021, the State Department upheld their decision to remove the plans from the "export-controlled weapons" list.
>* In 2021, the State Department upheld their decision to remove the plans from the "export-controlled weapons" list.
>the appellate panel found 2-1 that a 1989 federal law prohibits courts from overruling the State Department’s decision to add or remove a weapon from the Munitions List
nit: As I understand it, they didn't uphold the decision, they decided the courts had no say in the matter, and could not overrule even if they wanted to.
Which makes the dissenting judge's opinion a little concerning, because he seems to have been trying a different decision making process -- the courts should have a say, because he wanted to have a say in the matter.
but I'm basing this on the one quote from the article.
I really don't see 3D-printed firearms as a threat. It requires expensive, specialized equipment and days of patience to produce a product that is almost universally inferior to a length of pipe, a block of wood, and a nail. Everything one needs to create an improvised firearm is available cheaper and with less scrutiny at the hardware store.
Despite all the fight over distributing models for this junk, Defense Distributed also currently sells a genuinely dangerous CNC product[0] that is designed to automatically mill out so-called 80% receivers.
If you're not familiar with U.S. firearm law, the part of a gun that's legally considered a "firearm" is the frame or "receiver" that houses the other components. If you sell or produce one of these frames, you are selling or producing a firearm, whether it's made of plastic or metal. Companies get around this by selling incomplete receivers that still require machining, and Defense Distributed sells everything you need to finish the receiver and commit the felony yourself.
I don't actually know if there's actually any evidence of crimes (beyond production) committed with completed receivers but what I do know is that it has much more potential to create an actually reliable and dangerous firearm than 3D printing.
You can finish an AR-15 80% lower with commonly available hand tools in a few minutes. I don't see how the CNC machine that automates this procedure is somehow "dangerous". It's just a smaller, cheaper, and more specialized variant of a regular CNC machine which anyone could already buy.
You're 100% correct-- I believe it's more legally dangerous to those purchasing it than physically dangerous. It just lowers the barrier of entry and creates a frictionless path where someone buys a bunch of products, combines them in the way they were intended and they commit a felony and get a reliable firearm. When combined with the rhetoric that doing so is patriotic or in support of your rights it becomes worrying.
It sounds more frictioned if anything. Both would be pretty simple detective work. "Shooter had gun and ammo. Shooter bought from Bob's Guns. Case closed." vs "Shooter purchased receiver, ghost gunner, guncotton, loading bench, cases and primers, and prefabricated bullets/lead and casts. Case closed."
Also ability to get ammunition. Black powder is easy to make but it's dirty and modern smokeless powder is more difficult. Never mind percussion caps. Without ammunition guns aren't much good, no matter how they are made.
There are a couple fairly recent designs for 3D printed guns that are useful weapons, certainly better than the pipe-wood-and-nail arrangement. For example, the Washbear PM522 and the Liberator 12K shotgun.
But as another poster pointed out, ammunition is a completely different matter and is really the gating factor in all of this.
You're right, I was hyperbolizing somewhat, and I honestly hadn't looked into either of those designs closely before. The Liberator12K looks like it uses a steel barrel, which makes sense. I'm surprised the PM522 works as well as it does but I guess if any fully plastic design is going to work halfway decently, it would be a .22 Revolver.
I'm curious what regulations (if any) exist for the parts you need to complete a ghost gun. Surely some parts can't be plastic for a gun that shoots more than once.
The part of the firearm that is considered the gun, legally speaking, is the lower receiver. And a lower receiver can be used in a functioning firearm. In Europe, they don't regulate lower receivers but the parts of the weapon which bear pressure.
However, it is possible to manufacture these parts yourself - look up the FGC-9.
There are totally plastic designs for small calibers intended to shoot only a few times.
Then there's stuff like the FGC-9, with it's home made ECM barrel. Which was designed primarily for areas like europe where other firearm precursor parts are hard to get a hold of. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1Z9DpoGW7Y
At least for the AR-15 platform (the weapons pictured in the article), only the part that bears the serial number is regulated. Everything else can be bought freely and legally. For the AR-15, that part is the lower receiver.
The only part that is actually considered a firearm under federal regulations is the lower receiver, so it is the only item that is controlled and requires paperwork. Everything else (with the exception of prohibited or specifically regulated items such as suppressors) is a generally available component that does not require the ATF to approve the purchase. Laws state to state on other components may vary, such as magazine capacity.
There's still a lot of ways the ATF can show up and shoot your dog if you pick the wrong components and put them together without paying $200 and waiting half an eternity.
The question, though, wasn’t whether ATF agents might interpret the regulations one way or another, but what the regulations are. Millions of people purchase legal and freely available components for their legal firearm with a serial number, and do not run afoul of the law. As soon as we are talking about components or firearms requiring a NFA tax stamp we’re in a different category though.
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I think it's time we revisit the commonly applied interpretations of the First and Second Amendments and see of there's a way to better balance exercise of individual rights against public safety. Perhaps if/when the Supreme Court gets expanded, some less absolutist rulings can be handed down.
The First and Second Amendments don’t grant you the right to free speech and to bear arms. Being born a human being is where those rights come from. The amendments simply proscribe the government from infringement upon them. Not a hundred SCOTUS judges, not a thousand, not a million of them will change that.
Billions of people have been born human and never been able to exercise such rights without facing repercussions, so ... claiming inalienability yet not accounting for the effective and de facto removal of them for the majority of the human experience seems like nothing more than an exercise in empty rhetorical tricks.
I believe that the idea that they are something anyone is naturally entitled to by God or nature is a rhetorical trick. Specifically, one employed to discount the value of a strong, functional government. I believe that the state of nature outside of that exposes the shallowness of "inalienability."
I believe they are something you have to continually fight for, and that can only be secured by a functional government (which itself is something that requires constant maintenance), vs something you can truly secure for yourself.
And in the particular case of the second amendment, I believe we are in a situation where a "right" granted by our constitution impairs on a right to live freely, free from interference and harm from others, that I personally consider more basic and more essential. The Constitution doesn't have an amendment discussing a right to not get shot, but I don't think that makes it less important.
So why not? Why don't I have a right to not be killed by my fellow man? Why is it MORE IMPORTANT that my fellow man have a right to possess and carry weapons that could end my life?
How is the latter "inalienable" and the former is just wishful thinking? The only answer I can find is "because some people in the 18th century wrote one of them down, but not the other."
Wow, talking of rhetorical tricks. In this case, a textbook false dilemma.
The right to bear arms does not negate whatever right to safety you think you have. There are 300 million privately owned firearms in the US. Yet the odds of dying from a firearm homicide are quite small.
And the fun trick here is that "quite small" is meaningless, you would need to compare those odds against those in different countries with different laws...
Think through the implications. Hypothetically if you had the right to not be killed then that would imply that others would be required to do everything possible to protect you. Obviously that would be absurd.
Flagged for no good reason, so I will post it again, because I think it deserves a reply:
You are endorsing human rights abuses by oppressive governments like the Khmer Rouge because that government didn't extend the right to freedom from persecution to their subjects. You are suggesting that it was the Cambodian people's fault for not having a better government that granted them more rights.
This just seems to exemplify the purely-rhetorical aspect of the whole conversation about "natural rights."
"The government didn't extend the right to freedom from persecution" could be worded in any number of ways, such as "the government infringed on the inalienable rights of the people" but the fact that such an atrocity was committed says, to me, that claiming such rights are inherent, natural, or inalienable is rather useless. They clearly can be very easily violated. God or nature is not going to stop the violators, at least not during this life. So what good to the victims is a claim that the rights are inherent and a natural result of being born as a human?
Here is a different question - what makes it an atrocity? You could be technically correct and say "Because other people decided it." but that doesn't give any insight into why.
A natural rights framework has the thumbprint of a lawyer along with outmodedly telological way of thinking that can only see a wrong as a "crime" but is willing to construct justifications for what they already believe.
But mixed in the principles isn't just accepting "is wrong because I said so" as a proof. Thus it has contrived post hoc cruft to achieve consistency with assumptions but also underlying ethical principles.
You just admitted that it was an atrocity however. That implies the people who were killed had their rights violated. Your concept of rights granted by the government to the people is not self-consistent.
That's not a definition of atrocity that I'm familiar with. We could extend this to quibble about the definitions of evil, cruel, what have you, as well, but it's a wide diversion at this point. "Nature does not guarantee you anything" is not "there is no such thing as moral right or wrong."
Let's ask a different question: if there are inalienable rights, what is the complete set? Do you expect everyone to agree on what that set of rights is? If one person doesn't believe that guns are one of those, and another does, how do you break that tie? If there is truly a certain set of rights that's a law of nature, should everyone converge on the same set?
My point is that it is virtually impossible to establish the concept of wrongdoing without the notion of certain innate rights having been violated.
Each person has their belief of what they hold to be human rights. As human beings, it is the duty of each of us to protect what we respectively believe to be the rights of our fellow human beings.
It is perhaps the single most fundamental aspect of American culture. Though of course, certain people want to subvert that principle in order to aggregate power for themselves and their interest groups. I hope they eventually see the light and embrace America, or meet the same end as the redcoats.
The Declaration of Independence doesn't claim rights are derived from human nature, but that "certain inalienable rights" are "Endowed by [a] Creator."
So I guess that solves it. We can have all the guns we want because God said so.
The Declaration of Independence isn't part of the U.S. Constitution. The words "god" or "creator" don't appear in the Constitution or Bill of Rights that I'm aware of. It seems quite secular.
Thanks, that's what I was getting at if I was unclear. It predates the Constitution by more than a decade, with an abandoned Articles of Confederation in the middle.
It's historically important, but not legally meaningful when talking about the later US Constitution of 1789.
"Human rights" are a fiction, like money. The libertarian idea is that we collectively pretend human rights are real because doing so leads to empirically better outcomes in terms of human happiness, lack of suffering, etc.
So here's a question: has the absolutist interpretation of free speech and gun rights currently applied in the USA led to better outcomes than a more restricted interpretation? Well, let's see. We can compare the USA to other liberal democracies which do not acknowledge a near-absolute right to free speech, and have very strict gun laws -- like Germany, Canada, and New Zealand just to pick three. And if we do we find the USA is a dumpster fire compared to those countries, a place where white supremacism has run amok and schools must have active-shooter drills because of the ease with which nuts can get their hands on firearms.
So yeah, I'd say the more restrictive interpretation of human rights has, empirically, won out.
We have ways of changing the constitution. If there was support for these changes, it could be done, as it is it won't happen because there is not enough support for what you are saying. Any other method of subverting the constitution is wrong would violate the "contract" we have with our government... only bad things can result.
And yet the reason we have the interpretation of the second amendment we have today comes down to a small panel of people ruling at a particular moment in time.
Do you think you could pass an amendment expanding the second amendment had the court ruled more narrowly on it? I don't.
It's a thin line of interpretation currently, so we shouldn't pretend that there's overwhelming support for the status quo either. The reason these court challenges happen in the first place has been because large groups of Americans have chosen to try to restrict guns.
So let's keep having the conversation until we decide to fix the constitution.
Well I am talking about all the bill of rights, not just the 2nd amendment but ya the SC has upheld the 2nd and is incorporated under the 14th. Sometimes I feel like we are getting gaslighted by people wanting to curb the 1st and 2nd amendments by saying they don't mean what they plainly say they mean.
> so we shouldn't pretend that there's overwhelming support for the status quo either.
I never said there was overwhelming support, I just said that there was a process in place to change if we want to. I don't like underhandedness, if enough people want to "fix" or eliminate the 2A, then someone one ought to propose a new amendment plainly stating as such and see how well that goes.
There is one other point I wanted to bring up. The 2A was designed to protect the people/states from the Federal Govt. so it was sort a "check" on Govt. power. So I do find wrong to think that the Judicial Branch of the Federal Govt. can have the power to remove this check unilaterally. This is a bit like if one branch decided another branch of government could be dissolved. Or even if one branch decided to not follow the rules (like a siting Pres. deciding an election is invalid...). Anyway, just saying that I think the only legitimate way to alter/remove the 2A would be for amendment driven by 2/3 states method or _maybe_ through congress since they are supposed to represent the people.
The current, absolutist interpretation of the First Amendment came about in 1969, as a result of a Supreme Court ruling. Before that, Congress had considerably more leeway in restricting speech, and freely did so starting with the Alien and Sedition Acts.
We're living in an era where foreign states are running disinformation campaigns that swing elections. I think it's time we start thinking about putting the Brandenburg v. Ohio genie back in the bottle.
So we should destroy democracy to save it then? Democracy without freedom of expression can only be described as manipulated at best.
The Alien and Sedition Acts outright caused an election of somebody in jail whose defense can be paraphrased as "yeah I wrote it but this law is clearly unconstitutional bullshit". It wasn't fit for its stated purpose.
The most extensive 2A ruling from the Supreme Court to date is DC v. Heller. The majority opinion has the following bit in it:
> Although we do not undertake an exhaustive historical analysis today of the full scope of the Second Amendment, nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.
As well as:
> We also recognize another important limitation on the right to keep and carry arms. Miller said, as we have explained, that the sorts of weapons protected were those “in common use at the time.” ... We think that limitation is fairly supported by the historical tradition of prohibiting the carrying of “dangerous and unusual weapons.”
Are you seriously claiming that this is an "absolutist" interpretation?
Refraining from packing the court is one of the very last truces still in place just barely holding the country together by a thread.
I truly wonder what you suppose the marginal odds are that you or someone you love is killed in an event that your proposed action would prevent, vs the marginal odds that you or someone you love is killed as a somewhere-down-the-line butterfly effect of your trying to take that action?
You don't understand. The party that packs the court should have enough votes to make sure they never lose power again. If the party in power packs the court, what's going to happen is the other half of the country will just declare the federal government illegitimate and form their own.
The law has a solution for this. Portions of DC can and have been given back to the states. Frankly I think they should give the bulk of the "residential and normal city" areas of DC back to MD.
Perhaps we need to lock everybody down and forbid them to leave their own homes, so that we can take stock of the situation and figure out what's going on.
Hypothetical scenario: Donald Trump's political career miraculously comes back to life in 2024 and he is elected president. He does just as you propose and expands the supreme court with justices of his choosing, and curtails the first and second ammendments.
> Hypothetical scenario: Donald Trump's political career miraculously comes back to life in 2024 and he is elected president. He does just as you propose and expands the supreme court with justices of his choosing, and...
Forget what he does. In this scenario, do you still support expanding the Supreme Court?
Absolutely not, and that's the point. People are only considering this right now because it happens to be politically advantageous in the short term. It is incredibly reckless to subvert rights and institutions for political goals like that, and no amount of whataboutism can change that.
Absolutely. What it will do is destroy forever the independence of the Supreme Court. That is far to high a price to pay for temporary political advantage, for either side. (Which is not to say that somebody won't try...)
I might vote for Trump if he promised to fight against the second amendment. Enough lives have been lost because of our desire to potentially be heroes in a hypothetical uprising. The second amendment has been ineffective against so many government abuses to date, and enabled so much citizen violence. Nice idea to try, shame it didn't work, time to fix it.
Why not just live in a state with more strict gun laws and let people of other states live like they want? As someone in the rural US, guns are part of my heritage. Police response times can be 40+ minutes in non-urban areas, and removing legal guns would just make us vulnerable.
So we're in agreement that regional cultural differences need to be embraced and allowed in the legal system. Good! Now what do we need to do to make this a reality in our justice system?
I'm actually NOT convinced that such differences should be allowed, but given that you ARE: you should change the constitution - or the members of the courts interpreting it - to allow my state to restrict guns, because right now the claim is that such a thing violates the second amendment.
What are you talking about? States have been running wild passing unconstitutional gun laws for over a decade. All the Supreme Court has said on the 2nd amendment is the feds and states can't ban weapons in common use, specifically handguns - yet California has completely IGNORED this via it's handgun "roster" which is deliberately designed as a slow motion handgun ban. And you can't blame Republicans either - they have no power to stop California (which has a D supermajority) from passing gun laws.
"Over a decade" because pre-2008 it was much more of an open question what "constitutional" meant re: gun laws, no? Hence my claim of erosion: one party decided that their interpretation was now the law of the land, overruling what the populations of certain cities and states might want.
1) That's not the CDC. Not even a little bit. You linked to an incubator at Harvard which links to a document produced in response to an executive order and whose suggested citation credits the National Academies of Sciences, a nonprofit, nongovernmental organization. The chain went Barack Obama -> CDC -> Institute of Medicine (a subset of the NAS) -> A committee. At no point did the CDC adopt or endorse this report.
2) Following the trail of sources from the link you provide eventually gets you to https://www.nap.edu/read/18319/chapter/3?term=defen#15 which repeatedly states "the exact number remains disputed" and "is a controversy in the field." The document does not endorse ANY particular figure, and provides 108k, 500k, and 3M as estimates produced by surveys. There is no discussion of the validity or reliability of these surveys in this cursory overview; given that the numbers remain controversial and disputed I expect that both these properties are wanting. All the estimates come from academic sources, not governmental entities.
This reasoning is completely irrelevant as the law in question concerns international arms trafficking, not availability of guns to domestic criminals.
Nor did this ruling have anything to do with the Second Amendment or its interpretation. The question was whether or not guns could be exported from the country via the Internet. The State Department exercised its unilateral foreign policy prerogative to remove these prints from the US Munitions List as part of its role in implementing arms treaties. Other state and federal laws regulate who can actually make these guns and what they can do with them.