Alphabet Bois Pt II
It's dead, Jim
It’s not just Grandpa SniffyHair who tends to get just about everything about The Second Amendment wrong, it’s really depressingly common.
Part of the problem is that people have been conditioned to believe that the Bill of Rights grants citizens rights, rather than merely enumerating what were felt to be particularly important rights all people are endowed with by their creator, whomever or whatever that might be. In other words, neither the Constitution nor the Bill of Rights grants you rights, they merely list a few of the more important ones.
This goes back to a fundamental argument that occurred at the country’s formation. Federalist argued that the Constitution did not need a bill of rights because any and all powers not specifically given to the federal government belonged to the people and the states.
The Anti-Federalist, who were against a strong centralized government, felt that without the Bill of Rights to act as a wall and early warning bell against the encroachment of a federal government into the rights of the people, said government would quickly stop respecting anyone’s rights.
Other than the disagreement between the two sides over just how much power the federal government should have, the main argument was over the fear that the Bill of Rights would be seen as exhaustive, granting, rather than enumerating, the rights listed, thus reserving anything not listed as belonging to the government.
It took a couple of centuries or incremental governmental and judicial creep, but this fear has well and truly come to pass.
The Second Amendment has nothing to do with hunting. At the time hunting was an everyday part of most people’s lives, there not being a lot of Walmarts around. Specifically enumerating a right to have weapons so you could hunt would be as absurd as passing an amendment specifying the right to go grocery shopping.
Or, at least, as absurd as doing so would have seemed pre-Covid.
The Second Amendment has nothing to do with self-defense, at least not self-defense between citizens. At the time it was written people were still settling grudges with pistols at sunrise, the idea that anyone would question one’s right to self defense would have probably confused them.
No, these were people who had just taken on the greatest military power of the age and, through determination, guile, and more than a bit of luck, had won. They knew tyranny and knew it would rise again, as it inevitably does, even within the very government they were in the process of creating.
The Second Amendment was a bulwark against that inevitable rise, an insurance policy that would make sure the people could always respond to tyrants as they deserved.
In his famous ‘Tree of liberty’ letter to William Stephens Smith, Jefferson wrote:
And what country can preserve it’s liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is it’s natural manure.
That is what the Second Amendment is about.
Grandpa SniffyHair, and his ilk on both sides of the aisle know it, and, much as they pretend otherwise, fear it, and very much wish to be rid of any need to fear the people.
Good luck with that, jerkwads.
Grandpa SniffyHair wants us to believe that you’d need F-15s and maybe some nukes to stand a chance against his praetorian legions, the same legions that he pulled back with their tail between their legs because 20 years of Duking it out with goat herders armed with 1970s-era AKs got them exactly nowhere.
The problem for Grandpa SniffyHair and his ilk (id est, most politicians and government lackeys) is that while jets and tanks and bombs are great for fighting other jets and tanks and bombs or for turning pieces of countryside into glowing glass parking lots, for pacifying a population, especially if you want to have a country worth ruling afterwords, they’re not so good.
No, pacifying a population and still having peons to rule requires boots on the ground. Lots and lots of boots on the ground. But when anyone those boots harass might have a pistol in their waistband and any door those boots kick down might have a SCAR Heavy behind it, things don’t tend to go well.
When you have that pesky Second Amendment, a population in many areas armed to the teeth and willing to die on that hill — or, more accurately, willing to help anyone seeking to relieve them of rights and arms to die on that hill — well, not even Uncle SniffyHair and company want to go there.
At least not yet.
Enter “gun control”. Not to stop crime — spoiler alert, people committing crimes tend not to pay a lot of attention to laws, kinda by definition. Certainly not to stop two cops in New York from getting yeeted by some fruit loop whilst they were responding to a domestic dispute call.
That shooter was a prohibited possessor (id est, he couldn’t legally buy or own a gun), a felon, on parole, with a stolen weapon and a magazine that is illegal in New York. He was violating at least a dozen laws before the cops arrived, another dozen clearly wasn’t going to make any difference.
Adding the murder of two cops to his resume certainly wasn’t a deal breaker for him.
What laws, exactly, do you intend to add onto the several dozen already violated that would have made a difference?
Well, we need to get those guns off the streets.
Really, now? An illegally possessed long-since stolen gun? You’re going to get it off the streets how, exactly?
Make it more illegaler for someone like him to have it?
Gun control has nothing to do with crime, it has to do with all those firearms out there owned by people who will, if reluctantly, follow the law. It’s an old and effective playbook. You can’t risk trying to outright ban or repeal something, so you gin up lots of mostly made-up statistics to scare the Karens onto your side, push increasingly unreasonable “reasonable controls”, and after a while you’ve got near total control.
Enter Spookie Bois, and the death of gun control.
That picture was taken in 2021 and is of a Burmese rebel fighting against the military junta. The weapon he’s holding is an FGC-9 (the ‘GC’ stands for ‘Gun Control’, I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader to guess at what the ‘F’ stands for), a 9mm PCC (Pistol Caliber Carbine) designed by JSTARK1809, a founding member of Deterrence Dispensed and a legend in the gun world.
In October of 2021, at age 28, JStark was found dead of an apparent heart attack in a parked car just two days after the German Police had again raided his house.
Does anyone know what the German word for Arkancide might be?
The thing about the FGC-9 is that it’s made entirely using parts you can 3D-print, machine yourself at home, or buy at your average hardware store. Even the barrel is home made, created using a fairly simple electro-chemical machining technique.
Good luck controlling that.
The phrase “Ghost Gun” has entered into the politicritter lexicon relatively recently, quickly becoming one of their favorite whipping boys to try and scare voters with. Referred to derisively as Spookie Bois by gun enthusiasts, “Ghost Guns” refers to a nebulous fears of “untraceable firearms”, a term that might make sense if any firearms were traceable in this country.
Hint: they’re not.
As a legal matter, only the frame of a pistol and the lower receiver of a rifle is considered a firearm, and thus these things have to be serialized and transferred through an FFL if manufactured for sale.
This serial number is what politicians mean when they say ‘traceable’, the lack of it makes a firearm ‘untraceable’. The problem is the serial number only tells you where the weapon was shipped to so you can pull a 4473 from the relevant FFL and find out who it was bought by and when. Beyond that, it means nothing. The original owner may be long dead, may have sold it, lost it in a boating accident, thought it destroyed, whatever.
While I don’t doubt it happens, you would have to be very nearly brain dead to use a firearm you legally bought in the commission of a crime, otherwise the serial number means jack-freakin’-squat.
Somewhere along the line some bright soul asked the ATF at what point a chunk of metal or a piece of injection molded plastic becomes a gun. After all, a chunk of aluminum billet can be made into an AR lower, bit it certainly isn’t one when it’s just an unmachined rectangle of metal.
The ATF, for whatever reason, decided that any frame or lower more than 80% completed was a firearm and had to be serialized. Logically, anything less than 80% completed wasn’t a firearm and could be sold as basically a chunk of metal or plastic. Include a jig, some tools and instructions, and you have yourself a thriving business.
A firearm is a machine, and a relatively simple one at that. People have been making their own firearms for basically as long as firearms have existed. It has always been legal in the US to make your own gun for your own use with little or no governmental intrusion. But doing so required quite a bit of very expensive equipment and specialized knowledge.
With 80% lowers, 3D-Printers, and desktop CNC machines, all of that has gone out the window.
The Liberator was the first 3D printed gun. It was relatively crude, but functional, the distant ancestor of the FGC-9. Most designs that followed focused on frames and lowers, the components that were controlled by the government.
The majority of pistols sold today are polymer frame striker fired designs. PLA+ 3D-Printed pistol frames have reached a point where they are nearly as good as, and in some cases better than, the injection molded frames you get when you buy a pistol at a gun store, and for a bare fraction of the price. Slap in a couple of metal supports you can make yourself or buy, a trigger assembly, a slide, barrel, and spring, and you have a pistol that in many cases is better than what you can get from the gun store.
Sans serial number.
Sans the government having any way of even knowing it exists.
Good luck gun controlling that, tyrants.
There are hundreds of designs out there, with more regularly being released. Anyone can download the files, modify the design (or not, as is they’re wont), stick them into a Slicer (a program that turns 3D images into G-code the printer understands), and print them out.
It’s a fast moving field, but one that’s fairly cheap and easy to get started in.
The easiest and cheapest way to get into it is with an FDM (Fused Deposition Modeling) printer. There are a variety of them out there, but some of the most popular are made by Creality, with the Ender 3 (above) being the most popular starter printer and one that’s good enough for most people’s needs. It’s relatively cheap, easy to use, accurate, open source, easily built, modified, and upgraded. You can print a wide variety of pistol frames, magazines, and rifle lowers using it and once you have it fully set up it mostly runs itself.
Beyond that there are resin printers, which I confess I’m not well versed on, and desktop CNC machines like the upcoming Ghost Gunner 3, which can take a bare chunk of aluminum and turn it into an AR lower.
Politicians don’t yet get it, but eventually they’ll have to learn: You Can’t Stop The Signal.
The designs and knowledge are out there, sitting on thousands of computers and archives all over the world. They can be distributed as easily as a QR-Code, there is no way to stop it. There are tens, even hundreds of thousands of Ender 3s out there, let alone all the other printers available. Desktop CNC is advancing at a rapid pace and will soon be nearly as commonplace as 3D printers are. No specialized knowledge is required, just the ability to follow basic instructions.
Anyone can make their own gun, even Burmese Rebels in the middle of bloody nowhere.
Politicritters would love nothing more than for the public to be disarmed so they would never have to fear the people whose lives they would rule into ruin.
It.
Ain’t.
Gonna.
Happen.
Gun control is dead, politicians are just too damn stupid to know it.
