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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 19, 2026

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Sure, if you want to do it well. My point is that terrorists will likely not care about doing it well. If you already have a 0.5kg bomb with remote detonation, you can simply buy a large quad copter online, then affix it with duct tape. This is insufficient in a competitive environment like Ukraine, but good enough against an unsuspecting target.

Similarly, if I want to build a competitive small arm from the scratch, I could spend a decade and a few 50k$ on CNC machines and might end up with a very shitty Kalashnikov clone firing 3d-printed cartridges with a shitty accuracy (because rifling) and tending to burst the barrel after a few shots without cleaning (because the chemical propellant creates a lot of smoke). However, if you want just something able to propel a projectile at sufficient speed towards an unsuspecting target with a failure probability smaller than 10%, that would be a much smaller project. Buy steel pipe, plug one end, insert black powder, insert projectile, fire with a lighter. Hardly something I would dignify with the word "gunsmithing".