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Thought experiment: Set aside the 2nd and 4th amendments for a second. Suppose the United Stated banned civilian firearms, all of them. No manufacture, no sales, no ownership. All citizens must surrender their guns to the authorities. Anyone who has ever posted a gun on social media gets their house searched for contraband. Children are taught in school about the importance of turning in their parents if there are guns in the home. What does the murder rate look like in Chicago a year later? How about 10 years later? Surely you concede that there would be less mass shootings in the USA, how would random 20-year-olds be getting access to weapons after a generation of total control?
I mean,
See my other post about conservatively estimating that we could expect around 50,000 LEO casualties in trying to enforce a gun confiscation program.
PLUS the fact that guns can be 3D printed now, so it's not sufficient to confiscate those already in circulation.
I might concede this if you concede we would probably see an increase in vehicular-based massacres
Since nothing in your hypothetical has actually dealt with the issues that make mass shooters want to kill people, we have full reason to expect many of them will merely shift methods.
And if we accept the idea, for arguments sake, that we could toss out our civil rights in the name of achieving lower crime, then maybe the example of El Salvador represents a much MORE EFFECTIVE path we could follow to achieve a similar impact on violent crime.
So perhaps it looks really suspicious to zero in on the Second Amendment and impacting the rights of huge swaths of peaceful citizens in your zeal to bring down the crime rate, when there are readily conceivable alternatives that are less intrusive?
Thought experiment: let's just ignore the fourth and fifth amendment and massively incarcerate the most violent members of Chicago's population. What does the murder rate in Chicago look like a year later?
I flat-out do not believe this. At most you would get about 10 LEO deaths on the first day, and then the military gets called in to put down the insurrection. Rules of engagement are always optional. "There is absolutely no difficulty in using any level of the American security forces against the barbarians."
Can you 3D print gunpowder?
I do concede that. The standard economic result is that when one good is banned, some of that demand goes towards a substitute good, but not enough to completely make up for it. I would expect the new rate of vehicular massacres to be somewhere between the current rate, and the current rate + the gun massacre rate. I also suspect that "massacre-prevention software" would soon become standard on cars if this became an issue.
Oh, I am absolutely not advocating for large-scale gun confiscation. I am simply pointing out that it is both possible to do, and that it would achieve it's primary goal of reducing gun murders (and murders in general).
I think @gattsuru or Beej once pointed to a furry who had figured out how to make guncotton at home all electrochemically and such, so...sort of, yes.
Cathode_G does also have a non-corrosive primer (as above, link has no nudity, but be prepared for furry porn elsewhere on his feed) recipe, though most disposable guns in a highly restricted regime will probably just stick with the corrosive but dead-simple matchhead.
Primers are also kinda like the lye in cathode_g's guncotton formula; they have too many industrial and home uses to effectively ban. Even China still has them in common use for construction. If you don't want to bother with chemistry or corrosive primers, there's literally millions of these things out there.
Brass cases are obnoxious, but I'm not convinced they're the right decision rather than the available one. SuckBoyTony's done some interesting things with manufacturing polymer cases, and there's a lot of design space ignoring cases entirely that's largely unexplored because it makes so little sense these days. If you're custom-casting and electroplating bullets in mass, you could start experimenting with wacky designs like the Daisy V/L, Activ-style shells, or gyrojets, or truly caseless ammo... but unless you have absolutely no access to spent brass, it's mostly just coming up with new ways and reasons for the ATF to shoot your dog.
What I see is the goals changing whenever he fills it. First it was gunpowder, then it was primers, and then it was casings, now it is casings that are direct analogs for modern ammunition. What is next, anti-tank rockets?
Concerning brass casings through, it isn't as deniable but any machinist puts together far more complicated presses than what is needed for a punching and drawing brass casings.
Even launchers* can be 3D-printed now.
*(Not the rockets themselves, mind you, though I once saw a video about making rocket motors at home out of sugar and kitty litter.)
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