Unintended consequences and sociopaths

Obama is the best gun salesman the industry ever had. Right now he just set off a buying spree of semi-automatic assault weapons. In the next few weeks, any manufacturer who can get a rife in the stores will do so. If a President wanted to get a lot of military grade rifles in civilian hands, this is the way to do it.

Does anyone think it will possible to peaceably remove these guns from the hands of the general public?

Technological advances will soon make the whole thing moot anyway. People have always been able to turn out a machine gun in a good home machine shop. Now designs can be quickly be shared in an open source way to facilitate that process. Machine shops are old school. Check out this video on gun making in Pakistan. It doesn't take a nice new modern factory to turn out perfectly functional guns.

Before long it will be easy to turn out assault rifles on 3D printers. The printers are coming down in price and capability is going up. Of course, it will be illegal to put out your very own assault gun. It's currently illegal to print currency with regular printers, but it happens all the time.

The guns exist. Soon there will a lot more of them out there. Society will have to learn to live with that reality. There are serious problems with such powerful guns falling into the hands of the mentally unstable. We'll have to focus on the people instead of on the guns. That will be unpopular because dealing with people is a lot harder than passing another ineffective gun law.

Focusing on the guns will prove to be a waste of time and money. Really. It's a fact. Perhaps it's an uncomfortable fact, but there you go. It might might make liberals feel good. It will definitely put more guns out there. The NRA will do extremely well. Politicians will make speeches and fire up their base. In the end, sociopaths will still be out there, with tools of destruction at their disposal.


-Sixbears