Yeah been a long-time gun meme of people making batches of pipe-guns from Home Depot or 3D printing Liberators or whatever, all of which can be made for maybe $25 or less, and then trading them in for $200 gift cards or whatever. Surprising that someone got away with doing it for thousands of dollars, apparently. Sounds kinda made-up to me to be honest like officers running the event would get wise to the con. Or maybe they didn’t care.
But clearly it’s a bad incentive to say “we’ll pay you a lot of money for unregistered, homemade guns” when you can then legally(?) go and manufacture unregistered homemade guns for a few bucks each and little actual human effort.
It’s literally just printing money.
The attempt to close the loophole by saying it has to be multi-shot, well, for now that seems like it’ll work. And the ability for officers to use some judgement about the situation to adjust the prize amount is the real ‘common sense’ sort of move. But cheaply made semi-auto homebrew firearms are getting more and more common, and capable, and ultimately those will also be cheap to make (even if they don’t quite work good, so do some factory made firearms)
In some sense we have to respect that the awesome maker movement, the one I consider myself part of and has brought a lot of great things, has given all these creators who can make killer cosplay kit, the tools to make killer cosplay kit.
And meanwhile we can see those types of skills playing out in conflicts today, with inventive students making hell cannons and tanks in the middle east. And young folks getting called up into national defense corps and figuring out how to turn common quad-copters into personalized mortar delivery drones.
The difference in those cases of course is the context, and the social acceptance and impetus behind such ‘creative’ applications of their skills. And of course I have to acknowledge that the proliferation and availability of actual munitions to defense forces in a warzone is what differentiates someone being able to make a drone into an effective battlefield weapon vs a curious kid making a theoretical proof of concept toy, one that can only drop at best a firecracker. In the relatively safe and civil world, removed from the threat of bomb and missile strike, we rightly should want to prevent a preponderance of those curious kids from causing more mischief.
Still this all highlights that firearms technology, old as it is, is out there. And the tools that make most things be the same tools used to make firearms both recreationally and professionally. The device that can contain and direct the projectile is well within the means of anyone with a modicum of motivation or even passing interest to make. And it is the object which many covet and are interested in. So the technology and know-how will continue to expand.
The key then, IMO, is the ordinance. A million crates of AK-47s are so much paperweight and wall decoration without an ammunition supply. A drone is a drone until you strap a soviet mortar shell to a 3D printed release mechanism. Then it’s a precision strike weapon. The kids who are into guns aren’t getting off on having exotic and interesting ammo.
I still have a few rifles from my days when I was more into them. I have maybe a handful of rounds of ammo leftover from then. I still like the guns, they’re neat specimens. No interest in giving them up. Yet a state law requiring us to do the most trivial work to get the basic permit to be able to buy ammo, was enough for me to go ‘eh, I’m good.’ I have not bothered in something like 8 years to actually go get that simple permit. And so I haven’t bothered to get more ammo. (Also I’m not making a ton of money and ammo isn’t exactly cheap. So there’s that.)
