:rolleyes:I’ve posted this before, and I’ll post it again:
We can have all the draconian punishments we want on the books. If they are not applied they mean absolutely dick!
My example for this is armed robbery. Carries a max penalty of 40 years. Offenders rarely get 10% of that. A shitbag might think twice about holding up a gas station if he actually thought he’d spend the next 40 years locked up. But seeing the average is about 36 months they don’t think about it at all. The penalty could be a zillion years. If judges don’t apply it it doesn’t even matter.
Wired has an interesting article on the subject of 3D printing. It explains the recent surge in popularity (expired patents) and why it won’t grow as fast as computer technology. It briefly touches on guns.
I highly doubt this actually matters to criminals. They assume they won’t get caught, and if so, hey, free room and board for the foreseeable future. These people are desperate, and not good with math or thinking ahead.
Is there any evidence anywhere that incarceration periods correlate with reduced crime rates? And I don’t mean “there are fewer murders than robberies”. I mean, if the average prison sentence for a particular crime goes up, does the rate of that particular crime go down? Has that ever been shown?
Yes, but the studies tend to be skewed one way or another to reflect the agenda of those presenting the study.
But common sense does dictate that a thug can’t assault or kill a convenience store clerk during a robbery if he’s still locked up for a burglary he was convicted of years ago. I stick by my insistance that the increase in tax payer dollars to keep such scum locked up is minute’ compared to the expense of law enforcement, courts, and jailing of the same person over and over and over again in our revolving door justice system. Not to mention the human suffering such dirtbags inflict upon others between their times of incarceration.
Assuming we really had 3-D printers that could print out weapons roughly as good as normal manufacturing methods, we’d be talking about a situation where anyone who just knew how to punch a few buttons could print out a copy of a machine gun if they felt like it. That’s a lot easier than making a weapon with tools.
I bet the opposite. Many more people have $8000 to spend on pricey toys than have “access” to machine shops, especially if by “access” you include the skills to use all the equipment and build what they want.
What makes you presume that price is set for all time?
And I expect a criminal would find it easier to grab $8000 dollars (or just steal the machine itself) than to get machinist training and the equipment to go with it.
True, but a criminal will find it far easier to just get or steal a gun, and then they’ll have a far better gun that won’t fall apart or explode after a few shots. 3D printing is still very far from being the cheapest or easiest path for a criminal to get a gun.
It’s a long way from that. 3-D printing and fashioning a gun like this isn’t quite as easy as just pushing a button, you’ll need some technical expertise and experience. It’s easier than machining something sure, but machining a weapon you can actually create a rudimentary and reusable firearm. While the population of people who can machine their own firearms is small, the truth is there is actually probably a lot of overlap between that population and people who even know what a 3D printer is, and how to actually use one and get everything just right.
Right now it’s a fairly inconvenient and very expensive way to make the world’s shittiest, single shot firearm that has a decent chance of exploding during use and will almost certainly catastrophically fail after a few uses.
But you are correct about why some people fear this, eventually the technology will most likely mature. What is probably scaring people more about this weapon is it is almost entirely plastic. You could actually loud up some equipment with pre-set plans for machining metal as well which could produce a much more dangerous gun, I’d assume eventually that sort of thing will be done as cheaply and as easily as 3-D printing as well.
that was my thinking. A hobbyist milling machine and a chunk of plastic. There was even a movie about someone who built such a gun to get past security to do evil things (insert hero at last possible moment).
