channel12 wrote:In America AR15 uppers have no serial numbers but the lowers have to have seriall numbers put on by the manufacturer. You can buy an upper ie barrel and bolt group put it on a home made unserialised lower and you have a ghost gun
Yeah I know that - but the point is - why is this ghost gun, made with the DD Ghost Mill - even newsworthy, given that the above (your bit) has been the case since forever......
indeed - 80% lowers have been around an awful lot longer the Def Dist, and there are in fact groups in California where they meet up to share the tooling and experience to make said lowers - and again have been for a very long time (no doubt other locations).
So again - why all the fuss about ghost guns now? It's always been possible????
3D printing is a very interesting emerging technology but has very restrictive limits with regards to cost, accuracy, durability and accessibility. Interesting things will happen in time with them, and I'm looking at building one, but they are not like your £40 Epson inkjet you can get from Argos. The process for making an AR15 lower is not simply "buy, plug in, print, assemble, shoot". The main practical advantage they offer is that they require less skill to produce a design. That has lead to a lot of their popularity in the "maker" community IMO -- people who haven't learned hands-on skills and can't be bothered to learn them. I see it in electronics side of the "maker" community too; people buying Arduino boards for a task that would be better served with a cheaper, more reliable and physically smaller discrete circuit.
As I recall, don't 3D-printed AR15 lowers have a very limited longevity? Something in the region of 200 rounds. Not exactly earth-shattering when you look at some of the "0% lower" productions from the hobby gunsmiths.
As I'm sure we're all aware a basic SMG is available to anyone with basic metalworking skills, plumbing parts, the tools found in the average garden shed and a spare weekend. Crude .22RF pistols used to be made by crooks from telescoping radio antennae jubilee clipped onto a piece of wood. Mao Mao rebels built slam-fire shotguns from plumbing pipe. All of these are "ghost guns". They are less visible than the featured AR15 due to not having to buy the parts from Brownells, and arguably have a similar longevity.
Building an AK takes some level of practical knowledge, whereas the CNC machine in a box that the journalist used requires the same amount of knowledge as it takes to load an OS onto a laptop. Something almost anybody can do and a project that appeals more to the demographic of Wired blogazine.
All DD are doing is inviting further restrictions, I'm pretty sure they're an "anti" group really. They're not just skirting round the rules, they're actively, and aggressively, publicising what they do. Even going as far as selling a machine to show off.
Eventually the U.S. Gov't will get fed up and start restricting uppers, barrels or bolts. Then DD will start moaning about their loss of profits... I mean liberty..
Demonic69 wrote:All DD are doing is inviting further restrictions, I'm pretty sure they're an "anti" group really. They're not just skirting round the rules, they're actively, and aggressively, publicising what they do. Even going as far as selling a machine to show off.
Eventually the U.S. Gov't will get fed up and start restricting uppers, barrels or bolts. Then DD will start moaning about their loss of profits... I mean liberty..
On the US forums I frequent it is the "Libtard Fag" (their words,not mine) that wrote the article that's getting the flak.
