Wired Wets Its Pants Over New Home Gun Manufacturing Technology

Published under creative commons

To say the mainstream media is hostile to guns is a lot like saying Rosie O’Donnell gets a bit excited by the concept of an all-you-can-eat ice cream buffet. That is to say, it’s a gross understatement.

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Even technology publications like Wired aren’t immune, despite very little of their niche having anything to do with guns. Further, what parts of their niche that do involve guns are the parts you would think would geek out about new technology being used to do cool things.

Of course, you’d be wrong.

FOR THE PAST five years, Cody Wilson has applied every possible advance in digital manufacturing technology to the mission of undermining government attempts at gun control. First he created the world’s first 3-D printed gun, a deadly plastic weapon anyone could print at home with a download and a few clicks. Then he started selling a computer-controlled milling machine designed to let anyone automatically carve out the body of an untraceable AR-15 from a semifinished chunk of aluminum, upgrading his provocations from plastic to metal. Now his latest advance in home firearm fabrication allows anyone to make an object designed to defy the most basic essence of gun control: A concealable, untraceable, and entirely unregulated metal handgun.

Wow. Right from the start, we can see this will be a reasonable, focused article about new tech that allows people to do something cool at home.

The fact that people have been able to do this at home for decades is never mentioned.

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Let’s see if it gets any better, shall we?

On Sunday, Wilson’s gun rights advocacy group, Defense Distributed, announced a new release of software for his computer-controlled milling machine known as the Ghost Gunner. The new code allows the 1-foot-cubed tabletop machine—which uses a spinning bit to carve three-dimensional shapes with minute precision—to not only produce untraceable bodies of AR-15s but to carve out the aluminum frame of an M1911 handgun, the popular class of semiautomatic pistols that includes the Colt 45 and similar weapons. Wilson says he plans to follow up soon with software for producing regulation-free Glocks and other handgun models to follow.

Wilson’s goal now, he says, is to do for small arms what Defense Distributed did for AR-15s when it first released the $1,500 Ghost Gunner milling machine exactly three years ago to the day: Give people the ability to make a lethal weapon at home with no regulation whatsoever.

Except there are regulations. Plenty of them.

For example, if you’re not legally permitted to have a firearm, it’s illegal for you to manufacture your own. It’s also illegal to manufacture for sale without special licenses, which then requires you to perform the background checks that supposedly make everything better. And nothing Wilson may have said runs counter to that reality, though the profound lack of quotes might make one wonder just what Wilson said, and how different it might be from what Wired thinks he said.

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The rest of the article is just more of the same. Wired complains about how the wrong people can get access to guns this way, still ignoring the fact that this has been legal for decades now. Even before 80 percent lowers were a thing, enterprising folks could manufacture their own guns in their own workshops if they had the will to put forth the effort.

It’s also worth noting that “the wrong people” are getting their hands on guns just fine without using a Ghost Gunner.

All the Ghost Gunner did was allow people to manufacture metal lowers with more precision–thus making them safer–and easier.

And, really, that’s what’s the problem for Wired.

It seems that for Wired, home technology is awesome…until you use it for something they don’t like, then it’s problematic and it needs to be regulated.

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