Welcome to the age of the printed gun

[Simon_Jester]

Slight counterpoint:

No, I'm referring to the fact, Bean, that during the entire period you mention, Iraq was never able to establish lawful authority over the rural areas of the upper Zagros range. All you can bleat about is Kirkuk and the other cities of Kurdistan repeatedly falling to the Baathist forces. And the Kurds were never fully disarmed after the initial rebellion that started with just old British and Ottoman rifles, and always had this area to fall back into.

The catch is that the Kurdish cities also represent a huge slice of the Kurds' population. And the major economic and cultural centers that Kurdistan would need to exist as a viable nation rather than a persistent dream. As long as Saddam held the cities he had the Kurds by the vital organs, even if the periphery kept flailing and being ungovernable.

Tyrants' being unable to reduce mountainous rural backwaters (or desert rural backwaters, or jungle rural backwaters) to absolute submission is a convenient benefit for a rural population with small arms, but no matter how "WOLVERINES!" they may choose to go against their oppressor, it is of relatively limited help to the majority of humanity in the developed world, which lives in or around cities.

[PKRudeBoy]

Slight counterpoint:

No, I'm referring to the fact, Bean, that during the entire period you mention, Iraq was never able to establish lawful authority over the rural areas of the upper Zagros range. All you can bleat about is Kirkuk and the other cities of Kurdistan repeatedly falling to the Baathist forces. And the Kurds were never fully disarmed after the initial rebellion that started with just old British and Ottoman rifles, and always had this area to fall back into.

The catch is that the Kurdish cities also represent a huge slice of the Kurds' population. And the major economic and cultural centers that Kurdistan would need to exist as a viable nation rather than a persistent dream. As long as Saddam held the cities he had the Kurds by the vital organs, even if the periphery kept flailing and being ungovernable.

Tyrants' being unable to reduce mountainous rural backwaters (or desert rural backwaters, or jungle rural backwaters) to absolute submission is a convenient benefit for a rural population with small arms, but no matter how "WOLVERINES!" they may choose to go against their oppressor, it is of relatively limited help to the majority of humanity in the developed world, which lives in or around cities.

However, it does provide a (relatively) safe area for those opposed to a regime to be trained in operations before they go back into the cities, and then take actions from there.

The rebels in the Middle East weren't generally facing Apache gunships or Predator drones. And if by some miracle some of these militia fucknuts managed to stroll off with some half-decent modern anti-air or anti-armour weapons, and recruited or suborned someone who knew how to use them? Time to write off the whole town and send the B-52s in.

Very few regimes, even the most ruthless and oppressive, want to be seen carpet bombing mostly civilian areas. It's the kind of thing that might get international sanctions against you. Or at least a famous abstract painting about it.

In any event, though, this 3d printed version of the liberator is still completely pointless, because as I said earlier, for the price of the equipment to make it, you could set up a small scale machine shop in your garage, like the UVF did in Northen Ireland, or just order a real gun, that will be shipped to you piece by piece to get through customs, through a deep website like the now defunct Armory.

[Mr Bean]

Why the hate on the liberator? It's a first step, the first gun that worked. It's point is not to be the small arm of the anarchist movement or any such nonsense. It's a proof of concept. I can spend 20,000$ and print out a gun from plastic that works.

The fact the design needs work and that a decent machine shop for the same price could churn out automatics is besides the point. Your talking about over a hundred years experience with modern fire arms with tools that have been refined for generations by multiple groups of craftsman. VS the first attempt of a guy trying to produce a gun as a political statement.


Yes I can spend 5,000$ and produce a Sten gun in my garage. But then I did not have to invent a Sten gun all on my own. I had years and years of people making stens then other people trying to make Sten's with less materials and less equipment. My garage sub machine gun has the benefit of hundreds of thousand of man hours of research and testing. Give the liberator half as much time and prepare to be surprised about what someone will produce from a 3d Printer twenty years from now let alone forty.

On a side note about the revolutions of the past hundred years, what would be the best comparison to existing historical revolts and a hypothetical America, British or even Italy or Poland having wide scale revolt against a modern military. And note, the native military, not something like Iraq where the modern military was provided by outsides thus making it easy to rally against. Syria is the best example that comes to mind except Syria frankly sucks terrain wise for revolution.

[PKRudeBoy]

Don't get me wrong, I think that it's impressive that they managed to get anything that works at all built out of a 3D printer thats almost entirely plastic. "completely pointless" was the kind of hyperbole that comes out of posting a bit drunk, and I'll retract that. But it is absolutely not the kind of thing that people (politicians) should be getting up in arms about, because it adds nothing to the capabilities of homemade firearms manufacturing that wasn't already there. Now you can make a cooler looking zip gun of the kind that you could already make with 20 bucks of material and a youtube tutorial if you happen to have several thousand dollars worth of hardware.

[Metahive]

However, it does provide a (relatively) safe area for those opposed to a regime to be trained in operations before they go back into the cities, and then take actions from there.

No, it's a barren ghetto where the tyrant can count on you either slowly starve to death in or die quickly whenever you poke your head out of it. That's the whole history of the kurdish insurrection in Iraq in a nutshell until the Kurds were provided outside assistance.

Very few regimes, even the most ruthless and oppressive, want to be seen carpet bombing mostly civilian areas. It's the kind of thing that might get international sanctions against you. Or at least a famous abstract painting about it.

O you mean like Saddam's genocidal Al Anfal campaign for which Western Countries partially delivered the weapons. Yeah, definitely demonstrates the power of being internationally frowned upon.

Reality says HELLOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

Gad, I'm still in stitches about Duchess of Zeon trying to sell Hitler's hostile takeover plot of Austria as a triumphant example for the effectiveness of CITIZEN MILITIA!

[Simon_Jester]

Re: Metahive

I don't know, a lot of successful rebellions have begun with "the rebels control the countryside, but not the cities." Or with "the rebels were quickly driven out of the cities, but survived in remote parts of the countryside." Think Mao in China.

Although this really has more to do with rural areas being much harder to police and control. And with dictatorships paying more conscious attention to pacifying the cities that are the center of their rule, because they make the same calculation about rebels in the jungle/mountains/desert being irrelevant.

Sometimes they're right, sometimes the rebels pour out of the wilderness and recapture the cities as soon as the regime is suitably weakened.

[Metahive]

1. The People's Liberation Army was more professional and better armed than a frackin' CITIZEN MILITIA!
2. The Guomindang had just bled themselves dry in the war against Japan while the PLA had barely exerted itself with occasional guerilla strikes
3. The PLA had quite a bit of outside support
4. The safe havens of the PLA were not barren wasteland

Really, peeps, pay some attention to the details before you try and make grand points about the effectiveness of CITIZEN MILITIA! (TM)

[Simon_Jester]

Retreating to the countryside let the Red Army survive long enough to have a chance- Chiang's government having bled itself dry against Japan wouldn't have done the Communists any good if they'd been annihilated in 1935!

The Kurds, with less resources and arms, and worse countryside, had a worse experience- they weren't able to bounce back from the countryside at all, and just sort of... clung to existence until the US happened to depose Saddam for its own reasons.

But there is a very common thread of guerillas surviving in the countryside and being hard to dislodge, regardless of where they got their weapons from, or how well trained they are, or anything else. And that's what I was pointing out- it is realistic for Duchess to imagine a guerilla movement surviving in rural areas, and to consider that survival a success.

Survival is the first rule of how guerillas succeed, because a typical guerilla movement has nowhere near the resources it needs to win. So they hang on and survive, waiting for a situation that will allow them to get those resources (foreign aid, internal struggles within the enemy regime, war with an outside enemy). So surviving in inhospitable terrain really is a victory for guerillas, even if it would represent near-total defeat for a conventional army.
It's common sense.

[Spoonist]

@Duchess
Please note I'm not even going near the whole american insurrection thingie. That is worse than a RAR with triple !!!

I'm as usual nitpicking faults here, in this case regarding the iraqi kurds.

..., Bean,...

Bean? Is that some sort of insult? *goes googling* Nope couldn't find anything unless its some weird reference to its latin name... Is it some kind of beancounter reference? Hmm never seen that before, could someone explain?

No, I'm referring to the fact, Bean, that during the entire period you mention, Iraq was never able to establish lawful authority over the rural areas of the upper Zagros range.

*sigh* how could you miss this: "(ie not remote mountain villages with no economical importance)" I only wrote it about four times.
Its also a complete red herring in context since it has nothing to do with guns, but instead has everything to do with the fighting spirit and identity of the kurds + geographical advantages. It has nothing to do with gun control since except during insurgency crack downs the kurds were allowed/able to buy rifles etc legally on the open market. The second reason its a red herring is that outside of the regions that the governement deemed 'not worth it' they were defeated. The third reason why its a red herring is that the kurdish identity is divided over three countries and some disporia, meaning that they are almost always getting supplies and weapons from their brethren across the border. Something which has proven much more useful than any old stock of antiquated guns.
Its like saying that the taliban/al quaida is a successful insurgency versus the Afghani gov because they hide in the Afghani mountains and can get supplies through the pakistan border.
Then a small reminder what you actually said:
"an area larger than a half-dozen Luxembourgs for twenty years without help "
so with that in mind lets go through your new statement
" during the entire period you mention, Iraq was never able to establish lawful authority over the rural areas of the upper Zagros range. "
lets start from the back and correct the mistakes here. I'm pretty sure you know about these and just chose to gloss over them to make your argument coherent.
1) the Zagros range is mostly in Iran
2) the upper Zagros range is definately in Iran
3) the mountaineous parts you are trying to refer to is probably less than 30%-40% of iraqi kurdistan and it probably countains less than 5-10% of its population, for instance operation Comfort came into effect because it was impossible for all of those millions of kurds to flee up into the mountains.
4) during the time period I mention Iraq did establish lawful authority in a haphazard way every now and then when the regional governor got orders about it, the kurds then ran away and came back if and when the regional governor didn't care anymore, in no instance where an economic interest existed did the kurds remain in power or in "lawful authority", for instance during late saddam regime there were border crossings between Iraq+Iran with gov troops from both sides to prevent kurds to use them and that was in the heart of kurdish "controlled" Zagros
5) "without help" is completely untrue, the iraqi kurds received lots of help, first and foremost from other kurds across borders, but also from kurdish diaspora around the world, then also from foreign powers interested in a weaker iraqi gov
6) Luxembourg is really small but still... twenty would be, hmm some ~50 000km2? Now the iraqi kurds didn't hold on to that much since the current Iraqi Kurdistan contains about ~40 000km2 and the whole of iraqi kurdistan was never under complete control while Saddam was in power. Look at these two images:


Check out where Kirkurk and Mosul are on those maps.

All you can bleat about is Kirkuk and the other i]cities[/i] of Kurdistan repeatedly falling to the Baathist forces.

Nope, I was saying that before the UN resolution the kurds were losing the insurrection - badly. They couldn't fight the gunships and tanks of the loyalists.
It was why there was such a huge outcry from the global community.
If it hadn't been for the UN resolution and Comfort I+II there would have been another curbstomp.

And the Kurds were never fully disarmed after the initial rebellion that started with just old British and Ottoman rifles, and always had this area to fall back into.

You do realise that this actually goes against your argument right? But even given that, its not even relevant since they also had stuff like close supply of kalashnikovs etc especially during the iran/iraq buildup and conflict.
So nope, they had better stuff than that ever since WWII onwards.
Heck they even had some artillery pieces which they got from the turkish kurds.

[Mr. Coffee]

What the shit does any of this has to do with some guy making a crappy plastic gun in his garage? If you fuckers are so keen to bullshit history there's an entire forum for that now. Just sayin'.

[Simon_Jester]

People talk about printed guns making guns more available and therefore putting more power in people's hands instead of centralized industry and government. That leads to the whole posturing thing about guerilla warfare, which, yeah, sidetrack.

On the original topic, I suspect that non-weapon stuff made with these printers will have more effect... if we can make them easy enough to use. What we really need is a user interface friendlier than "design it in AutoCAD."

[Simon_Jester]

Ghetto edit:

We tend to fixate too much on the way that force alters society: rebellions and oppression and so on. The way economic goods are produced and distributed can be just as important, if not more so- would it make a difference to the relationship between industry and individual craftsmanship if we could routinely custom-make "machined"-quality parts like this?

[PKRudeBoy]

However, it does provide a (relatively) safe area for those opposed to a regime to be trained in operations before they go back into the cities, and then take actions from there.

No, it's a barren ghetto where the tyrant can count on you either slowly starve to death in or die quickly whenever you poke your head out of it. That's the whole history of the kurdish insurrection in Iraq in a nutshell until the Kurds were provided outside assistance.

Very few regimes, even the most ruthless and oppressive, want to be seen carpet bombing mostly civilian areas. It's the kind of thing that might get international sanctions against you. Or at least a famous abstract painting about it.

O you mean like Saddam's genocidal Al Anfal campaign for which Western Countries partially delivered the weapons. Yeah, definitely demonstrates the power of being internationally frowned upon.

Reality says HELLOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

Gad, I'm still in stitches about Duchess of Zeon trying to sell Hitler's hostile takeover plot of Austria as a triumphant example for the effectiveness of CITIZEN MILITIA!

Right because the Kurds are the only example of guerrilla warfare. Sorry I guess that that China, Vietnam, and all of South America don't exist. But you obviously don't care about reality, because as I was saying that as long as a guerrilla group continues to have a safe haven that the opposition doesn't control they can keep being a thorn in the side of the occupying forces.

[Metahive]

Right because the Kurds are the only example of guerrilla warfare. Sorry I guess that that China, Vietnam, and all of South America don't exist. But you obviously don't care about reality, because as I was saying that as long as a guerrilla group continues to have a safe haven that the opposition doesn't control they can keep being a thorn in the side of the occupying forces.

Yes, I only ever talked about the Kurds. O wait...

I did talk about things like the chinese revolution on this very fucking thread! My argument has been from the start that having a bunch of guns isn't enough for a revolution to succeed, they do need either the parts of the regular army to switch sides too (or stay neutral) or have outside support.
In the long list the Dumbshit from Zeon threw up on the last page they were none which didn't qualify for the above (or were against foreign occupiers). It also contained a very, very ignorant example in the Nazi assassination plot against Engelbert Dollfuß.
But hey, go live in your fantasy world in which you can challenge the might of the US Army with just a bunch of store bought assault rifles. Wonder how that'll help you against getting pulverized by a drone strike.

[Spoonist]

But you obviously don't care about reality, because as I was saying that as long as a guerrilla group continues to have a safe haven that the opposition doesn't control they can keep being a thorn in the side of the occupying forces.

While I agree that there is some sense in what you are saying, and that it was important in some of the east asian situaitons. But that wasn't imperative to the kurds in their situation, nor was it how they did things.
They trained, supplied etc as much in the occupied parts as in the non-occupied parts. It was rather the opposite really since most of their pop was in non-mountaineous regions. That is where they got their big victories in their last rebellion - and that is where they got their big defeats as well. Taking pot-shots from the mountains never troubled the iraqi gov.
This was why the saddam regime did such huge atrocities versus the kurdish population. It wasn't just the mountains that was the problem, it was the fighting spirit of all kurds. So targeting the vast majority with brutal force proved quite effective for the regime.

[PKRudeBoy]

Right because the Kurds are the only example of guerrilla warfare. Sorry I guess that that China, Vietnam, and all of South America don't exist. But you obviously don't care about reality, because as I was saying that as long as a guerrilla group continues to have a safe haven that the opposition doesn't control they can keep being a thorn in the side of the occupying forces.

Yes, I only ever talked about the Kurds. O wait...

I did talk about things like the chinese revolution on this very fucking thread! My argument has been from the start that having a bunch of guns isn't enough for a revolution to succeed, they do need either the parts of the regular army to switch sides too (or stay neutral) or have outside support.
In the long list the Dumbshit from Zeon threw up on the last page they were none which didn't qualify for the above (or were against foreign occupiers). It also contained a very, very ignorant example in the Nazi assassination plot against Engelbert Dollfuß.
But hey, go live in your fantasy world in which you can challenge the might of the US Army with just a bunch of store bought assault rifles. Wonder how that'll help you against getting pulverized by a drone strike.

Sorry, I hadn't seen that post of your's before I wrote that. My point wasn't agreeing with the position that all you need are civilian weapons to overthrow the government, it was arguing two specific points:

1-Having a safe zone can help a revolt. In some cases it will help, and in some cases, like the Kurds, it won't be of as much use.

2-Was a response to Zaune about "write off the whole town and send the B-52s in" if some people in a town managed to get any heavier weapons. You mention the Al Anfal Campaign, but if you're committing genocide, then you already don't give a fuck about international opinion. However, what he appeared to be talking about was a general revolt. Every instance of aerial bombardment in an internal struggle that I have seen, with the exception of targeted strikes in the recent Syrian civil war, has been in an ethnic struggle such as Chechnya, the breakup of Yugoslavia, or, yes, the Kurds. Even then from what I've seen it wasn't 'lets carpet bomb every town that might have some heavier weapons,' but targeting specific hotbeds of rebel support. Bombing the rebels away only works well if the rebels are a distinct group already in control of some areas. If the rebels are more spread out, bombing areas that happen to have some rebels and a whole bunch of people who aren't involved will just gain support for the rebellion and may be the exact thing that causes your military to turn on you.

Having a well armed populace may not be the only thing that you need to have a successful revolution, but it could help it survive to get to the point where it can get the others.

[Metahive]

Bombing the rebels away only works well if the rebels are a distinct group already in control of some areas. If the rebels are more spread out, bombing areas that happen to have some rebels and a whole bunch of people who aren't involved will just gain support for the rebellion and may be the exact thing that causes your military to turn on you.

A rebellion scattered and atomized to this extend also doesn't need the military to crack down in the first place, thereby invalidating your example. We're talking about open civil war, where taking and holding onto territory is an inevitable part of the process.

Having a well armed populace may not be the only thing that you need to have a successful revolution, but it could help it survive to get to the point where it can get the others.

It could also give the tyrant quick access to a citizen militia fighting on his behalf. Just like Saddam did with his fellow Sunnis. Nope, armed citizenry is a crapshoot at best.

[TimothyC]

Back on the original topic, it looks like the cat really is out of the bag:

Security|
5/20/2013 @ 11:51AM |9,399 views
$25 Gun Created With Cheap 3D Printer Fires Nine Shots (Video)

When high tech gunsmith group Defense Distributed test-fired the world’s first fully 3D-printed firearm earlier this month, some critics dismissed the demonstration as expensive and impractical, arguing it could only be done with a high-end industrial 3D printer and that the plastic weapon wouldn’t last more than a single shot. Now a couple of hobbyists have proven them wrong on both counts.

One evening late last week, a Wisconsin engineer who calls himself “Joe” test-fired a new version of that handgun printed on a $1,725 Lulzbot A0-101 consumer-grade 3D printer, far cheaper than the one used by Defense Distributed. Joe, who asked that I not reveal his full name, loaded the weapon with .380 caliber rounds and fired it nine times, using a string to pull its trigger for safety.

The weapon survived all nine shots over the course of an evening, as you can see in the YouTube video below. (The clip was filmed by Michael Guslick, a fellow Wisconsin engineer who helped Joe with his tests and who is known for printing one of the first working lower receivers for AR-15 semi-automatic rifles.)



Joe’s proof-of-concept could raise the stakes another notch in the growing controversy over 3D printed guns, an idea that threatens to circumvent gun control and let anyone download and create a lethal weapon in their garage as easily as they download and print a Word document. The first successfully fired 3D-printed gun that Defense Distributed revealed to Forbes earlier this month, dubbed the Liberator, was printed on an $8,000 secondhand Stratasys Dimension SST printer, a refrigerator-sized industrial machine. In testing, that prototype has generally only been fired once per printed barrel. The gun printed by Joe, which he’s nicknamed the “Lulz Liberator,” was printed over 48 hours with just $25 of plastic on a desktop machine affordable to many consumers, and was fired far more times. “People think this takes an $8,000 machine and that it blows up on the first shot. I want to dispel that,” says Joe. “This does work, and I want that to be known.”

Eight of Joe’s test-fires were performed using a single barrel before swapping it out for a new one on the ninth. After all those shots, the weapon’s main components remained intact–even the spiraled rifling inside of the barrel’s bore. “The only reason we stopped firing is because the sun went down,” he says.

Just how the Lulz Liberator survived those explosions isn’t exactly clear. Joe claims that the plastic he used, the generic Polylac PA-747 ABS fed into most consumer 3D printers, is actually stronger than the more expensive ABS plastic used in a Stratasys printer. In fact, before using a Lulzbot-printed barrel, he and Guslick tested one made on Guslick’s Stratasys printer. That barrel exploded on firing, though Joe blames the problem in part on its having been printed with a smaller chamber, the space at the back of the barrel into which the round is inserted.

Joe’s printed gun contains a few more pieces of metal hardware than the original Liberator. Rather than print plastic pins to hold the hammer in the body, for instance, he used hardware store screws. Like Defense Distributed’s gun, the Lulz Liberator also uses a metal nail for a firing pin, and includes a chunk of non-functional steel designed to make it detectable with a metal detector so that it complies with the Undetectable Firearms Act. The rifling that Joe added to the barrel is designed to skirt the National Firearms Act, which regulates improvised weapons and those with smooth-bored barrels.

Still, Joe’s cheap homemade gun isn’t without its bugs. Over the course of its test firing, Joe and Guslick say it misfired several times, and some of its screws and its firing pin had to be replaced. After each firing, the ammo cartridges expanded enough that they had to be pounded out with a hammer. “Other than that, it’s pretty much confirming that yes, Defense Distributed is correct that this functions,” says Guslick. “And it’s possible to make one on a much lower cost printer.”

It’s not yet clear if or when Joe or Guslick plans to release their modified blueprint for the Liberator online. That kind of publication may be legally tricky: When Defense Distributed put its CAD files online earlier this month the State Department responded with a letter demanding that it take the files down until they could be reviewed for export control violations. But that didn’t stop the Liberator files from being downloaded 100,000 times in their first two days online and then spreading further on filesharing websites like the Pirate Bay.

When Defense Distributed founder and anarchist Cody Wilson set out to create the world’s first 3D-printed gun last year, he told me at the time that his focus was on making guns as widely accessible as possible via the Internet, a move he believed would demonstrate governments’ inability to control digital objects. He planned to eventually adapt his model to be printable on a sub-$1,000 printer known as a RepRap. “Anywhere there’s a computer and an Internet connection, there would be the promise of a gun,” Wilson said at the time.

Joe’s experiment brings that idea of a universally-available gun with uncensorable online blueprints one step closer to reality. “I’m trying to do the same thing Cody wants to do. I’m not an anarchist, but I don’t like the idea that the government is telling us ‘You can’t have that,’” he says. “I agree with Cody’s idea that this is a perfect fusion of the first and second amendments.”

Of course, there’s a certain thrill of pioneering a new gun design, too, Joe admits. “I may be the first person in the history of mankind to fire a bullet through a plastic rifled barrel. It’s an interesting feeling,” he says. “I feel like Samuel Colt.”

As was noted in the thread earlier:

Again, this is a proof of concept. Nothing more nothing less. Give it a few years and never underestimate bored engineers.

[Metahive]

News from the Spiegel support what I said above, Assad is incorporating armed citizenry in his effort to crush the rebels.

Milizionisierung: Das Regime hat seine Kriegsführung umgekrempelt. Ausbilder aus Iran und von der libanesischen Hisbollah unterrichten die regimetreuen Kräfte im Guerillakrieg. Die regulären Truppen ähneln inzwischen eher Milizen als einer Armee. Guerillas kämpfen gegen Guerillas - statt wie anfangs Rebellen gegen eine Wehrdienst-Armee. Dazu wurden Zehntausende Syrer in Freiwilligen-Milizen entlang konfessioneller Linien mobilisiert. Auch helfen irakische Milizionäre und Kämpfer der Hisbollah.

http://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/s ... 00918.html

Here, an older english source on the same topic:

BEIRUT — A Syrian government militia that the U.S. has declared a terrorist organization is becoming increasingly important to the Syrian government’s strategy as it attempts to shore up its still-loyal but beleaguered military.

The militia, known as the National Defense Force or the People’s Army, is an extension of the shabiha, the pro-government gangs that were used to suppress demonstrations against the government of President Bashar Assad and that have been accused over the last two years of massacring civilians in rebel-held areas.

Made up primarily of Syria’s two largest religious minorities, Shiite Muslims and Alawites, the militia has been training in the cities of Latakia and Tartus, and it’s been increasingly active in the provinces of Homs and Hama.

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/02/19/1 ... yrian.html

So CITIZEN MILITIA! is indeed a crapshoot when it comes to armed rebellions. They might end up on the side of the tyrant.