 Welcome to Free Thoughts. I'm Trevor Burris, and I'm Aaron Powell. Joining us today is Matt Lurocier, a legal associate at the Cato Institute. Welcome to Free Thoughts, Matt. Thanks for having me. Now, why would anyone own a gun? Well, I mean, there's a there's several reasons. One, they look really cool. That's the most important. But no, I mean, you can, there's countless reasons people own guns. There, I mean, there are still a small segment of the population that use them for hunting, very regularly. I think that's going down, though, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah, well, and which is good, you know, as food becomes easier to get, there's less and less people that depend on the ability to, like, harvest squirrels. But the most important reason from a legal perspective and from a societal perspective is the simple reality that there are instances where people will be subject to illegal force, like attacked or burgled or what have you, and those people ought to have a effective mechanism to defend themselves. They shouldn't have to depend on physical strength or skill if they haven't done anything wrong. But I think it's interesting that for you, you have a different kid that you did not bring up, which is there's also hobbyist. Right. No, and of course there's, I mean, the guns are interesting just mechanically, and that's another reason. Yeah, no, and not only interesting mechanically, like if you're an engineer, you could you could be fascinated by developments in different semi-automatic weapons. And if you're like me and you have military history in your family, I am just utterly fascinated by collecting the weapons of the French military and just how different and bizarre they can be. And I get a lot of satisfaction from just collecting these stupid guns. But isn't there something, I guess, wrong with getting satisfaction from collecting things designed to inflict horrific harm on others? I mean, you could say like, well, my hobby is collecting pathogens. And I just love them and I love looking at them, but we'd say, well, that's all cool and all, but you know, those things are dangerous. Well, I think first of all, hobbyists generally are frowned upon by the broader public. People think that comic book collectors are odd and we make fun of them. But I mean, I think it's, guns are a particularly divisive subject, but people collect swords, like people will put up medieval swords and have done it for ages, and no one ever, no one ever says, no, I would you want a sword? That's for lopping off limbs and it's horrifying. It's just there's something about guns that are societal conscious has more freely associated with their use as a weapon, whereas there's tons of other things people collect that if you spend too much time harping on it, you can come to odd situations like spiders or snakes. Why would you want a horrible snake? You know, it could choke you and it's venomous, but there's all these, we don't look at somebody who has a snake collection. I mean, like I said, society, they're a hobbyist, they're considered odd, but we don't say, we don't put that same onus on them that you're collecting killing machines. My brother used to collect snakes, so if some, and I always thought it was very weird, so I have some sympathy for that. And you probably have enough guitar pedals. And I do have guitar pedals. Yes, collecting is interesting, but it is true, guns are interesting, but I'll grant that you, you know, a 1875 French firearm with a really interesting firing mechanism or beautiful carving or something like that is interesting by itself. But why would you want to own an AR-15? Well, and just by the way, Trevor, and I have related at length about our collections. The weirdness of collectors, but you have your gun collection, but AR-15s seem totally different. Why would everyone want to own an AR-15? AR-15s are fascinating in that really, if you're interested in weapons design and development like I am, the AR-15 basically terminated weapons developments. That was the end. There's been no more, at least in the 60 or 70 years since it was first designed, there's been no substantial developments in firearm operating mechanisms. The AR-15 is pretty much, is pretty much been the end. I mean, modern, even the newest, most high-tech weapons all trace their roots to the AR-15 in terms of locking mechanism and how the action works. Yeah, well, and first of all, the AR-15 is not just a gun, right? It's a pattern. It's a pattern. Can you explain more what that means? Okay, so the M-16A1 is a gun. You can point to it, and that is a particular firearm that, as it looks one way. The AR-15 is a basic set of principles and standardizations that can apply to all kinds of different weapons. We have the AR-15, which is the general principle for any civilian sporting version of the same system, the M-16, the M-4A1, and then there's like weird Danish versions, and they're all the AR pattern. And so if you can build one yourself too, correct? Yeah. And they're modular to some degree. They're completely modular, and that's the main advantage. So what is it about them that ended progress and development? Okay, so they're just extremely, it's just a good design. It's sealed off from dirt and dust. Common knowledge says that the AK-47 is the most reliable firearm. Well, actually tests show that the AR-15 is better sealed against dust and debris. It is a very simple mechanism to an extent, and very repeatable, reliable performance that it's just very dependable, is the best way I could say it. It doesn't have a lot of quarks. Yes, and you can fire it as quickly as you pull the trigger, correct? That's semi-automatic, and that can be pretty quick with an AR-15. So to understand, and people get confused between the terms semi-automatic and automatic, to understand these terms, we really have to go back to the turn of the century where weapons were typically manually operated. You'd fire a shot, you would manually operate the action. Like cock it back. Yeah, cock it, whatever. Bolt action. Exactly. Or a shotgun, pump action, you know, something like that was always required. Then when we came out with semi-automatic firearms, they were typically referred to as self-loaders. But over the course of different languages, you know, like the French referred to them as fusil automatique, automatic rifles. And it was because they automatically loaded themselves. You weren't having to perform these manual actions. The British Howell automatic rifle was a mechanism that bolted onto a bolt action rifle and automated the system of cocking it. Then later on, with machine guns rising to prevalence, fully automatic fire means that you hold the trigger down one time and the weapon does all of the rest. So there's no resetting of the trigger, there's no additional input aside from the feeding of ammunition. Semi-automatic fire is you pull the trigger and the firearm will do everything it needs to do to fire one shot. So you pull the trigger and then automatically the bolt kicks out this empty case, loads a new round, and then is ready for you to do it again to fire the next shot. Okay, so but you can still fire pretty quickly with an air-15. You can't just hold down the trigger on a civilian one that you haven't modified at least. No, and all you have to do is pull the trigger, which is not, you know, a tremendous feat for most people. Is that what the bump stocks got around? Well, so yeah, the bump stocks are a fascinating thing in that this is all getting down to really legal technical interpretations of firearm law. The National Firearms Act regulates who can possess a machine gun and a machine gun is defined by any weapon that can fire automatically more than one shot with a single function of the trigger. And so the understanding has been that the trigger's actual physical actuation, so the trigger moving backwards by the press of a finger, is a function. And so the bump stock is basically just a very, I describe it as a very bad gun stock because a gun stock is supposed to keep a gun steady. A bump stock allows a gun to a certain degree of movement back and forth. And so by putting forward pressure, you're actually causing yourself to pull the trigger and then the recoil... So you pull the gun forward, correct? Yes. Essentially, you hold it against your shoulder, pull it with your hand that would be supporting the support hand, and keep your finger locked on the trigger. Exactly. And then when it fires, it'll recoil, and then it will do it again kind of automatically. Well, it takes a degree of skill to do, which is kind of the funny thing because the AR-15 has really not much recoil. You can easily overcome it with your forward pressure and the bump stock won't work at all. So you have to kind of practice with holding it just right and putting just the right amount of forward pressure on it to make it actually bump back and cycle. But all that gets back to the issue here is people always say, well, why would you want something that fires so many shots? Or what does the legitimate need for that? And that's a really complicated issue. And it's because a weapon's efficacy is limited by its recoil, no matter what its rate of fire is. What people have to understand is that no modern military uses fully automatic machine gun fire in regular soldier-on-soldier engagements. They use semi-automatic fire because that is the best way to hit your target. Machine gun fire is used to suppress an area, to keep people from... If you wanted to keep people from going down a hallway, you would pepper machine gun fire down that direction, is it just a deterrent? Aimed fire is the most effective mechanism for actually hitting your target. And so, no matter how fast your gun shoots, you need to put it back on target to shoot again. So it really doesn't matter. This is why magazine capacity doesn't matter that much because there comes a point where you get diminishing returns. There's... And we've pretty much reached that point now with AR-15s. They recoil very little, but it's still enough to disrupt you and you have to put it back on target. You get any less power than that, and the round is really not very effective. So it doesn't really make much of a difference. If you have fully automatic fire, you might get more rounds down range, but your hit rate is going to go down a lot. You need to, like I said, the main point here is that you need to actually, after every shot, recoil impulse hits the shooter, throws the gun off target. The shooter has to competently put it back on target for the gun to do anything, aside from just spraying lead. So a lot of people who are pro-second amendment, pro-gun, anti-gun control get frustrated during debates about gun control, especially the kinds of debates that happen just after a shooting because they say, look, the people making these arguments for gun control don't understand all the stuff that you just told us about. They don't get the difference between semi-automatic and automatic. They don't understand what the bump stocks are doing. They don't understand why people would use one gun over another, and so on they get calibers mixed up, whatever. Why is that a cogent concern or objection? If the issue at hand is everything you've just described is just factors of how effective these things are at doing what they were designed to do, which is put bullets at high speed into people or other things, that it seems like then all we really need to understand to have a debate about gun control is whether we think it's okay that people have devices that are designed to do that. And if we don't, then what mechanisms we can use to prevent them from having those sorts of devices? So why do all the details, you don't know anything about guns, arguments matter at all in this discussion? I think it's because in this country, most people agree that somebody ought to be able to defend themselves if their life is actually in danger. I think in other countries, that's a totally different calculus. There are countries where through legislation or what have you, they've decided that no, no, we think it's better for society if people do not have the right to use deadly force and self-defense. In America, that's completely different. We've already had that discussion and we've decided that people should be able to defend themselves if they are subject to unlawful force. So once we've made that decision, it then comes down to when we're moving things along at the margin with gun control, what are we going to do? And the reason these factors are important is because the whole point of having a gun for self-defense is that it's an effective mechanism for defending yourself. So if the laws are being designed, which are, like we said, ignorant of how the weapon actually functions and what the purpose of its design is, it can actually, well, clearly the intention of the bump stock bands or whatever is to prevent a catastrophe like what happened in Vegas, the result of these policies can be to actually cripple someone's ability to use a firearm for self-defense. Now, I'm not saying bump stocks are effective for self-defense. Actually, I strongly argue that aimed fire is the only effective mechanism for self-defense, really, but when you group in, you know, the high capacity magazines is something I often like to talk about. You have to imagine a world where it was perfectly implemented. So like we got rid of all the 30 round magazines, there's only 10 rounders, right? Now imagine the very real possibility that somebody in a home is attacked by two armed criminals. Does it look completely fair, I mean, to use the term, if you can say that, oh, well, it's all right because they all have 10 rounds. Well, that seems like enough. I mean, it does. Well, it seems that way, doesn't it? But then when you actually, well, exactly. And there's data that says average shooters have about a 30 to 40% hit probability at a typical engagement distance, which is between 15 and 25 feet. Expert shooters, and this is defined by a police science management journal. So I don't know what they consider an expert shooter, but expert shooters only had a 49% hit probability at typical engagement distances. You combine that with the fact that in the grand scheme of things, guns are not that lethal. Individual shots, like from an AR-15, I believe, and I don't know this completely, but one shot from an AR-15 is statistically between 17 and 22% lethal. So you need to land multiple shots on target if you need to stop a threat. Well, do you, I mean, do we really want to just kill them? I mean, we are all about non-lethal, you know, tasers, rubber bullets, things like this to stop people in many situations. So why don't we just take rubber bullets and put them in our AR-15s? Well, or just to modify that question. I mean, if it only has a 20% chance of killing someone, that's not the same thing as it only has a 20% chance of stopping them. Stopping them, right. No, it's not. It's really unfortunate, but in a life or death situations, the only way to actually stop somebody who is hopped up on adrenaline and, you know, when guns are in the question is to land either a debilitating or lethal shot. And you know, that's horrible. Nobody wants to be in that position, but we're not making policy for, we're not making policy for like, you know, video games. This is for real life where people's lives are actually in danger, and there's a clear aggressor and defender. We don't want this situation to happen at all. But then when you recognize if it is going to happen, what do we want the defender to be able to do? So if you take that situation, if you just hash out the math on the back of the envelope, the defender has 10 rounds. The attackers have 10 each. And also, if you are attacking somebody, if you are doing crime, if you are intending on being violent, you're likely to bring spare magazines, and it only takes a couple seconds to reload. If you are just a person who carries a gun for self-defense or has a gun next to your nightstand, what is the likelihood that you keep a belt of spares on you? And so that's why that's why it's a very complicated discussion. It's not as simple as saying, oh, 10 rounds is enough. And then also, different weapons have different capabilities, and people should be able to choose for themselves whether they want a weapon that has more recoil, more power per shot, or, and then, and holds less rounds or a weapon that has less recoil, less lethal per shot, but they have more, if they're not as good of a shot, they have more chances to hit their targets. These are all questions that I could never make for another person, and that I have, you know, in my experience as a shooter have made for myself. I don't believe that there's any principled policy that can draw that line for everybody. Now, it seems that I read about guns that accept very large capacity magazines, and we're not talking about 10 rounds here, or even 12. We're talking about 50 or 100, which those magazines would seem to have little more than novelty use or complete carnage use in, in a standard setting. I don't think many gun owners own a 50 round magazine, probably not. But if we're talking about a high capacity magazine, what, what is a high capacity magazine in that regard? So the way I would define it is a weapon is a magazine that actually stretches the capacity of the weapon beyond what it was originally designed for. So an AR-15 was originally designed with a 20 round mag, but then standardized to 30. I wouldn't call that high capacity. It's standard equipment. However, the Beta C magazine, which is this ridiculous looking contraption, like you describe it, really is a novelty, holds 100 rounds. That's certainly a high capacity magazine. It stretches the weapon beyond the limits of its original design. It requires odd external fixtures to function correctly. However, it's still a complicated question. There's a reason that the military didn't standardize and that law enforcement didn't standardize on 100 round magazines. You would think that even though reloading is so fast, it would be nice if our soldiers didn't have to worry about it, right? Well, the more rounds you put into a magazine, the more friction is imparted by each round, then it increases the likelihood of a jam. Actually, in the Aurora Colorado shooting, the shooter employed one of these magazines and within a few shots, it completely locked the weapon up and actually allowed people to escape. He fumbled with his weapon for quite some time before switching to another weapon. He didn't actually clear the malfunction. I would never say it would actually be better off if they had these magazines. There's a reason people don't use them. There's an enormous shooting in circumstances. Exactly. I wouldn't say there's enough reason to obsess over it because it's just not particularly effective. I mean, most shootings are mass shootings, so it would seem that you can do most crime with a 10-round magazine if that's what you want to do. Yeah, the average number of shots, I think it's in Gary Klex's book, he looked over shootings that were mutual shootings with law enforcement officers. This is your typical crimes that you'd think would be the biggest shootouts and the average number of shots fired was like two and a half. The instances, again, this only matters in the incredibly rare instance where more than 10-round is fired. Here's another thing where we talk about technology and what people know about guns. Silencers. Now, if I've paid attention to my James Bond movies, silencers turn a gun into a dart gun, essentially, or a little thing. They're pretty much illegal. They're regulated, but they're pretty much illegal. If that's what they do, it's probably a good thing. Well, so I'd resist that. They're not pretty much illegal. They fall under the same laws as machine guns do, but individuals are still allowed to make and register suppressors. It just requires the payment of a $200 tax. Of all of the things that are incredibly restricted in the NFA, silencers or suppressors, whatever you call it, are definitely on the less restricted side, and many, many people have them, but this is just a basic function of physics. When something is a full-powered cartridge, it's delivering hundreds and hundreds of jewels to the target, and that's coming out of the muzzle of a weapon. There is no way to silence the delivery of 1,000 jewels. You just can't. It also comes out at the side of the gun, too. It doesn't just all come out of the barrel. When it's a semi-automatic, yes, gas escapes out the side, and otherwise, what people see, they see people shooting .22s, and even the .22, the typical .22 that you just buy at Walmart is supersonic, which means it comes out of the barrel, and there's going to be a supersonic crack, which is loud. People buy reduced-power .22 ammo to make their suppressed weapons sound like the type thing. Even then, it's still about as loud as shutting a car door. Really, the primary efficacy of suppressors would be, and has been, hearing protection. They were experimented with in World War II, and it really just didn't make enough of a difference. They're cheap to make, so if it was that much of a difference, they would have issued these to everybody. It would have cost almost nothing, but they didn't, because it just isn't that effective. It's really not that much of a difference. So even for hearing protection, it's just a few decibels. It's not even a ton, right? Well, as you know, when you drop a few decibels, it's actually a lot, but it does generally get to the point where we're talking about 110 decibels, which is on the border of what's safe versus 130, which is just like stupid loud. So it's a good thing to have, and what really people do, and what my friends who use suppressors, I don't really bother with one. I can't be bothered to pay that stupid tax, is they still use hearing protection, but when they are going to shoot a lot of rounds, they put their suppressor on just to extra for it. So it's comfortable, and they can shoot without getting fatigued, because over time, if you're shooting a lot of rounds, you get fatigued by the noise. It really does work on you. Anybody who's been to a loud concert and sat in the front, I don't think you feel like a spring chicken when you get out. It does fatigue you. Now, the controversy recently has been 3D printed guns, and I wanted to make sure, you know, lay the groundwork on some of these, how these guns work and stuff, so we can get into this conversation about homemade guns. So you know guns, you know how they work, you know what the laws are, and now everyone's freaking out about 3D printed guns, at least in this last week here. Why, first of all, I guess the first question is what happened to make suddenly everyone freak out about 3D printed guns? Because I think a lot of people have known that they existed, but it came into the news all of a sudden. So they've existed since before Cody Wilson, I mean like even became a figure. This has been something that people have been playing with ever since 3D printing came to be. Cody Wilson, of course, popularized it and spread it around. The reason this has come in right now was because the State Department had forced Cody Wilson's company, Defense Distributed, to pull these files that they were distributing for free off of their website. And this was obviously a First Amendment issue because it's a prior restraint on putting up these designs, which is all these are. You have to think of them that like, think of them, legally they're the same as if I drew a gun on paper and showed it to you. That's- Or a blueprint that showed you how to put it together, yeah. That's still my expression because the design of a gun could be exactly as artistic as it is technical. So there was a long drawn out legal battle, and then finally the State Department said, why are we doing this? Let's just, they knew their case wasn't that strong. What was their claim? Their claim was that this State Department's claim? Yes. They claim that putting the weapons up, and this is fantastic, putting the weapons up for free and unlimited download online constituted exporting defense articles under the Cold War era international treaty and arms regulation. This is the same as the arguments that were made about encryption, too. Are they used to itar against encryption? I don't know if they use that specific, but the arguments against encryption was that if you put it out there, you were basically exporting, I don't know if they categorized the munitions, but some sort of weapon because it could hide. Yeah, these itar regulations, I mean, in many ways they're just to keep you from putting plans for like an Apache helicopter online that the North Koreans could download or something like that, and that's sort of what they claimed about these 3D printed guns. Well, itar is really about like shipping bulletproof vests to Central Africa. That's what it's really about. These developments have all been an outgrowth of just increasingly aggressive readings of a really poorly written statute. And even if you look at the statute, it specifically exempts all information that's in the public domain. And so by definition, when you put your file up and say anyone can download this for free, it's part of the public domain. So it was just a bad case. And so the government decided they were going to settle, they were going to just give him his legal fees and leave him alone. There was some very strange technicalities with how they did that, but that's a different topic. And then what was reported was that 3D downloadable guns were becoming legal on the effective date of the settlement. Not that they had ever been illegal before, but that it's now the government is going to stop messing with people who put them online. And so this caused a media frenzy of people who, you know, it's been interesting because you've had mass confusion of the First and Second Amendment. No one is really sure which one we're talking about, but that's what's drove it into the spotlight. Yeah, now these plans, you put them into a 3D printer and like a really expensive 3D printer, do you have to go drop five grand on some thing? Because you have, I guess, you have printed a gun, which we can talk about exactly what that means. So what is the process of that? Okay, so it's not like a PDF file where you just hit print and it goes. These are actually, it's a series of points. It is literally a digital blueprint. It is just a 3D model. You feed that to, so if you want me to explain the process of how this works, you take this 3D model, which would be like the same thing that was used in a video game. In fact, I've actually literally ripped files from video game that had a stupid French gun that I really liked and printed a little scale model of it, a little scale one that's sitting at my desk. So yeah, it's just a 3D file. You then take it and feed it to what's called a slicer. The slicer analyzes the file and determines what is the best way that this could be printed. How a 3D printer works is it just heats up a type of plastic to its melting point and then lays it down in rows. Imagine if you put a hot glue gun on a little motor that carried it in very specific locations. That's how this works. So the slicer does that. You then feed this gcode file to the printer and this is the gcode file is what tells the printer, okay, get this hot, move left, move right, move right for 30 hours and then eventually you've got your piece. And how much is the printer? Okay, right. So the printers can range from the one I use, which I've heavily modified it from what it was originally, but the original price on it was $150. And I kind of did that intentionally. I bought the cheapest printer and saw what I could push out of it. But you can buy very competent printers for $250, $300. Most firearms have historically not been made out of plastic. Right. For probably very good reasons. So why are these a thing? I mean, is it pretty ill-advised to hold in your hand a 3D plastic gun that you've made and shoot it off? I mean, with the equipment I have available to me, I would never do that. The whole gun is 3D printed. No. So here's the thing. People always say, oh, the technology is going to get better. That's why I'm not making an argument out of the fact that it's hard and kind of technical to do, because I don't think that's relevant. Because, one, this is absolutely a First Amendment issue. And even if you made it illegal to 3D print a gun, you would not be able to illegalize the design for the gun. Or communicating how to do it. Because I can tell people how to saw off a shotgun. Exactly. But I cannot legally saw off a shotgun. Right. Yeah. But so even as technology gets better with 3D printing, it's going to have to be made of plastic, at least beyond any advancement in technology that is not on the horizon. The metals, there are metal printers, but they require the use of a furnace, which is, the furnace is the real expensive part there to actually center the metal. People don't really understand that. The plastic, if you're going to make the barrel or the bolt, which is the parts that hold pressure, they depend on the spring capabilities of steel to be able to withstand the explosive forces, all of that pressure, and then contract back to their original shape and do it again. What happens with plastic, the plastic fatigues, it deforms and every single shot, it's just going to get a little bit, a little bit, a little bit weaker until ultimately you're going to have a failure, which could be harmful. Yes. Because we're talking about a lethal amount of, again, it's basic physics. If it's got enough energy to throw several grams of lead downrange very, very fast, it's got enough energy to do some bad things if it's localized. So you just, it's just, I don't advise it. I've printed, I actually never did a completely 3D printed gun until all of this hysteria came up and I was like, well, you know what, I'm just going to do it. But there are also gun parts. Right. So there are tons of parts on a gun. Some of them don't hold up to any pressure at all. Some of them hold up to minor stress that actually you can buy very, guns that are very much plastic. And all of this, by the way, the laws about undetectable guns came around in the 1980s when everyone was horrified that Glock was going to make a completely plastic Glock. And of course, Glock would say, no, we're not going to do that. That's kind of stupid. So they imagine- It's going to be a really bad gun that will melt after a few uses. So they imagine these ceramics and all these things. None of this ever came to material is because steel is really good at its job. This is something that steel is for. But, I mean, if I learned anything from that movie in the line of fire, I need to get off one shot. To kill a president or- Did I just commit that federal offense about, no, I didn't say I was going to. No, to bring it on a plane or bring it through a metal detector, that seems to be a real big- I mean, that's what everyone- I think it was Chuck Schumer, someone who said, coming soon to a port near you, to a school near you. Even if we have metal detectors, we can just walk right in with that. That's true. Well, so there's a couple things there, but I want to finish on the- Okay, please, yes. Because we were about to get to the receiver thing. So a part that doesn't take much stress is the receiver on many guns. And the way a receiver is defined is totally up to the whims of the ATF. So I couldn't give you any principled reasons behind it. On some guns, it's literally a tube. On some guns, it's a side plate. It's very strange how it's defined. But with an AR-15, the receiver is the lower part that holds the trigger mechanism, which makes- it kind of makes sense, because, you know, that's what would separate a machine gun from not a machine gun, what have you. Well, so you can print out one of these things, because it doesn't hold up to any of the stresses of firing. And you can do a pretty good job. I've printed up one with my, you know, home cobbled 3D printer that's held up to hundreds of rounds. And people will say, well, well, but then, you know, that's the only part that's a firearm. So now anyone can just get it. Well, yes. And nothing is changed because of 3D printing. This has always been on the, in the carts. People have been able to, if you go on YouTube, there's AR lowers that were carved from wood, that were milled from aluminum, that were milled from plastic. This has just always been something that has existed. I wouldn't even argue that 3D printing makes it much easier. I would actually say that it's easier to carve out a 80% aluminum lower receiver and just have that be your gun. And there's no background checks there. So it's not that this isn't a cause for concern, although I don't think it is enough to justify a serious legislative response. It's that the 3D printing doesn't make a difference. It doesn't change anything. But why is, isn't it crazy that like people are building guns in their house that, that, I mean, it's not something I plan on doing anytime soon. That's until I come over next week. Of course, yeah. Maybe we'll build one together. But that seems, I think if you went to most western countries and said, it's just legal to make a gun in your house, that would be crazy. That would seem crazy to Germans and Brits and everyone. But I mean, you can do this in a variety of ways. It's been true for a very long time, right? Well, yeah. Right now, it would seem crazy because of the way our culture has adapted around this. And I would actually like to go on a small tangent about the Brits and their gun design. It used to be that they had talented gunsmiths that would design and make their guns at home. And so for the longest time, they had some of the best weapons in the world because they had a very good shooting culture, a very advanced shooting culture that would was often developing new designs and fabricating things at home. And these would develop into all kinds of different weapons. Then after that stopped being an issue, because the culture died or was made illegal. It was made illegal under the guys of wildlife protection. The Royal Small Arms Factory Enfield where these designs happen, they only hire the best Cambridge engineers. And so now they got all these engineers that had no experience with gun design. And actually a lot of them had never held a gun. And so they went on, they went from producing some of the best small arms in the world to producing a firearm that literally didn't work. And that is the standard, it was the standard equipment of their armed forces, a gun that did not function in the most basic way. And that's something that we don't have here in the US. Here for years, we've valued people who design anything. Our culture values entrepreneurs and people who take initiative and design things. That's just something that we have here. And in the gun context, I mean, certainly, I don't think nowadays we'd have a David Williams who was a convicted murderer who designed a semi-automatic weapon in prison and was then turned into a national icon when it was adopted by the military. I don't think that he was like, he was in the prison metal shop or something and decided to build a gun. Well, he was in the prison, he was in the prison. He would show them, he would show the guards his designs. They said, oh, you're really good. We're going to let you use the lathe. And then he designed four different semi-automatic rifles in jail, had his sentence commuted because of it, went and worked in the government and designed the M1 carbine, one of the most prolific weapons of the US armed forces and was turned, there was a movie made about him. He became a national icon. I'm saying our culture has shifted from then, but we still, I think we still value designers in general here enough that it should never be said that, oh, well, if you have a kid that says, I'd like to design a new gun, you shouldn't tell them, don't do that, you'll go to jail. That's what we're dealing with here. Are there any worries then about 3D printed guns? I mean, what you've told us so far is, so it's a first amendment issue, so the government is constitutionally barred from stopping the dissemination of these plans. And then also, of course, there's the, if we know anything about the internet, it would be impossible to stop it even if you wanted to, and even if you made it illegal, people would still do it and you can pass these around and crypt it. I mean, it's just- Shut down the tube, someone's got to clean up these CAD files, and then we'll open them back up. But that even bracketing that, there's not a lot of use for these things. They are largely, it sounds like, our novelty items at the moment, to make them anything more than novelty items would involve a huge expense, so like being able to print with metal and whatnot. So is this just, is this just an issue that we should just, like, no matter which side we're on in the gun control debate, we should just entirely drop? Or are there any legitimate concerns here or on the horizon within this general area? Well, I'd resist that it's only useful for novelty. I think it's most useful for prototyping and development of new designs. And that's what this suppression is really hampered down on the most. It's people who have new ideas that want to share them, because it's not illegal to have the files. It actually is not illegal for me to email them to you, even right now, as long as you're a US citizen, of course. But as for this being a legitimate concern, like a safety concern, I'd say not in the US. These weapons that are completely 3D printed, that creates a concern in other countries, where you don't have, so in the US is pretty unique in that you can buy a barrel, a bolt, all the other gun parts right over the counter. And that's something that it would be very hard to change, I think. Most of these parts are unregulated, and it would be almost impossible to put a damper on the existing supply of barrels, bolts, all these important parts that need to be made from metal. In other countries, though, where every part of a gun is restricted, these single shot, fully 3D printed guns are more of a legitimate concern. However, they're not more of a concern than any other homemade gun. If you go on Amazon, and there is a book about how to make a 9mm submachine gun from hardware store parts, that is actually quite effective. I haven't used one I've seen videos of this type of gun, and they actually find these in Australia. There was a guy who worked out of a storage unit and produced a bunch of them from like tubing. I was shocked by the video of which I put on a blog post a couple weeks ago of just a shotgun, which are literally just two store-bought pieces of tube that perfectly fits a 12 gauge thing. And then you have another tube and you ram them together and you have a shotgun for like $7. And that's always been legal, probably stupid. Yeah, that's called a zip gun. And zip guns have existed as long as ammunition exists, because guns at their core are very simple. So I'd say that is the biggest argument against these things. In other countries. In other countries, I'd say that's the biggest cause of concern. But then I would immediately say, but it makes no difference because pipe. Well, I mean, it's a concern if you care about Japan's restricted gun laws, which I think are a bad idea anyway, although crime is going to be low in Japan no matter what you do. But if you're trying to keep that out, then yeah, people can 3D print guns, but also there might be some sort of underground hobbyist culture for building guns in Japan anyway. Here's the better question. What about criminals? I mean, like actual criminals who are prohibited from purchasing a gun under background checks, who can't go to a gun store, because I've raised the point that you can pay $150 and get a pretty cheap 9mm pistol from a company called High Point that you showed me, but you have to go to a federal fire or ice and eat generally and you can't have it if you're a felon legally. So what if you're out there looking for a gun to commit some crime or to protect yourself and then you say, hey, let's get a 3D printer and use that? I mean, that seems like a real concern. Right. So it's also illegal in most states to just go out and buy weed, but I don't think it would take you too terribly long to find a source. So guns are kind of the same way. It's pretty cheap to be able to get a gun, quote unquote, off the street, and that's what most criminals are going to do. They'll either get a straw purchaser, which is have somebody else who is legally allowed go and buy it and just use it that way, file off the serial numbers, what have you. We just don't live in a society where the cost structure, where it would make sense from the criminal's perspective to invest in and learn this new technology and then also sit and wait. Most common criminals I don't think would have the patience to wait 40 hours for a single shot pistol to come off their printer and then file it and assemble it correctly. Homer Simpson said, I'm angry now. But I mean, on the long run, though, everyone's in the gun, 3D gun printing community, which you are somewhat a part of. The ultimate goal is to make these better, correct? I mean, that's what they're trying to do. The first one, proof of concept, often called the liberator, one-shot, rifle effective range about 20 feet. I mean, it was a real not very good gun, but it showed that you could do it without any piece of metal in it. Now you have things like the Songbird, which looks more like a regular pistol. And if you let people just continue to work on these plans, you're just going to be people churning out more and more effective guns. And eventually you might just get one that, I don't, I mean, you said it's not going to be possible, but maybe 10 shots of where it melts in your hand, but that's enough to do a shooting rampage if you're a felon who can't get a gun any other way. Right. Well, I wouldn't say it's not possible. And there's actually plans for, which aren't easy. It's very easy to get these plans for a revolver that just uses a insert, just uses metal inserts in the chambers. And they've been able to get quite a few shots out of that. I mean, then that if you're going to have a repeatable firearm, it's going to have to have a metal barrel and chamber, which gets over these, you know, airport security concerns. And also the big thing about a fully plastic one is that it has to be pretty huge to hold any cartridge that is, you know, really lethal. It's hard to sneak through a metal detector with a, you know, five inch bulge regardless. So, but so still not, not really going to happen. So you're saying, and we're still a ways away from being able to 3D print bullets then. Actually, so the bullet is a technical term. It's just the projectile. We do 3D print bullets, but there it's a funny thing that we do. It's we use them for target practice because they are stupidly light. They're far too light to actually use with gunpowder. So you basically just you print out a bullet and just put a primer in and you can use that as practice ammo at the range if you're exceedingly cheap like I am. So I'm like, I'm blown away right now. Like I said, it's like a little plastic bullet. You just have a percussion cap. Yeah, just the primer. And so it goes very slow. It comes out like 800 feet a second. Oh, really? It's just so light. It's just so light. Whereas a kill someone with one. No, I think it would hurt very badly. But so there's other plastic ammo. Plastic ammo has existed for a while. The Germans use it as training munitions. It's still very weak, but the one they have that still has to be fired out of a steel gun, but they have one that uses a full charge of gunpowder under this extremely light projectile. The projectile weighs like 10 grains. For comparison, the typical projectile in a rifle in the 308 is 150 grains. So this is stupidly light, but it comes out at 4,000 feet a second. So the energy is a function of those two factors. It's lethal. The ones that you 3D print, it would just be, if you actually put gunpowder behind it, they would melt in your gun and ruin it. So you just put the primer in and it comes out at a somewhat competent velocity, enough to poke a hole in paper. But it would be a bit foolish to try to use that in a defensive situation, I'd say. So if we understand that there are a lot of gun hobbyists out there who enjoy tinkering on them, just like enjoying taking or tinkering on cars, and there's air 15s that are not terribly particularly dangerous or high-capacity magazines, which again are not particularly dangerous. Silencers don't really make guns like dart guns. 3D printed guns aren't that dangerous and they're not dangerous into the future. Is there anything in the world of guns that you think we should be concerned about? You seem pretty blasé to say, okay, let's just make grenades legal or rocket launchers or anything like that. Are those the kind of things that just say, homemade rocket launchers? Why not? Should we draw a line somewhere? So what I've, the main takeaway from discussing all these different types of weapons is that it's really only marginal. There aren't particular firearms that are super deadly. They're all deadly. So there's not really much principle to be drawn there. What I would say is that any type of restrictions on firearms or weapons generally that are legitimate would be ones that were based in a theory of public nuisance to where, which would mean that this pretty much cannot be used competently to defend yourself as in like, I would say, a tactical nuclear bomb. Probably has no legitimate defensive use whereas I would... Probably grenades too. Probably because they're easily test-trafficked. Yeah, hand grenades are just... Yeah, are quite difficult to use carefully. But I would say... I am generally of the opinion that there is no shoulder-fired weapon that is very legitimately regulated or made criminal because, like I said, all of the differences, even when we're talking about machine guns, regardless of caliber, it's all limited by recoil and the efficacy is really quite limited when it comes to individuals. So there's just not really much point in drawing that line. And if you're going to draw it, it has to be... It has to take into account that when you criminalize these things, you're going to be going through neighborhoods and enforcing these laws, you're going to be putting people in jail. That's something that people don't ever think about. When you make a high-capacity magazine ban and there's millions and millions of these out there, what about all the families that are going to lose breadwinners as a result of that? That needs to be seriously taken into account. And so I would say that restrictions on tactical nukes can probably be said too. Thanks for listening. Free Thoughts is produced by Tess Terrible. If you enjoyed today's show, please rate and review us on iTunes. And if you'd like to learn more about libertarianism, find us on the web at www.libertarianism.org.