Here, things get a little more technical. Let me start by reminding you of things you probably haven’t considered. In the 1940’s it took the greatest minds of the era to come up with the Atomic Bomb. These were the finest mathematicians, physicists, and theoretical minds of their era. They were infinitely smarter than I am. It took these amazing minds years of hard work to come up with the Atomic Bomb. Today, a fairly bright High School Physics student can do the same thing. A college level student who is practically at the bottom of his class can do it. What prevents them is not that they are too smart to do it. What prevents them is one little thing. They need the fissionable material that has been refined.
Anyone can pick up Uranium. You can find it in Colorado literally laying on the ground. Your Geiger counter will click away letting you know you’ve found some. You can pick it up, and take it home. It is useless. It’s a rock that if you wear it or carry it in your pocket for fifty years might give you a bit of skin cancer. It is not refined. It is the refining that is the really hard part of building a nuclear weapon. The design is well known and able to be duplicated with ease.
This is for the most advanced and most destructive weapons know to our species. How to make it is easy, it’s one part that is hard. Now, what does this matter? Firearms are much simpler, much less complex, and the components are much much easier to get.
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These are home made submachine guns that were captured by police in Brazil. Look at them. There is nothing refined about them, they are stamped steel and cast aluminum. You can make it out of essentially scrap metal you would throw away, or find at the dump. How do you restrict access to scrap metal? I’ve never done that, but I can. Anyone with even one year of high school metal shop can do it with ease.
Before you say we can limit the ammunition, are you sure we can do that? What is ammunition? Gunpowder, and a hunk of metal. Gunpowder has been around for more than a thousand years. It isn’t exactly like your Momma’s secret Chilli. Everyone knows it. Coal or charcoal, salt peter, and sulfur. When Homer Hickam wanted to build a rocket, his science teacher told him that this would make rocket fuel. Homer and his friends went to the city and found a chemical supply shop. They asked to buy a couple pounds each of those. The man told them that first, the company dealt in train car loads, not pounds. Second, that stuff made gunpowder, and he wasn’t going to sell any to a bunch of kids.
Smokeless powder, or modern powder, has Nitrogen added to it. Nitrates. It makes it more powerful, and really no more unstable.
But we can make ammunition with ease too. Including the cartridge. The secret to that is the primer. The primer is a modern equivalent, but at first it was fulminate of mercury, and then fulminate of silver. The secret for those is known to just about every chemistry student in school today. Making explosives is easy, most of the training for chemists is how not to do it.
So banning the guns doesn’t work. Banning the ammunition makes it a little harder, but not significantly so. We know. We banned Crystal Meth. We made one of the ingredients so hard to get you have to present identification to the drug store to buy it. But guess what? Production of Crystal Meth has increased by 1,000%. Seriously.
All we did was cut down on the number of idiots burning down their mobile home trying to cook meth in their kitchen. The big boys started cooking it in huge factory settings ala Breaking Bad.
So what you are asking is how do we put the Genie back in the bottle? We can’t. It can’t be done. If you managed to ban firearms today. There would be literally tens of thousands of them buried in watertight containers waiting. People would start to work on them with tools they had gotten for a couple hundred bucks. Home made guns would become the norm. Ban high capacity magazines, and people can make those just as easy. A spring is another old invention that we understand pretty well.
You can make a Glock over the next month. It’s called Polymer 80. It is a nearly finished Glock frame. All you have to do is a little filing, and drill a couple holes in it. The parts are readily available, and you would have a pistol with NO SERIAL NUMBER. Untraceable. It’s sold today.
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It is sold from a number of stores and sites. So these pistols are manufactured in people’s homes, garages, workshops, or bedrooms. Basic tools, and you have a gun.
How do you ban knowledge? How do you ban basic tools? The bombing of Oklahoma City happened so long ago, but you can still buy Nitrate based Fertilizer, the key ingredient in the bomb that was used. Go to your local home improvement store, look at the fertilizers, the nitrate rating is on the bag it is sold in. You’ll need 20% or higher to make a bomb. I bet you can find at least two or three different brands of the stuff. Nitrates are very valuable as a fertilizer.
Now, all of this is capable of being made by someone with basic skills. What about those with advanced skills? What about those with advanced metalworking skills? The guys on Mythbusters made a cannon out of pipe. A cannon that was just as effective as one purpose built. They made cannon balls out of stone. They made them out of all sorts of items. How do you stop people from buying a couple hunks of pipe from their local metal supply yard? They could need it to repair a sewage line, or they could be using it to make a cannon. Welding the pipes together to make a cannon barrel is practically child’s play. Again, that one year of high school metal shop would do it to give them the skills.
If you didn’t have that year of shop, watching some You Tube videos on how to weld would give you the foundation, and a few days of practice on scrap metal would give you the skills. Now, all you need are some ball bearings, plentiful everywhere. Some gunpowder, easily manufactured, and you have a cannon firing grapeshot. Those weapons slaughtered people by the dozens with each shot during the era when they were the pinnacle of military technology.
The point I am getting to is this. There are dangerous weapons. Those are weapons that are poorly designed, or manufactured. Otherwise, there are only dangerous people. I was trained by the Army to think of this kind of stuff. I was trained to make weapons out of anything I could find. Wood would make a weapon. I could make a Pungi Pit, or a swinging spike trap. I could make a weapon out of string. Coating those spikes with fecal matter insured an infection, and probably caused the wounded to lose a leg from gangrene.
The only thing you can do is try and protect yourself from those dangerous people. You might not succeed. But you stand a better chance of it than hoping for the kindness of strangers to protect you.
