American Gun Sales Surge in Wake of San Bernardino Attack

At a gun range in Atlanta on Sunday, four days after the deadliest Islamic State-inspired attack on American soil, Brandon Langley practiced firing his AR-15 semiautomatic assault rifle.

“If people were armed, it would have changed the outcome totally,” Langley said of Wednesday’s assault by a heavily armed husband and wife that killed 14 people and wounded 21 in San Bernardino, California. “Instead of 14 victims, there would have been zero, except for those two (attackers).”

Many Americans agree and are stocking up on weapons after the country’s worst mass shooting in three years. Gun retailers are reporting surging sales, with customers saying they want to keep handguns and rifles at hand for self-defense in the event of another attack.

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Bill to ban 3d Printed Guns Reintroduced to Congress

Since Congressman Steve Israel first called for legislation that would ban 3-D printed guns, those plastic-printed firearms have evolved from a few simple components to a full one-shot pistol to rifles and multi-shot revolvers, with more advances on the horizon. Israel’s bill, meanwhile, has gone nowhere, leaving a widening gap between DIY weapons and the law.

But the representative from New York says he hasn’t given up: In the next few months, Israel’s office tells WIRED he plans to reintroduce legislation that would ban 3-D printed guns or any other fully-plastic firearm. The Undetectable Firearms Modernization Act, which Israel first tried and failed to pass last year, forbids the possession or manufacture of any gun that could slip through a standard metal detector unnoticed, including those that include a removable chunk of non-functional metal—what he sees as a loophole in the current law against plastic weapons.

“My legislation is about making sure that we have laws in place to ensure that criminals and terrorists can’t produce guns that can easily be made undetectable. Security checkpoints will do little good if criminals can produce plastic firearms and bring those firearms through metal detectors into secure areas like airports or courthouses,” Israel wrote in a statement to WIRED. “When I started talking about the issue of completely plastic firearms, I was told the idea of a plastic gun is science-fiction. That science-fiction is now a dangerous reality.”

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DARPA Demonstrates First Guided .50 Calibre Rounds

The U.S. government says it has developed the first ever self-guided bullets that can lock onto a target more than a mile away and maneuver midflight in order to hit its mark.

The .50 caliber target tracking bullets, dubbed Extreme Accuracy Tasked Ordnance (EXACTO), are designed for military snipers, who must deal with changes in wind, light and ambient heat as they fire on a target.

The EXACTO technology is being developed by Teledyne Scientific and Imaging with funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which researches new military technologies and is known as a key developer of the Internet.

The EXACTO round and optical sighting technology is expected to greatly extend day and nighttime range over current state-of-the-art sniper systems, DARPA said in a statement on its website. The system combines the maneuverable bullet with a real-time laser-guidance system to track and deliver the projectile to the target.

The EXACTO rounds, which are accurate up to 1.2 miles, are guided to laser-marked targets and should help snipers work farther away from intended marks, and therefore avoid detection after firing, DARPA stated.

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How 3D Printed Guns Became Serious Weapons in 1 Year

A burgeoning subculture of 3-D printed gun enthusiasts dreams of the day when a lethal firearm can be downloaded or copied by anyone, anywhere, as easily as a pirated episode of Game of Thrones. But the 27-year-old Japanese man arrested last week for allegedly owning illegal 3-D printed firearms did more than simply download and print other enthusiasts’ designs. He appears to have created some of his own.

Among the half-dozen plastic guns seized from Yoshitomo Imura’s home in Kawasaki was a revolver designed to fire six .38-caliber bullets–five more than the Liberator printed pistol that inspired Imura’s experiments. He called it the ZigZag, after its ratcheted barrel modeled on the German Mauser Zig-Zag. In a video he posted online six months ago, Imura assembles the handgun from plastic 3-D printed pieces, a few metal pins, screws and rubber bands, then test fires it with blanks.

It’s been a full year since I watched the radical libertarian group Defense Distributed test fire the Liberator, the first fully printable gun, for the first time. Imura is one of a growing number of digital gunsmiths who saw the potential of that controversial breakthrough and have strived to improve upon the Liberator’s clunky, single-shot design. Motivated by a mix of libertarianism, gun rights advocacy and open-source experimentation, their innovations include rifles, derringers, multi-round handguns and the components needed to assemble semi-automatic weapons. Dozens of other designs are waiting to be tested.

The result of all this tinkering may be the first advancements that significantly move 3-D printed firearms from the realm of science fiction to practical weapons.

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I keep toying with the idea of a future where everyone has a 3d printer capable of plastic and metal printing...and is required when a country is invaded to print weapons as instant militia.

Use of 3d Printer Lands Man in Jail for Illegal Gun Possession

A 27-year-old man who allegedly made handguns with a 3-D printer was arrested Thursday on suspicion of illegal weapons possession, the first time Japan’s firearms control law has been applied to the possession of guns made by this method.

The suspect, Yoshitomo Imura, an employee of Shonan Institute of Technology in Fujisawa, Kanagawa Prefecture, had the plastic guns at his home in Kawasaki in mid-April, the police said. No bullets have been found.

The police launched an investigation earlier this year after Imura posted video footage online of the guns, which he claimed to have produced himself, along with blueprints for them, according to investigative sources.

One of Imura’s postings carried the comment, “The right to bear firearms is a basic human right.”

Police searched Imura’s home last month and seized five guns, two of which can fire real bullets, the sources said.

Imura, who purchased a 3-D printer for around ¥60,000 on the Internet, was quoted as telling investigators during the search, “I produced the guns, but I didn’t think it was illegal.”

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Every Infantryman a Sniper

This week at the 2014 Consumer Electronics Show, firearms-manufacturer TrackingPoint announced an AR-15 version of its computer-controlled precision rifles. The company claims that the new weapon can hit moving targets “out to five football fields away.” And anyone can use it.

Described by the company as a “precision-guided firearm,” the 500-Series rifle could revolutionize how armies all over the world prepare for war. The technology promises a world where expert riflemen can be trained with very little effort—blurring the distinction between infantry and sharpshooters.

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In the World of Ubiquitous 3D Printing, Regulating Ammo May Not Work

USN/BAe Railgun Test Fire

Bladerunner Meets Star Trek

How Kinja Labels My Blog 'Conservative'

Kinja occasionally drops on me the blog label of 'conservative'. I find this annoying. I wish I could go back and reclaim the old title of Progressive Republican, but that first word has been coopted by the frakkin wackos in Berkeley. Generally speaking I have to say I am somewhat middle of the road with liberal tendencies - or I so like to delude myself. There are some points though that Kinja is definitely right. Let's visit them.

1. Preemption or the so-called Bush Doctrine. This I have absolutely no issue with. For pete's sake, if you see someone winding up to clock you, why not clock them first? There are issues about if the price will be too high - like just nuking the Soviet Union - but wrt problematic things like bin Laden, why not? I'd be as happy with Clinton having done this back in the 90s as Shrubbish having done it since. Shrubbish has just done it badly.

2. Go It Alone-ism. There are far too many times in this world that I have seen things that need to be done - whether in politics or in day to day life or at work - where things that need to be done, do not get done because someone objects right now. Far too often then things get worse and fester. Then there's the whiny attack of why didn't someone do something earlier. So, I am emphatically just rolling up the national sleeves and getting it - whatever it may be - done. There will always be objectors to a course of action, including by those that are powerful and even more so by our friends. Some times you have to do what you gotta do even if it makes you the least popular person in the room.

3. Expansionism. I believe, strongly, that the US ought to be trying to be another European Union. I do not mean that goofy rightwing, nut case version of it called the North American Union. I mean that the US has sorted out so many of the issues wrt annealing smaller and larger states that it would make for a great, no fantastic kernel for a hemispheric state. What is to be American has radically changed - culturally - in the last two hundred and thirty-one years. There is no reason why it couldn't in the future while still maintaining our core. The Roman Empire died on May 29, 1453. It spoke Greek and no longer occupied Rome. Yet it lived. There's no reason that the last American must look like me.

4. Berkeley Annoys Me. A lot. With blink tag. The politics of San Francisco bother me, but not as bad a Berkeley does. Greens - with a capital G - really annoy me too. Alright alot.

5. The fact that I am not terribly pro-union doesn't help either.

6. Very Second Amendment pry gun from cold dead hands, but with caveats.

And I am too tired to continue. If you have some good additions, my readers, from my own writings, by all means, feel free to add them in the comments section. I'll write up the counter-arguments hopefully tomorrow. Why I consider myself liberal. ish.

Some People Are Stupid

They forgot to put on their powered armour first! Sheesh! Idiots!