“Kits package together some unregulated parts. But the mechanism that makes a gun go “bang” is regulated and must either pass through the same channels as a commercially manufactured firearm or else be constructed from scratch or from unfinished blanks. That’s not necessarily difficult, but it means there’s really no magic legislative wand that can be waved to make DIY guns disappear.
After the high-profile assassination of a political figure in 2022, Reuters’ Ju-min Park and Daniel Leussink reported, “the man suspected of killing former Japanese premier Shinzo Abe with a hand-made gun on Friday could have made the weapon in a day or two after obtaining readily available materials such as wood and metal pipes, analysts say. The attack showed gun violence cannot be totally eliminated even in a country where tough gun laws mean it is nearly unheard of for citizens to buy or own firearms.”
The weapon the assassin used in Japan was a crude but effective two-shot firearm that looked more like an old-fashioned zip gun than the 3D-printed pistol used to kill Thompson. But while not pretty, it was just as effective.
In 2019, TheFirearmBlog published a retrospective pointing out that during the zip gun heyday in the 1950s, “a mechanically inclined youngster might upon obtaining ammunition, most often widely available .22 rimfire, find that such rounds will fit into a section of suitably sized steel tubing, often a section of the salvaged car radio antenna. From then on it is a simple matter of fabricating a means of striking the rear of the cartridge while ensuring the entire assembly is held firmly together.” The article included photographs of homemade firearms discovered in the tightly controlled confines of prisons, crafted by inmates from found materials including pipes and plumbing fittings.”
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“A 2018 Small Arms Survey report on improvised and craft-produced weapons noted that such “weapons have been manufactured for as long as firearms have existed, typically by hand or in small workshops.” Among the weapons manufactured by craft producers, the authors noted, are “mortars, recoilless guns, and grenade launchers.”
Revisiting the subject last year in the context of Europe, Small Arms Survey noted that evolving technologies make it much easier to share plans for privately manufactured firearms and to create sophisticated devices at home without specialized skills.”
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“In September, Lizzie Dearden and Thomas Gibbons-Neff wrote for The New York Times about the worldwide proliferation of designs for the FGC-9, a partially 3D-printed weapon that can “be built entirely from scratch, without commercial gun parts, which are often regulated and tracked by law enforcement agencies internationally.”
As one expert told the reporters: “Now you have something that people can make at home with unregulated components. So from a law enforcement perspective, how do you stop that?””
LC: Yes, some people will always be able to build their own deadly weapons. But, most people can’t or won’t. Most gun deaths are from people who have the deadly weapon because it is easily accessible, not because they were determined to build the weapon by whatever means necessary.
“The shooting that claimed a life and injured more than 20 others last Wednesday in Kansas City started for the most ridiculous reason possible.
Someone was looking at someone else.
Via NBCNews.com, court documents show that the shooting stemmed from an argument sparked by the stupidest form of testosterone-driving peacocking.
“Four males approached Lyndell Mays and one of the males asked Lyndell Mays what he was looking at, because they didn’t know him,” the paperwork contends.
“They began arguing about why they were staring at each other.”
Are we that insecure as a species that we can’t tolerate the fact that someone else looked at us? It would be hilarious if it wasn’t so tragic.
Insecure men, too thin-skinned to tolerate someone else’s gaze and too stupid to not start waving around guns and too impulsive to not pull the trigger resulted in the death of a woman who had nothing to do with their stupid-ass macho head games. Others were physically injured, tens of thousands were emotionally impacted, and millions of others must now take a serious look at whether they should avoid attending games or parades or other sports-related gatherings.
How can anyone even begin to combat this? It’s a combination of excess hormones and insufficient intelligence. Along with, of course, access to weapons that can be brandished and activated by someone who otherwise can’t be trusted to tie his shoes properly.”
“”A 2017 task force report on the involuntary referrals of children under Florida’s Baker Act found that one-third of them were not necessary,” according to a recent article by Kaitlin Gibbs of the University of Florida Levin College of Law. “Many children are Baker Acted more than once, which shows the initial Baker Act may not have successfully treated children with mental illness. At least thirty percent of all children Baker Acted will have a repeat Baker Act within five years.”
Nor is throwing people into mental wards likely to reduce the number of mass shootings. As Ragy Girgis, a clinical psychiatrist at Columbia University, wrote in 2022, “Serious mental illness—specifically psychosis—is not a key factor in most mass shootings or other types of mass murder.” And while 25 percent of mass shootings “are associated with non-psychotic psychiatric or neurological illnesses, including depression,” he notes that “in most cases these conditions are incidental.”
In the case of last week’s murders in Maine, the shooter, 40-year-old Robert Card, was hospitalized during the summer. But officials say there is no evidence this hospitalization was involuntary. And Card’s history of mental illness makes him unusual among other mass murderers.”
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“If DeSantis’ plan were enacted, the likely result would be a rapid increase in the unnecessary institutionalization of mentally ill individuals—and a negligible impact on criminal violence.”
“The core question in Rahimi, in other words, is whether the Court will back away from its decision in Bruen, which has led to all kinds of disastrous results, including the Fifth Circuit’s decision holding that abusive husbands have a right to keep a weapon they could use to murder their wives.”
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“Bruen held that, in order to justify nearly any law regulating firearms, “the government must demonstrate that the regulation is consistent with this Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.” This means that lawyers defending even the most widely accepted gun laws, such as the federal ban on gun possession by domestic abusers, must show that “analogous regulations” also existed and were accepted when the Constitution was framed — particularly if the law addresses “a general societal problem that has persisted since the 18th century.” If they cannot, the challenged gun law must be struck down.
This places an extraordinarily high burden on any lawyer defending a gun law. When the historical record is ambiguous or indeterminate, the government loses, and a gun law is effectively repealed by the courts. And lawyers defending gun laws face an especially heavy burden when they defend laws that seek to address a problem, like domestic abuse, that has existed for centuries.
Almost immediately, the Bruen decision sparked mass confusion in the federal courts. Judges have reached contradictory results in a multitude of post-Bruen challenges to gun laws. Courts applying Bruen have struck laws prohibiting guns in places of worship, requiring guns to have serial numbers that allow them to be tracked by law enforcement, and prohibiting underage ownership of guns — all claiming that these laws are inconsistent with “historical tradition.””
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“On the day Bruen was decided, Justice Stephen Breyer warned in a dissenting opinion that, by requiring judges to dive into often-vague and indeterminate historical records, Bruen “imposes a task on the lower courts that judges cannot easily accomplish.” “Courts are, after all, staffed by lawyers, not historians,” Breyer continued. And “legal experts typically have little experience answering contested historical questions or applying those answers to resolve contemporary problems.””
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“One fundamental problem with Bruen, as Judge Miller’s critique of the decision emphasizes, is that the six Republican-appointed justices who joined it appear to have no understanding of why changes in American society over the past 250 years make it difficult or impossible to draw meaningful analogies between modern gun laws and those that existed when the Constitution was written.”
“No other high-income country has suffered such a high death toll from gun violence. Every day, 120 Americans die at the end of a gun, including suicides and homicides, an average of 43,375 per year. According to the latest available analysis of data from 2015 to 2019, the US gun homicide rate was 26 times that of other high-income countries; its gun suicide rate was nearly 12 times higher. Mass shootings, defined as attacks in which at least four people are injured or killed excluding the shooter, have been on the rise since 2015, peaking at 686 incidents in 2021. There have been 565 mass shootings in the US in 2023 as of late October, including the Lewiston shooting, and at the current pace, the US is set to eclipse the 2021 record this year.”
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“According to a database maintained by Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training Center at Texas State University, there were 520 active attacks — defined as when one or more people are “actively killing or attempting to kill multiple unrelated people in a public space,” including but not limited to shootings — between 2000 and 2022. In many of those cases, police were unable to stop the attacker, either because the attack had already ended by the time they arrived or because the attacker surrendered or committed suicide. Only in 160 cases were police able to successfully intervene by shooting or otherwise subduing the attacker.
nother 2021 study from Hamline University and Metropolitan State University found that the rate of deaths in 133 mass school shootings between 1980 and 2019 was 2.83 times greater in cases where there was an armed guard present. The researchers argue the results suggest the presence of an armed guard increased shooters’ aggression and that because many school shooters have been found to be suicidal, “an armed officer may be an incentive rather than a deterrent.””
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“In 2008, the Supreme Court effectively wrote NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre’s “good guy with a gun” theory into the Constitution. The Court’s 5-4 decision in District of Columbia v. Heller (2008) was the first Supreme Court decision in American history to hold that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess a firearm. But it also went much further than that.
Heller held that one of the primary purposes of the Second Amendment is to protect the right of individuals — good guys with a gun, in LaPierre’s framework — to use firearms to stop bad guys with guns. As Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in Heller, an “inherent right of self-defense has been central to the Second Amendment right.”
As a matter of textual interpretation, this holding makes no sense. The Second Amendment provides that “a well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
We don’t need to guess why the Second Amendment protects a right to firearms because it is right there in the Constitution. The Second Amendment’s purpose is to preserve “a well-regulated Militia,” not to allow individuals to use their weapons for personal self-defense.
For many years, the Supreme Court took the first 13 words of the Second Amendment seriously. As the Court said in United States v. Miller (1939), the “obvious purpose” of the Second Amendment was to “render possible the effectiveness” of militias. And thus the amendment must be “interpreted and applied with that end in view.” Heller abandoned that approach.
Heller also reached another important policy conclusion. Handguns, according to Scalia, are “overwhelmingly chosen” by gun owners who wish to carry a firearm for self-defense. For this reason, he wrote, handguns enjoy a kind of super-legal status. Lawmakers are not allowed to ban what Scalia described as “the most preferred firearm in the nation to ‘keep’ and use for protection of one’s home and family.”
This declaration regarding handguns matters because this easily concealed weapon is responsible for far more deaths than any other weapon in the United States — and it isn’t close. In 2021, for example, a total of 14,616 people were murdered in the US, according to the FBI. Of these murder victims, at least 5,992 — just over 40 percent — were killed by handguns.”
“In the wake of the Hamas terrorist organization’s murderous attacks on Israel, the country’s government is admitting—not for the first time—that even Israel’s extensive security apparatus can’t be everywhere to protect everyone. Under the pressure of bloody events, officials are again making it easier for civilians to acquire and carry firearms for self-defense.
“Today I directed the Firearms Licensing Division to go on an emergency operation, in order to allow as many citizens as possible to arm themselves,” announced National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir. “The plan will take effect within 24 hours.”
By no means does the order eliminate the country’s tight restrictions on guns. But it’s an acknowledgment that too many Israelis were caught with limited access to the means of self-defense when Hamas terrorists crossed the border from Gaza and attacked civilians.”
“One of the most common types of new laws this year are those that allow handgun owners to carry a concealed gun without a permit. Florida, Nebraska and South Carolina have passed such laws, joining 23 other states that have passed permitless concealed carry since 2010. North Carolina advanced a similar law that was shelved earlier this month, but the state legislature did repeal a law that required a permit to buy a handgun, overriding the Democratic governor’s veto.
Other states have considered expanding the areas in which concealed weapons can be carried. In Mississippi, the state Board of Education implemented a policy last year to comply with a decade-old law that allowed guns in K-12 schools. In West Virginia, guns are now allowed on public college and university campuses, a similar law to one Tennessee considered. The Iowa state House passed a bill allowing legal gun owners to keep a weapon in their car on public grounds and decriminalized the carry of concealed weapons for certain people, like those deemed a danger to themselves or others. The Missouri House advanced a law allowing guns in places of worship and on public transportation.
Many of these gun-rights expansions are also geared toward schools. After the Uvalde, Texas, school shooting that killed 19 children and two teachers, the Republican Party promoted arming teachers as a way to increase school safety, and states have since begun passing laws allowing it. Last year, Ohio passed a law allowing teachers to be armed after 24 hours of training (down from 700 hours); this year, Mississippi passed a bill that would create a program to arm teachers, and Oklahoma has considered one similar to Ohio’s, though its legislative session is almost over. Texas’s legislature is considering a law that would offer a stipend to armed teachers, and Indiana has passed a bill allowing state-funded handgun training for teachers.”
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“We don’t know much about the effects most of these specific laws will have, because longstanding roadblocks on gun-related research mean we don’t know a lot about what kinds of gun laws prevent shootings, especially mass shootings. More than 20 years of research has found that increased availability of guns is associated with higher rates of homicide, and a 2014 study in the Journal of Urban Health found that a repeal of Missouri’s permit requirement for handgun purchases contributed to a 25 percent increase in firearm homicide rates in the five years that followed.”
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“many states are working to prevent the kind of data collection that would tell us more about the relationship between guns and gun violence. The federal government doesn’t track gun purchases. To fill in the gaps in that data, the gun-safety advocacy community has tried to work with credit-card companies to track gun purchases, according to Holihan. But Arkansas, Florida, Montana and Utah are among the states that have passed new legislation preventing “discrimination” against gun manufacturers in an effort to stop that practice before it starts, and credit-card companies have backed away from it. South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem has also banned state agencies from working with banks that track gun purchases.”
“Yet the perpetrator, who was killed by a police officer at the scene, had been licensed as an armed security guard, which means he passed a background check and was legally allowed to own firearms.
In that respect, the killer was typical of people who commit crimes like this. That is the main reason why expanded background checks cannot reasonably be expected to have much of an impact on mass shootings, contrary to the impression left by politicians who reflexively recommend that solution.
Federal law disqualifies broad categories of Americans from owning firearms, including people who have been convicted of felonies or subjected to court-ordered psychiatric treatment. Background checks are required for all gun sales by federally licensed dealers, and some states extend that requirement to transfers by private sellers.
As several news outlets noted after the Allen attack, Texas is not one of those states. But that detail does not seem relevant in this case: Although the killer bought some guns from private sellers, CNN reported, the rifle he used in the attack was “purchased legally,” meaning he was not a “prohibited person” under federal law.”