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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   31472 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 7, 2022

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A model of 3D printed rifle called the FGC-9 (which stands for F*** Gun Control) is being used by rebels fighting against the authoritarian genocidal military junta in Myanmar which regained power after a military coup deposed the democratically elected leader in 2021. If that's not enough, the government of Myanmar is not at all shy about killing civilians, from what I've heard.

https://nationalinterest.org/blog/reboot/guns-are-being-3d-printed-myanmar-199401

https://observers.france24.com/en/asia-pacific/20220114-3d-printed-weapons-myanmar-rebels

Apparently they've got 3D printers set up in guerilla jungle hideouts. The creator of the FGC-9 was a young German-Kurdish man named Jstark who died recently, possibly of a heart condition.

My thoughts: It's sad that some progressive organizations might be reluctant to bring positive attention to the rebels or the tools they use because it arguably hurts their cause or something.

If I was a guy like Jstark or Cody Wilson, and I was concerned about PR, I might say something truthful but strategic like "the most important thing to me is getting these files somewhere where they can't be taken down and where they can be accessed by anyone, because that's the only way for me to help rebels like these. I care about the downsides of making these guns available, but I've calculated things and it is greatly overshadowed by the upside." Or something. I didn't phrase that well.

Edit: A cleaner way to say it: "the moral benefit of 3D-printed guns to citizens living under brutal authoritarian dictatorships in places like Myanmar is so great that the harm caused to the rest of the world would need to be truly massive in order to outweigh it, and I do not believe it is so massive, if it is indeed a net harm to the wellbeing of other countries."

My thoughts: It's sad that some progressive organizations might be reluctant to bring positive attention to the rebels or the tools they use because it arguably hurts their cause or something.

"The Left (TM)" does not support my favorite cause! "The Left (TM) is so hypocritical! Imagine if the situation was reversed!"

Well, duh. "The Left" is many different groups and movements with different agendas of their own. Want them to help your agenda? Find some way to show them that supporting your exact agenda will help their causes, that your agenda will fit into intersectional mosaic.

Be concrete. Name the "progressive organizations" you expect to support rebels in Myanmar (Brady campaign? Mothers against gun violence?)

Be concrete. Name the "progressive organizations" you expect to support rebels in Myanmar (Brady campaign? Mothers against gun violence?)

I mean, maybe Human Rights Council? Amnesty International? Hell, why not Open Society Foundation? I'm sure Soros would think a military junta is right out in terms of types of governments.

How likely is the situation when someone has access to 9mm ammo, but not 9mm firearms that can fire it?

  • you have access to 9mm pistols, but you need a 9mm carbine for that extra oomph and accuracy. Perhaps you have taken over a police station, but local military bases remain out of reach

  • you simply need more guns: you have a surplus of 9mm ammo and willing soldiers, but not enough guns to arm them with. Perhaps you're in a warzone, so the ammo is everywhere, but the weapons are all in someone's hands

Would I want an FGC-9 in the US? No. There's enough 9mm guns, including carbines, that I could own.

Would I want an FGC-9 in Germany? Probably not. If I can buy 9mm ammo, I must own a 9mm pistol. If my goal is assassination, it's probably enough. If it's a violent uprising, it's enough to "liberate" some MP5 from the police.

Would I want an FGC-9 in Russia or China? Probably not. I would rather want something semi-automatic chambered in a local hunting caliber. This way I could get a license for a break-open shotgun, buy buckshot or slugs and use them in a printed gun.

How likely is the situation when someone has access to 9mm ammo

Unsurprisingly, this issue has already been considered by the people who champion 3D printed firearms, and a solution has been proposed. Project: But What About Ammo? provides detailed instructions on creating your own 9mm ammo from widely available components in restricted areas.

I've gone through BWAA1, and it looks like waiting for BWAA2 will be necessary:

  • bullets: only hunting calibers are available. I guess one could cast their own ❓

  • casings: again, only hunting calibers are available ❌

  • gunpowder: nail gun cartridges ✅

  • primer compound: nail gun cartridges ✅

  • empty primers: I guess blank cartridges could be used to harvest them, but they are available only in rifle and signal gun calibers ❓

Bullets aren't that well controlled. If you're a sports shooter who goes through 500 rounds a week, shooting 300 and selling 200 to someone about whom you're sure isn't a police agent can be fairly lucrative.

You'd probably have to do something crazy like buy thousands of rounds and do little shooting to arouse attention of police.

Meanwhile, guns can't disappear. Well, they kinda can but eventually if police figure it out last owner is in middling deep legal trouble if it's just one gun. Mandatory to report it went missing and all that.

Another aspect is that 9x19mm Parabellum is simply just popular. Sure, Myanmar's military is probably still using AKs chambered for 7.62x39mm, for all I know, but 9mm has been around for a literal century at this point, there's probably no corner of the world where you can't have access to it; either a country's military uses it, or a country's police force uses it.

Thanks. So the target market for an FGC-9 in Germany is someone who needs a firearm, knows someone who's willing to sell some surplus 9x19mm, but has no access to actual underground arms dealers.

Not sure if it was made with that in mind, but that's someone who can benefit, yes.

Have you considered that the people arguing for gun rights are mostly not utilitarians?

I mean, I personally think the occasional mass shooting is an unavoidable cost of maintaining strong gun rights.

Are these 3d printed guns remotely useful in combat? I can't imagine any plastic parts---let alone printed plastic---standing up to the pressures/temperatures created when firing a bullet. And AK47s are already dirt cheap.

I could see a 3d printed gun being useful for an easily concealable, single-shot assassination weapon, but that's not what a jungle guerrilla needs.

Look it up. FGC-9 seems fairly sturdy, and the actually stressed parts - barrel, bolt are metal.

And AK47s are already dirt cheap.

If you have a sponsor and someone willing to ship you weapons. FGC-9 can be made from fairly common materials. Steel pipe, steel barstock.

It's really not a bad weapon, fully automatic fire is not that important and rapid semi-automatic fire in jungle is good enough, especially if enemy doesn't have body armor that stops pistol rounds.

"Some have lasted over a thousand rounds, which is impressive, but military weapons last for tens of thousands of rounds. I’d imagine the FGC-9 acts like a modern Liberator pistol."

They're useful, I think.

Printed weapons include machined parts, including the barrel and springs. It's possible tp machine those parts using basic printed tools, for instance rifling can be done electrically with a current and some water. Generally the plastic parts are the complicated fabrication of the frame and trigger casing, and the screws, spring, and barrel are metals.

The FGC-9 has, to my knowledge, been regularly tested out to 1000 rounds with minimal wear. Printed parts greatly reduces the overhead of getting tactically useful parts for cheap and on demand, and makes repairs and part-replacement fast, cheap, and easy. I've been watching the space for years now and it is significantly more sophisticated than you seem to give credit. Most major form factors have a printable version that can be found online, with instructions and requirements, at a significantly reduced price for materials.

How does electrical rifling work? That seems like it would be the hardest part to manage without dedicated tooling, especially for a rifle-length barrel.

There's a video of the fundamental concept applied to a 3d printer here for cutting through metal plates. To produce a barrel, you 3d-print a shape that manipulates how the electrolyte is able to touch the surface; this was an older approach, but gives a good idea of the concept. Boring from plain stock can still be obnoxious, but once you've got a tube, running the actual rifling is mostly just messy and loud.

Because 3d printing can fabricate virtually any 3-dimensional shape, you can easily print a modular cylinder with a spiraling pattern engraved into the tool for cables to run through. You can slip the tool into an unrifled tube, electrically charge the wiring, pass flowing water through to slough off the material, and you've got moderately precise rifling.

I'll see if I can't find a video of it working tomorrow, it's a pretty fascinating solution to at-home machining.

I'm not sure; if I had to guess, probably something like painting the grooves with some sort of acid-like compound or something that, when placed into an electrolysis bath, activates and etches away the metal it was painted onto.

I'm not an expert in shop, but what's stopping people from publishing digital, open source schematics for using more traditional metalworking to make firearms? Would it be too effective, a kind of "how to build a nuke in your kitchen" type thing, or are 3d printers really that much more accessible?

What does it take to make an AK, probably more than just a lathe right?

Nothing is stopping them. If you have a metalworking workshop you can make a Sten SMG. Or an AK. The benefit of things like FGC-9 is that you don't have to be seen around a lathe or a clapped-out Bridgeport machining something that looks very much like a gun barrel or a receiver.

I read a decent primer on making zipguns (the name for what you're talking about) a while back. Takes some skill to make a weapon that isn't going to blow your hand off but it's definitely not rocket science. Sufficiently motivated people do it; Shinzo Abe was recently assassinated with a zipgun.

I'd take a zipgun made of metal over a plastic one any day.

These aren't plastic, though. It's a metal gun with plastic frame and some minor parts.

What's stopping people from publishing digital, open source schematics for using more traditional metalworking to make firearms?

Because the people doing the publishing generally rent apartments or reside in condos without garages. Autistic single nerds in their 20s and 30s don't generally own homes.

It's hard to make schematics when you don't have the tools to test them with; by contrast, even a shoebox apartment can accommodate a 3D printer, a vise block, a bucket for EDM rifling, and some hand tools.

I'm not an expert in shop, but what's stopping people from publishing digital, open source schematics for using more traditional metalworking to make firearms?

Nothing. It's easily accessable. You can just search "AR lower CNC file" and it should show up as the first result.

Building a gun from entirely from scratch is extremely difficult and costly for one person, but most of these files assume you're only interested in making the part that's actually regulated (the lower reciever).

I’ve assumed that’s already the case. Not sure how amateur gunsmiths are most likely to learn. I guess it wouldn’t be too surprising if (at least in America) it’s one of those skills managed entirely by cultural norms.

Edit: A cleaner way to say it: "the moral benefit of 3D-printed guns to citizens living under brutal authoritarian dictatorships in places like Myanmar is so great that the harm caused to the rest of the world would need to be truly massive in order to outweigh it, and I do not believe it is so massive, if it is indeed a net harm to the wellbeing of other countries."

Isn't that already a big part of what they're selling, only stated more broadly? The moral benefit of accessible firearms is that it prevents brutal authoritarian dictatorships, everywhere and always. This is most readily observable today in Myanmar, but I continue to believe that it holds true in places where the dynamic isn't as plainly visible. Shifting the focus to places like Myanmar feels like providing ammunition to the opposition - "OK, it's necessary in those places and our government can work with that, but no American civilians needs those weapons of war".

Isn't that already a big part of what they're selling, only stated more broadly? The moral benefit of accessible firearms is that it prevents brutal authoritarian dictatorships, everywhere and always.

Big if true, but is it true? Does not seem to be universally true.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_Yemen

Other sources state that many problems persist alongside allegations that these reforms have not been fully implemented and that abuses still run rampant, especially in the areas of women's rights, freedom of the press, torture and police brutality.[3] There are arbitrary arrests of citizens as well as arbitrary searches of homes. Prolonged pretrial detention is a serious problem, and judicial corruption, inefficiency, and executive interference undermine due process. Freedom of speech, the press and religion are all restricted.[1] In 2018 and 2019, numerous sources, including the United Nations described the human rights situation in Yemen as being the worst in the world.[4][5][6][7][8]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated_number_of_civilian_guns_per_capita_by_country

Country or subnational area Estimate of civilian firearms per 100 persons

3 Yemen 52.8

Yemen is a failed state that has been an active war zone since 2014. Not only has saudi support included indiscriminant bombing of civilians, but the US has supported and enhanced the suffering with funding of their own. I would be very careful in drawing conclusions from Yemen because A) the situation is still playing out and B) famine and lack of civilian healthcare is far more important for civilians in Yemen than civil rights abuses.

It's incorrect to claim that civilian gun ownership always defeats authoritarianism, but Yemen really isn't the cleanest case to use for either argument. It's more cleanly a case study in how foreign involvement in local politics tends to devolve into chaos. Gun ownership in the middle east is moreso a product of international arming campaigns aimed at politically involved insurgeants as opposed to civilians defending liberties. Distilling this down to gun ownership rates tends to ignore cultural and historical realities for particular regions.

Huh. I'm going to have to do some reading and get back to you. At a glance, I admit that I'm puzzled by the situation and it's a pretty clear refutation of my claim.

A Saudi carpet bombing campaign in the middle of a brutal sectarian civil war is not what anyone was talking about with "guns defeat totalitarianism"- for one thing, it's unclear that it's totalitarianism per se, as opposed to living in a war zone just generally sucking.

A Saudi carpet bombing campaign in the middle of a brutal sectarian civil war is not what anyone was talking about with "guns defeat totalitarianism"

This is exactly what would happen when second amendment overthrows totalitarianism in US - devastated land split among warlords, fighting it out in proxy wars between great powers of the world. Many such cases in history.

it's unclear that it's totalitarianism per se

No freedom of speech and press, no freedom of religion except current warlord's favorite sect of Islam, no justice system except current warlord's will, no human rights whatsoever. If it isn't totalitarianism, it really looks like one.

as opposed to living in a war zone just generally sucking.

This Wiki article is not about people killed in bombing and shelling or dying of disease and famine, it is about people arrested and tortured.

Exactly the thing universal gun ownership was supposed to prevent according to theory.

The question is: why guns do not prevent it? Why Yemenis armed to the teeth allow themselves to be arrested and tortured at the whim of local warlord and his goons?

Two reasons:

1/ The same reason why Americans armed to the teeth surrender to spend rest of their life in American hell prisons rather than die with their boots on.

2/ Family ties, much stronger over here than in the western countries. If you fight back, the warlord will make example of your whole extended family, and even if they do not care about their life anymore, average Yemenis care about their kin much more than average Americans.

It’s also possible that the Yemenis with guns are the ones doing the oppressing of their less-well-armed peers, and that’s driving the numbers up.

Tangentially related, Popular Front did a short documentary about Jstark a about a year ago. Jstark was pretty up front about his belief that all people should have access to firearms as a defense against authoritarian regimes.

My thoughts: It's sad that some progressive organizations might be reluctant to bring positive attention to the rebels or the tools they use because it arguably hurts their cause or something.

I mean, it actually can hurt their cause- if a man knows he can just magic up himself a gun, he has a stronger position from which to re-negotiate or enforce a social contract (and fighting against government forces is fundamentally a re-negotiation attempt, as is most targeted violence). For people who have, or aspire to have, the power to unilaterally impose such a contract, this is a problem.

So the establishment needs to show "that protest and resistance works and is good" per their internal narrative, but if they also anticipate (rightly or wrongly) being resisted in the same way (for any reason- human beings generally don't like being forced to do things at gunpoint), it's important not to go into too much detail.

"the most important thing to me is getting these files somewhere where they can't be taken down and where they can be accessed by anyone, because that's the only way for me to help rebels like these. I care about the downsides of making these guns available, but I've calculated things and it is greatly overshadowed by the upside."

This is the same argument pro-gun people use in the US as well- they just believe in arming said rebels up front rather than trying to fix it after the hypothetical dictatorship is imposed in an attempt to make it more difficult to create. Whether or not that's worth the price is... ultimately where the debate lies.

That is correct, and I don't think you can point on them being inconsistent on this subject.

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