I’m more surprised than you are, but it’s true that the NRA is inadvertently going to help Americans for a change.
I know that you’re thinking, “how the fuck is this going to happen, Bitchy?” Good question. I’m sure you are all aware that the NRA stopped representing gun owners years ago, and have become the lobbying arm for gun manufacturers. They don’t give a shit about the safety of gun owners any more than they care about the victims of gun crime. They care about one thing; selling a shit ton of guns to whoever has the money to buy them. The NRA has always mounted a strong attack on anything that hurts gun sales, and they always will.
You wanna know what hurts gun sales? Being able to print guns at home from schematics that you illegally downloaded from The Pirate Bay. This is not something the NRA will stand for. Trust me, the NRA is going to do everything they can to shut this down. My prediction is that Cody Wilson (the shitbag who started Defense Distributed), whose mission is to open source gun manufacturing, is about to feel weight of Wayne LaPierre’s boot on his throat.
So stop freaking out over 3D gun printing. In the short term, this problem will be solved by our new ally, the NRA. I think that in the long term, we’ll see a technology solution to this technology problem. There are a myriad of different ways to approach this. The one I can think of right off the bat, is to make make sure that 3D printers don’t work unless they’re connected to the internet. At that point, the giant data collection apparatus the NSA has set up can track every gun that is printed. But there are a ton of different ways to deal with this.
And we may just all end up with a net win from this whole situation. If the NRA does what I think they’re going to do, they’re going to have to expose themselves for what they are; lobbyists for gun manufacturers and gun smugglers. And when people like little Cody Wilson feel the wrath of the NRA, we may see some gun nut on gun nut violence (I’m speaking metaphorically, of course).
