[Clinton] Builds A Better Handgun

A few months ago, we caught wind of someone doing something remarkable. [Clinton Westwood] built a pistol from plans he found on the Internet. You can find plans to build anything on the web, from houses to four-stroke engines to perpetual motion machines. Most of the time these plans are incomplete and many of these devices have never been built at all. [Clinton]’s pistol was one of these never-built designs. After months of work, he’s ready to call this project done, and managed to build an awesome rig to rifle the barrel.

Before [Clinton] set out to build this gun from scratch, the only other example these plans could build a gun-shaped object were a few terrible pictures of what appears to be a gun that was thrown into a garbage disposal, then into a creek, then forgotten for several years. There is a distinct lack of workmanship in this one exemplar, but [Clinton]’s attempt at replication is far more professional.

Although this gun is designed to be built using simple tools, there is one aspect of amateur gunsmithing that requires some specialized equipment. The barrel must be rifled if you want any accuracy at all, and for this [Clinton] has come up with a very simple jig made out of a broken bicycle and some threaded rod.

If homebrew gunsmithery is your thing, but you’re looking for something with a little more punch than a .25 ACP, you can beat plowshares into an AK-47. All hail the shovel AK, defender of the motherland and digger of holes.

121 thoughts on “[Clinton] Builds A Better Handgun

      1. Especially in the light that had anyone been packing heat they’d have been shooting back instead of being slaughtered. If anything MORE gun articles would be highly appropriate. Along with people hacking up target practice and self defense obstacle courses etc etc… lots of things in that line. I don’t carry a gun myself but I do recognize the importance the right to do so. Without it we’d be completely steamrolled by just about everybody lacking a conscience.

        1. Gustibus is talking about the recent shooting of British Labour MP Jo Cox, which was a single target and carried out by a guy who may have hand-built a pipe gun to carry out the attack. You’re referencing the wrong tragedy.

          1. Hence Brian’s response about mental health – the guy was ill – rather Islamic terrorism or gun control.
            Welcome to the UK, where a shooting is a cause for everyone to grieve, and doesn’t become a political football.

            Brian – the timing’s fine. We’re over it already, because we’re British.

          2. Except that some in the UK would argue that religion is also a mental illness as it is an infection with a mind virus (meme) and that the dogmas of extreme politics are effectively the same psychopathology.

          3. Yes, you’re right.

            Thankfully unusual in the UK, and has provoked some thought regarding the current political climate.

            Unfortunately the Orlando events are just the latest in a very long line of such attacks in the US and probably far from the last. I understand the point that it’s just a tool but it’s a tool with a very specific purpose. To suggest otherwise is to delude yourself.

            Obviously there are many ways to find this information and hackaday posting it is fairly unimportant in the larger picture, but to do so given recent events (both sides of the Atlantic) and then to wallow in the knowledge that “my god this is the best clickbait headline I’ve ever come up with” is pretty grubby behavior.

        2. There was a policeman there who acted immediately but that didn’t stop the lunatic killing 50 people, right? What should be the percentage of well trained gunned people with us to feel safe? 100% ?

          You are an idiot.

          K.

          1. There is no need to be like that. If you live in a society where you have the two factors of readily available weapons, and a lot of inequity and mental health problems you should expect violence, that is not an idiotic point of view at all, it is just narrow, like your’s is, only different.

            The risks of Afghan army recruits turning their guns on their trainers actually resulted in the formulation of a strategy that would have stopped the Orlando mass murder, you have one or more other armed guards watching from a protected position the interactions between “persons of unknown status” and “personal tasked with protecting from or assessing danger” so that any signs of violence from the “persons of unknown status” results in them being targeted from more than one angle making it impossible for them to get into an area filled with potential unarmed victims. This does not stop teams of people with the initial strike being from a suicide bomber, but that is a more military different scenario and not like these random acts of violent madness.

            This is not to say that it is in anyway good or acceptable to have to go to such extreme measures just to safely “have a party”, it is just a pragmatic response to the reality we are faced with, because those who could do something about improving the mental health status of our communities (and that includes vigilance) fail to do so adequately. Having people feel they needed less guns would be ideal, but not in a world were there is no less danger from insane violence. Even without guns it only take a single well placed punch to kill a person, and minds that are distorted for whatever natural or chemical reason regularly do attempt to act out such violence, often against completely innocent and random targets.

            So does some shitty tinfoil gun make anyone safer, probably not as it is just as likely to jam or blow your hand off, in which case handing it to your attacker may be the most effective form of defence. Then again he could still use his remaining hand to stab you instead, before he passed out from blood loss.

            Can’t you see that if you want less violence you need less potentially violent people on the streets, that is the only effective solution because a weapon can be almost anything therefore you can’t remove them entirely from the equation.

        3. Ah, that’s a great idea. We’ll all be safer if everybody drinking in a bar has a gun.

          Even the fear-mongering nutcase Wayne LaPierre of the NRA says that’s a dumb idea.

          But Trump likes it.

        4. Cancer isn’t bad. Especially in the light that if your other cells were metabolising as fast as the cancer cells, instead of just acting normally, there’d be less opportunity for the cancer to grow. If anything MORE cancer is the answer.

      1. I’m pretty sure there are actually best practices for that in almost every industry. I say almost every because hackers and R&D in general are pretty much never included. :)

        1. Or better yet CNN and FOX and ABC and NBC and CBS.

          I’m surprised how long CNN is going on about the UK shooting, and how much, BBC has way less attention to it and also are done already, CNN goes on and on.

    1. Murder happens every day, in every part of the world; it’s generally worse in areas with higher gun regulation then in areas with higher rates of lawful carry concealed. Take Florida for example a place where it’s extremely difficult to lawfully own a fire arm, even more so if you want anything useful/fun/good.

      What I want to know is why weren’t the bouncers carrying ranged taser pistols. I mean they shouldn’t carry lethal munitions but if people took things like fear mongers declaring a holy war on our way of life maybe the tragedy could have been avoided,or at least less destructive. One could make the same argument for “a good guy with a gun” but this is a bar and responsible gun owners know better then to drink and carry.

      But if you active a crap about avoiding more needless murder maybe write your congressman asking they bring in refugees, sendedical aid, stop blowing people up when we have the technology to build sniper drones that only kill the target. Maybe if we exercised great control as a military people like you wouldn’t get the misconception that civilian arms are to blame for the trigger being pulled by self declared holy soldiers.

      Besides this is hackaday, stop blaming a tool for what the user chooses to use it for.

      1. When trained police officers can only hit their target in the field with one shot in three the idea that you’re safer if everyone has a gun is just plain crazy. The idea that Tazers are safe is also somewhat off beam.

        I’m not against people owning guns (I used to shoot targets myself in my youth), but there needs to be a damned site more regulation on ownership and storage if there’s to be any hope of bringing gun crime down in the US.

        1. Officers are usually aiming at moving targets, or targets that are hiding behind something… shooters aren’t usually doing either so are relatively easy targets.

          Gun regulation beyond current laws (which obviously aren’t even being enforced or taken advantage of by police anyway) would be prohibitively expensive.

          1. There’s a good deal of adrenalin involved in a live shooting event that makes accurate shooting much harder than you seem to think. The shooters don’t stand stock still like a piece of card, and are likely to turn and shoot at you if you miss. Need I quote the example of the church shooting where congregation members were killed by bullets other than from the shooters gun?

            As to cost, nonsense. Most of the rest of the world has gun control and regulation without it being prohibitively expensive. You’re also putting no value on the lives of the 13,000 people killed and 26,000 injured (ignoring suicides) last year alone.

          2. Having had law enforcement hand gun training, I can tell you that that isn’t the case at all. Most of it is done on static ranges with a face to face silhouette target. Most guys have great grouping at 3 yards, beyond that, things start falling apart fast. And these are static, non-moving targets that are perfectly still other than rotating so you have a time limit of engagement. Other than that it’s simulators which who knows how much better your shots are being registered than they would be IRL, which gives false confidence. Oh, and shooting courses when you are moving through, but the targets are stationary. I’m sure bigger departments have nicer training toys, but the reality is 99% of them train the way that I did when I was in that line of business…. But they still get better training than 99.99999% of civilians, even supposed “gun nuts”… The military has the best training, but soldiers die every day pretty much. All it takes is one lucky shot….

          3. Thanks it helps to have some perspective from the side of someone that has actually been though training. Seems kind of backwards to do training other than perhaps situational in a simulator though. Perhaps this is done for cost reasons?

      1. Thanks for the post of Cleese on creativity. It was one of the few useful ones posted in this thread. I actually had a boss put over an engineering department that actually implemented the last two minutes of his speech. Disasterous.
        The part that bothers me about the other posts is that there really isn’t any human endeavor that can’t be subverted in some way to cause other humans harm. Why is it we continue to focus on the harm and not the beauty? And why is it we continually feel that we can legislate the danger out of a creation that one of us makes and not realize that creative destruction cannot be controlled through any legislative process.
        The problem is we just need better people.

    2. Yes and no, a suicidal terrorist can do more damage with a tank of propane and a cigarette lighter.

      Personally I think projectile weapons are so 20th century and mostly pretty dumb, but ultimately they are not the problem, mental health is what causes deaths, not technology. Detect, cure or lock-up all the sociopaths and the number of guns in the community would not matter, but may end up dropping over time.

      The problem in the USA is just a reflection of that nation’s status as “top predator” look at the lion or the bear, it often turns on it’s young and kills them. The USA is just like that, dangerous, even to it’s own, but it blames everyone else for it’s troubles.

      1. Seriously, look at the stats on how many people have died at one time in a night club from fire, arson or otherwise. 90 killed in Brazil, 150 killed in Russia, etc…

    3. there’s another shooting every couple of weeks. there will never be a window where you would consider this post appropriate.
      go point out the logical holes in safe spaces, if you need something to do.

    4. Everyone needs guns, children, the elderly, the deranged, all of us need guns, more guns make us all safer, because everyone in perfectly sane enough to give a shit if they die or not. oops, wait, logic fail. Some people, typically the shooter don’t give a fuck if they die in act of their crime. And this John Wayne mentality of “if someone had just had a gun….” is the biggest line of bullshit ever to come out of the NRA. you know who also have guns on them at all times and are extremely well trained? Cops and soldiers. You know who die ALL THE FUCKING TIME TO GUNS DEATHS? Cops and soldiers. SO sure, every man women and child having guns is going to prevent crazy people who don’t give a fuck about their own lives from attacking, and if that’s not enough, every man woman and child with all draw down ON THE RIGHT PERSON in the heat of a RANDOM shooting and take out the bad guy as soon as they figure out who the fuck the right bad guy is in the sea of guns. EVENTUALLY all you gun toting morons will all be dead and Darwinism will win out and the world will be much safer.
      The facts and figures don’t lie folks, their just suppressed by the NRA so you don’t know the real truth about how dangerous your own gun is to your own life….
      If there were no crazy people, if people didn’t have tempers, if there was no stress, if, if, if…. So until then, we all need to be armed to the teeth. I am all for it…

  1. Nice to see one that isn’t 3d printed, but I was very very disappointed to find nothing else under the ‘my god this is the best clickbait headline I’ve ever come up with’ tag.

      1. That unfortunate person’s employment status and mode of death is irrelevant, it was no more or less heinous than the deaths of thousands of housewives who are beaten to death every year with whatever their partner found at hand.

        1. well when a person is employed to directly facilitate the state that people participate in then it does matter, people who do acts like this garner disproportionate attention as is, something that i bet is more of a motivator than anything else in such cases, doing it to someone in the public eye only furthers that.

          1. No, that is a very dangerous and primitive attitude that leads some people to believe that it is ethical to coerce others into a sacrifice for “the greater good”, and that is how politicians get wars started where sometimes millions of people, including children, killed.

            No life is worth more than another and no death is more regrettable than another. If you bend that rule you open up a big box of “evil”, it is your choice but don’t complain about the price you pay for doing so.

          2. way to grab at straws, you said her job was irrelevant, it isn’t, it most likely got her killed, that was my primary point.
            i said nothing about the relative value of any lives compared to another, so if you took it that way perhaps you should explain exactly why what i said leads to that (in your view) inevitable result?

          3. The killer was going to kill somebody eventually because he is insane, it could have easily been the noisy hipsters having a party across the road. This is the key point, all victims are equal, but all killers are not, some are far more dangerous than others. The problem is killers, not who they kill, or even the means by which they kill. But if you are going to be a twerp about it, tell me which is statistically the most dangerous past time? “Public Figure” is actually rather low risk, it is just that the ego maniacs that become public figures and their sycophants in the junk media think that they are more valuable than other humans. Far more insane murder and serious assault occurs in the domestic setting.

            Therefore I am not clutching at straws at all, my take on this is clearly far more mature and sophisticated than your simplistic mind will tolerate so you throw up distractions rather than considering the ideas without bias.

    1. I dare you to say that face to face to a victim of a house invasion, preferably those that didn’t just end with a mugging, but rather repeated rape, torture and murder of a loved one right in front of their eyes. At that moment a working handgun with ammunition would have been worth it’s weight in gold for them, probably even more.
      Just because you don’t need something, it doesn’t meant others don’t as well, not everybody has the luxury of living in a perfectly safe and unicorn filled world, some have to deal with evil people.

      There’s a very good reason so many people wanted miniaturized cannons that could be fired from your hand right from when they were invented, despite being clumsy, dangerous and expensive. Just that fact that the demand is so high indicates that they probably are useful.

      1. “I dare you to say that face to face to a victim of a house invasion”

        Or what about saying it to me – me and my wife were carjacked at gunpoint on our honeymoon by (probably) the Mafia in Naples. I’m personally very glad we didn’t have guns, better still I’m glad our carjackers could be pretty sure we didn’t have guns either, because if they thought we had they’d have shot us before we even knew what was going on.

        The reasoning behind increased gun usage in the US is utterly back-to-front. Attackers will use the minimum they think they need, because they don’t want to risk their lives either. If you don’t have guns and they can be pretty sure you won’t, they’re unlikely to use guns themselves. This means: you live. Which is why I, in the UK, am 50x safer from a gun attack than you are in the US.

        “Just that fact that the demand is so high indicates that they probably are useful.”

        No it indicates that the US has an internal terrorist organisation, called the NRA, with an incredibly effective media campaign.

        1. And let the fucking Mafia continue doing what it does? Nope, everyone should be able to defend himself from such scum-scrape from the bottom of the gene pool. Only dead Mafia is good Mafia.

        2. “I’m glad our carjackers could be pretty sure we didn’t have guns either, because if they thought we had they’d have shot us before we even knew what was going on.”

          Really? Why? Where you driving a big box of money with wheels or something? What made them want YOU so badly? Most people that are just out to steal something will see a gun and move on. There are plenty of less dangerous fish in the sea! I’ve gotten myself out of a few of bad situations that way, twice with a real gun and once just with something that looked like a gun barrel sticking out of my pocket. I’ve never even pointed a real gun at another human being!

          That is something that all those surveys and violence statistics that gun control proponents like to quote will always miss. You only get a statistic when tragedy happens. When things go right it’s nothing more than a story to tell the guys over a few beers.

    2. It’s easy when you are taking someone else’s rights away.

      I say the only good thing to do with beer is pour it down the drain, that stuff has no place in a civilized society.

  2. It is a DIY build and a hack, it is legitimate. Just as legit as a post on building a radar or radar seeker out of amateur radio gear and an o-scope right after that Ukraine airliner shootdown. IMHO if there was an application for DIY blasting like road engineering; rock, or tree removal I would appreciate a HAD article on that too, even if explosives can be misused.
    I think most firearm hacks, like hotrodding hacks, have been done and are well documented, but a complete DIY build of a non-anachronistic design is still uncommon when firearms are either outright banned with severe penalties or a precision aligned device most often easier to purchase legally or not within spec than to build.

    1. I think this analogy bears just one further step, though.

      Explosives can be dangerous; indeed when misused they can cause mass terror and death.

      Their main application, however, is quickly moving a large, heavy object for an incredibly short period of time, such as earth, a tree stump, or rock. Occasionally it is used for entertainment purposes but the I struggle to think that a post on Hackaday’s main “designed for” use would involve deliberately harming someone. It is relatively difficult to use explosives to cause deliberate harm on the spur of the moment, or when affected by severe mental illness (although harming yourself is quite likely)

      Additionally, explosives are highly regulated. The input products to explosives are highly regulated. If you set off explosives without appropriate accreditation, oversight, safety, secure method of storage and transportation, notification of authority prior to use, risk assessment, insurance and the like, you would face severe repercussions.

      Most people would agree that people who bought the ingredients for explosives should be watched, and that in the interests of public safety even those purchasing the ingredients for other purposes (such as farming) be placed under some level of scrutiny.

      The main purpose of a handgun is the ability to project a small missile at high velocity over a short (but significantly longer than arm’s reach), with convenience of transportation.

      In short, the ability to quickly and effectively harm someone is the prime purpose of a repeat-firing handgun as opposed to a manual breech rifle. “Home defence” is actually prioritising it’s use specifically to harm others, albeit in extenuating circumstances. Although it can be used for entertainment purposes (eg target shooting), the key optimisation that a handgun has is portable and concealable lethality, over a compromise in almost any other metric such as accuracy, range, muzzle velocity, repeatability – and particularly, in the words of Colt, making every man “equal” in the ability to harm others.

      It short, you wouldn’t find a glowing report and tear down of a project showing how to make an anti-personnel bomb on Hackaday. You might find one about the ingenious mechanisms that a terrorist used to make it nearly impossible to defuse, but I do think there is a difference in perspective in that article. (http://hackaday.com/2015/09/21/this-is-what-a-real-bomb-looks-like/)

    1. Yet a surprising number of psychopaths choose firearms, very few choose both, which I find odd.
      Then again, you can highjack a plane and crash it into a building “scoring” 1k+ lives, so it’s not about the tool, it’s about the user.

      1. I think gun control proponents are the reason that mass killers use guns.

        Why? Because they are all over TV, the internet and radio talking about the ‘evil’ of guns every day. They are putting the idea in people’s heads.. if you want to shock the world… use a gun. People aren’t afraid of a guy with a bag of fertilizer but 1/2 the population would faint in shock just at the sight of this particular inanimate object if they stumbled upon one lying in the road with nobody even in position to pull the trigger!

        Maybe that is a good thing. Blowing up buildings would kill so much more efficiently and if the psycho used a timer they might even manage to do it more than once before getting caught.

    2. Perhaps.

      And yet the mentally ill (eg paranoid delusions, suicial ideation) are rarely capable of making and deploying explosives. If they do make improvised ones, they are far more likely to injure themselves than others.

      Surely the greater risk is someone who is not mentally ill, but has decided to kill someone? Or even not to kill any specific person, but to have the capacity to kill, then using it deliberately at a time of passion?

    3. Not really. Most anyone, 2 year olds for example can kill with a gun. Even the simplest of explosive weapons are beyond what the average person is going to reach for in the spur of the moment. And IEDs of the household variety, such those made of plumbing fixtures are really not that effective. If you drop one in the middle of a crowd, the closest people are going to take the brunt. beyond them, it’s not that effective. You’d have to out of black powder and into higher velocity stuff in order to inflict mass casualties, and then it’s even harder for the average joe to pull off. A small hand gun with enough rounds is far more effective. A semi-auto rifle with a large clip and high velocity ammo inflicted more death than two whole pressure cookers worth of flash powder….
      Guns for sane people are fine, but I haven’t found a single completely sane person in my life….

      1. Exactly. Guns are easy, simple point and shoot interface, and if you can get one without having to manufacture it yourself, they are even easier.

        Bombs are hard. You need to get explosives, an ignition source, a trigger mechanism, and a delivery method. Sure this could be as simple as a pipe bomb with a fuse, a lighter, and throwing it into a crowd, but crowds tend to disperse when pipe bombs are thrown at them, and the effective range is limited.

        The locks on my house are easy to circumvent, Hackaday has covered how in the past, picking the lock, bump keys, even just breaking the door down, or cutting the door knob loose from the rest of the door with a battery powered saw. Yet locking them keeps my house safer, it provides a minimum level of security to stop criminals who are willing to put in the minimum level of effort, and a surprising number of people who commit crimes are looking to put in the minimum amount of effort.

      2. So.. I take it Timothy McVeigh was a genious? I find that hard to believe. All it would take is premeditation and the internet. When was the last time you heard about a mass shooting that wasn’t premeditated?

  3. For the rest of the world where guns are understood in a negative light this article is highly inappropriate, especially given that Hackaday is read by children.

    In the UK, we have been shocked by the murder of a single MP: Jo Cox by a nationalist who (we understand) built his gun using information obtained from the web. Promoting gun ownership on an international scale therefore strikes at the heart of our UK culture and validates what he did. An extremely poor show Brian.

    1. That’s what Brian does. He writes one decent article a year, the rest is tripe and most of those are click bait like this insensitive crap right after a couple of really awful things happen. More than likely to stir debate, but he just comes off like a sociopath, sadly.

      1. The steady stream of readers who faithfully complain on story after story indicates he is dong a great job! Lol, a highly inappropriate story because guns are understood in a negative light. I could’t make this shit up if I tried.

    2. “therefore strikes at the heart of our UK culture”

      Welcome to an international forum. This is not your “safe place” where everyone agrees with you and you have a right to not be offended. Some people’s ideas will challenge your own. If you ‘listen’, keep an open mind and evaulate what you know, what you believe and what others have to say with honest logic then it can only work to make you a better person. If everyone does this it can only make the world a better place. Such is the value of an open forum where nobody’s precious culture gets special protection.

      I have to ask though… so many people are dying violently all around the world and have been through all of history. Surely every one of them is a huge tragedy but… When one such death shocks you… how do you go on with life and continue to function? If your whole nation (do you really speak for all of them?) are in shock then how does your infrastructure continue to function?

      Honest.. terrible things have probably been done to several people somewhere on the planet in the time I am taking to write this message. Without a degree of ‘numbness’ I would think the whole world would have to be one big mental hospital where we are all just trying to recover from the latest sad story we saw on the news but never get enough time between to actually do so.

      Or does it only count when the victims happen to reside within the same political boundaries as youself? That’s awful convenient for someone who lives on an island! I live in the United States but almost all of these incidents have been far enough away from me that if they occured the same distance from you they wouldn’t even be in Europe! Well.. except maybe 9/11. That one would have been about the equivalent of occuring in Denmark for you.

      1. “Such is the value of an open forum where nobody’s precious culture gets special protection.”

        Does that mean that Julian has no right to express his opinion?

        “I have to ask though… so many people are dying violently all around the world and have been through all of history.”

        Yes, it did shake Britain and he spoke for everyone.

        Dude, all you do is promote guns and gun ownership. However hard is it to comprehend, in Europe we regard your behavior as being a cunt.

        1. If you are going to carry on like a SJW you may want to reconsider if it is appropriate to describe a person you hate as being “part of a female”, as if that part is somehow bad or repulsive, because that is blatantly misogynist.

        2. “Does that mean that Julian has no right to express his opinion?”

          Nope. I never called his comment ‘inappropriate’. He did call the article inapropriate however. Being inapropriate means that it does not belong, he is stating that this article should not be here. Then he goes on to talk about culture. So.. he is saying that Hack a Day should censor things that offend his culture.

          That sure sounds like “I’m entitled to my safe space” anti-free speech SJW bullshit to me! I didn’t write anything saying he should not be able to express his opinion. I simply excersized my own right to express my own opinion that he is wrong and that the logical conclusion of his opinion, censorship makes the world a worse place. In your own words, “However hard that might be for you to comprehend”.

          I find it especially interesting that he is labeling something inappropriate based on how it is seen by his own perceived local culture… when that culture isn’t even where Hack a Day is from. The site is owned by a company in California, USA! Granted it is international in both content and readership. So.. is it that Europe should get some special privilege to determine the culture of HaD? Or is it that HaD should always censor everything that might offend the self-proclaimed representatives of each and every culture on the planet? There probably wouldn’t be much content left!

          As for his and your own beliefs that you can speak for your whole country and/or continent.. Yes, I get it that Europe is far more pro-gun control and anti-gun ownership than the US. I gaurantee that does not mean you have 100% of your population agreeing with you any more than Charleton Heston could have ever claimed he spoke for all Americans! To believe otherwise is incredibly arrogant!

    3. Don’t put everyone else in the your basket of “world where guns are understood in a negative light”. That’s not the case. Guns are tools and that’s the way they should be and not everyone in even Europe sees them in negative light. I know because i live in a place where many people have guns (in Europe that is), though not for self defense, but hunting and target shooting. Gunfobics like yourself are just controlfreaks and want to ban guns from everyone else based on few deaths, which are a drop in a sea.

      Maybe all car hacks need to be banned from hackaday. Every minute there’s a car crash where someone dies. Or ban all articles about power tools. How about medical hacks?

      You seem to think that some politician and people in a bar are more important than the others who die every day. Every day people starve to death, are over worked to death etc. etc. Guess what, just the other day a police here was killed with an illegal assault rifle (yes, automatic weapon. Semi-automatics are not assault rifles, no matter how scary they look). Possibly stolen from the military. Why don’t you try to ban that.

      You are a hypocrite for not whining about the hacks i mentioned before and now you are here crying over some technological aspect involving weapons, which just happened to be used in couple of murders. The UK guy also used a knife. How about you cry over the silverware in your own god damn kitchen.

      1. “You seem to think that some politician and people in a bar are more important than the others who die every day. Every day people starve to death, are over worked to death etc. etc.”

        No one said that. Absolutely no one.

        “Semi-automatics are not assault rifles, no matter how scary they look). Possibly stolen from the military. Why don’t you try to ban that.”

        What does that even mean? Is that an argument?

        “Semi-automatics are not assault rifles, no matter how scary they look). Possibly stolen from the military. Why don’t you try to ban that.”

        Can you read? Where do you get this from?

      1. Here’s what I know: machine guns barrels get very hot, and need replacement on a regular basis.
        Another thing: You have to watch out where you grab machine guns while firing them since the barrel can get hot.
        Another thing: when a shell flies into your shirt you wills cream because it’s hot.
        So yeah, I know very little, but I do know that a small explosion and hot lead is involved.

        What I don’t know is how much you’d have to fire a regular handgun before it gets (too) hot.
        Oh and one last thing I do know: aluminium is very very good at conducting heat.

        And a final thing: you seem to have no issue suggesting I know much less than you, but you are very hesitant to put your two cents out there and give some real info on how long you’d have to fire a (well conducting) handgun before you feel it. Making me think you also do not know.

        1. Yes the brass is hot when ejected, because it has a low mass and it easily heated. The lead is hot partially due to the burning powder and the friction of the barrel. A riffled barrel requires a tight interface between the bullet and the barrel to work properly.

          The problem of heat buildup is basically a mater of duty cycle. Machine gun barrels get hot because they fire many rounds with very little break in between. This gun likely only holds a handful of rounds and any heat buildup would dissipate in the time it would take to reload. While aluminum has less heat capacity than steel, the increased conduction would likely keep the heat more spread out. So instead of the barrel getting hot, the frame may get warm.

          It’s not impossible to get a handgun to get too hot. I think if you search ‘Glock Meltdown’ on youtube, you would see how much effort it would take to overheat the gun. Glocks are famous for having plastic frames, so in these videos they fire the gun until it starts on fire I believe.

  4. When I saw the article header I predicted the timbre of the first comment (good answer Brian) and that there’d be a real interesting hack, like that bicycle hub rifler. Keep the clever problem-solving improvisations coming.

  5. It seems that many of you American commenters just cannot accept that not everyone loves guns outside the USA. There was a shooting in a kindergarten in the 90’s in the UK. Immediately after this the law changed and legislators made it nearly impossible to purchase guns. Meanwhile in the US there was one school massacre a week on average (2013). We can argue about forever but what strikes me is the level of arrogance and trolling from the pro-gun camp and the total lack of empathy.
    I don’t think this article should have been posted (Orlando is too soon) and seeing the level of argument here makes me wonder if I want to be part of the HAD community.

    Also, for some of the non-British commenters here: Joe Cox’s murder shook Britain and the fact that it didn’t shock you is not an argument. What hurts me is not you being an insensitive asshole but the fact that you can’t even be bothered look facts up and you have the fucking temerity to open your ignorant mouth. You are a cunt, mate.

    1. And you are an uppity little hypocrite that can see past the narrow minded guns are good vs guns are bad argument to what the real problem is, therefore you will never be in a position to ever solve it. It is not hard to get weapons in the UK, if you can smuggle in people from the third world (it happens all the time) then you can do it with weapons too. The more peaceful nature of UK society is fundamentally a cultural trait along with many other things that make them look more sophisticated than much of the U.S.A.

          1. I think you are a cunt and that has nothing to do with what I think about guns. You argue like a 5-year-old and make up facts about a country you probably never been to (let me guess, you never left South Kentucky) and claim sexism where there is none, plus you shit on Joe Cox’d memory and British people to win an argument.

          2. LOL, I’m not a yank, mate, and I don’t care how I win arguments, if I win, because that would make my point of view valid, even if you are offended by my direct manner it does not undermine the truthfulness or logic of my arguments.

            Furthermore, I did not use the term sexist, I used a very specific term that describes exactly the nature of your language.

            Take a hint STFU and think about that before you post anything on the internet again.

      1. “It is not hard to get weapons in the UK, if you can smuggle in people from the third world (it happens all the time) then you can do it with weapons too.”

        Where do you get thisfrom? Are you making this up? Have smuggled weapons to the UK before?

        1. I am old and have live a lot, anyway I met a guy who was in the IRA (not active when I interviewed him). His information made it clear to me that the the UK is no fortress. I also learned that a lot of the IRA activity was more criminal than political, it is like the terrorists now, no clear line between the two realms because psychopaths only subscribe to “me” when it comes down to it, the rest is a ruse to get whatever they desire.

          You sure are naive. It would be cute if you were not so annoying, always inflicting your ignorance on people and acting like you are knowledgeable when clearly your opinions are ill conceived and founded on ignorance, just like all the other plebs including the American ones you hate.

          1. “I met a guy who was in the IRA”

            Dude, whatever someone told you in that brothel in Rotterdam in 1966 is not data. It’s an anecdote. Drinking buddies don’t count. Nevertheless I’d love to hear the full story, I’m a sucker for good anecdotes.

          2. Your assumptions are false and you already have all the information you are going to get r.e. the activities of that particular sociopath because the rest is not relevant. FFS you don’t even seem to remember who committed the last political murder in the UK, or the fact that in that case is was a clear cut case of assassination and not a random act of murderous insanity.

            You don’t need any more information from me, you need to get off your ass, go down to the local library and learn what has transpired in your own backyard over the last half a century.

    2. You have to realize that you are part of the problem right? Yes, I own guns. Yes, I don’t believe taking away my rights is going to solve the larger problem of violence and hate in this world. I just want to be able to hunt and shoot my guns in peace, safely, and without bothering anyone. So because of my beliefs, you spew insults towards me as a gun owner, make rash generalizations, insult my intelligence, and make me feel unwelcome to voice my opinion publicly, essentially trying to bully me into your worldview? Convince me that your opinion is the only correct one, and that I should be ashamed that I have the audacity to have an opinion of my own?

      Yes people get upset over this issue. Yes, the average person (on both sides of the argument) are rather poor in their debate skills. That’s no reason to start calling names and puffing your chest out. It’s not a fight, it’s a debate. I respect the fact that you may not own any firearms, and I respect the fact that it may not be part of your culture or upbringing. I respect the fact that you may not have gone hunting with your father as a child and have fond memories of such events. I respect the fact that you may have grown up in a city or populous area that had no room for shooting or hunting. I respect the fact that your only knowledge of guns may be the negative media attention they get. I respect that you do not understand how I see guns in a positive light. All I ask is that you respect the fact that I want to protect my culture and hobbies, for my self, and for future generations.

    3. alkopop79, I know I am wasting my time here but not everyone INSIDE the USA loves guns. I can’t speak for every person in the US, if I tried then I would be like you but I can say that many people, (I suspect nearly all but again.. can’t speak for others…) are even keenly aware of the fact that there are plenty in the US that fear and hate guns and would like to make them all go away just like you. If we let them they will take them all away.

      Similarly.. I am pretty sure that if you search yourself you will realize that you already know that you do not speak for EVERY person in Europe or even the UK. If everyone in your part of the planet hated guns just like you then there wouldn’t be any guns in Europe and you would have nothing to motivate you to come here, get all frothy mouthed and call us names. The fact that this is even an issue for you shows that you know you don’t speak for everyone in your area.

    4. “Joe Cox’s murder shook Britain and the fact that it didn’t shock you is not an argument. ”

      I think you are responding to me here although you did so in the wrong thread. If you go back and read my post you will see that my ‘argument’ with what Julian said pretty much ended in my first paragraph. The shock thing was an aside… Based on his (and now your) statement that ALL of Britain is in shock I asked a question. How does one function in a world like Earth where somebody is being violently killed every hour if not every minute of every day if the death of one person who they don’t even personally know shocks them? It’s not really even about Joe Cox and Brittain, it’s a question about people in general and is applicable to everyone everywhere. Are you so insecure that you are threatened by a mere question?

  6. All the comment response to this post proves is that when you subvert the meme of gun control with the idea that anyone, anywhere can simply circumvent that control and build a gun themselves, authoritarians just take another step down the slippery slope, towards information control control and censorship.

    If they can’t control your property then they’ll try and control your thoughts and the information you read, no low is too low when you’re chasing an authoritarian ‘utopia’.

  7. All the response to this post proves is that when you subvert the meme of gun control with the fact that anyone, anywhere can simply opt-out of the system and build a gun themselves, authoritarians simply scramble down the slippery slope towards information control and censorship rather than address reality.

    No low is too low when you’re chasing ‘utopia’ apparently, even if it means selling out your own values.

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