Cohen: The Gun Debate is Increasingly Academic

By
Dan Zimmerman
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70
By Gage Skidmore from Surprise, AZ, United States of America – CC BY-SA 4.0, Link

The best part about the gun debate is that it’s increasingly just academic.

Our victory is assured.

Put aside Bruen, or Heller, or McDonald, or any of the other gun rights victories in courts. Put aside the massive increases in gun ownership, in every demographic.

Right now, there are more guns than people in the US. Tomorrow, that gun/people ratio will grow, as it has for years, and shows no sign of stopping.

Every day, 3D manufacturing technology continues to improve.

You’re already able to make a functioning gun at home, using free, publicly-available printing files. As that technology improves, we will reach the gun singularity, wherein you can make a gun at home of the same or better quality than you’d get from a manufacturer.

Soon after, you’ll be able to print better weapons at home than the meandering bureaucracy at the Pentagon can procure.

We won’t need to be terrorist groups or cartels to get machine guns from the CIA and ATF. We’ll just make our own, and our stuff will be better than theirs.

And thanks to Tor nodes, VPNs and other privacy tech, they won’t even be able to know who’s making them, or where they are.

— Spike Cohen at X (Twitter)

RELATED ARTICLESMORE FROM AUTHOR

70 COMMENTS

  1. I disagree that the ‘debate’ is ‘academic’. Genuine academics deal in truths, and reality, rather than ideology. Fact is, most of those we call academics in the US are ideologues conditioning today’s youth to be tomorrows drones. If there are any real academics in our colleges and universities, I would say they are running an experiment, using our kids as guinea pigs. “How hard would it be to brainwash a generation into believing that men can be women, that all history is false, and that inanimate objects can be evil? And, how hard can it be to just turn them all into mindless drones?” They’ve already rolled back Martin Luther King’s dream, and started segregating our colleges. The mayor of Boston decided to throw a huge party, from which all white people were excluded, just like academia is doing.

    • And all their efforts on gun control are for naught. The video game industry is introducing guns to America’s youth – at least the male of the species – in a vastly more persuasive medium.

      • I really wonder if actors/producers in Hollywood and game devs in the valley virtue signalling over gun control is mostly because they are doing such a great job peddling product in reality. I mean think about it, why do guys today in the general public want say MP5s or ARs that are made to look like a myriad of “MK” M4/M-16 type weapons? It’s because movies from their era had them in it. How many comp guns has the movie John Wick sold by its self? I’m guessing a lot.

        My theory is it’s kind of like Coca-Cola telling people to drink nutritious drinks. It’s mostly for show.

    • “Fact is, most of those we call academics in the US are ideologues conditioning today’s youth to be tomorrows drones.”

      Strange, William F. Buckley Jr said something similar. In 1951.

    • Take heart. I teach at a university, carry, and try my best to push no agenda. There are others like me.
      All is not doom and gloom. As one who works individually with our growing leaders, know there is hope for a bright tomorrow.
      Merry Christmas!

      • If you’re not promoting a conservative agenda then you’re voting present while the opposition votes against us. Not deciding is deciding.

        • Academia pushing an agenda is how we got to where we are. Anyone with half a brain knows what is being pushed there is garbage.

          I’d argue an educator loses credibility when you know their slant. If conservative ideals line up with the Constitution, teach the Constitution as the Founders intended, and the rest will follow. Tell people how they should think, and they will rebel against the teachings.

        • Call me weird, but I believe state-sponsored school is a place to learn basic to advanced subjects and skills. Public education is not the place for indoctrination (left or right).
          I don’t want some lefty teacher preaching their gospel to my own sons, so I don’t push my leanings on anyone else’s kids. That said, you can run your classroom however you and your Local Educational Authority (LEA) see fit.
          Cheers!

        • Jim,

          With all due respect, I strongly disagree. The role of “public education” is to educate, not indoctrinate. Teach children facts, teach them how to evaluate facts, and let them make up THEIR OWN DAMN MINDS. Not ANYONE’s job to “program the future”.

          No, it is not “voting present”, it is doing your damn job, and it sounds as if anti-fancy is doing that. I would think it equally inappropriate if he were proselytizing for unfettered capitalism, or 2A absolutism, or direct presidential elections. Heck, I don’t even give a sh*t if he has ‘strong views’ about string vs. membrane theory. Teaching is about introducing young minds to facts, reality, process, and how to learn and think. The conclusions they come to will be authentically their own (and then they will come into contact with reality, and change them. And then change them again, a few years later. Lather, rinse, repeat. Only really stupid people (MajorLiar and dacian the demented, as two simple examples (pun intended)) arrive at an opinion and are unwilling to change that opinion in the face of obvious facts. A teacher’s job is to help students not be stupid.

          Personally, I think anti-fancy is doing exactly the right thing, and I hope he continues, with great success. We need more teachers like that.

        • “Teach children facts, teach them how to evaluate facts, and let them make up THEIR OWN DAMN MINDS“

          Absolutely correct, no Bible stories about talking snakes to indoctrinate kids with someone else’s religious beliefs, no authoritarian administration leading prayer in schools.

          I’m glad we can agree on keeping other people‘s fantasies out of our public schools.

        • “…teach the Constitution as the Founders intended, and the rest will follow.”

          “…I don’t push my leanings on anyone else’s kids.”

          “The role of “public education” is to educate, not indoctrinate.”

          IMO, this mindset is why we will continue to lose for the foreseeable future. Sure, we’ll win some battles here and there, but we won’t change the current trajectory without changing our tactics. First, we need to understand how we got here. Teaching children “reading, writing, arithmetic, and science” will not do us any good if they don’t understand the difference between right and wrong.

          While we discard that responsibility, someone e-l-s-e will be teaching their version of right and wrong. What’s the most important aspect of school? Is it to work toward getting a job, or is it to help create a functioning and flourishing society?

          “someone e-l-s-e” -I have to write it like that so the comment isn’t moderated. Yes, really.

        • Can’t make any changes in an organization after you’ve been fired. Small victories add up, remember we’re not the collectivists here, it’s about each individual. So if the anti-fancy can exert any influence it’s better than no influence. As we say in the world of recreational running “one is better than none”!

        • Then why don’t we make a long march through the institutions and fire them instead? It doesn’t sound like he wants to exert any influence except to talk about what’s on page 154. The right is uncomfortable with having power unless it’s to lower taxes or rebuild the military again. They’re little more than placeholders and witnesses, constantly watching the other side utilize power. We can’t expect different results from the same tactics. It’s something to consider. We need a different mindset, IMO.

        • MINOR49er, According to you Hoplophobe control freaks, a child under the age of 18 is not an adult capable to making adult evaluations of (TRUE) facts. What you Lefties consider “facts” are your indoctrination of your Leftist ideology and agenda.

          Prayer in public schools has always been OPTIONAL. You do know what the word “optional” means? So where is the authoritarianism?

          Seems it’s you Lefties who want to be AUTHORITARIAN with your Hoplophobe control freak ideas.

      • @the anti-fancy, I wish I could share your enthusiasm, however, I applaud your efforts to carry at work. I also don’t understand the mindset of these democrat leftists that desire to remove my right to be armed. They must be afraid; I can only conclude they have something in mind for us but first We the People must to be disarmed…

        • Al Pastor,
          Thanks! It’s nice to get an atta-boy once in a while.
          I’m an optimist, so perhaps my outlook is skewed by the good I see in the world.
          I agree with you that there are those out there who would like to disarm good guys. To them I say ‘good luck with that.’

        • Al, these Leftist Hoplophobes are afraid. They are afraid because of a LACK of knowledge of what a gun actually is what is can and can’t do. They seem to think that a gun can shot itself, like that police officer’s gun that went off when his sergeant told him to get involved with subduing an unrully person who was being arrested. It seems that the gun did NOT go off by itself, but that 1) the officer did not properly seat the gun in his Safariland holster (if you don’t hear the “click”, it is not secure) and 2) the gun went off when it was jostled by the sergeant bumping into the officer’s handgun in the holster, improperly seated in the holster.

          For that matter no gun has ever shot itself. A gun only goes off when the person possessing does something STUPID!

      • anti-fancy,

        It sounds to me, sir, as if you actually understand (and are trying to perform) your ACTUAL job. Teach students basic concepts/facts. Teach them how to learn, how to research, how to evaluate what they see/hear/read, how to reason. What they do with those tools is on them. (And if they are like most people I know, they will have several different opinions, about damn near everything, over their lives – if someone like you teaches them the basics of critical thinking.)

        I was fortunate enough to have several teachers and professors who shared your POV (including two fairly hard-core Lefties), but they didn’t see their goal as recruitment or indoctrination, but instead to teach me to evaluate things for myself.

        I salute you, sir, and may you teach a long time!

        • LampofDiogenes (great name by the way),
          Thanks! I too was lucky to have many teachers who taught the basics without spin. It gave me the freedom to make up my own mind. It also made me more curious about the world.
          The few instructors I had who pushed an agenda lost my respect and tainted their cause in my view.

          My students will never know my political views. That is not why they or I come to class. They will never know I have a P365 holstered in my pocket, unless the day takes a very dark and potentially deadly turn.

          At the end of my class, my students will know whether engineering is a good fit for them (or not) because they will have spent two full semesters learning to do what an engineer does.

      • A-F, I thought you might be serving at a state-supported school. Thank you. I attended two in Texas, in the 1970s and 1990s, and saw almost no indoctrination. Many of my profs were decidedly conservative. My children, however, attended state-suported schools and turned out more liberal than I like, my daughter especially. Those schools are closer to Austin, so … .

        • Hi TX,
          Your experiences in Texas are similar to mine in Utah in the 1990’s. Very little spin for a BS in Engineering and an MBA. My 13 years working as an engineer were different of course.

          I hear that the level of spin has changed somewhat in Utah. Luckily at my University, most have their heads on straight. I hope I can talk my own 3 boys into attending where I teach.

          My Mother-in-law is from Texas and now lives in central Utah. She says Austin is its own animal these days. Parts of Salt Lake are trending that way.

          I have a brother in Washington State who says their k-12 is so left that they are homeschooling their 5 kids.

          It’s crazy to me how much or little spin there is based on geography.

      • I work in a university. They have instituted policies (mandatory diversity statement for job applicants) to ensure that no conservative is ever hired again, even by mistake.

        Academia is intensely hostile to gun rights, and freedom in general.

    • As one, who lived and worked next to Academics for over forty years there are almost no “Genuine Academics” left. We live in an era where “pier reviewed” means you sent copies to your buddies, who you eat out with several times a year at conferences, and they check your spelling and grammer! I have known or at least met many great ones in my field and subsequently read most of their obituaries.

      I do have to complement the author, who suggested the term “gun singularity”. I haven’t gotten set up yet, but am in a position to see the 3d print files that are published and think that gun singularity will come sooner rather than later!

      • @Scott,
        “pier reviewed”?
        I’m not busting your chops I promise. I make more than my share of typos 🙂

        This makes me smile though because the type of peer review you describe is nearly as effective as a paper being reviewed by an actual inanimate pier.

        Just to keep myself straight on the definitions:

        Pier: a platform supported on pillars or girders leading out from the shore into a body of water, used as a landing stage for boats.

        Peer: a person of the same age, status, or ability as another specified person

    • A fair point, but previously this required significant metalworking skill. At minimum, you needed to be a confident welder, and to be exceptionally good at cutting designs out of metal plates. To not be considered a garage hack you’d almost definitely need a mill and a lathe.
      Now, the barrier to entry is much, much lower. With a hand drill and some printed jigs, you can start with some seamless tubing, a few lengths of round bar, a handful of hardware, and have a fully functional semi-auto closed-bolt pistol complete with a rifled barrel. That’s a drastic improvement over previous homebuilding options, and I seriously believe history will show it was the decisive factor in ending the genocidal civil war in Burma.

      • Luty, Sten and other such guns can be made with hand tools. Not quickly, but possible. Children in Pakistan manufacture firearms that work just fine for their purpose. Rifling not needed for close range urban use. Like woodworking, machines do it faster, but not always better.

      • The same thing could easily be said about computers and the internet. It’s all just the results of human technological advancement and general improvement.

      • “Now, the barrier to entry is much, much lower.”

        Preach it. I encourage everyone to own 3 pieces of key tooling costing maybe a hundred dollars, a deep drill, a chamber reamer, and a button for cutting rifling in the caliber you want to keep alive for the next generation.

        The internet will teach them to use them… 🙂

  4. “The best part about the gun debate is that it’s increasingly just academic. Our victory is assured.”

    First, there’s this thing called “hubris”.

    Second, I thought academia was the thing that totally fucked up everything in the entire country? Isn’t it an all-powerful monster that destroys children, women and society leaving nothing but ruin and pitious wailing in its wake? Why would it leave guns alone?

    [Or is the Right’s entire view of education just hyperbole? FFS, pick one you goddamn schitzos.]

    Third, if past history is any guide to the future, the thought process of activist academics will be inculcated in K-12 teachers with a quickness via schools of education and you’ll get at least 20 years of K-12 grads who hate guns with a passion. At that point you’ll be getting pushed back hard on the cultural front, which honestly, is what matters because for the zillionth time, Andrew Breitbart was right that politics is downstream from culture.

    What, you think your adversaries are going to abandon Gramsci, who’s been delivering the W’s for 90 years? Or Freire? You think they’ll get tired of winning and just walk away?

    Eternal vigilance is the price of freedom. Forgetting that is why we’re in most of the messes we are. Can we try not to make that mistake yet again, please?

    No, they can’t stop the signal but they can lock your ass up until you die for listening to it. And they will if they think they can get away with it. They’re going after journalists who were at J6 now and looking for prison sentences.

    • “Second, I thought academia was the thing that totally fucked up everything in the entire country?”

      Thanks to Harvard university’s president, that’s now indisputable.

      “Third, if past history is any guide to the future, the thought process of activist academics will be inculcated in K-12 teachers with a quickness via schools of education and you’ll get at least 20 years of K-12 grads who hate guns with a passion.”

      Every bit of that has been countered by Hollywood and the FPS video game industry, full stop. Even if they stopped today, every DVD on a family’s shelf is just waiting to be discovered by the next generation, keeping the dream alive.

      Do they *seriously* think their message is stronger than the image of Mel Gibson on the rack (Braveheart) getting his intestines cut out of him while still fully alive?

      Thank the characters of John Wick, James Bond, and every other movie for *that*.

      All the kids playing ‘Call of Duty’ are gonna want real guns when they come of age, or. at the least, not be terrified if their friends have them.

      They can’t possibly compete with that, and they are the ones in control of Hollywood, for fuck’s sake!

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=afam2nIae4o

      • OK, well it’s not going to let me post, won’t even send to moderation, my data-heavy reply to you.

        In a nutshell, no.

        Looking at survey data, sales etc, your thesis is old and no longer applies. It broke down in 2020 and has not returned to being valid.

        The vast majority of money isn’t spent on shooter games and where it is there’s a big mix that don’t involve FPS games. The popular FPS games mostly don’t help us because they range from Halo to Red Dead or Apex Legends.

        Shooters that help us make up 1/5 for the top five and 2/20 of the top 20. Minecraft, Zelda and Hogwarts are kicking our asses as compared to, say, 2018.

        And GenZ’s spending on games is down. Their average purchase is about 1/3rd what a AAA studio game like COD costs.

        Oh, and most of them report that they now buy games not to play them but to hangout in the lobby and socialize.

        This ain’t 2016.

    • Well ‘First’..
      There really isn’t a debate. There is nothing to debate (except possibly caliber wars).

      Americans have a constitutional right to guns.

      • Assuming that what is correct will be simply because it’s correct.

        Typical of the Right who, apparently, never bothered to read any Solzhenitsyn even though they love to quote him constantly.

  5. The writer is unduly optimistic about the depravity of the police state mindset. The reason some of them threaten to nuke the free population is because they would gladly nuke the free population. Its not enough for us to have guns, we have to keep their fingers out of the nuclear arsenal.

  6. Thanx to torn nads and vpn’s they cant find me.
    .
    Tired of being spied on?
    Download NoSpyOnMe app @google play store.

  7. Overconfidence is bad. The vast majority of US school children are being taught that guns are bad and need to be banned, along with other liberal notions. Once these brainwashed youth reach voting age, the whole equation changes. Most gun owners possess multiple firearms, gun owners are not a majority of the population. The fight will get harder over time.

    • On the other hand, more and more youth seem to be getting fed up with authoritarian crap. It is the nature of youth to rebel against “the man.” And leftists are very much “the man.”

      Also keep in mind that collectivist authoritarians have been organized and pushing hard at least since Woodrow Wilson, probably before that, whereas the movement to conserve Western liberal values, to the extent there is a coherent movement, only took it’s first breath with Goldwater, and is really just starting to pick up steam. Whereas it’s starting to feel, here and there, as if Progressivism might have hit its high water mark for now (seems to go in cycles of about 40 years, give or take).

      More generally, there seem to be multiple dynamics here. I’m not at all sure how this will play out.

      • “It is the nature of youth to rebel against “the man.” And leftists are very much “the man.””

        Politics is cyclical. A hard push to the left is what got Trump elected. That enraged the Leftist Scum ™, and we got Biden.

        Lather, rinse, repeat…

    • “Most gun owners possess multiple firearms, gun owners are not a majority of the population.”

      Attempts at getting good data put a pretty hard floor of 40% of households having guns, with the debate about how much higher than 40% the real number is. Recent attempts, even by people with lefty agendas, have been producing numbers in the 50+% range.

      Now that is “households”, so how that breaks down compared to “population” is not nearly as simple as anyone would like, but it’s not remotely as doom and gloom as you put.

      Basically, we’ve already been through that period – we’re in recovery from it at the moment.

      (Like an ice age, that’s not to say it can’t possibly return, of course.)

  9. Not yet, might be getting there, but Giffords, Demanding MOMs and Students, Brady and Everytown are still fueled by highly emotional arguments and the “Lawmakers” are still fueled by their cash… We’re a long way from the world described in Mr. Cohens (X) Fantasy…

  10. Sure Spike pretend it’s all “academic”. Millions of gat owner’s(yeah MILLIONS) in ILLANNOY and other states are oppressed big time by dims & feds. Under penalty of law. Winning? Perhaps after we move east🙄☹️

  11. Academia in the United states is the single greatest threat to the Freedom and Liberty’s of the nation. It is and has been used to indoctrinate several generations of children to worship the ideology of liberalism/progressiveism. Ironically, resulting in the hatred of all the very freedoms. That have allowed them to become who they are. This has happened before in history and resulted in the complete destruction of a society and the deaths of 100s of millions of people. It was called Fascism and the product was the Hitler Youth.

      • Especially when their parents are more concerned with being their friends. Rather than their parents. Many of the Germans who fought for the Nazi’s were children of the Hitler Youth system.

    • Quote: “Academia in the United states is the single greatest threat to the Freedom and Liberty’s of the nation. It is and has been used to indoctrinate several generations of children to worship the ideology of liberalism/progressiveism.”

      The greatest threat is the democrat party (communist party USA)
      Academia is just one of the tools they use to destroy America.

  13. In reality if you are caught breaking the law the average citizen knows its not worth losing your job, losing most of your assets you worked so hard to accumulate your entire life, being fined heavily, going to prison and losing your right to own any weapons for life.

    And remember the Feds could in the future require you to go through a background check to buy spare parts like a firearms barrel which cannot be 3d printed. And the ability to make your own barrel is way beyond the skill level and the financial wherewithal of the average street punk or the Neanderthal Trumpite revolutionary.

    The 1968 law on signing for ammunition could also be reinstated making any firearm you possessed useless without the ammo to go into it. Again making your own smokeless powder and primers is way beyond the skill level or financial ability of the street punk or the Maga Maggot. bb

    • dacian, the DUNDERHEAD, I guess the Constitution, the 2nd Amendment, Heller, McDonald, and Bruen are lost on you Hoplophobes.

      What part of “SHALL NOT BE INFRINGED” don’t you understand? Each one of those items you cited, INFRINGE on our rights. But then you Leftist Hoplophobes are about making us go to court to enforce our rights on a tyranical government

    • Coming from you terms like Neanderthal Trumpite revolutionary and Maga Maggot sound like a good thing… Jealous?

  15. Don’t fire unless fired upon, but if they mean to have a war, let it begin here — Captain John Parker, 1775

    It is because the people are civilized, that they are with safety armed. It is an effect of their conscious dignity, as citizens enjoying equal rights that they wish not to invade the rights of others. The danger (where there is any) from armed citizens is only to the government, not to society, and as long as they have nothing to revenge in the government (which they cannot have while it is in their own hands) there are many advantages in their being accustomed to the use of arms and no possible disadvantage. – George Washingtonv

  16. What a complete crock of poopie.

    The second we “think we’ve won” it’s over. Thomas won’t be on SCOTUS forever and Roberts will gleefully find that banning guns is just a tax. Gun confiscation is built into the DNA of Democrats, just as butchering the unborn is who they are. They do not give up.

    Even if everything the author writes is true, “more guns than ever”, print our own, etc, etc, etc, relying on any of that – or the good will of the GOP – is a fool’s errand.

  17. Manufacturing your owns guns is great, but it’s USELESS without the ability to also manufacture ammunition, and that is much more specialized.

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