Machine Tools

The Arizona Rifleman is getting some experience with machine tools, and thinks about how easy it would be to manufacture naughty parts for guns.  It’s actually not that difficult to manufacture firearms if you have a reasonably well equipped machine shop.  The technology for modern firearms is a century old at this point, and you could fit the equipment necessary in a residential garage or basement.  You don’t see much of these types of operations today because of a lack of demand, since it’s easier for criminals to buy from existing black market stock.  But in the UK, it’s becoming common, and it would be common here too if guns are ever outlawed.

5 thoughts on “Machine Tools”

  1. In the 1990’s, a Briton named Philip A. Luty built a 9mm submachine gun of his own design completely from scratch. I believe he did this without machine tools, but instead with just a welding torch, steel tubing and flat stock, pipe fittings, and a power drill.

    Luty did all this simply as a way to graphically illustrate the complete fallacy of gun laws in the UK, and gun laws in general. (This was soon after a total ban on modern handguns was established there in 1997.) He hired a photographer to document his work for a how-to manual which he planned on writing, one whom ultimately decided to inform the police of his project. Luty was soon arrested thereafter.

    Luty was tried on a slew of charges in what is called “Crown Court” in the UK, among those being the construction of a machine gun, the writing of his how-to manual, and the possession of six live cartridges. Although the judge who heard Luty’s trial said that he could accept the claim that Luty had no ulterior criminal intent by constructing his machine gun, he still wanted to make an example of Luty as a warning to others. Luty then received a 5-year prison term from this same judge.

    Despite the wishes of powers that be in the UK, Philip A. Luty’s how-to manual on constructing a submachine gun from scratch was eventually published by the American book publisher, Paladin Press. The title of this book is “‘Expedient Homemade Firearms — The 9mm Machine Gun”. It is still available to this day.

  2. Don Kates wrote in his 1979 book that “villagers in Vietnam and Pakistan are able to fashion crude, working equivalents of modern firearms using equipment less sophisticated than what is found in many American’s homes.”, and noted that if firearms ever were banned, it was a virtual certainty that they would be manufactured on the sly and purchased by either criminals or those who believe firmly that they require a firearm for basic self defense, no matter what the cost.

  3. Has anybody ever read the anti-gun rights tripe on that “Gun Guys” blog? Here’s a direct quote from it that dates back to 2005:

    “If criminals are getting their illegal guns from a legal market, and that legal market is shut down, how will criminals get their guns? Will they make them from raw materials? Maybe criminals will take up mining and smelting to make their own weapons!”

    Somebody should tell whoever authors this laughable “Gun Guys” blog that it’s not even necessary to learn “mining and smelting” to make guns in a covert and/or criminal fashion, and that such a thing has already been done time and again all over the planet. If illegal drugs can be made by the metric ton by crime syndicates and then smuggled into these United States, the same could be done with firearms for sale on the black market. All that is missing from the picture now is the profit incentive, which is what a blanket gun ban from liberal gun-haters would readily provide.

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