Roll-your-own firearms

Smallest Minority has this post on small-scale firearms manufacture in Pakistan and the Phillipines. By 'small-scale' I mean what amounts to in a backyard shed in some cases, and some of these people turn out damn good firearms, stuff you would have no problems using. And all illegally made.

Which brings up the nonsense of 'ban guns and nobody will have them'. As has often been pointed out, the only people who surrender arms at government order are honest people, the criminals keep theirs. And get more illegally. And in many cases, can make them. There's been several articles about 'homemade' guns turning up in Britain, though not too many; it's too easy to smuggle them in(although the Brits have pretty much banned anything they think might be modified to fire a cartridge). And they do turn up here, too. Oh, and take note of this: "...Japanese Yakuzas were known in the past to fly to the central Philippines to collect them...". Now, that's just not possible, EVERYONE says Japan has no gun crime problem, and nobody has guns...

I first heard of this when I was a kid. Dad had a magazine from some LE agency that mentioned a bust of a gang armory in New York City. Among the things seized was a submachinegun made by the armoror, chambered for .22. They noted it test-fired just fine, and it was apparently the first; they lucked out and grabbed it and them before they could go into production. That was in the late '60's if I remember right, and nothing has changed since. Except that machinery like mills and lathes and, if needed, heat-treating furnaces are more available than ever before.

Which brings up something I read over at mASS BACKWARDS a while back. He noted that some idiot at a lefty blog had been running some posts on how the idea of people making guns and ammo was silly because of the precision machinery and special skills and materials required. As I note above, there are a number of places from which you can get milling machines and metal lathes- good ones- and they'll deliver to your door. Steel? Cheap and easily available in all grades, same for brass. And so forth. It would actually be easier to make a subgun than a revolver, and you can find plans to make a subgun from salvage yard materials, no special tooling needed except for a reamer(and as one book points out, doesn't even have to be an actual chamber reamer).

'Course, this is largely academic. With the borders as open as they are, does anyone really think that people who smuggle people and large amounts of drugs in would have any problem- or moral qualm- with smuggling arms and ammo?

Didn't think so.