Is this proof that gun control is doomed?
Jun 24, 2016, 5:55 AM | Updated: 12:17 pm
(AP)
Gun control is doomed.
In Austin Texas, a 28-year-old gun rights activist named Cody Wilson is selling a milling machine and a software kit that allows anyone to make a fully-functioning AR-15. And every time there’s an incident like Orlando, the orders come flooding in.
“In the last two years I think we’ve sold just shy of 3,000,” he explained.
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Of course, each machine can make a lot of guns.
If you make your own gun, it doesn’t need a serial number, and the government has no way of knowing how many you have. Cody’s company is called Defense Distributed – and his founding principle is that to be truly free, you have a right to the same weapons that the government has.
That could be why last year Wired Magazine named Cody the “fifth most dangerous person on the internet.” But he actually didn’t sound that dangerous to me, it’s the bad guys his machine might attract that have me worried.
“I freely admit and even concede that this is the type of behavior that you would expect people who would have designs against the government might pursue. ”
So then why does he do it? Because he believes in freedom, and freedom is sometimes scary:
“But a mature attitude about civil liberties is one that understands that in order to enable people to have the widest swath of freedom possible, we have to tolerate that there are people who can take advantage of our liberties in the first place.”
Anyway, he’s pretty sure most of his customers are not jihadists:
“[F]or the most part it’s actually just middle-aged white males, mostly in California.”
What could go wrong?