From: [j g d] at [dixie.com] (John De Armond) Newsgroups: talk.politics.guns,soc.culture.british Subject: Making your own gun (was Hungerford) Date: 21 Oct 93 04:58:31 GMT [m--ss--p] at [pangea.Stanford.EDU] (Antony Mossop) writes: >I have no doubt that a not very safe gun would be easy to make and a safer one >would probably not be harder. A semi-automatic or beyond though starts to get >out of most peoples league. The real problem I see is how you make your >own ammunition. Pissing about with mercury fulminate seems doomed to disaster. >Then there are the tolerances that each hand made shell has to be made too. >I foresee a lot of ruptured pipes and missing bits of flesh from the diy >enthusiast. I suppose one could always go for black powder and musket balls >and use the nail to put the stock on. The problem, Tony, is you are asserting as fact a guess derived from a position of zero knowledge. As both an amateur gunsmith and an amateur pyrotechnician, I know better on all counts. About the only thing difficult to do in a home shop is to make an *accurate* gun, really a non-issue for self-defence or close offence. Everything else is pretty trivial. If you want to see how trivial, buy that book or look in your library for a book on the Sten gun of WWII. Or the Grease Gun. Or take a look at a MAC-10 and convert all those square stamped steel shapes into round tubular shapes. The most amazing thing, at least to non-shooters, is that a full-auto machine gun is VASTLY easier to build than either a revolver or a semi-automatic. If I were ever to build a gun out of necessity, it WOULD be a machine gun for that reason. As to bullets, banning such a small object has about as much chance of working as has the drug bans. But for the sake of argument, let's stipulate that the government COULD ban ammo so that I'd have to make my own. Still pretty trivial. Bullets are no-brainers. Many shooters now cast their own bullets as an economy measure. Fewew but still significant numbers of shooters make their own bullets for match shooting. Cases? No problem. Brass tubing is readily available and amateur swaging technology is commonly available (see Corbin). Powder? Again trivial. And not just black powder. I'd make nitro-cellulose-based smokeless just like what is used today. I've done it before and I can do it again. As long as I can get any nitrate (fertilizer, for example) and battery acid, I CAN make nitro-cellulose using a process that is NOT hazardous. Primers? Again, no problem. While I might make fulminate of mercury if necessary, I'd most likely make lead styphinate, the same thing used in commercial primers. And because I have no need for machine-insertable primers, I'd just design my brass to hold a pellet of primer in front of the firing pin. Or if I wanted to get fancy, I'd design an electrical firing system and might even dispense with the primer all together. Visualize a cartridge with an electrode glass beaded into the bottom of the cartridge fired by a piezo device. The problem you and a lot of other people have is you assume the world is static, that if guns were taken away, everything would stay stationary. The problem for you is there are a whole bunch of people in this world, myself included, who simply will not be disarmed. And once they make store-bought weapons illegal and I decide to become a criminal instead of a victim, I'm no longer bound by ANY legal restrictions. I'll make full auto weapons, explosives and anything else I can think of to aid my self-protection. And that's just what I - a generally peaceable, law abiding citizen - would do. Imagine what people whose livelihood depends on firearms would do. What everyone concerned with violent crime needs to do is address the HUMAN behind the inanimate objects and forget about the tools. John -- John De Armond, WD4OQC | For a free sample magazine, send Performance Engineering Magazine(TM) | a digest-size 52 cent SASE Marietta, Ga "Hotrods'n'computers" | (Domestic) to PO Box 669728 [j g d] at [dixie.com] "What could be better?" | Marietta, GA 30066 Email to me may be published at my sole discretion.