A friend on Facebook asked for opinions on this video. It's a interview of Cody Wilson of Defense Distributed. I answered:
From an interview standpoint: Beck not being a bombastic asshole is always nice. He's a very considerate host here. Is he always like this on TheBlaze? Wilson has some very good points and their conversion is good.
From a societal standpoint: I think it's pretty clear that Wilson intends this to be a test to show how limited our government is and how society truly values the idea of freedom. He's trying to force the authoritarian mindsets' hand more than anything, to provoke a reaction. He (I think) believes (and I find it likely) that the authoritarians aren't so much a group of people but a mindset that (nearly) everyone has at least in part. This is a test of our principles, our willingness to really trust the individual with power.
What wins, the love of freedom and celebration of individual empowerment or the fear of others, avarice and the desire to control? This democratization of power isn't as inevitable or unstoppable as Beck suggests. If we're willing to give in to fear and sacrifice the very concept of liberty, which we've done in the past, if we're willing to hand the keys over to a fully authoritarian government, they can shut things down. He's worried about power creep, but he's not trying to subvert it, but shock society into choosing between unabashed authoritarism and a society that doesn't restrict individuals a priori.
From an engineering and strategic standpoint: this is a symbol. It doesn't truly democratize much, because the AR and most modern firearms are built around the assumption you have a way of producing propellants, primers and cartridges. Each of those is an additional control point (and bullets, too, but they're pretty easy).
If you want truly distributed armaments, you'll want to move to something else. Cartridgeless, I figure, probably smoothbore with sabots, as rifling is a serious pain in the ass, with liquid propellants, perhaps ethanol. And you'd use a different priming mechanism, like a piezoelectric ignitor.
You'd design a set of families of weapons along those principles: a pump with no springs (springs are hard), an autoloader with springs, an autoloader that's servo driven, etc. You'd perfect small arm smooth bore tech as well as the alternative propellants. Essentially, you're perfecting potato gun tech.
Somewhere, someone is doing this. And their probably doing it quietly for a reason, likely waiting to see the reaction to Wilson's AR-15.
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