INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Jon Stokes
Contributor
Jon Stokes is one of the founders of Ars Technica, an author, and a former Wired
He currently hacks ruby at Collective Idea, and runs AllOutdoor.com.
More posts by this contributor
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On Tuesday, July 10, the DOJ announced a
landmark settlement with Austin-based Defense Distributed, a controversial startup led by a young, charismatic anarchist whom Wired once
named one of the 15 most dangerous people in the world.
Hyper-loquacious and media-savvy, Cody Wilson is fond of telling any reporter who&ll
listen that Defense Distributed main product, a gun fabricator called the Ghost Gunner, represents the endgame for gun control, not just in
the US but everywhere in the world
With nothing but the Ghost Gunner, an internet connection, and some raw materials, anyone, anywhere can make an unmarked, untraceable gun in
Even if Wilson is wrong that the gun control wars are effectively over (and I believe he is), Tuesday ruling has fundamentally changed
them.
At about the time the settlement announcement was going out over the wires, I was pulling into the parking lot of LMT Defense in
Milan, IL.
LMT Defense, formerly known as Lewis Machine Tool, is as much the opposite of Defense Distributed as its quiet, publicity-shy
founder, Karl Lewis, is the opposite of Cody Wilson
But LMT Defense story can be usefully placed alongside that of Defense Distributed, because together they can reveal much about the past,
present, and future of the tools and technologies that we humans use for the age-old practice of making war.
The legacy machine
Karl Lewis
got started in gunmaking back in the 1970 at Springfield Armory in Geneseo, IL, just a few exits up I-80 from the current LMT Defense
Lewis, who has a high school education but who now knows as much about the engineering behind firearms manufacturing as almost anyone alive,
was working on the Springfield Armory shop floor when he hit upon a better way to make a critical and failure-prone part of the AR-15, the
He first took his idea to Springfield Armory management, but they took a pass, so he rented out a small corner in a local auto repair ship
in Milan, bought some equipment, and began making the bolts, himself.
Lewis worked in his rented space on nights and weekends, bringing the
newly fabricated bolts home for heat treatment in his kitchen oven
Not long after he made his first batch, he landed a small contract with the US military to supply some of the bolts for the M4 carbine
On the back of this initial success with M4 bolts, Lewis Machine Tool expanded its offerings to include complete guns
Over the course of the next three decades, LMT grew into one of the world top makers of AR-15-pattern rifles for the world militaries, and
it now in a very small club of gunmakers, alongside a few old-world arms powerhouses like Germany Heckler Koch and Belgium FN Herstal, that
supplies rifles to US SOCOM most elite units.
The offices of LMT Defense, in Milan, Ill
(Image courtesy Jon Stokes)
LMT gun business is built on high-profile relationships, hard-to-win government contracts, and deep, almost
The company lives or dies by the skill of its machinists and by the stuff of process engineering — tolerances and measurements and paper
Political connections are also key, as the largest weapons contracts require congressional approval and months of waiting for political
winds to blow in this or that direction, as countries to fall in and out of favor with each other, and paperwork that was delayed due to a
political spat over some unrelated point of trade or security finally gets put through so that funds can be transfered and production can
begin.
Selling these guns is as old-school a process as making them is
Success in LMT world isn&t about media buys and PR hits, but about dinners in foreign capitals, range sessions with the world top special
forces units, booths at trade shows most of us have never heard of, and secret delegations of high-ranking officials to a machine shop in a
small town surrounded by corn fields on the western border of Illinois.
The civilian gun market, with all of its politics- and event-driven
gyrations of supply and demand, is woven into this stable core of the global military small arms market the way vines weave through a
Innovations in gunmaking flow in both directions, though nowadays they more often flow from the civilian market into the military and law
enforcement markets than vice versa
For the most part, civilians buy guns that come off the same production lines that feed the government and law enforcement markets.
All of
this is how small arms get made and sold in the present world, and anyone who lived through the heyday of IBM and Oracle, before the PC, the
cloud, and the smartphone tore through and upended everything, will recognize every detail of the above picture, down to the clean-cut guys
in polos with the company logo and fat purchase orders bearing signatures and stamps and big numbers.
The author with LMT Defense
hardware.
Guns, drugs, and a million Karl Lewises
This is the part of the story where I build on the IBM PC analogy I hinted at above, and
tell you that Defense Distributed Ghost Gunner, along with its inevitable clones and successors, will kill dinosaurs like LMT Defense the
way the PC and the cloud laid waste to the mainframe and microcomputer businesses of yesteryear.
Except this isn&t what will happen.
Defense
Distributed isn&t going to destroy gun control, and it certainly not going to decimate the gun industry
All of the legacy gun industry apparatus described above will still be there in the decades to come, mainly because governments will still
buy their arms from established makers like LMT
But surrounding the government and civilian arms markets will be a brand new, homebrew, underground gun market where enthusiasts swap files
on the dark web and test new firearms in their back yards.
The homebrew gun revolution won&t create a million untraceable guns so much as
it&ll create a hundreds of thousands of Karl Lewises — solitary geniuses who had a good idea, prototyped it, began making it and selling
it in small batches, and ended up supplying a global arms market with new technology and products.
In this respect, the future of guns looks
a lot like the present of drugs
The dark web hasn&t hurt Big Pharma, much less destroyed it
Rather, it has expanded the reach of hobbyist drugmakers and small labs, and enabled a shadow world of pharmaceutical RD that feeds
transnational black and gray markets for everything from penis enlargement pills to synthetic opioids.
Gun control efforts in this new
reality will initially focus more on ammunition
Background checks for ammo purchases will move to more states, as policy makers try to limit civilian access to weapons in a world where
controlling the guns themselves is impossible.
Ammunition has long been the crack in the rampart that Wilson is building
Bullets and casings are easy to fabricate and will always be easy to obtain or manufacture in bulk, but powder and primers are another story
Gunpowder and primers are the explosive chemical components of modern ammo, and they are difficult and dangerous to make at home
So gun controllers will seize on this and attempt to pivot to &bullet control& in the near-term.
Ammunition control is unlikely to work,
mainly because rounds of ammunition are fungible, and there are untold billions of rounds already in civilian hands.
In addition to controls
on ammunition, some governments will also make an effort at trying to force the manufacturers of 3D printers and desktop milling machines
(the Ghost Gunner is the latter) to refuse to print files for gun parts.
This will be impossible to enforce, for two reasons
First, it will be hard for these machines to reliably tell what a gun-related file and what isn&t, especially if distributors of these files
keep changing them to defeat any sort of detection
But the bigger problem will be that open-source firmware will quickly become available for the most popular printing and milling machines,
so that determined users can &jailbreak& them and use them however they like
This already happens with products like routers and even cars, so it will definitely happen with home fabrication machines should the need
arise.
Ammo control and fabrication device restrictions having failed, governments will over the longer term employ a two-pronged approach
that consists of possession permits and digital censorship.
Photo courtesy of Getty Images: Jeremy Saltzer / EyeEm
First, governments will
look to gun control schemes that treat guns like controlled substances (i.e
The focus will shift to vetting and permits for simple possession, much like the gun owner licensing scheme I outlined in Politico
We&ll give up on trying to trace guns and ammunition, and focus more on authorizing people to possess guns, and on catching and prosecuting
You&ll get the firearm equivalent of a marijuana card from the state, and then it won&t matter if you bought your gun from an authorized
dealer or made it yourself at home.
The second component of future gun control regimes will be online suppression, of the type that already
taking place on most major tech platforms across the developed world
I don&t think DefCad.com is long for the open web, and it will ultimately have as hard a time staying online as extremist sites like
stormfront.org.
Gun CAD files will join child porn and pirated movies on the list of content it nearly impossible to find on big tech
platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and YouTube
If you want to trade these files, you&ll find yourself on sites with really intrusive advertising, where you worry a lot about viruses
Or, you&ll end up on the dark web, where you may end up paying for a hot new gun design with a cryptocurrency
This may be an ancap dream, but won&t be mainstream or user-friendly in any respect.
As for what comes after that, this is the same question
as the question of what comes next for politically disfavored speech online
The gun control wars have now become a subset of the online free speech wars, so whatever happens with online speech in places like the US,
UK, or China will happen with guns.
