So . . . how do they intend to ban this?

In a comment responding to my post from yesterday, fellow gun rights blogger Robb Allen (Sharp as a Marble) exposed yet another point of absurdity in regard to the VPC's apparent contention that Washington DC's handgun ban is all that stands between DC residents and mass suicide. To illustrate his point, Robb gives us this story, about a man who, over the course of a weekend, built a homemade firearm (using steel pipe) with which he committed suicide. Maybe the VPC should lobby for an aggressive policy of pipe control.

Checking out the comments posted in response to Robb's post about that incident, I found other references to building firearms at home (and not crude "zip guns," either--in many cases we're talking about the kinds of "military grade assault weapons" that so terrify the anti-gun herbivores).

For example, this YouTube video shows old men in Pakistan making fully functional (and fully-automatic) AK-47 copies (and many other guns) in "factories" that looked like mud brick hovels.

Perhaps my favorite link, though, was to The Home Gunsmith, a site run by a British citizen who, in a counter-strike against that country's draconian firearms laws, has dedicated himself to spreading knowledge of how citizens, with little in the way of mechanical skills or expensive tools, can build effective fighting firearms with which to defend their lives and liberty. The following line is prominently displayed on the site, and I assume it came from the site's owner (P.A. Luty). I really like it, and will most likely end up stealing it before too long:

There are over 550 million firearms
in worldwide circulation; that's one
firearm for every twelve people.
The only question is;
how do I arm the other eleven?

The site sells manuals on constructing 9mm submachineguns (and other guns) from materials that can be cheaply had at any hardware store. I assume these would have smoothbore barrels (as I don't know how one could easily or cheaply rifle a barrel). Accuracy would suffer, but at short range, and with a full-auto, that's probably a small concern. Still, I assume he did it that way because British law treats gun barrels as controlled items. If one were doing such a project here in the States, where a mere barrel is considered to be an inert hunk of metal, I would think it might make more sense to acquire a factory-made, rifled barrel, which can be had without any paperwork, and build the rest of the gun around it.

Even here at Armed and Safe, I've discussed home manufacture of guns as a way of defeating gun registration (which could also be referred to as gun pre-confiscation) and other so-called "gun-control" laws, although I was looking at the "80% frame" market (by the way, Rick Celata could use some help).

With the insane murder rates in "gun-controlled" urban sewers like Washington DC and Chicago, it would seem that citizen disarmament advocates have developed a very impressive immunity to logic in regard to discussions about violence reduction strategies. Still, if it can be shown that the more they prohibit guns, the more ways freedom loving people will find to defeat their prohibitions, they'll be forced to acknowledge that where there is a will there is a way, and that those who would fight for liberty have no shortage of will.