GUNS IN THE HANDS OF CRIMINALS AND DEMENTIA VICTIMS, BECAUSE FREEDOM

I don't know if Cody Wilson will actually achieve his stated goal of nullifying all gun laws, but, as Wired reports, the U.S. government is letting him take his best shot:

FIVE YEARS AGO, 25-year-old radical libertarian Cody Wilson stood on a remote central Texas gun range and pulled the trigger on the world’s first fully 3-D-printed gun. When, to his relief, his plastic invention fired a .380-caliber bullet into a berm of dirt without jamming or exploding in his hands, he drove back to Austin and uploaded the blueprints for the pistol to his website, Defcad. com.

He'd launched the site months earlier along with an anarchist video manifesto, declaring that gun control would never be the same in an era when anyone can download and print their own firearm with a few clicks....

The law caught up. Less than a week later, Wilson received a letter from the US State Department demanding that he take down his printable-gun blueprints or face prosecution for violating federal export controls. Under an obscure set of US regulations known as the International Trade in Arms Regulations (ITAR), Wilson was accused of exporting weapons without a license, just as if he'd shipped his plastic gun to Mexico rather than put a digital version of it on the internet. He took Defcad. com offline....

But Wilson sued -- and this year, with (perhaps not coincidentally) Donald Trump as president, the feds backed down and reached a settlement with him. Defcad. com is up and running again.

Now Wilson is making up for lost time. Later this month, he and the nonprofit he founded, Defense Distributed, are relaunching their website Defcad. com as a repository of firearm blueprints they've been privately creating and collecting, from the original one-shot 3-D-printable pistol he fired in 2013 to AR-15 frames and more exotic DIY semi-automatic weapons. The relaunched site will be open to user contributions, too; Wilson hopes it will soon serve as a searchable, user-generated database of practically any firearm imaginable.

Hey, what could go wrong?

The culture of homemade, unregulated guns it fosters could make firearms available to even those people who practically every American agrees shouldn’t possess them: felons, minors, and the mentally ill. The result could be more cases like that of John Zawahiri, an emotionally disturbed 25-year-old who went on a shooting spree in Santa Monica, California, with a homemade AR-15 in 2015, killing five people, or Kevin Neal, a Northern California man who killed five people with AR-15-style rifles—some of which were homemade—last November.

But what's more important to our dudebro hero is that every day he's a step closer to his ultimate goal.

I look down and find a granite tombstone with the words AMERICAN GUN CONTROL engraved on it. Wilson explains he has a plan to embed it in the dirt under a tree outside when he gets around to it. "It's maybe a little on the nose, but I think you get where I’m going with it," he says.

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That's the future, because freedom. Meanwhile, USA Today reports that gun owners of the past are holding on to their guns long after they're able to make sound judgments about using them:

A four-month Kaiser Health News investigation uncovered dozens of cases across the USA in which people with dementia used guns to kill or injure themselves or others.

From news reports, court records, hospital data and public death records, KHN found 15 homicides and more than 60 suicides since 2012, although there are probably many more. The shooters often acted during bouts of confusion, paranoia, delusion or aggression –common symptoms of dementia. They killed people closest to them – their caretaker, wife, son or daughter. They shot at people they happened to encounter – a mailman, a police officer, a train conductor. At least four men with dementia who brandished guns were fatally shot by police. In cases where charges were brought, many assailants were deemed incompetent to stand trial.

The stories are terrible:

With a bullet in her gut, her voice choked with pain, Dee Hill pleaded with the 911 dispatcher for help.

“My husband accidentally shot me,” Hill, 75, of The Dalles, Oregon, groaned during the call May 16, 2015. “In the stomach, and he can’t talk, please …”

Less than 4 feet away, Hill’s husband, Darrell, a former police chief and two-term county sheriff, sat in his wheelchair with a discharged Glock handgun on the table in front of him, unaware that he’d nearly killed his wife of almost 57 years.

The 76-year-old lawman had been diagnosed two years earlier with a form of rapidly progressive dementia, a disease that quickly stripped him of reasoning and memory.

“He didn’t understand,” said Dee, who needed 30 pints of blood, three surgeries and seven weeks in the hospital to survive her injuries.

But it's America, and guns are sacred.

Dee Hill had ignored her husband’s demands and sold Darrell’s car when it became too dangerous for him to drive. Guns were another matter.

“He was just almost obsessive about seeing his guns,” Dee said. He worried that the weapons were dirty, that they weren’t being maintained. Though she’d locked them in a vault in the carport, she relented after Darrell asked repeatedly to check on the guns he’d carried every day of his nearly 50-year law enforcement career.

She intended to briefly show him two of his six firearms, the Glock handgun and a Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum revolver. After he saw the weapons, Darrell accidentally knocked the empty pouch that had held the revolver to the floor. When Dee bent to pick it up, he somehow grabbed the Glock and fired.

“My concern [had been] that someone was going to get hurt,” she said. “I didn’t in my wildest dreams think it was going to be me.”

And gun absolutists, echoing Cody Wilson, imply that there can be no restrictions whatsoever on firearm ownership.

Arthur Przebinda, who represents the group Doctors for Responsible Gun Ownership, said researchers raising the issue want to curtail gun rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution, and are “seeking ways to disarm as many people as possible.” ...

Critics of gun restrictions such as Przebinda argued that the essential difference between driving and guns is that one is a privilege and the other is a protected constitutional right.

“The two are not the same,” he said. “You do not have a right to conveyance. You have a right to self-defense, you have a right to protecting your home and your family that’s intrinsic to you as a human being.”

He balked at any formal assessment of firearm use among people with dementia, saying it could lead to “a totalitarian system that decides when you can have rights and when you cannot.”

This is America, where

Only five states have laws allowing families to petition a court to temporarily seize weapons from people who exhibit dangerous behavior.

The American gun-rights regime is like capitalism: We believe we have to defer to it. We forget that it exists to serve us. Not even the right-leaning Supreme Court has argued that gun rights are absolute (though that may change with a court system fully remade by Donald Trump and Leonard Leo). For now, we're behaving as if the right to own a gun irresponsibly is sacrosanct.