Weapons as Political Protest: P.A. Luty’s Submachine Gun

Armament Research Services (ARES) is a specialist technical intelligence consultancy, offering expertise and analysis to a range of government and non-government entities in the arms and munitions field. For detailed photos of the guns in this video, don’t miss the ARES companion blog post!

Phillip A. Luty was a Briton who took a hard philosophical line against gun control legislation in the UK in the 1990s. In response to more restrictive gun control laws, he set out to prove that all such laws were ultimately futile by showing that one could manufacture a functional firearm from hardware store goods, without using any purpose-made firearms parts.

Luty succeeded in this task, designing a 9mm submachine gun made completely from scratch with a minimum of tools. In 1998, he published the plans for his gun as the book “Expedient Homemade Firearms”. Luty was not particularly discreet about his activities (actually, he was quite outspoken…) and was eventually caught by the police while out to test fire one of his guns, and arrested. He was convicted, and spent several years in prison. He continued to pursue a gun rights agenda after being released, and was facing legal trouble again when he passed away form cancer in 2011.

Several of Luty’s submachine guns are still held in the collection of the Royal Armouries’ National Firearms Centre, including the one that led to his original conviction. Many thanks to the NFC for allowing me to bring that weapon to you!

58 Comments

  1. Makes me think of pictures I’ve seen from the Philipines and Australia of expedient firearms. With the advent of polymer, these will become even easier to make, and if you can make a rifled barrel you’d be in even better shape.

    There would be a difference whether these were to be used for ‘freedom fighter’ roles, i.e. to seize a regular firearm from government forces, or a criminal role, to defend ones drug stash or do holdups. There’s always the option to shorten a double barrel shotgun, which is the route a lot of criminals seem to take in the UK countries where concealble handguns aren’t available. Takes less practice, too.

    • In essence, we have just proved that gun control only works if everyone were an obedient law-abiding citizen. The problem with this is that countless people dislike the idea of being slaves to elitist conformity. And crooks will carry out crimes, guns or no guns. One stupid bank robber tried to stick up a teller in a Chinese state-owned bank. The robber had a cleaver while the teller was sitting behind a bulletproof glass panel between her and the robber. The teller had a laughing fit, especially when the robber decided to answer his smartphone right there, oblivious to angry patrons and the very annoyed bank guard right behind him. The arrest was instantaneous and video footage of the incident was posted to the internet… The answer to gun-related crimes must come from the ordinary people, not from fat-cat political parties with filthy rich lobbyists. Crime is not a problem of gun making. It’s a problem of the human heart. Did I mess up?

      • This as I see it is exactly the issue, gun control is not really about guns, because if it was the current methods would have been abandoned as ineffective. Gun control is about control, it allows government and police to do what they want to whomever they want whenever they want, and be totally safe in doing it. In Canada we had, and still have a lesser form of, a gun registry, did it stop crime? absolutely not, because criminals did not register their guns, so what did it do? it allowed police to raid and search any registered gun owners home. The first thing the police would do when they suspected someone was check them against the registry, if their name came up they went to a judge to get a warrant which was granted because the person was a registered gun owner and therefore could be a danger to society if they were involved in illegal activity.

        • that’s the key to freedom: “be totally safe”. take that feeling of safety away. if the government agent knocking on doors to confiscate a weapon was not entirely sure he would make it home, safe, that evening …such confiscations would not happen.

          at least here in the US.

    • Matt, using ECM (Electro chemical Machining) to make a rifled barrel seems appropriate for such a DIY firearm.

    • no, you’ve proved your ability to debate is limited. The idea that we’d be better off with “good guys” having guns because if they don’t, only bad guys will have them is facile. In fact, the likelihood of a fatality at home of a gun owner either because of an accident or deliberate self harm is infinitely greater than the likelihood of repelling an armed assailant at your home. Children living in homes where guns are stored are more likely to die of gun related accidents than homes where guns are not available. Suicide success involving hand guns is much greater than any other method of self harm.

      Fact is, America’s fascination with guns will die or the US will die. Even if you argue that a small number have ruined it for the rest of us….. the fact is…. IT’S RUINED! Grow up America. Join the rest of the world where gun ownership is not protected, it’s severely limited! Most countries, off duty police do not carry their firearms! Think of that…. highly trained officers of the law NOT carrying their guns when off duty because STATISTICALLY, more harm than good results. Just like seat belts occasionally result in harm due to their mandated use…. they are still mandated! The NRA is not about your rights…. it’s about money…. and it isn’t YOUR money they’re concerned with! 🙂

      • Wow, you really don’t know much about firearms in the USA, do you? Do you know there are over 300 million firearms in the hands of approximately 100 million citizens? The much touted figure of 30 thousand “gun deaths” per year in the USA (among a populace of 300+ million people) doesn’t bother (on purpose) to break that down for you, the reader. Statistically, that’s .01% of the populace, despite all those millions of firearms and billions of cartridges. About half of those death are suicides, and sad as it may be, in the absence of firearms, other means to end those lives would likely be chosen; drug overdoses would probably take a upward trend. Out of the remaining 15 thousand, well over half of those are murders committed by gang members and other hardened repeat criminals. So, out of the 7.5 remaining are all other “gun deaths”, including accidents, justified shootings in self defense, police-involved shootings, and other murders committed by those who are not gang members. However, it’s still more “interesting” than the simple numbers because about half the counties in the USA have no murders in any given year, including none involving firearms. Indeed, in many areas of the nation awash in private firearms, NO ONE GETS SHOT. Your hyperbolic statement is reduced by the facts. Of course, I’d imagine that you don’t care about facts, simply about disarming the American populace, likely for political ends. The simple fact is, YOU don’t have the power to disarm us, and we aren’t going to disarm because others misuse their firearms.

      • dear nitrous,

        Since this forum doesn’t make clear who comments like yours (“no, you’ve proved your ability to debate is limited”) are replying to, I wanted to make sure that you knew I was talking to you.

        If debate consists of presenting your wishes and opinions as fact, packed tight as a blivet, then indeed you are a master debater. Don’t accuse me of not engaging, there is nothing to engage. Insofar as thinking is detectable in the formation of your ideas, I suggest you abandon it as a bad job and think something else. Very bad post, 3/10 for effort. My diagnosis of you is that of the doctor in Idiocracy. The appropriate Billy Madison meme also applies, as you are awarded zero points, and have made us dumber by your commenting.

        however, you may be good to your mother, so I wish you well. But please stop voting.

  2. “one could manufacture a functional firearm from hardware store goods, without using any purpose-made firearms parts”
    Good example here might be BŁYSKAWICA sub-machine gun:
    http://modernfirearms.net/smg/pl/blyskawica-e.html
    mechanically it was STEN, but with magazine sticking downward and MP40-style folding stock. Various other STEN-like weapons were crafted by Resistance workshops, but BŁYSKAWICA is notable as ~700 were made, under occupation.

  3. Luty also had info about making improvised cartridges out of pipe stiffeners. Necessity is the mother of invention and is why silly firearm control laws never work. They don’t work here in the gun control Mecca of Japan or anywhere for that manner.

  4. I tried to point that out to people, that guns aren’t complicated.
    Once one gets past “form” and goes for “function only”, they don’t have to look nice, they just have to work.

    Even banning cartridges isn’t foolproof as one can either use them, or build a crude front stuffer.

    At the time I had no camera phone, but a few months ago, local FunShop got in a hand made…well, it appeared to be a 1911. It was merely a “transfer” they were doing for a local, they didn’t get it on purpose.

    But it had been hand filed from steel by Viet Cong, and was straight blowback. The barrel was believed to be from a damaged M3 Grease Gun.

    Would it fire? Maybe once…but pistols were a sign of rank for an officer, so merely waving it around and pointing it at people would be enough for the most part.

  5. From my understanding the hardest bit about making “home-made” firearms (usually requiring a small machine shop and some metalworking knowledge) was generally manufacturing a reliable magazine.

    Loyalist paramilitaries in Northern Ireland made a lot of Sten and Sterling SMG knock-offs in Belfast during the 1960’s to 1970’s but they couldn’t make reliable magazines so instead used Sterling SMG mags stolen from the Army. The NFC have several of them in there collection. Hence why in NI magazines are a controlled part subject to licensing (ie you need a FAC to possess one) unlike the rest of the UK, frankly an idea that could only be made up by a fairly silly civil servant.

  6. A table vise, hand drill with bits, reamers, files, arc welder, steel rods and plates and hammers. These are the things for a skillfull person willing to make a firearm in pistol size. I have seen untrained persons making hand made bits for button rifling diving into the drilled steel rods by hammer punches. Laws are for obedient citizens.

  7. What makes gun to shoot is ammunition; no bullet, no shot. If you are not approved to buy ammunition, you are stuck. Just proved it to myself 2 days ago when I was buying ammo for my new small bore rifle. In Canada you need to have Possession and Acquisition Licence (PAL). It is funny you need it even for .22LR, but that’s the way it works here – with politics or without.

    • In a resistance/police state /”We’re the government, do as we say or else” situation, the only source of ammunition would be said authorities. Hence, chambering your improvised weapon for whatever the powers that be use is the sensible solution.

      During World War 2 the SOE designed a prototype revolver built along the lines of the old Dolne “Apache” pinfire;

      http://media.liveauctiongroup.net/i/15911/15828357_1.jpg?v=8CFF2D4550E7A50

      Made mainly of stampings, it was chambered for 9 x 19mm because that was what was available in occupied Europe- from the Germans and Italians and etc.

      During the Vietnam War, the CIA concocted the Deer Gun, and updated iteration of the FP-45 Liberator, also in 9 x 19mm;

      http://jamesdjulia.com/wp-content/uploads/images/auctions/264/images/org/37367×1.jpg

      http://14544-presscdn-0-64.pagely.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/plan-of-the-deer-gun.jpg

      Chambering your “Liberator”, of any type, for the other fellow’s favorite cartridge makes very good sense.

      cheers

      eon

    • “What makes gun to shoot is ammunition; no bullet, no shot. If you are not approved to buy ammunition, you are stuck”
      Fire-arm need not necessarily to be metallic-cartridge, before that existed percussion fire-arms, which need percussion cap, powder and projectile.
      Also, it should be possible to made gasoline powered weapons – if gasoline-oxygenium mixture is able to “fire” piston in engine, why not projectile?

      • I am lazy to do calculation right now, based on arbitrary engine (bore, stroke, compression ratio, average revolutions). But from what I recall, since I am also motorcycle fan, typically combustion engine piston will have some 35m/sec mean piston speed (linear). It is limited more by life of parts than ‘propellant’ capacity, but still. Do you thing that provides enough energy to propel bullet?

          • That is pretty good Joule-wise. If that number what you gave is divided by 1000 you get approx. 31,800 J for 1ccm which is about 8x more than same volume of gun powder. Not bad at all.

            But that conversion….. speed of expansion of flame, that is very different, true. Gasoline needs oxidant, gun powder does not. No, not good for shooting projectiles. That is except engine-powered eccentric force based machine gun I once heard about (but never sow) allegedly used in China in war with Japan.

          • “speed of expansion of flame”
            After some thinking it might be solved with hydraulic, similar to 1940s Soviet noiseless cartridge, see 1st image from top here:
            https://raigap.dreamwidth.org/451765.html#cutid1
            as you can see there is bullet, ethanol and piston of bigger diameter than bullet. Assuming fixed volume of said ethanol, if piston diameter would be 2x bigger than bullet then every 1 mm of movement of pistol will result in 4 mm of movement of bullet, if 3x every 1 mm will give 9 mm e.t.c.

          • There were experiments with liquid propellant small arms back in the 1960s
            I think that getting consistent metering of charge, sealing of the chamber and consistent burning were all problems.

            The sort of combinations you’d be looking at would be red fuming nitric acid (add a little hydro fluoric and the red fuming nitric will simply passivate a steel container and can be stored for decades – but it will attack you even more! Working with HF is a very easy way to lose fingers or worse)

            and anhydrous hydrazine – that’s lovely stuff (not), spill it on almost anything and it will start a fire all on its own. The fumes will also give you hallucinations before you suffer full seizures and die

            They’re all easy enough to make, not that you’d want to.

            They’re a self starting rocket fuel combination, the sort of combination that could be used for the little thrusters for adjusting the orientation of satellites, as well as for larger motors and potentially for liquid gun propellant.

            “Simply” squirt metered doses into the chamber and they burn as soon as they touch

            The simple was never simple, metering, injection, consistent burning and sealing are all difficult and problematic.

            Fortunately when uncle Sam was spending tax victims hard earned looking at projects like that, itwas a few hundred thousand dollars less for “him” to spend on bombing peasant farmers and spraying rainforest.

            For large bore low pressure stuff, air and gas mixtures work for short ranges. There are vids on YouTube of potato guns sending potatoes a few hundred metres using a squirt of hair spray as a fuel and a piezo electric gas lighter for ignition.

          • There was many attempts to make weapon with gas or liquid propelant. Most of relatively successful projects i aware of was made and used in years of WWI. All weapon of this kind was used to throw grenades, not bullets.
            For example gasoline engine powered rapid-fire grenade launcher made by Goldschmit in France.
            s41.radikal.ru/i091/1707/af/470f70a70dee.jpg

        • It could, you would obviously have to step it to produce the required velocity, But I should think a V8 of 300hp at least as powerful as a pistol.

  8. Who needs firearms? As the little devils at the Boston Marathon showed, firearms are not the most efficient method of getting your point across…..

    As far as that goes, witness all the appearances of The Truck of Peace in the last few years.

  9. Thank you for showing Luty’s guns to us!

    Several people have said that they were contacted by the British authoritahs, at around the time of Philip Luty’s conviction, and asked about the practicalities of licensing home work shops…

    This missed the point that the guns could be made with a hacksaw, vice and hand drill, they didn’t require a lathe or milling machine. Mitral’s home shop, by contrast, contained a very nice Deckel milling machine.

    It also pointed to a “there was an old lady who swallowed a fly… … perhaps she’ll die” tendency for gun control laws to produce unintended consequences, which tempted authoritahs to introduce further restrictions, which in their turn would produce more unintended consequences, and more temptations to continue with an ever increasing cascade of restrictions and unintended consequences.

    “I knew an old lady who swallowed a horse. She’s dead, of course”.

    Estimates for the number of in registered guns in circulation in countries are notoriously difficult to make, and are of highly dubious accuracy.

    The small arms project estimates for Britain, and several academic estimates based on actuarial techniques for estimating population size from the numbers of guns surrendered to police or captured,. All give numbers of illegal guns that far exceed the number of legally held guns

    By definition, those guns are in the hands of “criminals”, whether in the weak sense of people who have unlicensed guns, or in the stronger sense of people who do nasty things to other people, or other people’s property.

    In the case of gangs defending turf, of drugs consignments, we can safely assume that they will get guns and ammunition regardless of restrictions (drug consignments are known to be up to several tons in weight andcontraband cigarettes appear by the shipping container full they’re getting through, it follows that guns can too.

    So, if the real baddies can get guns anyway, and unregistered guns are more numerous than registered ones – why all of the security theatre with the control over licenced guns?

  10. As you noted in the video, Philip Luty was outspoken,

    following five years of incarceration in a high security prison, alongside dangerous hardened criminals, he doesn’t appear to have been cowed.

    He had kept publishing gun designs and ways to improvise ammunition.

    What followed was an example of criminality by individuals employed by the British state

    One of Luty’s books was said to have been found in the possession of some “terrorists”. I don’t know the details, of how real those terrorists were, for example were they simply losers who were being dragged into a sting operation? Or dreamers who were never going to achieve anything?

    Philip Luty was suffering from the cancer that later killed him

    On the basis of his book being found, he was “disappeared” for three months, without his friends or family being informed of what had happened to him.

    While Tony B Liar’s British equivalent of the “Patriot act” technically allowed the use of “disappearing” for “terrorists”

    The British state is signatory to a UN convention, condemning “disappearing” people as a crime against humanity.

    Luty’s email contacts and people who had bought his books from his website also received visits/raids from their local anti terrorism police.

    It is said that one of the strategies for opponents to a regime, is to induce the regime to let it’s mask of niceness slip, and the crude criminal violence underneath to show through for all to see.

    I don’t think that that had been Luty’s intention, but it clearly happened.

    The British state is signatory to a convention that describes such an action as a “crime against humanity”.

    I still haven’t heard of anyone appearing in the Haag for that act.

    • Very good insight Keith, and thank for putting it forth.
      If you think about it, Luty was just a small fish. How about real renegades, how are they treated? And you are right, state works at several levels of repression, from mild to atrocious. We only know what we can read…..

  11. If you study the penal codes of gun control legislation of nations going back over a hundred years one discovers that the nations with the strictest gun controls also have the worst human rights records. International controls such as the ITAR regulations have been compromised by technology. Most countries now can fairly easily set up their own firearm production facilities with the use of CNC machines. Many of the Western countries such as Britain, Australia, Canada have introduced anti-gun legislation where one size fits all. A consequence has been that cottage industry manufacturers producing illegal firearms have been created. These are fuelled by the profits of drug smugglers and the biker gangs which have now become international players in crime syndicates of all sorts. The types of weapons being used by crime syndicates have in general been banned for decades and the tightening of already strict firearms laws have done nothing to prevent the proliferation of illegal weapons. Furthermore, governments around the world pick winners and losers depending on the ideology they wish to support and supply weapons which inevitably end up in the wrong hands as political agendas and conflicts ebb to and fro. Since the end of WWII, although there has been an increase in the proliferation of weapons, especially from state sponsors, the number of firearm related deaths are actually declining. If the total of vehicle deaths, for example, are added world wide, vehicle deaths and injuries outnumber firearm deaths comparisons by a factor of almost three and this figure is steadily increasing as more vehicles become available in India, China, South America and Africa. Furthermore, a comparison of the amount of firepower that the State had at its disposal before the outbreak of the First World War when compared to civilian firepower, the State firepower has increased exponentially in spite of all the added restrictions placed on civilian weapon ownership.

  12. THANK YOU IAN!!! I have always wanted to see the original Luty Sub-machine Gun.

    I have the book, it is available on Amazon if anyone is interested. It is actually a very interesting read, and Mr. Luty was very innovative in his use of materials. An excellent book to own, just in case.

    Gun control has never, is not, and will never be about safety or security. Gun control is about one thing, and that is control. Every genocide in human history was preceded by a disarming of the people. Do not be lead to your own slaughter.

  13. Ian’s account of the motivations for the guns is slightly different to the version which I heard.

    I’m not saying that the version that I got is “THE RIGHT ONE”, at best, it’s an account, a post hoc rationalisation. I never got to communicate with Philip Luty, so I never got to ask him about the ins and outs of his motivation – I wish I’d made the effort to get in touch and meet him for a pint or a walk in the dales. Same with Emilio Ghisoni too…

    Philip Luty’s activism dates back to the aftermath of a mass shooting in a Scottish elementary school.

    Both the moribund John Major conservative regime, and the Tony B Liar neocon labour regime that replaced the Tory’s faces on the TV news
    Were all for banning legally held pistols. (In practice, a handful of veterinary surgeons, game keepers and cattle and deer farmers still have licenced pistols for humane dispatching of big animals that aren’t safe to approach, and where there’s not necessarily a safe shot with a rifle, there’s a whole different can of worms there).

    Aside from the point scoring of “right to keep” Vs the anti’s “right of five and six year old children not to be murdered” or “our tradition” Vs “our children’s lives”

    There is, as Ian says, the “practicality” argument of “you might be able to demand the ‘surrender’ of licensed guns by threatening the owners, but you can’t ban the knowledge of how to make guns” (try shoving the cat sh!t back into the cat!)

    The usual reply to that is that guns are difficult to make, that they require special skills, special high strength steels, lots of specialised machine tools and fixtures, special heat treatment

    And the illustrations to support that assertion are easily found, for example Colvin and Viall’s “united state Rifles and Machine guns” which illustrates all of the machining and guaging operations on the m1903 rifle (you can download free from archive.org), all of the marketing photos of craftsmen gun makers smoking and scraping the barrel attachment of double barrel shotguns, or rifle smiths bedding a premium quality Mauser.

    Even ?Mètral’s book of building your own SMG shows a very nice Deckel tool makers milling machine (far nicer and far more expensive than a Bridgeport!) And the design contains complex machined parts.

    So, someone like Philip Luty, who grew up on a small farm, and who was highly gifted at mechanical improvisation, was arguing against people who believed that they “knew” that guns were difficult to make, and almost impossible for ordinary people to make.

    And it was on the basis of illustrating and supporting his argument that Luty came up with the first gun and wrote it up for publication.

    One of the suggestions that was doing the rounds, was that he’d asked someone who was a good photographer to take the photos for the book, and that the photographer had “done the right thing” and reported him to the police.

    Continued

    • Photographer story does not makes sense, as the authorities just needed to look at the book cover to know the author,that did not hide his name with pseudonym.
      Why he did not is also a good question.

      • I’m not sure what the timing of publication of the book was,

        If the book finally went to press after Philip Luty’s conviction, then there was little harm in putting his real name on the work.

        The word about the photographer came from a fairly dependable source. In a world where it is claimed that no one individual is separated by more than seven degrees (a chain of at most seven people who know each other) from any other, my source was very close to a person who lived a part in the story.

        Under British Law, no one is supposed to “profit from a crime” so I suspect that having the satisfaction of his name on the cover of the book was the only benefit that the author received from his interaction with Paladin Press.

        It’s interesting that back at the same time as Philip Luty was becoming a political activist, there was uproar in the British tabloid media, over Gita Sereny (Ludwig von Mises’ stepdaughter!) sharing the proceeds of a biography of “Mary Bell”, with “Mary” herself.

        Mary is out of prison on licence from a life sentence, having been convicted of the murder of two children when she was ten years old.

        In the case of the Paladin Press book, I don’t know if the British state bureautwats went after Paladin for royalties.

        • Maybe the photographer (if thats the true fact) didn’t wanted to be accused and connected to him as an accomplice, so he reported. But the story is open and needs a lot of clarification.

          Hopefully the crime and conviction was posession of the gun,and not publishing the book, since no law exists on that basis,
          so he certainly got some money from the book sales.
          But note that if it’s not in the Harry Potter range of sales numbers, its probably a modest sum.

          • I think that a large part of the hash punishment was the unofficial crime of disrespectfully causing bureautwats to experience feelings of embarrassment.

            Especially several years later when the authoritahs went after Luty’s extended family and his contacts, and Luty was disappeared for three months in a breech of UN human rights conventions, for “aiding and abetting” and later still, was banned from having access to any computer with access to the internet.

            The aiding and abetting, consisted of people being found with a copy of his book. The argument behind the accusation “proves too much” the person who taught the people to read would have been almost equally “culpable” by following the same fallacious logic. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proving_too_much

            Not that the logic was ever tested in open court.

  14. Elaborating slightly on my “there was an old lady who swallowed a fly, I don’t know why she swallowed a fly, perhaps she’ll die” cascade of ever increasing unintended consequences and ever more drastic interventions to address them, which in turn spawn even more unintended consequences and temptations for more interventions.

    The (internationally criminal!) “Disappearing” of Philip Luty for three months, I think, reflects a desperation on the part of some individuals who occupied positions within the British state.

    In an economy (calling it a civilisation would be a gross exaggeration!) That is advanced enough to keep the authoritahs in the lifestyle to which they have become accustomed

    The materials and intellectual principles necessary to be able to make guns and ammunition, must be present.

    The only way to eliminate them is to do what Pol Pot tried to, to take the economy back to year zero by killing everyone who has any knowledge of Newtonian mechanics, school/first year college chemistry
    And to remove all metals and chemicals

    To an extent, that is being attempted

    Theresa May (she’ll be gone soon!) Sneaked a new principal into British law, via attempts to “control” legal highs and head shops (themselves the unintended consequences of drugs prohibition). Unless a substance is declared “legal” by the British state, it is now “illegal”

    It’s a move that was very much like Teddy Roosevelt’s inversion of the united state constitution, where he re interpreted it as allowing him to do anything that it did not specifically say that he should not.

    Substances such as chlorates (used to be used as a very effective and environmentally innocuous weedkiller) are now banned in Europe, on spurious “health” grounds. Any decent chemistry text book for 14 year olds from the mid nineteen eighties or before, explains how chlorates are made.

    Ordering saltpeter over the internet WILL result in a police investigation. Saltpeter is still available, pre mixed with lots of salt, if you want to cure your own bacon, as botulinum bugs will happily multiply in a curing solution of salt alone. The nitrate inhibits the bug and acts as an anti oxidant (!) In the bacon.

    Ordering strong acids will likewise result in police interest.

    It’s not like these materials are difficult to make, The absolutist and mercantilist Tudor monarchs of the sixteenth century tried to enforce a royal monopoly of saltpeter extraction – it isn’t rocket science

    Likewise, regardless of restrictions, sulphuric acid is available from car batteries, and as the 14 year olds chemistry text book tells us sulphuric acid will displace all other acids from their salts (which isn’t always true, in the case of barium sulfate in some mineral veins, carbonate has somehow replaced sulphate).

    In any reasonably advanced economy, heat treated high strength steels have to be used, for fastenings like bolts, and for suspension springs shock absorbers and drive shafts and connecting rods in vehicles

    Tool steels also have to be available, even in hacksaw blades drill bits and hand files.

    What of the knowledge?

    Education is considerably dumbed down since the 1980s, especially in the state sector schools and state crony examination boards (in response, some private schools have introduced their own certification systems ”We have developed The Ampleforth Certificate of English Literature as an alternative to the GCSE English Literature, giving our students a wider and richer experience of literature” https://www.ampleforth.org.uk/college-welcome/academics/departments/english-theatre-studies/english-syllabus )

    But the knowledge is still required for college level education, and for work in many industries,

    The old text books are also still out there

    The owner of a second hand book shop in Harrogate told me about twenty years ago, that he had some old gun books, but he’d received a visit from the police and with an ominous “you don’t really want these, do you sir” that was an assertion rather than a question, the policemen had stolen them.

    Theresa May (did I say that IMO, she’ll be gone soon?) Is fond of making the claim that her bureacracy is tackling “extremist ® content” on the interwebz

    In other words, “The book burning is proceeding nicely”

    Year zero, here we come (did I mention that she’ll be gone soon?)

    ________________
    ® You can bet that their definition of “extremist” is far wider than any normal person would ever have imagined

  15. European style gun control does not seem to be particularly effective. Even in a fairly firearms-restrictive nation like France, the number of illegal guns in circulation is large. GunPolicy.org states – “It is estimated that 10 million weapons may be in circulation, of which only 4 million are legally owned (official figure).” It goes on too say, “Unlawfully held guns cannot be counted, but in France there are estimated to be –
    2016: 7,237,000
    2015: 6,000,000.”
    Most of these guns were smuggled into France from Eastern Europe or the Middle East. Once they get into Europe, there are few if any controls to stop them from crossing from one European Union country to another.
    If the figures cited are even close to accurate, then the illegal gun traffic in France has grown by over 1 million guns in only one year. If we assume that the majority of guns are distributed one gun per one adult person, then over 7 million Frenchmen (out of a total of 53 to 54 million adults (67 million total population)) are willing to risk prison terms because in order to have firearms; and well over 10% of Frenchmen hold illegal guns! Who needs a clandestine workshop?

    • The economics of the choice are interesting.

      It’s only very occasionally that I watch any TV, let alone watch TV news, so I’m not up to date with the police putting seized and surrendered guns on show.

      So far, there don’t seem to be many home rolled, but then, the estimated stocks of unlicensed guns are in millions, so, even if there is a thriving cottage industry going on, it would take a while for numbers of home built guns to become a significant proportion of the authoritah’s haul.

      Large scale factory production is going to produce better quality at far lower cost (costs are what you give up; time, alternative uses that you could have put that time and those resources to, like meals out and evenings on the sofa with the girlfriend, binge watching the box set of sex and the city…).

      So, when prohibition limits supply, and prices of unlicensed guns rise, guns get drawn in from all sorts of sources.

      It becomes worth while for a friend of a friend to sell his long dead grandfather’s suveneer luger from the war, that has sentimental value to him (but is a pain to keep hidden and secret from the girlfriend and her kids -she’d likely gossip, and if he dumps her, she’ll probably snitch).

      If the price gets high enough to exceed the returns from drug smuggling, the boys and girls who smuggle drugs might bring some extra factory made guns in, over and above what they need for themselves to protect their business.

      And guns will go missing from police and military, as some of their personnel do some wheeling and dealing for extra Donuts and the like.

      For some people who feel the need for a gun, making their own might be the chosen method, whether for the satisfaction of doing it, to give the finger to the prohibitionist state, or because they don’t have reliable black market contacts.

  16. Ian, what about the other smg, the one on transparent plastic stand with silencer?

    You said nothing about it and its history, was it also really made by Luty?

    Because it looks more like it was made by someone else based on his books, but slightly “upgraded”.
    Similar designs appeared in Australia few years ago that hold general looks but are sporterized and even upgraded slightly with grips, scopes, rails, etc.

    On the other hand, Brasil is the mecca of homemade guns confiscated on daily basis from “criminals” (is it a criminal for mere posession, or from usage?), and based on existing accounts, all of them hold no Luty books reference whatsoever.

    As for the design, along with the slight genious in simplicity,idea and realisation, it also shows a slight gunsmithing and gun design inexperience, as some parts of construction are unnecessary “hardware storeized” and complicated, for example the usage of screws for the closing plate that holds mainspring, meaning that you cannot disassemble it without tools (allen key) for basic maintenance.
    But visually gun looks very good, he incidentally or not, striked a very outwardly appealing looking design, despite the crudeness in construction, and I suppose many book buyers when seeing its cover, were not scared away, rather opposite.

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