Slate's Pearl Clutching on Homemade guns.

Oh Slate.

I'll give them points for actually doing some historical research and realizing that the home fabrication of firearms isn't exactly new.

But then they get stupid.   See they point out how current law is that  non-FFL's (that is normal people) can make their own guns but are bared from transferring them to anyone else.

Sagely they claim this "is hardly a disincentive to those already trading in the black market."   while suggesting that a totally banning the home mfg of guns will.

Slate is aware that it's illegal for people to make meth right?  How's that going?
Or going digital... those bans on pirating movies and music are sure going well aren't they?

It gets sillier....

 In 2013 a man named John Zawahri killed five people in Santa Monica using an assault rifle assembled from parts legally purchased online.  In October in Kawasaki, Japan, Yoshimoto Imura became the first person prosecuted for making plastic guns on 3-D printers. And just this year, four men in Southern California were arrested for allegedly marketing dozens of homemade AR-15-style rifles on the black market.

Such cases are clearly just the beginning and threaten to sink reasonable efforts at regulating the traffic in “ghost guns,” as these weapons have been called. 

Wait what?   So...  people illegally making guns... threatens to sink plans to ban people making guns.

Huh?

Yeah, the rest of the article is just as logical.

Federal and state authorities are groping for ways to halt this alarming trend. Last year California Democratic Rep. Mike Honda introduced the Homemade Firearms Accountability Act, which would subject homemade guns to many of the same regulations as firearms sold commercially—though the bill stands virtually no chance of passage in a Republican Congress heavily beholden to the NRA and the gun lobby. Already in 2013 the Department of Homeland Security had issued an intelligence bulletin warning that halting or even slowing the distribution of the new homegrown guns “may be impossible.”

Oh no!  The evil NRA is blocking a bill that...  DHS thinks will be utterly impossible to enforce.  And the authorities are panicing over losing control.

So... Cody Wilson's right then?

And as for a bonus it ends with this bit of pearl-clutching:

 "But there’s a darker side to locophilia and the DIY movement, a place where the self-reliance of the woodshop putterer meets the libertarian zeal of the garage gunsmith."

Help!  If the citizens start to realize they can make whatever they want... why they might start thinking they can say whatever they want or maybe do what they want!

Chaos!