An Appalachian gunsmith’s robot army (2009)

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/02/23/shoot

by danso • 12 years ago

43 51 12 years ago

danso• 12 years ago

FWIW, I posted this story today because of the New Yorker's announcement of their redesign and temporary disabling of their paywall. I remembering reading the abstract of this article in 2009, and then became a subscriber because I wanted to read the full version...I'm not passionately against or for paywalls, but the New Yorker is probably the only single publication that could pull me like that.

That said, I did a cursory search for the gunmaker...didn't see any big update, I saw a mention that it's in rotation with the Marines...but no contemporary mention of what sounded like an impending revolution of shotgun-wielding-robots.

SEJeff• 12 years ago

This is a remarkable story, thanks for sharing it. As a former Shadow 200 UAV/Drone pilot, I had no idea that they had this type of tech, so it came as fascinating.

dang• 12 years ago

Excellent. More, please!

We added the date.

Edit: Perhaps I should clarify. By "more, please" I mean we want substantive articles on unexpected subjects, archival and historical material welcome. Not necessarily more on this topic.

chillingeffect• 12 years ago

propels the shell out of a gun barrel

What?

his own weapon: a fully automatic shotgun called the AA-12.

"Auto Assault-12 (AA-12), originally designed and known as the Atchisson Assault Shotgun, is a shotgun developed in 1972 by Maxwell Atchisson." [0]

What?

Can someone please explain to me what's going on here? Is this just my own ignorance or are these factual errors?

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atchisson_Assault_Shotgun

ephemeralgomi• 12 years ago

The article covers that. The original design was done by Atchisson, then sold to Baber, who improved on it.

vwruetag• 12 years ago

Read further in the Wikipedia article, the first sentence in the 'History' section is

In 1987, Max Atchisson sold the rights of the AA-12 to Jerry Baber of Military Police Systems, Inc., Piney Flats, Tennessee

Quoting the New Yorker in full

[...]he started producing, from start to finish, his own weapon: a fully automatic shotgun called the AA-12.

it is obvious that he was the first to produce a mass market ready model. The article doesn't claim that he invented it.

nordsieck• 12 years ago

"In 1987, Max Atchisson sold the rights of the AA-12 to Jerry Baber of Military Police Systems, Inc., Piney Flats, Tennessee.[3] MPS in turn developed the successor simply known as Auto Assault-12, which was redesigned over a period of 18 years with 188 changes and improvements to the original blueprint, modifications included changing the AA-12 from blowback- to gas-operated with a locked breech." [0]

Looks like there was a bit of exaggeration going on, but not anything terribly out of line.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atchisson_Assault_Shotgun

jboggan• 12 years ago

I imagine the recoil would have been ungovernable in the original blowback configuration and the reciprocating mass would have been relatively huge.

aaronem5• 12 years ago

What?

Expecting someone who writes for the New Yorker to understand how firearms work is, I think, expecting rather too much.

jessaustin2• 12 years ago

Based on sibling comments, that's also too much to expect of several HN readers. (Hint: shells don't leave by the front door.) I thought the most egregious howler was this one:

...a dainty, short-haired woman in high heels casually grips the gun and fires off eight hundred balls of .20-calibre [sic] metal in four seconds...

Although this is pretty bad, it would have been worse if the "balls" were described as 20-gauge as the author intended rather than 20-caliber which is just silly.

angersock• 12 years ago

See, this is the sort of thing that I hate reading about.

Like, yes, we have drones, and yes, we have firearms, and yes, we can add one to the other--but is it really a good idea?

The potential for abuse of such systems is absurd; I cannot believe that any engineer with a shred of morality would voluntarily work on such things without at least a solid explanation of why doing so is permissible.

Mark my words: these things will mostly be used against civilians and dissidents--not standing armies.

mkr-hn3• 12 years ago

The mantra I usually hear around here in regards to tech's harms--like putting people out of work--is to make the advances and let society adapt. It seems very shortsighted.

aaronem5• 12 years ago

Well, someone's going to do it.

seanflyon3• 12 years ago

I think that technology that provides goods and services more efficiently is quite different from technology that kills people more efficiently. Think of all those hunters and gatherers who were put out of work with the advent of farming, or all those farmers who lost their jobs when we switched away from a subsistence farming economy. "Make the advances and let society adapt" has worked quite well in the past.

mschuster914• 12 years ago

Mark my words: these things will mostly be used against civilians and dissidents--not standing armies.

Which is why I (German) really hate our weapons law. War will come back to Europe, we are on the fringe of a fucking Cold War turning into a Hot War with the Russians in Ukraine. Not to mention the rising inequality in Europe - if it blows up one day, it will hit hard.

I'd like to be equipped and trained properly instead of being restricted to gas revolvers, stones and arrows. Or knives, which are useless as I'm a terrible close-range fighter.

lesingerouge• 12 years ago

I don't really understand how buying your own gun/rifle/whatever would be of any help in surviving a war. The last couple of recent wars (think Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, etc) were fought mostly with "big tech" (airplanes, bombs, tanks, etc) which is pretty deadly to low level mosquitoes like civilians and foot soldiers. And while talking about inequality, I am quite uncertain about how a gun/rifle would help you. You would shoot the guy going through your trash? Or the guy stealing your bike? I am quite skeptical that a proliferation of this kind of thing would help you much with your "problems".

terhechte• 12 years ago

I really don't understand this kind of reasoning. What do you expect will a couple of lightly trained people with guns do against a huge, well-trained army with tanks, modern weapons, jets, and combat experience. If only it will make things worse because once civillians are starting to fire at will, it will be much easier for soldiers to decide to shoot at civillians, too.

I refer you to this beautiful Onion article. http://www.theonion.com/articles/62yearold-with-gun-only-one...

I'm particularly happy with our German gun laws, and I highly doubt that war will easily come back to mainland Europe. And if Russia really decided to start a war and bomb Germany, dude, not having a gun will be the least of your problems.

Crito3• 12 years ago

At least drones tend to have cameras, and their operators cannot excuse their own actions by claiming that their lives were at risk. Drones have the potential to be more audit-able.

lotsofmangos3• 12 years ago

Baber decided that the gun was too powerful to sell outside the military. He donated one to his local county sheriff, but turned everyone else away. “I don’t want that on my conscience—something I created going out and killing people all over the damn place,” he said. “I’m not worried about what it does over in Iraq or Afghanistan. That’s fine.”

This doesn't sound as though he has really thought this through. Either that or he has a rather nasty definition of "people".

Afforess• 12 years ago

I hate to be the one to inform you 99% of Americans don't actually care about the middle east.

lotsofmangos3• 12 years ago

That seems unlikely, given that 73% identify as Christian and not that many of them think Jesus was American.

aaronem5• 12 years ago

The reading you've given that quote is rather uncharitable, if perhaps heavily implied by the article's author. It's pretty obvious that Baber means he doesn't want his weapon falling into the hands of criminals, but he has no problem selling it to the military, to be put to whatever use they might find for it.

Granted, the question remains of whether US foreign policy, inasmuch as it deploys our military, is morally or ethically acceptable to you, but that's a point on which reasonable people can differ, and Baber's opinion on that point appears to differ from yours. If, from that difference, you choose to infer that Baber doesn't consider Afghans or Iraqis "people", that is of course entirely your prerogative.

lotsofmangos3• 12 years ago

I gave two different ways to read it, you chose which one you thought I favoured.

That said, he stated he didn't want to sell it to police departments, not the public, who couldn't legally buy it anyway, so I don't see how you think it is obvious that he means criminals when it says police.

"Police departments asked for AA-12s, but Baber decided that the gun was too powerful to sell outside the military."

jessaustin2• 12 years ago

For some reason I didn't expect a mad scientist with a secluded death-robot workshop to be a nice guy. I'd love to have one of his shotguns, though.

JasonFruit• 12 years ago

Maybe the key phrase is, "all over the damn place." Perhaps he's okay with it killing people in the context of a war zone, but not whatever any single person might decide to do with it.

RadioAndrea• 12 years ago

"On an LCD display behind Baber, I could see an image of my leg, transmitted by a camera under the robot’s gun barrel. The gun then pointed at my stomach. He assured me that it was not loaded."

Pointing a firearm an anyone, even unloaded, even (especially?) robot controlled, is a terrible idea. This bothers me to no end, and it's so strange that someone who works with very powerful weapons can act like this. Perhaps he feels that he's smart enough that no mistakes will happen? Perhaps he has confidence in the robot not to fire any rounds? He's a brilliant man, very good at what he does; certainly he's spent lots of time with these things, and understands them more than I ever will.

That said: mistakes happen, don't point guns at people you don't want holes in.

carsongross2• 12 years ago

This guy obviously knows the dictum "never point a firearm at anything unless you intend to destroy it."

Apparently writers from the New Yorker fall within that set for him.

aaronem5• 12 years ago

Or maybe he just likes screwing with their heads, and as a fellow Southron well familiar with the oft-condescending ways of Yankees, I don't suppose I can blame him too strongly for that.

jpindar• 12 years ago

This was a HUGE red flag for me too.

It seems to me that the only right way to work with robotic firearms is to keep a chamber flag in them at all times except when they're on a hot range.

chrisbennet• 12 years ago

Yeah, that is a big red flag for me too. Confidence in your engineering is one thing but I think this guy's hubris might explain why he has no friends. Someone points a gun at me and I'm giving them a wide berth from then on.

jqm• 12 years ago

When the army and police forces get robotic weapons, I can only imagine criminals won't be far behind.

russell2• 12 years ago

This kind of thing bothers me. I think it makes it easier for the US, or any other government for that matter, to drop a few dozen of these into any kind of local conflict without any debate in Congress or among the public. They are cheap and expendable, no television of troops mobilizing, no flag draped coffins flying home. The operators sit in Lazy Boys at their home bases while the eastern Ukraine (pick your battlefield) is overrun with these things.

DanBC• 12 years ago

Armed robots, he believes, could offer crucial assistance in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; they could be employed on a street monitored by snipers or sent into a building harboring insurgents.

And you hope they don't capture the robot because they then have

the most deadly close-range weapon ever created.

An Appalachian gunsmith’s robot army (2009)

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