“Our culture has become obsessed of late with the virtues of the locally sourced: local vegetables, local meats, local soaps. We’ve heard much about the moral worth of do-it-yourselfism and the soul-enhancing virtues of shop class. 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. If the growing black market in homemade firearms evokes a bygone era of small-scale experiment and chance invention, it presages a frightening future of proliferation and lethality that medieval gunsmiths could hardly have imagined.” – Bruce Holsinger in The Medieval roots of our DIY gun culture [at slate.com]