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Terrorists are at their most terroristy when they bring deadly weapons to places one doesn't generally expect to encounter deadly weapons, like a school, or the airport. So in Die Hard II, when John McClane encounters bad dudes who somehow sneaked handguns past airport security, we know that shit has now officially gone from "mostly not that real" to "real."

We'll quote you the pertinent dialogue: "That punk pulled a Glock 7 on me, you know what that is? It's a porcelain gun made in Germany. It doesn't show up on your airport metal detectors and probably costs more than what you make in a month."



"I'm going to need the names and addresses of every sizable kiln in the tri-state area."

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According to our research, the problem isn't that the German porcelain gun is expensive; it's that it's imaginary. First off, there isn't a Glock 7, but more importantly, there's no such thing as an entirely ceramic handgun. It's easy to make the frame or magazine of a gun out of some non-metal polymer, but things like the barrel and the pins are under way too much heat and pressure to be made of anything but good old-fashioned metal.

"Sure" you say, "maybe that gun isn't available to civilians, but surely rich people or the government could build one." That's what we thought, Reader McStrawman, until we read the story of David Byron. He kicked off all this madness about undetectable guns when he was issued a patent for one in 1987. Congress even tried to ban this as-of-yet unbuilt gun. But that didn't stop Byron from hooking up with investors and starting a company focused on making this "plastic gun" a reality.