Noncombatants in the Dominion War

[Captain Seafort]

True, but banning replicator programmes for weapons would at least make them more difficult to get hold of.

[Captain Picard's Hair]

That takes us back to the point that almost anything can be turned into a weapon. What are you going to ban? Conceivably, even makeshift energy weapons (or bombs, etc) can be made from engine parts or whatnot!

[Captain Seafort]

You won't be able to prevent people from producing weapons, or using an otherwise innocuous object as a weapon. You will, however, be able to make it a lot harder for people to get their hands on phaser rifles and the like.

[Tsukiyumi]

True, but banning replicator programmes for weapons would at least make them more difficult to get hold of.

Just like banning "assault" weapons makes it a lot harder for gangbangers to get ahold of AK-47s. Now, they actually have to go talk to the guy up the street instead of going to a sporting goods store.

[Captain Seafort]

Just like banning "assault" weapons makes it a lot harder for gangbangers to get ahold of AK-47s. Now, they actually have to go talk to the guy up the street instead of going to a sporting goods store.

True, but it means they have to find the local gunrunner, convince him they're not an undercover plod, and stump up however much he's charging. Admittedly it's probably not that much more complicated than buying an AK from the local gunsmith, but every little helps.

[Tsukiyumi]

Agreed.

[Sionnach Glic]

Well, yes, you could always use improvised weapons. But by that logic, there should be no restriction on guns in the modern day, either.

[Captain Picard's Hair]

Well, yes, you could always use improvised weapons. But by that logic, there should be no restriction on guns in the modern day, either.

Oh, I'm certainly not saying this, and yourself, Seafort, and Tsuki certainly have a point. However, in the event of an armed uprising as opposed to a peaceful civil environment/"minor" street crime, anything that kills the oppressor gets it done and the imperative to create weapons of any kind is far greater. Plus, the ease of replicating something is a bit different than going through the hassles to get an AK-47, whether legally or not.

[Tsukiyumi]

My analogy was a bit flawed, but you'd still have to go black-market or illegally hack the Federation database to get the patterns for any real weapons. Which would probably be at least as difficult as acquiring them today (except in third-world countries ).

Well, yes, you could always use improvised weapons. But by that logic, there should be no restriction on guns in the modern day, either.

No one's suggesting unlimited access to any weapon. Even I don't see the need to own an anti-tank rocket launcher.

However, you can still get high-quality, illegal weapons in most major cities, provided you can make contacts. Same thing in the 'Trek universe, except you're only smuggling data (replicator patterns), not the physical weapons themselves. The best restriction would be to create the replicator in a way that it physically couldn't construct items beyond a certain level of complexity. Like, it could create a PADD, but not components for a torpedo guidance system.

[Graham Kennedy]

Restricting access to replicators is going to be an interesting proposition. The TNG TM claims that the units we see people use are just part of a system that is networked through the ship, fed by big matter tanks. I have no idea offhand if the dialogue in the show supports that idea, but if true, and if all replicators were like that, controlling them from some central point might be reasonably doable.

But. We've seen that replicator systems can be small and self contained - a household replicator about the size of a cabinet was sufficient to supply a home for years, according to Picard in The Survivors. And we've seen them in shuttles and places like that. Given that, I don't find it at all hard to believe that a heavily populated world might have millions of such replicators on it. Tracking them down and confiscating them would be a pretty hopeless task. Unless you could do something with sensors to detect people using replicators and monitor very large areas with it.

Overall I don't think there is one solid answer here. It would be a cat and mouse thing. The Dominion would certainly do what it could to prevent replication of weapons, the population would do what they could to circumvent it. And it would be a case of some days you get the bear, and some days the bear gets you.

[Captain Picard's Hair]

The best restriction would be to create the replicator in a way that it physically couldn't construct items beyond a certain level of complexity. Like, it could create a PADD, but not components for a torpedo guidance system.

An interesting idea, certainly - but then my response in that situation would surely be to try to think up very simple things to replicate that can be turned into weapons. Ideally, simple things that are a regular part of life - like the farm implements discussed earlier.

Anyway, what I was on to but didn't quite express was that the ease in replicating a regular weapon with a replicator (Provided you have the pattern, as you've pointed out) translates equally well to the ease of replicating things which can be jury-rigged into weapons compared with past means of scraping things together.

In any case, Graham has it right - and as they say, necessity is the mother of invention.