Do 3D printers connect to the Internet, and could a firmware update be written that would cripple the manufacture of plástica guns?
Some are, some aren’t. But these devices can create arbitrary 3D objects, and there are many possibilities for guns. The printer doesn’t “know” that it’s printing a gun, so even if you disabled the ability to make a specific one, somebody would just tweak it a little and it would work again.
This genie is out of the bottle. We’re not going to be putting it back in.
Okay, not so much disable a specific design, but alter the printing process to make a printed gun ineffective.
It’s easy to make sure that 3d printed plastic guns will be ineffective. The way this works is that they’re made out of plastic, and plastic is a lousy material to make guns out of. Heck, even sintered metal, which some 3d printers use, is still a lousy material to make guns out of. If you want to make a gun at home, you wouldn’t use a 3d printer; you’d use a computerized machine shop (those have been around for decades).
This has actually been in the news of late and the viability sounds sincere. I suppose I could Google a story but so could you. Oh, look here.
If people are going to be paranoid about this, it’s not going to be about how effective the guns are–it’s going to be about how they don’t show up on a metal detector.
Bullets, now. They’re going to be a problem.
There was a thread about the whole 3D printed guns thing recently. As is often the case, the fears are greatly exaggerated. Making a real gun out of metal is fairly trivial for anyone with a hobbyist level machine shop. CNC milling machines like these are similar in cost to a good 3D printer, and yet society hasn’t yet fallen apart from people making their own guns.
Main concern seems to be when the cost of 3D printing drops any jamoke could make a gun even without basic metalworking knowledge. But I’ve never tried to make a gun, milled or plastic, so I won’t speak for that.
The OP seems to be relating something like protections in photocopiers to prevent copying US currency to adding something similar to 3D printers. The problem being that I’d guess there’s any number of ways you can tweak a printed gun versus needing to create a passable and accurate facsimile of a dollar bill.
The problem with this is that many of the low-end 3D printers are built by hobbyist builders using open-source plans. There’s no way to slip that kind of filtering software into them without the 3D printer community knowing and removing the filter. Furthermore, the actual controllers in the 3D printers are very simple, and don’t actually have the ability to tell if the object they’re creating is a gun or a flower vase.
The majority of the guns that are going to be printed out are going to be made of cake and served to NRA members (not that this is wrong).
As noted above it’s not feasible to make a real gun out of 3D printing yet. The technology has been around in high end prototype shops for awhile now and you can make some very realistic looking devices with them, but the materials are weak and just handing them from one person to another can damage them over time.
I suppose if a one was available in a prison workshop they could make a convincing likeness and bluff their way out like Dillinger (although his was smuggled) But then again they could always just crave one out of wood if they wanted to (old school style).
Guess again: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JK55GSbSWQ0
Yeah, I was thinking of an adjustment to the density of the printing, interruptions in the printing, something along those lines.
I don’t think as much they’re worried people will be printing their own guns because they can’t get them anywhere else, I think the concern is these are 100% plastic (except for the firing pin) and thus can be brought into secure areas without being easily detected.
My concern is, even if these things are only good for 1 shot (basically, a 21st century Dillinger), that’s plenty enough for your typical mugger.
Or assassin.
Re. sintered metal: The parts might be shit as they came out of the printer, but could they then be annealed to improve the metal quality? An electric furnace is a pretty simple piece of equipment.
I didn’t see it in the linked article (didn’t look at the Youtube), but I seem to recall reading that the “printed” gun would survive around 8 shots until it self-destructed.
And in any case, that’ll get better really fast as 3D printers start to become mainstream. Nascent technologies like this have a very fast innovation curve.
It’s my understanding that most home 3D printers use extruded thermoplastic. That printing method puts some pretty tough limits on the structural integrity of your plastic. For one thing, it has to be extrudable.
Now, different 3D printing technologies exist, but those are a long way from home use.
At its most basic level a gun is little more than a barrel and a firing pin, and is trivially easy to make now. Some kind of tubing for a barrel, a nail and a rubber band will do. Just Google zip gun or improvised firearm. I think the real problem is that the perceived ease of printing one of these guns will cause people who wouldn’t otherwise try to build one will now try.
I foresee zero murders with printed guns, but several accidental deaths per year.
Yeah, it’s a lot easier to make a grenade than a gun. Even if you’re not trying to make a grenade.