3D Printing and Plastic Guns

Factual Questions
41

To me it sounds like he made a toy gun and put a real bullet in it.

Is the big deal that it looks like a gun or because it’s something that a person with absolutely no skill would be able to do?

Take the iPhone Siri. It sounds like a woman, but it’s stuck in a sleek little box so it’s little more then another gee whiz gadget. But you installed it in lifelike sex doll, now that’s a story.

I wouldn’t know how to go about it, but I imagine someone with knowledge of gunsmithing could fashion something better then that gun from items found in a regular hardware store, even if it didn’t look quite so gun like.

42

This is a huge deal right now, I see so many specials on the news covering it and how the government needs to adjust laws to regulate what you can print. I think they will be like photoshop and counterfeiting. Every try to scan a dollar bill and open it in photoshop? It wont open and warns you, because it can recognize what you are opening as currency.

Same will happen to 3d rendering software

43

That might be true in the US, but the majority of people in the world live in countries where few, if any, adults can legally own firearms. And illegal guns are very hard to get hold of.

44

But then so are bullets and if you can make your own bullets the gun should be no trouble.

45

OK, but let’s do one point at a time. The point being made was that legal guns are easy enough to obtain, so why bother to print one? I’m just pointing out that the premise is not true everywhere. Indeed, not true for most places.

For this new point, I don’t know much about the required tolerances of a bullet slug, or casing, or how easy it is to make gunpowder. But I do know that until recently on the Dope many were saying a plastic gun that fired rounds was impossible (indeed some who hadn’t got the memo were still saying this).

Given how quickly that situation has changed, my suspicion is that bullets won’t be a fundamental barrier. Bear in mind, there is no requirement to print standard bullet casings, or indeed print anything. The bullets can be whatever just about works, and is reasonable for a non-expert to put together (and obviously it doesn’t matter if they are wholly unprinted). The gun can be designed to fit the bullets.

46

That’s Photoshop, not all graphics software, and it’s a lot easier to detect someone working with the image of a dollar bill than it is to detect that gun parts are being built. None of the parts need to have any distinquishable features.

47

They’re probably easier (and cheaper) than printing them out, at least for now. You’d be amazed what you can get in supposedly gun-free nation-states (or at least, places where they’re heavily regulated and ca only be stored in shooting clubs or as the odd collector’s item, etc.)

Those who did were foolish, but note that this gun is not free of metal; it needs something to spark primer and fire the bullet. it’s also a bulky and of poor quality, and that’s not going to change in the foreseeable future.

Likewise, you can perhaps make (low penatrating and probably not lethal) slugs from plastic, but bullets are unlikely. The reason isn’t the bullet itself, which is mostly just a bit of metal. It’s the cartidge: the element that actually holds the powder. And that you can’t just print. It has to be made to specific tolerances, can’t be too thick, and must hold good-quality powder. This may or may not be of much comfort to you, as quality rounds aren’t hard to make regardless. It would take a little practice, but you can make everything at home, with some not-too-expensive equipment.

But before you panic, please note that you can do this already. 3D printing does not make it easier, and not any cheaper. If you are concerned that people will suddenly have access to guns, then relax, because the kind of guns you can print from plastic are really, really bad ones. If someone wants a firearm for nefarious villainy, I sincerely hope they go plastic.

48

What would software pricing look like as all the current plastic-gadget manufacturers at Walmart (postulated upthread) saw their pre-designed product base become obsolete (as suggested) by do it yourselfers?

49

I live in the UK. I wouldn’t have the first clue how to acquire a gun.
And, even if I knew the sorts of people with access to guns, I wouldn’t go near them, because these would be serious criminals. They would be people willing to risk serious jail time so why on earth would I trust them?

Of course…I don’t know where to begin printing a weapon either. The blueprints for a gun have not been released yet. And I wouldn’t know which printer it makes sense to buy – perhaps before those blueprints a released a better gun design will be released for another printer. The whole thing is in the early stages.

But this could all change in a matter of months. There might be a clear consumer-friendly market leading 3D printer, weapon design on bitTorrent, just plug it in and start printing a weapon before you’ve even tidied away the box the printer came in.

That’s as I suspected. Bullets may never be printable but I didn’t think it would be hard to fashion something that would function as a bullet, given that the gun design can be based around whatever rudimentary bullets can be made.

I am not panicking. But this absolutely will make it much easier for me, and millions like me, to obtain a gun if we desire. Yes, a crap gun, but a gun nonetheless.

50

Mijin, are you a criminal? I’m guessing not. (Although that question for all would make for an interesting poll in another forum.)

51

Is that actually the case? I thought it was legal to own handguns in most of Europe.

52

IMHO, home fabrication (3D printing plus CNC machining plus automated controls) is at the ‘determined home hobbyist building kits’ stage, like computers were in the mid-1970’s. It is before the equivalent of the Apple II, let alone the equivalent of the widespread public Internet.

Current fabricators and printers are still mostly in the expensive kit stage. We even have the hobbyist magazines springing up, like Make magazine.

I suspect the Maker equivalent of the rise of the Internet will be the rise of widespread services for semi-automatedly requesting and delivering raw materials, services which could be treated as always-on utilities. This might be as simple as an automated request to a supplier, plus FedEx; a big part of it will probably be standardizing the raw materials.

This would parallel the shift from dialup to always-on Internet connections, which made a huge difference in the way we used the Internet, and IMHO laid the foundation for social media.

Since all this is already riding on the existing computer/communications revolution, it may happen faster. The Internet became widely available to the public around 1993-4, so that puts it maybe 15 years after the kit-based era of the computer revolution. I would not be surprised to see the beginning of widespread maker-supply services resembling utilities in about ten years.

Once this happens, the pressure will be on for cheap commodity plasticware manufacturers. Events may depend on, say, interactions between shipping costs from current plasticware manufacturers versus shipping costs for maker supplies, compared to incremental production costs; if long-distance transport costs rise, local production suddenly looks more attractive. Especially if suppliers are local.

The software would vanish, as far as the users were concerned. It would be built into the printer. Many people would just download and print a plan.

Software would remain important for mechanical designers though, and there would be many more designers than today. I can imagine more constrained, sculptural design software, more-consumer-oriented equivalents to AutoCAD and Pro/E and whatever makers are doing their mechanical design on these days.

53

Do they have chunks of metal and drill bits in these countries? Because almost any piece of metal with a hole drilled in it would make a better gun than that printed gun.
I think people are giving way to much credit to the quality or usefulness of a printed plastic gun. The only thing that is complicated about that gun is the trigger mechanism, which can be accomplished with a rubber band and a nail. If you ignore the trigger mech, it is nothing more than a piece of plastic with a hole drilled in it.

54

I was confident saying most adults worldwide because for a start gun ownership is heavily controlled in both China and India.

In Europe I don’t think you can really group the countries into what “most” do. The law varies a lot country to country and is quite nuanced in most cases.

I would say though that there are different levels to which handguns can be legal. Even here in the UK, it cannot be said that handguns are 100% illegal, as there are certain exceptions. However, it’s only after looking at these exceptions you appreciate that handguns are de facto prohibited.

55

There would be an easy way to discourage the home fabrication of plastic guns.

Set up sites that look like they give the open source software necessary to make a plastic gun. Then slip in the software a very subtle, almost invisible design flaw that will make the gun unusable, or even mildly dangerous to use. For instance, it should not explode in the illegal users’s hand, but it should go “poof” after an undeterminded amount of shots and melt hot plastic over the shooters hand, or something.

Then send out the rumour that there are websites out there for gun printing manufacture that have this design flaw built in, *and that there is absolutely no way anyone can distinguish those flawed sites from real open source sites. * For instance, the flawed sites should also have warnings against the flawed design sites and insist that they offer the real deal. The result should be that sensible people and crooks alike, anyone who isn’t a expert gun smith, will mistrust home printed guns.

If that does not discourage home printing of guns, I don’t know what will.

56

I’m not worried about someone printing a crappy single shot plastic gun and doing something nefarious with it. What is more worrying is someone (possibly in a secure area) downloading a scan of a real .45 from the internet and printing what appears to be a real gun.

57

If there are still billions of people who don’t live in such countries, then your point becomes pretty meaningless. You made it sound as if the US was nearly alone in allowing its citizens to own firearms.

58

Here’s the point some here are missing: It doesn’t matter if you think it is easy to make a basic gun. It doesn’t matter if it is easy to make a basic gun.

The point is simply that most people don’t know how to make a gun. Or set up a functional machine shop. And they are unwilling to invest the time it would take to even investigate whether it is feasible.

So, yeah I think a hypothetical where you buy a device at wal-mart, grab a file on P2P and press “go”…is radically different.

59

Why would you do that when you could go out to your local gunshop and just buy one?

60

You may have inferred that, but I implied no such thing.
I said “the majority of people in the world live in countries where few, if any, adults can legally own firearms”. Do you dispute that?