Sorry, you seemed angry when you claimed I must be afraid of guns. I also took your complete inability to stay on topic and simply demand time after time that everyone should have a machine gun if they want one as someone who wasn’t rational about the topic.
Putting a lot of lead downrange seems like an obvious advantage. I tell you what, go to the Pentagon and tell them they’re stupid for having automatic weapons.
True, for some values of unlikely. 
As I posted above, they are currently working with ceramics, and good on them. But as I also mentioned the hot isostatic pressing (which increases the size of the home unit some) makes the metals a lot stronger than sintering alone. I certainly won’t be surprised if we have amazing metal quality a decade or two down the line.
Not at all, I’m all about the debate. I’m just saying that the polymer is unnecessary to the situation. I’d in fact like there to be awesome polymers.
You missed the bit where military personnel are trained not to use the burst/full auto options except under specific circumstances? (Like when they’re defending a well stocked and fortified base being overrun.)
Did you stop to think about how those specific circumstances apply to criminals?
Why do criminals use fully automatic guns in drive by shootings? (I know there aren’t really that many drive by shootings by the way).
Yes. A criminal is in his well fortified base of operations, with hundreds of thousands of rounds of ammo and a supply chain that’s well organized enough to get him and his cohorts who are mounting an overlapping defensive screen sufficient ammunition to reload and resupply.
Oh wait…
First, lets see a cite saying most criminals use fully automatic guns in drive by shootings. I don’t think they do. My contention is it is more likely that most use semiautos and spray and pray.
But even accepting your Hollywood version of reality, for intimidation factor, not efficacy.
Do criminals really typically use fully automatic guns in drive-by shootings?
Yes, the military uses fully automatic weapons. But infantrymen almost never carry submachine guns, they carry rifles, and are trained to use single fire almost all the time.
Why is this? Because spraying a full magazine of rounds downrange is usually less effective than firing one aimed round.
Yes, troops also use machine guns. But these are used as support weapons. If machine guns were so effective, then why aren’t all troops equipped with machine guns?
I wasn’t the materials guy, but I worked 5 years for a leader in the field. Yup, Ti and tool steel were our best stuff. Surface finish was poor. Worse than a mediocre casting, much worse than a good casting…maybe not as bad as a really poor casting. Warpage and internal stresses are huge…but by all means buy a couple of the machines and see for yourself. (I own a small amount of stock)
This. Ammo gets expensive, pretty fast in full auto
That cite shows no such thing - it’s a materials evaluation of conventionally-produced ceramics. No rapid fabrication techniques were evaluated at all. To whit:
Are you alleging that HIP is a process that could scale to the desktop, and the amateur home user? Really? With thousands of degrees and thousands of atmospheres of pressure?
:smack:I guess you are, at that:
I was. I was imagining a futuristic method that didn’t require as high pressures or heat.
Although they do currently have something the size of a cabinet that can do HIP on a small scale, at current pressures and heat requirements.
3D printing wouldn’t be able to print live bullets, just empty shells.
My uncle does this kind of fabrication work, actually (among others–he’s a prototype machinist, and his foundry essentially produces exactly what we’re talking about here–high-precision prototyped parts with various processes). I’m going to lay it out for you as briefly as I can.
Sintering (the process you’re discussing, with powdered metals being laser fused) inherently and unavoidably produces parts that are weaker both in the aggregate and in different ways than casting molten metal. Blake’s objection is essentially that a machine that can sinter with sufficient accuracy to produce materials of the same strength and weight as firearm components can also produce things that are valuable enough and precise enough such that there will be a net reduction in criminal motive.
Incidentally, any process that can do this with metal to any degree of precision could be easily adapted to produce circuit boards, IMHO–ceramics can be sintered, and you’d just need to pause the process a few times to alternate sintering a ceramic dielectric layer and a copper one. I’m not 100% sure a suitable ceramic for this exists yet, but meh, we’re talking about the future. =) I’m not sure if it could produce actual ICs, granted.
Similarly, the objections of others are also pretty reasonable–you can’t fabricate bullets with this, and hand-loading them (after using this process to make the casings) is non-trivial.
Ultimately, I don’t think much would change. We’d continue to make possession of such weapons illegal. Perhaps a few more people would acquire them, but they’re not as easy to kill people en masse with as you think, and people who want to kill en masse already have explosives with much greater ability to do that available to them. They aren’t particularly any more effective for the criminal element, IMHO–if they were, we’d see more use of them on our streets today.