AK-47 made from a shovel.
Aluminum cans into AR-15 lower
Kyber pass copy
These are all lower quality, but with some QA can reliably go bang.
I personally wouldn’t have the wherewithal to make anything like this, but it’s really a simple mechanical process. 3d printers are a scapegoat. It’s a relatively cheap way for random people to make small parts, but CNC and injection molding are not inaccessible, and someone with the will to do so can do it pretty easily.
If technology advances to the point where you can make a high-quality automatic rifle using a home 3D printer that can compete in price with manufactured firearms, then manufacturing guns is just going to be a tiny fraction of the economic disruption.
This would mean the end of manufacturing as we know it. Instead of products made in factories and sold via retail outlets, you’d be able to make whatever you like at home. OK, not the computer chips and sensors and stuff. So you order a bunch of generic chips and load them in the hopper of your replicator, and the printer recipe programs the chips for whatever they’re going to be doing and sticks them in the correct places.
You don’t have to settle for a gun, why not just print yourself a car, or an airplane, or a house?
All this of course requires that the stipulations above are true–the gun is high quality, printed at home, and cheap enough to compete with firearms made in a factory. But those things aren’t going to be true for a long long time.
The rise of makerism is, indeed, going to become a factor at some point. Thanks to YouTube, it’s now clear to everyone that you can make a robotic sniperbot at home and integrate it with Google AI, so that you don’t have to pilot it remotely.
It’s never been illegal to make your own gun - you just can’t sell it. And you can buy a home CNC milling machine for around $1000-$2000. Download the .stl files for the AR-15 lower, send them to the mill, and soon you will have a very close replica, machined out of solid metal. Or you could design and mill a simpler, complete gun. That technology has been available for decades, but only recently has come down in price to the point where it’s feasible for home use.
You will never be able to regulate this stuff. 3d printers use absolutely bog-standard parts used in a million different pieces of equipment. Controllers can be made with Arduino boards. and the gun files are already widely distributed. There’s no closing that pandora’s box.
The gun itself is little more than a toy. It’s low powered, wildly inaccurate, single shot. You could make a better one faster out of a piece of pipe, a nail and a spring.
That’s correct, it’s a “What-if”.
However, they don’t.
The point is, in countries with gun control, generally people, including criminals, don’t have access to a mill, or know someone who both does and is willing to break the law.
If I’m desperate one day and decide to go do an armed robbery, I would have no idea how to procure a gun. And to anyone that suggests “You can get a gun anywhere!” the gun violence and suicide data beg to differ.
We all know that, that’s not the question. The question is what about if it does.
Also, once again, I’m not suggesting the printed guns are the same or cheaper price than manufactured guns. In much of the world easy access to rather expensive guns would still be a game-changer.
Heck here in China the vast majority of the 1.3 billion people have no access to guns. Separatist groups use knives or IEDs. The logic of “You can already Macgiver an AK-47!” doesn’t seem to apply.
That’s probably true in countries with no gun control.
But in essence, the whole debate comes down to what degree the government (and in most of the countries we’re talking about, the people) is willing to restrict the rights of people to use standard industrial equipment in order to potentially prevent people from making guns with them. Or, for that matter, restricting the flow of ideas and what amounts to the press with things like 3d printer files for making guns, for the same reasons.
To me, this is edging well into paranoia. It’s always been legal in the US to publish all sorts of sketchy stuff; it’s the actual execution of the instructions that is illegal. And there are plenty of uses for things like 3d printers and CNC mills by the general public that have nothing to do with guns or anything illegal. It’s the conjunction of the two that is where the issue lies, and that’s where IMO, the enforcement should be aimed. Anything else like criminalizing the files or their distribution, or restricting the actual manufacturing equipment is paranoid to an extreme.
Did you just stop reading after the first paragraph and think I didn’t realize it was a “what if?”?
The next sentences were:
For reference, here’s an article from 2013 describing a test firing of the actual 3-D printed gun that’s generating most of the hoopla this week. It did manage to fire one .380 round successfully – there was no test for accuracy, though:
When technology gets to the point where you can make a cheap accurate reusable firearm at home then it can be done in the plants as well. If you can make 2 mediocre firearms for 100$ at home they can probably make 20,000 units of better quality and sell them for less than that. Economy of scale and all that.
So essentially the market will be flooded with cheap firearms of various quality, many with obscure origin.
I suspect extremely heavy regulation and taxes will be laid on ammunition. With the primary regulatory targets being powder and primer. In addition manufactured printers with the capability to print firearms will likely be required to detect and block requests to print firearms.
Wouldn’t the Chinese government ban the printers, and arrest anyone who owned, purchased, made, or wanted one?
Bad guys with guns are already a common problem worldwide.
If they can’t use guns, they will use knives, pipes, fists, and feet. The intimidation of violent mobs can be effective.
Well it seemed your first sentence was redundant if you saw that it was a “What if”.
But to be fair I took your line as an example of people fighting the premise when in fact, it’s true, you did have a useful question to add.
So for the scenario let’s say it becomes a popular consumer device. One in five homes has one. Generally they are just for making toys and trinkets or replacement parts.
I forget, is this hypothetical taking place in a country with strong gun control, or one without one?
In a country with strong gun control, it will quickly be noted that the guns are illegal regardless of provenance, and if you’re caught with one you home-made you’re still screwed. It’s unlikely they’d come after the printers directly; printers aren’t illegal. Just the guns you make are. (Sort of like how owning chemistry sets isn’t illegal, but making drugs with them is.)
In a country without strong gun control (like the cowboy anarchy of the US) the effect of the introduction of these printers would be negligible - anybody who wants a gun already has one. It might become slightly safer to own a gun because you’d be less of a theft target because your guns are suddenly less valuable, but other than that nothing will change.
I really don’t get what the hysteria is about - even in countries with tight gun control, it’s not hard for criminals who want a non-printed gun to just buy one for relatively little money. Home CNC equipment can already produce high quality guns easily with little traceability, AK-47s are routinely made using hand tools, and an unrifled open-bolt submachine gun is really trivial to make with cheap and near ubiquitous equipment. https://www.timesofisrael.com/say-hello-to-carlo-the-cheap-lethal-go-to-gun-for-terrorists/ The hysteria over 3-d printed guns definitely isn’t about any actual risk from 3-d printed guns.
Are people hysterical about 3-d printed guns? I haven’t heard anything about it outside of threads where the message is “3-d printed guns make gun control impossible so guns should be legal everywhere!”
My facebook feed is full of anti-gun people hyperventilating over this.
It’s full of somebody hyperventilating over this.
“Zip guns” have been around a long time (1st page Google hits feature sites claiming to make one in under two minutes). The problem is not so much in the legality of printing one of these plastic guns, but in popularizing them, like this individual in Texas is doing. It’s like giving lots of press and upping the cool factor to pressure cooker bombs (god forbid), every part of which is eminently legal.