What if high-quality printed guns?

Great Debates
41

Why would a Separatist group import firearms, when explosives tend to be more effective?

If you look at Iraq and Afghanistan, I.E.D.’s caused the highest number of injuries. Americans casualties were ~25,000 for 2001-2009 while gunshots were 4,000 casualties. This has been pretty much true for most conflicts past WWII.

The physical volume is about the same or lower for explosives, but the impact in both terror and casualties is typically higher.

In the US the imports of cheap firearms would probably go to organized crime groups, who tend to want more directed attacks to settle disputes. In China they typically just bribe the officials as this is a more effective path. The point being that it is not as simple of a problem as your argument presented.

42

The lurkers agree with me!

43

Well this thread was a flop.
I feared people might not want to engage and would prefer to just repeat the reflexive talking points, but thought I could head that off in the OP.

Again, gun violence is much rarer in some countries than others, in absolute terms or as a percentage of all crime. So no, actually the data doesn’t support this.
Also, why would we restrict the discussion to criminals committing premeditated crimes – what about accidental deaths, suicides, crimes of passion etc?

Again big difference being able to make a gun if you buy equipment in advance for the purpose and have the requisite know-how and are willing to risk injury to yourself, than just being able to use a device you own anyway and press a button.
You see this in the gun crime data.
Plus, again, instances of, say, someone committing suicide with a Macgivered gun are rare because you aren’t going to plan that far in advance.

What hysteria? 3D printed guns right now are shit, and printers have had almost no traction in the consumer market. It’s a “What-if”.

44

We are a long (many decades) away from being able to “print” a reliable gun at home sans workshop and expertise. There are many precision machined parts that just won’t lend themselves to printing. The barrel rifling immediately comes to mind followed up by several other polished parts. Those are going to be out of reach until someone gets around to developing molecular nano-assembly.

But for the components with lower tolerances the raw material (carbon steel, chromium, aluminum alloy) aren’t going to be inexpensive in the volumes needed.

This mill will only do the finish cutting on an 80% receiver. It won’t take a block of stock and make you a finished receiver. Not saying it will never happen, just not today. OTOH, I can purchase unfinished receivers for $50 or less all day long. I can also purchase a complete AR-15 kit with the 80% receiver for $350. $300 on sale.

Actually, you can sell it. You just have to scribe a serial number onto it. And don’t do them in large enough volume to be considered a manufacturer.

I don’t know about hysterical, but someone’s ringing the alarms.
3D-printed guns: activists urge government to block blueprints

Sen. Chuck Schumer warns of coming online blueprints for ‘ghost guns’

There was a story on my fb feed a several days ago about some politician already introducing a bill to legislatively ban printing guns but I can’t find it right now. I’ll post it later if it floats back to the surface.

45

The way I see it you’ll never get it down to “just push a button”. At the very least you’ll have to search for a specific gun to print (and the ammunition to print for it), and then push a button. It’s going to be more involved than just punching a time into a microwave because you have to specify what thing you’re fabricating. There will be presumably tens or hundreds of thousands of different models you can make, including hundreds of different gun models, so the selection process will probably be at least a bit complicated. (Unless they put a “handgun button” on the machine with a preassigned handgun model for extreme convenience, which is theoretically possible but sounds somewhat odd.)

Not to mention that for this to be a ‘push button pull trigger BANG’ process, the gun’s going to have to show up loaded. That means we’ve catapulted past printing, casting, and machining all the way to molecular assembly, to make the explosive chemicals necessary. It’s going to be, at a minimum, several more weeks before the technology gets to that point.

46

Pardon my ignorance. I AM new around here, but how could a printed gun possibly work? A battlefield-quality gun receiver has to be forged from steel, tempered, and then machined precisely. Or, it could be cast, annealed, and then machined. OR it can be cold stamped from a sheet of very tough steel. Anything else is probably good for just one or two John Malkovich shots at someone.

47

Much of a gun can and often is plastic or some other weaker material.

But there’s no restriction that you can’t print metal. Dump metal powder into a canister, drop that into a shoot that heats each granule up to melting temperature while maintaining its position via magnets, and then project the granule to the desired destination. There may be better processes than that, but it’s eminently possible to create a device that did this and your accuracy is just a question of how finely tuned your magnets are. Given that we used something similar to run TVs back in the 30s, I think it’s safe to say that magnetic guidance is pretty advanced by now.

48

Some titanium alloys in particular are good for 3d printing. IIRC GE was going to make a jet engine this way.

I don’t know what specs you need for gun parts compared to jet engine.

49

I have a friend with a metal shop who makes custom store fixtures. He could make a rudimentary single shot firearm with no problem.

50

For the most part, the idea of printed weapons makes a run at the second amendment pointless. Once the plans are on the internet, thats it. The best you could do to restrict printing, is whats done currently with conventional printers and money. It gets interesting, when the major manufacturers start to sue people for copyright infringement and piracy laws move from multi media to firearms.

I would be more interested in a souped up air pistol, if you can push the payload beyond a certain Feet per second, chemical powder is no longer required.

51

3D printed parts, including jet engine parts, have been used for a while now. SpaceX’s SuperDraco engines are 3D printed.

Plastic 3D printing at home has also come along way. I built a 3D printer for $150 that could print that ‘Liberator’ gun if I wanted to. You can also get 3D printing filament impregnated with carbon fiber and other strengthening agents, and you can print tougher plastics like ABS, rather than just the weaker PLA that we started with.

The ‘Liberator’ gun is plastic, but it’s also chambered for .380, which is a fairly low powered pistol round. And it’s a single shot device, and very bulky because you need that much bulk for strength if you are shooting out of a plastic gun. And it has a plastic barrel, which means no rifling, no close tolerances, so it probably has a lot of blow-by and a low muzzle velocity along with the accuracy of a musket (i.e. almost none).

Home metal 3D printers are not here yet - they still cost thousands of dollars. The common method for printing metal uses a metal powder that is fused layer by layer with a laser. These parts can be made as strong as other parts, or even stronger because 3D printing allows you to build structural elements that are impossible when molding, stamping, or forging.

But there’s another way to build out of metal at home - CNC machining. Sites like https://littlemachineshop.com will sell you everything to set up a hobbyist machine shop at home, including computerized CNC mills that can take a plan from the internet and mll it out of a solid block of metal.

But you know, private machine shops have been around forever, and there’s no epidemic of untraceable machined guns. That’s 'cause it’s cheaper and faster to just buy one - either legitimately or through the black market.

That’s going to remain the case for the near future. Yes, you can 3D print a plastic gun. But 3D printing is slow, it’s finicky, and in a home environment is pretty inconsistent in quality. I wouldn’t shoot one of them, and I wouldn’t tie up my printer for the days required to print off one of these gimmicky things.

52

Depends on what the point of the “run” is. And how easy it is to actually print -and load- the weapons.

The idea that you can punch a button on a machine and print a loaded gun is silly.

53

Sam Stone, is that $1200 mill in your link all you need, or would you need a lathe too? I’m trying to get a sense of pricing to make something that wouldn’t just be good for one shot like the plastic ones.

And yes the metal printing is expensive. I’m interested in the tragectory of that pricing. Do you have a sense of how fast that’s moving?

54

The guy who put the ‘liberator’ plans on the internet also promotes an open-source CNC mill called the Ghost Gunner. It’s about $2000, but will mill out gun parts from metal.

Prices have been coming down like crazy for home 3d printers, but metal printers are still hella expensive starting at 125k or so the last time I looked. One promising new technology is bound metal printing, where the metal is printed from a filament that binds the metal particles together in a plastic matrix. This allows it to print without exotic electron beam or high powered laser technology. The downside is that you have to take the printed part and heat it in a sintering oven which melts out the binder and fuses the metal into a solid piece.

None of this is near the range where a hobbyist can start printing metal. And it probably won’t be for a long time. However, there are plenty of services out there that will take your 3d models and print them in metal for very reasonable prices. You can use your cheap plastic filament printer to print samples and prototypes, then when you are happy with it you send the same file to the service and get your model back in the metal of your choice.

55

The NRA and Gun manufactures should be very anti 3 D printed guns.

And those worried about criminals obtaining or selling these guns on the black market should also be worried.

An untraceable gun could be a real problem in high security places such as large live events, or airports.

If a child can create one at the click of a mouse…yikes.

Personally I don’t like it. It may be expensive now, it won’t in the future.

56

We weren’t talking about gun violence, we were talking about gun availability. I have never seen any statistics showing that criminals have significant difficulty getting weapons even in countries with strict gun control. They often choose not to get them or not to use them because the penalties and level of police investigation for crime + firearm are much worse than crime alone, but for anyone who has criminal contacts getting ahold of a gun for 1-5x regular market price is easily achievable pretty much anywhere in the world.

The move to ban plans from the internet, the articles bemoaning the danger of them, this thread, and so on. It’s not based on anything rational.

57

Why would the NRA care?
Why would manufacturers care any more than traditional competition?

What do you think “traceable” means? It refers to a paper trail. Un-metal detectable firearms are already illegal, have been for 30 years, and the current discussion are not metal detector proof, despite media hand wringing.

Not quite, see above posts.

58

As someone who has built a 3D printer, I would feel safer firing this prison produced firearm than some ABS/PLA printed firearm. Additive manufacturing lets you make some great shapes, but a few 100 bucks and a trip to harbor freight would buy you the machine tools to make a functional firearm. While a AR15 receiver is complicated to machine and is in fashion, if home machining was going to cause a non-mass produced Apocalypse it would have happened with subtractive manufacturing.
https://www.correctionsone.com/contraband/articles/1961780-15-deadly-improvised-prison-weapons-and-tools/

The type of 3D printer in this case is really a form of CNC hot glue gun, is slow and as other people shared no more risky than other forms of firearms.

While I have no desire to produce a firearm, if I were I would start with high quality, higher strength plastic bar and round stock. You can order high quality materials, with good QA and controls or you can hope that your robotic hot glue gun has good adhesion, lacks voids etc…

https://www.onlinemetals.com/merchant.cfm?id=181&step=2&top_cat=181

The production method here is new, thus this application is novel which is a perfect recipe for fear, uncertainty and doubt. But the reality is that absolutely nothing changes by using additive manufacturing as far as risks go here.

That said is does wonders for page hits which helps with selling ads.

59

In general, criminals aren’t known for being industrious, productive, nor wise.

Between building something that will work with 8 hours of effort or something that might work with the click of a button, it’s reasonable to say that a criminal will go for the latter. Yes, that may be patently stupid, but so is committing a crime for a wage that’s worse than working as a line cook at Taco Bell. If they were the sort who would go down the path of wisdom, it wouldn’t be a concern to begin with.

60

The illegal drug trade is estimated as nearly 1% of total global trade, with some estimates of around $750 Billion a year in the US. Yet they can get people to stand on corners to sell drugs for less than minimum wage.

The shear size of that market, which also performs complicated chemical reactions which are far more difficult than 1800’s era manufacturing tasks seems in conflict with your claims.