Gun Control & RKBA
Related: About this forumMake Your Own Gun!
Specifically, it’s Nick Bilton’s “Disruptions” column in the business section of Monday’s New York Times. Bilton writes about 3-D printing—nothing new about that—and how it will soon enable people to build their own plastic, but very functional, handguns in the comfort of their homes. That’s news—and the more you think about it, the scarier it becomes.
According to Bilton, it will soon be possible to download a printing schematic from the internet (for free), hit “print” on your 3-D printer, “walk away, and a few hours later, you have a firearm.”
Three-D printers, for the uninitiated, are printers that use plastic, ceramics or metal to make 3-D objects through a process of spraying on the substance layer by layer, just as a slow regular printer spits out a written document line-by-line. Manufacturers have used such printers for years to make prototypes of products, or specialized plastic parts. As the cost of 3-D printers has fallen in recent years, manufacturers have begun marketing them to individuals. In the household market so far, the 3-D printer has chiefly been a novelty product that makes novelty products, or, more precisely, tchachtkes—small pottery, little animal figurines and the like.
http://prospect.org/article/make-your-own-gun
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Reasonable_Argument
(881 posts)But if you lease a 5 axis CNC machine you can build a real metal receiver with a CAD file. Which is the only registered part of the firearm, the rest you can get through the mail and it's perfectly legal to build weapons for yourself. You only need a license if you're going to sell them.
slackmaster
(60,567 posts)I can make one in an afternoon on my completely manual mill starting with a block of metal.
slackmaster
(60,567 posts)
Kolesar
(31,182 posts)Trunk Monkey
(950 posts)I'm not sure what you are asking but a firearm isn't difficult to make if you have the know how. I recall a thread on THR a few years back in which members were posting photos of pistols they had made in their home machine shops.
Kolesar
(31,182 posts)Trunk Monkey
(950 posts)Thus opening your self up to responses from any interested party
Jester Messiah
(4,711 posts)Hell, you don't even need a fancy 3-d printer to make a knife. You can just make a shiv prison-style, or head over to wal-mart and buy some steak knives.
But let's get people scared away from fabber tech anyway. That'll help... well, somebody. Who has the most to lose when this tech is widely adopted?
holdencaufield
(2,927 posts)... to use this tech to make guns when you can buy them freely.
However, in countries where you can't people have published complete plans and instructions for not only making compact automatic weapons in a home workship that are as good as those widely used in World War II -- you can find, and download, complete instructions for making black powder and brass casings in a home workshop.
If the day ever comes where legal guns are ever banned -- even more deadly illegal ones will flood the market. If you don't think that's true, look at Australia. Since the enactment of draconian gun laws in 1997, the number of illegal weapons involved in gun crimes has skyrocketed. Just recently, a factory in Australia was shut down by the police for turning out fully-automatic Owens Guns in the hundreds.
Prohibition of firearms will do precisely what it does with everything -- take if from the hands of those who want to follow the law and put it into the hands of those who clearly don't care about the law. And we know how well that has worked in the past.
4th law of robotics
(6,801 posts)You've always been able to build your own guns at home.
Not a lot of criminals do that (even in places where guns are "forbidden"
.
Do you ever wonder why?
And the 'plastic gun' meme . . . didn't yall learn from your hysteria over the glock?
"they're undetectable!"
"you can take them anywhere!"
"blood in the streets!"
/I wonder if the proto-grabber was out lamenting the invention of steam powered industry because now every house will have a gun and blood will run in yonder streets!
rrneck
(17,671 posts)force tool using mammals with opposable thumbs to stop making things and businesses from selling them the stuff to do it.
Remmah2
(3,291 posts)Okay, maybe a pinch of chemistry.
No computers needed.
WTF, not limited to firearms. It's possible to make your own artillery and rockets too.
Some of these people think they invented gravity, truth is they're dumber than a box of rocks.
If the pen is mightier than the sword, how come we're not banning pens?
X_Digger
(18,585 posts)Atypical Liberal
(5,412 posts)This article is a big yawn.
Firearm technology is hundreds of years old. Modern firearm technology is over a hundred years old. People can, and have, and do, make firearms with tools no more sophisticated than hammers, files, and drills.
There are plans readily available to make a sten submachine gun out of pipe and metal bits you can buy at Home Depot:
http://www.milsurps.com/content.php?r=422-Blueprints-for-The-STEN-MKII-%28complete-machine-plans%29
The article is about rapid prototyping, which I have been involved with for decades now. Most of these work by either a resin that hardens when exposed to a UV laser, or by printing molten plastic.
Originally the resins were quite brittle and not much good for much more than visual mock-ups, but today some of the resins are engineered plastics and can be functional.
But you still cannot "print a gun". You might be able to print certain parts of the gun, but there is no technology that allows printing of the barrel. That is exposed to high pressures and must be made out of steel.
In any case, it is not illegal in most places to manufacture your own firearms.
But, technology does march on. Some day people may well be able to easily manufacture at home many things that they currently have to buy, even firearms.
