OMG, nerds think alike. I was just coming here to post that if I had the free time, I’d rather have a cnc router to play with than a 3d printer. Oh the things that I could do.
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Would people be required to keep their 3D printers locked up if there are minor children in the home (as I think is common with guns)?
Because if Mom or Dad buys the printer and then the kid uses it to print a gun… that’s still an issue.
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Most 3D printers use a fairly soft medium and there’s no way you could make a useful gun with them. Maybe a water gun, although I’d expect it to leak.
There are some high end (and expensive) printers that might be gun-capable. But it’s really dumb to put firearm restrictions on the vast majority of consumer-grade 3D printers.
The newer Ender printers, which are something like $400 on Amazon, can print with carbon fiber embedded filament. People have printed guns and shot hundreds of rounds from them. Now they aren’t printing barrels, and maybe some other parts like the firing pin, so you still have to buy or make those however you do that.
Probably not as good as a commercial firearm, but good enough to do some serious damage.
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And 3D printed single-use plastic handguns have been around a while.
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There was an episode of Elementary not long after the plans were posted where (Elementary episode spoiler) a 3D printed gun was used by the bad guy, then was dissolved in acetone. The only non-printed part, the firing pin, was used to hang something on the wall.
I’m not saying it isn’t possible to print major parts of guns, but I really don’t believe that most consumer-grade 3D printers can do that. I have a lot of friends with 3D printers, and I have a lot of 3D printed stuff knocking around my house. Some is sintered stainless steel coated in archival bronze. And most of it is lightweight soft plastic. You can 3-D glass and wood and chocolate today. Restricting “3D printers” is like restricting “material that comes in sheets”. Sheets of stainless steel and sheets of paper have very different qualities.
3D printed wood isn’t real wood, it’s a plastic matrix with a lot of embedded sawdust. But like the sand in concrete, the sawdust significantly changes the physical qualities of the plastic, and makes it more rigid. And it looks surprisingly like wood when it’s done. It’s very weird to pick it up, because it doesn’t feel like wood.
Tons of videos, below is Vice News printing a gun on an Ender machine. I don’t know what model it is, I have an Ender that looks just like it that was $350, I think you have to spend a bit more if you want to print carbon fiber. You can absolutely print a workable gun on a <$500 printer. Might not last as long as a Glock.
Strength of the part depends on a few things, plus likely some things I’m not aware of. One is the filament. PLA is strong but brittle, PLA+ is very strong. PETG is less rigid but less brittle. The carbon fiber stuff is insanely strong. The other thing is infill, if you’re printing a little toy then it probably has like 15% infill to save on material and print time. I printed some parts for a loudspeaker, the first run was at 15% and it was flimsy, ran a second part at 25% and it’s rigid enough. Ran a third part at 40% and it is very solid. It’s 1/4” thick at the edge and I can’t flex it. I would imagine a carbon fiber part with >50% infill might do the trick for a gun, dunno.
That video shows why a 3D printed gun isn’t quite ready for prime time - the guy had an expert helping him put it together, spent a lot of time trying to improve the fit and finish, and it still jammed repeatedly.
And it required a lot of metal parts that they mail-ordered. I wonder how specialized those parts are.
You can print metal, too, although I don’t know if you can (currently) get the tolerances good enough.
It’s not that “you can’t 3D print a gun”, it’s that banning “3D printers” is an extremely blunt tool to attempt to make that harder.
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I agree, the cat is kind of out of the bag here and trying to regulate or bad 3d printers is blunt. I was responding to this line of thought:
I don’t know about quantifying ‘most’ printers or how ‘useful’ these guns are. Certainly when he swapped in a genuine Glock slide it was working really well. At any rate, if the current crop isn’t useful, it won’t be long I suspect.
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When you start “swapping in a genuine Glock slide” you have to start asking which part makes it a gun. You could make the stock of a rifle with a block of wood and a pen knife. No one is worrying about how the availability of pen knives is impacting the availability of rifles, however.
It’s a spectrum. We aren’t in a place yet where I can buy a 3d printer and get a gun printed in a few hours. We are in a place where it’s feasible with some legwork.
The ‘gun of Theseus’ argument is interesting, I don’t know where to draw the line on how much of the gun has to be printed in order to be considered a 3d printed gun. At any rate, it seems people are DIYing guns in larger numbers.
Well, when referring to “ghost guns”, I guess it’s relevant that whatever part of the gun is tracked with a serial number (and I have no idea how that works) CAN be printed today That suggests several alternatives, including labeling a different part of the gun. Cars have VINs all over the place. Maybe guns need that, too?
That’s probably a short-term solution at best, though, because printing is only going to get better.
Yeah, the ‘receiver’ is the thing with the serial number. It’s like the chassis, more or less. Anything else is basically a part you can just buy, as I understand it.
I’d be totally fine with stamping numbers on barrels and firing pins, but you and I can GTFO. This is America.
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