This is also a very confusing headline for a native speaker. It makes almost no sense, nobody I have ever met has ever mentioned a "ghost gun," it's not really a concern that affects daily life.
A "ghost gun" is a political buzzword for "gun not manufactured by someone the local government has leverage over".
Most firearms manufacturers that manufacture and sell firearms for resale are bound by federal guidelines to do things like serialize them to comply with regulations that make it easier for law enforcement to trace the paper trail or ownership of a firearm. They must also have enough metal in them by law to set off a metal detector.
None of these measures cover firearms privately made, not for resale. those are not regulated. therefore it creates an extra "spooky" mystique the media likes to play up, and xertain groups wring their hands over. The fact 3d printing has made firearm manufacture that much more accessible to the everyone of course has certain political factions wanting to figure out ways to keep those pesky weapons out of people's hands.
For the ghost guns, do you still need to have professionally manufactured elements standing pressure, like a barrel, or are ghost guns, in practice, made 100% with home made elements?
In the UK the pressure elements are regulated and need serial numbers whereas in the US it is the receiver, which could make creating these ghose guns easier.
> For the ghost guns, do you still need to have professionally manufactured elements standing pressure, like a barrel,
Yes, the 'ghost guns' politicians fear the most are built like that. Particularly, AR pattern rifles that have printed or home-milled receivers but are otherwise build out of factory parts.
There are also some 'ghost guns' that are wholly homemade, with all the variable quality you would expect. Most of them are probably more dangerous to the user.
as article mentioned i browsed one of suppliers polymer 80. looks like its like lego for guns where you buy pieces of guns. reminds me of CS:GO weapon skins but IRL.
You can finish an 80% Glock kit with a pair of snips, file, and something sturdy to hammer the 3 pins in. After you have your 80% lower done, the rest of the parts are unregulated, and can be freely purchased either online or locally.
3D print a base plate for which designs are easily found online, file down a piece of thin sheet metal to the correct dimensions, and you have a fully automatic glock.
Everything up until the custom baseplate is legal to do, turning your 80% Glock in to a fully auto firearm is the only step that's against the law. (Assuming you don't have any felonies or domestic violence charges that bar you from owning a firearm in the first place)
An AR-15 80% is a little more involved, but with a jig and a router/drill you can do one in a hour and a half in your garage, the hardest part is cleaning up the absolute metric crap ton of aluminum shavings/chips the process produces.
Are gun barrels unregulated in most US states? E.g. in Slovakia a barrel is considered a main weapon part, and case of short arms the slide is considered another main weapon part. So a Glock has serial numbers on the barrel, slide and also the body. You can buy the rest without any license or manufacture it if you want, but no one will sell you a barrel or slide unless you have a purchase permit. You can't sell it to someone else, you need to transfer the ownership.
And making a good and safe barrel and slide is the most complicated part, you can't just easily print this at home. So no one is printing guns in Slovakia yet (AFAIK :-)). And just for comparison - we have less strict rules than California (concealed carry is possible for regular citizen. Not limits on calibers or magazine capacity yet).
> but generally it's a pain, often requiring special tools and machining experience
False. If you can use basic hand tools like a drill and file, it takes about half an hour. 3D printing makes it even simpler.
Edit: for downvoters, this is useful information that I'm providing to someone who apparently didn't know. I know a good bit about this topic, and I'd be happy to answer any questions you might have.
IMHO this is sensationalist "think of the children" piece.
There are a ton of other ways to get a gun illegally, this is just the cheapest and least reliable one.
Without knowing the denominator, the numbers are useless.
Also very much doubt that the traceability of legal guns is that useful.
> Also note that seizures are the metric in the article, not acts of violence.
Well, there’s this:
> Detectives have linked the untraceable weapons to 24 killings, eight attempted homicides and dozens of assaults and armed robberies since January, according to the report.
LA saw about 343 murders in 2020 of which 73% (about 250) were from guns.
The 24 killings mentioned in this article would then represent about 10% of 2020 gun murders. That seems significant to me, especially if it continues increasing.
I am from Poland. I am 39. I am male. I have never seen a gun other than on a policeman or a soldier.
There are ways to get a gun illegally, even here. But most people do not have easy access to guns. Neither the Police expects you to have one (so they don't pull their gun on slightest pretext) nor people who are stupid can use them by accident.
There are shootings. But these are rare and usually involve only police and bad actors.
But there are no school shootings, there are no people killed by roadside because they look like they tried to pull their gun, there are no people killed by their children by accident, and so on.
The scariest thing I have seen is US Police officer pulling their gun for a regular traffic stop (because the windows were tinted) and then killing the driver (because he looked like he is "reaching" for a gun).
It is sick and it is not right and it is all caused by gun proliferation.
"Poland therefore becomes only the second EU member state included in the report to lose its full democratic status. The other, Hungary, lost its “consolidated democracy” rating five years ago, and has now fallen far enough to no longer be classified as a democracy at all."
I'm no fan of the current government, but Polish attitudes to guns remained unchanged since we joined the EU, at minimum. They certainly predate this government.
Bringing up the democratic status in this particular conversation doesn't add to the understanding of the issue.
Also, Poland is a just the country mentioned because its their one the OP lives in. The exact same statement could be made using almost any other country in the world.
While I agree with this and I am seriously irritated at the current populistic, anti-democratic government and people who vote for them not seeing the damage that is being done, I fail to see the connection with discussion about guns.
If anything if an undemocratic country like Poland can make streets safer than the supposed paragon of democracy, it should be even more argument against unrestricted availability of firearms. Unless you are of the opinion that these deaths are somehow necessary for democracy.
Guns are the porn of manufacturing: cutting edge production and delivery concepts are always validated by the respective industries before the techniques get used by the wider markets. I think Gresham's Law might have a hand in how this plays out, too.
And yes, cops are being melodramatic here. The police rebellion that started somewhere around George Floyd's murder is continuing well beyond complaining about Chesa Boudin and Larry Krasner and Tish James and heck, Bill De Blasio. It won't stop until every police budget is iron-clad by statute and oversight is one again powerless. Nobody gets an opinion on police patterns and practices other than police, lest they pout.
Result: politicians pat themselves on the back for doing something, non-felons can no longer build DIY firearms, felons continue to ignore the law.
Sigh.
With the amount of uppers that are in the wild, and the fact that a lower can be made from either an 80% part, or 3D printed from scratch by pretty much anyone with two working hands means trying to stop this is like pissing in to a hurricane.
Google FGC-9. Even the barrel can be made at home, rifling and everything, ivanthetroll has videos/files online documenting the process. If Henry Colt could produce a firearm using 100 year old tools and technologies, it's comical to think you can stop people doing the same using 2021 technology.
Perhaps it's time to consider bringing up the poorest members of society out of the abject poverty, that will do a whole lot more to reduce gun violence than passing even more ineffective gun control laws.
TBQH, even poor people in America can afford better guns from a store than homemade guns. The main exception to this is people who aren't permitted to buy guns. Wikipedia says the infamous FGC-9 costs "less than $400" to make if you already have the printer. You can easily buy a better gun cheaper than that in just about any gunstore.
"Not everyone follows laws, so why bother having them" is a pretty bad argument. You're right that pretty much no law can be 100% effective, but if you want to reduce gun violence, reducing the number of legal firearms is certainly one of the ways to go about it.
I'm trying to think of a crafty was to respond to this.
There is the free for all approach where we resign to accept the presence of 3D printed guns and let our county mail us instructions on how to 3D print polymer-kevlar vests
There is also a way to work within the constitution to restrict their presence. I don't think any seizure is an affective public policy measure, since that means it was already printed and subsequently found. I'm thinking a tariff on the polymer can be done but that would penalize all 3D makers although stranger things have happened, or an attestation of how the polymer won't be used, or a straight up license with reporting guidelines and a regime that requires the printers to phone home. Of course, non-licensed use being prohibited or severely restricted. And now, same result but without even brushing near the 2nd amendment, and it gives enforcement a pre-emptive reason to act on non-compliance.
Disclaimer, I'm not advocating for anything, I just know a sure-fire approach to making a prohibition stick in the US system: 1) regulate the intermediaries instead of the specific action itself. 2) deputize private individuals or a specific private sector to do the reporting and compliance for you.
The real answer is that you'd have to essentially ban the internet to keep this from happening. As the recently deceased JStark, designer of the FGC-9, said: "Can't stop the signal".
Problem, of course, is that, for guns, the exact looks aren’t important. That’s true for child pornography and pirated movies, too, though, and those are being worked on.
So, I foresee tech in commercially bought 3D printers that attempts to disallow printing anything remotely looking like a gun or gun part, and people circumventing that by tweaking models, say by adding easily cut of images of flowers and kittens.
Instead of trying to craft legislation addressing 3d printed guns directly, it might be more effective for governments to target the 3d printing hobby using environmental rhetoric. They could point to and ridicule the number of "Benchy" boats printed over and over again. A hobby that, at least at first glance, seems obsessed with creating useless plastic trinkets, seems vulnerable to social criticism in this age of environmental awareness.
Not really, not in the sense that most people think of it. It can be composted, but certainly not in the backyard pile of vegetable matter most people will imagine when you talk about composting.
It's a loophole in the law defining what a firearm is. You're allowed to make your own weapon for yourself. It turns out you can buy almost everything that constitutes an AR-15, except for the lower receiver that holds all the other pieces together, with little to no restriction.
You can buy a kit that isn't a functional receiver, but is 80% of the way there, you have to complete a few machining steps, which they've made VERY easy, and you've now legally made your own firearm. (by skipping almost all of the skilled part that the original intent was all about)
It turns out that if you use enough of the right kinds of plastic, you can get something that holds up reasonably well long enough to commit crimes with.
I expect this loophole to be closed somehow, fairly soon.
There's no way the NRA would let this loophole get closed, right?
Also, I'm confused. I tried to look up the legal standing of ghost guns on Wikipedia, and it mentioned that regulating them would violate the Commerce Clause (since they're not articles of commerce), but there's a Supreme Court case on homemade machine guns which upheld those being illegal. What's the deal there?
Activists love it when judges stretch words far beyond their original intent.
Same happened in Roe v. Wade, involving "due process". The majority found a meaning in words far beyond what was there previously. A dissenter said: To reach its result, the Court necessarily has had to find within the scope of the Fourteenth Amendment a right that was apparently completely unknown to the drafters of the Amendment.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roe_v_wade#Dissents
>There's no way the NRA would let this loophole get closed, right?
They might, since people making rifles at home aren't buying rifles from manufacturers. Licensed FFLs don't use this 'loophole', it exists for private unlicensed people to use or abuse. A common criticism of the NRA is that it prioritizes manufacturer interests. For instance, (from what I've seen, correct me if I'm wrong) the NRA doesn't seem to do a very good job at protesting import bans that harm collectors but benefit manufacturers.
I think AR related murders per annum are lower than the number of pneumonia, which is around 1000/year. Pistols are much scarier and commonly used for crimes because they can be concealed.
So this really isn’t as scary as it’s made out to be, numbers-wise.
This article is simple fearmongering. Yes, "ghost guns", or homemade firearms are growing in popularity, and of course LAPD is seizing them: they're illegal in CA. If you know a weed dealer in the US, I promise it's easier to get a gun through them than by printing one.
The reality is that this is here to stay. The FGC-9 is not a joke, it's a powerful weapon that's impossible to effectively regulate. Let that frame the discussion. You can't get rid of this, how do you work with it?
But meanwhile making bullets has long been a trivial affair. And you can totally reuse spent cartridges. It's a brass jacket with a lead tip filled with gunpowder (which can also be homemade). It's 19th century technology.
> You can’t get rid of this, how do you work with it?
This reminds me a lot of an attitude among anti-DRM people that I’ve been trying to get folks to reconsider: the “DRM is bad _and also_ useless so why bother!” stance.
The RIAA and MPAA have largely gotten their way with stuff like EME and HDCP. It’s become pretty tough to get 4K pirated versions of any but the most popular movies, and even then it’s pretty tough sometimes. While we were chuckling about that 12 digit DVD region lock code meme they were cooking up invasions of privacy that we just didn’t think they’d have the balls or the competencies to pull off.
I’m not too into guns myself, but if you are, take heed from what happened to piracy. These things are not inevitably going to propagate. If you find yourself going “but in order to stop this, they’d have to do X”, stop yourself and consider the possibility that they might try.
But piracy is a completely different issue. The source is controlled. With guns, it's literally random furries posting the latest Glock variation they designed. Sure, you can try to stop that, but you'll need to repeal the 1st amendment first.
I'm very much into guns, co-host a pro-gun and Pro-AAPI gun ownership podcast, and personally know a lot of the people who are behind this movement. Many of them work for FAANG companies. They are aware of the challenges.
I’m hesitant to even get into this into HN, so I’ll try to keep this very narrow. You say maximum freedom, but already the biggest means of “projecting force” (here it seems you literally mean as a projectile) cannot be 3D printed and is only in the hands of the government.. tanks, attack aircraft, missiles, nuclear weapons, etc.
So how does a 3D printed gun give maximum freedom, especially when you can buy legal equivalents, and the real “maximums” aren’t possible?
It's the current local maximum. The point of civilian gun ownership is to keep the means of offense and defense in the hands of the people. Think socialism, but instead of companies, it's guns.
But that’s already the case. A state is just a bunch of people. Without public support, states fail. Public opinion is far, far more powerful than weapons, and open source 3D printed guns will have the most positive impact only for criminals. If there really was some revolution where ordinary citizens required guns, there’s already more legal guns than people in America.
Of the people I know manufacturing firearms, the motivation is gun laws themselves.
California laws are so completely insane [1] that many normal sane gun owners I know have just kinda thrown their hands up in the air and decided if they are going to be criminals anyways, they might as well be criminals with the stuff they want. These are tax paying, law abiding, average joes that have given up on trying to "stay legal" within their hobby.
1. Here is the flow chart to figure out if the rifle you've done target practice with for years and is legal in most of the US will get you thrown in jail: https://www.calguns.net/caawid/flowchart.pdf
> it's literally random furries posting the latest Glock variation they designed
This statement sounds like “I’m a responsible pro gun person, but obviously the ones who aren’t are <insert random unliked group>!!”. That’s not much of an argument?
> The reality is that this is here to stay. The FGC-9 is not a joke, it's a powerful weapon that's impossible to effectively regulate.
Look, people in the 1940s were able to manufacture effective submachine guns while living in countries occupied by Nazi Germany. If it was doable with the tools available then and under the constant threat of armed soldiers legally ransacking your home or business without warning or warrant, it is doable today and in any conceivable future.
There is nothing particularly novel about the threat scenarios caused by ghost guns. The only thing that is novel is the reduced cost of obtaining an illegal gun.
Nobody's sitting around going "hmmm, I used to be a law abiding citizen, but now that I can 3D print an illegal gun instead of buying it, I will use it to go out and do crimes".
Probably more likely that they’re going, “Hmm, I’ve got that 3D printer gathering dust, and I don’t really ask too many questions. Maybe I could print some and make a little side money?”
If your thinking is "yes, I'll make money by selling firearms (components) to people looking for a cheap untraceable gun", then you've basically decided you're comfortable with the risk of being found guilty of accessory to murder, in order to make a couple hundred bucks. Because of course "untraceable" doesn't mean the person you sold the gun to can't tell the police who made it, for instance in a plea bargain.
That alone puts such business far, far outside the comfort zone of any normal 3D printing hobbyist.
Sure, people could write books before the printed press, but guess what? You lower the barrier to entry and stuff happens.
If the LAPD declares it an epidemic, isn't that good reason to be at least slightly alarmed?
Come now, are you really arguing that criminals in the US have a hard time acquiring illegal firearms?
Under that hypothesis, shouldn't 3D printed firearms be a much larger problem in countries where access to firearms is much more restricted than the US?
To me it's obvious that the increase in homicides et.al. is very likely rather due to the increased psychological issues due to the covid-19 restrictions on people...
I've seen a number of comments criticize the reporting, inferring that it's the press that's generating the fear and confusion here.
I think this is in error. The press may be guilty of amplifying FUD but it is obvious that the creation and shape of this particular narrative is from the LAPD.
Is the LAT guilty of parroting LEO w/o providing sufficient analysis? That sounds reasonable to me. News orgs republishing Gov/Biz/LEO PR - w/o analysis or related context - happens pretty much every day in every US town.
But criticizing the press (again, reasonably) while giving the cops who designed and crafted the FUD a pass - I think this shows us that tribalism is rating higher than fixing broken things.
103 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 176 ms ] threadMost firearms manufacturers that manufacture and sell firearms for resale are bound by federal guidelines to do things like serialize them to comply with regulations that make it easier for law enforcement to trace the paper trail or ownership of a firearm. They must also have enough metal in them by law to set off a metal detector.
None of these measures cover firearms privately made, not for resale. those are not regulated. therefore it creates an extra "spooky" mystique the media likes to play up, and xertain groups wring their hands over. The fact 3d printing has made firearm manufacture that much more accessible to the everyone of course has certain political factions wanting to figure out ways to keep those pesky weapons out of people's hands.
Or a gun that has legally required markings removed (CA defines it this way, wouldn't surprise me if a few other states did).
They aren’t in any way comparable in the eyes of the law.
That's true. But some jurisdictions report all un-serialized guns as "ghost guns" in their stats because that's how they want their stats to look.
In the UK the pressure elements are regulated and need serial numbers whereas in the US it is the receiver, which could make creating these ghose guns easier.
Yes, the 'ghost guns' politicians fear the most are built like that. Particularly, AR pattern rifles that have printed or home-milled receivers but are otherwise build out of factory parts.
There are also some 'ghost guns' that are wholly homemade, with all the variable quality you would expect. Most of them are probably more dangerous to the user.
https://www.polymer80.com/partsandaccessories/pistolbarrels
Technically true (though only some parts can be polymer, obviously) but generally it's a pain, often requiring special tools and machining experience.
This article is fairly sensational in its description of the process, honestly.
3D print a base plate for which designs are easily found online, file down a piece of thin sheet metal to the correct dimensions, and you have a fully automatic glock.
Everything up until the custom baseplate is legal to do, turning your 80% Glock in to a fully auto firearm is the only step that's against the law. (Assuming you don't have any felonies or domestic violence charges that bar you from owning a firearm in the first place)
An AR-15 80% is a little more involved, but with a jig and a router/drill you can do one in a hour and a half in your garage, the hardest part is cleaning up the absolute metric crap ton of aluminum shavings/chips the process produces.
I’ve very familiar with US firearms law, and to my knowledge no US state regulates barrels.
> So no one is printing guns in Slovakia yet (AFAIK :-))
Check out the FGC-9. The plans include instructions for creating a rifled barrel using electrochemical machining (ECM), using 3D printed tools.
False. If you can use basic hand tools like a drill and file, it takes about half an hour. 3D printing makes it even simpler.
Edit: for downvoters, this is useful information that I'm providing to someone who apparently didn't know. I know a good bit about this topic, and I'd be happy to answer any questions you might have.
There are a ton of other ways to get a gun illegally, this is just the cheapest and least reliable one. Without knowing the denominator, the numbers are useless. Also very much doubt that the traceability of legal guns is that useful.
This is generally true. Many guns used in crimes are stolen, "tracing" the gun usually means getting it back to the original owner.
Also note that seizures are the metric in the article, not acts of violence. Non-serialized guns are a no-no in CA.
Well, there’s this:
> Detectives have linked the untraceable weapons to 24 killings, eight attempted homicides and dozens of assaults and armed robberies since January, according to the report.
The 24 killings mentioned in this article would then represent about 10% of 2020 gun murders. That seems significant to me, especially if it continues increasing.
There are ways to get a gun illegally, even here. But most people do not have easy access to guns. Neither the Police expects you to have one (so they don't pull their gun on slightest pretext) nor people who are stupid can use them by accident.
There are shootings. But these are rare and usually involve only police and bad actors.
But there are no school shootings, there are no people killed by roadside because they look like they tried to pull their gun, there are no people killed by their children by accident, and so on.
The scariest thing I have seen is US Police officer pulling their gun for a regular traffic stop (because the windows were tinted) and then killing the driver (because he looked like he is "reaching" for a gun).
It is sick and it is not right and it is all caused by gun proliferation.
https://notesfrompoland.com/2020/05/06/poland-no-longer-rate...
Bringing up the democratic status in this particular conversation doesn't add to the understanding of the issue.
That doesn't say anything about guns. And the US isn't that much of a democracy either these days, despite having most of the window dressing.
If anything if an undemocratic country like Poland can make streets safer than the supposed paragon of democracy, it should be even more argument against unrestricted availability of firearms. Unless you are of the opinion that these deaths are somehow necessary for democracy.
And yes, cops are being melodramatic here. The police rebellion that started somewhere around George Floyd's murder is continuing well beyond complaining about Chesa Boudin and Larry Krasner and Tish James and heck, Bill De Blasio. It won't stop until every police budget is iron-clad by statute and oversight is one again powerless. Nobody gets an opinion on police patterns and practices other than police, lest they pout.
Solution: write another law.
Result: politicians pat themselves on the back for doing something, non-felons can no longer build DIY firearms, felons continue to ignore the law.
Sigh.
With the amount of uppers that are in the wild, and the fact that a lower can be made from either an 80% part, or 3D printed from scratch by pretty much anyone with two working hands means trying to stop this is like pissing in to a hurricane.
Google FGC-9. Even the barrel can be made at home, rifling and everything, ivanthetroll has videos/files online documenting the process. If Henry Colt could produce a firearm using 100 year old tools and technologies, it's comical to think you can stop people doing the same using 2021 technology.
Perhaps it's time to consider bringing up the poorest members of society out of the abject poverty, that will do a whole lot more to reduce gun violence than passing even more ineffective gun control laws.
There is the free for all approach where we resign to accept the presence of 3D printed guns and let our county mail us instructions on how to 3D print polymer-kevlar vests
There is also a way to work within the constitution to restrict their presence. I don't think any seizure is an affective public policy measure, since that means it was already printed and subsequently found. I'm thinking a tariff on the polymer can be done but that would penalize all 3D makers although stranger things have happened, or an attestation of how the polymer won't be used, or a straight up license with reporting guidelines and a regime that requires the printers to phone home. Of course, non-licensed use being prohibited or severely restricted. And now, same result but without even brushing near the 2nd amendment, and it gives enforcement a pre-emptive reason to act on non-compliance.
Disclaimer, I'm not advocating for anything, I just know a sure-fire approach to making a prohibition stick in the US system: 1) regulate the intermediaries instead of the specific action itself. 2) deputize private individuals or a specific private sector to do the reporting and compliance for you.
Criminals would steal the polymer, and not pay the tariff.
Your scanner likely won’t scan money, photoshop may refuse to edit or print images of money (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Bank_Counterfeit_Deter...), your printer may black them out, etc (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation), all to prevent the easy counterfeiting of money.
Problem, of course, is that, for guns, the exact looks aren’t important. That’s true for child pornography and pirated movies, too, though, and those are being worked on.
So, I foresee tech in commercially bought 3D printers that attempts to disallow printing anything remotely looking like a gun or gun part, and people circumventing that by tweaking models, say by adding easily cut of images of flowers and kittens.
Even if they're in a place (like LA) where the DA isn’t trying to arrest people, they can still prioritize certain kinds of thefts
Existing laws like getting a gun from out of state and literally getting back in your car circumvent most local regulations
And yet the municipality is worried about this polymer vector
So it can be reduced by raising the compliance burden and creating other chokepoints that allow for preemptive action
You can buy a kit that isn't a functional receiver, but is 80% of the way there, you have to complete a few machining steps, which they've made VERY easy, and you've now legally made your own firearm. (by skipping almost all of the skilled part that the original intent was all about)
It turns out that if you use enough of the right kinds of plastic, you can get something that holds up reasonably well long enough to commit crimes with.
I expect this loophole to be closed somehow, fairly soon.
Also, I'm confused. I tried to look up the legal standing of ghost guns on Wikipedia, and it mentioned that regulating them would violate the Commerce Clause (since they're not articles of commerce), but there's a Supreme Court case on homemade machine guns which upheld those being illegal. What's the deal there?
There's no federal law banning 80% firearms or home manufacture. If there was, then prosecuting it would fall under the same umbrella as the NFA.
Activists love it when judges stretch words far beyond their original intent.
Same happened in Roe v. Wade, involving "due process". The majority found a meaning in words far beyond what was there previously. A dissenter said: To reach its result, the Court necessarily has had to find within the scope of the Fourteenth Amendment a right that was apparently completely unknown to the drafters of the Amendment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roe_v_wade#Dissents
No, it can’t. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Lopez
They might, since people making rifles at home aren't buying rifles from manufacturers. Licensed FFLs don't use this 'loophole', it exists for private unlicensed people to use or abuse. A common criticism of the NRA is that it prioritizes manufacturer interests. For instance, (from what I've seen, correct me if I'm wrong) the NRA doesn't seem to do a very good job at protesting import bans that harm collectors but benefit manufacturers.
Everything is made of something, and guns are made of things you can't realistically regulate.
1. https://www.80percentarms.com/products/0-billet-ar-15-lower-...
It may be politically impossible to do it in the US but it's certainly possible.
The NRA is busy trying not to be dissolved.
So this really isn’t as scary as it’s made out to be, numbers-wise.
Sources:
https://www.polymer80.com/pistols/80percentpistolkits
https://ctrlpew.com/file-drop-tms-94-effeeness-3d-printable-...
The reality is that this is here to stay. The FGC-9 is not a joke, it's a powerful weapon that's impossible to effectively regulate. Let that frame the discussion. You can't get rid of this, how do you work with it?
They're way ahead of you on that one.
I would shoot you if I could afford it
But meanwhile making bullets has long been a trivial affair. And you can totally reuse spent cartridges. It's a brass jacket with a lead tip filled with gunpowder (which can also be homemade). It's 19th century technology.
This reminds me a lot of an attitude among anti-DRM people that I’ve been trying to get folks to reconsider: the “DRM is bad _and also_ useless so why bother!” stance.
The RIAA and MPAA have largely gotten their way with stuff like EME and HDCP. It’s become pretty tough to get 4K pirated versions of any but the most popular movies, and even then it’s pretty tough sometimes. While we were chuckling about that 12 digit DVD region lock code meme they were cooking up invasions of privacy that we just didn’t think they’d have the balls or the competencies to pull off.
I’m not too into guns myself, but if you are, take heed from what happened to piracy. These things are not inevitably going to propagate. If you find yourself going “but in order to stop this, they’d have to do X”, stop yourself and consider the possibility that they might try.
I'm very much into guns, co-host a pro-gun and Pro-AAPI gun ownership podcast, and personally know a lot of the people who are behind this movement. Many of them work for FAANG companies. They are aware of the challenges.
So how does a 3D printed gun give maximum freedom, especially when you can buy legal equivalents, and the real “maximums” aren’t possible?
Of the people I know manufacturing firearms, the motivation is gun laws themselves.
California laws are so completely insane [1] that many normal sane gun owners I know have just kinda thrown their hands up in the air and decided if they are going to be criminals anyways, they might as well be criminals with the stuff they want. These are tax paying, law abiding, average joes that have given up on trying to "stay legal" within their hobby.
1. Here is the flow chart to figure out if the rifle you've done target practice with for years and is legal in most of the US will get you thrown in jail: https://www.calguns.net/caawid/flowchart.pdf
This statement sounds like “I’m a responsible pro gun person, but obviously the ones who aren’t are <insert random unliked group>!!”. That’s not much of an argument?
Also yeah, furries seem to be getting into guns, and also seem to be acting with due safety, so I'm a fan of that happening.
Look, people in the 1940s were able to manufacture effective submachine guns while living in countries occupied by Nazi Germany. If it was doable with the tools available then and under the constant threat of armed soldiers legally ransacking your home or business without warning or warrant, it is doable today and in any conceivable future.
There is nothing particularly novel about the threat scenarios caused by ghost guns. The only thing that is novel is the reduced cost of obtaining an illegal gun.
Nobody's sitting around going "hmmm, I used to be a law abiding citizen, but now that I can 3D print an illegal gun instead of buying it, I will use it to go out and do crimes".
That alone puts such business far, far outside the comfort zone of any normal 3D printing hobbyist.
Under that hypothesis, shouldn't 3D printed firearms be a much larger problem in countries where access to firearms is much more restricted than the US?
I've seen a number of comments criticize the reporting, inferring that it's the press that's generating the fear and confusion here.
I think this is in error. The press may be guilty of amplifying FUD but it is obvious that the creation and shape of this particular narrative is from the LAPD.
Is the LAT guilty of parroting LEO w/o providing sufficient analysis? That sounds reasonable to me. News orgs republishing Gov/Biz/LEO PR - w/o analysis or related context - happens pretty much every day in every US town.
But criticizing the press (again, reasonably) while giving the cops who designed and crafted the FUD a pass - I think this shows us that tribalism is rating higher than fixing broken things.