There are just so many interesting angles to this story. I'll start with just one...
The government is always behind the curve when it comes to regulating technology. The rise of text messaging has forced local and state governments to create new laws to discourage/punish distracted driving. Airbnb and Uber have disrupted the traditional hotel and taxicab industries respectively, and have caused lawmakers to rethink how best to regulate those industries.
3-D printing is on the verge of becoming a mainstream technology and we'll continue to see more issues like the one highlighted in this story.
The Second Amendment to the US Constitution protects the right of the people to keep and bear arms. Does it also allow us to print our own weapons? Does the First Amendment to the US Constitution protect websites that provide instructions and blueprints on how to print your own weapons (or parts of weapons)?
Cases like Uber aren't just pushing governments to rethink regulations, but these emerging businesses are routing around regulations. This is an encouraging trend, I think. As government stifles certain industries (like taxis) with regulation, creative entrepreneurs can still find ways to give people choices.
On another topic, if governments go after websites that host information on the "printing" of weapons, those sites can switch their hosting provider to a friendlier country. Failing that, they can become onion sites, or something similar. Again, people can manage to stay ahead of whatever government is doing.
Gun control or the lack of it in the U.S. is ultimately due to regulatory capture by the gun industry. I'm sure legislators will draft into laws provisions that would make sure the legal gun industry retains its commercial upsides over 3D printing.
That is not even close to true. The gun industry is tiny. The real power comes from the millions of individuals who vote in unison on the issues and who have an uncanny political memory (aka the NRA, but they are really just a small subset of gun rights activists).
Let's briefly talk about gun ownership issues. There are two classes of people who use guns. Those who have a practical need for it, and those who use guns recreationally.
The second group are not dissimilar to people who drive Dodge because they want to honor the "farmer in themselves", or people who'd never take their 4WD off-road. It is the same people who buys Harleys and tattoo Harley Davidson's logo. These are "aspirationals".
These aspirations don't come out of no where. There's marketing dollars at work.
Harley Davidson's may be a way of life for many, and represents an important social outlet. It doesn't take away the fact the Harley Davidson is a commercial endeavour.
Private gun ownership is a billion dollar per year industry in the U.S. This is not a niche market. (Harley Davidson's motorcycle sales was $771m per quarter).
My thesis is that the NRA, being driven by commercial interests rather than 2nd amendment ideals, will come out in opposition to 3D printing of arms.
We've had a problem over the last decade or so: how do governments deal with populations where the individuals have more and more power?
America has traditionally been more libertarian than most countries, so the crisis isn't as bad here, but we still see the signs. We're outlawing doing certain kinds of reverse engineering, we're making copyright violations a criminal offense, and so forth. (Most of our government reaction has been in the form of protecting large industries).
Some other countries are seeing crackdowns on where you can go on the internet, who you can talk to. To those countries, individuals simply having the power to gather information is too much for them.
I hate to make cataclysmic predictions, but I think the U.S. is going to get pulled more and more into your house and head. Where you surf, what you consume, what kinds of things you print on your 3-D printers. 3-D printing is the thing that is going to change everything, because now we can make whatever we need without having to rely on established patterns of commerce (which the government can control).
If it helps any, I don't think this is some sort of deliberate power grab. Quite frankly I don't think the people we have running things are anywhere near qualified enough to be making the decisions they are, On top of that, we have no examples throughout history of a government with the ability to control and monitor so much of each person's life. There's no precedent.
3-D printing, to me, is the one tech that over the next 50 years or so will dramatically change everything. Robots are a close second. Fun times to be alive! (Or perhaps a more accurate word than "fun" would be "interesting")
"America has traditionally been more libertarian than most countries, so the crisis isn't as bad here, but we still see the signs."
I think we're way past seeing a few signs. I encourage you to read Naomi Wolf's 2007 article 'Fascist America, in 10 easy steps' [1] or watch the presentation 'The End of America' [2].
It'll be even more fun when argiculture and currency become distributed. I know that we already have bitcoin but imagine if it entered the mainstream. The powers that be would be reeling since they would effectively no longer be relevant and would have very little influence left.
Personally, I think that this is all going to cause today's authorities to become increasingly violent until they collapse as a result of the new ways making them obsolete. Then we just might see another golden age for humanity. My forecast is thunderstorms followed by bright sunshine.
I think you're right, particularly when it comes to currency. Currency is the absolutely pinnacle of power of modern governments. Loss of that power means weaker governments. Most people don't realize that for much of the USA's early existence, currency was essentially outsourced to the Spanish Empire in the form of silver coins.
Why is 3D printing a gun any different to making one with machining tools? Surely the same laws should apply, and this is just an advancement of home-manufacturing technology that has no real involvement with gun laws.
I use SLA 3D printing almost weekly for rapid prototyping (in the past I've used powder sintered 3D printing as well). If you can find the proper CAD file (I use STEP, or IGES), it can be made. If those plans were distributed on P2P, it would be as simple as importing the files, orient the build, and then press a button, then assemble after the run.
It's relatively easy to manufacture most of an AK-47 using machines that are affordable and that fit in a garage (the exception being rifled barrels, but those are relatively easy to find). In the US, it's also perfectly legal, as long as the firearm is not capable of automatic fire. If you have a CNC mill, you can make your own AR-15 (again, you'll probably have to buy a barrel).
The "OMG people will print guns" stuff is just hysteria and grandstanding.
Even with CNC programming, a person has to have skills to properly mount and orient the work (center if on a CNC lathe, zero the coordinate system if on a mill), machine, and assemble. It takes decent skill to make a firearm with conventional machining.
The concern (I'm not saying it's a founded concern) is that 3D printing would allow unskilled folks to download increasingly complex plans and implement them with little skill. The pool of people with good CNC machining skills (and access to at least $10K worth of very heavy equipment) is probably less than the pool of people with $5K spare cash (ballparking what a future 3D printer might cost) and only basic mechanical skills.
Except, as brought up elsewhere in the thread - the present state of 3D printing (and the state in the foreseeable future) also require substantial personal skill to print a weapon.
The prospect of an unskilled individual loading a file in a program, hitting "print", and retrieving a usable gun from the other end, is not at all realistic.
I still don't see what distinguishes this from good old gunsmithing laws/issues.
You're overstating the ease with which you can create a rifle with machine tools. While it can be done, it is both time consuming and very difficult to do in a home shop, or even a proper shop.
If 3D printers could print materials with the appropriate structural characteristics (a huge if), it would be much easier.
I have serious doubts about that happening in my lifetime. It's quite a trick to go from printing ABS to printing hardened steel.
My point isn't that it's a simple job. My point is that it's legal today, and that you /can/ do it. A beginner with a 20 ton press and some other simple tools could probably bend an AK blank and have a rifle in a week or so. I don't know what's involved in making the blank (probably a way to cut sheet steel and a jig for drilling accurate holes). Fiddly bits (springs and such) are available in kits; these are tough to make yourself, but people do.
There's a video of gun shops in Pakistan making perfectly servicable rifles under extremely primitive conditions. Of course, the folks doing this have a lot of experience.
Sure, printing would make it easier. No, the current 3D printer materials will not work. On the other hand, the AK is designed so that the receiver doesn't need to be uber strong, and we might not be /that/ far from the required material strength for everything except the barrel.
You seem to be assuming that the term rifle always implies something complicated like an AR-15 or AK.
The most likely reason someone would go about creating a rifle in their garage due to an oppressive government is because most likely all guns have been banned and confiscated. In that situation, the ability to create a simple bolt-action rifle would be of immense value to anyone fighting the oppressive government. For that matter, a good shotgun that doesn't require rifling is better than nothing. Another option is to make smooth-bore musket types, in the past they were accurate up to 100 yards or so.
Considering that in the past rifles were created by hand with simple tools, as compared to today's technology, I don't find it hard to believe that a small group of dedicated people can figure out how to make somewhat quality firearms in their garage with modern tools.
This talk of people making something like an AR-15 from a printer anytime soon is just someone that's looking for something political out of it, a scare the populace tactic.
It is harder to make a bolt action rifle than an AR-15. The skill and time involved are substantial in both cases, but creating a heat treated bolt gun receiver that works is no joke.
But what is much more interesting to me is the interplay between technology and the law. The lower receiver, the regulated part, will be printable (usefully so) within a decade in my view. That makes it possible for someone with basic skills to own a proper semiautomatic rifle without the government even knowing about it. Would that cause regulation of other parts like barrels? Maybe, but barrels are expendable parts...I'm pretty sure the NRA would blow a gasket over that for more than one reason. Triggers? How? What's a "trigger?" Guns, like information, want to be free.
It all puts gun control advocates in a bit of a pickle. In fact, it puts prohibitionists of all kinds in a pickle. And that is a good thing.
Well, I was speaking more in terms of functionality, not materials. I didn't mean to imply that making a bolt action rifle was easy, but I find it hard to believe it is harder to make a bolt action rifle versus a semi-automatic AR-15. I'm not a gunsmith, so I could be wrong but the difference in complexity between the two seems to suggest this. I would have to assume that making a single action revolver would be easier than a semi-automatic handgun.
Discussions of quality of the resulting weapon is a different matter though.
If we had printers capable of making a functional gun, then the government can try to regulate individual parts all they wanted. It would make no difference. It's only a matter of time before there's a simple way of making a high quality rifled barrel of your choice of caliber. They would have to look into controlling the materials required; metals, gunpowder, and so on. Even then that's a losing endeavor, simply because how can you tell the intentions of the person buying the materials? You can't.
This goes beyond weapons, the ability to create nearly anything you want in your home with no one knowing opens up a huge can of worms that I feel that most people simply cannot comprehend.
The difference is in the complexity of the parts. A bolt gun receiver is much more complex to build than any part on an AR-15, which is the closest thing out there to a gun you can just bolt together.
But yeah, this genie is not going back in the bottle.
More sensationalism about 3D printed guns. People, please - nobody is going to be printing a functioning gun purely out of ABS plastic on a <$1k hobby printer for a long time(if ever).
The only people who might be printing guns(requiring pretty rigorous touchup after the printing process) are those with access with extremely expensive printers that can print metal.
I sincerely hope this doesn't lead to regulating 3d printing into oblivion. Just like the entertainment industry wishes it got the jump on filesharing, I'm sure big manufacturing is prepping its lobbying efforts.
Yes, the fact the article refers to > than 1k (but still not terribly expensive) printers using 'advanced polymer' instead of ABS makes it yet another article about using pure ABS plastic on a sub-1k printer...
I'll agree that metal is probably a requirement for a barrel. But barrels are not controlled or restricted. Neither are magazines, which we know can be printed already with some success.
I'd love to see some 'advanced polymers' that can handle the stress of a caliber greater than .22LR(which is what Defense Distributed tested with), while simultaneously being printed with the precision necessary from a printer costing <$10k.
It's also worth pointing out you can already buy all of the components necessary to assemble your own firearm, all without a serial number. I think the deeper issue here is, as another comment pointed out, there are entrenched interests promoting this hysteria to garner public sentiment for regulation by making the scary applications glaringly obvious and overshadowing the beneficial implications of the technology.
It's also worth pointing out you can already buy all of the components necessary to assemble your own firearm, all without a serial number
Not exactly true. Every legal gun has one part with a serial number that defines the gun legally. Usually (always?) it's the receiver. There are some grey areas where you can get an almost finished receiver free of regulation.
The comment was referencing the fact that you can make a gun for yourself without a serial number as long as you don't sell it or do anything with it that is defined as 'transfer.'
>> Just like the entertainment industry wishes it got the jump on filesharing, I'm sure big manufacturing is prepping its lobbying efforts.
Or possibly is already working hard to focus all conversations about 3D printing toward scary applications that make people want to regulate it heavily.
It's almost a year old, but Scott Locklin's comments are still pertinent, especially since it discusses the AR-15 which the Washington Post article discusses.
3d printing guns might be bad news for opressive regimes. I grew up under one, remember all the measures to regulate the use of xerox copy machines. A book was an enemy of the regime. Imagine guns instead. Now, where to get enough amunition?
With 3d printers you are printing layers, like a conventional printer, but one over the others. In fact you could even use the same heads, I could 3d print wax with my printer and an Epson Inkjet head.
Should we stop saying 'telephone call', when 'to call' meant to actually visit somebody? Of course not. Language is defined by usage, not by the dictionary.
It seems like a different sort of a thing. The trouble with drunk driving is that someone is doing something dangerous that could cause someone to get hurt unintentionally. The trouble with guns is that bad people intentionally use them to do bad things.
Stopping the drunk on the seventeenth instance of driving drunk makes good sense, because it stops someone getting hurt on the ninety fourth instance.
Stopping someone intent on committing murder on the seventeenth instance is too little too late. You have to stop them the first time, or make it so that they don't find murder to be an acceptable course of conduct regardless of the legality of the tools.
>There is nothing wrong with having gun control laws.
There is something seriously wrong with having laws you can't enforce. It erodes respect for the law in general and it promotes demagoguery and a dangerous trend of expansion in police powers as the law inevitably proves to be unenforceable, law enforcement demands dangerous powers that still don't allow the law to be enforced, and the new powers fail to resolve the issue that the law is unenforceable generating a renewed call for more new and dangerous police powers.
Another example following your unenforceable laws logic, drug laws. Look at how many civil liberties have been tossed to the side in the ever expanding drug war, even though most applications of these laws these days having nothing to do with drugs. No-knock raids are pretty much the standard on serving a search warrant now.
>He suggests one way to prevent dangerous, illegal usage of 3-D printers is to better control gunpowder, an idea that has come up in gun control in the past.
Isn't gunpowder pretty easy to manufacture too? Not with a 3D printer, obviously, but with common materials and a cursory knowledge of chemistry.
>When I tell them the law that would stop these plastic guns from getting onto planes is expiring in just a few months, people are appalled.
This is the essence of missing the point. The issue with 3D printed weapons is that you can't ban them. I have to imagine that it's already illegal to bring a gun onto a plane, so he has to be talking about banning their manufacture, which is the exact thing 3D printing will make moot.
Can we please at some point graduate from trying to prohibit anything with a sharp edge and instead try to address crime and terrorism at the root? I realize that isn't as profitable with campaign contributors or as rhetorically effective in frightening the voters, but the point of a representative rather than direct democracy is that legislators are supposed to make hard or unpopular decisions when it's necessary.
In theory - but not at a quality level approaching what you can buy at a gun store today. But primers are the hard part. I don't know of anyone who has made their own primers.
Today's politics and laws are about emotion. A group has an emotional crisis so a law must be written to address it. Most bad things in life are already illegal, but there seems to be the desire to add more laws to address that specific thing that bothers that specific group. Even though it is already covered by a number of other laws. Politicians take advantage of this with the typical "we must do something!" or "we must do this for the 'whatever'" (typically children) rhetoric that addresses the emotion but tosses out all logic. It's similar to the perpetual war concept by always pointing over the border at "the enemy".
The problem is that your average person doesn't know enough of what's going on in the world and probably cannot do so anyway, that's the point of a representative government. That's another thing that politician's take advantage of, a person's willingness to believe whatever an "expert" states. Of course it's illegal to carry a firearm onto a plane, except for certain situations (police and so forth), but when someone of authority says that laws that prevent plastic guns from going on planes are expiring the average people assume the politician means that it will suddenly be legal to do so. That's not necessarily true, there are several other laws to prevent such a thing from happening. But the authority figure in his rhetoric chooses not to mention that.
As for almost all gun ban laws in place or have ever been proposed, if you take a hard look, do nothing in terms of preventing any other laws from being broken. Most mass shootings happen in areas where it is known the likelihood of another gun being on the premises is low because the law makes it a "gun-free zone". Gun ban laws tend to lean towards banning guns based on cosmetic features, not the actual functionality of the weapons involved.
They're probably not going to test gun control as much as the press thinks. Calibrating cheap 3D printers is hard, and chances are it's going to take quite a bit of tweaking to print off a reliable magazine or other part on a new printer. I can easily see would-be spree killers getting stopped mid-massacre because their misprinted magazine jammed.
Calibrating cheap 3D printers is hard right now. That doesn't mean it always will be. The good ones will get cheaper and the cheap ones will get better.
It used to be hard to get a computer to use a new paper printer at all. Now it's almost always plug-and-play.
You could imagine a 3D printer that prints test objects, scans them in great detail to find defects, and calibrates itself accordingly.
Exactly right. Computers used to be hard to build by hand years ago, you had to solder your own boards for gosh sakes. These days you buy the components off the shelf and stick them together correctly.
What is hard today will most likely be easy tomorrow.
I think there's some failure of the imagination here. 3D printing as we know it today will soon be only one tool in the automated arsenal. As robotics improve and 3D printing improves, the idea of a fully automated shop that fits in a reasonable size is not silly. You say you need a lathe to really make a gun? OK, fine, I tend to agree that current 3D printing techniques will never really make you a decent barrel... but what the stopper on a robotic lathe, or other robotic tool for building barrels? There isn't one.
54 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 105 ms ] threadThe government is always behind the curve when it comes to regulating technology. The rise of text messaging has forced local and state governments to create new laws to discourage/punish distracted driving. Airbnb and Uber have disrupted the traditional hotel and taxicab industries respectively, and have caused lawmakers to rethink how best to regulate those industries.
3-D printing is on the verge of becoming a mainstream technology and we'll continue to see more issues like the one highlighted in this story.
The Second Amendment to the US Constitution protects the right of the people to keep and bear arms. Does it also allow us to print our own weapons? Does the First Amendment to the US Constitution protect websites that provide instructions and blueprints on how to print your own weapons (or parts of weapons)?
The bill of rights restricts government, not the people. It is an important distinction missed by many.
On another topic, if governments go after websites that host information on the "printing" of weapons, those sites can switch their hosting provider to a friendlier country. Failing that, they can become onion sites, or something similar. Again, people can manage to stay ahead of whatever government is doing.
The second group are not dissimilar to people who drive Dodge because they want to honor the "farmer in themselves", or people who'd never take their 4WD off-road. It is the same people who buys Harleys and tattoo Harley Davidson's logo. These are "aspirationals".
These aspirations don't come out of no where. There's marketing dollars at work.
Harley Davidson's may be a way of life for many, and represents an important social outlet. It doesn't take away the fact the Harley Davidson is a commercial endeavour.
Private gun ownership is a billion dollar per year industry in the U.S. This is not a niche market. (Harley Davidson's motorcycle sales was $771m per quarter).
My thesis is that the NRA, being driven by commercial interests rather than 2nd amendment ideals, will come out in opposition to 3D printing of arms.
America has traditionally been more libertarian than most countries, so the crisis isn't as bad here, but we still see the signs. We're outlawing doing certain kinds of reverse engineering, we're making copyright violations a criminal offense, and so forth. (Most of our government reaction has been in the form of protecting large industries).
Some other countries are seeing crackdowns on where you can go on the internet, who you can talk to. To those countries, individuals simply having the power to gather information is too much for them.
I hate to make cataclysmic predictions, but I think the U.S. is going to get pulled more and more into your house and head. Where you surf, what you consume, what kinds of things you print on your 3-D printers. 3-D printing is the thing that is going to change everything, because now we can make whatever we need without having to rely on established patterns of commerce (which the government can control).
If it helps any, I don't think this is some sort of deliberate power grab. Quite frankly I don't think the people we have running things are anywhere near qualified enough to be making the decisions they are, On top of that, we have no examples throughout history of a government with the ability to control and monitor so much of each person's life. There's no precedent.
3-D printing, to me, is the one tech that over the next 50 years or so will dramatically change everything. Robots are a close second. Fun times to be alive! (Or perhaps a more accurate word than "fun" would be "interesting")
I think we're way past seeing a few signs. I encourage you to read Naomi Wolf's 2007 article 'Fascist America, in 10 easy steps' [1] or watch the presentation 'The End of America' [2].
[1] http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/apr/24/usa.comment
[2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Skhd9NCseF4
Personally, I think that this is all going to cause today's authorities to become increasingly violent until they collapse as a result of the new ways making them obsolete. Then we just might see another golden age for humanity. My forecast is thunderstorms followed by bright sunshine.
The "OMG people will print guns" stuff is just hysteria and grandstanding.
The concern (I'm not saying it's a founded concern) is that 3D printing would allow unskilled folks to download increasingly complex plans and implement them with little skill. The pool of people with good CNC machining skills (and access to at least $10K worth of very heavy equipment) is probably less than the pool of people with $5K spare cash (ballparking what a future 3D printer might cost) and only basic mechanical skills.
The prospect of an unskilled individual loading a file in a program, hitting "print", and retrieving a usable gun from the other end, is not at all realistic.
I still don't see what distinguishes this from good old gunsmithing laws/issues.
If 3D printers could print materials with the appropriate structural characteristics (a huge if), it would be much easier.
I have serious doubts about that happening in my lifetime. It's quite a trick to go from printing ABS to printing hardened steel.
There's a video of gun shops in Pakistan making perfectly servicable rifles under extremely primitive conditions. Of course, the folks doing this have a lot of experience.
Sure, printing would make it easier. No, the current 3D printer materials will not work. On the other hand, the AK is designed so that the receiver doesn't need to be uber strong, and we might not be /that/ far from the required material strength for everything except the barrel.
The most likely reason someone would go about creating a rifle in their garage due to an oppressive government is because most likely all guns have been banned and confiscated. In that situation, the ability to create a simple bolt-action rifle would be of immense value to anyone fighting the oppressive government. For that matter, a good shotgun that doesn't require rifling is better than nothing. Another option is to make smooth-bore musket types, in the past they were accurate up to 100 yards or so.
Considering that in the past rifles were created by hand with simple tools, as compared to today's technology, I don't find it hard to believe that a small group of dedicated people can figure out how to make somewhat quality firearms in their garage with modern tools.
This talk of people making something like an AR-15 from a printer anytime soon is just someone that's looking for something political out of it, a scare the populace tactic.
But what is much more interesting to me is the interplay between technology and the law. The lower receiver, the regulated part, will be printable (usefully so) within a decade in my view. That makes it possible for someone with basic skills to own a proper semiautomatic rifle without the government even knowing about it. Would that cause regulation of other parts like barrels? Maybe, but barrels are expendable parts...I'm pretty sure the NRA would blow a gasket over that for more than one reason. Triggers? How? What's a "trigger?" Guns, like information, want to be free.
It all puts gun control advocates in a bit of a pickle. In fact, it puts prohibitionists of all kinds in a pickle. And that is a good thing.
Discussions of quality of the resulting weapon is a different matter though.
If we had printers capable of making a functional gun, then the government can try to regulate individual parts all they wanted. It would make no difference. It's only a matter of time before there's a simple way of making a high quality rifled barrel of your choice of caliber. They would have to look into controlling the materials required; metals, gunpowder, and so on. Even then that's a losing endeavor, simply because how can you tell the intentions of the person buying the materials? You can't.
This goes beyond weapons, the ability to create nearly anything you want in your home with no one knowing opens up a huge can of worms that I feel that most people simply cannot comprehend.
But yeah, this genie is not going back in the bottle.
The only people who might be printing guns(requiring pretty rigorous touchup after the printing process) are those with access with extremely expensive printers that can print metal.
I sincerely hope this doesn't lead to regulating 3d printing into oblivion. Just like the entertainment industry wishes it got the jump on filesharing, I'm sure big manufacturing is prepping its lobbying efforts.
I'll agree that metal is probably a requirement for a barrel. But barrels are not controlled or restricted. Neither are magazines, which we know can be printed already with some success.
It's also worth pointing out you can already buy all of the components necessary to assemble your own firearm, all without a serial number. I think the deeper issue here is, as another comment pointed out, there are entrenched interests promoting this hysteria to garner public sentiment for regulation by making the scary applications glaringly obvious and overshadowing the beneficial implications of the technology.
Not exactly true. Every legal gun has one part with a serial number that defines the gun legally. Usually (always?) it's the receiver. There are some grey areas where you can get an almost finished receiver free of regulation.
Or possibly is already working hard to focus all conversations about 3D printing toward scary applications that make people want to regulate it heavily.
https://scottlocklin.wordpress.com/2012/08/11/bad-engineerin...
print·ing /ˈprintiNG/ Noun
1. The production of books, newspapers, or other printed material.
2. A single impression of a book.
Synonyms print - press - impression - typography
With 3d printers you are printing layers, like a conventional printer, but one over the others. In fact you could even use the same heads, I could 3d print wax with my printer and an Epson Inkjet head.
But we still have those laws for darn good reasons.
There is nothing wrong with having gun control laws.
Stopping the drunk on the seventeenth instance of driving drunk makes good sense, because it stops someone getting hurt on the ninety fourth instance.
Stopping someone intent on committing murder on the seventeenth instance is too little too late. You have to stop them the first time, or make it so that they don't find murder to be an acceptable course of conduct regardless of the legality of the tools.
>There is nothing wrong with having gun control laws.
There is something seriously wrong with having laws you can't enforce. It erodes respect for the law in general and it promotes demagoguery and a dangerous trend of expansion in police powers as the law inevitably proves to be unenforceable, law enforcement demands dangerous powers that still don't allow the law to be enforced, and the new powers fail to resolve the issue that the law is unenforceable generating a renewed call for more new and dangerous police powers.
Gun control laws go beyond that. They seek to ban peaceful activities on the basis that it might stymie a few violent criminals... maybe.
Your analogy fails.
Isn't gunpowder pretty easy to manufacture too? Not with a 3D printer, obviously, but with common materials and a cursory knowledge of chemistry.
>When I tell them the law that would stop these plastic guns from getting onto planes is expiring in just a few months, people are appalled.
This is the essence of missing the point. The issue with 3D printed weapons is that you can't ban them. I have to imagine that it's already illegal to bring a gun onto a plane, so he has to be talking about banning their manufacture, which is the exact thing 3D printing will make moot.
Can we please at some point graduate from trying to prohibit anything with a sharp edge and instead try to address crime and terrorism at the root? I realize that isn't as profitable with campaign contributors or as rhetorically effective in frightening the voters, but the point of a representative rather than direct democracy is that legislators are supposed to make hard or unpopular decisions when it's necessary.
In theory - but not at a quality level approaching what you can buy at a gun store today. But primers are the hard part. I don't know of anyone who has made their own primers.
The problem is that your average person doesn't know enough of what's going on in the world and probably cannot do so anyway, that's the point of a representative government. That's another thing that politician's take advantage of, a person's willingness to believe whatever an "expert" states. Of course it's illegal to carry a firearm onto a plane, except for certain situations (police and so forth), but when someone of authority says that laws that prevent plastic guns from going on planes are expiring the average people assume the politician means that it will suddenly be legal to do so. That's not necessarily true, there are several other laws to prevent such a thing from happening. But the authority figure in his rhetoric chooses not to mention that.
As for almost all gun ban laws in place or have ever been proposed, if you take a hard look, do nothing in terms of preventing any other laws from being broken. Most mass shootings happen in areas where it is known the likelihood of another gun being on the premises is low because the law makes it a "gun-free zone". Gun ban laws tend to lean towards banning guns based on cosmetic features, not the actual functionality of the weapons involved.
It used to be hard to get a computer to use a new paper printer at all. Now it's almost always plug-and-play.
You could imagine a 3D printer that prints test objects, scans them in great detail to find defects, and calibrates itself accordingly.
What is hard today will most likely be easy tomorrow.
I think there's some failure of the imagination here. 3D printing as we know it today will soon be only one tool in the automated arsenal. As robotics improve and 3D printing improves, the idea of a fully automated shop that fits in a reasonable size is not silly. You say you need a lathe to really make a gun? OK, fine, I tend to agree that current 3D printing techniques will never really make you a decent barrel... but what the stopper on a robotic lathe, or other robotic tool for building barrels? There isn't one.
Zipguns / improvised firearms have been a thing for a long time -> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Improvised_firearm
Gunpowder is pretty easy to make as well.
Stop whining about 3-D printers it's not that big of a deal in regards to guns.