3-D printing technology could make efforts to curb weapons impossible. Background checks and gun regulations will do little good if criminals can print Guns and high-capacity magazines at home. Forbes has recently published an article after Defense Distributed, an open source DIY gunsmith group working to manufacture both guns and their accessories using 3D printing technology, successfully printed and tested a 30-round AR-15 magazine
Defense Distributed also printed an AR15 lower receiver (main part of the gun) They thought it would last for about ten shots but it failed after 6. They are doing a redesign beefing up the weak parts. Eventually they will print with metal rather than plastic. Printing will not produce anything than can not be built in a shop but it will allow mass reproduction. Gun control nuts do not apply any logic they run strictly on emotion.
All defense distributed plans are available for free download at their website, pick up a printer and you are good to go.
Naw…they just appear to run on emotion and to be il-informed.
The term “assault weapon” was coined, about a decade or so back, by a gun control executive type, named Josh Sugarman, to deliberately confuse the term semi-auto matic with full automatic. This why so many think AR15’s are machine guns or are used by the military. It’s deliberate…..not ignorance.
It’s like “hide the decline” is proof that the climate alarmists were fully aware the AGW was a false concept.
It is mafeasance…not incompetance.
The term “modern sporting rifle” is appropriate in that these represent an altogether new concept in architecture (and appearance)….in principle a modern Rem 700 is the same architecture as a Brown Bess.
Really anyone with a bit of patience and access to a machine shop can make a garage gun(or something like the liberator pistol) which fires a .45acp, heck I mean people have been making pipe rifles for decades. While I’m pretty interested in 3d printing the real problem with it, is the vibration and shock that the plastic takes. While the plastic is good for things like prosthetics on arms and sometimes legs if it’s reinforced, it doesn’t usually take hard and jarring repeatedly well against a metal frame well, it’s a problem the hubby’s company has been running into on their printed stuff and prefab testing as well.
I thought that a zip gun (treasured in bad detective novels of my youth) was a type of homemade gun? They were notoriously inaccurate, but impossible to trace.
If portions of the printed gun are only good for 6 shots, would deformation of the plastic barrel make current ballistics matching impossible? For that matter, melt down the barrel, or entire gun, and reprint to destroy the evidence.
Plastic works fine for magazines. I have one somewhere – somewhere stored safely. Of course, no-one would ever print one as it’s illegal. Just like no-one would ever murder anyone because it’s illegal.
This is a no brainer. The Feds will soon legislate the requirement for license and registration to own a ‘3D Printer’.
Yeah, that’s the ticket. Commonsense ‘3D Printer’ laws!
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Plastic magazines work fine, and the production of 30 rounders is apparently very easy. Magpul, one of the leading manufacturers, makes one very similar to the printed one. Receivers, could be turned out in a home CNC milling machine, or cast, in many hobby level processes.
Plastic barrel, wouldn’t work, but some manufacturers make barrels out of similar metals, with steel liners..
All of the above are focused on AR derivatives, but realistically, its easier to make a complete, functional Sub-machine gun, out of products available in a hardware store.. the plans are available at home gunsmith dot com..
Zip guns?? A onetime young kid I am familiar with made a functioning 22 long-rifle gun using a car antenna. It was never street-ready using electric ignition but it fired many rounds clamped securely in a vise with the gunsmith around the corner. Surprisingly, not once did the barrel fail.
Two words of advice. Don’t ever put a primer on an anvil and hit it with a hammer. Kind of wakes you up. Also don’t fire a low powered round at a rubber tire. That one wakes you up too.
They printed the lower receiver, not the upper. The barrel was still metal.
I’m sure the Liberals and NDP are already thinking how to set up a 3D Printer Registry that will only cost a couple of bill…..er million bucks.
Either that or a plastic registry. Maybe because there are some violent novels out there we should set up an ink registry. And a pen registry since a Colorado Democrat says women should use pens to stop a rapist.
This is terrible.
This must be George Bush’s fault.
With hundreds of millions of guns already out there, I can’t believe these idiots are still kicking this dead horse against all logic and rationale. I think the Bloombergs of the world have made these power tripping fools think they can ban anything they desire. Correct so far, but this is where it will have to end. If it doesn’t Democracy is finished.
I’ve yet to see how they print the spring.
The spring is nothing more than folded metal. Could be made in two minutes.
2 1/2 in Newfoundland.
Very nice springs can be twisted up out of standard issue piano wire. You can make a spring out of plastic, I’ve seen it done. But not the usual spiral kind we see made of wire. For that matter springs can be made f wood.
So is the spring inserted separately? or how does that work?
“The more the government regulates, the sneakier people get.”
In the apartheid days in South Africa the rebels made pipe guns and in Syria at present the rebels are making grenades and mortar shells. Imagine what the retired or unemployed machinists in the USA could make considering that everyone of them has better equipment and better steels than Peter Paul Mauser and John Moses Browning ever had.
The only machine tool necessary to make a rifle that is not commonly available is the rifling ‘button’ but that tool can be made by any machinist. There are dozens of youtube videos showing barrels being fabricated in home workshops. When prohibition was introduced many people quickly learned how to make bath tub gin. I expect a similar learning curve is just starting.
M here is a quick video that shows a pistol magazine being disassembled. As you can see there are only five parts to a magazine. I had to take apart and modify every magazine I owned to restrict the capacity 20 years ago and there’s no rocket science involved in their manufacture.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RgQKishug8c
3D printers are a revolution in themselves, this administration is going to hate them even more than ATM’s. The Soviet Union restricted printer use and that worked pretty well for them up until the collapse, since Obama and the Dems want to follow that pattern to collapse, why not adopt their laws…
Have caught myself referring to gun control as, “people control” a few times as of late.
Heh heh, this gun-tard myth is right up there with the x-ray invisible ceramic gun, powder taggants, firing pin microstamping, ballistic imprinting, ballistic engraving and even misclassifying self loaders as assault weapons. Don’t you just love watching lefty paranoia caving in their heads.
Now let’s see it print some ammo.
I am still trying to figure out what a semi-automatic pistol is. I know what an automatic pistol is and what a machine pistol is.
Same thing as a semi-automatic rifle. Every time you fire a round, it chambers a new one as you pull the trigger. Unlike the automatic pistol though, it won’t empty the entire clip if you keep the trigger depressed.
There was an episode of CSI:NYC about this. In that show, the gun exploded after a few shots. Clearly, superior technology could prevent that from happening.
Never thought in my lifetime that we’d have Star Trek replicators or anything like them. I was wrong.
Glenn Beck couldn’t comprehend the idea of 3D printed guns, which leaves me to wonder what the neo liberal/conservative establishment will do to counter this innovation. But the way I see is you can’t kill idea nor can you dictate the actions of one individual. The free market will continue to invent things that most control freaks absolutely hate, whatever.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwkX8sWSxNQ