My take on 3D printed guns

[Courtesy Flush]

I've been saying this for a while, and now it's happening.

Just as the internet revolutionized the world, so too will 3D printers. They will free us from corporate consumer products, and allow the average person to download open-source goods, spare parts, etc., bypassing big business, and threatening their stronghold on consumers.

The corporate world will not let this happen. How will they stop it? I've been saying this all along... they'll stop it for our own protection. They'll make the public believe that 3D printing threatens our safety, and they'll be banned.

Doesn't this seem obvious?

[rdharma]

1. No! eom

[Courtesy Flush]

8. That's a pretty persuasive argument

but I'm not convinced.

[rdharma]

9. No "argument" needed........it's just a fact. eom

[onehandle]

2. Nope. But printed guns will be rolled into existing plastic gun laws.

This age of gun madness is the last vestige of the racist right.

People will put up with it for only so long.

[rdharma]

3. Very likely! eom

[NYC_SKP]

4. IMO, it'll be about situation as with printers, VCRs, and digital recordings/file sharing.

Some things will be copy protected, others will be open source, and everything in between.

[Posteritatis]

25. A lot of those faced concerted attempts to regulate or outlaw them, too. (nt)

[Jenoch]

5. I do not believe 3D printed

guns will be a aocietal problem because it is so much easier cheaper to buy an existing gun, not to mention better.

I think the inkjet printer technology will have great promise in the medical field.

[baldguy]

6. People who see this technology & can only think of ways to harm people with it are evil.

[rdharma]

14. Exactly!

Have you seen the titanium prosthetics they can make with this process? Amazing and wonderful!

[dairydog91]

7. Currently, it's just a canard used to get prohibitionists into a lather.

You'd probably spend less money buying a CNC machine than you would buying a quality 3d printer, and you could then download CAD files off the net and build genuine metal guns, instead of fooling around with a plastic smoothbore pistol. That technology is already out there (There's even youtube videos of people cutting their own AR-15s out of aluminum blocks). The internet allows for rapid transmission of CAD files, and you can grab plans for quite a few military style guns, not to mention magazines and other accessories. I don't see the person who released this plan onto the net as anything more than a marketing genius: He's managed to release plans for a gun which is far crappier and costs far more to produce than home-shop metal guns, yet he's getting more press than people who are essentially making fully-functional military rifles with a CNC machine.

[rdharma]

11. Oh, come on! It's the gun huggers who are glomming on to this BS.

Claiming it makes gun legislation "irrelevant"!

What a joke!

[dairydog91]

13. So they've realized they can troll people who want to ban guns.

And they've realized that somehow mentioning 3D printers, which really do far less than already-existing CNC technology, for some reason will rile some people up and make them demand increasingly-comical levels of government control over 3D plastic printing.

[rdharma]

17. The gun hugger trolls have already FAILED......

....... we're just laughing at them, dairydog91!

They're SO easy to spot!

[dairydog91]

19. Failed at what?

These "plastic gun" threads keep popping up. This supposed menace is a piece of shit zip gun with almost no range, a high risk of failure, and which requires a multi-thousand dollar printer to make. Yet somehow the ability for someone with a very expensive toy to make an utterly crappy zip gun is an OMG crises which necessitates proclamations of "Government's gotta control this! National Crisis! Gun Lovers!" People show up to argue that the government must ban this, either because they're being way oversensitive to this or because they're concern trolls. Why are people so flipping upset over a piece of shit zip gun?

[Posteritatis]

24. The media wants them to be, basically.

The combination of that and people generally not knowing much about the subjects the media are panicking about (because the media itself is just as clueless) is pretty odious.

[jberryhill]

27. I thoroughly admire your take on this meme

[JaneyVee]

10. I like the idea of subverting corporations and downloading products, but guns? Ugh.

[cynatnite]

16. What makes you think you'd be able to subvert corporations?

They could get their hands on these products to get a piece of the pie. Of course, there could be ways (not legal) to get around them if one so chooses.

That's even if 3D printing becomes as common as using the $100 printer at home.

[JaneyVee]

18. Yeah, I was thinking like torrent sites for products/codes.

[TampaAnimusVortex]

12. They can no more be banned than sharing music or videos could be stopped.

Do you think corporations would have stopped file sharing of music and video if they could have? Government is not omnipotent. Countries have borders...the internet doesn't.

[dogknob]

30. They couldn't stop file-sharing because it's not what they're really worried about...

They're worried about you and I and that wanna-be feminist NIMB-eral jackass... being able to speak to each other and not needing them.

The RIAA doesn't care if you downloaded a copy of Cat Scratch Fever. They care about you recording and distributing music without their involvement. "Piracy" is a big scary quack word meaning "Help! I'm Irrelevant!"

[Renew Deal]

15. How sophisticated are those printers?

I don't think they have the ability to recreate most products. Also, I don't think that 3D printers will be affordable enough that everyone will have one.

3D printers are a manufacturing tool. In theory, manufacturers must respect patents.

[Posteritatis]

23. Just about any on the market now are single-medium sort of things

They'll print one type of material, usually one type or another of plastic in coils or other formats (though it varies), and can output some pretty intricate things at the moment. A lot of the emphasis in the designs at this point is on resolution instead of size, so there's a goal of "I want to make something as finely detailed as possible in this half cubic foot of space" going on with a lot of the designers of the printers themselves.

A couple of friends and I are planning on chipping in together on one for a few projects sometime in the next year; we're expecting to budget $2-3K for it depending on where the prices are by then, so maybe in a similar range as an entry-level set of machine shop tools (or one good lathe/drill press/etc). Someone could probably correct me on the prices there, since I'm bereft of machine shops. Basically, they're not cheap, but someone willing to put a few grand into a hobby or business would be able to keep one running.

[NYC_SKP]

33. Their greatest limitation right now is that they don't use good strong engineered plastics.

The resolution isn't very good on the lower cost models.

And, they depend upon using low strength, low melting point materials like ABS because that's how they work- by melting a bead of plastic in layers from bottom to top until the part is there.

Eventually, they'll use stronger materials, but there are other digital fabrication techniques like metal sintering and CNC machining of metal and other materials.

For somebody who wants to build a gun, it's cheaper and easier to buy a lathe and a mill and do it the old fashioned way.

[brooklynite]

20. ...just like Corporations got the Government to ban the right to grow your own food?

The problem with conspiracy theories is that the start to sound silly as soon as you think about them.

[loli phabay]

21. wait, what, we cant grow our own food. erm thats just weed tomatoes etc growing on my land

Mr government worker.

[madville]

22. People act like making guns was impossible before

You could make the same gun out of plastic or metal with a CNC mill and/or lathe or a manual mill/lathe. It's perfectly legal as well as long as the person would not otherwise be prohibited from ownership and doesn't transfer it.

These plastic gun files are a great marketing tool and publicity stunt though, useless in the real world but they have certainly riled everyone up and got the maker a ton of free advertising and press.

[jberryhill]

26. +1

[lumberjack_jeff]

28. +2. The 3d printer industry couldn't have invented a better marketing vehicle. n/t

[kudzu22]

29. The 3D liberator gun is exactly the kind of gun DiFi thinks we should have

It only fires a .22, it's incredibly expensive, and has to be reloaded after each shot. There will never be a school massacre with a printed plastic gun.

[napoleon_in_rags]

31. Rec'd just for mentioning the industrial change.

Decentralized manufacturing. If this takes off, it could be as transformative as the Internet was. Very exciting stuff. A possible golden age of amateur engineering: Whereas the PC revolution put the computing power of a million information workers at the fingertips of the average Joe, this puts the power of industrial workers and factories at our fingertips. Man that's cool!

[dogknob]

32. OK, so I got the damn thing...

The README has a discreet wink-wink-nudge-nudge concerning how to build the gun so it is "detectable" and therefore "legal."

I'm fed up enough with the absurdity of our culture to laugh my ass off the first time I read about some dickbug blowing his own nuts off with one of these.