The semantics of gun control...

[Straw Man]

115. Yet only sterility achieves the goal ...

... of safety.

The point is not to achieve sterility, which no one believes possible.

The point is to make it much harder for the next Adam Lanza to lay his hands on high-capacity magazines.

In other words, the goal is to inconvenience spree killers. That'll show 'em.

A thirty-round AR magazine is not "high-capacity." It is standard-capacity.

Yes, you could use your 3-D printer (which of course, everyone has and knows how to use) to fabricate one, assuming you could find a design that you were fairly confident was created by someone who knew his ass from a hole in the ground.

Design? We're not reinventing the wheel here. The design comes from one of the millions of extant magazines.

You'd then have to purchase the non-plastic parts, like fasteners and springs.

Yeah, that's a daunting task in modern America. Springs and fasteners? Omigod, where are we ever going to find those?

Then you'd have to assemble and test your baby, unless on your planet, mechanical devices that have never been tested always work.

Assembly is a snap-together process. Test? We're working from a proven design -- remember? The first few would have to be function-tested, yes, but after that it's good-to-go. A magazine is a spring in a box. It's not rocket surgery.

Unless you have a gun range in your basement, you'd have to take the magazine somewhere to test it.

Function testing of a magazine can be done without firing the gun. Manual cycling will identify any major problems. However, live-fire testing in a basement is eminently do-able. The main challenge of indoor ranges is air quality, which is a non-issue with the limited number of rounds that would have to fired to test prototype magazines. Then there are the trackless deserts of our Western states. Lots of illegal shit goes on there.

Congrats. You now have invested a lot of effort and assumed significant risk to make two or three high-capacity magazines. There's not much you can do with them, unless you're a deranged killer.

Two or three? Why stop there? We're talking about a criminal enterprise that could generate substantial profit. It's bootlegging, man: criminal commercial enterprise, and highly profitable.

You're right, a truly obsessed and talented person is pretty unstoppable. The Unabomber made some of his bombs out of match heads. He hand-made his own screws. But you know what, there haven't been a lot of Unabomber copycats.

The Unabomber was creating a one-off of his own design. He had no proven model to work from. The difference between that and 3-D printing of a ubiquitous and proven item is like the difference between carving your own furniture from wood and assembling it from Ikea out of the box.

There have been a lot of Adam Lanzas who use whatever they can easily pick up.

How many Adam Lanzas have there been? He might not have been able to acquire his magazines on the black market. Do you think you could say the same of the San Bernardino, Orlando, and Dallas shooters? I don't.