Doesn't seem like a lot of money. Shame somebody didn't buy it and shutter it. Less guns in the world is better for everyone.
Seems like a big commitment to using one.
It's not hard to build a reliable firearm with fairly little skill. In the United States, it's not even illegal to do so.
Point being: Yes they do, but also no they don't, because you're having different conversations about different types of weapons. Are fully plastic weapons commonly used for anything? Doesn't seem to be, and I would suspect the reason is because they'd be inclined to blow up/warp after a single fire.
At the current rate of development, I give it 10 years, tops, before European and Australian gun control measures are effectively meaningless.
This assumes that everyone carrying a gun has a permit to do so.
You've just described yet another reason why gun control measures are meaningless. The desire to kill oneself and/or others (with or without a gun) doesn't exist in a vacuum; guns don't magically make people suicidal or homicidal. That desire happens due to a combination of socioeconomic pressures and inadequate mental healthcare - two angles that gun control proponents chronically ignore, instead pushing for band-aids like gun control because those band-aids are "easier" and don't involve confronting the painful realities of socioeconomic inequality.
Hence, my point: as home manufacturing of firearms proliferates, that band-aid loses whatever tenuous effectiveness it has. People concerned about "gun violence" are then forced to consider why people are killing themselves and each other (hint: because the average person is broke and depressed).
The actual difficulty for a sufficiently motivated person to obtain a gun (legal or otherwise) under gun control in the UK is not that high, but the incentives to do so are reduced, the disincentives increased, and the average person with the potential to carry out non-premeditated shootings never considers buying one. The ability to learn all about how to 3D print a gun instead of learning how to license and modify a shotgun or how to find black markets that will sell you illegal firearms does not change that calculus very much.
Most aspiring firearm enthusiasts who are not criminals could get legally permitted in Europe if they were willing to invest as much effort as it would take to make their own guns and ammunition from scratch. Most criminals who want guns just as crime accessories don't have the discipline and drive to make weapons that they can't buy. (Thank goodness, or homemade bombs with wireless command detonation would already be common instruments in areas with gang rivalry.)
Re: black powder, I think you're overestimating the level of effort a bit. It certainly hasn't gotten harder to make it after the Industrial Revolution. Hell, there are even WikiHow articles on it: https://www.wikihow.com/Make-Black-Powder
It's the primers that are, from my understanding, the tricky thing to replace. I suspect that if push came to shove, though, a primer shortage/restriction would lead to designs of new cartridges and firearms built around spark plugs or some other alternative source of ignition. 3D printing would enable the sorts of quick prototyping necessary to rapidly iterate on unconventional firearm designs like that.
> Most criminals who want guns just as crime accessories don't have the discipline and drive to make weapons that they can't buy.
Well that's the thing: they don't have to be the ones making them, just like how drug dealers are not usually the ones themselves making the drugs. This is something that could very well be the purview of some black market cottage industry.
> (Thank goodness, or homemade bombs with wireless command detonation would already be common instruments in areas with gang rivalry.)
I mean, bombings are pretty common in a lot of places. See also: Ireland during the Troubles, the Middle East today, etc. And with quadcopters being widespread, it's probably only a matter of time before we start seeing drone bombings.
Cat's pretty much out of the bag. Pandora's opened the box. The only viable approach to stopping violence is to end it at its source: by addressing the reasons why people commit violence in the first place.
I don't think that a cottage industry of weapons-for-criminals is going to spring up in the same way as illicit drug production. The drug trade is nearly impossible to vanquish because so much of it is victimless; neither the seller nor the consumer attracts much attention in the usual case. But if you're dealing weapons specifically to people who can't get them by legal means, that's much riskier. Most would-be attackers who meet with a "bomb seller" are actually meeting with LEO.
The novelty factor of "3D printed" firearms leads to law enforcement worrying about them disproportionately to their actual significance. They're mostly an exotic hobby.
In any case, the US is inherently more violent and criminal than other nations in general independent of guns. It also has extremely violent subpopulations centered in major urban centers that tilt the numbers significantly. Outside of a few specific cities like Baltimore, Detroit, Chicago, etc. the US is extremely peaceful and low in crime.
And I'm saying that's incorrect. It's not wrong in the binary sense of "no firearms made" vs "some firearms made", but rather in the sense that if the mass-production output were to drop significantly, prevalence and use would also drop significantly (although this would be mitigated by there being a huge stock of existing guns).
And just to clarify - I'm not saying that this is the way to "solve the gun problem" in the US though.
I'm not sure that can be assumed anymore. The 3D printer market has been absolutely exploding. I and my siblings got one as a present from my father for Christmas in 2020. Some reports[1]state there was a 68% increase globally in personal desktop 3D printer units in 2020, and that's after there were manufacturing problems to overcome.
If if shutting a factory today might suppress supply slightly in the future, I suspect that within 5-10 years the point will be mostly moot.
1: https://www.tctmagazine.com/additive-manufacturing-3d-printi...
Are these parts functional? I would be literally stunned if you could 3D print a bolt carrier group that lasts more than a clip.
The last I looked (and it's been a couple years), the designs exist, but are largely non-functional and/or still require several parts to be made of steel.
The barrel is another problematic piece. I get that with enough plastic, you might be able to make it handle the pressure (and that's a pretty big might). Even presuming you do, plastic is not hard enough to allow rifling, so we're back to smoothbore rifles, which practically haven't been seen since the Civil War. Worse yet, every time you pull that trigger, the heat and pressure will blast more of your plastic out the end of the barrel. That's going to ruin your accuracy, and at a certain point, you'll start losing muzzle velocity because the barrel no longer seals around the bullet.
3d printing everything except the parts you mentioned is quite tractable, and constantly improving from an already acceptably-high standard.
No, the chokepoint here is primers. Which are scarce on the ground at the moment, and I expect will receive significant regulatory encumbrance in the near future.
Something like ammonpulver would be comparable in power and cleanliness to modern smokeless powder, but is pretty corrosive and gets ruined if it absorbs too much water.
The same types of people eho develop 3d gun models are also putting effort into developing alternatives for primers, powder, and cases. Homemade metal barrels were an issue a few years ago but ECM barrels made it easy to make them at home with only a couple hundred dollars in tooling.
In most parts of the United States a barrel (or anything other than the frame/receiver for that matter) is not a regulated part. You can order it online and have it show up at your door without ID or signing for it. Even in areas where barrels are regulated it only requires a few materials to electrochemically machine a barrel.
The end result is a firearm built entirely with parts that are legal to purchase in the EU.[3] This will only get easier as 3D printers improve and weapon designs are refined.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FGC-9
2. https://imgur.com/gallery/xZqXXuE
3. The FGC-9's designer lives in the EU. He manufactured the gun & ammo himself and shot it in his basement: https://twitter.com/freegunzone/status/1309896256760709128
Furthermore: rising up against a tyrant/despot is only possible if the population is very united; but a tyrant/despot, with enough economic power (or oppression of others) can make sure a population is ideologically or otherwise fractured/disunited and cause infighting.
This will actually make benefits of being well armed a liability as now you have a tyrant/despot and also can't walk safely in your neighboorhood.
The two-bits army was ideologically and organizationally aligned with an already functioning colonial government. But that's survivor bias too. I don't know if there are any reliable rules for the long term outcome of a successful insurrection.
The British didn't need to be defeated, they only needed to realize that they could no longer govern the colonies.
And one major way of doing this is by reducing your combat power, and by securing control over the means of providing defense.
> Furthermore: rising up against a tyrant/despot is only possible if the population is very united;
Historical counterexamples proliferate.
> This will actually make benefits of being well armed a liability as now you have a tyrant/despot and also can't walk safely in your neighboorhood.
Fortunately possession and carriage of armaments mitigates both those ills.
Guns are legal in America and it's safe to walk in my neighborhood.
If the defenseless had guns they would be able to protect themselves. I am not sure if that would result in more peace or more war, but it would definitely be a more just world.
More realistically it would change what type of guns people own. Fewer Colts, more Glocks, I presume. From a public policy perspective that’s no change at all.
> Most of the weapons used by the Mukti Bahini were taken from defeated soldiers. Then, there were homemade bombs, knives and even instances of the use of bows and arrows.
> Walking along the gallery of the Liberation War Museum in Dhaka where a number of weapons, including rifles and machineguns used in the Liberation War of 1971, had been put on display, Shahzaman Mozumder Bir Protik, a guerrilla freedom fighter, reminisced saying “They had to earn their weapons.”
Not to mention kicks, slaps, and karate chops.
as for guns, the solution is societal change.
However removing handguns, and limiting the legal reasons to be wondering around the streets with a gun would also help.
Modern America is a historical anomaly. The powerful aren't peaceful by choice.
It's the SECOND amendment in the constitution for a reason.
If anything, a lot of nations were subjugated with the help of or by the US.
Start here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_NATO
And sure..America's not perfect... but it's a hell of a lot better than the alternative!
There was a commission from he government to find out how many laws existed in America and after years of looking into it they gave up and the final conclusion was that no one knows.
Everyone looks to the government to solve their problems instead of solving it themselves.