Spanish police raid factory making 3D-printed weapons | Hacker News Reader

Spanish police raid factory making 3D-printed weapons

reuters.com

27 pointspseudolus73 comments

This article is nonsense.

"The first such factory to be discovered in Spain also contained working 3D-printing equipment that could manufacture gun barrels in only two minutes, Spain's National Police said in a statement."

Either the author is an idiot and something is lost in translation or Spain's National Police are a bunch of idiots. You can't make anything in only two minutes with a 3D printer, and you can't make gun barrels at all.

This is propaganda fear-mongering about 3D printers.

You forgot the most obvious alternative, the police are deliberately lying.

They found "nine ammunition magazines, two silencers, two pieces for rifle barrels". I consider this to be state propaganda disguised as news laundered through REUTERS.

Yeah, it's kind of hilarious how little they claim to have found. And that's after trumping it up as much as possible, I'm sure.

> could manufacture gun barrels

One hopes this is more than the mere suggestion that it could be used to make gun barrels. Otherwise everyone from hobby machinists to CNC shops had better watch their backs.

this is textbook law enforcement FUD.

The wording may be unfortunate and/or mangled through the Chinese whispers that press releases are, but you can most certainly 3d print jigs to ECM barrels. And yes, the ECM process takes 20 minutes not 2, but still.

3d printed weapons are here. Crude, maybe, and you still need quite a bit technical expertise; but give it another 5 years and everything will be much easier still.

That said, there have always been 'home manufactured' of course. Arguably even Khyber pass guns could be designated 'home manufactured'. But I still think that the ease with which one can make guns with 3d printers today is unparalled with anything we've seen before. Also, ironically, I think Biden's ghost gun ban is only going to accellerate research into 3d printed gun manufacturing.

The fundamental issue is that firearms are not very complicated, and so they're very difficult to regulate. I particularly see this in trying to regulate magazines...literally boxes with springs in them. You have no chance! Anyone who wants a bigger magazine can slap two smaller ones together with duct tape. An amateur working alone will probably be able to make better weapons given modern technology, but that's true of making anything at all.

Well yes, but your original claim was that you cannot 3d print firearms, and you implied that 3d printers are not great tools that make it vastly easier to manufacture firearms by people who do not have years of metalworking experience. Both are (mostly) false. In other words, yes, 3d printers are a game changer when it comes to diy manufacturing of modern, semi-automatic (or even full auto) firearms.

(let's not get into pedantry here like 'I can stuff black powder into metal tubing and make a blunderbuss in a few hours! haha you can't stop me from making weapons!' While technically true, you're not going to rob a convenience store (or stop an invading army) with a diy black powder blunderbuss. What you can do with modern 3d printers gives home users without any experience in manufacturing anything pretty much equivalent capabilities of commercial gun manufacturers of, say, 60 to 80 years ago, which is enough to produce highly sophisticated weapons. True, you cannot make complex ejector mechanisms with lugs on bolts or Glock style firing mechanisms with 3d printers (yet), but you can most certainly make straight blowback guns that reliably fire medium power cartridges like the 9mm. In my eyes, that is a quantum leap in capability, and a game changer as far as law enforcement is concerned).

You make a lot of good points! I agree that 3D printing has lowered barriers.

I would point out, however, that your viewpoint appears to be U.S.-centric. In the U.S., you can 3D print all the "easy" parts (pistol frame, rifle stock--parts that could be whittled out of a larger piece of plastic, molded from epoxy, or similar), but you can buy all of the "hard" parts without restriction since they're not legally the firearm (barrel, chamber parts, etc.). I bet that varies a lot country-by-country.

And another idea I have: a lot of the "vastly easier" manufacturing you're describing is actually a product of the interconnection the internet has wrought, rather than 3D printers specifically. If I imagine a world where we didn't invent 3D printers, but we do have the internet, I bet we could've captured most of the manufacturing-ease gains other ways. For instance, just produce molds and then mold parts out of fiber-reinforced plastic. It makes iterating on designs harder, but we have a lot of people + the internet. So the process would be slower, but we would get there. Neat, huh?!

In fact, my viewpoint is entirely Europe-centric. I know it's easy to order an 80% lower in the US. The whole point is that with 3d printers, even those in jurisdictions that don't have weird 'let's take one component of each type of gun and make only that regulated' laws can manufacture guns at home, with $500 worth of tools, and <$50 of materials. And no, you cannot whittle a Glock lower out of a block of plastic.

The vast majority of people in this thread are making vastly unsubstantiated claims. Claims that might have been true in the first years of the RepRap, but that certainly aren't true today. Please, before you post another reply, google 'FGC 9 Youtube', watch that, and then come back and tell me that that is not a massive shift in capabilities.

I'm not going to reply to the second part of your comment - if I'm understanding you correctly, you're saying 'yeah but if we didn't have 3d printing there would still be other ways of making guns.' May be, maybe not, I don't have a glass ball - but that's entirely besides the point. In the world we live in today, we have the internet, we have 3d printers, and in 5 years time we will have a situation in which every criminal and terrorist can make a small arsenal of firearms in a weekend, and at the same time, in most of the world, law-abiding citizens will have all their rights legislated away under false pretenses. And most people are perfectly fine with it, because 'guns are scary'. That is the real problem here.

I think we basically agree.

> you can't make gun barrels at all

I agree with you that the two minutes statement is ludicrous.

However, you can print barrels (they're crappy and will fail after very few shots, but still):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5fhBBipU3w

Yeah, you can make things with bullet-sized holes in them. Calling them "gun barrels" is I think a bit of a stretch ;-)

The problem is that calling them "gun barrels" trades on readers' expectations of what a barrel is, so they end up thinking one can make "regular" or "pretty good" gun barrels on a 3D printer, which is false.

do you recommend ABS or ninja flex? LOL.

I'd go with some fiber reinforced stuff for extra interesting fragmentation.

Well, technically, as long as they deliver a single shot they're plenty dangerous to others and afterwards they're dangerous to their owners/wielders.

Lol, I guess! I think most people who want a gun aren't on a single-shot suicide mission.

I'm reading the same new from other sources in Spanish. I didn't saw anything about making weapons in 30 minutes. Instead I read that they have a lot of supremacist and fascist material, manuals about how make bombs, many chemical products that could be used for weapons, etc.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/elpais.com/espana/2021-04-18/la...

So it seems like we should blame Reuters for trying to exploit an uninformed audience for clicks, rather than blaming the Spanish National Police.

What if Reuters is part of the uninformed public (on this topic/situation) and is being exploited by the police?

It's possible, but I'd argue it's sort of their job to not be part of the uninformed public.

Reuters' job is to sell "news", which can be anything anyone* pays them to distribute.

It's harmful to conflate clickbait and stories with journalism.

*Only trusted corporate or political partners. They have some standards.

In theory, I agree. I've seen plenty of mainstream media stories that have incorrect facts. Some of this might just be human - we all make occasional mistakes. Some of them seem to require being uninformed or intentional, especially when they decline to correct mistakes or they are critical to their central point.

Yeah, something was lost. According to the police, the person was arrested for manufacturing weapons, possessing explosives, and other sorts of illegal activities. The National Police (similar to the FBI) were looking into terrorism charges and other criminal activities including to a trip/links to Germany. They confiscated plenty of illegal stuff including explosives, bullets, silencers, other gun manufacturing tooling, some partially/fully completed parts, and plenty of electronic documents - including some white nationalism and terror training guide. Two 3-d printers and 11 spools of filament were also confiscated.

But a CNC mill can also make a gun barrel, whats so sensational about 3d printed barrel?

Yeah this has always been my point. Why would you use a 3d plastic printer to make a gun when it's as easy to get a CNC machine and make actual guns.

Have you ever tried using a lathe or mill, CNC or not? I have, and I did some summer jobs in metal working businesses, and I can tell you that making a metal part vs 3d printing one is nothing alike. You need highly specialized skills to operate a mill or lathe, even on CNC ones (the skills are a bit different but it's not 'easier' to become a CNC operator than it is to become a manual lathe operator).

Becoming a sufficiently experienced 3d printer operator takes two weeks if you can spend an hour in the evenings tinkering with it, or a day if you spend a whole Saturday.

Jupp have done a bunch of CNC work and it does require a fair bit more knowledge than a 3d printer for sure. But then these kind of things have started showing up https://ghostgunner.net so I'm sure it's only a matter of time before anyone can buy something closer to a 3d printer in simplicity.

Right, but a ghostgunner is not a CNC machine in the common meaning of that word. It was made specifically for cutting 80% lowers (even if the GG website claims it's a 'general purpose' CNC), and even then, only the lowers from GG themselves. And yes, there are initiatives like the GGFlex, but none of that takes away from the fact that it's vastly harder to machine a gun than it is to print one. Like, even with a GG you still need a premade barrel, FCG, magazine etc. In the US, you can buy those off the shelf (for now), but most places in the world you can't. Maybe someone some day will build a GG-like device that can cut all of those parts with the ease the GG can do it. But until then, there are 3d printed guns for those willing to take the risk.

We should also clarify here for those who might not be in the know: while it is possible to 3D print metal parts, it's a lot harder, requiring lots of expertise, and it's more expensive than 3D printing plastic parts.

I think every reference to 3D printing in this discussion is to 3D printing plastic parts.

Same thing that makes 3D printers in general a sensation: you don’t need to be very well trained to make something that looks interesting.

They’re the Visual Basic (or possibly the Excel) of machine tools, for good and ill.

You can not make a gun barrel with a CNC mill. You can however make one on any old lathe.

Or just buy some pipe! Can't argue with tradition.

Better make sure your pipe does not have a welded seam or you're going to be in for a surprise. The proper name I think is 'technical tubing'.

For a lathe, CNC or not, you need 10's of thousands of $ worth of equipment and specific skills and experience; several months worth, at the very least. Plus you need a space where you can put a workshop.

To 3d print a gun, you need a sub $200 3d printer, $50 worth of filament, a desk and a computer, and another $100 worth of tools to be able to ECM barrels in your bathtub.

If that is not a sensational leap in capabilities, I don't know what is. It the same leap as going from needing $50k Onyx workstations to being able to program advanced 3d applications with $500 worth of computing equipment and a bunch of free software from the internet.

Like Biden’s proposed executive actions on “Ghost Guns” they sound scary, but it’s not as if anyone is using them, especially as there is no market demand in the US given the ease of getting a regular gun.

Disclaimer: please don’t infer anything about my comment regarding the broader gun control debate

Article has nothing to do with the US. I am not even sure why anyone is bringing up the US at all.

Lots of Americans here

Yes and their comments lack any insight into the effect of having readily available guns in Europe. The points made are along the lines of this isn't a problem cause genuine guns are so easily available.

> Like Biden’s proposed executive actions on “Ghost Guns” they sound scary, but it’s not as if anyone is using them, especially as there is no market demand in the US given the ease of getting a regular gun.

A "ghost gun" is just a firearm without a serial. That would include 80% lowers too (which do not require any ID to purchase as they're just hunks of plastic or metal). Many people enjoy the hobby of building their own guns. To say there is "no market demand in the US given the ease of getting a regular gun" is simply untrue.

I think parent meant to communicate that the vast majority of "uses" of guns in the U.S. are still serialized, mass-manufactured guns. Not that the market for non-serialized but legal guns is literally zero.

That's not really true. Plenty of people in the US build their own guns (ghost guns as they like to call them today). You can see this in the sales of places selling 80% receivers/frames. Even if you can buy a professionally built gun at the store, some people would rather build their own, putting their own personal touches on it. It's a similar mentality to hotrodders, or custom motorcycles, etc.

Except the receiver/frame is the part that is FFL regulated and treated the same as an assembled gun from a sales/regulation standpoint - so they are not in fact “Ghost Guns”

But my point still stands - the cost and obtainability of real guns to people that would misuse them obviates the need to manufacture their own

"80% recievers" aren't regulated, so there's no paperwork when they are sold and then finished by the buyer.

Of course they would be subject to regulation once finished, but there's not any record of the firearm.

I agree, but just want to point out that they aren't required to be finished. If you do any work to it at all (81%+ complete), then they are considered a firearm.

I know it sounds like I'm being pedantic, but I wouldn't want anyone to get into serious trouble if they read this didn't understand the difference.

"Except the receiver/frame is the part that is FFL regulated and treated the same as an assembled gun from a sales/regulation standpoint - so they are not in fact 'Ghost Guns'”.

I'm not sure exactly what you are referring to - the 80% receivers/kits? Those do not have serial numbers and are not considered firearms until you make them 81%+.

You can make a mandrel in a few hours that can be used with other stuff to electrochemically rifle and chamber a barrel.

But yeah, the article is nonsense.

Link [1] to the news in spanish, includes a video of an officer giving more details about what was found and how.

1. https://www.canarias7.es/sucesos/detenido-tenerife-montar-20...

Thanks, according to that the only thing that had been printed were some “handgun frames”.

I don’t know why this of interest to HN other than it has the words “3D-printed” in it. Maybe we can talk about how somehow 3D printers make illegal manufacturing scarier?

I mean underground illegal weapon manufacturing has been a thing for hundreds of years, so there’s nothing new here.

It’s just gone from a blacksmith pounding on metal to a machine shop operator with a lathe to a programmer with a 3D printer. Also you still need the lathe to turn a gun barrel so maybe it hasn’t even come that far...

"Also you still need the lathe to turn a gun barrel"

No you don't, you can ECM rifling and a chamber, using 3d printed jigs.

Ok, here is how I know the entire article is bullshit. When they say 3D printed, they really mean that some parts like the trigger or the stock are 3D printed. The actual weapon still relies on steel barrels and other steel components. The 3D printed portion is often entirely insignificant and sometimes only two weapons out of half a dozen were 3d printed but the articles make it sound like all of them were and that 3D printing was the primary factor.

The article mentions this [0] synagogue shooting in Germany.

>En octubre de 2019, en Alemania, se cometió un atentado terrorista contra una sinagoga judía, en el que otras armas y explosivos, se utlizó un fusil fabricado con una impresora 3D.

Google translate: >In October 2019, in Germany, a terrorist attack was committed against a Jewish synagogue, in which other weapons and explosives, a rifle manufactured with a 3D printer was used.

The shooter didn't need to 3D printing at all, all of his weapons (he had a complete arsenal ranging from handguns to shotguns to rifles) were made primarily made out of steel. The reason why he couldn't get through the synagogue door is that he couldn't obtain ammunition so he had to use a weak gunpowder substitute to make his own. I consider this proof that strict gun laws prevented this shooting from occurring the way he wanted.

Images of the non 3d printed guns:

https://img.huffingtonpost.com/asset/5da09aee200000690550003...

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EGdwR-hWsAERlKN?format=jpg&name=...

https://i.redd.it/q6qhms9a0pr31.jpg

Images of his partly 3d printed guns:

https://preview.redd.it/hp9ot6apeqa51.jpg?width=960&crop=sma...

https://d3pbdxdl8c65wb.cloudfront.net/cloudinary/2019/Oct/10...

I'm more worried about the ones with wooden stocks, than the 3d printed ones, primarily because he didn't even use them.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halle_synagogue_shooting

The ignorance in this thread is mind-blowing. You most certainly can manufacture a reliable, semi-automatic, 9mm compact rifle where the only part that is not 3d-printed is the barrel and the springs. And even the barrel can be home-rifled using readily available tools from any hardware store, using 3d-printed jigs.

Now, the links you post look more like traditional Luty-style designs, albeit with some parts 3d-printed; still, regardless of whether this specific Spanish guy or the attacks in Germany used 3d-printed guns, 3d printed guns exist and you will see them show up in the news more often over the next few years. Brace yourself for the backlash, instead of closing your eyes, putting your fingers in your ears and singing "lalala you're all stupid, you can't print guns".

This person is basically correct.

As a Spaniard, I repeatedly have the weirdest experience online. As someone who normally keeps up with national news, I usually read on the internet and for the first time about things that happen here and seem to have enough relevance to top international webs, but don't appear on any national newspaper or on the news.

Normally they don't have a good reception, and insults are included (Spanish police "are a bunch idiots"). What is my surprise that when I read about them from the national news or from the original/official statement, the intersection of what I read in the comments and the original/official source barely have anything in common.

Is there some weird agenda that I'm missing? It's seriously very unsettling and there's no way to fight it because people don't read in the original language and barely any newspaper publish in both languages (why would they anyway?).

It's interesting to hear that you have this experience repeatedly.

In my defense, I said "Either the author is an idiot and something is lost in translation or Spain's National Police are a bunch of idiots." and then concluded that "So it seems like we should blame Reuters for trying to exploit an uninformed audience for clicks, rather than blaming the Spanish National Police."

Americans commenting here have their own bias.

2 Minutes to print a barrel? Is 3D pring really so far already? Somehow I can't believe this.

It isn’t. They’ve confused a 3D printer with a lathe.

I’m guessing Reuters is uncritically repeating the police’s story. It’s in both the police and Reuters’ best interest to make this a sexy modern story about 3D printing, rather than a boring story about raiding a basic machine shop turning out unregistered firearms. Which feels approximately ten thousand times more likely.

You can't make gun barrels on a lathe in two minutes either. Unless you started with a gun barrel.

You can certainly drill out a very short, non-rifled barrel on a drill lathe in single-digit minutes. Everything in this story is an exaggeration or misunderstanding, so it wouldn’t surprise me to find the “2 minute” figure to be a wild-ass guess too.

Yeah, you can make a hole in some metal. I would argue that doesn't make it a "gun barrel". A barrel will almost always have rifling and some sort of breech locking mechanism. Unless you've got some truly wild CNC setup, you have no chance of both making the hole (even smoothbore) and any sort of locking mechanism.

If your gun doesn't lock (simple blowback for example), then you can skip the breech locking mechanism.

Agreed that I don't think you can meaningfully rifle a barrel in under 2 minutes though.

So even Reuters makes mistakes? I consider them to be the most unbiased news source.

Sadly, this doesn't seem like a mistake. It seems like they're either negligent or complicit in spreading propaganda.

That's because it's false!

It's not, that's nonsense or a gross misunderstanding.

In any case making gun barrels has been doable with fairly simple metal working tools long before 3d printing - particularly if you're not hung up on reproducible quality. But even that would still take a few hours. 3d printing is a bad fit for that task.

I understand that is "2 minutes to mount a weapon with previously printed spare parts". I could be wrong. Maybe a 'lost in translation' case.

My bet would be a lonesome survivalist trying to increase its fine "that for sure will impress lotta chicks" weapon collection. Could be a furtive also or a wannabee seller.

The most interesting part would be to know how the police discovered him. Probably the old 'bragging in front of friends'.

Could be technically possible for one of those 3D files to call home somehow? Maybe they made a report when downloaded in some dark place of the web?

Can you use a 3D printer to make explosives? How does that work? I thought it was primarily a chemical process and a matter of getting precursor chemicals and controlling reactions...

Edit: I looked online and the only reference I find are using explosives (or precursors) as inputs to a 3d printer to make components that need them like airbags.

No, you can't use a 3D printer to make explosives.

Thanks, I was confused when the article claimed that and wondered if I'd missed some great new home-chemistry breakthrough!

3D printers make shapes, not substances.

In principle — and this would be a bad idea even just for the safety of the person running the printer — you could have a multi-head printer deposit powders of charcoal, potassium nitrate, and sulphur in the same internal void while printing in a more conventional material.

I don’t know of any four-head printers, and even if they exist this is a bad way to make gunpowder, but in principle it could be done.

That's what I thought, the article seems to be nonsense...

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