"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.
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.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/elpais.com/espana/2021-04-18/la...
It's harmful to conflate clickbait and stories with journalism.
*Only trusted corporate or political partners. They have some standards.
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.
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.
(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).
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?!
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.
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.
I think every reference to 3D printing in this discussion is to 3D printing plastic parts.
They’re the Visual Basic (or possibly the Excel) of machine tools, for good and ill.
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.
But yeah, the article is nonsense.
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):
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.
Disclaimer: please don’t infer anything about my comment regarding the broader gun control debate
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.
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
Of course they would be subject to regulation once finished, but there's not any record of the 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.
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%+.