Thingiverse is cracking down on gun-related models using a new automated system | Hacker News Reader

Thingiverse is cracking down on gun-related models using a new automated system

tomshardware.com

5 pointsMrMember6 comments

Thingiverse was never the place for firearms anyway.

Is the best place for guns and guides to building them.

Can’t people in like 48 states buy an 80% kit and finish it themselves? All perfectly legal from a federal perspective. Check your state laws before doing anything silly.

"Creating a weapon is as easy as loading a print file in your print queue"

Well that's just flat-out false. You can print things like frames, receivers, and misc hardware, but you still need machined metal components for parts that need to tolerate heat and pressure, and specialized hardware like springs of specific dimensions and tension which are really not easily home-manufacturable.

The author explicitly links to another article[1] on Tom's Hardware which specifically says this, so, uh, top notch journalism there, fellas.

[1] https://www.tomshardware.com/3d-printing/i-tried-3d-printing...

The Liberator is fully 3D printed, except for a single metal nail:

https://www.vam.ac.uk/articles/the-liberator-the-worlds-firs...

And it still requires assembly, is sensitive to tolerances, and is functionally a plastic zip gun - an inferior variant of what you could easily produce with nothing more than a trip to your local hardware store. A better comparison is the FGC-9, which is specifically designed to be manufacturable without access to any regulated parts, and even then there's quite a bit of specialized materials sourcing and assembly that has to be done (including rifling your own barrel out of hydraulic tubing using electrochemical machining). The story that people are just rolling fully-functioning firearms off of their 3D printer is a tale told to frighten hoplophobes.

This is what always bothered me about the "gun printing" thing. It's always been really cheap and easy to build a zipgun. When I was in grade school, there were even kids who got in trouble for building them in shop class.

3D printing is a worse way to do something that has never been hard to do.

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