3D printer 'gun parts' found in Manchester raid | Hacker News Reader

3D printer 'gun parts' found in Manchester raid

bbc.co.uk

24 pointsjamesmoss48 comments

The items shown here are just components of the 3D printer itself. I'd say they would struggle to create a gun from them!

http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:52838 & http://www.makerbot.com/blog/2013/02/22/replicator-2-extrude...

As noted in the comments on The Verge's article[1], these parts actually seem to be replacement MakerBot parts. This feels like nothing but 3D printer scaremongering.

http://www.theverge.com/2013/10/25/5027282/uk-police-seize-3...

It reminds me of an old joke I heard shortly after 9/11.

Did you hear that they confiscated knitting needles from an old lady before she was allowed to board her flight? They were afraid she was going to make an afghan.

Best of it is - less tech-savvy criminals that didn't know about the possibility of printing gun parts before in the UK? Will sure as hell know about doing it now. Nice work BBC and the old bill.

I went to a protest once that featured, for some reason, a number of toy weapons used as props: a completely non-functional "crossbow" made with a bungee cord, etc. The cops seized the "weapons" and their statement in the media made it sound as if they'd seized an actual crossbow, etc.

This raid story makes me think of this. It could be someone seriously attempting to fabricate arms or it could just as likely be someone having fun experimenting. At any rate, I am quite skeptical about the cop's grandiose announcement that "today will be an important milestone in the fight against this next generation of homemade weapons".

I guess the war on general computation has officially begun. I can't wait for someone to propose a ban on home 3D printers to prevent firearm proliferation.

To put this in some context, Cory Doctorow has done talks / written pieces on "The Coming War on General Purpose Computation".

Charles Stross's 'Rule 34' features a dark near-future setting with organised criminals operating illegal, unlocked 3D printers that are used to print guns and child sized sex dolls. An interesting read for sure.

I assume the authorities will lock down 3D printers before they get good enough to print functioning weapons. If you've got an IPrinter that only builds licensed IObjects from the official IStore, this problem goes away for authorities, and all we lose is our computing freedom.

>In theory, the technology essentially allows offenders to produce their own guns in the privacy of their own home, which they can then supply to the criminal gangs who are causing such misery in our communities.

Meanwhile, anyone can create a (subpar) .22 machine gun in their garage.

>If what we have seized is proven to be viable components capable of constructing a genuine firearm, then it demonstrates that organised crime groups are acquiring technology that can be bought on the high street to produce the next generation of weapons.

Just like its namesake the Liberator is clumsy. Criminal intent or not, and aside from the plastic aspect, people are going to prefer a weapon that's actually reliable.

Exactly. Improvised firearms have been around for nearly a century, if not longer.

> Meanwhile, anyone can create a (subpar) .22 machine gun in their garage.

Really? This is your argument? That's like saying anyone can construct a nuke in their basement so all explosives regulations are silly.

No, not anyone can just build a nuke in their basement. The Chinese struggled for years until they liquored Richard Feynman up and he accidentally let an idea slip that led to them getting the bomb.

Anyone that has a garage and tools can easily, and again I want to emphasize easily, construct a makeshift shotgun or machine gun.

Your position is essentially the same one that enables the (never ending) war on drugs. I don't disagree with gun and weapon regulations, but the UK and AU stance is just laughable. Their violent crime per capita has somehow increased as well making the UK the most violent nation:

http://www.aic.gov.au/publications/current%20series/cfi/101-...

You didn't even read the summary:

> Rather than indicating a sharp rise in actual violence, however, this increase is largely the direct result of major changes to the way crime data are recorded in the England and Wales. First in 1998 and then again in 2002, amendments were introduced to include a broader range of offences, to promote greater consistency, and to take a more victim-led approach where alleged offences were recorded as well as evidence-based ones

Stop pushing an agenda.

Sorry, you are right, thought that study took into account the difference in crime reporting. I'm busy deploying to a server and didn't bother to read the summary.

>Stop pushing an agenda

Your assumption that I have an agenda is also laughable. I do not own a firearm.

The Chinese struggled for years until they liquored Richard Feynman up and he accidentally let an idea slip that led to them getting the bomb.

I'm sorry, but teasing us like this is just unacceptable. Dirt, please, or at least a reference for where we can find it.

I must be scrambled today because I cannot find it, he "contributed" to their getting the bomb but they also had a lot of help so I overstated his importance. I'll try getting back to you later, it might've been in a biography of his, 'Sun in a Bottle', or one of his interviews where he talks about some meeting with Chinese scientists. Apologies.

Just because anyone could doesn't mean that is how criminals operate - your average firearm toting gangster in the UK is not technologically smart. There was a major case a few years back when an armourer got busted for reactivating firearms bought from mainland Europe. He was producing fully automatic Mac-10s and selling them for a few hundred pounds. Unsurprisingly he received life in prison as they had been used in several murders.

The UK, despite strict laws on firearm ownership, already has a problem whereby organised crime can acquire firearms - 3D printing is not going to be that much of a game changer.

Well - I guess we're going to have to licence use of 3D printers and make sure that DRM is used to restrict what can be printed.

I suppose we'll also have to ensure that corporations have control, so they can liaise with law enforcement agencies - after all, our safety will be at stake without affirmative action.

Of course, there'll also be tangential effects: e.g. the technologies for restriction will be able to be used to ensure that 3D printing IP can be monitised ..

.. but of course there's absolutely no way in the world that could be anyone's primary concern. The powers that be are simply worried about our safety.

I'll admit I know next to nothing about this subject, but aren't the parts of a gun which can be machine printed, also fairly easily manufactured using widely available metal working tools?

Surely the hard parts of manufacturing a gun, would the the ammunition, where you'd need propellant and percussion caps?

So, 3D printers don't really change things much, since they can only make the parts that can already be fairly easily made, and can do nothing about propellant or percussion caps.

"but aren't the parts of a gun which can be machine printed, also fairly easily manufactured using widely available metal working tools?"

No, it's quite different. A metal work workshop is not something the typical urban criminal has access to. Yes, I realize there are many people in rural areas who have such workshops, and shared workshops in urban settings, so theoretically yadda yadda yadda, but the practical (socio-economic) reality is that those who want firearms for criminal purposes in the vast majority of cases do not have access to these tools, and/or lack the knowledge to reverse engineer and adapt available plans for metal weapons, and manufacture them. It's quite hard to make a metal gun using a traditional lathe and milling machine, and even when using a high-end CNC.

3d printing on the other hand requires no more than the average high school kid's computer knowledge, plus a few files downloaded from the internet. The barrier to entry is orders of magnitude lower.

The costs are vastly lower, too - you can get started printing a gun (although I don't think guns made on MakerBots today will actually work) for ~ 1000$. That is not much more expensive than a weapon on the black markets costs (to those who have access to such a market). You'd spend an order of magnitude more on a metal workshop, and that's not even counting the materials and auxiliary tools.

Assuming that most organized crime groups exist either to facilitate prostitution, betting, or sell drugs, we don't we just legalize all of that and "price them out of the market"?

Organized crime groups live off high prices maintained by police. Basically, any prohibition or regulation is a monopoly grant to a very few who can earn higher profits than in an open competition. These few are either legal licensees, or illegal gangsters who bribe or outgun cops. Remember that bootleggers were opposed to ending of prohibition in 1933.

The guns mentioned in this article are not very useful in either one of those 3; at best in the 'peripheral' aspects of the drug business.

Apart from that, the reasons are different for all 3:

- prostitution: grounds for prohibition are based on 2 'prongs' as it were: the moral aspect, it's quite clearly a matter of fact that a large amount of people find prostitution per se morally reprehensible. Secondly there is the argument that many prostitutes are being forced into their work. Empirical evidence shows in countries around the world that legalizing prostitution does not (completely) take away human trafficking and sex slavery. So, the argument is, if we prohibit prostitution, there will be less of that sort of suffering.

- betting: this is based on a protect-people-against-themselves theory. Since betting is addictive to some people, these have been many cases in the past where people were driven to ruin by it. Furthermore, there are many 2nd degree victims - the families and children of gambling addicts, society at large for the damage they do to fund their addiction, etc. So again the reasoning is - let's prohibit gambling, then these will go away.

- drugs: well this is actually similar to betting; its effect might also compromise somebodies' health, but the fundamental reason is protecting people against themselves from something of which they cannot quite assess the effects when they start on it, and are unable to detach themselves from when they get into problems.

Then again, I think you and anybody else with a 'normal' intelligence are/is perfectly capable of coming to these conclusions yourself, and you were just deliberately being obtuse; but just to get this pseudo-anarchistic discussion out of the way before it really gets started, I thought I'd point out the obvious.

> Empirical evidence shows in countries around the world that legalizing prostitution does not (completely) take away human trafficking and sex slavery. So, the argument is, if we prohibit prostitution, there will be less of that sort of suffering.

But does legalizing at least reduce human trafficking and sex slavery? If so, then the inverse follows: by allowing prostitution, there is less of that sort of suffering.

Prohibiting gambling: same thing - gambling happens regardless of whether it's legal or not. If it's legal, the government can at least tax it significantly.

Prohibiting drugs: I don't think that the government is smarter than me; cars are dangerous, and scalpels are dangerous, but we don't prohibit them, we simply require people to educate themselves first before they can use them. I think the same could be done with drugs; in fact, it would be better than the current situation where noone really knows what effect drugs have.

> you were just deliberately being obtuse

Well, up until this point I thought your comment was very thoughtful, but here it went from good to terrible; you know, people with "normal" intelligence can disagree as well. Unfortunately I already up-voted you.

Look, I'm not defending any of those positions, frankly I think most of them are stupid, so I'm certainly not going to get sucked into a position arguing for them. But is it really worth it to ask 'hmm, why would prostitution be illegal?'. There have been 1000's of man-years of work put into that - start at scholar.google.com, then continue in your local universities' library, and one could spend every waking hour the next 40 years studying past discourse on it and still not be done. Those questions have been rehashed and researched 1000's of times deeper than anything we could every write here. Masquerading the questioning of the obvious as a question does not add to the vast majority of discussions. But yay, let's reduce every news item to 'hmm, does morality really exist?', and drown the actual new things about those items in tangential hemming and hawing, because putting a little bit of effort into trying to get some basic knowledge about a subject before partaking in a public discussion is too much work.

Normally I wouldn't even has responded if it weren't for this

"you know, people with "normal" intelligence can disagree as well"

Of course, that's the whole point of my comment, that it doesn't take much empathy to see why some people would feel it just that society enforces a prohibition of those 3 things! If even I can understand why some people feel that way (of course you'd have to know me IRL to get the implications of stressing that), it shouldn't be hard or even take effort for a 4-9's proportion of the general population to do so. By using a glib 'I don't see, within my moral framework, why they should be illegal, therefore it's stupid that they are' argument, the GP is denying exactly that.

Then again I'm just a grumpy misanthrope so what I do know...

The article is really a stretched out version of a single piece of information: all we know is that somebody might be creating a 3D printed gun. How surprising !

Citing a "police raid" and making links to gangs is just a dramatization that doesn't bring anything. Where's the evidence that there is a link to a criminal activity instead of just being a hacker who's curious and got busted because he order the wrong set of components from Amazon ?

The raids were part of an operation cracking down on gangs - the parts were found during that raid. It was not that the police raided somewhere because they suspected there were printed gun parts there.

> Citing a "police raid" and making links to gangs is just a dramatization that doesn't bring anything.

The article notes that the parts were seized as a part of the Greater Manchester Police's "Operation Challenger", which targeted "drug dealers, loan sharks, rogue landlords and counterfeit good suppliers." [1] It is likely that the owner of these parts is was not targeted for creating guns on their 3D printers, but for other reasons.

> Where's the evidence that there is a link to a criminal activity instead of just being a hacker who's curious and got busted because he order the wrong set of components from Amazon ?

I think it is extremely doubtful that they just happened to buy plastic components that could be used as a trigger and magazine from Amazon while simultaneously owning a 3D printer (that could be used to construct said components).

[1]: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-manchester-24660056

> I think it is extremely doubtful that they just happened to buy plastic components that could be used as a trigger and magazine

Agreed. However, those parts aren't able to be used as a trigger or magazine. One of them hooks onto the back of a 3d printer, holding the spool of plastic. The other one can be attached to the print head to help feed the plastic into the nozzle.

In no way can they be used as a trigger or magazine. Coincidentally, I have a similar spool holder on my desk right now.

I hope that the GMP's tests mentioned in the original article prove this. Ideally, the BBC would update their article if this occurred, but I assume they will not (based on previous articles that they have written that have turned out to be incorrect).

At the same time, I think assuming that these parts were seized while their owner was doing nothing wrong may be naive.

All we know is that he's been arrested "on suspicion of making gunpowder" and that they found 3D printed plastic parts that could make a (1 shot) gun.

To be useful the article would have to expand on the person and it's ties to the aweful criminal organization who owns "air rifles" and "BB guns".

I think the message is pretty clear: > GMP said through Challenger it was "declaring war" on criminal networks. And the BBC is just playing along.

> To be useful the article would have to expand on the person and it's ties to the aweful criminal organization who owns "air rifles" and "BB guns".

While I am not a UK resident, it looks like some "air rifles" and "BB guns" are illegal to own in the UK without a Firearms Certificate [1].

Neither you nor the BBC article have provided any evidence that there is some kind of vendetta against 3D printers or their owners (which your original comment suggested).

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_gun_laws#United_Kingdom

My point is that the article is overly sensationalized and lacks content, that's all. The information is presented in such a way to support the idea that this person is bad and that the police have done something.

The issue with these kind of articles is that they don't provide enough food to have a meaningful conversation on HN. Reality is rarely that simple and it's good to explore the various possible facets to provide a full picture of the situation.

thought it was easy for some people to get real guns in manchester, unless those days are gone

Some people perhaps (career criminals with deep connections in the sphere).

I suspect it's a lot harder for your average man in the street.

Even for career criminals it's vastly more difficult and expensive than the newspapers would have you believe.

Hence: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Rebore

Oh undoubtably, one of the governments successes over the last decade has been to get gun control back under control.

Crimes involving a gun are down by half over 10 years (they set up some special task force to police firearms as well as working in Europe with partner countries where the guns where coming from).

When articles like this pops out, it means that soon 3D printers will get regulated to oblivion.

UK is crazy, even pocketknife or pepper spray is forbidden. And this country has one of highest violent crime rates in Europe.

> UK is crazy, even pocketknife or pepper spray is forbidden. And this country has one of highest violent crime rates in Europe.

Umm, that entire sentence is total bullshit. UK has no way near the highest violent crime rates in Europe. Look it up. Plus pepper sprays and pocket knives are common place. You can buy them anywhere.

>Plus pepper sprays and pocket knives are common place

Pepper spray is illegal in the UK.

Pocket knives with folding, non-locking blades under 3 inches are legal to carry around. Larger blades are legal to carry around if you've got a good reason to have them and aren't doing anything the Police consider dodgy (UK knife law is quite complex).

Pepper sprays aren't - they're illegal under Section 5 of the Firearms Act (no - they aren't treated as being firearms).

Pocket knife legislation is a bit off after a court decision regarding the length of blades. Under 3 inches and folding and you're fine - so Swiss Army knives are OK. Other knives require lawful authority or reasonable excuse - so workmen are fine, someone carrying a knife "for protection" is not, and rightly so.

The UK does have a serious problem with knife crime, and a serious problem with young people carrying them for protection.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1196941/The-violent-...

search "pepper spray self defense":

    amazon.co.uk: 151 results, mostly books, none of them actually usefull

    amazon.com: 1,812 results

The Daily Mail.... ha ha whatever.

Yeah .. and Duct Tape is illegal too, since it can be used for criminal purposes.

Of course it would be in Manchester wouldn't it... I promise it wasn't me.

Wait... I hope that wasn't my dealer :(

You silly, organized crime have guns, they are not playing with 3D printers...

Begun, the clone wars have.

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