Hacker News Reader

Comment by artificialidiot | Hacker News Reader

For the about the same price of a 3d printer and plastics, you can buy a small lathe and aluminium stock to build a gun far superiour yet just as dangerous for the user. Required skill is comparable. Why aren't there any talks about banning those hobby machines too? Because you need a good scary story to sell and cutting metal is old news. I don't buy the plastic widget manufacturers getting in the way angle either. Do you have any idea how much cheaper is buying a mass produced thing instead of designing, building and botching the same piece with worse tolerances and worse materials?

View on HN

The fear comes from being able to buy a relatively cheap 3D printer at Walmart, download a firearm template and build yourself a firearm that way.

Manufacture of a weapon may require the same skill using lathe and other machining tools but duplication can become very easy with 3D printer after the initial weapon has been created.

Nevertheless that is just media made circus. Getting firearm is currently so easy there is no underground manufacture even with cheap tools and low skill needed. So at worst 3D printing could change the type of weapon in circulation, not change the overall availability.

If you can operate a computer equipped with a plastic printer, I think you can operate a 18th century machine following a blueprint on paper. It is not like machinist design those lower receivers from scratch either.

I agree with you. I went from laymen to building both of them in a matter of months, and subtractive tech is both more readily available, cheaper, has more support from vendors for these uses than a printer. Strictly from a manufacturing perspective, it's the proper method for the part requirements, which is anything but trivial.

IF 3D printer become as popular as regular printer, that will change.

A car for example, require more skills overall than using a printer or a lathe, yet you can ask the vast majority of American to use their car for, comparatively speaking, much more complex tasks than printer or machining a gun.

That said I agree that it is low skill to achieve on a lathe. Basic furniture making, DYI, car fixing, ... are also low level type of task. However, few people have the opportunity (time, money) to acquire those skills in the first place. If 3D printers becomes popular, it may not reduce the overall complexity but it will seriously increase the pool of people qualified and equipped to make them.

Not that I think this is a genuine concern in the US. Why would you print a gun when you can get a reliable, discreet one very easily.

That's in the US, though. In most european countries, there are close to no guns in circulation and this could change a lot of things.

In the US, one can simply buy a gun at Walmart and skip the building it at home part. Even at the low end, it will probably be a better gun than one made on a 3D printer.

In some countries with stricter gun laws, illegally-made guns are pretty common. You can see examples at http://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/author/improguns/ - many of them are submachineguns, which are a bit more scary than single-shot pistols and pepperbox revolvers.

> Why aren't there any talks about banning those hobby machines too?

There are.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/unfini...

TFA doesn't mention banning the machines themselves. In fact only thing worth mentioning is the seizure of plastic %80 lowers because they were just too easy to finish while leaving the metal ones. There is no intent to regulate even the %80 lowers.

That was kind of a canary citation to indicate that there's growing sentiment towards banning the 80% lowers, though if I understand your objection correctly, you are right in asserting that suggestions to ban CNC / milling equipment is not predominant. That said, I would swear that I saw some state making mention of regulating the purchase of drill presses and/or milling equipment to restrict their purchase to those who could show a justifiable industrial need, but I can't remember whether it was federal, state, or if state, which, nor can I find such a citation in my naive Googling efforts.

Regardless, the sentiment definitely exists for banning 80% lowers, and that is in fact the core of Kevin de Leon's "ghost gun" legislation, though that does not necessarily extend to banning the equipment required for milling them to functionality.

Note that these sources are biased, so take with salt: http://dailycaller.com/2013/08/14/federal-gun-bill-would-ban...

http://bearingarms.com/california-legislator-targets-80-lowe...

I can understand the sentiment if the goal is to prevent someone mail ordering an AR-15 kit and a plastic %80 lower, then drill a few holes with a battery powered drill, assemble, spray paint it pink, slap a hello kitty sticker and off to the shooting range.

I have no stakes in the gun kit regulations so I couldn't care less if they ban them or not but banning machines would be akin to banning chef knives just because you are not working in a restaurant and the knife can potentially be used to stab. Have fun slicing tomatoes with a butter knife. IMO they are regulating the wrong parts of the equation deliberately and have no intention to alienate large swaths of certain demographics. I am only interested in this debate's entertainment value, so popcorn it is.

I don't see a machine ban on the horizon.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com