Comment by roel_v | Hacker News Reader

Comment by roel_v | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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