Comment by ktizo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ktizo | Hacker News Reader

The main issue with restricting availability of 3d printers is an economic one. The potential for engineering improvements, cost savings, insanely tight development cycles and mass bespoke manufacture-to-order would seem to strongly favour the society with the least regulation on this.

Is not as though it is really going to widely cut the cost or massively increase the availability of handguns however.

The economics of established mass manufacture of simple mechanical items will have an edge over 3d printing for a while yet for any items that derive negligible economic benefit from uniqueness or short runs.

There is little economic benefit in 3d-printing basic guns, in the same way as there is little economic benefit in 3d-printing paperclips. People who really want guns can get them dirt cheap already. I think grips will start being 3d printed however and the existing high-end market for bespoke crafted guns will start using technology like metal laser sintering, if it doesn't already.

I am just hoping that a few idiots won't manage to completely hijack the public perception of this technology, just to play the violent-paranoia politics of gun rights, when there are far more interesting uses for this tech than adding more guns to a world that already has a massive surplus of the bloody things.

I live in Germany and I have never held a real gun in my hands. I am not sure where to go to get one. I think there are some shops, but a gun permit might be required to buy one.

Printing one at home would lower the bar, I think. Not that I need a gun, but I mean in general. What about kids, for example?

I grew up in the UK and did some cadet training, so I learned to shoot a small caliber rifle there. I also know some farmers, some professional hunters, and some folk who go on pheasant shoots so I know a few people who use guns professionally and for sport. Legal guns are pretty widespread. On the other side, there is an illegal gun market in most large cities, where prices are shockingly low. In the reports of the recent killing of police in Manchester, both guns and grenades were claimed to be being sold on the street for between £50 and £200.

As for the argument about kids, if your kids have easy access to bullets, then there are already problems long before they start trying to 3d print a gun.

Good point - I guess somehow there has to be a way to print the bullets, too...

Not that I am eager for the time when everybody can print themselves a gun at home. But I guess it will happen.

Also, I have no idea how to find such a black market. Perhaps asking on Twitter would work? Otherwise I can only think of silk road, the BitCoin market. Never checked it out as I don't do drugs, but perhaps they also do guns?

Not that I want a gun atm, just curious out of principle.

Actually I would like to have a gun in case there is some kind of apocalypse. But I don't want to have a gun around (I think statistics say that you are much more likely to be killed by a gun if you have a gun). There should be some way to hide it somewhere safe :-/

Yes, I encourage you to ask where you can illegally purchase a firearm on Twitter. That will be extremely useful, at the trial.

    I think statistics say that you are much more likely
    to be killed by a gun if you have a gun

Statistics from gun-control advocates, for what it's worth.

I find it hardly likely that it would be lower given you would have to factor in accidental death, suicide, murders within gun owning families, etc, and on the other side there are just the situations where owning a gun actually stopped you being shot, which are obviously much much less and often end up with the other gun owner shot, so effectively reducing that number still further. It seems fairly obvious that proximity to a deadly item increases the chance of being killed by it.

Surely those who frequently encounter dangerous situations or routinely feel that their safety is at risk are much more likely to own or carry a gun (e.g. retail business owners). I'd wager that this self-selection bias skews the statistic significantly.

Guns are pointless defensively for anything barring a very narrow range of situations. If you are really that worried, get a big stick, it is far more likely to be useful and you aren't going to get arrested, shot, or accidentally blow off bits of yours or other people's anatomy. Better yet, cheer up and stop worrying about the possibility of some kind of apocalypse, and if it does happen, and you have a 3d printer and a load of material, may I suggest you start with water filters and simple pumps rather than weaponry.

Good point :-) I didn't actually think "I need a 3d printer so that I could make a gun". If I was seriously worried, I'd try to get a gun the official way.

Not saying I am not worried, but I don't seem to get round to building that emergency package.

The problem with serious stockpiling is that you make yourself a target for anyone who didn't, if the worst actually happened. A stockpile of weapons might help protect you, but if you're sitting on years and years of food and survival equipment in a wasteland of thousands of starving and desperate people, chances are most of your weapons will just be one more thing looted from your corpse after a less well prepared and more desperate person gets lucky.

That's why you need to stockpile something which will be extremely valuable after an apocalypse, but not worth killing you over. Something which is cheap now, but that most people with a little extra food stockpiled might be willing to trade you for. Something you need and will use daily anyway: toilet paper.

Plus, any accidental death resulting from your toilet paper stockpile is probably going to be hilarious .

Or something valuable that clearly requires your personal knowledge to operate. Like a fancy radio.

This is an excellent reason to be a bicycle mechanic.

Interesting idea, but I think toilet paper won't cut it. In an emergency situation, you can probably get by without it. Especially if you don't have anything to eat.

Perhaps batteries? But they would be hazardous to store. Also these days the only things I own that use batteries are alarm clocks.

Antibiotics? They wouldn't take up so much space either, but perhaps they decay too quickly?

I've always thought that in the event of an apocalypse a good plan would be to go and knock off a survivalist and nick all their stuff. Given the name, it would be funny if the survivalists are all the first ones to go.

No doubt it will all go badly and I will end up being suffocated after trying to break into the fortified ranch via what looked like an undefended tower on the northern perimeter, but actually turned out to be the largest of their toilet paper silos.

Erm, if you get more utility for violence from a stick than a gun, I believe you may need to revisit your firearms training. I'm not sure you're doing it right.

Where does the pointy end go again?

I was meaning that the ability to shoot someone is not really needed in the vast majority of defensive situations.

Also, if you are up against someone who wants to kill you and who has a gun, if you have no warning then they probably have the drop on you already, and if you have reasonable warning then you would usually have many other options other than shooting someone. The remaining situations seem to be where you only have limited warning, in which case a gun might be useful.

That sounds exaggerated. A black market handgun will cost you like $700 in the States, and they're entirely legal here. (Felons, etc can't buy them, thus the black market)

Remember, there's much less demand for guns here and ~20% less GDP per capita, plus those areas of manchester are particularly poor and the bullets are much more expensive as we don't stock them in the supermarket.

Not sure if you're joking or not, but someone will take it at face value even if you are. We don't actually stock bullets in the supermarket.

Some Walmart stores do carry them, but you have to remember that Walmart is not a supermarket. They started out as a discount store and about 15 years ago they also started selling food.

Walmart sold guns long before they sold groceries.

If you want to quibble about it, it's probably best to say that we don't stock bullets in every supermarket. Plenty of other super stores stock guns and ammunition, as do many country grocery stores (which are often a grocery store and a hardware store and a sporting goods store, and maybe even a gas station).

I guess in the Walmart case it'd also be more accurate to say we stock groceries in our gun stores, since as the gp said Walmart sold guns and ammo before groceries.

So now we're back to Americans all being fat as opposed to gun-crazed.

What other super stores sell groceries and guns? K-mart probably, but according to Wikipedia they only have 29 super stores.

Target doesn't sell guns/ammo, and they are the only other retail chain with super stores that I'm aware of.

Also the combo grocery store/hardware store gas station thing is pretty much dead. I'm sure you could find a few, but I've traveled extensively in rural areas, and almost every small town has a proper grocery store these days.

Meijer and Fred Meyer. That pretty much leaves Costco and Target not selling ammunition.

I agree that rural outposts are going away, but I would guess there are still hundreds and hundreds of them.

I don't know if you were joking, but I'd like to point out that at a Super Walmart in the US you can buy both ammunition and a gallon of milk.

That seems really high given that new or nearly new hand guns easily go for less than $200. But again, I don't buy a lot of illegal guns myself.

The real problem is getting ammunition. Even if you can print a gun getting bullets will be a far bigger problem. (At least in Germany.)

Think of it like pornography. It may be available cheaply at any time at the store down the street. But having it available for download in the privacy of one's own home removes a significant barrier.

But for the moment having the minus of time, material, equipment, accuracy, money, reliability, etc. Plus, people can already make guns at home using fairly simple metalworking tools that are much less likely to fail badly than using 3d printed plastic. Or you could make a crossbow or something really basic. Is not that I don't see how certain people could be drawn to this idea, but other than as a pure engineering exercise, I really don't see the practicality, even to nutcases. Admittedly, nutcases might not be looking at this completely clearly however.

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