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Comment by jlgreco | Hacker News Reader

> announced he would be introducing legislation to renew a ban on firearms and magazines that can't be picked up by standard metal detectors. The current ban on plastic firearms expires this year.

In other words, the only thing this has to do with printed magazines is that printed magazines are being used as a talking point to promote the bill.

Printed magazines, when printed with plastic, would still be picked up by a metal detector since they need a large metal spring (yes, there are printed plastic springs. they suck). Printed magazines printed with metal would obviously be unaffected by this law.

The concept of a "plastic gun" is (currently at least) largely an urban legend anyway. Glocks set off metal detectors just fine.

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The idea of a plastic Glock appeared in one of the Die Hards. For all I know that's where it originated.

Die Hard 2 I believe. That's where I first heard it too.

they called it the "glock 7"

There was also a composite gun used in 'In the Line of Fire', a Clint Eastwood movie from 1993.

According to the Glock company's official story, that's correct.

The Glock 7 is a fictional weapon, it doesn't cost as much as John McClane said, and a gun barrel is still made of metal to deal with the explosive pressure of rapidly expanding gases.

It didn't originate in the Die Hard movie. There was a media fueled rumor about the Glock 17 containing so little metal that it wouldn't show up on metal detectors, and Die Hard 2 merely perpetuated that idea. However, none of it was ever true.

In the mid '80s there was a rumor about a Soviet all-plastic 3-shot gun, and there was a guy who patented the idea of an all-plastic gun, and then the media picked up on Glock making guns using plastic frames (but still more than 80% metal by weight). Then someone wrote a breathless story about how Libya was trying to buy Glocks, and this rapidly snowballed into a media fueled freakout about plastic guns and the Glock became a "terrorist special" and so forth.

P.S. Here's an article from 1986 which was one of the major sources for the "plastic gun" scare:

http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1842&dat=19860418&...

As an intellectual exercise, see how many mistakes and logical fallacies the author commits.

If I were making a "non detectable by x-ray gun", I'd probably go with ceramic instead of plastic for some parts, or with using more metal, not less, to disrupt the shape (which is illegal under current law, too)

There are printable ceramics as well, though I don't know how strong they are. The usual method is to print a powder and binder, then fire and glaze the piece.

Well, the slide of a Glock (and of all other polymer-framed firearms) is a big hunk of metal.

Not to mention the barrel.

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