That was my first thought: start with a gun model, then add on nonsense knock-out blocks and bits of plastic filigree that you just clip off .
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… like … maybe … just print themselves one?
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I’ve seen accounts where an AR-15 lower was made of such materials as wood and nylon cutting boards, and while they looked pretty, they were not very reliable from reading those accounts. Until they were shut down, Cavalry Arms (I think) had a polymer based lower which was designed for those stresses, but I’m not sure if they did any real super long term testing on it.
And plus, it’s all a snow job- the parts that do take the stress on an AR-15 (the upper receiver and barrel) are technically ‘not classed as a firearm’ per the BATFE, so you can have those shipped via UPS or FedEx or USPS all day long with no federally mandated checks. (The lower receiver is defined as the firearm, and it has to be due to the weapon’s design; even a stripped lower, with no parts and no ability to hurt anyone unless you drop it on a bare foot or throw it at someone, counts.)
It’s a stupid set of rules, but that’s what we have to play by.
I had an “a-ha” moment when I realised that a firearm is ‘just’ an internal combustion engine (like the one under the bonnet of your car) with an unconstrained piston.
(edit: although, given the timeline of technology development, it’s probably more accurate to say that a car engine is ‘just’ a bank of firearms with constrained pistons)
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That is indeed the direction technology is going toward. Machines that make machines, and there are multiple degrees on this depending on the scale you’re talking about. MIT is one of the places at the forefront of this research.
There’s a series of videos about the topic on Tested.com, i can dig them up if you’re interest (and yes i know you posted that in jest).
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Only half in jest. Probably less than half.
I look forward to the day when it’s feasible for most folks to say “fuck your drm - I’ll just print my own”
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Regulate ammo. If you 3D print a gun and can’t get ammo or powder without filing some paperwork that is a relatively easy way to close this loophole.
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I have multiple uppers for my firearms to use different calibres. That’s better than owning multiple guns. And the 22LR ammo is waaay cheaper to target shoot than 5.56.
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Making ammo is easier than making weapons.
Instead of trying to find a cute way to regulatenotregulate firearms (see also: mandatory insurance), you could try a sane licensing system for users and/or weapons. That’s only worked successfully … oh, just everywhere it’s been tried 
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What if we wait for something to be a problem before we try to solve it? It’s not as if zip guns are a major problem. 3D printers are just another way to build an unsatisfactory zip gun.
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It’s bad enough that lawmakers don’t understand how information security works. But I assume the researchers are engineers of some description. They should ask their alma maters for a refund.
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Depends on how far down the rabbit hole you want to go. Gun powder can still be regulated, and i presume a lot of people don’t have the technical knowledge and skill to manufacture smokeless powder. And making large batches of it might land people in potential problem with some agencies.
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Right, but that’s just another cute attempt to regulatenotregulate
Edit: I made my own gunpowder as a pre-teen with a few basic chemicals (carbon, sulphur, saltpetre) I had … ah … liberated from a school science lab. As gunpowder goes it was ‘dirty’ as hell, and things got a bit chaotic when the mercury thermometer (also liberated) I was using to try and measure the temp of combustion exploded. My ambition vastly outran my ability. Still, with practically no knowledge, it worked. What now; regulate saltpetre? Regulate suphur? Regulate carbon … wait, ok, that might be a good idea, but for entirely different reasons.
Edit2: I also made my own ammo using gunpowder freed from fireworks, loaded into cart cases with a small hole punched in the side. The fuze from the firework was inserted into the hole, and the end stopped with hot solder as a projectile. Hold the cart case in a pair of pliers, light fuze, and hope for the best. They were a bit unreliable, with a lot of blow-outs back through the fuze hole, but some of them worked well enough to punch holes in various targets we found … and amazingly we somehow never had a cook off while setting the solder into place.
Heh. On balance, I’m vaguely surprised I survived adolescence …
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IKR?
Next thing you know they’ll try to outlaw newspapers!
This is certainly a good example of the synergy that can exist between evil and stupid (not that we’re starved for examples right atm), but I’d say it’s so dumb that it’s unlikely to ever be implemented even in the UK. So, I’m not going to spend any emotions on this until it gets a lot closer to reality.
Obviously 3D-printed guns are an imaginary problem – hobbyists in the 19th century could make guns just fine without a 3D printer – but it is interesting that this is what captures people’s imaginations. When you think about it, why are we so convinced that there is this primal hunger to possess guns? Based on the evidence, the only people who give a shit about being able to have guns are people who already can and do have guns, often to an absurd extent. I don’t actually recognise this fantasy world where anyone is so hard up for gun options that they’d resort to 3D printing.
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My dad said years ago primers and percussion caps are the one thing not easily made and would be the keystone to limiting reloading. While smokeless powder is hard to make, good black powder isn’t that hard. A projectile or shot is pretty easy to make. There are lots of cases and shells one can use. But the primer in modern ammo, and percussion caps in old black powder guns are harder to make. It can be done, but it is the most difficult part to make. REALLY old black powder used flint and steel.
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You made something akin to black powder i presume, which fouls guns like crazy. Smokeless powder can still be homemade but personally i have no taste for making large batches of explosive material for many reasons. Put enough barriers in front of someone and a reasonable person just won’t bother. In Japan ammo and guns are heavily regulated and you don’t see people homebrewing their own.
That being said, this is an intellectual argument i’m making. I’m not actually advocating for taking guns out of people’s hands or making it a heavily regulated thing. I do believe better laws need to be passed around firearms but stopping access to things like 3D printers doesn’t solve anything (To circle back to the topic at hand).
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Licencing doesn’t work. There’s no reliable way to differentiate between someone who wants to go hunting deer or jackrabbits and someone who wants to go hunting people except after the fact. The problem is that if you ban the legal possession of firearms you still need to fix the illegal possession of firearms. Now, 3D printers don’t (yet) do well with stress-bearing parts, but they are great at subverting your controls. It takes one person to engineer some sort of smoothbore full-auto mechanism using a sturdy length of pipe and a whole lot of intricate 3D printed machinery, and you have a very good rifle for, amusingly, doing precisely the thing we want to ban and nothing else. You couldn’t really hunt with it, reliably defend yourself with it, or target-shoot, but you sure could kill loads of people.
Sure, but making drugs is quite hard, too, and yet it is done in industrial quantities all the time. Compared to cooking up some LSD or meth, nitrating some cellulose is dead easy.
That said, modern ‘powder’ is a bit more tricky with stuff like nitroguanidine and RDX making up most if not all of it. Now that would be hard to replicate. But just guncotton would be enough for someone who wants to cause mayhem.
[citation desperately needed]
Evidence from around the world suggest that it does, in fact, work. And work very well.
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