Weapons made with 3-D printers could test gun-control efforts
Feinstein’s proposed legislation, which would also ban AR-15s, restricts manufacturing of such items by anyone in the country, said a spokesman for the senator.
But 3D-printing experts say that logic is dated and misses the point of the technology. Making guns for personal use has been legal for decades, but doing so has required machining know-how and a variety of parts. With 3-D printers, users download blueprints from the Internet, feed them into the machine, wait several hours and voila.
“Restrictions are difficult to enforce in a world where anybody can make anything,” said Hod Lipson, a 3-D printing expert at Cornell University and co-author of the new book, “Fabricated: The New World of 3D Printing.” “Talking about old-fashioned control will be very ineffective.”
It is unclear how many people are trying to print their own gun parts and magazines. But Cody Wilson, a University of Texas law student who is leading the ideological and technical campaign for 3-D printed guns through an organization called Defense Distributed, said blueprints have been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times from his group’s Web site.
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From today’s LA Times.
RINOs are people too on February 19, 2013 at 4:40 PM
To SWalker and the others impinging that 3-D printing wil be able to turn out a fully functional, practicable gun…. DREAM ON. You are clearly confusing scientific metallurgy with the physical capabilities of fashioning a thing that LOOKS LIKE a gun via 3-D printing. The high strength metals, hardening processes, and fine machining that are needed to create a real, useful, long-term, serviceable gun CANNOT be made by any 3-D printing machine now or in the foreseeable future. Do not confuse the capability of the 3-D printer to fashion a thing that looks like a gun part to an ACTUAL working gun. That is what you are doing. You are enamored by the technical possibilities of making something that looks good via a 3-D printer with making something that can actually work. The two are not the same.
Warner Todd Huston on February 19, 2013 at 4:47 PM
What you see here is what I call the the Kickstarter Derangement Syndrome. The basis for this is no one knows how to make anything, so why not make it that way?
This is a result of the loss of a manufacturing economy in the US. There are no apprentice machinists, mold makers, fabricators, etc.
We live in a “There’s an app for that” society and they don’t know any better.
Case in point, AR-15 magazines. They require progressive rate springs, hardened after shaping. Does any one know the proper spring rates? Plastic housings have to resist this pressure for extended periods unless you want to load them just before you use them. The polymer must resist this force with no change in size or shape in +50 C to -40C just to be practical. The polymer must be resistant to all chemicals, including oil based solvents.
And this the short list for a magazine, imagine the parameters for a receiver.
RINOs are people too on February 19, 2013 at 5:07 PM
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