San Diego County jumped into California’s sprawling ghost gun fight this week, suing a 3-D printing filament manufacturer it says hocks material for homespun firearms in violation of state law.
Working with the Giffords Law Center, the county counsel sued manufacturer Polymaker, alleging the company made a “strategic business choice” to market and sell 3-D printer filament to Californians for the express purpose of building illegal weapons. The polymer filament is sold in spools that feed into 3-D printers, allowing the devices to form designs created by their owners.
I’m not a gun guy but from my understanding of ghost guns you pretty much buy the whole gun online in parts, and you just 3d print a handle.
So I don’t understand why people are so afraid of 3d printing when it really has minimal to do with the final product. From what I can tell you can’t just 3d print a gun from start to finish like its a llm. You still have to buy the actual gun parts from the manufacturer. To me this sounds completely unrelated and like a issue with regulating gun parts.
You can carve a handle out of soap, wood, or buy a solid chunk of plastic and its the same result.
The problem is that, legally speaking, the lower receiver is the gun. So you can buy all the other parts online with no background check etc.
A person with a machine shop and knowledge on how to use it could also do this
My biggest problem with all these attacks on 3d printing is that what you are talking about is completely legal as far as I am aware. There are tons of places online that sell partial receiver blanks that require the buyer to do the last few bits of machining and turn a “block of metal” into a “gun”, legally speaking. It is currently completely legal for an individual in the US to build a gun without telling anyone about it for personal use so long as the final result does not run afoul of ant NFA rules (like automatic fire, length of shotgun, caliber size, etc.). They don’t start doing anything illegal until they sell them, or even give them away (again, assuming they meet all of the NFA rules - obviously someone making themselves a gun has a high risk of running foul of the myriad of rules here, but the end result has to be evaluated to determine if they broke the law or not).
So all of these are just using gun terror as an attack vector against 3d printing in general. Just like the “think of the children” campaigns all over the world that are really just about stripping us of privacy and security. The guns aren’t the real problem and neither are the kids. A free, private, and secure populace is the problem.
I am not advocating that people build their own guns. I am not a lawyer. I advise anyone go learn your local laws and discuss with actual legal counsel before choosing to attempt anything that could be against federal firearm law. kthx
Makes you wonder if there’s a more sensible way to classify things legally… Probably not.
I’m pretty sure you can. It might only work once though.
Basic guns aren’t really all that complex.
They used to make guns out of umbrella parts.
One of the best guns of all time (the .45 1911) was made by a typewriter offshoot of Remington.
You can print all sorts of gun parts though, like suppressors and modifications to allow a gun to shoot faster than normal.
With that being said, trying to ban 3d printing or sue filament manufacturers is monumentally stupid.
I don’t know how impactful those are, and I think a person with access to a decent metal shop could pose more danger.
What is it just the access that’s scary then? As a guy that doesn’t know guns, you often hear things like a potato or a water bottle can be made into a makeshift surpressor or turning a single fire into a sensative rapid fire trigger is trival. So I’m just not understanding why 3d printers are almost entirely linked to making guns in everyone’s minds. When I first got a elgoo that was the first thing people would jokingly ask if I was going to make one.
Like maybe I can understand the argument that access is so low anyone can do it, but even then you can’t just download a gun. The person who is doing this already bought gun parts and knows how to assemble them. This is not going to stop that kind of person from building a gun in any form. The gun is still the metal parts you buy online. A silencer, a trigger mod, whatever is useless until you handle ghost guns.
Yeah going after printing and/or filament is dumb. I’m I guess what some would call a “gun guy”. 3D printing in this space is less practical and more just for fun.
You can use a metal coat hanger to full auto an AR. A printed suppressor is going to be so weak it’ll probably break on first use. Oil filters work tho. If you want to illegal things the better way to do most often doesnt involve printing.
Ive alwaya assumed 3D printers were new enough that Genie could be put back in the bottle
Who is Jeannie?