The Law How do the police enforce gun control in the future with 3D printers?

[SaintsSeptember]

Because the advancement in 3D printing is amazing, the Advancement in making 3D gun's is not.

This is an amazing piece of technology that everyone should have access to, the constant fear mongering of stupid s**t like 3D printed gun's (which is just not having anywhere near the breakthroughs of other designs) 3D printing for firearms has been piss poor.

yet the focus is on gun's, I don't want to see the Advancements made in 3D Printing cut off from the public out of fear anyone can get a gun. Particularly when anyone get get a ******* gun that works right now!

you want to talk about breakthroughs in 3D printing i'm all for it. my car is fitted with a 3D printed water pump that has just clicked over to 19,000Km's and showed no sign's of stress fractures, crack's or leak's when i checked it last week.

It is lighter, stronger and not prone to corrosion like the OEM part which would have cost me $60 instead materials cost me $30 (per unit it would have been just $5)

on the weekend i had to clean out my Idle Control Valve in doing so it destroyed the stupid brass pin and not even bunnings sold screw that small not wanting to risking cracking the housing went round my mate's printed off a polymer Nut and bolt that fit's perfectly. cost nothing, and i didn't have to **** around trying to tap the plastic housing.

These are the sort of innovations that should be talked up, not some fear of the rise of 3D printed gun's that are still horribly flawed.

You know as well as i do that the more these rubbish articles are talked up the more likely 3D printers are going to end up highly regulated and treated as if it's a dangerous piece of tech that the public shouldn't have access to.

The fear's are unfounded and pointless. Anyone can get a gun, hell go get a rubber glove a bunch of staples (and stapler), a piece of PVC pipe, a rubber doorstop and a screw. spend all of 2 minutes on google and you can make a very effective Muzzle loaded rifle that fires real rounds that's less likely to injure the user than any of the current 3D printed gun's that currently exist.

That is how piss poor the designs are, anything more than one shot and it becomes dangerous to discharge a round, These articles are fairyland stuff. and the ill informed are going to get themselves hurt the more these articles hype them up. Followed by the moronic masses crying about safety and security.

The reality is that you are comparing manufactured cost to retail.
I know first hand that items sold for spare parts by car companies for $50-$200 are sold complete and packaged to car companies for $4 to $6.
For mass production 3D printers are great for prototyping, but expensive and slow to make compared to high volume moulding or die castiing.

For you and me the great thing is that you can get stuff that would otherwise be expensive/hard to make.

Guns? They are made of Steel. For a reason.
You cant print steel (yet - and if you could the laser in your printer would be far more powerful than the gun you could make ), and its unlikely that even high grades of lower melting temperature metals will be able to be produced without special heat treatment.

 

[Chief]

I don't believe the focus is on guns. They are one of the things that gets media attention but people with 3D printers that I know have not mentioned them.

I feel that the main fear is that talking about guns will cause the governments ears to prick and 3D will be regulated.

There is a 3D thread on the computers board. Go there if you'd like to talk about the technology - though guns are mentioned in that thread.

Guns are always going to be sexier than a water pump. That's life.

 

[SaintsSeptember]

A bigger question may be , how will airport security stop people from bringing on dodgy plastic guns.

 

[Admiral Byng]

Given the current state of technology, I think dodgy plastic guns are probably more of a danger to the person holding them than what they're pointing it at. The technology with the most promise is probably the powder and laser type printer, but there's so far no domestic type set up for them. My brother has a plastic 3D printer. He has made a few bits and pieces for me, a mounting bracket for a camera for example, it works but the quality of the plastic isn't great. I can't see that would make a working gun.

 

[SaintsSeptember]

Given the current state of technology, I think dodgy plastic guns are probably more of a danger to the person holding them than what they're pointing it at. The technology with the most promise is probably the powder and laser type printer, but there's so far no domestic type set up for them. My brother has a plastic 3D printer. He has made a few bits and pieces for me, a mounting bracket for a camera for example, it works but the quality of the plastic isn't great. I can't see that would make a working gun.

A working plastic gun can get through airport security. That's about the only thing it has going for it.
Even with metals there is more to it than the material. Forged metals are far stronger than die-cast or sintered metals. I'd expect ( without knowing ) that printed metals would be sort of like sintered metals.
Metal guns don't go through metal detectors. So you are no better off than if you machined a gun out of a bit of good steel.

 

[Sydney Bloods]

I don't believe the focus is on guns. They are one of the things that gets media attention but people with 3D printers that I know have not mentioned them.

I feel that the main fear is that talking about guns will cause the governments ears to prick and 3D will be regulated.

There is a 3D thread on the computers board. Go there if you'd like to talk about the technology - though guns are mentioned in that thread.

Guns are always going to be sexier than a water pump. That's life.

Which is why i've been focusing on these plastic gun's, that's what this thread is about, Currently they are not only rubbish, they are dangerous to the user.