3-D Printing
Everyone keeps screaming and crying about how “OMG 3-D PRINTERS WILL ALLOW PEOPLE TO MAKE GUNS!!!!”
Once again, it’s all fearmongering bullshit. If I smash my head against my desk in exasperation any harder, I will have to buy a new desk.
First of all: It is already legal to make your own firearms. There are some exceptions regarding “non-sporting semi-auto rifles and non-sporting shotguns”, but it is already legal for you to build a firearm on your own. And always has been.
Secondly: Frankly, it’s cheaper and easier to build your own firearms from $20 worth of hardware down at Lowe’s than it is to gain access to an industrial 3-D printer. Not necessarily legal, but I’d trust this guy’s pipe gun much more than I would that flimsy plastic “Liberator”.
Finally, on that note: anyone who prints out that Liberator “pistol” and suffers when it blows up in their hand deserves what they get.
On the home front, I was laid low by a 24 hour bug this weekend. Started around noon Saturday, as I began this strip. Chills, fever of 102, extreme physical purging from both ends. Fever broke around 5 am today, thankfully. But as Saturday is the day when I do most of my comics, I am waaaaaaaaaaay behind. Some would take this as a sign that a comics buffer of more than a week is a good thing to have. I need to work on that again, especially with con season coming up.
Actually, depending on where you live, access to a 3-D printer is easy and cheap. You don’t need to own one; there are “maker clubs” popping up all over, where they get together and trade designs, rent shop space (and sublet it to members, or even non-members [at a higher price]), and such.
As for why the DoD got involved, it’s because the Liberator guys didn’t get an export license. It’s the same sort of thing that “prevented” exportation of strong encryption, back a decade ago, which led to all sorts of issues for PGP.
The Liberator blueprints are available on a number of Darknets (just checked), though I wouldn’t vouch for the reliability of the plans – some of the bastards who frequent such places would think nothing of modifying the schematic to make it more likely to blow up.
An industrial 3-D printer, is legal to own, Tec schools are training people on them and proper prepared materials would set you back. It would be cheaper and easier to make a Liberator the old fashion way. No need to modify a schematic as they were not designed to be reused, but thrown away if needed. However the material and plans to make a legal 30 round magazine and some machine rental time gets by the sale of such magazines. Like a Pottery Barn call it the “Got Gun?” The Kel-Tec People are probably working on an industrial 3-D printer pistol with all materials and software licenses included (I’d like 5 production licenses, personal use please.)
Find it amazing how many people don´t belive me when i say i can do something just as fast and probably far less likely to blow up in my hand, in my dads garage.
The only Liberator I want is a stamped steel single shot
You mean those little single-shot .45 jobs we air-dropped to the french resistance in WW2? At least they were stamped steel and not just plastic, plus the ammo was air dropped along with them! Lots of krauts learned about those the hard way. Serve the traitor anti gun lobby right if personal armament proliferates one way or th other!
Here is a company that makes modern repros of the FP45. One will cost you $500, so you really, really, REALLY have to want one.
http://vintageordnance.homestead.com/Liberator.html
The strange part is that the fury seems to be that since this sort of thing is possible, it means any and all gun laws are obsolete, the criminals will get guns anyway, etc., as if the fact that criminals will break laws means we shouldn’t bother to have laws. I mean, do people think we should live in a world where convicted felons not possessing firearms is just a recommendation? That if caught they get let go because it isn’t illegal? How many petty criminals are going to buy a 3-D printer just to make a gun? It sounds more like the argument of a self-proclaimed “law abiding gun owner” who is declaring that they will not in fact obey the law.
“do people think we should live in a world where convicted felons not possessing firearms is just a recommendation?”
That’s the world *I* live in, where do you live? Any man you wouldn’t trust on the street with a gun shouldn’t be put onto the street. In my world, felons manage to obtain guns IN PRISONS.
“That if caught they get let go because it isn’t illegal?”
Requires them to get caught in the first place. Then, if they haven’t actually committed a crime with the gun, that’s practically what happens today.
“a self-proclaimed “law abiding gun owner” who is declaring that they will not in fact obey the law.”
Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add ‘within the limits of the law,’ because law is often but the tyrant’s will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual.
–Thomas Jefferson
I’m tired of prohibitionary laws, that make useful and even innocuous things illegal because I MIGHT do something awful with them. Guns, tiny baggies, pill bottles, cold medicine, 30-round magazines, take your pick.
So since it requires they get caught, don’t bother making it illegal. Got it.
I was referring to background checks, when I mentioned obeying the law. Would you knowingly sell to someone that isn’t allowed to own a gun?
Most states do not give felons the right to own guns back automatically. If you disagree, that’s another argument, but not reality.
Should you be allowed to own a nuclear weapon?
You know, I’ve heard the nuclear weapon argument used before, and something occurred to me.
Seems the consensus is that on the black market, a 20kT nuke costs about $35 million.
You know what? I’m okay with you buying a nuke. If you have that kind of scratch, go for it. I can’t stop you. Nobody really can, unless you are identified by NATO as a threat and they get the USA to impose sanctions on your ass.
The nuclear weapon argument is a non sequitur. We’re not talking about people having the right to own weapons designed to destroy cities. We’re talking about, at worst, weapons to take one specific life to save another. Weapons of mass destruction would be “munitions,” not “arms,” in 18th-century terminology, and aren’t covered by the Second Amendment, presumably because they’re a totally different class of objects.
I’m assuming you were referring to Henry Bowman’s statement, “I’m tired of prohibitionary laws…” Note that he continued with “…that make USEFUL and even INNOCUOUS things illegal…” (emphasis added) If you can think of a definition by which a nuclear weapon is both useful and innocuous in civilian life, I’d be interested to hear it.
The thrust of the argument isn’t that we should just stop caring about enforcing the law because you can “print a gun.” It’s merely pointing out that the “if we ban guns nobody will have them” argument falls flat when it’s effectively impossible to keep people from having them. (Never mind that this was already impossible; see the CNC comments below, or refer to the quantities of illegal narcotics imported into the US in a year.) The argument “criminals will have guns, but you won’t be able to, and this is a good thing” is hard to get people to buy into.* The 3D-printable gun is merely a clear example of a way that criminals WILL have guns, which leads to banning guns to keep them out of the hands of criminals to be an obvious impossibility.
* The ways that this is said to be a good thing are generally either the “ordinary people become killers when guns are present” or the “lack of guns will decrease the suicide rate” arguments. The former has been addressed here before, and both has been proven incorrect and is a rather frightening insight into the mental state of the person making the argument. The latter may have some validity, since guns are highly effective tools for committing suicide and suicide accounts for the majority of gun deaths, but leads to the moral issues, including whether it’s the best solution for decreasing the suicide rate or if there’s a right to deny an effective tool for suicide.
I feel this point of yours needs to be emphasized.
The top things convicted felons are sent back to prison for, while still on parole, are:
1. Alcohol possession.
2. Testing positive on a piss test.
3. Firearms possession.
All three of those things are already illegal for a felon. Illegal. Completely. And yet they do them anyway. If you look down the list, actually committing other crimes takes a distant, distant fourth on the recidivism rates. Let me explain that again, as it bears repeating: Most felons who get busted on parole aren’t actually hurting anyone else. They’re busted for doing things that the rest of free society does. So they go right back into the prison system, and the wheel keeps on turning.
I personally believe that the laws prohibiting felons from those three things, even if they committed a violent crime for their original conviction, are bullshit. The whole concept of incarceration in this country is one of paying one’s debt to society and reforming. The whole concept of letting people out of prison, parole or not, is that they have paid that price already and are safe to let free. Mind that last word: free. And yet, we have laws that, if you break, you forfeit your freedoms for life. Your constitutional rights go straight out the window.
I am not afraid of an ex-con getting a .45 to stick under his pillow at night. I’m not afraid of a man, convicted of 2nd-degree murder, having a joint or a vodka sour when he gets out 20 years later. Hell, if anyone needs it, he probably does. We either need to come up with serious legal reforms that give convicts their actual freedoms back when they get out, or just publicly admit that the system is neither about paying the price, nor reforming law breakers. It’s about class warfare, plain and simple, and god help you if you get caught in this system.
The problem with your argument is, no one in the government is trying to ban guns, despite the rhetoric. I don’t agree with magazine bans, or renewing the AWB, but by blocking even something like universal background checks, which have already been shown to prevent illegal sales, we face being ignored entirely.
Your statement, as worded, is provably incorrect; there is a well-known senator from California who is, indeed, attempting to ban guns, specifically the guns referred to as assault weapons. What I assume you meant is “no one in the government is trying to ban ALL guns”. I’m not aware of evidence to conclusively prove this incorrect. However, given that it’s provable that there have been people in the Federal government who want to ban and confiscate assault weapons (Feinstein, 60 Minutes, 1995), ban possession of all handguns (Chafee, Congressional Record, 1992), and “possibly ban bullets” (Simpson, CPSC, 1973), it’s clear that this is not limited to one person and one class of gun in a recent or brief effort. I don’t know about you, but personally, I’m not much more fine with being allowed only a break-action shotgun than I would be of an outright ban. (Especially since they’d almost certainly get banned too, since criminals would be using them, as found by ICPSR for NIJ in 1986.)
Incidentally, I found all of these in less than 5 minutes. Granted, I knew where to look, and one of the places I chose to look (GunCite) is itself a compilation of this information from other sources, but it is not difficult to find on-the-record quotes that at least suggest a government interest in broad gun bans and even confiscation.
As for the universal background checks, I’m curious whether you’re unfamiliar with the argument against them (which has been made here in the past, and is the reason the NRA switched from supporting them to opposing them between 1999 and 2013) or choose to ignore it. If the latter, it’s disingenuous to not mention it, and preferably rebut it, when discussing gun rights supporters blocking background checks. If the former, I’ll happily fill you in; the succinct version is, “When ATF stops keeping records of Form 4473 in violation of Federal law, and thus turning background checks into de facto registration, we can talk about it.” This is not a trivial concern worth yielding so we aren’t “ignored entirely”; this bears on a clear risk to gun rights which we ourselves would be fools to ignore.
You make one heck of a leap of logic there. The simple fact of the matter is that the vast majority of gun violence occurs by people who can’t legally own guns in places with the most strict gun laws. It is very clear that criminals don’t CARE what the law says, and are very happy to buy black-market firearms to use against those of us who do obey the law and are thus disarmed. A law which makes the innocent defenseless against the lawless is not a just law. An unjust law is no law at all.
Forget the 3d printer. As soon as it gets here, I’m going to draw a gun with my 3doodler!
Makes about as much sense as printer fears to me.
Hm. “Fisher Price presents ‘My First Handgun’.”
Yeah, I wrote pretty much this over at http://lizard-sf.xanga.com/773135495/everybody-panic/ . Except you say it in far fewer words and more effectively, which is why cartoonists>writers on the Internet. Sigh.
As a liberal I really had to facepalm at the fears about 3D printers. But I generally facepalm at any technology-based fears. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to explain to people that while I’m sure it’s possible for someone to hack your fax machine, it’s just not something people actually do.
Jay Leno spent somewhere near a quarter million bucks a few years ago on a 3D printer that can print in moderately crappy metal plus a 3D scanner. He can take a broken alternator mount for a 1929 Bugatti or something, glue it together so it looks right, scan it, print it, bolt it in, drive off.
That level of 3D printer could probably build a working 12ga repeating shotgun. It wouldn’t be very good, it would be too damn heavy but it would work. It could also build zip-guns like the Liberator. It can’t build a real high-pressure barrel or chamber, esp. not a true rifled barrel.
As this tech gets better 3D printing WILL get to a point where you can download and print a 38Spl revolver or some kind of modest-pressure rifle – at a guess, the first effective repeating 3D rifles will chamber something like the .44-40 or other low-pressure round dating back to the black powder era.
At that point the world will in fact start to change. I think we’re roughly 30 years out. The main thing slowing down 3D printer developments is patents – the “hobby grade” 3D printers like the Makerbot and such are running off of patents that just recently expired. Then again, at some point one 3D printer will be able to make the parts for another and at that point it can “spiral out of control” in a good way.
So here’s the kicker. If the entire concept of gun control is going to die a whimpering hot death in a bit over a generation, killing off the “gun culture” now is maybe a BAD IDEA. The question is not whether we’ll have a gun culture come that point, but what kind? Will it be based on “I will not initiate force against another person” or “I’ll busta cap in anybody’s ass who disses me!”?
THAT is the choice politicians get to make today, if the courts are stupid enough to let them.
I could care less about a printed gun, but the thought of printing standard capacity 5.56mm mags makes me giggle like a school girl at a Justin Bieber concert.
Furthermore, as some sort of libertarian/Constitutionalist/republican hybrid, the blurring of the line between the 1st and 2nd Amendment makes me wobbly in the knees.
And in regards to the ITAR nonsense, I’m sure Haji is going to attempt to print a gun instead of merely using one of the millions of AK-47s, AKMs, AK-74s, PKMs, Dish-Kas, RPDs, RPGs, and SVDs that the Soviets flooded their client states with.
Glad you’re up and about, Grant.
For the same kind of expense you could rent time on a really good multi-axis CNC machine. The cad plans for classic firearms like the 1911, browning, S&W revolver, etc. can be found online. Mill the frames and slides from the premium metal of your choice, buy a barrel and the parts you can’t mill, lube and assemble the beast. Voila’, You are now a firearms manufacturer!
The first time firing should be a bit scary so I recommend using a remote firing rig.
Yes, but “CNC machine” is both less catchy and older, so it’s harder to fear-monger with. Never mind that you can make a vastly more effective weapon that way.
While I love the wonderful things that can be done with 3D printing. I’ve had to remind people that Sten guns were designed to be made in the simplest of machine shops for about $12 in materials. It’s essentially a zip gun with a spring. The Grease gun and Mac 10 required more work, but apply similar principals.
As for .45 Liberators, my friend Richard fired one when in the Philippines. That little POS hurt like hell and drew blood. Archibald has the better idea. You’re better off with the Bersa 😉
I’ve had people not believe me when I tell them how easy Sten guns are to make. Part of it, I think, relates to people not comprehending that a fully-automatic open-bolt blowback firearm is a ludicrously simple device. All it needs to do is slam open and shut a lot and have a catch (called the trigger) to make it not slam shut when you don’t want it to. (There’s even been a Sten variant, the Sputter Gun, that skipped the trigger and just fired until the magazine was empty when the bolt was opened and then released.)
I’ve got a Solidoodle and I’m messing with printing one of these. Yes, I know it’ll probably blow up frequently; and I know that there are far easier ways to print a pistol.
The idea of printing out a pistol on my $600 hobby toy is fun.
This is pretty much just the first step. Eventually, 3D printers will be able to do a lot more and in metals too. This is just a demonstration and as such it doesn’t have to be pretty or particularly effective.
Wait. A .380 pistol that shoots one shot, then breaks down? OMG! Someone invented a Hi Point!
Just kidding Hi Point owners. I Know it’s a decent gun. I just hadda make that joke…
My understanding is that the hue and cry over printed firearms is due to the lack substances that will set off metal detectors. Either way, Barbara Streisand might have had some advice for the government on this one.
You mean they shoot plastic bullets out of plastic cartridges too? Will wonders never cease. (Yes, that was sarcasm. Empty plastic gun is even less use than an empty metal gun.)
Is a single bullet enough to set off a metal detector?
Dunno… I’ve been wondering that myself. From the hue and cry, I’m guessing that a single bullet is undetectable as far as most security-station metal detectors go.
I know that metal detectors can be sensitive enough to detect single bullets (and even smaller stuff), but maybe that begins to defeat the purpose: A metal detector that sensitive might start generating false positives on everyone, due to zippers, snaps, and other metal bits found in normal clothing.
This touches on another reason I think the Liberator 3-D print gun is a stupid concept.
Know what the original Liberator pistols had, in WWII? 10 rounds of god damned AMMUNITION, homie. You can’t print gunpowder.
Off topic, but I’m getting an error when trying to buy a FO&BS shirt and don’t know where else to contact you. It won’t let me complete checkout.
“You don’t have permission to access / on this server.
Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.”
Give us tonight to look at it. Mel’s the coder there.
Only thing is it takes a $8,000 3D printer to make the Liberator, not the $2,500 models.
Right now, sure. But 3D printers for hobby use are advancing in lockstep behind cutting-edge commercial 3D printers, exactly as fast as patents are running out…
another person’s take on the whole thing for a lot of the reasons already stated. http://hackaday.com/2013/05/06/the-first-3d-printed-gun-has-been-fired-and-i-dont-care/