So, there’s a very interesting discussion going on over at Thingiverse, a site where people can share projects for their 3d printers. If you have never seen what a 3d printer can do, I recommend watching this video as an example. It seems that some folks have made projects for a couple of parts of an AR-15 rifle (the magazine and the lower receiver). And of course there’s a bunch of people up in arms about it (pun intended). Their all fussing about the legality of ‘printing’ a weapon. At what point does it go from printing parts to printing a weapon? It’s a situation that really deserves a touch of attention from the ATF (take the hint Scot/Drew), maybe even a blog post or something pointing people to the federal code that covers things like this. Personally, I foresee a day when Remington et. al. start suing people for copyright/trademark/patent infringement for printing copies of their guns.
But all that aside, there’s a part of this story that I didn’t see mentioned anywhere else. It’s my understanding that 3d printers don’t exactly fabricate things out of metal. As such, someone could easily buy such a printer and make a fully functioning gun that would pass through metal detectors. Granted that the weapon would probably break after a shot or two is fried from it. But how many shots do you need if you can walk right into a place where no one else is armed? Additionally, what’s to stop someone from printing out knives, shuriken, or some other weapon. I can’t wait until these printers get more common. Inevitably some prison somewhere will buy one and some inmate(s) will starting printing weapons and then we’ll have headlines about prison riots and how dangerous these printers are. Yep, can’t wait. You know it’s coming.
Thanks to TechCrunch for the link to Thingiverse
Thanks to HackerNews for the link to TechCrunch
