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The fact that it is possible to make a gun using 3D-printed parts does not make it a significant contributing factor to the prevalence of guns (for non-recreati

The fact that it is possible to make a gun using 3D-printed parts does not make it a significant contributing factor to the prevalence of guns (for non-recreational use) in the US.

yellowapple 6y ago
Correction: it's not a significant contributing factor yet. It takes a pretty advanced case of myopia to not be able to foresee home firearm manufacturing growing. At the current rate of development, I give it 10 years, tops, before European and Australian gun control measures are effectively meaningless.
- notahacker 6y ago
  But they're not "meaningless", because the average person in Europe and Australia has no interest in owning a gun, never mind figuring out how to print one, and even the average hardened criminal has to consider the possibility that since it isn't necessary for them to preemptively shoot anybody who challenges them, possessing guns might not be worth the risk of additional penalties. Those are much bigger factors in low gun deaths somewhere like the UK than the difficulty of obtaining one on the black market
  - emteycz 6y ago
    Every tenth adult in Czechia carries a gun. Last time I checked, Czechia was safer than UK.
    - pauke 6y ago
      Nope on the first part. 8M adults, 300k gun permits. And that's including almost 100k active police/military. As for the latter part, maybe, but there is way more guns in US than in CZ. And last time I checked.. Let's say I don't think there is any correlation between the two statements.
      - emteycz 6y ago
        You're right about the stats, the news article I was referring to was wrong. It's not including police/military service permits though, the 300k is purely private permits (which can have overlap with police/military - they can't use guns for private purposes without a private permit); and there are 900k private guns.
      - yellowapple 6y ago
        > 8M adults, 300k gun permits. This assumes that everyone carrying a gun has a permit to do so.
  - yellowapple 6y ago
    > But they're not "meaningless", because the average person in Europe and Australia has no interest in owning a gun You've just described yet another reason why gun control measures are meaningless. The desire to kill oneself and/or others (with or without a gun) doesn't exist in a vacuum; guns don't magically make people suicidal or homicidal. That desire happens due to a combination of socioeconomic pressures and inadequate mental healthcare - two angles that gun control proponents chronically ignore, instead pushing for band-aids like gun control because those band-aids are "easier" and don't involve confronting the painful realities of socioeconomic inequality. Hence, my point: as home manufacturing of firearms proliferates, that band-aid loses whatever tenuous effectiveness it has. People concerned about "gun violence" are then forced to consider why people are killing themselves and each other (hint: because the average person is broke and depressed).
    - notahacker 6y ago
      Guns don't magically make people homicidal, they just make it magically easy and efficient to kill people in the heat of the moment, or by mistake, or because they fear if they don't pull the trigger first the other person might, or when too mentally ill to know what is going on. The actual difficulty for a sufficiently motivated person to obtain a gun (legal or otherwise) under gun control in the UK is not that high, but the incentives to do so are reduced, the disincentives increased, and the average person with the potential to carry out non-premeditated shootings never considers buying one. The ability to learn all about how to 3D print a gun instead of learning how to license and modify a shotgun or how to find black markets that will sell you illegal firearms does not change that calculus very much.
- philipkglass 6y ago
  If the guns themselves become easy to manufacture I think that there will be more emphasis on controlling and tracing ammunition, including primers and propellants for handloading. Making stable, uniform smokeless propellant starting from raw cellulose and over-the-counter chemicals is a huge investment of skill and effort. Making black powder is more tractable but still a lot of effort. Most aspiring firearm enthusiasts who are not criminals could get legally permitted in Europe if they were willing to invest as much effort as it would take to make their own guns and ammunition from scratch. Most criminals who want guns just as crime accessories don't have the discipline and drive to make weapons that they can't buy. (Thank goodness, or homemade bombs with wireless command detonation would already be common instruments in areas with gang rivalry.)
  - yellowapple 6y ago
    > Making stable, uniform smokeless propellant starting from raw cellulose and over-the-counter chemicals is a huge investment of skill and effort. Making black powder is more tractable but still a lot of effort. Re: black powder, I think you're overestimating the level of effort a bit. It certainly hasn't gotten harder to make it after the Industrial Revolution. Hell, there are even WikiHow articles on it: https://www.wikihow.com/Make-Black-Powder https://www.wikihow.com/Make-Black-Powder It's the primers that are, from my understanding, the tricky thing to replace. I suspect that if push came to shove, though, a primer shortage/restriction would lead to designs of new cartridges and firearms built around spark plugs or some other alternative source of ignition. 3D printing would enable the sorts of quick prototyping necessary to rapidly iterate on unconventional firearm designs like that. > Most criminals who want guns just as crime accessories don't have the discipline and drive to make weapons that they can't buy. Well that's the thing: they don't have to be the ones making them, just like how drug dealers are not usually the ones themselves making the drugs. This is something that could very well be the purview of some black market cottage industry. > (Thank goodness, or homemade bombs with wireless command detonation would already be common instruments in areas with gang rivalry.) I mean, bombings are pretty common in a lot of places. See also: Ireland during the Troubles, the Middle East today, etc. And with quadcopters being widespread, it's probably only a matter of time before we start seeing drone bombings. Cat's pretty much out of the bag. Pandora's opened the box. The only viable approach to stopping violence is to end it at its source: by addressing the reasons why people commit violence in the first place.
kbenson 6y ago
I think the point was to note that shutting down manufacturing us no longer a useful way to prevent firearms from being made. They don't need to be 3D printed right now because there are factories. If all the factories shut down tomorrow, that wouldn't stop new guns from being produced.
- minikites 6y ago
  Might as well not have any laws or regulations ever, then.
  - HideousKojima 6y ago
    Or you could simply add additional penalties for commiting actual violent crimes with weapons, which we already do. See, for example, strongarm robbery vs armed robbery. That way criminals are punished for misuse of firearms while law abiding owners don't have their rights infringed.
    - sofixa 6y ago
      And how is that working out? Last time i checked, the US was leading in violent crime, death and suicide by guns, mass shootings, etc. among developed nations, by a lot.
      - HideousKojima 6y ago
        Why does it matter if someone is murdered by a gun vs. cut into cubes by a cartel or brained with a hammer or anything else? If you don't limit it to murders and suicides by guns, your claim is flatly untrue. Japan's suicide rate is greater than the US's murders and suicides combined. Russia has far more murders despite having fairly restrictive gun laws. In any case, the US is inherently more violent and criminal than other nations in general independent of guns. It also has extremely violent subpopulations centered in major urban centers that tilt the numbers significantly. Outside of a few specific cities like Baltimore, Detroit, Chicago, etc. the US is extremely peaceful and low in crime.

The fact that it is possible to make a gun using 3D-printed parts does not make it a significant contributing factor to the prevalence of guns (for non-recreational use) in the US.

yellowapple 6y ago

Correction: it's not a significant contributing factor yet. It takes a pretty advanced case of myopia to not be able to foresee home firearm manufacturing growing. At the current rate of development, I give it 10 years, tops, before European and Australian gun control measures are effectively meaningless.

notahacker 6y ago
But they're not "meaningless", because the average person in Europe and Australia has no interest in owning a gun, never mind figuring out how to print one, and even the average hardened criminal has to consider the possibility that since it isn't necessary for them to preemptively shoot anybody who challenges them, possessing guns might not be worth the risk of additional penalties. Those are much bigger factors in low gun deaths somewhere like the UK than the difficulty of obtaining one on the black market
- emteycz 6y ago
  Every tenth adult in Czechia carries a gun. Last time I checked, Czechia was safer than UK.
  - pauke 6y ago
    Nope on the first part. 8M adults, 300k gun permits. And that's including almost 100k active police/military. As for the latter part, maybe, but there is way more guns in US than in CZ. And last time I checked.. Let's say I don't think there is any correlation between the two statements.
    - emteycz 6y ago
      You're right about the stats, the news article I was referring to was wrong. It's not including police/military service permits though, the 300k is purely private permits (which can have overlap with police/military - they can't use guns for private purposes without a private permit); and there are 900k private guns.
    - yellowapple 6y ago
      > 8M adults, 300k gun permits. This assumes that everyone carrying a gun has a permit to do so.
- yellowapple 6y ago
  > But they're not "meaningless", because the average person in Europe and Australia has no interest in owning a gun You've just described yet another reason why gun control measures are meaningless. The desire to kill oneself and/or others (with or without a gun) doesn't exist in a vacuum; guns don't magically make people suicidal or homicidal. That desire happens due to a combination of socioeconomic pressures and inadequate mental healthcare - two angles that gun control proponents chronically ignore, instead pushing for band-aids like gun control because those band-aids are "easier" and don't involve confronting the painful realities of socioeconomic inequality. Hence, my point: as home manufacturing of firearms proliferates, that band-aid loses whatever tenuous effectiveness it has. People concerned about "gun violence" are then forced to consider why people are killing themselves and each other (hint: because the average person is broke and depressed).
  - notahacker 6y ago
    Guns don't magically make people homicidal, they just make it magically easy and efficient to kill people in the heat of the moment, or by mistake, or because they fear if they don't pull the trigger first the other person might, or when too mentally ill to know what is going on. The actual difficulty for a sufficiently motivated person to obtain a gun (legal or otherwise) under gun control in the UK is not that high, but the incentives to do so are reduced, the disincentives increased, and the average person with the potential to carry out non-premeditated shootings never considers buying one. The ability to learn all about how to 3D print a gun instead of learning how to license and modify a shotgun or how to find black markets that will sell you illegal firearms does not change that calculus very much.
philipkglass 6y ago
If the guns themselves become easy to manufacture I think that there will be more emphasis on controlling and tracing ammunition, including primers and propellants for handloading. Making stable, uniform smokeless propellant starting from raw cellulose and over-the-counter chemicals is a huge investment of skill and effort. Making black powder is more tractable but still a lot of effort. Most aspiring firearm enthusiasts who are not criminals could get legally permitted in Europe if they were willing to invest as much effort as it would take to make their own guns and ammunition from scratch. Most criminals who want guns just as crime accessories don't have the discipline and drive to make weapons that they can't buy. (Thank goodness, or homemade bombs with wireless command detonation would already be common instruments in areas with gang rivalry.)
- yellowapple 6y ago
  > Making stable, uniform smokeless propellant starting from raw cellulose and over-the-counter chemicals is a huge investment of skill and effort. Making black powder is more tractable but still a lot of effort. Re: black powder, I think you're overestimating the level of effort a bit. It certainly hasn't gotten harder to make it after the Industrial Revolution. Hell, there are even WikiHow articles on it: https://www.wikihow.com/Make-Black-Powder https://www.wikihow.com/Make-Black-Powder It's the primers that are, from my understanding, the tricky thing to replace. I suspect that if push came to shove, though, a primer shortage/restriction would lead to designs of new cartridges and firearms built around spark plugs or some other alternative source of ignition. 3D printing would enable the sorts of quick prototyping necessary to rapidly iterate on unconventional firearm designs like that. > Most criminals who want guns just as crime accessories don't have the discipline and drive to make weapons that they can't buy. Well that's the thing: they don't have to be the ones making them, just like how drug dealers are not usually the ones themselves making the drugs. This is something that could very well be the purview of some black market cottage industry. > (Thank goodness, or homemade bombs with wireless command detonation would already be common instruments in areas with gang rivalry.) I mean, bombings are pretty common in a lot of places. See also: Ireland during the Troubles, the Middle East today, etc. And with quadcopters being widespread, it's probably only a matter of time before we start seeing drone bombings. Cat's pretty much out of the bag. Pandora's opened the box. The only viable approach to stopping violence is to end it at its source: by addressing the reasons why people commit violence in the first place.

kbenson 6y ago

I think the point was to note that shutting down manufacturing us no longer a useful way to prevent firearms from being made. They don't need to be 3D printed right now because there are factories. If all the factories shut down tomorrow, that wouldn't stop new guns from being produced.

minikites 6y ago
Might as well not have any laws or regulations ever, then.
- HideousKojima 6y ago
  Or you could simply add additional penalties for commiting actual violent crimes with weapons, which we already do. See, for example, strongarm robbery vs armed robbery. That way criminals are punished for misuse of firearms while law abiding owners don't have their rights infringed.
  - sofixa 6y ago
    And how is that working out? Last time i checked, the US was leading in violent crime, death and suicide by guns, mass shootings, etc. among developed nations, by a lot.
    - HideousKojima 6y ago
      Why does it matter if someone is murdered by a gun vs. cut into cubes by a cartel or brained with a hammer or anything else? If you don't limit it to murders and suicides by guns, your claim is flatly untrue. Japan's suicide rate is greater than the US's murders and suicides combined. Russia has far more murders despite having fairly restrictive gun laws. In any case, the US is inherently more violent and criminal than other nations in general independent of guns. It also has extremely violent subpopulations centered in major urban centers that tilt the numbers significantly. Outside of a few specific cities like Baltimore, Detroit, Chicago, etc. the US is extremely peaceful and low in crime.