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So we now have the potential to print a 3-D firearm.  Well, sort of.  Sixteen parts, plus a common nail to use as a firing pin (try using a piece of plastic to pop the primer on a bullet).  This is at once a bigger deal and less of a big deal than people think.  On the one hand, yes, here is a gun with no more metal in it than a nail (there’s no reason you HAVE to include the six-ounce chunk of legally mandated metal to make it trip the metal detector).  On the other hand, this is a single-shot gun, apparently – there doesn’t appear to be any sort of magazine.  In addition, some extra steps are apparently needed to toughen up the “barrel”, which while interchangeable for different calibers also appears to be unrifled and thus less accurate. (A short, unrifled barrel is not going to be very useful at anything but very close range.)  Too, since you’re using ABS plastic instead of metal, the whole thing is bigger and bulkier than an equivalent metal firearm, so concealment is going to be tricky – it’s a lot of trouble to go to for one shot at a time and problematic reload options.

The most important part of the gun, though, is the most important part of any gun: the bullet. A gun with no bullets is only useful inasmuch as you can bluff or club someone with it.  All the power a particular gun can impart is based on how many bullets it holds and how long the barrel is (for accuracy and giving the gunpowder long enough to burn to build up maximum force behind the bullet).  Everything else is down to the cartridge itself, and that’s generally a function of how big the actual piece of lead is and how much (and how potent) the burning gunpowder behind it is.  Which makes things tricky with a 3-D-printed plastic gun: the industry standard for a 9mm cartridge (the bullet with its casing and gunpowder and primer) is 31,000 psi.  Which means your plastic gun has to stand up to a momentary burst at 31,000 psi, which means that by and large your plastic gun is going to fail after more than a couple of shots.

By no small coincidence, this gun is called the Liberator, after the FP-45 Liberator of Second World War notoriety.  It was a bog-simple gun, stamped out of sheet metal in bulk at a GM plant, that could fire a single .45 bullet and be reloaded with another single bullet in about a minute with the use of a dowel to extract the fired casing.  Not very practical. But the point was to drop them all over Occupied France, where anybody could potentially have one – and ideally, use it to pop a German soldier and take his superior weapons. Similarly, I’m sure the idea is that you in your occupied country can print out the parts for this gun separately and severally, including a barrel that fits whatever sort of bullet you can get your hands on, then pop in a nail for a firing pin and use it to cap somebody who has a better gun that you can then take for yourself. 

Thing is, something like this has existed for a while – in the 50s, the gangs of New York would fashion “zip guns” out of a hollow car antenna and a simple wooden handle, able to fire something like a lightweight .22 bullet (plenty deadly if it hits you in the head, make no mistake) at close range…assuming it didn’t blow up in your hand.  Simple shotguns aren’t tough to put together, as a one-round shotgun is basically just a long tube for the barrel, a hammer to hit the end of the shotgun shell, a trigger to drop that hammer, and a stock to brace against your shoulder.  So improvised firearms are not new.  Indeed, the ability to generate one from a 3-D printer (sort of) isn’t even that big a change at present; how many people have access to a 3-D printer?  And more importantly, how far are you going to get with a brace of single-shot plastic pistols that have to be reloaded every time you shoot them, when the Oppressive Socialist Fascist United Nations One World Government army is coming at you with real honest-to-God machine guns and assault rifles?

The risk posed by 3-D-printed firearms, right now, is that they make it that much simpler to improvise.  Some random kid can download the plans – and then, if they can find a 3-D printer and a bullet, they can make a zip gun.  Then again, if they can download some plans, find a car antenna and a .22 bullet, they can also make a zip gun.  Or they can just obtain a real gun – a top-quality 9mm pistol costs an order of magnitude less than the 3-D printer needed to print the parts for this one-shot gun.  Of greater concern should be the 3-D printer’s ability to produce, say, a 40-round magazine for an assault rifle in places where magazines of that size are already restricted.  Somebody whose cheap Chinese AK-knockoff now has an extra 40 rounds between reloads is infinitely more dangerous than somebody with one .380 bullet in a thick plastic pistol.

The moral of the story, as with most things involving guns, is that you have to think things through.  Which is not a hallmark of the firearms debate.

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