I understand the intent, but feel that there are so many other loopholes that put much worse weapons on the street than a printer. Besides, my prints can barely sustain normal use, much less a bullet being fired from them. I would think that this is more of a risk to the person holding the gun than who it’s pointing at.
There’s a community that builds 3d printed guns, and those don’t last very long either. They’re not printing barrels, they’re just printing the trigger housing and grip. They go out and buy the dangerous bits.
This is all a bit pointless.
Even more pointless when you consider that once you have a 3d printer, you can make a lot of the components for a second 3d printer, and go out and buy the other parts, without ever buying a 3d printer. Now you have two ghost gun machines!! Oh the horror.
This is the reason why I need education. CNc machines are the only tools you need. Fast food is probably just CNC assembled.
It’s all CNC. All the way down. Always was.
Seriously, 3d printers are just CNC machines, they use the same code the mill I use that was built in 1989 uses.
Yes, they added some new g codes for the extruder bit (even that is just used as an axis), but otherwise you could hand code a 3d print. Probably not a good idea, but could be done. CNC is cool
Not to mention the ammo. 3d printed guns are useless without real ammo.
Isn’t that an old Chris Rock line. Just make bullets cost $5k each
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Tbh, you print em right they’ll last a good 2k rnds and you can rifle the barrel with ECM at home these days, they’d get “the job” done, save an extended firefight, and then “NY reload.”
That said I agree this is pointless.
A self replicating 3D printer? I like it.
The reprap movement was exactly that. A self replicating rapid prototyper. While it never reached true replication, it got close enough to cause an explosive growth of the community. That, in turn led to the huge number of low cost suppliers and designs we have now.
Yeah it’s called RepRap
As others have said, the RepRap concept was trying to be that. At first the idea was to 3D print as much of the machine as possible, but what it realistically achieved was you would buy metal frame rails, nuts & bolts, the hot end assembly (a glorified hot glue gun), motors, and a controller board (in many cases literally an arduino) and 3D print connectors and bracketry necessary to hold the thing together. Josef Prusa took the “Mendel” pattern Reprap and simplified it into his now ubiquitous upright plate style “Prusa i3” pattern.
I’ve built several 3D printers from “scratch” and at least 20 from kits. My own 3D printer has printed many of its own parts.
They saw the x-files and got scared