One of the big questions that the entire Utopian 3D printing community doesn’t particularly care to discuss is the fact that inevitably, somebody’s going to print out something dangerous and kill someone else or themselves with it.
Seriously. It’s going to happen. As optimistic as I am about 3D printing to substantially change pretty much everything about the human experience, and sooner than we think, I’m also not delusional enough to think nobody will ever look at this thing and think “I could print out a knife and totally stab my neighbor with this thing and the cops will never trace it back to me!” I’m a little amazed it’s not a CSI plotline already.
One of the people trying to hand hack TV writers yet another gimmick is Defense Distributed. Their dream is to design and open-source the 3D printing of firearms, but they’ve suffered a setback: The company that rented them a 3D printer revoked their lease.
As Wired more politely puts it:
… last Wednesday, less than a week after receiving the printer, Wilson received an e-mail from Stratasys: The company wanted its printer returned. Wilson wrote back, and said he believed using the printer to manufacture a firearm would not break federal laws regarding at-home weapons manufacturing. For one, the gun wouldn’t be for sale. Wilson added that he didn’t have a firearms manufacturers license.
Stratasys’s legal counsel wrote back: “It is the policy of Stratasys not to knowingly allow its printers to be used for illegal purposes. Therefore, please be advised that your lease of the Stratasys uPrint SE is cancelled at this time and Stratasys is making arrangements to pick up the printer.”
Roughly translated from the legalese: “When the larger media finally catches up with you people, we don’t want to be in the middle of that firestorm.”
Defense Distributed is angry and reasonably so. They’re on completely legal ground according to the federal government. You can make your own guns if you want under the Second Amendment, you just can’t sell them, something Defense Distributed is very clear it has no plans to do (and you can legally sell the plans to build guns anyway, so really, moot point). So far the Justice Department has shown profound apathy towards this idea.
Furthermore they were only working on the proof of concept. If they had managed to print a gun and it didn’t just explode, even the most optimistic think that the barrel would have melted after one shot. This is just to show that you can do it, really, pretty much the driving force behind all nerdy pastimes.
On the other hand, as you can tell from their amusingly defensive FAQ, even they know that some idiot is eventually going to print out a gun and try to rob a bank with it. So you do find yourself wondering what they were expecting, exactly.
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Won’t happen on this site but I regularly read and post on Wired and the article on this topic got highjacked by the gun-nuts. Because it’s already not easy enough to get guns. We need to print them now, too. Apparently.
Really, it’s only a matter of time. It’s like saying “Bloody Mary” into a mirror.
As far as 3D printing of firearms, I’m really neither here nor there. The technology is at least a decade away from being more than a pipe dream (metal 3D printing will have to become viable for consumers first, and that will take a while). But I’m not really sure it’s possible, or wise, to try and limit the scope of 3D printers, and any laws attempting to do so would probably run afoul of Second Amendment challenges.
@Iron Mike Sharpie: a nutjob rolled in, it seems.
And honestly, I, like most nerds would be using it to make a case mod to make my sweet zombie killing nerf gun into a more geekly recognizable frame. But who cares? They are paying way more per month to rent that beast than it would be to buy a gun. It’s silly.
They want to prove the concept. Apparently they get told this so often it’s actually in their FAQ.
I just can’t wait until morons start blowing their own hands off trying to fire these things because they aren’t informed enough to know that the tech isn’t safe yet. I don’t think it will happen very often, but every now and then some redneck will get a hold of a 3d printer and a cad file and make national headlines.
You’d be amazed how often this happens already.
I think everybody is missing the point here. This is less about making guns more available and more about pushing the envelope of what “free” internet/society/etc means. Everybody wants freedom for themselves and others who share similar beliefs but NOT those who have opposing beliefs – plain and simple.
No, I see that point, and like I said, legally they can do what they want.
That said, when you know something is stupid and is going to end badly, this does raise the question of why you’re doing it in the first place.
It is merely your opinion that “this is stupid and will end badly” though. Take your position and substitute some other topic – internet pornography, abortion, whatever and that will nicely illustrate my concept.
And for the record, there has never been a correlation between availability of firearms and crime rates. Furthermore, these machines can only produce the firearm receivers, not a working gun. To achieve a working gun there are metal parts needed (barrel, chamber, bolt, fire control parts, etc) necessitating a level of knowledge, and assembly skill that would preclude simpletons blowing their face off due to their ignorance of the tech. So the assumption that this will end badly is not necessarily founded.
@Clusterfunk: No, dude. “This is stupid and will end badly” should be taken as the gospel. Have you ever met a human before? They are almost all stupid and they almots all end badly.