Australian police issue warning on 3D printed guns

http://www.techworld.com.au/article/462774/nsw_police_issues_warning_3d_printed_guns/

by samuellevy • 13 years ago

26 53 13 years ago

techworld.com.au

jgoewert• 13 years ago

I can understand the worry about 3d printed weapons, but I don't see much of a difference between this an a zipgun besides that a common zipgun uses a metal tube for a barrel so it would show up on a metal detector.

I am completely disinterested in any of the fearmongering about this weapon. There is no way to hold back technology to prevent violence, we just need to accept that and deal with not being asshats to each other that causes the violence.

InclinedPlane3• 13 years ago

Indeed. It's a typical moral panic. The fact is that improvised guns have always been easy to manufacture from very cheap materials. Anyone could make a gun as capable as the 3d printed gun using less than $10 of parts from home depot and no more than a day's labor.

chiph2• 13 years ago

After seeing the gun and electro-glove that Tony Stark made in Iron Man 3 (spoiler, sorry), why isn't there more outrage over Home Depot sourced weapons? Personally, I wondered why Tony just didn't buy a fuel-cell powered nail gun, and tape the safety nose down.

RealGeek2• 13 years ago

So is it perfectly acceptable to kill people with home made guns and bombs for the progression of technology?

This is actually terrorism. I see someone creating guns and killing people to be no different than boston bombers.

orangekawi2• 13 years ago

Technology is not the criminal here. Direct the resources and the anger at the criminals. If we spent half the time on dealing with the real issues (Hate and Prejudice) that we spent on trying to get rid of items that can kill people we would be far more effective at dealing with this problem. I'm just saying.

jtreminio• 13 years ago

This conversation took a ridiculous turn.

k-mcgrady• 13 years ago

I'm less laid back regarding this than most of the people in this thread (I think it is a problem) but your comment is ridiculous. First of all what has this got to do with bombs? It's a story about a home made gun. Also:

Terrorism: The use of violence and intimidation in the pursuit of political aims.

Until someone uses this to cause terror it isn't terrorism.

>> "I see someone creating guns and killing people to be no different than boston bombers."

For a start no one has been killed with this gun. People are killed with guns every day - that does not constitue terrorism. The Boston bombers committed mass murder of innocent people and caused 'terror' in Boston - that is terrorism.

mseebach2• 13 years ago

Yeah, you're right. The Oklahoma City bomb was homemade, and as we all recall, for that reason it was widely considered a completely justified bombing.

InclinedPlane3• 13 years ago

The answer is obvious. Is it ok to kill someone with a kitchen knife, or a frying pan? What world do you live in where these answers aren't obvious?

Your comment adds no value to this discussion whatsoever.

reader50002• 13 years ago

I'm not sure the theory that violence is caused by "people being asshats to each other" is accepted by anybody other than Wayne LaPierre.

Gun violence is caused, first and foremost, by the presence of a gun. A sufficient cause? Often yes, given appropriate context.

There are plenty of very successful ways to "hold back" this technology. It's called law.

Anyway I don't think anybody is worried about this 3d printed deal other than the press trying to get page views. The scrawny middle class kid who made it is an uninteresting attention whore, and the gun itself is a massive piece of shit. As others have pointed out, self-made ballistic weapons have been possible for years. This doesn't lower the convenience factor.

smokeyj2• 13 years ago

> Gun violence is caused, first and foremost, by the presence of a gun.

Gun violence is caused by people.

Sambdala2• 13 years ago

Violence is 100% caused by "people being asshats to each other" though.

There may be complicated motivations or factors involved, but without at least one person being an "asshat" in any interaction between multiple human beings, you don't get violence.

freehunter• 13 years ago

>Gun violence is caused, first and foremost, by the presence of a gun.

But violence is caused, first and foremost, by people being asshats to each other. A gun is just a tool a violent person may use to be violent. In the absence of a gun, they may use a knife, a baseball bat, a crowbar, a fist, a pencil, a screwdriver, a laptop, a bucket full of sardines, etc.

flagnog• 13 years ago

Nice, go straight to calling names.

Here, let me restate your main theme: Violence is caused first and foremost by the presence of two or more people. As Disney says, it's a "song as old as time".

Turing_Machine• 13 years ago

"Gun violence is caused, first and foremost, by the presence of a gun."

"Gun violence" isn't "caused" by guns any more than "knife violence" is caused by knives or "fist violence" is caused by hands.

clarkevans• 13 years ago

Funny, it looks just like a squirt gun. That can't be good.

jevinskie• 13 years ago

  "This is now becoming a problem the world over," Scipione said.

According to whom? The police forces that are trying to drum up FUD about hobby-manufactured firearms?

zackzackzack• 13 years ago

Part of the social contract in most societies is that the police are the only members of society who can use enough force to kill or injure anyone critically. The governments of these societies create laws to ensure that it is only special well regulated instances when an ordinary citizen can use deadly force (hunting of lower animals and self defense being two examples in the United States). Anywhere these guns can be manufactured successfully thwarts the old laws and contracts.

This means that it will be a "Problem", but no one can say for who. The big gun manufactures are going to be pissed and are already probably already preparing legislation to bitch slap any one who tries to produce these guns. The liberator people are working on making the guns not explode and hurt anyone. The police are scrambling to figure out how to reclaim their sole ownership of force. The people are waiting to see what happens.

epochwolf• 13 years ago

This isn't part of the social contract in parts of the US. Guns are pretty common in rural areas and I've see people open carry in urban areas around Seattle.

astangl• 13 years ago

Is anybody surprised? Even the inventor of the gun seems quite hesitant about how many times it can be fired safely. Anyone setting out to show how dangerous it can be can simply keep firing it until failure occurs. Voila!

If article made any mention of how many times that gun was fired until it failed, I missed it.

orangekawi2• 13 years ago

Better still, did they mention what ammunition was used? Police typically use +P+ ammunition, especially in smaller calibers like .32 and .380. I have no doubt that the original inventor used standard pressure loads or even sub sonics to decrease the chance of a failure such as this. In the end the gun was a POC anyways, designed to show what could be done.

What I find more disconcerting is the continue emphasis on how the gun is "undetectable". While it is certainly harder to detect because of the small number of metal pieces, you still have the ability to detect bullets!! Or are they so focused on the gun itself that they haven't kept up technology to detect gun powder?

As others have mentioned.. its all about drumming up noise to defend their removal of this information from the Internet.

nsxwolf2• 13 years ago

Defense Distributed added a piece of steel to the final build to make it detectible and legal. It's entirely possible most metal detectors won't pick it up.

Anecdote: I went to traffic court years ago, and after exiting the courthouse stuck my hand in my pocket and realized I had forgotten to remove a handful of .22 LR cartridges. They did not activate the detector.

runarb• 13 years ago

Thats true. All gun will wear out and fail eventually.

stephengillie• 13 years ago

Metal guns normally wear out by jamming or having another internal problem -- for an outside user, they are "Fail Safe".

One concern being presented here is that the gun could shatter on failure, making it "Fail Dangerous".

ck2• 13 years ago

I am not sure why we care about people making plastic guns when they can make full-auto AK47s that are not traceable in the slightest.

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/05/ak-47-semi-autom...

corresation• 13 years ago

Most people fail putting an Ikea cabinet together. You cannot compare a simple print job with custom construction (even a zip gun is beyond the skills or available tools of many people).

3D printers are currently rare and expensive, however they are bound to become mainstream and inexpensive very quickly. When every angsty teenager has the capability to print a gun simply by hitting "print" with the $69 3D printer in the corner, there is a legitimate concern, and many of the haughty, world-weary replies to this submission declaring this a non-issue and nothing new are not reasonable.

How will the world adapt? We'll see. I fully expect consumer 3D printers to be legally required to identify gun-capable parts and reject to print them, or intentionally print flaws (in the same way that your printer will watermark printed currency, and your scanner will corrupt scans of currency). There will likely be restrictions on the strength of the materials, etc.

cobrausn• 13 years ago

Some guns are useful as clubs without the bullets, but this one is just useless. Unless that same angsty teenager can also acquire bullets, there isn't really a problem - the legal age to purchase ammo is (as far as I know) the same as purchasing guns.

waffle_ss• 13 years ago

The guy in the article didn't build a full-auto AK-47, although he did commit a couple felonies along the way[1]. First, he mounted the magazine lock too too far back, which allows the magazine to be detached without the use of a tool - a felony in California on a semi-auto rifle with a pistol grip. Secondly, he says

    Back in my garage I use a grinding wheel to cut the receiver in half and the other components into pieces. I put the scraps back in the cardboard box the kit came in and leave it for the garbage truck.

This is an improper demill. To demill a receiver you must cut it into three pieces. Therefore, when he left the receiver out for the garbage truck he effectively transferred his rifle to the garbage truck without going through an FFL, which is another felony.

Finally, the process for actually obtaining or building a fully automatic rifle (assuming it's not outlawed by your state) is arduous and expensive. The short answer is that you have to go through extensive background checks by the FBI and BATFE in order to get a $200 NFA tax stamp, which takes months to be approved for. You also have to get a signature from your local sheriff, who can just decide he/she doesn't want you to have one if they wish (alternatively, you can go to a lawyer to set up a special trust to assign NFA devices to). Finally, the actual cost for a select-fire AK receiver, of which there are limited supply as they have to have been registered with the ATF before May 19, 1986 (and there are no more being manufactured for civilian use), is between $15-20K (here's a current gunbroker auction[2] for reference). For a longer description of this whole process see: http://www.cheaperthandirt.com/MediaPages/ArticleDetail.aspx...

[1] http://www.calguns.net/calgunforum/showthread.php?t=767020

[2] http://www.gunbroker.com/Auction/ViewItem.aspx?Item=34324298...

barake• 13 years ago

It's just as easy to build an AR15 basically from scratch: http://www.oocities.org/elmgrove1765/project6/project6.html

A $500 mill from Harbor Freight, a barrel, and some springs has you in business.

nsxwolf2• 13 years ago

They didn't say if they used the acetone vapor process to harden the barrel or the heating process during printing overall to increase the strength. Defense Distributed did this and the .380 test did not explode.

It would work in the Australian police's favor to make the gun look as dangerous to the user as possible.

I'd still like to know how dangerous the explosion is. It's plastic, so I'm imagining it fracturing and releasing all the pressure quickly.

ap2002• 13 years ago

Barbra Streisand effect in 3.. 2.. 1..

Sambdala2• 13 years ago

  "Police believe that despite this, the files are still circulating."

The quality of journalism is pretty awful these days.

I can't believe someone would feel qualified to write an article, especially one that came out today, without explicitly knowing that, yes, the files are most assuredly still "circulating" via torrents.

marshray• 13 years ago

Is it possible to make a worse gun?

I.e., a higher ratio of danger-to-shooter to danger-to-target.

chiph2• 13 years ago

Of course - if you build a zip gun and use a barrel that isn't seamless (it was bent & welded into it's tube shape) you'll have a bad time. There's also guns like the Lorcin -- it's made from pot metal and is as dangerous to the wielder as it is to the target. There's no point in buying more than one box of ammo for it...

guizzy• 13 years ago

You could try to make it out of glass, I guess.

C1D2• 13 years ago

This is very scared as 3D printers are becoming cheaper soon any one could print out a gun with litte effort. As people said, you can create your own guns but whats different is this takes little work which any one could do. This could be a world problem as soon as 3D printers become mainstream, especially in countries with tight gun regulation.

colinshark• 13 years ago

It's easier and cheaper to make a shotgun with 2 pipes, an end cap, and a screw. I'm not exaggerating the simplicity.

http://www.issafrica.org/armsnetafrica/sites/default/files/2...

Guns are simple.

Guns are 17th century technology.

Australian police issue warning on 3D printed guns

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