22 August 2018 – Since the Fifteenth Century, when Johannes Gutenberg invented the technology, printing has given those in authority ginky fits. Until recently it was just dissemination of heretical ideas, a la Giordano Bruno, that raised authoritarian hackles. More recently, 3-D printing, also known as additive manufacturing (AM), has made it possible to make things that folks who like to tell you what you’re allowed to do don’t want you to make.
Don’t get me wrong, AM makes it possible to do a whole lot of good stuff that we only wished we could do before. Like, for example, Jay Leno uses it to replace irreplaceable antique car parts. It’s a really great technology that allows you to make just about anything you can describe in a digital drafting file without the difficulty and mess of hiring a highly skilled fabrication machine shop.
In my years as an experimental physicist, I dealt with fabrication shops a lot! Fabrication shops are collections of craftsmen and the equipment they need to make one-off examples of amazing stuff. It’s generally stuff, however, that nobody’d want to make a second time.
Like the first one of anything.
The reason I specify that AM is for making stuff nobody’d want to make a second time is that it’s slow. Regular machine-shop work, like making nuts and bolts, and sewing machines, and stuff folks want to make a lot of are worth spending a lot of time to figure out fast, efficient and cheap ways to make lots of them.
Take microchips. The darn things take huge amounts of effort to design, and tens of billions of dollars of equipment to make, but once you’ve figured it all out and set it all up, you can pop the things out like chocolate-chip cookies. You can buy an Intel Celeron G3900 dual-core 2.8 GHz desktop processor online for $36.99 because Intel spread the hideous quantities of up-front cost it took to originally set up the production line over the bazillions of processors that production line can make. It’s called “economy of scale.”
If you’re only gonna make one, or just a few, of the things, there’s no economy of scale.
But, if your’re only gonna make one, or just a few, you don’t worry too much about how long it takes to make each one, and what it costs is what it costs.
So, you put up with doing it some way that’s slow.
Like AM.
A HUGE advantage of making things with AM is that you don’t have to be all that smart. If you once learn to set the 3-D printer up, you’re all set. You just download the digital computer-aided-manufacturing (CAM) file into the printer’s artificial cerebrum, and it just DOES it. If you can download the file over the Internet, you’ve got it knocked!
Which brings us to what I want to talk about today: 3-D printing of handguns.
Now, I’m not any kind of anti-gun nut. I’ve got half a dozen firearms laying around the house, and have had since I was a little kid. It’s a family thing. I learned sharpshooting when I was around ten years old. Target shooting is a form of meditation for me. A revolver is my preferred weapon if ever I have need of a weapon. I never want to be the one who brought a knife to a gunfight!
That said, I’ve never actually found a need for a handgun. The one time I was present at a gunfight, I hid under the bed. The few times I’ve been threatened with guns, I talked my way out of it. Experience has led me to believe that carrying a gun is the best way to get shot.
I’ve always agreed with my gunsmith cousin that modern guns are beautiful pieces of art. I love their precision and craftsmanship. I appreciate the skill and effort it takes to make them.
The good ones, that is.
That’s the problem with AM-made guns. It takes practically no skill to create them. They’re right up there with the zip guns we talked about when we were kids.
We never made zip guns. We talked about them. We talked about them in the same tones we’d use talking about leeches or cockroaches. Ick!
We’d never make them because they were beneath contempt. They were so crude we wouldn’t dare fire one. Junk like that’s dangerous!
Okay, so you get an idea how I would react to the news that some nut case had published plans online for 3-D printing a handgun. Bad enough to design such a monstrosity, what about the idiot stupid enough to download the plans and make such a thing? Even more unbelievable, what moron would want to fire it?
Have they no regard for their hands? Don’t they like their fingers?
Anyway, not long ago, a press release crossed my desk from Giffords, the gun-safety organization set up by former U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and her husband after she survived an assassination attempt in Arizona in 2011. The Giffords’ press release praised Senators Richard Blumenthal and Bill Nelson, and Representatives David Cicilline and Seth Moulton for introducing legislation to stop untraceable firearms from further proliferation after the Trump Administration cleared the way for anyone to 3-D-print their own guns.
Why “untraceable” firearms, and what have they got to do with AM?
Downloadable plans for producing guns by the AM technique puts firearms in the hands of folks too unskilled and, yes, stupid to make them themselves with ordinary methods. That’s important because it is theoretically possible to AM produce firearms of surprising sophistication. The first one offered was a cheap plastic thing (depicted above) that would likely be more danger to its user than its intended victim. More recent offerings, however, have been repeating weapons made of more robust materials that might successfully be used to commit crimes.
Ordinary firearm production techniques require a level of skill and investment in equipment that puts them above the radar for federal regulators. The first thing those regulators require is licensing the manufacturer. Units must be serialized, and records must be kept. The system certainly isn’t perfect, but it gives law enforcement a fighting chance when the products are misused.
The old zip guns snuck in under the radar, but they were so crude and dangerous to their users that they were seldom even made. Almost anybody with enough sense to make them had enough sense not to make them! Those who got their hands on the things were more a danger to themselves than to society.
The Trump administration’s recent settlement with Defense Distributed, allowing them to relaunch their website, include a searchable database of firearm blueprints, and allow the public to create their own fully-functional, unserialized firearms using AM technology opens the floodgates for dangerous people to make their own untraceable firearms.
That’s just dumb!
The Untraceable Firearms Act would prohibit the manufacture and sale of firearms without serial numbers, require any person or business engaged in the business of selling firearm kits and unfinished receivers to obtain a dealer’s license and conduct background checks on purchasers, and mandate that a person who runs a business putting together firearms or finishing receivers must obtain a manufacturer’s license and put serial numbers on firearms before offering them for sale to consumers.
The 3-D Printing Safety Act would prohibit the online publication of computer-aided design (CAD) files which automatically program a 3-D-printer to produce or complete a firearm. That closes the loophole letting malevolent idiots evade scrutiny by making their own firearms.
We have to join with Giffords in applauding the legislators who introduced these bills.