Quote Originally Posted by curious aardvark View Post
THAT'S the difference. 3d printing puts the ability to make complex objects in the hands of people who lack the skill and education to make them any other way.
And the printers are now cheap enough for anyone to have one.

So people who wouldn't have considered making their own zip gun. Might happily print a 3d gun for a couple of dollars and a few hours print time.
No skiill required.

So by that same argument, the automobile should be banned as well, no? Its now cheap enough for common folks to own one. And they can be used to smuggle and transport illegal items like weapons, drugs, and undocumented/illegal humans. Where is the outrage there! And what about motorboats? They should be banned too, because they are smuggling mexicans and cubans as well as drugs in massive amounts from offshore drops.

And, yes it takes a bit more than pushing the print button to make a gun. You should know that. Just downloading a thing off thingverse doesn't mean you can simply press print and get a perfect working copy even if its just a soap dish. Now amplify that issue with the fact a typical gun has a chamber pressure exceeding 20,000 psi and apply that thought to 3D printed parts and you can see rather quickly that a printed gun isn't simply a copy of an existing design. It can't be, not in plastic. And as you noted a true metal printing printer costs many thousands of dollars. An AR lower receiver is only hundreds if that (used and aftermarket are pretty cheap).

The same is said for CNC milling machines. Most of them are pretty much like 3D printers. Upload some gcode, load a block of metal and watch it grind it into a gun. Yea, no. There is more to it than that but not much. And these tools produce REAL solid metal gun parts, not layers, extrusions and other weakly made constructs.

In fact, there is a device called Ghost Gunner that is a self contained CNC mill designed to produce finished gun parts. It costs way less than my Taz 5 did and its bench ready and takes LESS skill than a 3D printer or a commercial CNC machine. And, they are sold out. That alone ought to tell you something about the demand.

Guns are not evil. Some people with them are. And some people without them are too. The gun does not make someone evil. We should spend less time trying to control an inanimate object and more time rooting out the evil people who will use any weapon at hand (including biological, chemicial, nuclear or technological) to achieve their goal.