How Will 3D Printed Guns Affect Gun Control?

Since 2013 3D printed guns have been a hotly debated topic; that’s the year when Cody Wilson through his company, Defense Distributed, released online the files for the 3D Liberator printable gun.

Many debates have been sparked since then—most to fit one political ideology over another. For those wanting extreme gun control, there is a notion that 3D printed guns will spell a proliferation of guns like we’ve never seen—there will be no way to keep guns out of the hands of felons, domestic abusers, severely mentally ill or children. For those desiring no restrictions on guns, their refrain is: Guns will be printable at home, so, why bother with restrictions at all?

This is oversimplifying matters greatly. For starters, there have only been a few viable 3D printed guns made. The process is extremely technical, time-consuming and there is assembly required. And it takes plastic—lots and lots of plastic.

Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM) uses thermoplastics in a highly specialized FDM 3D printer, over a very long period of time to manufacture a firearm. Additionally, a gun has many different mechanized parts. A 3D printer cannot print something with as many different parts as a gun as a whole unit. So the parts must be printed separately and then assembled. Even so, the force of firing one shot is too powerful for most thermoplastics to withstand more than one shot.

Metal 3D printing technology does exist, but it is extremely expensive—printers cost tens of thousands of dollars to hundreds of thousands.

The concerns about 3D-printed guns are vastly inflated. If someone desires to commit a crime using a gun, it’s simply far easier to acquire a ready-made gun than to “print” one. Still, the technology is fascinating.

Gun violence in America is excruciating. But 3D-printed guns are not yet the problem.  

Images of injection-molded mounting fixtures for completing milspec 80% AR-15 receivers from ghostgunner.net (Defense Distributed)