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Downloadable Blueprints for a 3D-Printed (Plastic) Gun: What to do?

BTW You all are quite ignorant of what's at hand, and so is the liberal media because they wouldn't go out of their way to download the blueprints.

It's not just guns. TONS of blueprints for ammo, dozen plus handguns, dozens of rifles, and four grenades.

Loving it.

CNN went out of their way to under-report on this one.
 
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2018/08/01/3-d-guns-serious-threat-u-s-communities/883626002/

Some 3D print experts said that even if Wilson wins his battle, the plastic gun is, at least at this point, not a practical weapon.
Click to expand...

In short: Jess is right. You all are worried over nothing. Metal guns are here to stay.

“It’s not feasible to print a 100% 3D-printed gun, because the plastic that is being printed that is used here is not strong enough to withstand a barrel or the explosion from a bullet,” said Michael Flynn, who runs a year-old 3D printing business in Fort Worth, Texas.

As the latest chapter in America’s battle over gun control unfolds, the use of 3D printing technology for manufacturing reliable firearms is still very much a work-in-progress and a pricey endeavor.

Industrial 3D printers cost $20,000 to $100,000, and many companies that rent use of their printers explicitly prohibit users from manufacturing weapons.
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But you were like kid in the candy store with your last post getting McDonald's up in here with your love for it.

No more love for our plastic toys?
 
w01fg4ng said:
But you were like kid in the candy store with your last post getting McDonald's up in here with your love for it.

No more love for our plastic toys?
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I loved the media explicitly under-reported this issue.

I don't have a 3D printer, so I have no ability to use these blueprints. I have like a million things I would rather buy than weapons or a 3D printer.

The "liberal" media isn't really liberal; ALL major networks lent money to Trump for television ads on the promise he'd pay them back :|

All media is conservative media, of varying degrees, from what I can tell. All big $.
 
Captain.Heroin said:
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2018/08/01/3-d-guns-serious-threat-u-s-communities/883626002/



In short: Jess is right. You all are worried over nothing. Metal guns are here to stay.
Click to expand...

That's the thing. No plastic material that currently exists is useful for making the operating components of a firearm.

To make an accurate, reliable firearm, it needs to withstand pressure, which plastic isn't great at, heat, which plastic is terrible at, and maintain rifling. Plastic is simply not a suitable material.

Sure, you can build a specially designed plastic gun to fire a small low caliber bullet like a 22. But you can't make an ar15 out of it. All you'll have is a very small, very ineffective bomb. And if you have the ammo already, which can't be 3d printed at all so you'd have to, then you already have gunpowder. Which means you have all you need to build a much more lethal bomb without a 3d printer. This whole controversy is built on ignorance and fear.
 
This whole ignorance and fear thing I'm still not getting. I'm genuinely intrigued. Especially by things like what CH bolded--grenades. One time use makes it immediately applicable where as we can work the kinks out the gun with time.

It's pretty cool actually. I'm just trying to be realistic here.

Captain.Heroin said:
I loved the media explicitly under-reported this issue.

I don't have a 3D printer, so I have no ability to use these blueprints. I have like a million things I would rather buy than weapons or a 3D printer.

The "liberal" media isn't really liberal; ALL major networks lent money to Trump for television ads on the promise he'd pay them back :|

All media is conservative media, of varying degrees, from what I can tell. All big $.
Click to expand...
This whole media argument you have been talking about in this thread is completely lost on me. I don t watch TV.
 
You can't 3d print grenades. Certainly not with the technology virtually EVERYONE is referring to as 3d printing. Or any technology that currently exists for that matter.

I was really hoping this was something so obvious that it didn't need to be outright stated.

You can print a small pill shaped object. But it's still just plastic. It'll never be ecstasy. Likewise, you can print a small grenade shaped object. Some people might even mistake it for a real grenade. But it's never gonna blow up.

Honestly, some of this reminds me a bit of the suggestions made long long ago that people might fax sheets of LSD.
 
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Ok, a 3d printer, the devices we are talking about. All they do, all they are capable of doing, is producing plastic shapes. That's it, they make shaped plastic. That is their only function.

Now, you can make a gun shape, and you can put a real bullet into that barrel shape, and configure it with a plastic spring so that maybe it'll even detonate. But plastic is not a suitable material to build a firearm out of. Outside of very controlled conditions where you're basically firing a single bullet with little ability to even reload it, all it'll do is blow up. And by blow up, I'm talking about a very small explosion of very small, light fragments. Because those fragments are a light, they also won't do much damage either. Also because it's plastic, rifling won't work properly so don't expect it to be very accurate.

Since all a 3d printer can do is print shapes of plastic, it can not produce any other chemical compound, like say, chemical propellants. It can't make ammunition, which means it also can not make the explosive charge used in a grenade.

All a grenade is, is an explosive charge, and a small shaped container of metal. The charge explodes, the metal is designed to be incapable of holding the sudden increase in pressure, so it loses structural integrety and sends metal shrapnal flying at lethal velocity.

You can print the shell of a grenade in plastic, but plastic won't hold anything like the same pressures, nor does it have the same mass, so it's just not going to be able to do much damage. And you will already need to have sourced the explosive charge elsewhere. IF you already have the explosive charge, THAT'S the dangerous part. All you gotta do is buy a metal pipe and metal screw caps from any hardware store and you already have something far more dangerous than anything a 3d printer can help you with.

That's why 3d printers aren't something to be regulated, they aren't the magical replicators from star trek. They are devices that create plastic shapes. Not even particularly strong ones at that. Sure, people can print a shape that looks like an ar-15, and put the plan for that shape online, and freak out a bunch of ignorant people. But anyone who understands even a fairly basic amount about physics and engineering can see that there's nothing here worth regulatory action.
 
DISCLAIMER: I know this is a long post, but this describes exactly what will happen if you decide to base your terrorist career on 3d printing technology. It'll be a joke. So if you have concerns about the technology being used to create weapons, please consider reading the whole thing.

Let's say you take all the designs for an ar15, and tell the 3d printer to print a plastic shape the shape of all components. OK so that's just not gonna work at all. The plastic won't function as the springs you need to store the potential energy required for it to function have been made of plastic. They won't store energy, they'll break under the force. So they'll need redesigning, but let's say you can actually get it to fire by changing the springs to a design more suitable for plastic. It's very unlikely. You still have no metal firing pin. Which means even with sufficient energy stored in a plastic spring, you can't empart it to the cartridge with a plastic firing pin. Even if it did it might well shatter instead of causing primer detonation. But let's say you actually did somehow get it to fire...

The plastic barrel is never gonna be able to contain the detonation of the cartridge. Most likely you'll wind up with an injured hand and a lot of broke pieces of plastic. Some of it might get embedded in your skin. But you'll live. It's unlikely anyone will die because it's unlikely the bullet will be able to get to lethal velocities in those environments. And even if it did, it's never gonna fire again.

And as for a grenade, OK same thing, let's take your average us military fragmentation grenade, print it in plastic. OK so that requires springs too, which again won't be able to hold enough potential energy to detonate the primer and ignite the primary charge, but you've got a bigger problem in your budding career in terrorism and guerilla warfare. Namely, no primer, and no primary charge either. They require specific chemicals in order to create the reaction needed to trigger an explosion. There may be "plastic explosives" , but in that situation, the word plastic just means it's moldable. It can't be made from actual plastic in any circumstances. So, you pull the pin, first nothing happens cause there's no spring to release the firing pin, and assuming the pin itself didn't break from being made of small flimsy plastic, and it probably did, you still don't have any gun power. So let's say you source that some other way.

If you already have the explosive charge and are intent on terrorism, just make a fucking pipe bomb. Because let's say by some miracle you manage to make it work with plastic, plastic just doesn't have the mass to make good shrapnel. Odds are it won't kill anyone.

Construction materials matter in engineering. The unabomber failed repeatedly to kill anyone because he kept making his bombs with wood in the first many years of his career. Until he wised up and switched to metal.

In short, as I said earlier, we don't make all these weapons out of metal just to look cool. There's actually quite a lot of math, science, engineering involved in determining how to build a weapon that'll work.
 
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there are plastics that are stronger than steel out there, believe it or not. so technically you can use a 3d printer to make a javelin (man portable fire and forget anti tank rocket launcher) that will hold up to the strain but joe blow or jane blow doesn't have access to those kind of plastics. what they do have access to is info passed along the net others carelessly leave in sight of them and seeing as they don't know any better, they will seriously hurt themselves and/or someone else in making such shoddy imitation of a weapon and thinking it is so cool.

the hard part is what kind of material do you use for the bullet. you can use just about anything for the majority of it but in order to have a more accurate projectile that will stand up to traveling to the target and still be lethal, some of it will have to be metal, especially to withstand the explosion from the propellant. there are ways of getting metal bullets around metal detectors but that is for a smaller number of bullets and being discrete as opposed to a larger number of bullets for larger numbers of people. also to note is that some metals do not set off metal detectors or even cause problems with microwave ovens, like copper and nickel respectively (depending on the amount and quality of metal). the effectiveness of said metals is to be questioned. also how to get explosive materials of any kind around the kind of sniffers used to detect such things like in some airports in america today.

it's actually easier and more effective to make a pipe bomb from things around your house or office than it is to use a crappy piece of plastic from a 3d printer as shrapnel that is more likely to fall apart on the way to deliver it than actually doing soft target damage.
 
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