As you say, if someone wants to kill someone, a great many things can be used as weapons. But guns are only weapons, they have no other purpose. Except for a very few which are designed for and only really useful for target shooting, they're designed for the sole purpose of hurting/killing other creatures. And in the vast majority of cases they're designed with humans in mind.

What does it say about your (people in such a country, not you specifically) attitude to life and your fellow humans that you feel the need to carry a weapon around? That you place that much of a premium on your safety, regardless of the cost to that of others.

It seems to me a very self-centred/selfish thing to do and bespeaks an uncivilised society, really.

It's not really, for me at least, about the guns. It's about the culture that allowing people to walk around armed fosters. An attitude to violence and human life that I just don't agree with and couldn't live with. And this is borne out by statistics since while your rate of homicides with firearms is obviously higher than ours (3.21 per 100k as opposed to 0.07 on our end) your non-firearm homicide rate is higher too (1.54 compared to 0.99).

You realise that it's a very shit gun? And that the printer required to print a working gun would cost tens of thousands of pounds? At this point, you may as well just buy a gun.

And while sure this stuff is going to eventually get better and cheaper to the point where most homes will have a 3D printer, you still won't be able to print ammo*. And we don't sell ammo here, so no problem.

(*until we get to like Diamond Age nano-printers, like)

I'm well aware of the shitty little plastic tube with a nail in the end. It's hardly a gun, though. 

So you don't think that will improve?

>>(*until we get to like Diamond Age nano-printers, like)

I had a lovely chat with one of the top bio-engineers from NASA a few weeks back. She was telling me about the replicators they're working on for the Mars mission (which she reckons will be GO GO GO as soon as the Chinese start making any realy progress in space (by which time the USA will have no money left anyway :'D )).

Anyway, they sound really cool. She's designing bacteria things that can a) self replicate and b) turn the Martian soil into bricks which are then assembled into buildings by robots. She's also working on a bio replicator that can build pretty much any organic organism (bacteria, vacine, food etc.) from a selection of raw ingredients and some instructions - crucially instructions that can be uploaded from Earth, so if the astronauts on mars suddenly get ill and need a vacine we can send it to them :D

Seemingly NASA's Mars plan is to have a base built and ready by the time the astronauts get there. I kept thinking she must be bullshitting me, but she seemed totally serious (and extremely knowledgeable)  about the whole thing.

Not until we can print materials with the same precision and strength of current manufacturing methods - and that is likely a /loong/ way off. And when that happens a 3D printed gun will be the least of our worries.

I didn't say it was a great gun but it shoots a projectile. Sure it will get better. And I'm sure they will come up with something for ammunition.

How long is a looong way off?  We are printing house foundations and a bunch of other shit already.  NASA is going to print food. I'd say 5 years max and they will have a pretty good printed gun.

I love that stuff :|

Taking this carrying around weapons thing to extremes. Say you had a barbecue and I was invited (as I'd better fucking be) and at the barbecue I carried around... a glaive, would that be ok? Or an RPG launcher? Or a hand grenade? I mean at what point does it become unacceptable to you?

A glaive might be cool! It depends how big it is. If you had a knife like Rambo I wouldn't think much about it, but if you carried a sword around I'd think you were a little fucked in the head.

The other things I wouldn't think were acceptable.  The items you listed are only used for military purposes, although I think some things like that are legal to own. I know you can own a tank as long as it can't fire. I have a friend who has a pretty good arsenal of mortar rounds too. Although I don't think you're allowed to have them.

So are guns you bunch of crazy fucking dicks.

Not here they aren't. We've been through this, and have come to the conclusion that it's a cultural thing right? If you grow up using and around guns your whole life you're used to them.  I guess you /could/ be correct in a way. The reason we have the second amendment is to be able to protect ourselves from the government and are able to form a militia, so yeah you're right.  Every American is a member of the military to a point I guess.

House foundations is really nothing more than pouring concrete with a robotic arm - not going to help you make a gun.

Printing precision parts is a complete bitch - the plastics warp and change shape significantly over any distance (hence the incredibly short barrel on the Liberator), and the plastic really isn't strong enough for the job (notice how the amazing test firing was only a single shot?). ABS is far more elastic than steel, so it's never going to be possible to get a proper seal around the slug with ABS. Also the seal around the chamber isn't going to be very good with ABS either.  I've no idea what the muzzle velocity is, but I bet it's not great. Also there's no rifling, as the ABS can't cut into the bullet, so with a tiny barrel and no rifling you're going to struggle to hit anything you're pointing at. I'd imagine the most likely outcome of firing a Liberator being pretty similar to holding a bullet in a vice and hitting it with a hammer.

As for printed metals, they're currently done by using powdered metals and 'fusing' the particles together with a laser. The result is pretty brittle and the machines are ridiculously expensive, unlike the ABS printers you can get/build for a few hundred dollars.


If you *really* wanted to manufacture a gun at home then all you need is a half decent workshop, a mill and a lathe. Add in a CNC lathe, CNC router, CNC mill and you could automate the process and make something half decent in a week or so. 

Good points and true. But at the speed technology is moving I can't imagine not being able to print most things within 10 years or so.  And really, you don't need more than a couple shots to do what you intend to do, or if you do you print a bag full 'o guns and go Matrix style.

Albeit not a very good one, it blew his own finger off didn't it? Which just goes to show, gun control might be working quite well if the illegal ones can be so shit they're more dangerous to the shooter.

Maybe he wants to use the big sword to chop up bbq meat! It is a man's free choice to do that and you can take my burger-choppin' spadroon from my cold dead hands :)

That might be entertaining! OK, I'll allow it!

You said 5 years in your last post!

Never mind, Guess we'll just have to wait and see. *adds google calendar reminder for 23rd of May 2023*

Yeah, I think we will have a printable, usable gun within 5 years. I think we will be printing a lot/most of the household things we use within 10 years. We will just hit Walmart/Target/Sears/Lowes/Whatever.com and download the plan for the item we want and it will start printing.