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You can also duplicate most modern firearms (if you don't have a needed tool, you can make that too), and your work can be as good or superior.

http://www.cncguns.com/downloads.html

There are already plenty of people machining parts for modern weapons. It's legal. You can make them for yourself in your home workshop, and it doesn't cause problems.

http://www.cncguns.com/

The problem isn't weapon availablilty, which is universal.

The first problem is unwillingness to punish or kill the people who commit CRIMES with weapons. The second is unwillingness to lock up mental defectives and remove them as a social problem.

Criminals stop being a threat if they never get out of prison or if they are dead. The whole concept of "reforming" such folk has been accepted due to repetition, but it's absurd and they know it.

When the US was serious about dealing with mental defectives, it locked them up and left them there. It being MUCH cheaper to throw a few drugs at the crazies, pretend they will take them, then dump them on the streets, that replaced loony bins. When they act out, they go to prison, which is the other industry that replaced loony bins.

Don't want problems from mental defectives? They can't be helped, only stoned, and they won't stay stoned unless they are controlled. Don't want problems from violent criminals? Lock them up for life and work them so the system turns a profit.

I won't miss either lot. The majority of people are decent folks and won't miss them either.

However, there is no practical way to crack down on that, and MANY classic battle rifles were first made on manual machine tools.

http://www.cncguns.com/

Unlike the (beautiful troll as was intended) 3D printed weapon, here and elsewhere you can find plans for the real deal.

http://www.cncguns.com/downloads.html

Note that paper prints are more than sufficient to machine modern firearms. About 2000 bucks gets you a used manual milling machine. About the same gets you a lathe. You can use those to build a machine to cut a rifled bore if you wish. It's very old technology.

Remember the DeCESS T-shirt? Weapon prints can be protected speech too. They can also be incorporated into fiction as an illustration.

Actually, you can make an AR 80% lower with only a drill press. The bulk of the material removal is with drill bits and only some light cleaning up is done with the endmill. It helps that the AR lower is aluminum, not steel.

That said, I recognize that a mill will likely be more useful overall. I appreciate the link to the Sherline mills. I've been looking for a small one for some basic work and that looks like it'd hit the spot.

Sure it can -- you can build an AR-15 lower receiver using nothing but a drill press, some drill bits, and an endmill.

Using a slightly different kit, one can do it with nothing more than a basic mill (though a drill press and an XY table would also work).

It's not building the whole gun from scratch, sure, but it's the only legally-regulated part: you can order everything else you need through the mail without any paperwork. If one were building it from scratch then one would definitely need more skills.

While making the whole gun from scratch is hard, it's not really that hard if you use an 80% complete receiver/frame. The ATF decided that a chunk of metal becomes a "gun" when more than 80% of its production is completed. There's many companies that sell, for example, 80%-complete AR-15 lower receivers. Legally, it's a chunk of metal but you can do some basic work to finish it up.

For example, here's some instructions. You basically need a drill press (about $100 from Amazon or $70 from Harbor Freight), some drill bits (and maybe an endmill bit) which are available for cheap at hardware stores, and some basic supplies like wood, a permanent marker, etc. 80% lowers are about $80 for small volumes but get cheaper in bulk. You can buy the jigs that tell you exactly where to drill for about $120 and they can be used to produce as many lowers as you want (they don't really wear out).

The fire control parts, trigger, grip, etc. are about $80.

For the "complete" gun parts, it's about $750 (that includes everything except the machine tool parts -- it includes the barrel, stock, fire control parts, etc.).

Operating a drill press isn't terribly hard and one can be trained in a few minutes. After that, it takes a few hours to make the needed holes and the jig makes it pretty idiot-proof. Putting the rifle together isn't terribly hard (and there's lots of information online that details how to do this) and you're good to go. Basically, it's less than a day's work and less than $1,000 for the first rifle (with the cost being amortized if you make any more).

Certain groups have "build parties" where you put your 80% lower into a CNC mill and press "start". Since you push the button, it's you who are making the gun (as opposed to the machinist) and thus is legal. It can make it in about 8 minutes.

Sure, making your own rifle out of metal isn't trivial like it is with a 3D-printer (where you just hit "print"), but it's not that hard either.

If memory serves, at least the first-gen 3d printed designs were direct adaptations from http://www.cncguns.com/ CAD files, and that site has been up with little or no controversy for some years now. I assume that there has been some adaptation since then to support the limitations of 3d printing hardware.

Yeah, yeah, '3d printers' are magic star-trek replicators from the future, and CNC gear is old-and-busted-industrial-economy-getting-your-hands-dirty; but small scale weapons manufacture really isn't news(especially when you can legally buy some of the really tricky parts(properly rifled and chromed barrel, say) and just screw them on to the lower receiver you hacked together.)

By 'instantly censored' and 'frozen out' you mean "Indiegogo.com decided to drop them, they switched to using paypal, nobody else has done more than chatter"...

It might come, er, something of a surprise to people like http://www.cncguns.com/ (operational since 2004, if their site stats are accurate) that some ideas are "instantly censored"...

I realize that being a persecuted speaker of truth amidst the world's hypocritical sheep is ennobling and all; but please try to keep it empirically grounded.

Anyone know if the Great Firewall of China blocks sites like:

http://www.cncguns.com/

Even more fun than blueprints: http://www.cncguns.com/projects/1911a1frame.html

That's right, complete CNC files. No need to translate the blueprints and drawings into instruction lists. And light-duty CNC mills can be had for under $10k new. Sure, that sounds like a lot of money, but how many people have two or three times that in a bass boat? If machinework is your hobby, you can have your "3D printer" right now, and it'll make real metal objects, not plastic toys.

God, I love living in the future!