UK Police Seize 3D-Printed 'Gun Parts,' Which Are Actually Spare Printer Parts

nk497 writes "Police in Manchester have arrested a man and seized what they claim are 3D printed components to a gun. They made the arrest after a 'significant' discovery of a 3D printed 'trigger' and 'magazine,' saying they were now testing the parts to see if they were viable. 3D printing experts, however, said the objects were actually spare parts for the printer. 'As soon as I saw the picture... I instantly thought, "I know that part,"' said Scott Crawford, head of 3D printing firm Revolv3D. 'They designed an upgrade for the printer soon after it was launched, and most people will have downloaded and upgraded this part within their printer. It basically pulls the plastic filament, and it used to jam an awful lot. The new system that they've put out, which includes that little lever that they're claiming is the trigger, is most definitely the same part.'"

Comments

over-reaction?

[Custard Horse]

FTFA: "The man was also arrested on suspicion of making gunpowder"

He was probably making coffee...

Re:over-reaction?

[RalphMichaelDeLeon]

That actually wasn't a 3D printer it was a pillow.

Re:over-reaction?

[RDW]

This is England, so it was probably tea. It's an easy mistake to make:

http://www.whittard.co.uk/tea/type/green-tea/gunpowder-tea

Re:over-reaction?

[Anonymous Coward]

That actually wasn't a 3D printer it was a pillow.

Don't let your guard down.

The pillow was made in China, which borders Afghanistan. He looks pretty guilty to me.

Re:over-reaction?

[auric_dude]

Barista seeks Barrister?

Re:over-reaction?

[gandhi_2]

seing as a trigger is nothing but a lever in most cases, and a detent with a nice finger surface in really fancy cases, i'd say that declaring that someone who has made a trigger can easily fashion it into a firearm is something of an exageration.

the magazine on the otherhand... a box, a spring, and a plate... now THAT is truly terrifying!

Re:over-reaction?

[mrspoonsi]

In other news, a 80 year old grandmother has been released today when it was found that a supposed rocket launcher was just an umbrella stand.

It is hardly a gun if all it consisted of was a trigger and magazine. A hammer and nail is much more dangerous (assuming you had ammunition).

Re:over-reaction?

[Thanshin]

And, as they 'significantly' discovered later, the man wasn't actually a man.

Re:over-reaction?

[paiute]

I'm hearing every comment in this thread in the officious voice of the late Graham Chapman.

Re:over-reaction?

[Jamu]

Making gunpowder is a crime? I may or may not remember making gunpowder after school. Does this law date from 1605?

Re:over-reaction?

[gweihir]

And rightfully so! Gunpowder is a monopoly of fireworks and ammunition makers. Making it yourself is a crass example of copyright terrorism! Had he bough a few large firecrackers and opened them, he would have been alright.

Re:over-reaction?

[Anonymous Coward]

At least the didn't murder him.

Re:over-reaction?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's also worth pointing out that there is absolutely nothing illegal about triggers or magazines in the UK. My father owns several deactivated guns, all of which have real metal gun triggers (not simply trigger shaped bits of plastic) and at least one has a magazine. These are legal and have been certified as properly deactivated yet that process does not involve doing anything to damage/limit those components. (Chambers on a revolver are blocked as part of the process however.)

So if it's not illegal to own real triggers and magazines, why is it illegal to make plastic things that look like them? Actual construction of a firearm out of plastic gun shaped bits should be illegal in a country where firearms are illegal of course. This is similar to black powder guns, or guns of obsolete calibre (for which ammo is not readily available), these do not need to be deactivated however if you make or acquire ammo for them from somewhere then you're in trouble.

Re:over-reaction?

[cervesaebraciator]

I may or may not remember making gunpowder after school.

After that explosion, it's hard to remember anything really.

Re:over-reaction?

[nitehawk214]

So you typed this message on a keyboard? Oh my god, that means he has fingers... he could fire a gun! Police, arrest this man!

Re:over-reaction?

[Anonymous Coward]

Stop that! It's silly!

Re:over-reaction?

[Anonymous Coward]

Recipes can't be copyrighted.

Yeah.... Woosh!

I get the sarcasm... I just think it was somewhat deflated by using terminology that would never have been applicable even if making it were illegal.

Re:over-reaction?

[durrr]

Gunpowder tea

Re:over-reaction?

[Dishevel]

A hammer can be fairly dangerous without ammo. Some might argue that if you are facing 2 men. One has a hammer and a nail and a .45 caliber bullet and is trying to shoot you with it, the other just has a hammer and is coming at you with it.

I would put my focus on the guy without the nail and the bullet.

Re:over-reaction?

[interval1066]

Maybe he was playing with a toy gun.

Re:over-reaction?

[Anonymous Coward]

What a boat you?

And be four any one says the same a boat me I am using a text to speech program.

Re:over-reaction?

[Archangel Michael]

What happens when a person designs and builds a series of parts that are separately useful as something other than a "gun", but when combined in the right way does build a functioning "gun"? In other words, an disassembled gun is not a gun.

Please describe how any law can prevent this? If you outlaw guns, fine, but they better be fully working versions, and not the disassembled blob of misc. parts.

Re:over-reaction?

[RaceProUK]

What happens when a person designs and builds a series of parts that are separately useful as something other than a "gun", but when combined in the right way does build a functioning "gun"?

You can make a 'gun' using a ballpoint pen barrel and an elastic band.

*awaits GMP declaring Rymans (a stationer) a 'terrorist organisation'*

Re:over-reaction?

[K. S. Kyosuke]

He was probably making coffee...

And what happens when you make coffee in pure oxygen atmosphere?

Re:over-reaction?

[K. S. Kyosuke]

So if you try to grow it yourself, does that mean that you have your own small gunpowder plot in the backyard?

Re:over-reaction?

[fahrbot-bot]

What happens when a person designs and builds a series of parts that are separately useful as something other than a "gun", but when combined in the right way does build a functioning "gun"?

Is that you Francisco_Scaramanga?

Re:over-reaction?

[cusco]

There are probably 57 different pieces of random metal or plastic parts in my garage that could easily become a trigger. I also have a fully functional potato cannon out there, which doesn't have a trigger at all, as well as a can of ether to fuel it and a ten pound bag of otherwise-delicious ammunition. Rather wonder what the bobbies would make of that.

BTW, if you use ether instead of hair spray to power your spud gun wrap the combustion chamber with duct tape first. That way if it should shatter you won't end up with pieces of ABS shrapnel flying around.

Re:over-reaction?

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Well, you know, 5 November is coming up, so here in the UK everyone is into gunpowder plots lately...

Re:over-reaction?

[rubycodez]

indeed, when an unconfined handgun round goes off, the brass flies away from the bullet. at gun club I used to belong we'd sweep up powder residue and brass after matches and burn the pile since a portion of the powder is ejected from a gun unburned. every now and then a live round would pop and send the brass flying. but put that round in the shortest metal tube, maybe even inch beyond edge of brass (e.g. like a snub nosed revolver, which even has *air gap* before the short tube), and that's a whole different matter, that's a lethal weapon.

Re:over-reaction?

[JazzLad]

Try speaking clearly?

Re:over-reaction?

[Anonymous Coward]

a bunch of sticks and a string can be used to launch high speed projectiles that can punch through soft body armor. Its a new high tech weapon system called a Bow.

Is england not aware of this? /S

Re:over-reaction?

[RaceProUK]

Shh... don't mention Agincourt...

Re:over-reaction?

[Anonymous Coward]

A finished lower receiver is legally the firearm, everything else is just accessories.

Re:over-reaction?

[Darinbob]

Gunpowder tea!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunpowder_tea

Re:over-reaction?

[Anonymous Coward]

lol, made my day. Mod parent up.

Re:over-reaction?

[shutdown -p now]

No, he's right. In England, coffee could only possibly be used to blow something up, because for everything else there's tea.

Re:over-reaction?

[shutdown -p now]

At the point where you have all the parts that are necessary to assemble a working gun, you are deemed to be in a constructive possession of one.

Of course, such a law would be tricky to enforce in any meaningful cases, since buying parts separately is not illegal, and by the time someone actually assembles a gun and uses it, it's too late. So in practice it's mainly just an extra headache for legal gun owners - e.g. in US, you have to be careful to never be in a possession of an unmated short-barrel upper if you also have another full-length gun with a compatible lower, since that can be argued to be constructive possession of a short-barreled rifle (even if you never actually put the components together, or even disassemble the full-length gun).

Re:over-reaction?

[shutdown -p now]

That's the law in US, but it's not universal. Are you knowledgeable about UK firearm laws?

Re:over-reaction?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Constructive possession" comes into play if the primary purpose is to build a weapon, and all parts are present. For example, in the US, you can own the full auto guts to most rifles--ARs, AKs, etc. You can't possess the parts AND the rifle they go in at the same time, without the relevant paperwork. Which is ridiculous, because your buddy could have the parts, you have the receiver, and as long as they're kept in different houses, you're legal. Of course, putting them together would take 3 minutes.

Re:over-reaction?

[rpstrong]

At the point where you have all the parts that are necessary to assemble a working gun, you are deemed to be in a constructive possession of one.

But you are in physical possession of one when you acquire one specific part - the part (such as a rifle's lower receiver) that is required to have the gun's serial number. In as much as that specific part would deem physical possession, it would seems to be superfluous to claim constructive possession.

Re:over-reaction?

[shutdown -p now]

It might be tricky when the part is manufactured rather than purchased, and does not have any serial number - what do you count as "the gun" then? At best, you can say that "lower receiver is always 'the gun'", but the problem is that a stripped receiver for many kinds of guns is pretty much just a steel box, and banning steel boxes by themselves is not feasible. So you'd have to say that it's a receiver if it's used as one, or can be used as one in combination with some other things that a person has - which would, again, be constructive possession.

Re:over-reaction?

[ihtoit]

I own several firearms. ALL of them fully functional projectile throwers.

All of them LEGAL.

Only thing that would make them ILLEGAL would be if I decided to do something ILLEGAL with them. Apart from that, they are just lumps of inanimate metal.

Come get me.

Re:over-reaction?

[ihtoit]

making/possession of substances intended to cause explosions. Offences Against The Person Act 1861. I can't remember which section, it's somewhere near "Piracy at Sea".

Re:over-reaction?

[RockDoctor]

In other words, an disassembled gun is not a gun.

Sorry, I don't think so. I'm pretty sure that I've seen reports of people importing parts of guns and ending up in the slammer. Otherwise every one who wanted a gun would just order barrels, chambers, clips, [list of appropriate parts], collect them together, and "boom, boom."

Our legislators may be outwitted by clinically retarded oysters, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the "civil" servants who actually write the final versions of the legislation to "implement the will of Parliament" are idiots.

Re:over-reaction?

[rpstrong]

It might be tricky when the part is manufactured rather than purchased, and does not have any serial number - what do you count as "the gun" then?

From my post: "[...] the part (such as a rifle's lower receiver) that is required to have the gun's serial number [...]"

The ATF defines the specific parts that are required to be numbered. Having the actual number is immaterial, in terms of whether or not that specific part is defined as a gun. Grinding the serial number off (an offence of its own) does not affect the status of the part. Whether it is self-manufactured (without a number) or purchased, whether you can use it as a paperweight or a change box doesn't matter - in the eyes of the law, it is a gun. The law does not give a damn if you have the other incidentals (barrel, trigger, etc.) or not - possessing the part itself is all that counts.

Re:over-reaction?

[shutdown -p now]

The ATF does not require a serial number on the gun (receiver etc) that you manufacture yourself for your own use. You only need to place it there if you are selling or otherwise transferring it.

PC Plod does it again!

[Anonymous Coward]

What a bunch of fucking bellends.

Oh god

[O('_')O_Bush]

...the U.K. has found another moral panic. Everybody pop some popcorn, asinine laws are about to get passed and massive propaganda campaigns will be starting. Fun for the whole family, as long as you don't live there and as long as it doesn't spread here.

Last time I remember one of these "weapons" related knives, it was during the post-handgun knifing sprees, and the gov't managed to spin up its citizens so much with their knife amnesty programs that people were turning in unsharpened movie prop fantasy knives, kitchen utensils, and yard tools afraid they were going to get prosecuted for owning lethal weaponry.

We'll see what they come up with for 3D printers. Maybe plastic/printer amnesty days

Re: Oh god

[O('_')O_Bush]

"Weapons" related campaigns*, not knives

Re:Oh god

[_KiTA_]

Lets not forget a major part of this panic is due to old manufacturing companies starting to realize that if we can print something for 5 cents, then why would we pay $5 for it?

While we're not at that point yet, we certainly will be in 5 years. In 10-15 years, we'll be able to print iPods. Once that happens... why buy an iPod, when you can download a crowd-engineered alternative that's better and cheaper?

I expect some form of faux outrage to ramp up and 3D printing to be banned or seriously restricted soon. It's too disruptive for us us mere plebeians to be allowed to have.

Re:Oh god

[qbast]

Yeah, it's just like with movies and music - nobody wants content owned by big labels anymore because free stuff from garage bands is so much better. Oh wait, they don't and almost all downloaded music is actually pirated stuff.

Re:Oh god

[harrkev]

Printing an iPod??? Not a chance. Printing an iPod case? Sure.

Sorry, you cannot print electronics. Well, you *CAN* (some have experimented with this), but your iPod would have the size and consistency of a phone book. Even a simple processor these days consists of tens of millions of transistors. Same for memory.

I can envision two scenarios for printing electronics:

1) Print just the board yourself. This is certainly feasible, eventually. However, assembly of something the level of a iPod requres soldering which simply cannot be done at home. Try soldering a BGA with 1,000 pins. This CAN be done is a toaster oven (but not by beginners), but requires a lot of knowledge to get it to work. Add in memory, caps, resistors, etc., and the odds of getting something out without any defects seems unlikely.

2) Print the entire circuit yourself. It is possible to print transistors, but not to the scale needed. I would guestimate that thousands of transistors on a sheet of paper would be possible, but that is still a far way off from printing millions. Modern transistors can most closely be compared in size to a red blood cell. That sort of scale is difiicult to achieve with billions of dollars of equipment.

Printing of electronics will be awesome when it comes, but it will have limits. Expect some fantastic hobbyist inventions, but it will not be able to even come close to commercial products.

Re:Oh god

[IamTheRealMike]

people were turning in unsharpened movie prop fantasy knives, kitchen utensils, and yard tools afraid they were going to get prosecuted for owning lethal weaponry

Yeah, those, and also real Klingon Bat'leths (I mean, with actual sharpened edges that could take someones head off). Along with machetes and lots of other things that typically aren't needed in suburban Britain.

I would expect panics about people 3D printing guns to be relatively commonplace in the UK and throughout Europe in future. Being an island, the UK has had a particularly effective form of gun control that has seen criminal gangs reduced to trying to make their own ammo and weapons, often shittily and resulting in much less lethal weapons than those professionally made. Random shootings are extremely rare. However plenty of Brits read the newspapers and see how the USA experiences lethal shootings seemingly every day at the moment, which is completely insane. Now I read that children as young as 12 are shooting their teachers.

Everyone in the UK knows that it tends to experience a lot of US "cultural imports", and basically nobody I know there would want to see US-style gun crime. So gun controls are likely to remain popular and if it takes licensing of 3D printing equipment to enforce that, it won't surprise me at all to see such a thing be implemented.

Re:Oh god

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd say "Oh, Britain...", but I've seen the same stupid police propaganda here in Canada.
 
When we hosted the G20 conference, police confiscated what they claimed were "incendiary arrows" but were actually foam-tipped arrows used by LARPers. They stuck to the story well after their actual purpose was confirmed, since it made a better story than "we fucked up."
 
I suspect that's how it will play out in this case, too. You don't get to play soldier and you don't get your budget raised by confiscating printer parts.

Re:Oh god

[RogueyWon]

Our police (I'm British) do seem to be on a bit of a PR flurry at the moment, trying to get headlines by puffing up raids and arrests in response to whatever the moral panic of the day is.

A cynic might suspect that it's related to a general crisis of confidence in them, relating to:

- several years of stories about the doctoring of crime statistics
- violent over-reactions in some public order situations
- attempted cover-ups of said over-reactions
- catastrophic under-reactions in other (genuinely dangerous) public order situations
- the sale of confidential information to certain journalists
- a brazen attempt to "stitch up" the career of a Government minister they didn't like (not a very likeable one, but that's not the point), through a series of increasingly barefaced lies
- increasingly silly uniforms (admittedly that one not really their fault)

Don't get me wrong, this isn't a general anti-police rant. I know that most of them are honest and do their best in a bloody awful job, in a country where even serial burglars routinely get community sentences (primarily the fault of successive government policies, with courts also sharing some of the blame). But there are plenty of signs that British policing in general is at a real low ebb right now and desperately reaching for all of the positive news stories it can get.

Re:Oh god

[jobsagoodun]

We need more Chris Morris on the telly. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwylBRucU7w

Re:Oh god

[nitehawk214]

Foam tips... could catch on fire... Incendiary arrows! Police, arrest this man!

Wait, the schoolyard that only allows nerf toys is in Toronto! Arrest those children, immediately!

Re:Oh god

[cyberchondriac]

There's no such thing as a "real" Klingon Bat'leth, for starters. Second, those kinds of weapons are props and do not hold an edge very well. Swords made for Renaissance faires are well known not be to be up to actual battle standards. But what's to stop someone from putting some nails in a cricket bat and going to town on someone with that? Going to ban cricket too? How about wood saws and hacksaws? Axes? Hatchets? Sledge hammers?

Re:Oh god

[Rich0]

That board with a nail in it may have defeated us.

But the humans won't stop there. They'll make bigger boards and bigger nails, and soon, they will make a board with a nail so big, it will destroy them all!

Re:Oh god

[pr0fessor]

I'm not sure you can lump the entire US into a single cultural box. Although we may share federal laws and a single language, states that border each other will likely be very similar, but as you put more distance between the states you are comparing they become more dissimilar. The US is roughly 9 million km2 and Europe is roughly 10 million km2.

When I hear people talk about US or American culture I often times find myself thinking maybe in some other state {over 1,000 miles away} but not here.

Re:Oh god

[tmosley]

I was about to make a comment about how modern music is garbage, and that people only download the stuff made a long time ago and probably that they already owned at some point, but then I realized that there are a bunch of damn kids on my lawn again.

Re:Oh god

[tmosley]

In fifteen years, we may well have fully configurable computer components being mass produced on paper or some other disposable substrate. You also use commodity wire to connect to your scissor cuttable e-ink color screen which refreshes 128 times a second.

Hell, in 25 years we might have full functioning robotic fabricators that can do everything from laser sintering to textile weaving to chemical vapor deposition on the desktop. A fully automated, fully configurable and reconfigurable factory in a box.

That is, if we can keep hysterical police state nutters from smashing that which they do not understand.

Re:Oh god

[tmosley]

Liberals let their feelings dictate their actions, regardless of the consequences. That is why the UK has higher violent crime rates than the US, despite our much larger minority population and the fact that we border a country in a state of civil war against non-state actors that exist in both nations. Violence ALWAYS follows disarmament.

Re:Oh god

[serviscope_minor]

Hell, in 25 years we might have full functioning robotic fabricators that can do everything from laser sintering to textile weaving to chemical vapor deposition on the desktop. A fully automated, fully configurable and reconfigurable factory in a box.

I really, truly hope you're correct, but that seems a bit optimistic.

Re:Oh god

[serviscope_minor]

Liberals let their feelings dictate their actions, regardless of the consequences.

Ah the evul libruls. What about the commie-nazis?

. That is why the UK has higher violent crime rates than the US,

lolwut?

The obvious search turns up this first:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-25671/Violent-crime-worse-Britain-US.html

Which is, of course the daily fail. Quoting from that has about as much credibility as quoting from the National Inquirer.

If you read a sendible analysis, then you get:

http://blog.skepticallibertarian.com/2013/01/12/fact-checking-ben-swann-is-the-uk-really-5-times-more-violent-than-the-us/

which paints a very different picture.

Violence ALWAYS follows disarmament.

In the UK, violent crime has been reducing both before and after the 1997 gun ban. The gun ban didn't appear to make a significant change on the trend.

Re:Oh god

[Anonymous Coward]

Practicalities forbid licensing 3D printers; the constituent parts can be pulled out of 2D printers and hardware from a DIY store. Almost anything you buy from a DIY store could be a weapon. Last time I checked you could buy a hammer, wood and a nail from there without a license to potentially manufacture lethal weapons.

Re:Oh god

[serviscope_minor]

- violent over-reactions in some public order situations

Also big over reactions to harmless demonstrators, i.e. kettling to strip them of their right to protest. The thing is kettling only works on peacful protestors. When the riots broke out there was no thought of doing that (how do you kettle people lobbing rocks and petrol bombs?)

So it showed up the police's ability to crack down on peacful law abiding citizens and being near powerless in the face of actual criminals.

Though I suspect you're refrring to the murder (ok manslaughter--it didn't look like intent to kill) of Ian Tomlinson:

- attempted cover-ups of said over-reactions

For which we have an American to thank for. At least I believe it was an American tourist who posted a video of the actual event on youtube from the safety of the US when he got home.

The thing is the police always, or at least very often lie. Whenever some event happens which hits the news, the police release a statement. Subsequent investigation always seems to show that they were lying through their teeth. The public ones being Jean Charles de Menezes and Ian Tomlinson, recently.

- catastrophic under-reactions in other (genuinely dangerous) public order situations

If you're referring to the riots, then I think that was a (quite reasonable) inability to act against massively dispersed and seemingly random riots. Made their overreaction at the previous demostrations look really stupid, though.

- increasingly silly uniforms (admittedly that one not really their fault)

For what it's worth, last year I did see a City polieman in a very old-fashined cape. No hi-viz in sight.

Re:Oh god

[Anonymous Coward]

Print the case, buy/solder some Arduino-equivalent to put into it and flash Rockbox onto it. That doesn't sound too far-fetched.

Re:Oh god

[harrkev]

Well, I do have a master's degree in electrical engineering, and I design silicon for a living. I think that makes me at least a little qualified to answer. I am also capable of making a point without having to resort to personal attacks and insults. That is the sort of thing that you do when you do not know enough to actually use facts.

The problem with electronics is one of scale. To get millions of transistors, you need TINY transistors. Tiny transistors = machines with extreme precision, and an incredibly clean environment. Current technology has 28 nm process as the mainstream, with 22 nm being more cutting edge, and right now, anything smaller is "bleeding edge" with yield problems.

So, given this, I would consider 250 nm to be a nice goal to be able to do anything "real." 250 nm is 1997 technology, and ten times larger than current processes (along one axis, 100 times bigger for 2D items). This is about the same size as some larger viruses!!! Can you imagine a home device capable of the precision of the size of a virus? How much would that cost?

Now, home electronics DOES have a lot of DIY-type stuff. Things like the Arduino come to mind. How about an FPGA (since you are an expert, I am sure that you already know what an FPGA is)? The humble FPGA is one of the greatest things for a DIY-electronics enthusiast. If there is to be a real home-electronics revolution, it will likely come from making your own boards, maybe with a few hundred transistors for analog and interface stuff, along with an FPGA to do all of the heavy lifting. Still, soldering a large FPGA is not for the timid.

Re:Oh god

[tmosley]

The communists and the nazis are much the same, allowing their feelings to trump reality. That is why so many died under Franco, Stalin, Mao, etc. The difference is that they killed anyone who spoke out against their deadly foolishness, rather than simply castigating them with ad hominem (don't agree with what I say? You must be a tea bagger, ie a homosexual even though homosexuals are generally my constituents. But it's you guys who are prejudiced, not me, no sir.).

Nice strawman with the daily mail, but kudos for at least using google. Might try this one instead: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/5712573/UK-is-violent-crime-capital-of-Europe.html

Apparently, violent crime is up six-fold over the last sixty years, concurrent with ever-tightening gun control laws. You forgot that the UK didn't go from guns everywhere to no guns in 1997. They had been gradually reducing really since the early 20th century, but really took off with the controls in the 1960's.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_politics_in_the_United_Kingdom

Re:Oh god

[Anonymous Coward]

Printing a case doesn't sound far-fetched. Printing the electronics and integrated circuits does.

Re:Oh god

[Dishevel]

250 nm is 1997 technology, and ten times larger than current processes (along one axis, 100 times bigger for 2D items). This is about the same size as some larger viruses!!! Can you imagine a home device capable of the precision of the size of a virus? How much would that cost?

In 1998 Nokia came out with the iconic 5110. That is one year after the 1997 technology you talk of. Let us compare the 5110 with last big phone the Samsung Galaxy S4.

Nokia 5110: 2G Network. 170 grams. 5 line monochromatic display. SMS Messaging. Played 3 games. and could store 5 received, 5 missed and 8 dialed calls.

Galaxy S4: 4G LTE, 3G, Wifi, Bluetooth, A 5 Inch 1080 x 1920 pixel color display, SMS, MMS, Email, Web can store 64 GM of information, can play games that would have been impossible on full computers at the time. It is also lighter.

Again. 3D printing 15 years from now ... You really can not imagine what they will be capable of. Current processes are slowing due to the physical nature of the universe. 3D printing can grow quickly right up to those numbers. It will. I do not think it will take much more than 10 years. The materials they will be using are not knowable right now. I can tell you this. In 10 years it will cost less, be 1000 times more capable and will be used for things we can not even imagine now. Just like cell phones. 3D printers are a game changer. If you can not apply the history of technology when you look forward ... I am sure you can. The reason you did not is so that you could make that post. Again. Enjoy that post. It did not make you look smart, or knowledgeable.

Re:Oh god

[ediron2]

Totally agree!

Integrated circuits are built using photolithography and chemical, not mechanical processes. There are so many advanced tricks being utilized that a 'printer' can't do, that 10-15 years is stunningly overoptimistic.

OTOH, building blocks (custom units like i/o, cpu, gpu -- flexible like FPGA, all-in-ones like screens or storage blocks) plus printable plus commodity materials could be really cool in 10-15 years.

Re:Oh god

[ElectricTurtle]

The demoscene has been going strong for decades, and there is a ton of rather good music out there that was made for no other reason than the authors wanted to make some music, as opposed to money. I have literally thousands of tracks that were produced and distributed for free on purpose, and I listen to them all the time.

As consumer media capture and production equipment and software continues to go up in quality and down in price, you will see even things like movies emerge without commercial intent. Yeah, there is and will be a lot of complete crap, but so what? I've seen a lot of complete crap for $15 a pop in a theater. At least I'm not wasting money.

Re:Oh god

[WaffleMonster]

Lets not forget a major part of this panic is due to old manufacturing companies starting to realize that if we can print something for 5 cents, then why would we pay $5 for it?

Except it takes 5 cents to mass produce in a factory where millions of them can rapidly be stamped out and $5 to SLOWLY print one copy of the part. 3-D "paper" is not cheap and does not grow on trees.

While we're not at that point yet, we certainly will be in 5 years. In 10-15 years, we'll be able to print iPods. Once that happens... why buy an iPod, when you can download a crowd-engineered alternative that's better and cheaper?

No such technology exists or can reasonably be predicted to exist within the specified timeframe.

Re:Oh god

[Trailer Trash]

This is about the same size as some larger viruses!!! Can you imagine a home device capable of the precision of the size of a virus?

And now the police in the UK are shitting themselves even more because someone's going to 3d print a virus.

Re:Oh god

[AmiMoJo]

I don't think people were thinking of "printing" the integrated circuits (chips) in the iPod, they would be off-the-shelf parts. If you want to go down that route then Apple doesn't make iPods either, they just assemble components made by others, or rather pay Foxconn to do it.

An iPod is a bit of an extreme example since you can get a fairly good MP3 player below the cost at which you are ever likely to be able to print one in single quantities, but there are many other electronic gadgets that might be worth making. Car key fobs that the dealer charges hundreds to replace, or Hearing aids (which must be moulded to fit your ear, presumably using your 3D scanner) which are also outrageously expensive.

Re:Oh god

[AmiMoJo]

The law in the UK is that pretty much anything can be an offensive weapon if wielded as such. That seems sensible until you realize that it's basically down to how thick the copper looking at the situation is.

Re:Oh god

[harrkev]

I should also like to point out that 3D printing has existed for over 15 years. It just took that long to get the price and size down enough for home use. However, the seeds were there almost two decades ago. I actually held a 3D plastic model in 2000. The technology existed then.

When it comes to making tiny transistors, there IS NO OTHER METHOD besides the conventional silicon fab.

There were some experiments to print circuits using modified ink-jet printers (in theory, all you need is a conductor, an insulator, and an 'N-type' and a 'P-type" semiconductor). These actually worked (nobody said that they worked well, or were capable of any type of speed). Even assuming that this technology takes off and gets millions of dollars in research, there are fundamental limits in this type of technology. You will not be able to "spray" transistors at the size that we are talking.

Now, if I wanted to prototype a million-transistor digital circuit right now without takint it to a real silicon fab, let me list the ways that this can be done today. 1) Simulate in software. 2) Put on an FPGA. All other methods (including hardware-accelerated simulations) are combinations or enhancements of the above two approaces. There is no thrid approach, even in the labs, as far as I am aware.

Let's look at building a custom chip in a 28nm process. The mask costs are easily over one million dollars. This means that the very first chip that you get back will cost over $1,000,000. The 2nd might only be $50, but the first one is the expensive one. If you find a bug, hopefully the problem is small enough that you can re-use most of the masks. If not, expect to hand over another million for a re-spin. So, if your design is risky and you are not guaranteed that it would work, paying $250,000 for a single prototype made by some other method would be a bargain! Yet there is nobody out there offering to prototype an ASIC like this.

The old saying is that what we have in our homes today was in the labs 20 years ago. There is nothing in the lab right now that looks promising for making your own high-density circuits right now, other than the FPGA. Low-density? Yes. Hundreds or maybe even thousands of transistors? Maybe. Millions of transistors? No way that I can forsee.

Re:Oh god

[harrkev]

Fair enough. What you are talking about is simply printing your own circuit boards. Already possible at home. It needs to be refined a **LOT** to get to the level of making your own iPod. However, even if printing it WAS possible at home, you still have to assemble it. That is an even trickier proposition. Pick-and-place, along with having an oven is what is used today, and you do not want to do those by hand. There are enough different steps in building and assembling a circuit board that I cannot imagine that one box would be able to do it.

What **WOULD** be possible would be to design your own circuit board on a computer, and send the files to a remote factory that could build and assemble the entire thing for you, and ship you a working board. You can already get circut boards built this way, but you are sent bare boards and have to put the parts on yourself. If they could also populate tand test he board for a reasonable cost, the next revolution would begin.

A lot of work needs to be made to the infrastructure: the factory would need a supply of almost every imaginable common part, all easily accessible to the pick-and-place machine without human intervention. testing would need to be completely automated without human intervention too (if you start having to pay people to do setup for one or two boards, the cost will go way up). For testing, JTAG can only go so far if you have a lot of discrete "glue" logic and passives on the board.

You are absolutely right about the simpler devices such as hearing aids. Nobody is using 3D printers to make a million items. They are being used for the "fringe" products where only a few are needed, or making prototypes of entirely new products. The fringe is where all the cool stuff is happening.

Re:Oh god

[ultranova]

Can you imagine a home device capable of the precision of the size of a virus? How much would that cost?

Yes. They're called hard drives and manufacture magnetic structures in the picometer (sub-viral) scale. Cost is around 100 euros.

Obviously, it would require a lot of work to turn a hard drive to a manfucaturing plant; but if you made the platter from some material who's optical properties change with magnetism, you could prepare it with the head and use it as a reflector to get things started. Or we could adapt DVD recording technology - just make the spiral so tight the dots in successive layers overlap, and you can make contiguous chemically altered areas, which can then be altered further with chemical baths.

Re:Oh god

[harrkev]

That is, if we can keep hysterical police state nutters from smashing that which they do not understand.

Well, according to popular belief, guns are inherently evil. Therefore, anything that can make a gun must also be inherently evil.

Once you believe that objects themselves are capable of being evil, that opens up the floodgates of this type of thing. A gun in the hands of an honest person is about as evil as a toaster, or a pressure cooker, or a baseball bat, or a box of spaghetti. Objects do not matter, it is the person wielding the object that makes the difference. Yet many politicians would rather focus on the tools and ignore the people.

Politicians also never seem to understand that laws are only obeyed by honest citizens, and those prone to criminal behavior will obey laws about owning guns about as much as they obey laws about stealing and murdering.

I love seeing the "weapons free environment" sign at my local Ikea. If there were a person who had mass-murder on his mind, would he see that sign and suddenly realize that his gun was not allowed in there are ralize that his nefarious plan was foiled? Or, would he think that he is then safer, since nobody will be armed and able to stop him until the police arrive?

Re:Oh god

[harrkev]

Hmmm. That is actually an original idea on the subject. I could think of a lot of practical reasons that might stop you, but there is actually a chance that you are on to something.

The only real down-side is that if this type of thing WAS possible, it would take years of work to make it happen. In the lab in 5-10 years? Maybe. In the home in 15? Not likely (unless you have an extra million dollars lying around). Even products designed for consumers (like the CD player, DVD player, etc.) start out at least an order of magnitude more expensive than price a decade later. The first CD player in the 1980's was something like $800. Even a decade later they were around $100.

I am not saying that such a thing will not happen. I am just saying that, even if possible, it is not likely to be in the home if 15 years.

Re:Oh god

[Anonymous Coward]

Enjoy that post. It did not make you look smart, or knowledgeable.

It did in fact, and I learnt something. You on the other hand look like a blathering idiot. Again. Enjoy your humiliation.

Re:Oh god

[Dishevel]

Again. No way that we can see means nothing over 15 years.

Show me a person that though in 1997 that cell phones would have more power than the Best PCs of the time. That they would be smaller. That they would create multiple new markets. That they connect everyone constantly in unimaginable ways. I see no reason why 3D printing can not get down to a 180nm process. Can you even imagine what the world will be like if people can get their hands on a home based 3D printer capable of even 250 nm tech? Even at $5000 - $10000. It could be considered a bargain.

Re:Oh god

[Anonymous Coward]

1) Print just the board yourself. This is certainly feasible, eventually. However, assembly of something the level of a iPod requres soldering which simply cannot be done at home. Try soldering a BGA with 1,000 pins. This CAN be done is a toaster oven (but not by beginners), but requires a lot of knowledge to get it to work. Add in memory, caps, resistors, etc., and the odds of getting something out without any defects seems unlikely.

The BGA with 1,000 pins can be done with a heat gun and a warming plate. It's not as hard as you make it out to be. The layout of the board is much, much harder and that's why open hardware designs will win the day. People, will and do, team up to create designs and distribute them using services like github, thingiverse or something that doesn't even exist yet.

Remember the OP was talking about the future and the reality is that this process is a possibility today for a mostly poor hobbyist in the developed world. It's really not that hard any more with SoCs being prevalent and SMT soldering being approachable for even the novice with a little patience, a dash of low temp soldering paste and a heat gun.

Re:Oh god

[harrkev]

And yet cell phones existed back then -- I had one. Hand-held computers existed back then (Palm anyone?) -- and I had one. Both had a processor, display, and battery. It did not take a genius to figure out that one device could, one day, be able to do both. Honestly, my biggest problem with the concept of a "smart phone" 15 years ago is that I worried about running an operating system which could crash just when I might need to make a "911" call. And, you know what? I have had my phone crash or lock up at the most inconvenient times, and had to reboot my phone so that I could make an important phone call.

The convergence of the two was hardly surprising. Phones getting cheaper and adding features -- very predictable. Getting better processors -- also predicted. All of those were realy evolutionary -- fairly predictable based on current trends. Touch-screen being capactive instead of resisteive -- well, that was a new one, but merely a detail.

The fact that they were all touch-screen, with no slide-out keyboards? That was not guaranteed. The fact that Apple came out with the first truly viable smart phone? NOBODY predicted that 20 years ago. But those are details. Existing products getting better, smaller, faster, cheaper. No surprises. The only surprise was the names on the back of the boxes. New markets? Predictable. Exactly HOW they would evolve was a different story, but it was generally assumed that new technology would be disruptive to the status-quo.

I can easily see real difficultes in getting down to 180nm, especially with the stuff needed to build circuits. I hope you are right. I hope that there is some technology that I am unaware of that will allow this sort of thing to happen. Even if the precision is NOT the problem, you still would practically have to build the entire circuit in one step, since a stray dust particle could ruin the entire thing. That definitely means a one-box solution. How would this work? How do you lay down the N and P regions? How do you add metal layers? How do you form the oxide? How do you put vias in the structure? Who knows?

Re:Oh god

[Dishevel]

How would this work? How do you lay down the N and P regions? How do you add metal layers? How do you form the oxide? How do you put vias in the structure? Who knows?

Not me. I do know that looking back in history the smart money is on it getting done. If only flying cars were not the one exception to this rule.

Re:Oh god

[newcastlejon]

Which is, of course the daily fail. Quoting from that has about as much credibility as quoting from the National Inquirer.

Cut the guy some slack, tmosley probably has some sort of familial connection to the Mail. :P

Mosley, if you're reading, it's an ad hominem not a straw man, and even then this isn't some debating club where we get to use such thought terminating clichés and ignore the well-known and horrendous biases of both Mail and Telegraph.

Re:Oh god

[serviscope_minor]

Might try this one instead:

Why would I want to try that? Because I was supposed to read your mind and respond not to a point you had made incorrectly, but one you intended to make in future?

And oh wait, that article uses the same debunked statistics as the daily fail one. That makes it really legit IMO.

Apparently, violent crime is up six-fold over the last sixty years,

[citation needed]

Oh and don't forget to account for the way crimes have been recorded.

concurrent with ever-tightening gun control laws

It's also concurrent with the increasing density of transistors, the number of people "out" as gay, the population size and the price of carrots.

Re:Oh god

[kellymcdonald78]

You fail to take into account that other manufacturing processes will continue to improve over the next 15 years as well. For highly customizable personal goods I agree 3D printing will be revolutionary, but I suspect it will be more of a "upload my file to the commercial 3-d printer at the local Walmart and pick it up" than a Star Trek replicator at home. Just like it is with photo's, I "can" print photo's at home on a $50 ink jet, but it's much cheaper and I get better picturess when Costco prints it on their $10k dye diffusion printer. For general commodity goods, mass manufacturing will always be cheaper. The factory can buy raw materials in bulk at much lower costs than you and can stamp them out 1000 at a time. Economies of scale don't dissappear simply because of 3D printing.

Re:Oh god

[Anonymous Coward]

It didn't take '15 years' to get the price and size down
It took the expiration of patents.

Re:Oh god

[david_thornley]

No, actually, the smart money isn't on getting it done. You've got a selection bias. We don't have flying cars or commercial passenger rockets. Our manned spaceflight technologies are still very limited. We don't have robot maids. We don't have many people living past 100. I can come up with lots of things that people expected that at least aren't here yet.

I live in a house built in 1892. I eat meals there that are put together out of ingredients, frequently basic ingredients. I drive an internal combustion vehicle. My electricity comes in from the grid, and is mostly produced in same ways we had when I was a kid. My house is heated by natural gas piped in. Most of the stuff I did in 1983 I still do in much the same way, although the tools are mostly nicer and better. The things that have radically changed have done so based on relatively few new technologies with major impacts.

I'd say that any specific predictions of amazing breakthroughs are unlikely to occur in the next thirty years, although there will be some amazing breakthroughs that will have great impacts on how we live, that people failed to predict.

Re:Oh god

[RespekMyAthorati]

Straw man.
Nobody has ever described guns as evil, only dangerous.
Vastly more dangerous than toasters, pressure cookers, baseball bats, or boxes of spaghetti.

Re:Oh god

[Darinbob]

On behalf of all Americans, I would like to take this moment to thank the UK government for temporarily taking over our position as dumbest government on Earth.

Re:Oh god

[Darinbob]

Oh yes, it only costs 5 cents! What a deal! Except for the printer and maintenance and training and supplies.

Re:Oh god

[Darinbob]

Then where the hell is my flying car? I've been waiting decades for that one!

Re:Oh god

[harrkev]

In the hands of an honest man, a gun is only dangerous to criminals.

Re:Oh god

[Anonymous Coward]

Still, soldering a large FPGA is not for the timid.

I often wonder why the FPGA manufacturers don't produce large FPGAs with limited IO capability so that they can be put in a package that can be soldered by the home market. I'm sure such a device would have plenty of applications, but honestly the number of home users who can solder even the QFP packages that the smaller FPGAs are packaged in is limited, but the big stuff is basically only available in BGA which is entirely out of the question for almost everyone.

Re:Oh god

[Anonymous Coward]

Yea?

The phone got better. It also got much more expensive. a 5110 was about $99, the max anyone was prepared to pay for a phone at the time. Now people are ok with paying $999 for a phone.

But, that's not the biggie. The process used to make the 5110 was shit by every metric, worse timing control, worse seismic control, worse aberation control, worse dimensional control, worse surface polishing, worse contrast, worse particulate control, worse mask generation, etc. The process technology used to make the 5110 was also about 100 ~ 1000x cheaper than the process technology to create a Galaxy S4, and took up far less factory floor space, and used far less energy.

So while the end product technology is getting better, faster, cheaper(?), the process technology used to make it is becoming more expensive, larger, and, for saving grace, faster.

So tell me, great wise one, what magic is going to take precision manufacturing and miniaturise it, when all historical trends in precision manufacturing are for bigger, more expensive machines?

I suggest you study this lecture series and learn what exactly it takes to reach the levels of precision required to achieve the high quality process lithography we all enjoy today. You're just not going to achieve that level of precision at home. The only way I can see this panning out, is with some as yet uninvented nanoscale jet printing, and it's likely that system will not be cheap, and require the same high levels of metrology and precision engineering that existing photolithographic systems require.

No.

Re:Oh god

[Anonymous Coward]

Now, if I wanted to prototype a million-transistor digital circuit right now without takint it to a real silicon fab, let me list the ways that this can be done today. 1) Simulate in software. 2) Put on an FPGA.

Putting something on an FPGA is software, just a different kind of software.

So, if your design is risky and you are not guaranteed that it would work, paying $250,000 for a single prototype made by some other method would be a bargain! Yet there is nobody out there offering to prototype an ASIC like this.

There is. The compromise is that you only get to customise a single layer of the maskset, rather than the entire stack, which is made of a fixed selection of standard devices. It fits nicely the niche where you are making enough volume that FPGAs are sucking down too much of your profits, but not enough to do a full custom ASIC. The cost of a maskset is about $1M, the cost of a single metalised layer mask is about $50k ~ $100k.

Nobody buys a maskset without already assuring that their design works. Logic design and device design are two different departments, final designs are manufactured with device packages that are already fully validated, and devices are so small that large numbers of prototypes can be produced in a single reticle. device prototypes are still expensive, but they are validated by processes like matrix assay, where matrices of variants are patterned to find the optimal geometry for a process node, so the cost of each prototype device is some small fraction of the $1M for a maskset. Contract foundries like TSMC will only offer quality assurance on a design that has been validated by approved EDA tools and use device packages validated on their machines, because they don't want to be offering refunds for faulty devices that they manufactured correctly.

Re:Oh god

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey,

Firstly, kudos for a measured answer to a nasty response....!

Here's a question.... my experience with FPGAs (and this was in the 90s, and I've not stayed current) suggests that the very vast majority of a PGA is connections that get fused out. The bit that you actually use is just two inputs of a 32 input nand, sort of thing. Given that a custom thing-specific printed circuit could skip the unused stuff, doesn't that mean that we can build a far less comprehesive device - therefore at a much bigger scale?

You wouldn't be able to skip stuff for a CPU, because you need the whole thing to work for it to execute code .... but it suggests that smaller modular designs would prevail.

My guess is that a future printer might have small pots of common modules, maybe like an ARM, memory etc, in packages that allow simple placement into a printed substrate, and can be wired by metal printing onto the substrate, possibly with additional chemical printing capacity for making additional components.

Or maybe not. 3D printers are in the same place as computers were in 1978: big industrial mega-bucks machines, and toys for the home. Back then it was the arrival of business machine micros (ie PCs and Macs) that commotized and converged with the toys that changed the world. Bet the same thing will happen here. Maybe by 2030, we'll be laughing at "soldering an FPGA".... it'll be the same problem as "a strong circuit board to support the weight of the valves"!

Re:Oh god

[sjames]

Start with Raspberry Pi, add LiIon batteries and an appropriate plastic shell from your 3D printer (including battery compartment).

Perhaps not as sleek and it could do better on power consumption, but it's a starting point.

The toaster oven soldering can be improved and made more foolproof with a better controller and thermal mass. If it's needed, it will happen.

Re:Oh god

[sjames]

Violent crime is also down in the U.S. without a gun ban.

Re:Oh god

[Anonymous Coward]

The mask costs are easily over one million dollars. This means that the very first chip that you get back will cost over $1,000,000.

In case some of the readers are mistakenly assuming the cost of a 28nm chip is close to 1 million dollars:

The cost of tools and engineering time to produce the chip and package design, in and of itself, will easily exceed a mere 1 million dollars. Figure 20-30 people working for several years for a typical mid-sized design. Tool license costs alone will probably exceed 1 million dollars in a typical year, for all the tools needed to work at this scale. You'll need a computing grid, and some high end machines with enormous amounts of memory.

Then there's the cost in expensive test equipment (and more engineering time) to validate (aka "test") the fabricated chip and package. A high end logic analyser or scope is not a trivial investment (tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars per item), and you'll need multiple test stations (but at least you can spread the cost over multiple projects). Don't forget the licenses for the test tools. Easily add another several million dollars here.

Then there's the cost of more engineering time to put the chip into a product, and the cost of software time needed to program it, plus all the engineering and management time associated with actually planning and executing the design, test, manufacturing and logistics. Add another several million dollars.

Don't expect to get everything right on the first spin, either. As with software design, there are lots of problems that can't be found with automated tools, requiring significant human time to plan and implement verification. It will never be possible to completely verify any non-trivial design, as with large software systems, but the problem here is even worse since you can run into physics issues that are not captured by the models. Custom analog is even more difficult and risky, but even "digital" designs run into lots of "analog" issues these days.

Also, a fab capable of doing 28nm work won't be interested in working with you on small projects, so you'll have to establish and maintain a business relationship with them that can be expected to produce enough long term business to make it worth their time, or expect to pay a LOT more up front.

In short, the cost of a typical 28 nm chip will exceed 1 million dollars by quite a lot.

On the other hand, the cost in lost sales of not producing the chip in time to compete with other vendors in your business will most likely exceed ALL those other costs by a significant margin.

Custom ASICs make FPGAs look cheap, but they also reach performance and integration levels that vastly exceed what can be done in a FPGA. And, of course, many pieces of technology simply can't be implemented any other way: they have to be done on chips, or you can't do them at all.

Re:Oh god

[akozakie]

I completely agree (*not a "me too", read on) with you on the impossibility of printing <100nm electronics in forseeable future. However, this does not mean that 3D printing has no potential for nearly-commercial-level prototyping.

As you mentioned a couple of times, FPGA is incredibly powerful. You can also buy some commercial-level chips, the same the big companies are using. Now realize that printing of the boards is entirely realistic. That leaves only two problems:

1. Precise soldering of complex chips with insane amounts of pins
2. Availability of insanely complex FPGAs with lots of pins and gates

Doesn't adaptation of sufficiently precise 3D printers to 1. seem feasible? In 15 years? Certainly. I also believe this will solve 2. as well - as soon as it's easy to use them, they will appear on the market.

So, printing commercial-level electronics? No, if at all, then always at least 20-30 years behind. But printing of nearly-there prototypes using existing chips and FPGAs far more powerful than today? In 15 years? I can easily see that happening.

Re:Oh god

[Feyshtey]

Show me a person that though in 1997 that cell phones would have more power than the Best PCs of the time.

I'll do one better and show you a person that believed that in 1965: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore's_law

Re:Oh god

[delt0r]

Lets not forget a major part of this panic is due to old manufacturing companies starting to realize that if we can print something for 5 cents, then why would we pay $5 for it?

I highly doubt that. Fact is modern manufacturing methods are just bloody cheap. Especially in volume. These said companies have been using 3d printing for more than a decade and know dam well you can't print something they sell for $5 for even close to 2x that.

Re:Oh god

[delt0r]

While technology is hard to predict. However i doubt this for the simple reason that its cheaper to just mass produce some things in factories. Much Much cheaper.

Kudos to the police for realizing...

[Godwin O'Hitler]

...a 3D gun is much more likely to be viable than a picture of a gun.

"During the searches, officers found a 3D printer and what is suspected to be a 3D plastic magazine and trigger which could be fitted together to make a viable 3D gun.
It they are found to be viable components for a 3D gun, it would be the first ever seizure of this kind in the UK."

Re:Kudos to the police for realizing...

[gl4ss]

I'm pretty sure you could design a gun that would use those parts somehow, so the police have lots of busy nights with cad to make them not seem stupid...

Re:Kudos to the police for realizing...

[Anonymous Coward]

Apparently if you fit a trigger to a magazine you have a gun!

Someone teach me how to do this, I'm interested in how you actually fire ammunition without a barrel, receiver, and firing pin.

Re:Kudos to the police for realizing...

[Sun]

Any chance they'll open source it? Might be better than the currently circulating CADs.

Shachar

Re:Kudos to the police for realizing...

[mark_reh]

I'll teach you how to make a better "gun" than you can with a 3D printer.
1) gather components: a bullet, a block of wood, a rock.
2) drill a hole through the block of wood that matches the diameter of your bullet.
3) place bullet in the hole in the block of wood. Congratulations, you're done.
Fire the "gun" by hitting the back side of the bullet with the rock.

The "gun" described above doesn't require a 3D printer, knowledge of CAD software or metallurgy.

Re:Kudos to the police for realizing...

[mark_reh]

Oh yeah, one more thing- if you use your imagination, that block of wood with a hole in it can used to smoke weed, so now you have not only made a weapon, you've also made drug paraphernalia.

Use with caution!

Re:Kudos to the police for realizing...

[Zemran]

You need special glasses to fire a 3D gun and only people wearing those glasses can get shot by one.

Re:Kudos to the police for realizing...

[Feyshtey]

Yes. And a 3D gun that's exponentially more viable is as easily created by a water jet cutter, or plasma cutter, or oxyfuel cutter, or a laser cutter. Any of which requires roughly the same level of training to utilize as a home 3D printer. Granted those technologies are much more expensive, but there are 1000's of them in use in machine shops in the US and Europe. All one needs is the file that defines the part, and the ability to access the machinery.

Now you may be able to argue that the ease of access to home 3D printers makes it possible for more whacko's to get their hands on printed guns. But they will have shitty little pea shooters that might work once without blowing up in their faces. Whereas the 10s of 1000s of machine shop owners/employees out there are just as likely to be whacko's, and capable of producing things much more dangerous than some idiot in his basement. You're worried about a 15 round magazine being printed? How about a vulcan cannon?

Hell, a marginally talented machinist with knowledge of firearms can make a damn effective weapon out of some pipe, using a lathe and a drill.

So where's the moral outrage against the people with machine shops? Cutters? Drills? Maybe laws should be passed to regulate the purchase of pipes?

The guy that fixes your uber eco bicycle as every tool he needs to kill you and everyone within 50 feet of you. But you are freaking out about a chunk of plastic.

Re:Kudos to the police for realizing...

[Anonymous Coward]

One question:

If I don't use my imagination, can I still smoke weed through it?

Re:Kudos to the police for realizing...

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:62510

The "trigger" turns out to be part of an extruder filamrnt pressure bearing arm, the other component is a makerbot replicator spool holder designed to clip on the back of the machine.

Plod gets it wrong again.

Re:Kudos to the police for realizing...

[Anonymous Coward]

Hell, a marginally intelligent person, with very little knowledge of firearms, can make a damn effective weapon out of some pipe, and a few hand tools. There, fixed that for you.

Re:Kudos to the police for realizing...

[Archangel Michael]

But you are freaking out about a chunk of plastic.

BUT IT IS A GUN OMG FML LMNOP!!!!!

Re:Kudos to the police for realizing...

[Ardyvee]

They are not new, and most people think that forging and related practices by people are no longer happening, with most of the trade being done by computer from an encrypted file nobody has access to. O wait.

Really, it's all a matter of perception. Most people don't have in their minds that you can use a plasma cutter/etc. (or well, if you are so inclined maybe you can forge one yourself by hand, if you are so inclined) to produce a firearm (or other potentially lethal weapons), while there has been a lot of media attention to the fact that people are trying (and succeeded, but recently) to produce most of a firearm (but not all) with plastic (instead of metal).

Re:Kudos to the police for realizing...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm pretty sure you could design a gun that would use those parts somehow, so the police have lots of busy nights with cad to make them not seem stupid...

The UK police would be happy to spend many a busy night with a cad. Wink wink nudge nudge know what I mean?

Re:Kudos to the police for realizing...

[rubycodez]

i'd even question the need for "hand tools" to be plural, plenty of zip guns made with just a claw hammer

Re:Kudos to the police for realizing...

[GrimShady]

since the cops there have never actually owned or seen a gun in person I can see how they were confused....

Re:Kudos to the police for realizing...

[Darinbob]

Alright Mr Bond, here is the latest gadget from Q Branch: a 3D printer. Just print whatever device you want in the field.

Re:Kudos to the police for realizing...

[fatphil]

Violence and drugs, eh?

You missed out sex and rock'n'roll - your block of wood's rubbish!

Gun Control Nuts...

[clonehappy]

Bigger authoritarians than the "gun nuts". Hopefully this shit stays on the other side of the pond.

Re:Gun Control Nuts...

[Anonymous Coward]

If you think they are "just nuts", you haven't read The Guardian yet. I find it hilarious that a UK newspaper is constantly pushing through both its UK and US editions for gun control in the US, but then again, The Grauniad's political agenda is pretty crazy and pays little attention to reality.

Re:Gun Control Nuts...

[Archangel Michael]

Nothing scarier to someone trying to control your life than your ability to say "NO FUCKING WAY".

Legislation

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess they won't be banned 3D printers just yet then, although the BBC is still going with suspected "homemade" gun components . A few MPs with connections with the manufacturing industry will, no doubt, be disappointed.

Perhaps No Accident?

[lubaciousd]

In the internet age where transferring music and media without destroying the original copy has predominated retail acquisition, 3D Printers have the potential to reduce nearly every object imaginable to information about fabrication, effectively IP. The prospect of being hypothetically capable of 3D printing a gun seems to be almost as frightening to authorities as the finished product itself. Will we see more 'confusion' by authorities who have trouble discriminating between legitimate uses and those that make them paranoid? It does seem like this would have an intimidating effect on people considering a purchase of a 3D printer.

Re:Perhaps No Accident?

[digitalchinky]

Lathes, CNC cutters, drills, milling machines, and so on, all of this stuff while a tad on the expensive side, is not out of reach. There are also untold numbers of machine shops around the place.

I think this entire incident is more about pure stupidity and lack of common sense. The tools exist for the common human and have done for centuries. The sky isn't falling.

Re:Perhaps No Accident?

[MBGMorden]

Comparing a lathe, CNC cutter, mill, etc to a 3d printer is like comparing assembly language to Visual Studio. Sure, you can use both to create the same thing, but you're just either naive or being intentionally thickheaded if you refuse to believe that the latter opens up that capability to a much larger group of people.

Re:Perhaps No Accident?

[Feyshtey]

All one needs to build a functional firearm is a drill and some extraordinarily mundane materials from any local hardware store. Oh, and the ability to read. And that weapon is far more likely to kill the target rather than the shooter, when compared to anything coming out of a 3D printer.

If you actually think that 3D printers are what makes it possible for a larger group of people to get weapons, you have demonstrated your depth of ignorance on the topic of firearms. Which is really the whole problem; people who have no clue whatsoever about firearms, and foist that ignorance onto equally ignorant politicians who create ill-concieved knee-jerk laws.

Re:Perhaps No Accident?

[RayHs]

If someone produces a 3D printer that can print bullets and eject them in a desired direction with a desired velocity, would the printer qualify as a gun? Would a keyboard then qualify as a trigger?

Re:Perhaps No Accident?

[MBGMorden]

You mistake me for someone who fears 3D printers. I've actually hand fitted and assembled an AR-15 and a 1911. I'm a certified Glock armorer and a competitive shooter. I'm quite experienced and knowledgeable about firearms.

Still, for the common person, the use of machine tools is out of their reach and capability. Running a 3d printer is much less complex and will only get more so. The guns that produce now are very much just proof of concept but a) the technolgoy will improve, and b) over time designs will be made that better work within the limitations of the fabrication technique.

The first flight by the Wright Brothers lasted 12 seconds. Today you can board a jumbo jet and fly from one point on this planet to any other in less than a day. I'm a firm believer that 3D printed guns will eventually be viable and easy to produce for anyone who wants one. I also think that's a good thing.

Re:Perhaps No Accident?

[FatLittleMonkey]

You can use much simpler tools to make a one-shot, smooth-bore, take-apart-to-reload, zip-gun like the 3d-printed guns, starting with off-the-shelf parts and very limited tools and experience. A zip-gun just need a barrel (pipe), a firing chamber (thicker walled pipe), a firing pin (nail on a spring). Buy pre-threaded pipe and you don't even need welding experience.

Hell, you can probably make one out of plastic without too much difficulty. I suspect you can buy higher grade plastic tubing that is stronger and more heat-tolerant than anything you can print.

[Elsewhere I describe a shotgun made out of scaffolding. http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4377441&cid=45235721 A garage-gimmick that's been around for decades, yet you don't hear police reporting murders by pipe-shotguns very often. Nor calling them "the next generation of firearms".]

The actual advantage of the 3d-printer is not that it makes it easier (it doesn't), it's that you end up with something that looks more like a gun, with the firing mechanism (catch, release, trigger and spring) neatly fitted inside the housing.

Re:Perhaps No Accident?

[RespekMyAthorati]

Lathes, CNC cutters, drills, and milling machines are not only expensive, but require years of training before someone can use them to make anything complex.
Using a 3D printer, on the other hand, requires:
1. download design file
2. click "START"

Re:Perhaps No Accident?

[shutdown -p now]

There is a guy in prison in UK at the moment because he wrote and published a book on how to construct a 9mm submachine gun out of plumbing tubes, using tools like a file and a hacksaw - no mill and lathe needed.

Really, the only reason why there's a panic over 3D printing now is because the mass media chose this particular topic to hype the audience.

smug retribution

[Anonymous Coward]

who has the crazy gun laws now?!
  -- USA

Re:smug retribution

[qbast]

Week later: 20 kids gunned down in another school massacre in USA. "Crazy" depends on what you want laws to achieve.

Re:smug retribution

[X0563511]

Unfortunately you can't just legislate it away. That doesn't work, has never worked, and will never work. Doesn't stop them from trying, though.

I'm not going to get into it beyond that though - I'm not an expert, but it doesn't take an expert to recognize that something is broken. I really don't think just taking them away is the answer. As other incidents have spotlit, the act will not change, only the tools. Children (and adults too) committing violence against their peers and authority figures is the symptom, the gun (or knife etc) is just the vehicle, and the real problem is something else that I can't really identify personally. People are losing hope, getting restless, frustrated, and angry. We need to determine (and fix) the cause of that, not the results. But good luck with that, because the people in charge only care about looking like they are fixing things. Which only compounds the problem.

Re:smug retribution

[Vanderhoth]

I think it was just last week a 14 year old shot another student, a teacher, then himself. Parents gun that wasn't properly stored or locked that a kid had access to. Negligence causing death, I hope it means jail time for both of the parents.

Re:smug retribution

[qbast]

Clearly the only answer is 'more guns'. If other 14 years olds (hell, why not start at 8 years?) all were carrying, this tragedy could be avoided.

Re:smug retribution

[qbast]

Unfortunately you can't just legislate it away. That doesn't work, has never worked, and will never work.

Well, it works very well in Europe. So while this particular case is example of police idiocy, the law in UK is not crazy. But I agree that it would be extremely hard to do in USA.

Doesn't stop them from trying, though.

I'm not going to get into it beyond that though - I'm not an expert, but it doesn't take an expert to recognize that something is broken. I really don't think just taking them away is the answer. As other incidents have spotlit, the act will not change, only the tools. Children (and adults too) committing violence against their peers and authority figures is the symptom, the gun (or knife etc) is just the vehicle, and the real problem is something else that I can't really identify personally. People are losing hope, getting restless, frustrated, and angry. We need to determine (and fix) the cause of that, not the results. But good luck with that, because the people in charge only care about looking like they are fixing things. Which only compounds the problem.

With that logic every kind of weapon should be legalised. Why bother banning nerve gas and explosives ? After all this will only change tools, not the act itself.

Re:smug retribution

[Archangel Michael]

Here is the statistic that should shut people like you up for good. Suicide and Murder Rates for the US and Great Britain are about the same. One has strict gun control laws and the other does not. Suicide by guns in the US far outpace Suicide by guns in the UK, yet the overall rates are almost identical. The same is true for murder rates. In fact, if you exclude the cities in the US with the strictest gun control laws (DC, Chicago etc) which also happen to have the highest murder rates by guns, the murder rates in the US is actually LESS than most other countries.

The problem is, the facts don't line up with the Liberal Logic. Less guns do not produce less violence. This means people are violent with whatever tool they find handy, just like killing themselves. We should address the reasons for violence, not the method.

I mean just recently, you had a trained military person beheaded in broad daylight by a couple guys with knives. AND nobody stopped them. Nobody could. In America, you would have had someone (or a few someones) kick the shit out of the guys before they could finish cutting the soldiers head off.

Sorry, I don't want to live in a Society that is so scared of everything that people don't step up and face evil directly. Call it "Rugged Individualism", something Liberals can't understand and therefore despise.

Re:smug retribution

[codepunk]

Another teacher was killed this week with a box cutter. Clearly we need to rid the world of these devices of death.

Re:smug retribution

[Archangel Michael]

But if he did it with a box cutter would you blame the parents for leaving the box cutter out? Because that also happened just this week. Is that "negligence causing death" too? Do you want those parents jailed then?

Perhaps it isn't the tool that caused the violence, it is the person using the tool!

Re:smug retribution

[Anonymous Coward]

You are wrong.

US: 4.7 per 100,000
UK 1.2 per 100,000

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate

Re:smug retribution

[Anonymous Coward]

You really have no idea how ridiculous you guys sound. "Oh I can kill people with a spoon too, so spoon should be banned". What friggn f'ed up logic by exactly the kinds of people that shouldn't be allowed to own guns.

Re:smug retribution

[Archangel Michael]

Take out the "Gun control City" violence and see what the rates are, which is explicitly stated in my post.

Or put it another way, Wyoming has a very low crime rate, with a very high gun ownership rate. Correlation doesn't equate to causation.

http://www.cityrating.com/crime-statistics/wyoming/#.UmqW0XdGat8

Re:smug retribution

[qbast]

Here is the statistic that should shut people like you up for good. Suicide and Murder Rates for the US and Great Britain are about the same.

By "here" you mean in your head? Only total moron would post lie that can be disproved by 30 second search in google. Here is source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate . USA - 4.7 homicides /100 000 vs 1.2 in UK. Almost 4x difference is 'about the same' ? Go back to polishing your penis enhancer^W^W gun and leave discussion to others.

One has strict gun control laws and the other does not. Suicide by guns in the US far outpace Suicide by guns in the UK, yet the overall rates are almost identical. The same is true for murder rates. In fact, if you exclude the cities in the US with the strictest gun control laws (DC, Chicago etc) which also happen to have the highest murder rates by guns, the murder rates in the US is actually LESS than most other countries.

Exclude cities with highest murder rate and murder late drops a lot ... thank you captain obvious! You can't exclude any cities, because people are free to move between them without any border control.

The problem is, the facts don't line up with the Liberal Logic. Less guns do not produce less violence. This means people are violent with whatever tool they find handy, just like killing themselves. We should address the reasons for violence, not the method.

Considering that you started your rant with total nonsense, your conclusions are not any better.

I mean just recently, you had a trained military person beheaded in broad daylight by a couple guys with knives. AND nobody stopped them. Nobody could. In America, you would have had someone (or a few someones) kick the shit out of the guys before they could finish cutting the soldiers head off.

Sure they would. That's why every other month another guy has ample time to shoot 20 people and off himself.

Sorry, I don't want to live in a Society that is so scared of everything that people don't step up and face evil directly. Call it "Rugged Individualism", something Liberals can't understand and therefore despise.

Your 'rugged individualism' exists only in Hollywood action flicks. Your are living in society of sheep scared half to death of 'terrorists' and everything else.You do know that majority of US citizens actually supports TSA ass-groping because it makes them feel safer? On Slashdot it might look differently, but slashdotters are tiny minority. If you want example of actually brave society, then look how Norway handled Breivik incident. They prosecuted, sentenced and chucked him into a prison then got on with their lives. No PATRIOT acts, no crazy witch hunts, all civil liberties retained - just business as usual.

Re:smug retribution

[Archangel Michael]

I find your post most amusing, simply because it ignores the "Gun killed a teacher, guns bad" vs "box cutter killed teacher, student bad" doesn't compute with people like you. My point, which you OBVIOUSLY missed, was student kills teacher in both cases, in one you blame the gun on the other you don't blame the box cutter. Why the difference?

Re:smug retribution

[ducomputergeek]

If the same thing happened on the streets of the US, chances are people would pull out their cell phones and record rather than help. I hope that I am wrong. A lot of jurisdictions have done away with good samaritan laws and the US is law suit happy. It's enough that I'd hesitate to act as I have personal net worth in the 7 figures and a family.

And I say this as someone who also has a CCW and carries daily. Bob Costas made fun of the people who "Check if they have wallet, phone, keys, and Glock before leaving the house". Well I do check to se if I have wallet, phone, keys, Walther, and spare mags before leaving the house.

While in my state it would be legal to intervene with force to stop such an attack on another it doesn't grant me any legal immunity from civil action unless happening on my personal property. I step in and pull the trigger, it's going to to cost me at least $50,000 to lawyer up. And that's if I win. If the attackers turned and come for me or my family, all bets are off. I'll pay the $50,000 in a heartbeat. Am I going to risk $50,000 to intervene on the part of a stranger when I don't know the situation. Probably not.

It may be harsh to say, but another man's life is not worth $50,000 to me.

Re:smug retribution

[thoromyr]

a good start, but your need to justify legalizing weapons make you look silly when you assert that nobody could stop a couple of guys with knives, but in the grand ole USA they coulda kicked da shit outta dem. Really? So, only in the US is someone brave enough to assault another person? Is that what you are trying to say. You forgot to include the part about shooting the knife wielding guys with their duly authorized concealed carry hand guns.

The hardline rhetoric is silly enough in its own right, but when you weaken it by recognizing that possession of firearms (or any weapon) is not necessary for resistance its even worse. Is it intended as a jingoist statement without meaningful content?

I'd rather not live in a society that is so petrified of itself that its members feel a need to constantly carry handguns for use on other members of the society. Regretfully, it sure seems like your POV is winning as the "gun rights" nuts insist you have to carry and kill to protect yourself while the "gun restriction" nuts insist that firearms are too scary for anyone other than law enforcement to possess. Both sides convey their message through fear.

Just so you don't get the wrong idea, this "liberal" owns multiple weapons ranging from those used up close and personal to killing at a distance. That's what weapons are *for* but it doesn't mean it is the only way that they can be *used*. Just like a screwdriver isn't *for* killing, but they can certainly be *used* in such a fashion.

Re:smug retribution

[Anonymous Coward]

Wrong. The US murder rate is around 4x greater than the UK murder rate*.

Suicides are generally not related to gun controls, since if someone wants to kill themselves, there are a plethora of easier ways than getting their hands on a gun.

Lee Rigby (the soldier you mention) was initially run over by a car which rendered him unconscious . The men in the car then proceeded to hack his head off (the two men were also armed with a gun, amongst other weapons). Do you think things would have been improved by a running gun battle at the same time?

I don't want to live in a society that lets idiots like you spout unchallenged nonsense.

[citation] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate

Re:smug retribution

[AmiMoJo]

Unless they accidentally shoot themselves, or get extremely angry and without thinking pull their weapon on someone who is then entitled to kill them in self defence.

I think you were being sarcastic, but I just wanted to add that.

Re:smug retribution

[Vanderhoth]

I didn't read anything from the AC that said who or what should be held accountable, just that it's silly logic to say because X does Y and Z does Y we should ban Z. It's an obvious misdirection to take focus from whatever X is. In either case the person should be held accountable, all I said in my original statement was the parents should be held accountable in this situation because they were negligent by allowing their kid to have access to an unlocked gun.

I was blaming the gun owners, not the gun, but you felt the need to throw in some silly logic anyway. Someone left a box cutter out where a minor had access to it, same rule applies. It's negligence on the owner, or last user, of the box cutter and murder on the part of the teen.

If someone hot wired my car and stole it I wouldn't expect to be found guilty of negligence, but if I left the keys in my car and some teen jumped in it and started mowing people down should I not be charged with negligence for failing to properly secure my vehicle?

Same applies here, parents legally own a gun, fine and dandy. Parents leave said gun and ammo out where a minor that shouldn't have access to gun can get it. Minor kills people. Minor is guilty of murder, parents are guilty of negligence.

Re:smug retribution

[jafiwam]

Unfortunately you can't just legislate it away. That doesn't work, has never worked, and will never work.

Well, it works very well in Europe. So while this particular case is example of police idiocy, the law in UK is not crazy. But I agree that it would be extremely hard to do in USA.

Doesn't stop them from trying, though.

I'm not going to get into it beyond that though - I'm not an expert, but it doesn't take an expert to recognize that something is broken. I really don't think just taking them away is the answer. As other incidents have spotlit, the act will not change, only the tools. Children (and adults too) committing violence against their peers and authority figures is the symptom, the gun (or knife etc) is just the vehicle, and the real problem is something else that I can't really identify personally. People are losing hope, getting restless, frustrated, and angry. We need to determine (and fix) the cause of that, not the results. But good luck with that, because the people in charge only care about looking like they are fixing things. Which only compounds the problem.

With that logic every kind of weapon should be legalised. Why bother banning nerve gas and explosives ? After all this will only change tools, not the act itself.

Read the Wake Forest Law Review document "Imagining Gun Control In America" that goes into depth about why "just ban them" won't work.

Here is the link if you want it: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1326743

One would think though that a bunch of people saying "we'll kill you if you try" running around would be enough to make it clear it won't work. Here in the US, trying to ban them, is essentially starting a war. Which is a good thing in my opinion.

Re:smug retribution

[AmiMoJo]

Murder Rates for the US and Great Britain are about the same

UK murder rate: 1.2
US murder rate: 4.7

(per 100k inhabitants)

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate

I mean just recently, you had a trained military person beheaded in broad daylight by a couple guys with knives. AND nobody stopped them. Nobody could.

He was not beheaded, he was stabbed and hacked to death. It happened without warning and so quickly that it is unlikely anyone could have stopped them, armed or otherwise. A woman did actually confront them, as it happens, despite being unarmed. By then the guy was dead though and the police on their way, so there was little point fighting them.

In any case, that sort of thing is 4x more likely to happen to you than it is to me, despite you being armed. You seem to be really worried about people trying to murder you, to the point where you feel the need to be armed, but most people here are not concerned with being randomly attacked.

Re:smug retribution

[Anonymous Coward]

I just decided to fact check the first thing you wrote there, and boy was it bullshit, so I'm just going to assume that reality is the exact opposite of everything that you wrote.

Figure 5 Homicides per million people 2009, selected countries

        Homicides per million people

Germany 8.6

Spain 9.0

Italy 10.4

Netherlands 10.9

France 11.2

England and Wales 11.2

EU 12.2

Australia 13.3

New Zealand 15.1

Canada 18.1

United States 49.7

Source: Eurostat

Re:smug retribution

[AmiMoJo]

While this is true, there is also a clear difference between a knife and a gun which is important to consider. A gun can kill someone from a distance with little risk to the attacker. A knife requires the user to get close to their victim, where they risk being injured or killed themselves.

It's rather obviously really. Guns are hard and expensive to get compared to knives, so if knives were just as good people would prefer them over guns. The stats say that they very clearly don't.

Re:smug retribution

[cusco]

You've utterly missed the country with the highest percentage of households with guns: Switzerland. Not only in Europe, but also has an exceedingly low rate of gun crime.

The problem is cultural. Get in line at the Windsor Tunnel on the Detroit side of the Saint Claire River and check out the hookers and crack dealers. Come out of the Tunnel a few minutes later on the Canadian side and you're in a different world. (Haven't been there in a number of years, but I'd be surprised if it has changed much.)

Re:smug retribution

[Anonymous Coward]

I just fact checked the first thing you wrote, and it was the exact opposite of the truth and reality, so I'm going to assume that nothing you wrote is true.

Figure 5 Homicides per million people 2009, selected countries

        Homicides per million people

Germany 8.6

Spain 9.0

Italy 10.4

Netherlands 10.9

France 11.2

England and Wales 11.2

EU 12.2

Australia 13.3

New Zealand 15.1

Canada 18.1

United States 49.7

Source: Eurostat

Re:smug retribution

[cusco]

I grew up in northern Michigan in the 1960s and '70s. Almost everyone in our town had guns at home, even if they didn't use them they had their grandpa's guns laying around. And not just "a gun", but multiple. We had six shotguns of various sizes and ages and two rifles and multiple boxes of ammunition for all of them, and were in no way unusual. The only gun safe that I knew of in the city was at Hampel's Gun Shop, where they locked up stuff brought in for repair (mostly so that it wouldn't get sold by accident). You could buy any kind of gun at Ace Hardware, and ammunition was available at gas station mini-marts and supermarkets.

The problem isn't the presence of guns, the country with the highest percentage of gun-possessing households is Switzerland. The issue is cultural. The only solution for gun violence is to fix our culture.

Re:smug retribution

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm curious where you're getting your statistics from. According to this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate the per capita rates for 2012 are:

USA: 4.7
U.K.: 1.2

I would not call that identical.

Re:smug retribution

[Richy_T]

I'd rather not live in a society that is so petrified of itself that it doesn't trust its members with handguns.

So I don't anymore.

Re:smug retribution

[Vanderhoth]

I think you need to do some more research on Switzerland before you use them as a model that guns in the home provides access. They do actually have very strict gun laws.

In Switzerland you have a gun, but you can't have ammunition. Ammunition is stored at central arsenals in case for some reason it's needed. When you go to a shooting range you buy your ammo there, but you have to use it all, you can't take it out with you. Also there's compulsory military service for all male Swiss citizens, where they're trained to use weapons properly, a cultural difference as you pointed out.

If military service was required in the US and there were sticker gun laws (like in Switzerland) school shootings would be a much less frequent occurrence, but merely suggesting either of those would get you shot, metaphorically, in the states.

Re:smug retribution

[stymy]

Umm, the murder rate for the US is about 4.7 intentional homicides per 100 000 people, while for the United Kingdom it's 1.2. So almost 4 times more murders per capita in the US.

Source:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate

Re:smug retribution

[Grumbleduke]

Unfortunately, your "statistic" to "shut people ... up for good" isn't actually true.

Suicide and Murder Rates for the US and Great Britain are about the same

According to the United Nations (warning, .xls file), the intentional homicide rate in Great Britain (the UK collects different data for England and Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland, so I've combined the E+W and Scotland data to get a GB one) in 2011 was 1.1 per 100,000. In the United States it was 4.7. The suicide rates are similar, but the intentional homicide rates are way off; over four times as high.

That said, according to the FBI about 69% of homicides in the US in 2012 involved the use of firearms. So ignoring all firearm-related homicides, the US's homicide rate is about 1.4 per 100,000, so still higher than Great Britain's.

But none of this means anything on its own, as far as policy implications go. Working out whether bans on certain classes of firearms are necessary and/or proportionate is a very complex task, and a couple of statistics are hardly conclusive.

Your "statistic" was still wrong, though.

-----------------------

On the murder of Lee Rigby, there are a few subtleties you may have missed. First the assailants killed him by hitting him with a car, and then stabbing him with knives (apparently unable to decapitate him) before anyone could react, even if they were armed - it's unclear if there were even people nearby at the time (one of the first 'witnesses' got involved after thinking it was an accident and trying to give the victim first aid). The assailants had a revolver, so it wasn't just knives; it is possible that if they had anticipated resistance from someone with a firearm, they would have shot him (rather than stabbed) and may have shot others nearby.

The suggestion that anyone would have "kicked the shit" out of them is rather ludicrous in any event. As it happened, after their attack the suspects waited calmly for the police to arrive (talking to passers-by); when the police did approach, they charged them ineffectually, were shot, and taken into custody.

I fail to see how widespread access to firearms would have made the situation any better, or how passers-by beating them up would have furthered the interests of justice.

Re:smug retribution

[Archangel Michael]

Do you equally blame the box cutter owners for their not locking up a the box cutter?

The analogy is X used Y to do Z, in one case you want W to be charged for allowing access to a Y, but not in the other.

Re:smug retribution

[Anonymous Coward]

Suicide and Murder Rates for the US and Great Britain are about the same.

Not according to wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate
This lists the U.S. at 4.7 per 100.000, while U.K. is at 1.2 per 100.000 inhabitants.
For referencethe extremes in 2012: Hong Kong 0.2; Honduras 91.6.
Holy s#ite.
Let's never go to Honduras.

Re: smug retribution

[Vanderhoth]

Are you incapable of reading? I specifically said the owner of the box cutter is responsible. Stupidity is only hurting your cause.

Re:smug retribution

[Anonymous Coward]

Here is the statistic that should shut people like you up for good. Suicide and Murder Rates for the US and Great Britain are about the same. One has strict gun control laws and the other does not. Suicide by guns in the US far outpace Suicide by guns in the UK, yet the overall rates are almost identical. The same is true for murder rates. In fact, if you exclude the cities in the US with the strictest gun control laws (DC, Chicago etc) which also happen to have the highest murder rates by guns, the murder rates in the US is actually LESS than most other countries.

The problem is, the facts don't line up with the Liberal Logic. Less guns do not produce less violence. This means people are violent with whatever tool they find handy, just like killing themselves. We should address the reasons for violence, not the method.

I mean just recently, you had a trained military person beheaded in broad daylight by a couple guys with knives. AND nobody stopped them. Nobody could. In America, you would have had someone (or a few someones) kick the shit out of the guys before they could finish cutting the soldiers head off.

Sorry, I don't want to live in a Society that is so scared of everything that people don't step up and face evil directly. Call it "Rugged Individualism", something Liberals can't understand and therefore despise.

Um. No. The murder rates are not about the same unless you mean simply "less than Somalia." If you refine for firearms, the difference is nearly an order of magnitude in both suicide and homocide. If you wish to make claims, look them up and cite them before you post them. Welcome to the internet. I am going to neglect to include the hyperlinks but here are the study names:
"Homicide Statistics 2012". UNODC.
"Guns in United Kingdom: Facts, Figures and Firearm Law". Gunpolicy.org. University of Sydney School of Public Health. Retrieved 2013-05-22.
  Guns in United States: Facts, Figures and Firearm Law". Gunpolicy.org. University of Sydney School of Public Health. Retrieved 2013-05-22.
There are other valid arguments for firearm ownership, but yours are full of falsehoods. Get some new ones.

Re:smug retribution

[Ash Vince]

The same is true for murder rates. In fact, if you exclude the cities in the US with the strictest gun control laws (DC, Chicago etc) which also happen to have the highest murder rates by guns, the murder rates in the US is actually LESS than most other countries.

Unfortunately that is not actually true:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate#By_country

US: 4.7 per 100,000 inhabitants
EU Average: about 1 per 100,000 inhabitants.

(Russia is not part of the EU so the figure for Europe on the page above is not the same as the EU)

There might be plenty of countries who have a higher murder rate than the US, but most the western europe or the rest of the developed world is way below you. If you filter the list of countries linked above to only include developed countries with stable democratic governments the US is suddenly fares pretty badly. I mean sure, you do have a lower murder rate than El Salvador, but the UK, Italy, Germany, New Zealand, France, Israel, Australia, Denmark, Japan, Spain, etc are all about 5 times lower.

Seriously, have a good long look at the list of countries above you on the list above and see if you can find anywhere which had a comparable standard of living to that of the US which has the same or similar murder rate.

Re:smug retribution

[asc99c]

*One* person beheaded. It's still one too many, but the fact is that two people armed with assault rifles and a desire to kill innocent people would almost certainly have managed to do an awful lot more damage, even if passers by were similarly armed.

Also, given that the US murder rate including Chicago and DC is pretty much 4 times the UK rate, but without them is less? Well thank you for informing me, I'm heading to America next year, but there's absolutely no fucking chance I'm visiting cities with those sorts of murder rates - I hadn't realised those US crime dramas were non-fiction!

Re:smug retribution

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's the fact that should shut you up for good - you're a moron.

Murder rate per 100,000 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate

USA 4.6
UK 1.2

Re:smug retribution

[Anonymous Coward]

Gosh what a load of nonsense you talk, a mixture of fact, fiction and fantasy.

Lets work our way through the it and see if we can work out you're talking about:

>> Here is the statistic that should shut people like you up for good.

You quote no statistic, merely your views.

>> Suicide and Murder Rates for the US and Great Britain are about the same.

No they are not, by any measurement whatsoever. The number of murders is 15x higher in the US than the UK, if you adjust for different population sizes (circa 300M vs 65M) you have three times as many murders per head than the UK.

The number of murders in the UK in 2012 was 722.
The number of murders in the US in 2012 was 14,612.

Source UN Office on Drugs and Crime (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate)

The only stats I could find on the breakdown of murders (http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/dan-ehrlich/uk-gun-ownership-up-deaths-down_b_1209967.html) was that the UK had 51 murders by firearms in 2010 whilst the US had 8,775 out of 12,996 murders. Whilst I cannot claim to be a statistician my maths says that around 66% of murders in the US are firearms related and around 8% in the UK. Pretty big difference.

I agree that the suicide rate is about the same per head.

>> One has strict gun control laws and the other does not.

Yes we agree.

>> Suicide by guns in the US far outpace Suicide by guns in the UK, yet the overall rates are almost identical.

I couldn't find any statistic that shows suicide rate for guns in the UK or US.

>> The same is true for murder rates.

No, the rate for murder by firearms in the US is around 8x higher. See above.

>> In fact, if you exclude the cities in the US with the strictest gun control laws (DC, Chicago etc) which also happen to have the
>> highest murder rates by guns, the murder rates in the US is actually LESS than most other countries.

Please provide citation for this.

>> The problem is, the facts don't line up with the Liberal Logic. Less guns do not produce less violence. This means people are
>> violent with whatever tool they find handy, just like killing themselves. We should address the reasons for violence, not the
>> method.

Nope, the facts do line up with logic (liberal or otherwise). Tight gun controls DO produce less murders. They don't appear to alter the overall suicide rate, but certainly in the UK having fewer funs seems to result in fewer murders by guns.

>> I mean just recently, you had a trained military person beheaded in broad daylight by a couple guys with knives.
>> AND nobody stopped them. Nobody could. In America, you would have had someone (or a few someones)
>> kick the shit out of the guys before they could finish cutting the soldiers head off.

Ah, this is where the fantasy comes in.You're assuming a gang of martial arts experts will magically step in and do something. How did that work on all the school massacres that happened recently in the US? You are living in a comic book world.

>> Sorry, I don't want to live in a Society that is so scared of everything that people don't step up and face evil directly.

Now you've moved onto another area all together. Not sure why you think the UK doesn't step up and face evil directly. You've given no evidence to support this hypothesis, merely a set of wrong facts. I'll pose the question to you, why does the US think that 14,000 murders a year vs 3,500 (adjusted for population size) a year for the UK is acceptable? Why won't the US address high school massacres by removing guns from people?

>> Call it "Rugged Individualism", something Liberals can't understand and therefore despise.

I'm proud to class myself as a liberal, oddly enough that marks us liberals out as individuals these days. No idea what a rugged Individual is, somebody who doesn't shave, has smelly armpits, hair shirts

Re:smug retribution

[Darinbob]

UK is not really Europe though, and definitely not typical for European countries.

Re:smug retribution

[Ash Vince]

I mean just recently, you had a trained military person beheaded in broad daylight by a couple guys with knives. AND nobody stopped them. Nobody could. In America, you would have had someone (or a few someones) kick the shit out of the guys before they could finish cutting the soldiers head off.

You know they ran him over first to make sure he could put up any resistance? And you should just shut the fuck up to be honest as you have had plenty of incidences of similar crap in the US, did anybody stop them?

In fact, if the two muslim nutjobs who atacked that soldier were in the US instead of here they would have shot a whole bunch of people instead thank to the ease with which they could have gotten firearms. Then again, in the US there might have been somebody walking down the street with a concealed carry permit who could have played rambo and started a firefight in a public place and killed a bunch more people in the crossfire.

Also, do read my other post where I actually post some figures calling you out for the absolute bullshit you posted about murder rate by country. Maybe then you will pull your head out from Wayne LaPierre's ass.

Re:smug retribution

[shutdown -p now]

It still doesn't explain why murder and violent crime rates vary so widely even between the states in US, with seemingly zero correlation between those and gun control. And we're not talking just urban/rural here - compare the rates in e.g. Texas vs Oregon.

In truth, the difference in numbers between US and UK (or any other two countries) doesn't really tell you anything other than there is a difference. It's certainly not enough to ascribe that difference to a particular factor X, because there are so many other factors that are different. To remind, US is the only Western country with no public healthcare system; it has highest poverty rates and lowest social mobility. Is it that surprising that it has more social tension and crime?

Re: smug retribution

[dwillden]

So box cutters should now be kept locked up at all times? Purchase restricted to those who pass a background check and so on. Your ignoring the comparison does not detract from it's validity. Two teachers were killed last week: one with a gun = immediate calls for more gun control and condemnation of parents for not locking up the gun. One with a box cutter = oh how tragic and too bad. But not a single call for box cutter control (remember these weapons of mass destruction were also the primary weapons used in the 9/11 attacks) nor for mandating blade locks or secure storage for all box cutters.

You can walk into any Walmart plop down your cash and walk out with a box cutter regardless of age.

Also why must guns be kept locked up? Because holophobes are afraid of them? Many across this country have grown up with firearms in the home, firearms that until the last couple decades were most commonly stored unsecured. The kids knew how to use the firearms and where they and their ammo were stored, but the kids were also taught firearm safety and knew not to play or touch them. It was like that in my parents home, not one of those firearms was ever used to harm anyone, we knew they were not toys and that we were not to touch them without permission.

Re:smug retribution

[Zaelath]

If you take out all the cities with crime problems the statistics are almost the same as another country? Wow. That's some fantastic analysis there, Mike.

Besides, those cities with strict gun control laws got them because of all the gun violence. Admittedly when you have prohibition combined with porous borders you will probably have more problems, but that doesn't even go close to making a case against a country wide prohibition. It's similar to the climate change argument that "we won't do anything until China does".

Also the unusually high suicide rate by guns never comes into question, because people killing themselves is seen as acceptible somehow, yet there's a lot more suicides per capita in the USA than in the UK too. None of those would be misclassified murders, since you know, murder stats and suicide stats are treated as equal levels of failure in police juristictions. Yeah, that passes the laugh test.

Simple solution

[Rik Sweeney]

So what they're saying is that we can use replacement printer parts to make guns?

Re:Simple solution

[cdrudge]

Or that you can use replacement gun parts to make printers.

Re:Simple solution

[Zaiff Urgulbunger]

So what they're saying is that we can use replacement printer parts to make guns?

Exactly this. And also, off the shelf ink jet printers can be used to make deadly Ink-Jet-Guns and even worse, off the shelf laser printers can be used to make even more deadly Laser-Guns!

Luckily, Lego are producing super leet policemen to tackle these futuristic meanaces, and being leet, will likely be considerably more technologically clued up than the GMP, who, let's be honest, look like a bunch of complete tits.

Speaking as a Brit

[sa1lnr]

I love that the Greater Manchester Police site has suffered the curse of slashdot. :)

Re:Speaking as a Brit

[Anonymous Coward]

The web is truly mightier than the 3D-printed ersatz gun part.

Re:Speaking as a Brit

[Anonymous Coward]

Great, now we'll all be arrested for contributing the the DDoS attack.

Re:Speaking as a Brit

[daremonai]

If this is what the Greater Manchester Police are like, I'd hate to meet up with the Lesser ones.

Re:Speaking as a Brit

[Anonymous Coward]

Naw... it will be easier just to keep the poor guy detained for operating a botnet and initiating cyber-attacks on their website.

Re:Speaking as a Brit

[Anonymous Coward]

Do people in Manchester call their police "gimps"?

Re:Speaking as a Brit

[SalafranceUnderhill]

> Do people in Manchester call their police "gimps"?

Well, it's spread to Wales as of my reading this - it's a nice alternative to 'The Feds', 'The Dirt' and/or 'The Bottom Inspectors'.

Re:Speaking as a Brit

[Darinbob]

Can't we just use a 3D printer to print out some smarter cops?

Re:Speaking as a Brit

[hicksw]

Greater Manchester was cancelled in 1986 due to lack of interest.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_Manchester
--
The universe - it's made of mistakes all the way down - Scott Meyer

Sounds like another case

[msobkow]

Sounds like another case of the WMD aluminum tubes they found in Iraq, which were way too weak to be used for a centrifuge for enriching uranium. But it was a good enough excuse for the US to go to war.

"But we have tubes!!!"

Re:Sounds like another case

[msauve]

"But we have tubes!!!"

They were obviously planning on making their own Internet.

Re:Sounds like another case

[intermodal]

It's a good thing they never got them conected in a series!

Re:Sounds like another case

[Anonymous Coward]

But I thought you needed a truck to do that?

Re:Sounds like another case

[idontgno]

I don't know; a series of aluminum (or aluminium, since this story is English) tubes makes for a damn fine Internet.

OHM teh h@xx0rs are 3d-printing Intarwebz of Mass Destruction!!!!111oneoneelventyeleven

It ALMOST looks like a hammer

[PseudoCoder]

Except it's missing the hook that catches the trigger. I understand that UK cops don't really carry firearms, so they may not really be trained in the inner workings of different guns. I don't know much about what their training standards are, but I'd say it's an easy mistake to make for those who don't disassemble firearms very often. See below:

http://www.joeboboutfitters.com/product_p/jp-sh-1a.htm

Re:It ALMOST looks like a hammer

[Anonymous Coward]

You'd think if they raided someone's home looking for firearms, that maybe they'd have taken some officers with firearms along.

Re:It ALMOST looks like a hammer

[Anonymous Coward]

Doesn't necessarily mean those officers know anything about guns either...

I'll bet they have some SAS armourer they turn their firearms into at the end of the day who does all the cleaning and maintenance.

Re:It ALMOST looks like a hammer

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know much about what their training standards are

Essentially none. My younger brother has just joined the Met', and the training standard is pretty much "if it looks gun-ish, treat it as a gun and call in the firearms guys. You're not trained to handle firearms, and any you DO encounter are likely to be in such poor condition that they could discharge with little provocation, so even if you have some experience with firearms don't handle them".

Re:It ALMOST looks like a hammer

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I suspect that it's more about the fact that hysteria sells than genuine cluelessness.

PCSOs and not-otherwise-alarmed officers don't routinely carry firearms; but 'Authorized Firearms Officers', potentially any officers with the Police Service of Northern Ireland, and various other entities here and there, do, so it's not as though the necessary expertise isn't an internal phone call away, at most.

(The, um, unimpressive... build quality and design standards of 3d printed weapons may also be a factor: if you are hunting parts for firearms that are made out of shitty plastic, to a level of quality that would shame your average zipgun and make a 'saturday night special' look like some sort of futuristic H&K design concept, you may be inclined to consider the absence of 'normal' features to be mere shodiness, rather than a sign that it's a different part entirely.)

Re:It ALMOST looks like a hammer

[PseudoCoder]

(The, um, unimpressive... build quality and design standards of 3d printed weapons may also be a factor: if you are hunting parts for firearms that are made out of shitty plastic, to a level of quality that would shame your average zipgun and make a 'saturday night special' look like some sort of futuristic H&K design concept, you may be inclined to consider the absence of 'normal' features to be mere shodiness, rather than a sign that it's a different part entirely.)

Yes, a maker-whatever 3D printer in your garage cannot be expected to make a decent firearm, even by the most liberal definition of a firearm, but it is enough to make a drop-in auto sear conversion to modify an existing semi-auto to full auto that would at least be good for one spray in a drive-by. Then print as many as you like. That's what a more practical criminal mind would be inclined to do.

Re: It ALMOST looks like a hammer

[foobar bazbot]

In the US, the auto-sear approach is definitely the smart-criminal move, because it lets you convert legal, and thus readily-available, semi-automatic weapons to full-auto, and ammo's available with no identity check or anything. In the UK, this is less obviously a smart move, because semi-autos are rather hard to come by, and AIUI ammo sales are restricted -- if you and your buddies have one readily convertable semi-auto amongst you, it may be more beneficial to make you each three or four single-shot disposable guns than to convert that one gun to full-auto, and then pay black-market premiums on the increased ammo consumption because you don't have a firearm certificate.

Thank god

[mythix]

Luckily, they didn't go all Amercian on his ass and shot him on sight http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-24648974

Re:Thank god

[Anonymous Coward]

That's only because British cops don't carry guns.

Re:Thank god

[Anne Thwacks]

Well, mostly they dont. This is a good thing, given that they shot some guy for carrying a table-leg (thought it was a gun), and another for being on the underground (obviously an act of terrorism - only terrorists would go underground).

Re:Thank god

[Sun]

I think it is beyond dispute that the kid was carrying something that looked like a gun. If the policemen's story is to be believed (I know it's a stretch, but still), then the kid refused to drop it when told to. Under those circumstances, a policeman can justifiably say he felt threatened to the point of shooting.

I file that story under "tragic misunderstanding" rather than "homicidal police".

Shachar

Re:Thank god

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Luckily, they didn't go all Amercian on his ass and shot him on sight http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-24648974

Kid was obviously some kind of foreign pinko sleeper agent. No Real American would be caught dead with a replica assault rifle, rather than the real thing.

Re:Thank god

[misexistentialist]

Could you, an untrained unpaid person with no body armor no partner and no backup on the way get away with killing a kid because he was holding something that looked like a gun? If so, why haven't you, do you like kids on your lawn?

Re:Thank god

[Sun]

Could you, an untrained unpaid person with no body armor no partner and no backup on the way get away with killing a kid because he was holding something that looked like a gun?

The laws of self defense, at least in my area of the world (Israel), let you go if the damage you inflicted is no greater than the damage it was reasonable to assume you might sustain (i.e. - a subjective test). The answer, therefor, is "absolutely yes". IANAL, of course.

If so, why haven't you, do you like kids on your lawn?

My 3yo does not play with pretend weapons (yet?). Answering your real question, though, it all boils down to how reasonable it is to feel threatened. About a decade and a half ago, there was a big terrorist attack during Purim, a Jewish holiday in which it is customary to wear customs. The next year there were a few incidents where children dressed as terrorist were harassed by police (though, as far as I remember, no one was shot). Considering the threat, I consider it reasonable.

I have held and fired rifles. I do not recall any toy I've seen, in a kid's hand or in the store, that looks as realistic as the toy in the link OP gave. That one would have fooled me, as well.

Which is not to say police necessarily acted properly. It all boils down to whether the kid acted as if he was about to use the weapon, on how clearly (if at all) they asked him to put it down, and on whether they properly identified themselves as police. I do not, however, fault them for assuming that was a real weapon.

Shachar

Re: Thank god

[jd2112]

As they say on this side of the Atlantic, "If it's not a flag, it's a bomb. "

Re:Thank god

[serviscope_minor]

being on the underground

Oh come on. You well know it was being on the underground while brown. That's definitely cause for shooting.

Re:Thank god

[Richy_T]

Good job he wasn't holding a table leg

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Harry_Stanley

Re:Thank god

[shutdown -p now]

I think there are some other aspects to it, even if the weapon is realistic. As you say yourself, it boils down to how reasonable it is to feel threatened - and I feel that the probability of facing an actual bad guy toting an AK in the middle of the street in broad daylight, vs a kid playing with one, should factor into this decision.

The other thing is that I think that police in particular should be held to a higher standard of scrutiny in such cases, and even when there were legitimate signs of danger, if they could be reasonably interpreted either way, cops should err on the side of caution even when it carries a risk to themselves - because the alternative is to place the risk on the populace at large, and the whole point of police is to reduce said risk!

In other words, cops are paid to get into the danger's way to protect the rest of us. This is also an example of that, just a non-obvious one - they could have protected the kid by not being trigger-happy and risking the AK actually being real and fired at them. My opinion is that they should have.

What we have instead is a situation where cops actually get away with things that would send a civilian to prison, everything else being equal. Prosecutors tend to be really unhappy about pressing charges against police, so if they can write it off as "mistake" or "negligence", and just reprimand or demote them, they do so, even when injury or death is involved. The result is that police in US tends to be extremely trigger happy, with numerous cases of mistaken identity, wrong place, mistaking something for a weapon, or miscommunicating the order to drop a legally carried something that could be used for a weapon, ending in deaths of innocent people.

Re:Thank god

[Sun]

What we have instead is a situation where cops actually get away with things that would send a civilian to prison, everything else being equal. Prosecutors tend to be really unhappy about pressing charges against police, so if they can write it off as "mistake" or "negligence", and just reprimand or demote them, they do so, even when injury or death is involved. The result is that police in US tends to be extremely trigger happy, with numerous cases of mistaken identity, wrong place, mistaking something for a weapon, or miscommunicating the order to drop a legally carried something that could be used for a weapon, ending in deaths of innocent people.

What I'm saying is that I agree with that statement, but believe this case is a poor example in support of it.

Shachar

How realistic are the fears?

[91degrees]

Is there really a risk of "organised crime groups" making plastic guns? My understanding is that the ones that have been made are more proof of concept than something that would actually be particularly useful. On the other hand, there are plenty of places in Europe where guns are available, and hundreds of people take the ferry (or Le Shuttle through the tunnel) to and from Europe every day so if you really want to get hold of them, it's not going to be difficult.

Do wonder why the police raided this guy in the first place. I assume they didn't just pick a house at random hoping they might find soemthing they can chage someone with.

Re:How realistic are the fears?

[AHuxley]

The main fear is the ip tracking and forum reading/web 2.0 surveillance. What more countries will offer is police and local low level bureaucrats court powers to watch, track and log via any national isp. As for 3d printing wait a year until new products with new tech are on sale as key patents slip.

Re:How realistic are the fears?

[Anonymous Coward]

Even if it is possible to print a fully working gun (which is a big "if") that's not a problem unless they can also print some ammo. Thankfully we're a while away from that point.

Re:How realistic are the fears?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I suspect that ownership of a 3d printer (statistically) places you in the category of people who are approximately 45343465% more likely than the population at large to have done something on the internet(possibly from the command line) that would scare an AOL user, so they may have been sniffing after something in that vein.

As for practical criminal interest, though? Absolutely zero so far demonstrated, largely because it doesn't resolve any ammunition supply challenges (and anyone who can do that can probably get at least a pistol snuck through the same channels), and performance so low that hand-tools and hardware store metal stock are almost certainly still ahead in the DIY race, much less actual machine tools or smuggling of real guns.

Re:How realistic are the fears?

[FatLittleMonkey]

Is there really a risk of "organised crime groups" making plastic guns?

The "Liberator" 3d zip-gun can fire one shot at a time. It's smooth bore [*], limiting it's accuracy and hence range. Even when made by a high-end sintered powder commercial 3d printer, they tend to fail quickly when firing full-power rounds (so are usually tested with low-powered cartridges.) After a few rounds, the barrel melts and deforms enough to crack, and if you keep firing, it will eventually fail completely. Depending on how it fails, it may blow your hand off.

To reload it, you have to unscrew the barrel, poke out the spent cartridge with a rod (it will jam in the barrel due to the melted plastic), then put in a new cartridge, screw the barrel back in the gun-body, cock the firing pin, and then you're ready to fire. In a video some months back, it took about 20 seconds per round, during which time you would be, in effect, unarmed. That means, of course, that in reality you have only one shot.

[* One experimenter found that his version kept failing, so he put "rifling" in it and it worked. But I suspect all he did was make vents that bled off part of the gas, reducing the pressure enough to prevent immediate barrel failure. That, of course, will cut the range/power dramatically. It may have also loosened the firing path for the slug, preventing jamming in the barrel. Basically he made it sloppier so it wouldn't explode.]

Re:How realistic are the fears?

[Ash Vince]

Is there really a risk of "organised crime groups" making plastic guns?

Certainly not in Manchester where this occurred as any criminal worth his salt can get themselves a real gun or at least a converted started pistol, it didn't get the nickname "Gunchester" for nothing.

Do wonder why the police raided this guy in the first place. I assume they didn't just pick a house at random hoping they might find soemthing they can chage someone with.

Not quite but close. Nowadays search warrants to boot someones door in like this do not require a judge to sign them anymore so it all it takes is to convince a slightly senior officer and they can go a knocking. This guy probably did something in the past to get on their shitlist so they just turn up a raid him anytime they are doing a big operation in his area.

Often they will need to make sure they find something when they do a series of raids like this as they look stupid if they raid 5 houses and find sod all. So instead they pick the 5 houses they want to raid for serious criminals then include 5 houses of habitual drug users so they can be sure of having a few arrests by the end of the day when they talk to the press even if the serious criminal raids generated nothing. The fact that all the charges get dropped a few weeks later for insufficient evidence or because the amount of drugs found are pathetic is rarely reported in most of our shitty press so nobody notices what a joke it is.

Alive?

[Anonymous Coward]

If a 3D printer can print 3D printers, is it by definition a living thing?

Article slashdotted

[rhazz]

Article slashdotted - alternate story including updates below. Despite the obvious evidence, police continue to wave their arms wildly. http://gigaom.com/2013/10/24/uk-police-seize-3d-printer-and-printed-gun-components/

That just proves our point

[Sun]

Sure, the parts are not part of a 3D printed gun, but of the 3D printer itself, but with these parts the printer can be used to print a gun, which is what makes them so dangerous.

Re:That just proves our point

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe the printer IS a gun. Perfect plausible deniability.

The process is the punishment

[mc6809e]

They punish someone with the legal process, knowing they can't convict, but sending a message to anyone with a 3D printer that 3D printer owners can expect trouble from the state.

Re:The process is the punishment

[IamTheRealMike]

Is that meant to be a prediction, or a statement of fact? If you read the article it becomes clear that they had search warrants as part of a targeted investigation into organised crime, and apparently were surprised to discover the 3D printer at one of the searched areas. Given that they arrested someone because they think he was making gunpowder, and because you can't make gunpowder with a 3D printer, it seems that they believed (correctly) that someone was trying to manufacture ammo and got a judge to issue a warrant on that basis. When they discovered the printer, they made the obvious logical conclusion - someone who is illegally making guns, and has a 3D printer, might be experimenting with 3D printing plastic guns. What else would he use it for?

It may turn out in the course of events that the printer was used for something else, or making tools used to help make ammo rather than making gun parts, or something else. But ownership of the 3D printer is incidental. There isn't even any way they would know he had such a device, as far as I can tell.

Re:The process is the punishment

[Anonymous Coward]

You're missing the reason why they raided this place originally. It wasn't because he was a guy who owned a 3d printer, it was because he was associated with criminal gangs in Manchester and they were raiding him and others to confiscate the proceeds of crime. This was one of the things they found, alongside ~$3.5m in counterfeit goods, $500k of drugs and $50k in cash and 50 people arrested.

When you find a 3d printer in the garage of a suspected gangster, you don't assume anything and investigate everything. Last year, a member of one of these Manchester gangs, already wanted for double murder, lured a couple of unarmed female cops to a house to investigate a break in, and then killed them with grenades. This is a fucked up part of the UK.

Re:The process is the punishment

[PRMan]

See!?! That's why we've outlawed grenades in the US!

Re:The process is the punishment

[Anonymous Coward]

But even the gunpowder claim makes no sense. Gunpowder is little more than an intellectual curiosity. Anyone looking to create anything is going to make something better and safer, or buy some cheap fireworks and duct tape on November 6th.

They probably raided him not because of his "criminal connections" but because he legitimately bought chemicals and equipment as part of his normal fabrication business, and someone overreacted when monitoring systems raised a flag against the purchases.

Expect the police to go into full cover up mode, having learned nothing from Plebgate.

Re:The process is the punishment

[thoromyr]

yes, the paralysis of total information awareness. When you have enough data the utility of indicators actually goes down.

Re:The process is the punishment

[Anonymous Coward]

Grenades are about $6.50 direct from the mfr in the US, but you have to pass a background check just as if buying a firearm and pay a $200 federal tax (in the form of an adhesive stamp) per grenade.

Considering you can buy a HE mortar off the shelf all June and July long in some states for $50, grenades are simply not very cost effective.

Re:The process is the punishment

[AmiMoJo]

No matter how you look at it they were idiots for going to the press with "we think we found a 3D printed gun" before actually determining if, in fact, the parts are for a firearm. If they had kept quiet it would have been an in-joke with their colleagues every time they found a 3D printer, now the whole world knows what morons they are.

Re:The process is the punishment

[Anonymous Coward]

I hate to sound racist, but anyone from the south knew what morons they would be as soon as we got to the word "Manchester".

Police seize $1000 in Cash

[Anonymous Coward]

Police seized $1000 dollars in cash due to the possibility of obtaining a gun with said cash.... source: future...

Re:Police seize $1000 in Cash

[Justpin]

Thats not funny, SOCPA 2005 prohibits carrying more than £2000 of cash on you without good reason with the penalty of forfeiture if you can't prove where it came from. In fact a few years ago the London police went for a smash and grab of safe deposit boxes, it was all declared illegal except people went and started claiming it back with receipts.

Breaking news!

[Anonymous Coward]

Wait until they realize you can fire rounds with pliers and a hammer.
Will they raid all hardware stores in the country and seize those dangerous "gun components" too?

More Apt than you think?

[Firethorn]

Personally, I'd compare it more between C++ and visual basic scripting. While it does indeed take more knowledge to operate the lathes and such, currently that tool set can produce far more capable devices, and I'd imagine that at least the CNC cutter shouldn't be that much more complicated to program than the printer.

With the printer you can make a 'liberator' type firearm - a single shot weapon that you MIGHT be able to reuse the trigger group for.
With the machine shop equipment you can churn out full auto M-3 'grease guns' for not much more money than the plastic in the liberator.

Re:More Apt than you think?

[serviscope_minor]

While it does indeed take more knowledge to operate the lathes and such, currently that tool set can produce far more capable devices, and I'd imagine that at least the CNC cutter shouldn't be that much more complicated to program than the printer.

It's actually put it the other way round for now. I have a bit of experience in CNC milling and a bit of experience in using a 3D printer (the type in the $1000-$2000 range). I think that puts me in a reasonable position to judge since I'm an expert in neither field so know how far a bit of knowledge can take a person.

Honestly the 3D printers are harder. Don't get me wrong, they're fantastic machines and I love them, but they are not easy to use. After receiving instruction on how to use it, getting reliable prints out of it still took considerable work. Even after figuring out that much I (and ecen much more experienced people) still have the odd problem with parts sticking too hard, not hard enough, curling up, etc.

And don't get me started on how the slicing process can go bad...

I think the main thing is that the 3D printers are cheap and small and clean devices so you can have one without having to dedicate serious space (I don't own one, but I live in a place which could easily accomodate one. The same cannot be said about a machine shop). You also only need one, rather than a quite large collection of tools.

It's also that the barrier to entry is lower in that there's a nice library of 3D things to print online and the slicing process for the printing is simpler the software to do the printing is more readily available.

So, they're not necessarily simpler to use (that really depends on the shape being produced), but they are much, much, much more accessible.

Re:More Apt than you think?

[Firethorn]

On the ease of programming - you're probably right, a 'shouldn't be that much more complicated' was intended to be more of a cap - producing a part from a CNC machine shouldn't exceed 110% of the effort of doing it with a printer, and quite possilby be less.

Also, I've seen small CNC machines, and while you can indeed get a printer more the size one of those popcorn machines while the CNC I saw was about double it, both are still best left in a garage/machine shop. I saw an article recently how the melting plastic releases toxic fumes. Lovely.

It's also that the barrier to entry is lower in that there's a nice library of 3D things to print online and the slicing process for the printing is simpler the software to do the printing is more readily available.

Same deal with C++ vs VB. VB is easy to access by anybody with a windows box. Programming in C++ takes a greater initial investment, but after that you can do so much more...

As for producing weapons with each, keeping in mind that I put a liberator(effectively single shot) up against a M-3(full auto, service life in years), I'm sure that you could build nearly everything you need for a firearm on the CNC. So it might be the only non-hand tool you need, assuming the proper design. The M-3 was designed to be cheap to make in large quantities for the time it was made, when CNC wasn't available, but big sheet metal presses were. So it's very much NOT optimized to be made individually in a small shop using not much other than a CNC. You'd probably want to redesign the parts that are intended to be welded together, for example. It's an interesting though process....

55 Terrorist plots foiled

[Anonymous Coward]

So now we're up to 55 terrorist plots foiled! I bet he downloaded the plans to lots of thing, including a gun, decided what to print, and GCHQ monitored that URL to sent the police after him.

Hurrah for mass surveillance!

If he hadn't made the gun yet, he was sure to make it and kill small children, so GCHQ can add 1 to the terrorist plots foiled!

Move along citizen, nothing to see here.

The technical ineptness of this country...

[Anonymous Coward]

... it never ceases to amaze me.

Our government is just an old man's club.

He is lucky

[Anonymous Coward]

that he didn't receive the de Menenzes treatment from the trigger happy ***********. After all, these jokers have killed a man carrying a table leg.

Toy guns and fabric softener?

[FatLittleMonkey]

Also, if a plastic trigger is illegal, that would make every plastic toy gun, every water pistol, every cap gun, illegal. And every seller, maker, importer guilty of manufacturing/importing/distributing illegal firearm parts.

Nearly every cleaner, weed-spray, bug-spray bottle in my laundry has a trigger on it.

Re:Toy guns and fabric softener?

[Kozar_The_Malignant]

You are beginning to see things correctly Comrade Citizen. Have you considered applying for a career position here at the Ministry of Truth?

From the film version of Dr. Zhivago where Strelnikov is interrogating Zhivago on his armored train:

Strelnikov: You put your knife with a fork and a spoon and it looks quite innocuous. Perhaps you travel with a wife and child for the same reason.

Re:Toy guns and fabric softener?

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, if a plastic trigger is illegal, that would make every plastic toy gun, every water pistol, every cap gun, illegal. And every seller, maker, importer guilty of manufacturing/importing/distributing illegal firearm parts.

No, it wouldn't. Intent is important in law, in this case the law prohibits not the posession of parts that could be used to make a gun, but the possession of parts that are intended to be used to make a gun. It's a critical distinction, and means (for example) that you couldn't successfully prosecute any of the cases you just described, but could actually prosecute somebody who acquired parts in an attempt to produce a gun even if the parts weren't actually appropriate for the job.

Happy I live in the US

[flyingfisch]

Happy I live in te US, you need a warrant to arrest someone here. Oh, wait, we arrest without warrants too.

Re:Happy I live in the US

[Gibgezr]

Just pointing out what most folks are missing: hey had a warrant, which was not based on "look for 3D printed gun parts", but on other stuff related to the fact that this guy is a member of a criminal gang.

Re:Happy I live in the US

[Anonymous Coward]

Technically the police don't need a warrant to arrest someone in the US. They just need probable cause to make an arrest.

gun and ammo easily built at hardware store

[raymorris]

It's easy to make the ammo (and the gun) from readily available materials found at your local hardware store.

The garden department has the three ingredients for black powder and the plumbing department has most of the rest . A few items like springs come from the hardware section.

Ammo is short piece of copper tube from plumbing, filled with black powder mixed in gardening, topped with whatever little chunk of metal - a short hex bolt would do fine.

Re:gun and ammo easily built at hardware store

[FatLittleMonkey]

Since these are essentially one-shot guns. If you are making your own ammunition, why not make a muzzle loader? Saves a lot of hassle making the ammunition. Powder, ball-bearing, wadding. Use an electric (piezo) ignition instead of a match or flint-strike.

Re:gun and ammo easily built at hardware store

[91degrees]

I like the idea of using electric ignition.

Would guncotton be a better propellant? Instructions are easy enough to find online. I seem to recall from Mythbusters they found it a lot easier to make than effective black powder.

Re:gun and ammo easily built at hardware store

[FatLittleMonkey]

Buy a box of Estes rocket motors, a knife and a spoon.

Are triggers and magazines controlled in the UK?

[cyn1c77]

Is printing gun components illegal in the UK?

In the US, the only part of a gun that is controlled is the receiver. What are the laws in the UK?

It's hard to believe that making or owning a trigger is illegal in the UK since low-power pellets guns (which use triggers) are legal. That said, UK gun laws are so restrictive, that I am sure they try to control high-capacity magazines. (UK high-capacity meaning more than two rounds.)

Incendiary comment

[FatLittleMonkey]

police confiscated what they claimed were "incendiary arrows" but were actually foam-tipped arrows used by LARPers

Meanwhile, the same police will call their own actual incendiary grenades "smoke grenades" which, oops, "may have accidentally caused a fire" (and burned the body of the shot suspect and most of the evidence re: the police shooting.)

And the media will go along with it. Which is the problem. Reporters trust police statements to be roughly factual, so police quickly learn they can get away with saying almost anything.

[Note the phrase the UK police are hammering in every release in TFA, "The next generation of firearms". (Which involves "technology being acquired by the organised crime groups, which they supply to criminal gangs, which are causing misery in our communities".)]

Joke is on you

[drakesword]

I have been secretly designing upgrades to all the popular printers that also double as gun parts. This way in the future when there is an apocalypse I can salvage all the 3d printers and make guns

3d Printers are not only tools that can make guns

[n2hightech]

I do not understand this hysteria over 3d Printers and Guns. You can make a plastic gun using other tools too like a drill press, milling machine and lathe. The quality of guns built that way would be much much higher than 3D printed guns. With a little effort someone could use modeling clay silicon rubber and polyester resin to make a plastic gun. If you added some fiber reinforcing it would probably hold up very well. Much better than 3Dprinted guns.

There, you see?

[Anonymous Coward]

With all this performance art the 3D printing crowd indulged in, it backfired. Maybe if 3D printing had actual, legitimate uses for people that outweighed the negative hype... But it doesn't.

In a related story...

[Macdude]

A Manchester plumber was arrested for having a van full of "bomb" making material.

His pleas of "It's just pipe for a sink" went unheeded.

Re:In a related story...

[CrazyDuke]

Anyone else remember this happened occasionally in the 80's and 90's: Some loner would tell a bully to fuck off, the bully or his/her family would bitch, the cops raid the loner's house, find a box of batteries and a gas can next to a lawn mower or similar, and claim to have found bomb making materials?

Re:In a related story...

[cusco]

A local electrician had a restraining order against him, keeping him away from his ex-wife. A cop arrested him one day for having "plastic handcuffs", for conspiracy to kidnap her. The "plastic handcuffs" turned out to be the zip-ties that every electrician on the planet uses. The police were not apologetic.

Shotgun!

[FatLittleMonkey]

There is steel scaffolding pipe which is exactly the right inner-diameter to hold a standard 12-guage shotgun shell. It's also usually pre-threaded off-the-shelf.

So buy or cut a half a metre (a couple of feet) of unthreaded pipe that neatly holds a shotgun shell. That's your barrel. Then cut around 15cm (six inches) of a larger diameter pipe that slides over the first pipe, this should be threaded at one end. Get a standard end-cap that fits the larger diameter pipe. Drill a pilot hole in the centre of the end cap, screw in short screw, so a few milimetres (errr, not much of an inch) of the point is poking through the inside. Size the pilot hole so that the screw is in tightly, it's your firing pin.

Screw the end-cap on the larger pipe, also tightly. Load a shotgun shell in the small (long) pipe, put the larger pipe over the back, and pump it sharply against the shotgun shell to fire. (Like using a bike pump.) Pull the "pump handle" off, flick the spent shell out, load new one, repeat. If you want to get fancy, you can make up a stock, springs, catch and trigger, etc, to make it more "gun-like". While making it, use a spent shell cartridge to see if your firing-pin lines up and is the right length. And the first time you fire it, it's worth removing out the shot and test firing a blank cartridge. Look for cracking or warping between every shot.

Do not point directly at face. Do not fire at humans or pets. Do not pass go. Do not collect $200. No responsibility is taken by FLM Co or its parent company for any damage or injury caused by...

Seriously, making zip-guns is dangerous, and typically illegal outside of the United States. The point is that it's easy, even without skills, and yet outside of hobbyists (and prisons), you don't see criminals using one-shot zip-guns for their crimes.

Re:Shotgun!

[cusco]

Dull the point of the screw, you need to punch the firing pin, not pierce it. It will take some testing to get the firing pin the right depth, too shallow or too deep and it doesn't ignite. In the US it's more common to use a .22 caliber rim-fire cartridge since no firing pin is necessary.

Re:3d Printers are not only tools that can make gu

[cusco]

I remember a number of years ago a prisoner in Michigan made a gun of paper mache, match heads, aluminum foil, and the metal eraser clasp from a pencil. When it was found the guard staff fired it into a telephone book, and it penetrated over an inch.

More BS...

[Frosty Piss]

"If what we have seized is proven to be viable components capable of constructing a genuine firearm, then it demonstrates that organised crime groups are acquiring technology that can be bought on the high street to produce the next generation of weapons," he said in a statement.Even if they were gun parts, this statement is bullshit.

Re:Are triggers and magazines controlled in the UK

[GrimShady]

...(UK high-capacity meaning more than two rounds.)

Rule 4: Double tap

True, a fishing weight is a lead ball, or bearing

[raymorris]

True. For muzzle loaders, they just use a metal (lead?) ball. A fishing weight is lead, or a steel ball bearing would work fine.
In that case, "making" the ammo is simpler than a one-step process - it's a zero step process.

Re:Oh god, how many times have we heard that?

[Anonymous Coward]

I just love it when people claim something couldn't be done.
They are the ones left standing at the train station (rapid transit station) wondering
when the train of technology left them behind.
Man will never be able to travel faster then a horse at full run.
Man will never fly.
Man will never be able to go under the sea.
Man will never be able to survive the dangers of space.
Man will never understand how biological systems work.
Man will never need more then 1 blades on his razor.
Man will never be able to talk to someone on the other side of the planet with a small, portable device
that he can carry in a pocket.
Man will never be able to cook without fire.
Man will never be able to see atoms and their structures.
Man will never................too late, he has already figured out how to do that, now lets move on. What's the next thing he will never be able to do?...........

PEZ?

[Kozar_The_Malignant]

>the magazine on the otherhand... a box, a spring, and a plate... now THAT is truly terrifying!

Putting a Miss Piggy head on top was a clever disguise, Mr. Terrorist, but we recognize a .22 short magazine when we see one. Come along quietly now before we get upset and have to beat you senseless.

Re:Are triggers and magazines controlled in the UK

[Anonymous Coward]

Any part that causes feelings of fretting are illegal

Re:Are triggers and magazines controlled in the UK

[Anonymous Coward]

In the US, the only part of a gun that is controlled is the receiver. What are the laws in the UK?

That owning anything with the intent to use it to make a firearm is illegal.

It's hard to believe that making or owning a trigger is illegal in the UK since low-power pellets guns (which use triggers) are legal.

While such guns are legal, home manufacture of them is not. They must be officially tested in order to determine that their output power is lower than the specified legal maximum. This requires a lot of jumping through hoops and red tape. I used to maintain the web site for one of Britain's last real gun manufacturers (now unfortunately closed down), and the legal headaches they told me about, even for their range of air weapons, were pretty serious. They gave up on manufacturing actual firearms long before I was involved with them.

Relying on people's technical ignorance...

[ibsteve2u]

Relying on people's technical ignorance is catching, it appears...spare printer parts are named weapons components (undoubtedly as a prelude for a campaign to make the printers themselves illegal)...and here in America, a $294 million (!!!!) secure website, the private contractor explains, cannot possibly be expected to work as it was never tested end to end...

And of course nobody says "What! $294 million (!!!) for a secure website, and you couldn't spare a few millions for unit testing?"...because they - both the American public and our Congress - either don't know any better or would find the truth to impair their intended political narrative.

War on 3D printing

[dafradu]

There are a lot of people dying to start a "war on 3D printing", soon there will be more cases where 3d printing will be associated with all kinds of nasty things...