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UK Ballistics Scientists: 3D-Printed Guns Are 'of No Use To Anyone'
New submitter graveyardjohn writes: "The BBC has a short video about why the U.K.'s National Ballistics Intelligence Service thinks 3D-printed guns are 'of no use to anyone.' They show a 3D-printed gun being fired in a test chamber. The barrel explodes and the bullet flops forward a few feet. They say, 'without additional expertise and the right type of ammunition, anyone attempting to fire one would probably maim or even kill themselves.'"
There are several commercially successful makes of polymer AR lowers.
In AR-land, the serial is on the lower.
A 3d printed lower gives you the ability to print a non serial numberd AR. Which is legal (US federal. YMMV) because home-made guns don't have to be serialized.
THL phish sticks
At this point it's still cheaper to buy a gun than a 3-D printer
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Why even bother printing guns when you can just buy a legally unregulated upper, a trigger assembly, and an 80% lower reciever blank then just mill the blank and assemble a fully working, untraceable and unserialed AR-15?
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
And I'm sick of gun people thinking of guns as a great equalizer that anyone can make without substantial engineering expertise. But somehow I suspect neither group is going to respect the results of this research.
Do you have access to a steel pipe with a reducing coupling, a spring, and a nail? Then yes, you can make something capable of more-or-less safely firing most lower pressure rounds. By "more or less", I mean I wouldn't touch one with a 10 foot firing pin, but it would work just fine 99 times out of 100.
For the 3d printed guns we hear the most about, keep in mind that they have the goal of a "pure" implementation, using just 3d printed parts. Your local street punks probably don't care about the "purity" of their finished product... So, remove that constraint and add a trivial metal part or two (a chamber and at least the throat of the barrel - just a plain ol' dumb metal tube, in essence - would single-handedly solve the "blows up on firing" problem), and even your local wannabe-thugs could manage to print and assemble a fairly effective DIY gun.