The problem is we decided to regulate the one piece of a firearm that’s now the easiest to 3d print.
Everything else you can buy online.
If we regulated barrels instead, people couldn’t make a Glock at home. And they definitely couldn’t make an AR
I think you vastly underestimate the gunprinting community, but it would make it more difficult for some people.
Yeah, go ahead and 3d print a barrel and let me know how that works out…
A barrel isn’t a straight pipe either, you’d need a CNC machine
I realize this isn’t what they’re printing in this case, but look up the FGC9. It’s designed to be made with hydraulic tubing and a 3d printed jig to elctro-discharge machine the rifling inside.
It’s perfectly possible to machine a gun barrel in your garage. Difficult, yes; prohibitively so, no. But like the other commenter said, it would at least cut down on homemade firearms
Is CNC even an effective process to use for barrel making from start to finish? I know it can be used to mill the outer surfaces of a barrel, things like fluting and other features, but on the commercial scale I thought the inside of rifled barrels were typically made by hammer forging. I could be wrong.
On the home scale, I’m sure people will find a way. & anyway the Liberator is 100% printed, IIRC. Of course it’s not in the same world of efficiency and re-usability as a commercially produced firearm, but it is a firearm.
I don’t know about you guys, but my super primitive knowledge of guns + the accuracy of my 3D printer (which pretty clearly doesn’t have fine tolerances), I’m not sure I would trust firing a gun I’ve made. Everything I print has something not quite right, like a corner that elephant foots a bit, or some stringing or whatever. Not anomalies I want to be dealing with when firing a gun, I don’t think.
