Breitbart – by AWR HawkinsOn May 21, the Department of Homeland Security circulated a bulletin among federal and state law enforcement agencies warning that guns created on three-dimensional (3D) printers are probably beyond the reach of regulators.
The memo, uncovered by Fox News, said attempts to control the flow of such guns will be “useless” once “their manufacture becomes more widespread.”
Significant advances in [3D] printing capabilities, availability of free 3D printer files for firearms components, and difficulty regulating file sharing may present public safety risks from unqualified gun seekers who obtain or manufacture 3D printed guns.
The bulletin refers directly to print plans made available by Defense Distributed–nonprofit creators of a 3D gun called “The Liberator.” Although the U.S. State Department forced Defense Distributed to quit sharing the plan online, more than 100,000 of the plans were downloaded before the file sharing was stopped.
In light of this, the DHS bulletin concludes by indicating that limiting access to such firearms “may be impossible.”
Some officials outside of DHS have warned that these guns will beat magnetometers and that their proliferation will eventually lead to pat-downs at every event Americans attend. You may recall naysayers and gun control advocates saying the same things about Glock handguns when they began to hit the U.S. market in the late 1980s. Now Glock is one of the most popular and sought after handguns in America.
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/05/24/3D-Guns-Targeted-By-Homeland-Security
This is just stupid, but we shouldn’t expect anything sensible from DHS. This is obviously another agency who refuses to hire anything but idiots.
I think we’re up to somewhere in the neighborhood of 150 million guns in this country, and probably not more than a few dozen of them being printed at home because the technology is so expensive.
Doesn’t a 3D printer cost about $10,000? It’s unlikely that anyone who can afford such a device would be supporting a revolution, and the fact of there being so few of them in an ocean of firearms makes paying much attention to them simply silly.
“may present public safety risks from unqualified gun seekers”
What on earth does this mean? In the United States, under the 2nd Amendment, there are, by definition, no “unqualified gun seekers”.
There is currently no penalty for buying a handgun in a state like Texas, and then on-selling it to a convicted felon or person deemed “psychologically incompetent”, provided the seller isn’t in a position to be aware of the fact.
And another thing:
“100,000 of the plans were downloaded before the file sharing was stopped.”
What kind of disinfo is Breitbart pushing, published just the other day, without making it clear that the files are still available? The sharing has certainly not stopped! It is trivially easy to download the whole magilla of shared printables peer to peer from defense distributed via torrent sites, and has been since the day the file sharing was “stopped”.
If there is anything related to this development that DHS may want to worry about, it is that with slight modifications, the easily assemble-able parts of this plastic gun can be formed to a shape which will fit in bodily cavities easily.
Notwithstanding that a small co-ordinated group of conspirators with airport jobs would have no trouble at all smuggling entire submachine guns onboard airliners. One cleaner, one luggage handler, or catering company insider, and possibly one flight-crew is all that would be needed to put a myriad of guns on planes, or other “secure” locations, and they needn’t even carry them past security themselves. So much physical material moves through the hidden parts of an airport, that the pretext of an area being “sterile” of weapons is pure theater.
The fact that it has not yet happened doesn’t mean it’s not possible, but simply that no one has yet desired to do it!