Blueprints for 3D-printed guns can be downloaded next month following a landmark Department of Justice settlement with Second Amendment advocates.

Defense Distributed, a non-profit defense firm, will offer the blueprints for download starting Aug. 1 following a multi-year legal battle with the federal government.

“It’s personally satisfying,” Defense Distributed director Cody Wilson told Fox News, adding America’s gun culture has been “guaranteed safe passage” into the modern era.

Defense Distributed and the Second Amendment Foundation were co-plaintiffs in a 2015 lawsuit against the government, which had forced Wilson’s firm to take blueprints for the “Liberator” 3D-printed gun off its website. More than 100,000 copies of the controversial blueprint were downloaded before the government’s clampdown.

The settlement paves the way for Defense Distributed to again offer the Liberator files, and others for 3D-printed guns, on its website. “Under terms of the settlement, the government has agreed to waive its prior restraint against the plaintiffs, allowing them to freely publish the 3-D files and other information at issue,” explained the Second Amendment Foundation in a statement released July 10.

SAF Founder and Executive Vice President Alan M. Gottlieb heralded the settlement as a victory for free speech, and “a devastating blow to the gun prohibition lobby.”

The organizations had filed their suit against the State Department under the Obama administration. In May 2013, the government had cited International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) when clamping down on Defense Distributed. In its statement SAF described ITAR is a Cold War-era law designed to control export of military items.

The settlement has sparked anger from gun control advocates. “We're extremely concerned about a sudden settlement by the DOJ allowing blueprints for 3-D printed guns to be posted online, and we're looking forward to learning through our FOIA request exactly how this came to be,” tweeted the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence on July 13.l

Link

Maybe I'm reading too much into this, but this could change everything when it comes to firearms. The internet is going to be the bane of politicians and tyrants existence in the coming years.

I read about this, a few days or weeks ago.

I'll repeat what I said then,

Good, Fuck 'em

quote:

Originally posted by bigdeal:
Maybe I'm reading too much into this, but this could change everything when it comes to firearms. The internet is going to be the bane of politicians and tyrants existence in the coming years.

As was the printing press before it. Information is dangerous.

I already have some prints and models from the original release.

I just don‘t have a 3D printer.

They have come down in price a great deal though so...

Curious to see how big the files are. I will probably download them just to have. I'm pretty sure work would frown on me actually printing gun parts on the company 3D printers.

I would like to see every gun owner download the files just to run up the download count. Hundreds of thousands downloads would drive the anti's crazy.

I know I'll be downloading them. Only problem with doing at work is I'll have to do the boss's first

Ken

That's quite interesting nice to see SAF getting a win for things like this, I'm guessing all the ATF rules apply for being a gun manufacturer so if you download the plans and make a working firearm you'll need to file a form, serial number it, or keep it in your house on your property for personal use?

How much would one have to drop to have a 3d printer capable of doing this...

quote:

Originally posted by HRK:
... I'm guessing all the ATF rules apply for being a gun manufacturer so if you download the plans and make a working firearm you'll need to file a form, serial number it, or keep it in your house on your property for personal use?

Really? Even if I'm just making a gun just for my own personal use? Am I not allowed to do so without having to serialize it?

IIRC there was some discussion a while back over the 80% ghost guns people were making. That you can make your own but there are restrictions.

It is an ATF rule, hence the "or keep it in your house or on your property" thought I read that such "ghost" guns ie guns you make yourself cant' be carried around, I could be wrong, haven't google fu'd it...

You still need all the parts to make it go bang. Seems like they are making it out to be easier than it is, but I don't know.
How much different is it than buying an 80% frame?

When the 3D gun design came out I asked a computer teacherabout this. He pointed out that you could print out any gun, then use the parts to meet molds to create metal parts.

As for the 80% lowers, I expect you’ll be able to download the commands to mill one out.

quote:

Originally posted by Icabod:
When the 3D gun design came out I asked a computer teacherabout this. He pointed out that you could print out any gun, then use the parts to meet molds to create metal parts.

As for the 80% lowers, I expect you’ll be able to download the commands to mill one out.

This is true to an extent. 3D printing models for a modern version of lost-wax casting has been used for years in jewelry production and some specialized industrial stuff.

This process still has a lot of the problems of traditional casting methods - especially if you are trying to do it in your garage with a minimum of specialized, expensive equipment, you can't really get fine surface finishes or very precise tolerances. You also can't really make springs.

You could get around most of this by designing a firearm suitable for this production method that doesnt require fine tolerances and finishes and uses readily available non-firearm-specific pins and springs.

If you were doing home metal casting, you'd probably also want to make the barrel walls WAY thicker than normal, for obvious reasons.

quote:

Originally posted by maladat:

This is true to an extent. 3D printing models for a modern version of lost-wax casting has been used for years in jewelry production and some specialized industrial stuff.

This process still has a lot of the problems of traditional casting methods - especially if you are trying to do it in your garage with a minimum of specialized, expensive equipment, you can't really get fine surface finishes or very precise tolerances. You also can't really make springs.

You could get around most of this by designing a firearm suitable for this production method that doesnt require fine tolerances and finishes and uses readily available non-firearm-specific pins and springs.

If you were doing home metal casting, you'd probably also want to make the barrel walls WAY thicker than normal, for obvious reasons.

So you could make a Hi-Point

This marks the end of gun control (John Lott's words)



The federal government has finally recognized the obvious – that sharing instructions on how to make guns with 3D printers counts as constitutionally protected speech. Despite little fanfare, this is an important victory for First Amendment rights. It also represents a real blow to the increasingly futile cause of gun control.

The U.S. Justice Department announced a legal settlement and its surrender to the First Amendment arguments July 10 made in a case brought by Cody Wilson, founder of Defense Distributed. Wilson, 25, created a ruckus in May 2013 when he announced his successful design of a plastic gun. In just two days, 100,000 copies of the handgun blueprint were downloaded from Wilson’s website.

The most downloads came from Spain, followed by the U.S., Brazil and Germany. The heavy downloading in Spain, Brazil and Germany likely reflected attempts to evade extremely restrictive handgun regulations in those countries.

People are going to download these files whether they're legal or not. As we've seen with movies, file sharing is unstoppable. The most pirated TV program in 2017 was the seventh season of “Game of Thrones,” with well over 10 million illegal downloads in most weeks.

Within days of the gun file being uploaded, the Obama State Department served Wilson with a letter threatening criminal prosecution for violating federal export controls. Wilson immediately complied with the order, but there was no way to stop further downloading.

Within a week of the initial uploading, the file could be downloaded on the Internet from over 4,000 different computers around the world.

The Justice Department’s recent settlement with Wilson is very favorable to him, allowing Wilson to provide the printing instructions “for public release (meaning unlimited distribution) in any form.” The government also compensated $40,000 of Wilson’s legal costs.

Someone has just as much right to release the instructions in a computer file as in a book or newspaper article. The groups that submitted arguments on Wilson's behalf were ideologically diverse, ranging from conservative self-defense advocacy groups to the Reporters’ Committee for Freedom of the Press and Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Anyone with access to a metal 3D printer can make guns functionally and aesthetically indistinguishable from any gun that can be bought in a store. Such metal printers are available for less than $2,000.

How the government will stop people from obtaining these printers isn’t exactly obvious. Proposals to require background checks, mandatory serial numbers and even a registration process for printers are easily defeated. Even if printers are registered with the government, what is going to stop gangs from stealing them? And the designs for making your own printer have been available on the Internet for years.

3D printers make the already extremely difficult job of controlling access to guns practically impossible. The government is not going to be able to ban guns, and limits on the size of bullet magazines will be even more laughable than before. Many parts of a gun can be made on very inexpensive, plastic 3D printers or even from simple machine tools.

It will be even more difficult to impose background checks, which have proven quite useless anyway. The government has been no more effective at stopping criminals from getting guns than at stopping them from obtaining drugs. That isn’t too surprising, as drug gangs are the source of both illegal drugs and guns.

The goal of eliminating guns is ultimately a fool’s errand. Every place in the world that we have crime data for that has banned all guns or all handguns has seen a subsequent increase in murder rates. Even island nations such as Ireland and Jamaica – with coastlines that are more easily monitored and defended than land borders would be – have faced five- or six-fold increases in murder rates after guns were banned.

It is understandable that governments want to regulate 3D printing, but gutting the First Amendment is too high a cost. This settlement may bring some awareness to the futility of gun control regulations that only disarm the law-abiding.



http://www.foxnews.com/opinion...end-gun-control.html

quote:

Curious to see how big the files are.

Not that large at all.
The main disadvantage at this time is that readily available consumer grade printers don't use materials that will stand up to some of the structural demands of parts like chambers and barrels.

quote:

Anyone with access to a metal 3D printer can make guns functionally and aesthetically indistinguishable from any gun that can be bought in a store. Such metal printers are available for less than $2,000.

I'm pretty sure this is TOTALLY false. I think he's confusing metal printers and plastic printers.

Here's an article from a year ago that piles on the hype about a company promising "100x faster, 10x cheaper" metal printing - meaning their cheapest system only costs $120,000 instead of more than $1 million.

https://newatlas.com/desktop-metal-3d-printing/50654/

Metal printing machines are EXPENSIVE.

You can print something that LOOKS like metal in an inexpensive home 3D printer than normally prints using plastic filament - but it works by using plastic filament that has a lot of metal powder in it. It doesn't produce a part anything close to as strong as a machined metal part.

never send to know for whom the bell tolls it tolls for thee, gun control.

Why couldn't you just 3D print the receiver and slap off the shelf barrels/parts onto it?

I get that being able to manufacture the entire firearm would be ideal in some post apocalyptic future, but the way you guys are talking it makes it sound like a show stopper for the here and now.