There are a couple issues with the article that I'd love to address.
While DD was making progress with its 3D-printed gun experiment, the company managed to get a license to become a legal manufacturer and vendor of guns, somewhat muddling the legal status of the 3D-printed gun, a weapon anyone with a 3D-printer could make at home.
There's absolutely no "muddling" here. You can do any amount of gunsmithing you want, at home, and it's legal without a manufacturer's license up to a very specific point. You can feel free to make a stock, a trigger, a pistol grip, etc., but just don't make a receiver. On some guns there's a lower and upper receiver, in which case you can make the lower without the license. Make the upper without a license and you're in trouble.
Side note: don't make a silencer either. They are easy enough to make and you don't need the license to make it, but you do need the license to own it.
The Liberator still has some more testing to go through
It's probably damn close to a 1-shot gun and then replace the barrel. It also won't have rifling so it won't be accurate. The cartridge next to the gun in the picture appears to be a .22 short which is probably the maximum the plastic can handle. I wouldn't want to be anywhere near this thing when a .38 or 9mm cartridge is fired. The plastic won't contain the significant force.
but the lack of requiring a license — and the gun’s lack of a serial number — are unsettling thoughts.
Much like you don't technically need a license to make a gun, you don't need a license to drive a car. Simple guns have been made by machinists for a long, long time. And you don't need a serial number on a gun either but if you are found with a gun sans serial number it's a felony with huge prison time. But cops see guns with serial numbers shaved off all the time.
I understand the threat of plastic guns getting on a plane or through security but you'd still need to get a bullet through as well which wouldn't be so easy.
When it comes to law and guns, don't be wrong. One oops and you're in prison for 10 years.
On some guns there's a lower and upper receiver, in which case you can make the lower without the license. Make the upper without a license and you're in trouble.
Not in the USA. Here, the "lower receiver" (at least for the AR15, the quintessential semiautomatic rifle most presume for this discussion and what DD is making) is the gun. Uppers you can freely make; lowers you can make in small quantities so long as there is no indication you'll sell them as a business.
[Silencers] are easy enough to make and you don't need the license to make
OH YES YOU DO. It's a $200 manufacturing tax per item, background check, Chief LEO signature, and related paperwork before you start making one. This is one of those things that WILL get you 10 years in prison fast.
HN being an international phenomenon, your jurisdiction may vary greatly in both legality and severity of punishment for violations.
I think what he means is that you don't need to be a class 2 SOT to manufacture silencers (as you would to manufacture machine guns, for instance). You still need to fill out a Form 1 and jump through the other hoops, but there's no "license" required beyond the usual tax stamp.
License, tax, label may be strictly different under exacting law but the point is you have to pay and get permission to make one. As phrased, he sounded like you didn't.
I don't have an AR but I assumed that because the cartridge flows from the lower receiver and is chambered in the upper that the upper was what was the ATF definition of a gun. My mistake, I got them backwards. The lower is what needs the background check through an FFL.
I guess I also didn't read the law correctly with respect to a silencer. I figured since it's illegal to possess without the proper paperwork you couldn't make one anyways since one you completed it you were immediately guilty. I didn't realize there is a separate law covering the process of building one but I guess I should've since guns require a manufacturing license.
But the Feds define a rifle as a firearm so does it matter what the NY law defines? Unless they are defining it as something that is much more strict, which, as draconian as the gun laws are in NY, that wouldn't surprise me.
My point was to not make statements about gun laws unless you in fact know the law, and to demonstrate how common wisdom can be very legally wrong.
Wanna make it a serious matter? A "sawed off shotgun" is legal if made one way, and 10 years prison time if made another - identical parts used either way.
Since your comment at the top of this thread is the top-voted, I suggest you please edit it lest the false information land a non-careful reader in jail.
There are some guns for which the upper receiver is the controlled part though. FALs, SCARs, etc consider the upper the controlled part, while the FNC is in the curious position of being sometimes upper, sometimes lower, all depending on where the manufacturer decided to stamp the serial number.
In short, there's no logical reason that the lower is considered the firearm over the upper, except that's what the ATF defined it as... more reasons not to ever assume anything. :-)
> You can feel free to make a stock, a trigger, a pistol grip, etc., but just don't make a receiver. On some guns there's a lower and upper receiver, in which case you can make the lower without the license. Make the upper without a license and you're in trouble.
This is incorrect, assuming you're in the US and no weird state laws are relevant. In general, it's perfectly legal to make your own guns from scratch. A license is only needed if you plan to manufacture guns for sale.
Feel free to make firearm (federally, state law may be more restrictive) but only without the intent to sell. If you use it for a few years and then sell it, that's fine. If you "use" it for a day before selling it, that won't fly. It is also recommended to add a serial number to the receiver so LEO don't freak out. I believe only firearms manufactured with an intent to sell require serial numbers.
The whole hubbub over 3D printed guns is silly. People have already been legally and safely manufacturing firearms as a hobby for many, many years.
I thought it was the case that you could never sell it, only keep it for personal use. The entry at the ATF FAQ page (http://www.atf.gov/firearms/faq/general.html) is unclear, and I haven't actually gotten around to reading the statute.
Others have chimed in with some corrections, but this one seems to have been missed:
"And you don't need a serial number on a gun either but if you are found with a gun sans serial number it's a felony with huge prison time."
That's not exactly true. It is illegal to remove the serial number from a gun that has one, but it is not required that all guns have serial numbers. Guns manufactured before serial numbers were required of licensed manufacturers obviously don't have them, but also, if you manufacture a gun for yourself, which is perfectly legal, you are not required to manufacture it with a serial number.
In short, you're absolutely right that the removal of a serial is a felony. Also true for the sale, purchase or possession of a firearm that has had its serial number removed. It is also true that all guns manufactured by firearms dealers for sale in the US after 1968 are required to be manufactured with a serial number. But simply having a gun without a serial number is not necessarily a felony, depending on whether or not it ever had one or who manufactured it.
My father, who is a gunsmith, finds the hoopla amusing. He sometimes jokes "In my day you didn't have a fancy 3D printer, you had to make a gun out of part of the sink with a rubber band and a nail for the firing pin, you got your sweety to smuggle you in a bullet."
The basics of guns are very very simple. And anyone reasonably facile with hand tools can make them out of off the shelf parts. Things you don't get, a lot of accuracy, or multiple shots, etc.
Ammunition is still pretty hard to do well on your own. Black powder muskets with lead ball shot are no problem, but a reasonable .32 or .45 cal handgun, dicey.
>Ammunition is still pretty hard to do well on your own.
Could you clarify this? Reloading ammo is a very popular past time among many shooting enthusiasts and not difficult at all. You do rely on manufacturers for the powder, of course. You usually buy brass and bullets separately as well. But you can cast your own bullets if you're so inclined and many reloaders use spent brass to reload (making reloaded ammo cheaper than manufactured).
I am talking about constraints on buying the power, brass, and bullets. If you wanted to make all of those things 'off the grid' as it were (like you were equipping a small army) then you show up on the radar just as clearly as you do if you're buying a lot of guns.
For black powder weapons you don't need brass, you can make your own black powder out of raw materials, and lead is pretty easy to get hold of as well.
Black powder cartridges were common stay until ~1890s and some (e.g., .45-70) were very powerful. You also technically don't even need brass: shotgun shells use plastics and (prior to that) used to use cardboard. Shot/slugs/bullets... are all easy to manufacture as well (you just need a mold and lead).
The difficult parts are:
1) Getting the mercury fulminate percussion cap. I doubt this is something that can be easily manufactured. Even if you use a readily bought one (which, I'd imagine, could easily be tracked and/or prohibited by government), it would be quite dangerous to monkey-patch it onto self-manufactured brass.
2) Non-standard brass will not feed reliably from a magazine, even if it will chamber: so any such firearm will be limited to single shot.
3) You'll still be limited to low pressure rounds: I highly doubt a home made action would withstand even a strong black-powder round like a .45-70. I don't imagine this handling anything more powerful than an old .32 S&W or a .410 shot shell. Still dangerous, but not exactly a major caliber.
It wouldn't be hard at all to sneak a few bullets on a plane. Have you flown recently? At many airports they try to force everyone through the body scanners, but if you refuse, you bypass both the body scanner and the metal detector and get a non-invasive patdown that wouldn't be sufficient to find a couple .22 bullets. The harder part would be assembling and loading the thing once you're on the plane without someone noticing.
I don't think it's true that opting out always bypasses the metal detector. I preemptively opt out every time I fly, and I think only once did they take me around the metal detector. I remember it because I was so surprised.
Why would you be on the plane? This is getting it through security.
Get enough of them through security and one can eliminate security.
What happens next is no longer constrained by "what one can get through security."
But to answer your question more directly, an airplane is one of the few places where a zip gun could actually be effective as a firearm. The cockpit door is fortified. Is the galley bulkhead or the wall of the lavatory?
What about that period of time when one of the pilots has to use the lavatory and the 5'2" FA is guarding the front of the plane during egress and ingress? At that point you're relying on human tissue to prevent access to the cockpit.
Perhaps you're thinking of a zip gun as something that shoots rubber bands, but what you'd do is fashion a firing pin out of the smaller cigar holder and plunge it into the larger cigar holder to make the bullet come out the other end, or any variation on those mechanics.
What I'm saying is that this doesn't really matter. Cockpit doors lock now, and waving a gun isn't going to make the pilots open them.
If terrorists just want to shoot somebody, there's no reason for them to bother getting on an airplane.
The most such an attacker could hope to accomplish would be to take someone hostage and negotiate over intercom for the plane to land at a different airport, the way hijackings used to work. This is undesirable, but not a threat of nearly the same magnitude as the 9/11 attacks. It barely even makes the news when it happens.
In any case, the hijacker's game is up the moment they actually shoot anybody, as their zip gun is almost certainly difficult and slow to reload, and they will be trapped in close quarters with scores of angry and frightened passengers. With this in mind, they'll almost certainly have better luck producing realistic looking fake guns. A submachine gun, even a fake one, is more likely to scare passengers into cooperating, and that cooperation is what gives them a chance to succeed.
>"The most such an attacker could hope to accomplish [...]" //
I think you're lacking imagination there.
"If pressure was lost at that altitude, everyone aboard would have been incapacitated almost immediately. Autopsies will tell if they died before the crash or from the impact."
It seems like a rapid/explosive depressurisation event would be possible to create from inside the cabin with an explosive weapon. I'm not saying that's going to down the aircraft but it seems it would create more of an incident than your imagined scenario.
The pilots should have time to don oxygen masks unless pressure is lost very rapidly at very high altitude. I'm doubtful that just shooting the plane is an effective way to accomplish this.
Doesn't have to be a bullet. In the link (which is a small plane) a door/window seal is suspected as the cause of bringing down the plane. But surely if you can compromise a seal or something and cause a rapid decompression that's going to more than likely kill some passengers at ~12km cruising altitude.
Looked at other cites and there was a study on pilots showing that even a 2s delay from decompression to them fitting masks was significant in reduced control.
My point was only to challenge that the very worst you could do was cause a minor panic without affecting the mechanical flight at all or injuring more than maybe 1 or 2 people.
I didn't check but IIRC that Wikipedia article refers only a bullet passing through the fuselage? In which case the hole is too small to cause even rapid decompression.
If these are really one shot then presumably you could make something truly single use that contains the charge and projectile rather than using a bullet. Depends on the use case I suppose.
While DD was making progress with its 3D-printed gun experiment, the company managed to get a license to become a legal manufacturer and vendor of guns, somewhat muddling the legal status of the 3D-printed gun, a weapon anyone with a 3D-printer could make at home.
There's absolutely no "muddling" here. You can do any amount of gunsmithing you want, at home, and it's legal without a manufacturer's license up to a very specific point. You can feel free to make a stock, a trigger, a pistol grip, etc., but just don't make a receiver. On some guns there's a lower and upper receiver, in which case you can make the lower without the license. Make the upper without a license and you're in trouble.
Side note: don't make a silencer either. They are easy enough to make and you don't need the license to make it, but you do need the license to own it.
The Liberator still has some more testing to go through
It's probably damn close to a 1-shot gun and then replace the barrel. It also won't have rifling so it won't be accurate. The cartridge next to the gun in the picture appears to be a .22 short which is probably the maximum the plastic can handle. I wouldn't want to be anywhere near this thing when a .38 or 9mm cartridge is fired. The plastic won't contain the significant force.
but the lack of requiring a license — and the gun’s lack of a serial number — are unsettling thoughts.
Much like you don't technically need a license to make a gun, you don't need a license to drive a car. Simple guns have been made by machinists for a long, long time. And you don't need a serial number on a gun either but if you are found with a gun sans serial number it's a felony with huge prison time. But cops see guns with serial numbers shaved off all the time.
I understand the threat of plastic guns getting on a plane or through security but you'd still need to get a bullet through as well which wouldn't be so easy.