TL;DR: A man starts with a shovel (formerly used for shovelling shit) and forms an AK receiver using little more than a furnace, some hammers, a spot welder and a drill.
So yeah, the printers change very little. What they have actually done is effectively communicated the idea that guns can be made in your garage (previously that message was not getting through for some reason which I cannot for the life of me understand).
The difference is the amount of know-how and effort involved. I think people overestimate these for the machine-shop approach and underestimate (for now) in the 3D printer case, but in principle the latter eventually allows that know-how to be entirely baked into a digital file and distributed and the effort will eventually come down.
I'm still not sure that this is terribly important but it is a distinction with some basis in reality.
Really the only thing holding back anybody from doing it the proper way out of metal is a lack of motivation. If you want to do it, teaching yourself to do it is fairly trivial. Any highschool kid (from a highschool that still has a shop class, which are increasingly few...) could do it if they were inclined to do it.
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Obligatory "Shit Shovel" AK-47: http://www.northeastshooters.com/vbulletin/threads/179192-DI...!
TL;DR: A man starts with a shovel (formerly used for shovelling shit) and forms an AK receiver using little more than a furnace, some hammers, a spot welder and a drill.
So yeah, the printers change very little. What they have actually done is effectively communicated the idea that guns can be made in your garage (previously that message was not getting through for some reason which I cannot for the life of me understand).
The difference is the amount of know-how and effort involved. I think people overestimate these for the machine-shop approach and underestimate (for now) in the 3D printer case, but in principle the latter eventually allows that know-how to be entirely baked into a digital file and distributed and the effort will eventually come down.
I'm still not sure that this is terribly important but it is a distinction with some basis in reality.
Really the only thing holding back anybody from doing it the proper way out of metal is a lack of motivation. If you want to do it, teaching yourself to do it is fairly trivial. Any highschool kid (from a highschool that still has a shop class, which are increasingly few...) could do it if they were inclined to do it.
Yes. Like I said, I believe both the know-how and effort required in the first case are overestimated.
That's rad, thanks for sharing this.