Is gun control in America really dead? – Firstpost
Luigi Mangione, the suspect in the shocking killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, made his first appearance in court on Tuesday. He was arrested after a McDonald’s employee recognised him and called the authorities, while he sat at a corner table wearing a blue face mask and stared into a laptop for hours. Amongst his belongings was found the 3D printed gun that he used to assassinate Brian Thompson. A ghost gun that was seen on the surveillance footage of the crime, that looked so unfamiliar that even police veterans were puzzled by it.
The “ghost gun” found on Mangione was capable of firing a 9mm round and had a suppressor, also known as a silencer, that muffles the sound of the gunshot.
Ghost guns are untraceable, most often self-assembled and can be put together with the help of a 3D printing machine and metal parts bought online in a matter of a few hours. They don’t have serial numbers which can make them almost impossible to track and regulate.
The United States of America, where gun laws have been a hotly contentious and angrily debated issue for decades now, is now faced with a new dilemma.
3D printing of firearms
In the United States, 3D printing has progressed by leaps and bounds in recent years. There are now 3D printers available for a price as low as $350 that can reliably print, post 0-5 hours of tuning. There is barely any real skill required anymore, as there is far less troubleshooting than earlier. There are now better stock slicers settings, a toolpath generation software used in 3D printing, that facilitates the conversion of a 3D object model to specific instructions for the printer, and more accessible guides on diagnosing and fixing.
The files needed for 3D printing have gotten better and better since Cody Wilson released the Liberator (the first 3D printed gun ever). Technologies often develop faster than the laws that govern them, and when Cody Wilson a former law student from Texas founded Defense Distributed in 2012, to defend the civil liberty of popular access to arms and fired the Liberator, 3D printing lost its innocence forever.
The Liberator STL files were made public for use on Wilson’s own search engine for 3D printable models, DEFCAD. The Liberator was made of 15 parts of ABS (Acrylonitrile Butadiene Styrine) plastic, slightly tricky to print and weaker, and had only a single shot.
Now there is access to better filament PLA and PLA plus which are easier to print. There are now printed magazines available for Glocks, CZ Scorpions, MP5s, ARs, Aks, etc, on many platforms. Also in a country like the US where the sale of metal arms for firearms are mostly entirely unregulated, magazines for guns are not marked, which makes putting a date on them difficult. So, a magazine printed today could not be easily differentiated from one made later, in case of a possible future legal ban.
If it was ever legally required that a gun made by any process after 2025 had to have a serial number, there would simply be no way to tell if the gun was made before that rule and was grandfathered in. The Grandfather Clause is a policy that originated in late 19th century legislation, passed by several southern US states. It is a provision in which an old rule continues to apply in some situations, while a new rule will apply to all future cases.
In the US you must grandfather in guns without serial numbers, because their 1968 Gun Control act required all commercially manufactured firearms to have serial numbers, and guns made before that law came into effect might not have a serial number, which means that there are potentially hundreds of thousands of guns that simply do not have a serial number.
There is the crucial question of how to enforce serial numbers on existing 3D printed guns. There is also the challenge of regulating the files required for the 3D printer, since they’re on the internet, and the sheer widespread piracy of movies and media shows us how difficult it is to actually control file sharing in the cyber world.
For the same reason, regulating the technology will also be equally difficult. There are three essentials required to print a gun using a 3D printing machine. There is open source CAD (Computer Aided Design) software that is locally hosted, which means that it cannot be checked or reported to a regulator without access to the device. Requiring everyone with a computer to always have access to the internet is simply not doable, and also an invasion of privacy, while requiring that all CAD software be cloud based gets us back to the question of how to stop file sharing.
The slicers (super slicers, prusa slicer, cura and orca slicers) are all locally hosted and open source. This means that even if you required them to check, regulate and not process gun files, any user could go into the code and remove the code that does that. This would require that the project would have to go closed source, which would dramatically hamper and slow its development, not address slicers from outside the US and would be a huge step back for software development in the US.
When it comes to the printers there is an excellent slew of open source printers (Prusa, Voron, RepRap) that use parts that would be equally at home on a PC as they would on more advanced machines. You cannot effectively regulate printer parts without controlling CNC routers. All these factors make it effectively impossible for the US government to restrict the production of 3D printed guns.
The idea that a resistance movement can take place using 3D printed guns has already been tested in Myanmar, who have utilised the FGC-9, a design that requires nothing beyond hardware store parts, as a service weapon. Is it ideal? No. Is it actually good enough? Most definitely, yes.
America’s gun saga, its deep roots in their culture and their firearm laws have been long discussed in the country and around the world, with their recent epidemic of mass shootings bringing the spotlight right back on it. Ghost guns are undoubtedly the latest chapter and challenge in this long chronicle of frequent disasters and of course, the pits and peaks of modern technology as it continues to blaze forward at a dizzying speed, that mankind is now at times finding it hard to keep up with.
The author is a freelance journalist and features writer based out of Delhi. Her main areas of focus are politics, social issues, climate change and lifestyle-related topics. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.
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