USA | Law enforcement leans on 3D-printer industry to help thwart machine gun conversion devices
USA | Law enforcement leans on 3D-printer industry to help thwart machine gun conversion devices
Justice Department officials are turning to the 3D-printing industry to help stop the proliferation of tiny pieces of plastic transforming semi-automatic weapons into illegal homemade machine guns on streets across America.
Justice Department officials are turning to the 3D-printing industry to help stop the proliferation of tiny pieces of plastic transforming semi-automatic weapons into illegal homemade machine guns on streets across America.
Archived version: https://archive.is/FzBzV
“Law enforcement cannot do this alone,” Monaco said during a gathering in Washington of federal law enforcement officials, members of the 3D-printing industry and academia. “We need to engage software developers, technology experts and leaders in the 3-D-printing industry to identify solutions in this fight.”
Good luck with that, it's basically impossible. The best they could hope to do is have commercial printing services watch for and refuse to print the devices. Anyone can look up the patent for a Glock switch and design and print one themselves. It can't be blocked on the printer level because that would require the printer to be a lot smarter than they currently are, and any such blocking could be bypassed by building a printer from scratch (not easy, but totally doable).
And it would require all printers to be closed-source, else people would just patch out the "is this a glock switch?" check.
The anti-counterfeiting EURion constellation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation) works because most printers are made by a handful of established companies. 3D printers, on the other hand, are made by dozens of tiny companies, many of whom are Chinese companies buying similar source parts and adding their own touches, and those companies don't give a shit about American law beyond the bare minimum to make a sale.
Plus it's not like fully automatic is really all that useful, as the military can attest.
They don't even use full auto on the standard issue rifles - at most there's a burst option, because full auto is inaccurate.
Full auto, because it's inaccurate, is mostly useful for suppressive fire. I've shot full auto 7mm and 223. 7mm is just spray and pray, 223 slightly more controllable, but still you'd have to be an exceptional operator to be accurate. The recoil of 7mm for a single round is staggering, let alone full auto.
So the question then becomes - if they want to prevent full auto conversion (something of questionable usability), why?
Oh, that's right. It's about surveillance and control.
If your goal is to dump as many mags as possible into a crowd then your aim and recoil don't matter that much.
mostly useful for suppressive fire
I think the concern is about a shooter firing into a dense crowd (like the Las Vegas attack) which is generally an application that would not come up during military use.
While I agree that it's completely impractical for accuracy, there have been many crimes committed with a switch and 30 round mags. It's not accurate, but it will 100% be an efficient killing device in a crowd. Which has happened.
Sounds like they are trying to crack down on people trying to print bump stocks or something. Truly sounds like a damn stupid sisyphisian task that can be used to survail what is being printed on common printers.
There are small modifications that can be done to convert guns to full auto. Glock switches and auto seers, or what not. The idea of usi g this to spy on printers is frustrating.
Yep. Plus, what measures would be required to defeat basic printer blocks? Could it defect differences in tolerance? What if you redesigned an internal part to make the overall print slightly different? It an endless task that doesn't seem like it will be very useful for anything other than random surveillance.
I've never seen a 3D printer itself able to convert a gun to fully automatic. 3D printers don't kill semi-autos, people kill semi-autos.