BANG! / Kenneth lu

Last month, Canadian gunsmith “Matthew” fired thirteen shots from a goofy-looking plastic rifle, before a fourteenth shot split the barrel. It’s an improvement on the previous model, which blew apart on its first firing. However, he made his point. Footage of Matthew’s test firing ignited a storm of press, much of which missed the point.

Despite what the tabloids might have you believe, we are not facing the threat of an insurgency by nerds armed with freshly-baked plastic guns. And here’s why. 3D-printed guns are crap. Really, really crap.

Let’s start with the Grizzly, Matthew’s 3D-printed rifle that’s really more of a pistol with a long stock. The barrel isn’t rifled as far as I know, which means the bullet won’t spin as it leaves the gun, reducing accuracy and range. The gun needs to be disassembled to remove the spent cartridge before another can be loaded, giving the gun a terrifying fire rate of fire of around two shots per minute, enough to grant seven minutes of warfare before you need to go print another barrel. Forget 3D-printed rifle, this is a 3D-printed musket.

Zip Gun / Wikimedia Commons

The idea of home-made guns is not new. They’re known as zip guns, and like the Grizzly they tend to be poor quality, single shot, and liable to blow your hand off. (Matthew fired the first ten shots from his 3D-printed rifle from a distance, by tugging a piece of string tied to the trigger). Some workshops in the States will even let you machine your own untraceable gun which will rival store-bought guns for quality and effectiveness.

Being able to print a gun doesn’t suddenly make guns widely available in the US; they’re already widely available. Although licensed gun sellers must carry out background checks, this requirement doesn’t include private sales. It is incredibly easy to buy a gun in the United States. No one in their right mind would print a slow, costly, fragile, poor quality firearm if they wanted an effective weapon. And what of countries like the UK, where firearms are strictly controlled? Fine, print a gun. Now, where are you going to get some ammunition? Show me the shapefile for that.

AR-15 Lower Receiver / Defense Distributed

The driving force behind the 3D-printed gun flap is Cody Wilson, a 25-year-old law student and founder of Defense Distributed,an organisation launched with the express aim of creating and publishing designs for a 3D-printed gun. I like to think Wilson isn’t the gun nut he’s made out to be. His first (and probably most important) success with Defense Distributed was to fabricate a receiver or “lower”, the part of a gun that contains most of the firing mechanism, and also the part that legally constitutes a firearm. Without a receiver, a gun is just wood and metal tubing. From a lawmaker perspective, controlling the receiver makes sense, because it’s the most complex and identifiable part of a gun. By illustrating that 3D-printing would reach the point where anyone could easily make their own receiver, Wilson demonstrated that these laws were inadequate to control firearms. His plastic receiver undermines gun control far more than a crappy pistol does.

The second clue might be in the name. Wilson’s 3D-printed pistol is named the Liberator, seemingly as a reference to the FP-45 Liberator. And, in all fairness, the FP-45 is the worst gun ever made.

Wikimedia Commons

Designed and built in the USA during WWII, the FP-45 was intended to be given en masse to insurgents behind enemy lines. For this reason it had to be cheap, quick to make, and did I mention cheap? The FP-45 was crafted from sheets of stamped metal (you might even say… printed). The tiny pistol could only fire one shot, after which the unrifled barrel had to be cleared with a wooden stick so that another bullet could be loaded. This means the FP-45 has the dubious honour of being the only gun that could be manufactured faster than it could be reloaded. Its maximum range was 25 feet, and it was intended for much closer confrontations, close enough to smell the breath of the soldier you were ambushing (and with one shot, you better hope he was alone and your aim was lethal). Of one million FP-45 Liberators built, there is not a single recorded instance of the gun being used in combat.

Why would Wilson name his utopian everyman weapon after the most useless firearm in recorded history? Is the 3D-printed gun craze simply a big joke by a law student? Only time will tell.