The US Senate has voted to extend a ban on the production and use of plastic guns for another ten years. The move was prompted by the threat of mass at-home 3D gun printing. Are 3D printing technologies useful or harmful and what else can they produce? VoR’s experts look into the issue.
The 2nd amendment to the US Constitution protects the right of individuals to keep and bear arms. Over the next decade, however, those arms will be made from anything but plastic. No sooner had plastic guns, light and invisible to metal detectors and X-ray scanners, become possible thanks to 3D printers than they were banned over fears that crimes may be surging.
The problem with 3D printers is that anyone who has it at home can create both lethal guns and their non-lethal replicas and use them to commit robberies or other crimes, said Andrei Masalovich, President of the Inforus IT consortium.
“If a gun is made from modern plastic, no scanner will detect it. You can walk through a metal detector, unstopped, and then take out a plastic gun looking exactly like a real one out of your pocket. It’s a serious problem and there is a special law prohibiting such stunts at airports. With the appearance of 3D printing, anyone can take cheap plastic and make an item imitating a lethal or health-threatening object. And that’s got nothing to do with terrorism. Terrorists and organized crime groups have long procured themselves undetectable plastic knifes and single-shot guns made from thermoplastic with a 3D printer and containing no metal,” he told the Voice of Russia.
In May 2013, a 25-year-old US citizen, Cody Wilson, invented a thermoplastic 3D-printed handgun that fires real bullets. Its sole steel component is a firing pin made from an ordinary nail. Wilson posted a blueprint of his 3D Liberator rifle on the Internet. Experts from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives made two copies of his gun and test-fired them: one exploded, the other successfully fired eight shots. Liberator’s blueprint had been downloaded 100,000 times before the government ordered its removal.
With 3D printers being sold at fairly affordable prices starting from $3,000, virtually anyone can make himself or herself a toy gun.
3D printing technologies originated about three decades ago and were first employed in car manufacturing. There are 3D printers for industrial and at-home use, ink-jet and laser, using thermoplastic, iron chips, wood chips, plaster and even biological cells as initial printing staff.
Biomodelling is a promising branch of 3D printing, said Albert Yefimov, director for IT cluster projects at the Skolovo Foundation.
“It means you can virtually model human organs with a 3D printer. Different physical principles will be applied, of course, to create organic tissue, but the idea is the same – slowly printing one layer atop another. Russian scientists, for example, have 3D-printed a human liver using an ink-jet printer. Liver tissue is fairly heterogeneous, which enabled them to create an artificial liver looking exactly like a real one. They filled the cartridge with liver cells and the machine printed the tissue layer by layer,” Yefimov said.
While 3D bio-printing is only just being tested in research centers, non-organic 3D printing is conquering consumer markets. “Whatever you invent we will print!” is the motto of 3D Fabrication Laboratories (FabLabs) opened in various cities of the world, including Moscow.