The $1,200 Machine That Lets Anyone Make a Metal Gun at Home

And to underscore how a usable rifle may be constructed with readily available parts, I present a personal favorite, the AK-47 built from a receiver recycled from a shovel: http://www.northeastshooters.com/vbulletin/threads/179192-DI...

Not to mention, its been trivial to build "zip guns" with basic tools. Crude pistols aren't that tough to make, especially when the heavy lifting (making of reliable and safe ammo) is already done for you.

Don't say that. They will outlaw education next. Any person with high school knowledge of physics and chemistry can mcguyver himself a lot of really deadly stuff.

Or just buy a drone, strap something light and sharp to it, and just nodedive it into the target.

As an illustration of the above point about Home Depot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwCP2Og__Go#t=94

Exactly, and it never too "tens of thousands" of dollars to buy a mill unless you were buying one new. A used Bridgeport that can turn out all the parts for say .45 cal automatics (or lower receivers for an AR15) can be had with minimal tooling for less than $10K and usually less than $5K.

This isn't a general purpose CNC milling machine.

If you read the whole article, this is specifically designed to mill and drill the lower receivers of AR15, from a piece of aluminum stock called the "80 percent stock", which is a non-functional metal part that is only missing a few holes.

If you have grand ideas about bike accessories and other metal objects, you can buy a proper CNC mill which is a bit more expensive than this. Or pay for CNC machining service at your local machine shop. It's not super expensive.

This machine is likely to have a very low machining speed due to weak motors and other motion components. You are unlikely to be able to out-compete a professional machine shop making small parts. So while this is nice for hobbyists, it is unlikely to pay for itself in a professional situation. If you want a machine to pay for itself and be more generally useful, you would be better off spending the money on a Chinese manual milling machine.

I want to do a similar project but for car dashboards.

Much like bike accessories we're always buying things like phone holders, fan holders, or CB radio handset holders. But these things never attach to the dashboard well because they depend on suction cups or clips to the vent grate (which aren't standard anyway).

All car dashboards should come with a 1/4-20 inch screw thread. Maybe two, one of the driver's side and a second for the front passenger. Then to accessorize your car, you just buy a simple cellphone clip which screws in.

The nice part about 1/4-20 is that it is already used for a ton of stuff (i.e. anything tripod compatible), so there are already accessories on the market for that screw size.

> every light has a different mount, as do GPS devices, and cameras, and bag attachments. Yet you could manufacture some common clamp, and then adaptors for each thing. Perhaps standardise around something like the GoPro bracket for an even wider market

You can't just sell them, you first have to license every patented clamp and mount. And I guarantee you, 99% of them are patented.

Plus the way the law is structured in the UK, you cannot out-clever it. It is a "If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck."-type of law.

So for example, a farmer (without a firearm licence) tired of people stealing created a trap, a thick cardboard tube, hung on a string pointed at the doorway, set to ignite and shoot shrapnel when the door was opened.

The farmer winds up forgetting about his trap and sets it off injuring himself. He was charged with having an illegal firearm because even though it was something he built himself, it was still similar enough to a gun to be considered one.

(opinion of a non-gun owner)

It is my understanding that the important part of arming a group of people is quality/reliability of the weapons. I was watching an interesting History channel episode of some series (back when they were good) about the horrible gun that was the Chauchat. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chauchat Basically these guns didn't have interchangeable parts and would often jam. The narrator said that the Americans who received this gun would basically throw it away once they encountered an enemy gun.

I don't know where you live, but in the USA the weapons aren't an issue. This country has literally tens of millions of high quality small arms already available to the people.

Instead, the real key can be found in the words "well regulated" in the US 2nd Amendment.[1]

   "[t]he adjective 'well-regulated' implies nothing
   more than the imposition of proper discipline and
   training."

The professionals will win even if they aren't "heavily armed". Because they are trained and they're not simply a disorganized mob.

In the USA, most of these professionals can be found in "a well regulated militia", which nowadays we tend to call by a slightly different name, the National Guard. [2] Every state has one, they're full of veterans of the Gulf Wars and of Afghanistan, and they're not simply "weekend warriors".

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Amendment_to_the_United_... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Guard_%28United_States...

>eventually there will become some expensive but exceptionally effective weapon only large governments can afford or supply

This already exists. Ubiquitous air presence via unmanned drones armed with air-to-ground rockets, missiles, or guided bombs.

Sometimes I feel like libertarians and NRA types seriously believe that they (a bunch of angry right-wing hunters or whatever) could actually throw off what they feel are the chains of oppression emanating from Washington, if only they could be sufficiently organized and motivated to rise up together.

Any serious armed rebellion in the United States would be deftly crushed. I'm not convinced that a peaceful/political rebellion would not be crushed also.

The System exists to perpetuate itself.

I agree the article is alarmist drivel, but you greatly overestimate the difficulty of assembling a lower. Furthermore, there is pretty much no way to misassemble one in a way that would cause an explosion.

It's not that hard to finish assembly, but to your intent: it DOES take enough knowledge & effort to acquire & assemble all the parts that anyone intending to use the finished product for criminal purposes will just buy one (black market most likely).

"OMG someone can make an unregistered gun and kill someone with it!" is hyperventilating drivel. Far, far easier to just buy/steal one. Anyone interested in making one won't be interested in throwing their lives away (arrest/incarceration/execution) by abusing it. Anyone who IS willing to throw their lives away by abusing one won't find any advantage/interest in making one from scratch.

While I haven't learned this in detail (I loathe the AR10/AR15 design), I gather it's quite a bit easier than that, e.g. http://www.brownells.com/.aspx/lid=11004/learn/ Maybe six months if you're busy with a lot of other things. And of course a fair amount of mechanical aptitude is required, if you're learning that from scratch or nearly so (not the case for many of us in flyover country), it could indeed take quite a while. And more than a few ruined parts.

I was able to put together a stripped lower receiver with the lower parts kit in one hour. My background in firearms is from owning a pistol and a 22 magnum bolt action rifle.

It is trivial to put together a lower receiver. You can do it with a hammer and a roll pin punch (and you really don't need the punch).

There are numerous vids on how to assemble a lower receiver and how to mill out an 80%. You could even buy a polymer and carve it out with a knife, if you felt so inclined to do so.

it doesn't take 6 months of gunsmithing experience to put together an ar-15 from parts, it takes about an hour for a complete novice. it's not difficult or dangerous. it's just not. especially with youtube.

before i owned one, i had the notion that it was dangerous. but it's a real-world (i.e. you literally bet your life on it) modular weapons system - you don't make the modules (barrel, etc.), you just snap or screw them together. the gun was designed to be taken apart and reassembled in the field by people without a high school education, much less any kind of gunsmithing ability.

i know it sounds hard to believe when you don't know anything about it (i was the same way), but it's true. when you start researching, it's incredibly confusing for about 20 minutes but then it just clicks in your head. it's a very basic weapon.

More like an afternoon on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SiHdV5slQps

If you were making the barrel from scratch as opposed to buying off the shelf, yeah, it might blow up in your face. But that is the part prone to catastrophic failure. People have been making lowers out of HDPE (plastic) and it works just fine, it doesn't need to contain combustion, just hold all the parts together.

Yeah... it's not as if proper guns are hard to come by in the US. If it were possible, guns would be sold in vending machines.

Most states require only a driver license to buy a rifle, no purchase permit required.

I don't know what a purchase permit is. In Washington, Oregon, and Idaho guns are cash and carry.

No, it is not a general purpose CNC mill. It is specifically designed for the task of making the receiver parts from almost ready but non-functional gun pieces ("80% receivers").

It might be adaptable something else but it wasn't designed for that.

Try 24. $50 seems to be the new floor for AR15 lower receivers. I've seen some as low $38 + shipping to an FFL dealer.

PSA blems are $45 on sale. LPK for $45 and a stock kit for $60 and you have a complete lower.

One with a serial number, but there it is.

It is not exploiting a loop hole. Federal law allows for the building of guns in the privacy of ones home. Just because this individual has decided to use this to make a gun, does that mean that we should outlaw all 3d milling devices because some of them make guns?

People have been building 80% lowers for years, without any background check, as the ATF does not consider it to be a weapon. All one needs is a drill press. Should we outlaw drill presses because they can be used to make a gun less then 1% of the time. Despite all of the other uses of a drill press?

Also the difference between a gun and your meth example is that meth manufacturing is illegal in all capacities. The private manufacturing of a firearm is not considered illegal, as long as you do not sell that firearm that you have created.

Wrong analogy by far.

Owning and/or making your own "AR15 lower" is legal (your local jurisdiction may vary, but for point of discussion...). Meth 100% isn't.

The legal nuance addressed by this machine is: if you (as private individual, or as industry manufacturer) make an "AR15 lower" for sale, you must register the manufactured part with the government ... but if you make it for your own use (to wit: not for sale), you don't have to register it.

Those wanting "unregistered guns" could make an "AR15 lower" out of a block of steel, at home, for personal use, and be completely legal. YES, you can sell a CNC machine, block of steel[1], tools, and instructions to build a gun.

Surprise: guns are legal in the USA, and you're allowed to make one for yourself without registering it (some jurisdictional limitations may apply, but the general point is absolutely true).

[1] - Hobbyists strained the limits of what constitutes "make" and "block of steel" (what if it's cut to the exact outer dimensions? what if I drill a hole? how close to the final shape constitutes "not made"?); the government ruled that doing 80% of the work required to convert a block of steel into an "AR15 lower" was as far as you could go and the object still not legally considered an "AR15 lower" (any farther and it may be incomplete but close enough to be considered a gun). This machine takes an "80% AR15 lower" and finishes the work.

The regulations that make it impossible to sell a DIY meth lab also make kid's chemistry sets neutered pieces of crap.

Meth should be legal and sold out of liquor stores to anyone 21 or older anyway. And while I don't condone tweakers cooking it in the trailer park, I see no reason why one shouldn't be allowed to do that chemistry if they're careful and take proper precautions.

Meth is illegal, full stop. Guns are not, that "legal loophole" is referred to by others as the Constitution, which makes gun manufacturing subject to laws and regulations, but not bans in the US.

It's not an "AR-15 lower receiver maker". It's a cheap CNC mill you can do an infinite number of useful things with. Should high quality printers be illegal because you can make counterfeit bills with it? Or is the potential for harm an incidental part of any useful device? You can stab someone with a knife, but they're pretty handy for chopping food, too.

It's a mill. Doesn't "print", it's a subtractive process... give it a block of metal and it cuts away the pieces you don't want.

Because that's what the machine is designed for, as advertised by Defense Distributed?

It's not like Wired has never talked about general purpose CNC mills before.

> $1200 machine that can print arbitrary metal objects

It's nothing like that. This specifically designed to drill holes in gun parts and do only that.

CNC mills and metal 3d printers do exist but they are quite a bit more expensive than this.

The journalist focused on the purpose for which the machine was built, which is expressly making parts for guns.

There aren't. It's a long piece of hardened steel with a hole drilled in it and a groove added thereto. No laws prohibit such manufacturing (assuming USA, I haven't so extensively studied such laws of other countries).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Amendment_to_the_United...

Except for some "slave states" as I've taken to calling them, you can buy ammo mail order, often with a statement of age or perhaps a photocopy of your drivers license. Powder, bullets, cases and primers by mail, although there may be limits to the amount of powder you can hold before the BATF wants a license, safe(r) storage, etc. And similarly your local fire department prefers or may demand limits.

And this stuff is stable, lasts a long time. My father has several 25 pound casks of powder he or his father bought before or after WWII that he's still reloading from, and ammo manufactured in WWII is still being used (although a lot of it has corrosive primers, requiring much more thorough cleaning).

I see the opposite, I see a world where the predator on the street corner cannot be sure I am armed, who has to pause and think before he mugs me or another, are they armed? They have to think twice about that home invasion as well.

You vastly over exaggerate the issue here, this level or paranoia needs medical assistance.

Gun laws will not make people safer, making an already illegal act; using a gun against someone/something; even more illegal solves nothing.

We have a major problem with drugs. There is too much money in this because of the illegal nature of it. From the use and sale of drugs to prosecution, treatment, and imprisonment. The establishment has too much to lose to give it up and those in that system have too little to lose to not resort to violence.

Fix the drug laws, find good work for those who have too much idle time, and then we can work on the culture of violence that pervades many inner cities.

I am not trying to be glib/mean here, but you should probably see a therapist to learn how to cope. It sounds like you are suffering.

really? Have you had bad experiences with gun wielding Americans? I acknowledge that the US certainly has a lot of guns and armed robberies/crimes are highly publicized, but if you aren't in a sketchy neighborhood the likelihood of running into a malicious person with a gun is very very low

I don't see why your fear differentiates between guns with and without serial numbers. Either way, you're dead if you get shot with one. Then again, fear is irrational.

Take a look at a state like New Jersey. Guns are illegal there for all intents and purposes. Does nothing to keep cities like Camden off the most dangerous cities in America list though.

You are ridiculous.

If only we could uninvent the CNC and the firearm.

Totally agree. Particularly since US citizens are so obsessed with guns and violence. I mean, look at all the shootings and massacres happening, by people of all ages and races, it's crazy! Couldn't stand living in a society like that where everyone's allowed and legally motivated to keep guns.