Why would I bother with an unreliable 3D printed zip gun and 3D printing when I can go and get a real working gun off the street for a few hundred?

Edit, reading further it's even more insane:

> The New York definitions sweep in not just FDM and resin printers, but also CNC mills and “any machine capable of making three-dimensional modifications to an object from a digital design file using subtractive manufacturing.” That’s a lot of shop & manufacturing equipment!

This is the dumbest thing I have ever read.

Exactly. The zip gun people are mostly just weird nerds, and not professional assassins. The latter seems to be doing it the old fashioned way which leaves no traces - buy cheap gun, file off serials, throw it in the river after.

Zip guns may get past a metal detector, but not the standard x-ray luggage scan. To the extent it'll make it past the x-ray screeners, it's because they let all kinds of stuff through, because it's a poor way to screen for dangerous things, and they are not high-skill employees, they are relatively cheap labor.

Source: I used to travel every week flying home Friday, cycle clothes out of my travel bags, and be on the road again on Sunday night. I learned to my horror I'd been flying with a pair of scissors for at least 5 weeks - during which, TSA forced me to open a Christmas present for my sister and throw away some hand lotion which was in too big of a bottle.

There's a reason they call it security theater. This is just more of it.

3D printed guns haven't been zip guns in a long time. That reads as willful ignorance. Only the receiver or frame are controlled. Every other part can be purchased online without any checks. Hoffman Tactical's Orca and a myriad of pistol frame can be used to produce weapons on par with commercial weapons. Many commercial pistols are polymer frames. A good 3d printed pistol frame is no different than a cast nylon polymer frame.

If you want to see what is possible with 3d printed guns now I recommend Hoffman Tactical and PSR on YouTube.

https://www.youtube.com/@HoffmanTactical

https://www.youtube.com/@PrintShootRepeat

3d printing ghost guns with a 100% plastic construction is a silly thing only done for clickbait, and probably comprises less than a tenth of a percent of 3d printing gun related activity. Most people are printing frames, parts, flair, accessories, mounts, things like that, and using sensible real metal parts for things involving explosive forces and danger.

Not is it only dumb, but it is plain unimplementable. Are they saying the HMI interfaces on CNC machines need to be able to parse the GCode generated by any of dozens of CAM software options out there and divine if it might be gun related? That is not possible.

> Why would I bother with an unreliable 3D printed zip gun and 3D printing when I can go and get a real working gun off the street for a few hundred?

Even in countries with strict gun control, like the UK, the most serious criminals can get hold of guns. And if lesser criminals 3D printed a gun, they'd struggle to get hold of ammo for it. So they stick to knives.

And anyways, you can make a zip gun out of hardware store parts on your kitchen table, no machining or 3d printing required.

The only time a 3d printed gun is useful is if your country is occupied and you have a chance to secretly shoot one of the occupiers if only you could get a gun past their confiscation. Otherwise it is an interesting toy that you might shoot once to say you did it.

I don't know where you get bullets for the gun though.

Is that true in New York? Maybe it currently requires permits, so at least there is a log and provenance chain someone could use in case it's used for bad stuff? Sounds like if you'd want to avoid that (like if you wanna shot a CEO and get away with it for example), you could use a offline 3D printer.

If I wanted to make a custom one-off weapon for some reason why would I use CNC? I'd just do it like normal on manual toolmaking machines. CNC is for achieving repeatability with less tooling in a manufacturing pipeline. Nobody is mass producing bootleg guns. Even if you buy the premise that someone might do this (which to your point they won't--getting a real gun isn't hard) it's completely flawed reasoning based in some CSI style TV trope. Next they'll demand CCTV cameras have an "enhance" mode.