For the love of God I didn’t want to come back to this but the shrieking has gotten so over-the-top I couldn’t help myself.

From Alyssa Milano:

My latest Op ED for CNN:

A 3D PRINTED GUN IS DOWNLOADABLE DEATH https://t.co/byl0u7gned#NoRA

— Alyssa Milano (@Alyssa_Milano) July 30, 2018

This is going to be good.  Let’s take a look.

Alyssa Milano: A 3D printed gun is downloadable death

Imagine this: the convicted domestic abuser next door tries to buy a gun. He’s turned down because he fails his background check. When he gets home, he opens up his browser, and in half an hour he’s printing out his own undetectable, fully functional plastic gun, with no background check and no record of his purchase.

Printed in half an hour?  Well, using a commercial printer it takes about eight hours, using a $1,300 desktop printer it takes more than two days.

The  Defense Distributed Liberator is designed to use ABS plastic.  Most desktop printers are designed to use PLA because it has a lower melting point and better flow characteristics.  It also has significantly less tensile strength.

What this prohibited person will end up with is a single shot zip-gun (I’m done calling it a gun, it’s a fancy zip-gun).  A length of pipe and a nail would make a more effective zip-gun for a shot shell and would take a lot less cost and effort than 3D printing anything.

As of August 1, it will be a reality in America — unless we are able to stop it.

It will be a hypothetical for unserious people.

Due to a settlement between the State Department and Defense Distributed — a Texas based designer of 3D guns — felons, domestic abusers, terrorists, those adjudicated too mentally ill to own guns and any other person unable to legally purchase firearms will be able to print one at home. Depending on the printer, they can be untraceable and plastic, or they can be metal. People will be able to make anything from novelty guns to AR-15s. And we will never know — until it is too late.

I’m sick to fucking death of this like 3D printers capable of making one of these is in any way common.  I have worked in two labs with additive manufacturing systems capable of making prototypes.  Anybody familiar with my history knows that I earned my PhD in this, 3D printing medical devices.  The cheapest system I used was $600,000 dollars.  There are some printers that “print” metal at a lower cost, but those print a metal/binder matrix that has to go off for sintering in an oxygen free furnace at over 2,000°F.

Most of the desktop printers that I’ve seen under the $5,000 mark do not have the build volume to make an entire AR-15 receiver.

So please spare me where this felon who just got out of jail has access to tens of thousands of dollars of equipment to 3D print a gun.

For a lot less than that he can talk to anther felon buddy about meeting a fence that can sell him a burner.  That’s the Chicago way, where a person in the know can get a gun in a couple of handshakes.

As for terrorism, if maximum carnage is the desired goal, I’m sure ISIS has proven that a rental tuck is many times more effective than a single shot pistol.

It gets worse: this requires a legislative fix immediately, and the House of Representatives session adjourned for August recess on Thursday. In other words, there won’t be a fix this month.

The CAD files have been available for a few years now, I don’t think an extra month is going to get everyone killed.

It is not hyperbole to say that this could mean the end of our ability to have meaningful gun violence prevention in America.

Yes it is. It is exactly that.  Gang members running around Chicago with literally thousands of illegal guns and printing a single shot zip-gun is the crisis.  This is the very definition of hyperbole.

There are those who will say that 3D printing of guns is not a major issue — that it’s unpractical or too expensive, but many people said the same thing about tablets, e-readers, cell phones, laptops, home printers, computers and cars. And in 2013, for a printer that then cost less than $2,000, it was possible to make a plastic gun that successfully fired at least 9 shots.

Consumer electronics are not guns.  That is a hugely different market.

I have a whopping shitload of guns.  I have an iPad and a smartphone.  I will not shoot a 3D printed gun made on a $2,000 printer because of that unsuccessful 10th shot.

Does anybody think the technology is worse or more expensive than it was five years ago? It’s not. You can now buy a 3D printer for less than $100. You could buy a printer fully capable of producing this gun for less than $1,000. The gun itself cost just $25 in materials to make — in 2013.

This was the same argument made about Gunbroker and Armslist and how the internet was going to cause the death of us all with backdoor gun sales.

This is part of the larger problem of ghost guns. These guns are made from DIY kits, which have no serial number, require no background check and are currently fully legal due to loopholes in our laws. An internet search on ghost guns tells a terrifying tale: headlines of gangs stocking up on these untraceable weapons. Of states with strict gun laws like Massachusetts confiscating hundreds of these guns. Of a tide of guns we don’t know are out there and we don’t know how to trace.

Also not a problem.  Even Kevin “ghost gun” de Leon didn’t point out one murder that was tied to a ghost gun.

I said it before, I’ll say it again.  If ghost guns are really an issue where are the gangs making their own Khyber Pass copies for sale?  Any auto body shop could knock out a gun easier than some jackass in his cabin could cook up some meth.  This to my knowledge and Google searching has never happened.  I’m sure if it had, it would be all over the news.

Gun violence prevention organizations — Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, Everytown for Gun Safety and the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence — filed a lawsuit to get an injunction to keep these downloadable guns from becoming legal, but on Friday a judge denied their motion to halt the sale of these deadly weapons.

You can’t ban CAD files.

Partnered with The Newtown Action Alliance and Fred Guttenberg of Orange Ribbons for Jaime, the No Rifle Association (NoRA), my organization, is helping to build a coalition of state attorneys general to also fight in court. We hope that we will be able to keep us safe long enough to enact a permanent legislative solution to this menace.

So no First Amendment right to publish.  What about if I draw my own CAD file?  What are the limits here?

But without the public electing a Congress with the backbone to stand up to the gun industry and drawing a line in the sand at guns on demand for everyone, anytime, it’s unlikely to happen.

What the hell does the gun industry have to do with this?

It must be reflexive with her to blame the gun industry like the way some people blame the Illuminati.

I’m going to be fighting this — in the courts and at the voting booth. I encourage everyone who cares about public safety to do the same.

You are going to shout into the wind about something you don’t understand.

Look, I can guarantee someone is going to get hurt with a 3D printed gun before long.  I have an idea of what is going to happen.  Some dumb-ass kid or kids are going to download the CAD files and print one.  They will test the limits of what they can do and make it bigger then 380 ACP.  They will proceed to torch off something through a 3D printed gun that will take it apart violently and some dumb-ass kid will earn himself the name “Stumpy.”

How do I know this?  About once a year it happens with homemade fireworks.

Here is the other issue, and to be blunt about it: kiddie porn.

Possession of that is highly illegal.  It’s still widely available in the internet.  I’m not even going to post links to news articles about that because I’m not typing that into my search browser.

The internet is an enormous place.  What do these people intend to ban?  Once the file gets uploaded it will never go away.  What stops people from drawing their own CAD files.  Are 3D printers going to have to be regulated.  Will they have to have some sort of fail safe shutdown if a gun gets printed?

Hell, despite the music industry’s best efforts, there are plenty of places to download MP3s for free.

This is totally off the wall bonkers, but that’s where these people stand now.  Off the wall bonkers.

They are right about one thing, we can’t have a conversation about guns.  How do you have a conversation with people who have detached from reality?