You Don't Need to Worry About 3D-Printed Metal Guns

A Texas company has made the world’s first 3D-printed metal gun, but despite what some headlines would have you believe, we’re not all doomed.

3D printing firm Solid Concepts announced they’d successfully made the gun, modelled on a M1911 semi-automatic pistol, in a blog post on Thursday. But before you start panic-buying body armour, rest assured this new gun doesn’t pose the same sort of threats as open source, plastic 3D-printed firearms like Defense Distributed’s "Liberator".

Sure, the printed product does the job—Solid Concepts claim their “resident gun expert” fired 50 rounds with the gun—yet the barriers to manufacturing the 1911 are more than sufficient to prevent hobbyists from printing their own metal firearms at home, at least for now.

To make the 30-plus components of the gun, Solid Concepts used an additive manufacturing process called direct metal laser sintering (DMLS). This uses a laser to fuse together layer upon layer of powdered metal into the shapes outlined by CAD files. It’s not something you could do with the sort of desktop printer that springs to mind when you hear the term “3D printing"; the gun was in fact made using an industrial machine that a representative from Solid Concepts wrote “costs more than my college tuition (and I went to a private university).”

And the project wasn’t an attempt to get around the law: Solid Concepts holds a Federal Firearms License, which means they're allowed to manufacture firearms.

In short, you don't have to worry about your neighbours printing metal guns in their bedroom any time soon. That's probably a good thing. But it also raises the question, what’s the point? Why would anyone actually want a 3D-printed metal gun of this sort?

The attraction to 3D-printed plastic guns like Defense Distributed’s is borne of the fact that they offer something conventional, above-board gun vendors can't. They're easily and cheaply accessible to anyone, regardless of the law, and can also be built so they don't show up under metal detectors. But Solid Concept's 1911 doesn’t offer a new solution to any particular problem. It's just a more costly and difficult way of making something that already exists.

To be fair, Solid Concepts claim the main motivation behind the project wasn't really to invent a new type of gun. Rather, the idea was to showcase the capabilities of laser sintering.

“When we decided to go ahead and make this gun, we weren’t trying to figure out a cheaper, easier, better way to make a gun; that wasn’t the point at all,” said Phillip Conner, the company's DMLS manager, in a video introducing the project. “What we were trying to do was dispel the commonly held notion that DMLS parts are not strong enough or accurate enough for real-world applications.”

Conner didn’t explain why the firm thought a functioning firearm would be the best example to use.