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When You've Got a 3D Printer, Everything Looks Like a Gun

In a recent raid, Manchester police either seized parts of a gun or parts of a printer—at this point, both can be made from the same stuff in the same place.
Trigger or Spring-loaded Replicator 2 Drive Block? via Thingiverse's Spring-loaded Replicator 2 Drive Block.

There was a time when the words “gun-metal gray” actually described guns—they were reliably metal and reliably gray. When the police came across gun, there wasn’t a whole lot of ambiguity there. Like all good old days, those days are gone, as proven by the police in Manchester, who, in a recent raid, either seized parts of a gun or parts of a printer—at this point both can be made from the same stuff in the same place.

With the rise of 3D printers, determining what is and isn’t a gun is getting more complicated. Motherboard checked out Defense Distributed, which has 3D printed an entire gun as well as components that fit into otherwise conventional guns, and made the blueprints available online until the feds had them taken down. Defense Distributed’s founder Cody Wilson spoke about how part of his motivation behind posting plans for home-printed guns was to point how technology increasingly makes gun regulation more complicated, pushing towards impossible.

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Wilson could’ve just held out a few months for something like this come along to illustrate the same point.

In Baguley, Manchester, police raided a man’s home and found a 3D printer and what they described initially as a plastic magazine and trigger, “which could be fitted together to make a viable 3D gun," they were quoted as saying by PC Pro. This would be the first seizure of its kind, if those plastic bits actually turn out to be what the police say they are.

The arrested man, out on bail, told the BBC that the parts were “nothing to do with a gun whatsoever.”

"I have no idea why they think it is part of a gun. It's designed by the company that makes the printer to go in the printer to make it better,” he said.

And the 3D printing community agrees. Scott Crawford, head of 3D printing firm Revolv3D, told PC Pro, "As soon as I saw the picture… I instantly thought 'I know that part',” he said in reference to “the trigger.”

"It may be that someone has used that part in a gun design,” Crawford said, “but I'm confident it's an upgrade for the printer and not an actual gun part."

Indeed, on Thingiverse, PC Pro found the “trigger”, or at least something that looks almost exactly like it, as a part of the “Spring-loaded Replicator 2 Drive Block.”

The suspect said that what the police called a “magazine” was actually a spool holder for the printer. By putting those exact words into the search field on Thingiverse, you can find an almost perfect match.

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Magazine or spool holder? Via Spool Holder for Filament on Thingiverse

Having parts of a gun? Sure, that sounds suspicious (illegal is another thing). But printing parts for your 3D printer? Man, that sounds pretty convenient.

So we’ve arrived at a strange place where fear of printed weapons has lead to a fear of printed anything. The police are going to go through computers they recovered from the raid to look for blueprints for printing weapons. Whether they plan for any or not, it certainly seems like they don’t have any gun parts to go with them.

The confusion that Cody Wilson warned about has arrived, but counterintuitively. Instead of authorities worrying that gun laws will be undermined by people printing guns, it’s people with 3D printers who should be worried that they’ll have to prove to the authorities that they aren’t.