Comment on USA | Law enforcement leans on 3D-printer industry to help thwart machine gun conversion devices
Garbanzo@lemmy.world 2 months ago
“Law enforcement cannot do this alone,” Monaco said during a gathering in Washington of federal law enforcement officials, members of the 3D-printing industry and academia. “We need to engage software developers, technology experts and leaders in the 3-D-printing industry to identify solutions in this fight.”
Good luck with that, it’s basically impossible. The best they could hope to do is have commercial printing services watch for and refuse to print the devices. Anyone can look up the patent for a Glock switch and design and print one themselves. It can’t be blocked on the printer level because that would require the printer to be a lot smarter than they currently are, and any such blocking could be bypassed by building a printer from scratch (not easy, but totally doable).
Plus it’s not like fully automatic is really all that useful, as the military can attest.
They don’t even use full auto on the standard issue rifles - at most there’s a burst option, because full auto is inaccurate.
Full auto, because it’s inaccurate, is mostly useful for suppressive fire.
So the question then become if they want to prevent full auto conversion (something of questionable usability), why?
Oh, that’s right. It’s about surveillance and control.
If your goal is to dump as many mags as possible into a crowd then your aim and recoil don’t matter that much.
mostly useful for suppressive fire
I think the concern is about a shooter firing into a dense crowd (like the Las Vegas attack) which is generally something that would not come up during military use.
While I agree that it’s completely impractical for accuracy, there have been many crimes committed with a switch and 30 round mags. It’s not accurate, but it will 100% be an efficient killing device in a crowd. Which has happened.
catloaf@lemm.ee 2 months ago
And it would require all printers to be closed-source, else people would just patch out the “is this a glock switch?” check.