Justice Department officials are turning to the 3D-printing industry to help stop the proliferation of tiny pieces of plastic transforming semi-automatic weapons into illegal homemade machine guns on streets across America.
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Garbanzo@lemmy.world 2 months ago
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).
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.
BearOfaTime@lemm.ee 2 months ago
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.
unmagical@lemmy.ml 2 months ago
If your goal is to dump as many mags as possible into a crowd then your aim and recoil don’t matter that much.
ArbitraryValue@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
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.
Gerudo@lemm.ee 2 months ago
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.