If the guns themselves become easy to manufacture I think that there will be more emphasis on controlling and tracing ammunition, including primers and propellants for handloading. Making stable, uniform smokeless propellant starting from raw cellulose and over-the-counter chemicals is a huge investment of skill and effort. Making black powder is more tractable but still a lot of effort.
Most aspiring firearm enthusiasts who are not criminals could get legally permitted in Europe if they were willing to invest as much effort as it would take to make their own guns and ammunition from scratch. Most criminals who want guns just as crime accessories don't have the discipline and drive to make weapons that they can't buy. (Thank goodness, or homemade bombs with wireless command detonation would already be common instruments in areas with gang rivalry.)
> Making stable, uniform smokeless propellant starting from raw cellulose and over-the-counter chemicals is a huge investment of skill and effort. Making black powder is more tractable but still a lot of effort.
Re: black powder, I think you're overestimating the level of effort a bit. It certainly hasn't gotten harder to make it after the Industrial Revolution. Hell, there are even WikiHow articles on it: https://www.wikihow.com/Make-Black-Powder
It's the primers that are, from my understanding, the tricky thing to replace. I suspect that if push came to shove, though, a primer shortage/restriction would lead to designs of new cartridges and firearms built around spark plugs or some other alternative source of ignition. 3D printing would enable the sorts of quick prototyping necessary to rapidly iterate on unconventional firearm designs like that.
> Most criminals who want guns just as crime accessories don't have the discipline and drive to make weapons that they can't buy.
Well that's the thing: they don't have to be the ones making them, just like how drug dealers are not usually the ones themselves making the drugs. This is something that could very well be the purview of some black market cottage industry.
> (Thank goodness, or homemade bombs with wireless command detonation would already be common instruments in areas with gang rivalry.)
I mean, bombings are pretty common in a lot of places. See also: Ireland during the Troubles, the Middle East today, etc. And with quadcopters being widespread, it's probably only a matter of time before we start seeing drone bombings.
Cat's pretty much out of the bag. Pandora's opened the box. The only viable approach to stopping violence is to end it at its source: by addressing the reasons why people commit violence in the first place.
People who commit violence out of ideological devotion may rise to the level of competence required to assemble weapons from over the counter components. It already happens occasionally, like with the 2005 London bombings. I very much doubt that the typical gun toting criminal of today will rise to that level of competence. I wouldn't expect the median member of the law abiding public to successfully make a rifled firearm and ammunition given a machine shop, a shed full of agricultural chemicals, and a year to practice. My expectations are even lower for the median armed criminal. Most will get distracted or injure themselves before reaching success.
I don't think that a cottage industry of weapons-for-criminals is going to spring up in the same way as illicit drug production. The drug trade is nearly impossible to vanquish because so much of it is victimless; neither the seller nor the consumer attracts much attention in the usual case. But if you're dealing weapons specifically to people who can't get them by legal means, that's much riskier. Most would-be attackers who meet with a "bomb seller" are actually meeting with LEO.
The novelty factor of "3D printed" firearms leads to law enforcement worrying about them disproportionately to their actual significance. They're mostly an exotic hobby.
Most aspiring firearm enthusiasts who are not criminals could get legally permitted in Europe if they were willing to invest as much effort as it would take to make their own guns and ammunition from scratch. Most criminals who want guns just as crime accessories don't have the discipline and drive to make weapons that they can't buy. (Thank goodness, or homemade bombs with wireless command detonation would already be common instruments in areas with gang rivalry.)
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