There’s been a push this year, especially, to try and step in the way of people who want to use a 3D printer to make their own firearms. Some states have banned so-called ghost guns entirely, but others are also trying to tell printer manufacturers that they can’t sell their products in those states unless they include software in the printers that bars it from making certain shaped parts entirely.
And, there’s a problem with that. Being able to make your own firearm is something Americans have been able to do since well before the Boston Massacre. It’s something we continued to be able to do until very recently. It wasn’t until a politician stood up before the press, panicking because “ghost guns” were a thing, and we just couldn’t have that.
A recent story I came across that was looking at the state-level restrictions on printers, though, started off by really kind of highlighting what the issue really does seem to boil down to.
For decades, making an untraceable firearm required specialized tools, technical expertise and hours of work.
Today, it can start with a downloaded file and a consumer-grade 3D printer.
As advances in additive manufacturing, commonly known as 3D printing, make it easier to produce firearms at home, lawmakers in a growing number of states are pursuing new restrictions specifically for 3D-printed guns. That rapidly evolving category of weapons can be manufactured from digital blueprints and often lack serial numbers used by law enforcement to trace firearms.
The implication here is clear: these guns are way too easy to make for them to be permitted.
First, let’s understand something. Nearly a decade ago, I wrote about P.A. Luty and his wonderful little book that took fairly common tools and hardware store parts to build a submachine gun. It never required specialized tools or particular expertise. Hell, making an “untraceable” gun was as simple as scratching out the serial number, if we’re being honest.
Still, let’s also understand something else. At no point in time did the ease or difficulty in building a gun have any bearing at all on whether someone has the right to build a gun on their own.
As noted already, we had this right and the legal ability to exercise it for centuries. Many of the guns on Revolutionary War battlefields two and a half centuries ago were made in someone’s home workshop. They bought parts from gunsmiths, the ones they couldn’t replicate, then did much of the other work themselves to build rifles that were not just functional, but some are works of art.
While the skills to do so might not be as common today as they were then, it wasn’t considered some esoteric skillset, either. Many farmers and others in rural communities know how to work the wood, do some metalworking, and build themselves a functional gun with a few parts from the big city.
Over time, things get easier. At the time of the nation’s founding, farming was a small operation. Farms didn’t tend to have more cultivated land than the farmer and his family and/or farmhands could work. Weavers used small looms and made cloth by hand. Blacksmiths made tools and hardware like nails one piece at a time, taking up valuable time to produce products. Gunsmiths had to do much of the work for a single firearm one piece at a time, as well.
When the Industrial Revolution came about, it changed all of that. Suddenly, nails could be made in massive lots. Cloth could be woven by the mile. Farms saw mechanization that allowed a single farmer to handle much more acreage than he could have dreamed before. Things got easier.
The 3D printer has taken the concept of an individual being able to make his own firearm and, like the advancements of years gone by, made it easier for everyday people to take advantage of something that was always legal for them to do, and that is what really bothers the anti-gunners.
On the same token, though, that shouldn’t matter.
Do we suddenly decide that free speech is irrelevant now that we can easily communicate with millions with a few strokes on a keyboard? Does freedom of the press stop working because someone can create a blog or Substack at home in their underwear and become a journalist? Obviously not, and in that same spirit, the difficulty or ease of making a gun isn’t relevant, either.
And considering how few are used in crimes even today, that there’s no evidence that they increase crime, and that the Founding Fathers thought nothing at all negative about people making firearms for themselves, it’s well past time for these states to step the hell off and accept that our rights don’t stop existing just because they don’t like them.
At the end of the day, our rights are what they are. It’s up to states like California to learn to accept this as fact and move on.
Editor’s Note: The radical Left will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.
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