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3D printed guns: This time it's for real! Oh, wait – no, still crap

It turns out you can make a real gun ... from steel and gun parts

Violent recoil

The "Atlas .314" attempts to solve this problem by including a steel barrel and chamber as part of the cartridge. Instead of being attached to the cartridge tip, the bullet in the Atlas is recessed well down inside the heavy tubular steel case. There is a notional plastic barrel in Crumling's accompanying 3D-printed "gun" as well, with pretend rifling to comply with US gun law, but it is the steel tube of the Atlas which does the work; the "gun" has become nothing more than a holder with a striker mechanism for popping the cap (and indeed Crumling's striker mechanism is actually made of proper steel gun parts).

Metal pipes in racks

GUN BARRELS: Actually, almost any metal tube can contain an explosion

The one problem that hasn't been addressed here is that of stopping the cartridge from recoiling violently backwards on firing, and sure enough it turns out that the original "gun" design shattered itself attempting to do this. Crumling has "solved" this issue by simply removing the top and back of the "gun" and allowing the heavy steel case to fly out to the rear on firing. This works just fine when shooting the "gun" on a test stand with a string to the trigger, but would not be very practical if one were actually holding the thing.

Of course the Atlas cartridges, being made of steel rather than crappy laminated plastic, cannot be 3D printed at home. Crumling makes them using a lathe — a machine tool. Ignorant journalists are excited by the fact that once fired the cartridges can be refilled with powder, fitted with a fresh primer and a new bullet, and used again: but this is also true of normal spent brass. Thrifty gun fanciers have been recycling their cartridge cases time out of mind.

So — amazingly — it turns out yet again that with nothing more than machine tools, steel and some specialist manufactured parts YOU CAN MAKE A GUN. As indeed you have always been able to. If like Mr Crumling you insist on using 3D-printed plastic for one of the important functions, it will be a crappy and dangerous gun: Crumling's .314 Atlas weapon will lack striking power, range and accuracy compared with a proper gun with a proper rifled barrel and breech mechanism, and will badly injure anyone foolish enough to be behind it when it goes off.

But it's hard to see why you'd bother fooling around with a 3D printer when you have steel, gun parts and proper tools: why not just finish the job and make a proper gun?

You wouldn't get breathlessly written up in WiReD, of course. That publication gaspingly tells us:

Crumling’s 3-D printing-friendly ammo will serve as a proof-of-concept, and a reminder: If gun control advocates are taking comfort in printed weapons’ impracticality, that comfort gets a little colder with every upgrade.

Rubbish: nothing has changed here. Plastic 3D printing remains a stupid and impractical way to make any important part of a gun, and it has always been possible to make a gun with the right materials, tools and parts — guns are actually relatively simple machines.

And it's always been very hard to see why an American gun-control advocate would care a jot about 3D printing or indeed any form of home gunsmithing, when it remains completely legal for a US citizen to go out and simply buy a real proper gun made in a factory, in many cases without so much as a criminal records check let alone any form of licencing or registration.

Against that unchanging background, it would be very difficult to overstate the unimportance of Mr Crumling's invention. ®

Those interested can read Lewis Page's gun CV at the bottom of this article.

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