If lawmakers are truly worried about the threat of
unregistered firearms, they should focus instead on the bustling market of
unfinished firearms, reported Slate. They’re, commonly called 80 percent lowers, in reference
to the fact that these kits include guns that are about 80 percent complete but
don’t constitute a full firearm and therefore don’t require a serial number or
background check to be sold.
The 80 percent and do-it-yourself gun market has been able
to blossom within a small loophole of the Gun
Control Act of 1968, which made it illegal to build a firearm and sell it
without a license. But the catch is that it’s legal if you make
the firearm and keep it—no background check, serial number, or
seller’s license needed. Do-it-yourself gun-making has been hard to regulate,
largely because it’s hard to regulate componentry, and it’s near impossible to
draw the line between a piece of metal that might go into a gun and one that
actually does. And to make the prospect of regulating DIY guns even harder,
there are already so many homemade guns out there it’s almost impossible to
know that someone has one unless there’s an incident or someone has been
stockpiling them to sell. The sad fact is that the more gun regulations pass,
the more at-home gun-making kits sell. In California, for example, it’s
illegal to possess an assault weapon like an AR-15, and Wilson told me
in an interview earlier
this year that California is his biggest market.
Despite what lawmakers were saying this week, it’s not clear
that 3D-printed guns pose a serious threat. Plans for printing 3D weaponry
never disappeared from the internet as a result of Wilson’s legal challenges,
and it seems that 3D-printed guns don’t even work very well—when they do work.
Police in Australia used a high-end 3D printer to make one, and when they
fired it, the gun exploded upon the bullet leaving the chamber. People who
print guns and try to shoot them might be more likely to blow off their hands
than fire multiple bullets.
If lawmakers are concerned about threats having to do with
3D-printed weaponry, they might consider banning 3D-printed bump stocks, too,
which are attachments that can be added to semi-automatic rifles to make them
fire faster. Those might work better than a fully 3D-printed gun. But 80
percent lower kits remain a much bigger threat—and should be a higher priority
for lawmakers.
Banning files from the internet doesn’t make much sense,
anyway. Digital files can be reproduced with the click of a button. That’s how
the internet works. Lawmakers should know this by now.
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