A disturbing development of a scientific nature should be of concern to all security professionals, wrote NSI chief exec Jeff Little in the June 2013 monthly print issue of Professional Security magazine.
That is the future potential to manufacture so called โ3-D printed weaponsโ in the home. Unlike our allies in the United States, Britainโs gun laws are thankfully taut and generally successful following incidents like the massacre at Dunblane Primary School in March 1996. The gunman, 43-year-old Thomas Hamilton entered the school with four weapons, killing 16 children and an adult before shooting himself. The debate following Dunblane focused on gun control laws and resulted in the Cullen Report. The Firearms Act of 1997 made owning of handguns a criminal offence. This has made firearms difficult to obtain and conceal. However, the advent of 3-D printing could make the home production of firearms relatively simple and shift the goalposts when it comes to regulation.
The first gun made almost entirely using a 3-D printer has been called โthe Liberatorโ and has been trialled at a range in the USA. The majority of its components can be printed from a 3-D printer โ with the exception for the firing pin. That is made of a nail. Guns are simple things. Encase a bullet into a strong tube, hit the percussion cap at the end of the round, it goes bang and the bullet is launched en route to its target. The issue of producing accurate fire, reliably and repeatedly is another matter altogether. There are serious issues surrounding 3-D produced guns and the impact which 3-D printing may have on our futures. Whether the technique is a good or a bad thing remains to be seen, but it is certainly coming of age very quickly. We need to understand the implications before the act of downloading a pattern to produce a weapon off the internet, in your garage, is as easy as buying a pattern for the making of a dress in your workroom.
