Thursday, August 4, 2011

The Printer's Devil

Note to the four remaining people in the US--and the vast majority in the rest of the developed world--who still think gun control has a chance in hell of ever working as advertised:

Man Uses 3D Printer To Make Repair Part For $25, Instead Of Paying $250

A man had a part break on his Bugaboo, a really nice and pricey stroller. The official repair center said it would cost $250 to replace the part. So the man said, forget that, and used a 3D printing service, which creates three-dimensional objects by laying down successive layers of material, to get it fabricated in stainless steel for $25 instead. Schweet!

At this very moment, you can outsource 3D printing in stainless steel. In five years, it will be possible to print steel parts in your garage for under ten thousand dollars. In ten? It'll probably be a ubiquitous consumer technology. This will allow every criminal so inclined to print endless supplies of every part of a submachine gun except the springs. How are you going to justify the fiction of gun control as criminal-access-control when everybody knows intuitively that you can't begin to control access to anything?

We're rapidly entering a time when people will pirate objects as easily as they currently pirate music. Adapt or die.

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