Convicted felon busted for 3D printing gun parts A US man has admitted he broke the law when he used 3D printers to make components converting semi-automatic guns to full auto. Kent Edward Newhouse, 41, a convicted felon of Jacksonville, Mississippi, pleaded guilty [PDF] to two counts of being a felon in possession of a firearm and one count of engaging in business as a …
It wasn't a 3d printed gun, but a 3d printed attachment for a standard gun, to use the recoil to activate the trigger, and use the recoil to activate the trigger, and use the recoil to ... and so on. This would convert a simple handgun into a rapid fire automatic, it whatever it's called.
From an engineering perspective, a clever bit of kit. I think it also subverted legislation on owning automatic weapons.
Yeah, a homemade plastic replacement for another low stress plastic part. Not especially clever, but certainly low hanging fruit for a sting operation. Now only 30-40,000 more idiots left willing to sell illegal full auto conversions to strangers. I'm sure the local ATF guys, FBI, etc will get right on that. Oh wait, this was all a publicity stunt.
You are right that a fully plastic 3-d printed gun like the liberator knock off that idiots in the press trot around is at least as much a danger to the idiot that's holding it than in front of it. "Real" ghost guns are just generic gun parts with no serial numbers or 95% percent complete bits that need a couple of holes drilled. They just gamed loopholes in the laws for shipping w/o a background check, they aren't any easier to make than the ones coming off the line at Colt or Ruger.
Also for anyone who isn't deterred by the possibility an illegal seller isn't really a member of the law enforcement community, keep in mind that bootleg gun parts don't get QC testing. Yours may be a self punishing crime, with your new toy either jamming or blowing up in your hand/face possibly when you need it most. Stay safe and shop from a reputable source.
"95% percent complete bits that need a couple of holes drilled"
not to split hairs too fine, but they were 80% finished, per the ATF. I'd never been the least interested in them until they were going to be banned, then the oppositional-defiant part of the personality kicked in, and away went my money. They don't make any creepy, ghouly sounds, though, they just sit quietly in my parts chest, so I'm really skeptical that they're actually "ghost" gun parts. Most likely they're "parts-I'll-never-build-with" parts. The AR receivers look like a bit of a PITA to finish . The AK receivers don't look too hard, though, especially compared to building an entire AK.
3D printed guns (especially polymer) just seem like a dumb idea that's the perfect catalyst for a Darwin award. Some lower-stress things like an AR lower could possibly withstand some use before it fails spectacularly, especially if certain areas are reinforced with brass bushings, but uppers, pistol slides, hammer, trigger, firing pin, extractor, ejector, block/bolt, no. Barrels for anything above a BB-gun? Big, fat, explosive "NO!". Maybe a very crude single-shot breech-loader frame could work if you took a donor barrel from something else and figured out a way to lock it to a block. But that seems like more work than heading to the seedy side of town with a couple of benjamins. Those ugly-assed Iver-Johnsons snubbies fished out of a river will still send lead down-range more reliably than anything an at-home felon is likely to cook up.
a simple handgun
Not exactly, which is the fundamental problem.
When automatic weapons were first introduced, they didn't work. They jammed and overheated.
Later versions just didn't work well: they jammed and overheated.
Later versions worked very well, except when they jammed or overheated.
Modern automatic weapons don't jam or overheat. They can be converted to non-automatic 'manual' mode, but they are still fundamentally capable automatic weapons, and can be simply re-enabled.
"The gatling's jammed and the colonel dead,
....
"Play up! Play up! And play the game!"
"3d printed attachment for a standard gun, to use the recoil to activate the trigger, and use the recoil to activate the trigger, and use the recoil to ... and so on"
That's not what he was making. The sear is the mechanism that controls the release of the hammer/striker. In a semi auto, it produces the need to release the trigger after firing, causing the sear to reset before it will allow the hammer/striker to release in response to a new trigger pull. An auto sear releases the hammer/striker at the end of each cycle for as long as the trigger is held down.
I am very curious what exactly he WAS making, because the classic drop-in auto-sear requires afaik a particular style of lower (certain areas of material cut away and differently shaped) and a different trigger group that are not widely available. The ATF seems to have a habit of labeling anything that could enable something resembling repeating fire as an "auto-sear". I doubt it's even mechanically possible to do so within any Glock sold as semi-auto for instance. You'd definitely need some external parts as far as I am aware.
The venerable SLR (FAL) rifle could be converted to full-auto using just a broken matchstick. I suspect accounts of this are apocryphal, though: the "upgrade" would take some time to remove during which the culprit would probably find themselves put on a charge. If it happened at all, it was probably one of the armourers proving a point (such as the rifle being totally uncontrollable, hence its removal in the first place).
For those who are interested, it prevented the sear sliding forward in the slots in the trigger housing which without the matchstick caused its rear part to no longer be aligned with the "shoulder" at the back of the housing which was required to give it enough of an angle to disengage with the hammer. Once the rearward-moving bolt re-cocked the hammer, the hammer's spring pressure would push the sear backwards once the trigger was released. The original sear had a projection which engaged with the selector spindle to prevent this back-forth movement but once the US insisted everyone used 7.62×51 instead of the FAL's original .280, full-auto was much more impractical and so the option to select it was removed. The British Army had plenty of old Bren guns they converted to 7.62 for when full-auto was needed (a bit of a faff in itself as the heavily-tapered magazine well wasn't wide enough for the 7.62 mags so the conversion was a bit more involved than might be expected) and the soldiers liked them. They "gave" me one to look after for a bit but they wouldn't let me fire it, I just got to lug it about for some guy. :(
With the SLR the standard selector lever had a lug on it that stopped it being rotated into the "Full Auto" position. I never came across a lever without the lug, but they were made and I have seen photos. I would imagine five minutes with a file would be enough to remove the lug on a standard selector. I was always led to believe a bit of aluminium foil wrapped around the inside part would do the same job (presumably like your matchstick), but as the selector lever is also the "safety" it's probably not something to be messed with.
We were warned that fully automatic version had a different barrel to handle heat and that using a standard SLR on automatic would destroy it. Didn't stop us when using blanks. Just had to remember to take the matchstick out when going from the training area to the live firing range. Ah - Seventeen year old reservists playing soldier.
We didn't even get blanks, just someone to yank it backwards and yell "bang!" :| The first time I actually fired one was with live ammo and I nearly crapped myself. And it was much too big for me anyway even with the smallest stock, but given that I wasn't expected to use one I suppose it didn't really matter. I was much handier with a Sterling even if I can't quite pull off the Princess Leia look posing with one.
Just days after a new law re 3D print guns comes into effect? Considering what he was doing was already illegal under existing laws, I'm not sure what the two separate stories have in common. One about a new law on 3D printing and another about some guy making parts to turn legal weapons into illegal ones.
Yeah, clearly part of the press offensive, but there is a subtle difference, which is that these were now illegal parts to make a legal weapon into an illegal weapon. As opposed to parts that were neither legal nor illegal until installed.
That difference matters when you have to take the (probably loaded) illegal full auto weapon away from someone instead of just arresting someone that UPS narced out for selling illegal bits of plastic that got diverted and are sitting on the floor next to a x-ray scanner in a shipping center in another state.
Not a fan of idiots spraying the sidewalks down with F-A glocks and shooting into crowds, so I am not losing much sleep over this one.
and as I am also ex-military I have had the opportunity to shoot full auto. And, I have zero interest in having it. Sure, it's fun to shoot but full auto is very difficult to control without a lot of practice, and very expensive to get the practice required. It only takes about 2 seconds to send 30 rounds downstream, and by the time you reach the end of the magazine the barrel is about 2 inches higher - only the first 5 slugs hit the target before it starts climbing on you. You waste an entire magazine on 1, maybe 2 targets. Far better to use single shot, or 3 round burst at most. Single shot gives you far more control over all 30 rounds, and even 3 round burst stops shooting before the barrel starts to climb. But, 3 round burst means a 30 round magazine is good for 10 targets, single is good for 30 targets. Just not as much fun.
Thanks for answering the question about the practical accuracy which was bothering me.
Machine guns take into account many items like recoil, change in balance due to the movement of cartridges, gas discharge, etc.
Question: could an automated pistol be used on a crowd of people? Sadly, I am less worried about militaries or regular criminals using it and more about mass shooters.
The muzzle climb results from the recoil not being perfectly in line with the support, i.e., your hands and arms.
If you shoot the gun sideways, as the gangstas do on TV, the muzzle climb will also occur, only sideways.
I hardly ever shoot handguns, and not a single time gangsta-sideways, but I suspect that a typical human offers an even less stable platform for the sideways gun than compared to the regular way of shooting.
All things with butt-stocks? No gangsta sideways style.
Handguns? Where do you reasonably put your support hand when holding a pistol horizontally?
This. Exactly this.
Nobody "needs" a fully automatic. Sure, it's fun. But so is a super sports car. But nobody in their right mind would use such a car for their daily commute. For this, you use a more practical choice.
And the same goes for home defense and (possibly) target shooting. There people are most likely to choose a more practical thing.
And if you want the fun, there's always the range. Much in the same way as you can rent a super sports thing and book time on a race course.
900 rounds per minute is a bit on the high side for most rifles (AK/AR), and most people should be able to at least learn to fire controlled short bursts without too much practice. Keeping the trigger pressed for 2 seconds is basically a magdump which is simply "doing it wrong" in the first place.
As to "why would you want to".. to each their own. Doesn't really interest me either.
AFAIK, in some states, anyone convicted of a felony that involves a weapon is then barred from legally owning a controlled weapon for the rest of their life.
It may also depend upon the state and/or the severity of the crime.
The same rules often apply to voting. In some places, if a felon votes, they could be back in jail for a 5-10 stretch.
The USA is a quagmire of conflicting laws at county, state and federal level. There is a law that makes federal crimes 'trump' state ones but some GOP states are ignoring that and hoping that the SCOTUS will back them up (with their GOP/Federalist society 6:3 majority).
If any normal person had committed even 1% of the crimes that Donald J Trump has done (and in many cases admitted it) they'd be locked up but he's free to cheat at golf on an almost daily basis.
Form 4473, Question 21, subsection c. "Have you ever been convicted in any court, including a military court, of a felony, or any other crime for which the judge could have imprisoned you for more than one year, even if you received a shorter sentence including probation?"
If you have ever been convicted of a felony, you are barred from ownership of a firearm. Many states also have the provision that you may not even be around firearms, such as visiting a gun shop or a shooting range.
Lying on the Form 4473 is in itself a felony with punishment of a fine up $250,000 and up to 10 years in prison.
Also, ask why Hunter Biden isn't in jail for his alleged lying on the Form 4473 he filled out when he purchased his handgun.
Produce sufficient evidence to have a trial.
This is called "rule of law", and is something MAGA Republicans are utterly terrified of.
Otherwise, stop spreading unfounded rumours - accusations like that are not protected speech, there are civil and (in some cases) criminal penalties for that kind of thing.
Anyone hear the rumour that Ghostman lied on their form 4473? It's got just as much to back it up.
"Why, exactly, does the 2nd Amendment not apply to felons?"
For the same reason that we "the people" are not allowed to own un-registered and un-taxed fully automatic weapons, short-barreled rifles or shotguns, or silencers. The infringing laws were passed long ago and have been allowed to stand.
Ah, yes. the National Firearms Act of 1934; designed to make it harder for gangs to buy guns by implementing a $200 tax stamp on full auto weapons, short barreled rifles/shotguns, and mufflers (silencers).
IIRC, the 1968 gun control act put even more stringent restrictions on full auto, and the last one in 1986 banned any 'new' full auto from public sales unless you have a number of licenses, tax stamps, and 'Father May I' notes.
This is why a beat-up 30's vintage Thompson submachine gun that is in horrible condition that jams every other shot can still fetch 50 thousand or more.
Yes, agreed. I don't mind the ban on select-fire, even as a demented gun-fetishist I can see some logic behind that.
I mortally HATE 922R though. Total piece of crap regulation. There are better ways that are less intrusive to achieve the same result.
To the downvoter: Criminalising blacks has long been American policy.
Originally by passing lots of vague laws like "vagrancy" and having the white law enforcement only enforce them against blacks, who would be sentenced to slavery for a period of time.
Then Nixon launched the War on Drugs specifically to target blacks and hippies.
Why should it apply?
You will not be taking long to find regulations in your juristiction which excludes certain groups from some rights.
Felons might not be allowed to vote, or stand for election. Freedom of movement might be restricted. Etc., etc.
When you show up to a gunfight with a Lewis Gun, you do not really have to aim to make a point, just direct it in the general direction of the adversary, pull the trigger, and try and hold on...
Make sure, you are not the team member who is designated to clean up afterwards, unless you like the messy bits...
I guess there's two factors here:
First is the "well regulated militia", and nobody seems to agree on what that means
Second, I guess the "right to bear arms" is satisfied if you have a right to bear arms of some description. It doesn't have to be a nuclear missile, as long as it is something.
"First is the "well regulated militia", and nobody seems to agree on what that means"
A militia is a state level body for defense and law enforcement. The Constitution gives states the right to "appoint officers". Back when that was written, it was everything from town sheriffs to whatever served as a police force (actual professional police forces were not really a thing for another 50 or more years). Our Constitution reserved the right to arm said militias to the US Congress. So that would have left states with unarmed defense/police forces. Not very useful. The Second amendment said "We'll keep our hands off the people's right to be armed. And you can hire them." You (states) can't arm them. But you can call up "the people" who can bring their own guns.
That leaves a pretty clear definition of how the people can be armed. You can have anything that the state would find appropriate for it's policing powers. Cops can't have nuclear weapons. Or Javelin missiles. So neither can you people. Our cops have M16s. Unless someone has found a big loophole in the constitutional right to arm militias being reserved to Congress, our state certainly didn't hand them M16s. They must have acquired them themselves as the people.
"Our cops have M16s. Unless someone has found a big loophole in the constitutional right to arm militias being reserved to Congress, our state certainly didn't hand them M16s. They must have acquired them themselves as the people."
Police departments can procure full-auto weapons. Although my vague understanding is they still have to have an FFL on-staff (or possibly it's the Chief/Sheriff who becomes the FFL) as the "owner" of the weapons in the Federal registry. If I'm wrong, feel free to correct me on that.
If the current Supreme Court was consistent in its theory of "original intent", it would have noted that if the right to bear arms was meant to be granted to people outside of well-regulated militia, that mention (well-regulated militia) would not have been put in the text.
There's another option which is to regulate ammunition. Probably a lot easier than trying to regulate guns.
A lot of fun could be had by enforcing safe practices such as use of gun safes and outlawing carrying a loaded weapon - that would allow open carry but make it pointless and would also prevent a lot of accidental shootings.
Exceptions for gun clubs, licenced hunters etc etc
Also by definition, amendments can be amended.
"Probably a lot easier than trying to regulate guns."
It's far, far easier to make ammo in the workshop than it is to make a firearm. "Regulating" that will be pretty difficult.
"Also by definition, amendments can be amended.
Agreed. We need to amend the First Amendment to prohibit much of the nudity and violence that pervades our "entertainment" industry and video games. Nobody needs that crap shoved in their face all the time.
Easy to make ammunition. True as long as percussion charges are available, that bit is not all that easy to make in a garage.
The first amendment needs alteration but not to satisfy prudes but to eliminate hateful and incendiary speech. People should be free to say what they want as long as they are also prepared to accept any repercussions. Free speech without responsibility is just a ticket to tyranny of the loudest.
The sexualization of nudity is relatively modern and is really harmful, as for violence that's tricky, do you ban Tom and Jerry cartoons, they are far more violent than almost any live action. People can tell the difference between fiction and reality, they understand that a character like Harley Quinn could not exist in real life.
"Tom and Jerry cartoons, they are far more violent than almost any live action."
Have you seen "The Boys" on Amazon? Or any of the other "recent" shows from the past 5-7 years?
My (oblique) point wasn't prudism, but was that perhaps we shouldn't start fiddling with the foundational restrictions placed on our government by The Bill of Rights. That becomes the slipperiest of all slopes, especially as fragmented and divided as our society is currently. There have only been a small handful of politicians in my lifetime that I would trust to touch those words, and none of them are still in politics.
...Have you seen "The Boys" on Amazon? Or any of the other "recent" shows from the past 5-7 years?...
No and that's the point, I don't have to watch stuff I don't want to watch, there is no coercion to watch any programs so I see no reason to restrict stuff just because I don't like it.
But this is not the same as "free speech" fiction is normally pretty obviously fiction. The problems start when "news" media start making things up and presenting them as facts, that can cause tangible problems in society.
"Freedom of expression" and "free speech" are not synonymous.
By that reasoning, nothing is safe and everything should be banned. Which is obviously ridiculous.
Some things are dangerous, some people aren't wired up right. Occassionally the two sets intersect. But everything in life is a risk, and trying to deny that human nature often likes a bit of violence and nudity as long as it's fiction is simply failing to understand human nature.
You don't like it. No problem. No one will force you to watch it. But leave the rest of the world to make their own choices.
Don't forget the brass. There's a ton of it out there so regulating that will be a challenge, but brass cases aren't exactly something that's super easy to make at home (certainly not at quantity). Not saying it can't be done (you can do a lot with a relatively cheap CNCed lathe nowadays) but it would get expensive and time consuming rather fast.
Yeah, brass will be hard to make. I remember seeing a guy on Youtube years ago that made a set of dies where he could use a hydraulic press to slowly form brass sheet into cartridges. So yeah, not easy, but not impossible.
Primers are more difficult since the primer compound is, by nature, a bit unstable. The cups are probably easily made, the anvils, not so much. The assembling with the priming compound would be the tricky bit.
Neither process would scale well, but over several months, a bit of a stockpile could possibly be built up.
Come on. Nobody's "shoving that crap in your face all the time". You don't want to watch it? Don't watch it. For people who do want to watch it, well that's up to them.
Your later point about people knowing fiction from reality except for the 1 in 270 million random outlier is a pointless argument that can be applied to practically anything. So following your logic, we should ban everything remotely dangerous, controversial or antogonistic just in case there's a statistical outlier who gets the wrong idea about something. Cars and trucks (someone's always getting hurt or killed by these), trains (people sometimes get hit by them), aeroplanes (e.g. because of 9/11), knives, sticks, rocks, hands (just as dangerous as a rock, stick or knife), nudity, partial nudity (e.g. bare legs - there's a whole chunk of the global populaton that gets up tight about that), whole grapes (1 in a few million might choke on one)...
See where this leads? Not a good plan, is it.
"So following your logic, we should ban everything remotely dangerous,"
I apologize, my sarcasm must have been too thick. My original point, about amending the First Amendment, was a counter-point to DJO's implication of amending the Second Amendment since "amendments can be amended". Some groups lately are all about "amending" things, without putting a lot of thought into what happens when that can or worms gets opened. So my idea was how would those same groups like it if other Amendments were changed in ways that negatively affect their activities? I don't personally give a damn about banning nudity or violence any more than I want scary black rifles to be banned. Which is to say, not at all.
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As a kid (back in the late 50's) I always loved November 5th, it was so much fun to get a bag of bangers and then stick a pipe in the ground, light the banger and drop it down the pipe with a marble on top of it. I never thought that I might have been making a "gun" but these days? Back then my parents just thought I was smart inventing a way to play with fireworks while potatoes were being roasted in the bonfire so we could all have tasty fun.
That's what we might think these days but we were just kids, 7 to 9 years old, probably thinking we were making toy cannons that "fired" to the back of the garden. We were being careful not to hold the bangers after they had been lit but it was England, so guns were not common.
"The use of 3D printers to unlawfully manufacture firearms, and to make devices to convert semi-automatic firearms into machine guns, poses a real and current threat to our communities," ATF Special Agent in Charge Kurt Thielhorn said in a statement today.On August 24 this year, an ATF rule targeting these types of home-made weapons took effect. It's intended to tackle "ghost guns" — firearms that are assembled from kits or manufacturers using 3D printers, do not contain serial numbers and are sold without background checks, making it difficult for law enforcement to trace and easy for criminals to access.
US law enforcement recovered about 20,000 ghost guns last year alone, according to the White House."
I'm not in the US and don't intensely follow the news there but I'm unaware of any large (or even small) scale use of 3-d printed firearms or fire-arm parts for crime purposes. It seems to be bog standard weapons nearly all the time. And also keep in mind that the 20,000 "ghost gun" number from the White House apparently includes bog standards weapons that have had their serial number removed or improvised weapons like pipe-guns that have been around for decades before 3d printing was even a thing.
I'm personally opposed to the "ghost gun" ban, but I understand the logic behind it. I think Biden, et al, pushed the wrong narrative for it, since they wanted to score points with the anti-gun crowd.
IMHO, had Biden come out and plainly said the ban was primarily aimed at organized crime building up arsenals using 80% lowers, then I think maybe it might have gone down a little smoother in the gun community. We still wouldn't have liked it, and we'd have certainly still bucked and said "it's not about organized crime, it's about aiming at AR/AK rifles", but at least we could have consoled ourselfs to some small degree that there was some modicum of truth to the fact that it would impact organized crime.
Instead, Biden chose to aim it more squarely at the firearms community itself, as if to shame us for wanting to build our own weapons without government oversight. We aren't the bad guys, here, we're just nerds and bubbas who like to build stuff, and the 80% crowd was an even smaller subset of us. IMHO, it's way too much trouble for a wanna-be mass-shooter (with a clean record, at least) to turn an 80% lower into a "ghost gun", when he could just buy a completed Palmetto State or Anderson lower for $50 and be done with it.
Printed guns are just a Bad Idea. As another guy on here said, they are "self punishing".
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