The US Supreme Court has upheld a major gun control policy enacted by the Biden administration to regulate so-called ghost guns - largely untraceable firearms that can be assembled at home using kits.
The rules require manufacturers to include serial numbers on the kits and to perform background checks on those who purchased them.
Advocacy groups have called ghost guns the fastest-growing gun safety problem in America, with the numbers of such guns recovered from crime scenes rising by more than 1,000% since 2017.
You don’t even need to print a full gun. In the US the lower is typically what’s considered the firearm. The upper has almost no restrictions on them in comparison.
Right now I could fire up my 3d printer print out a complete Glock 17 lower, clean it up a bit, then slide on a glock 17 upper and have an actually fairly reliable gun that will withstand lots of rounds. There’s frames designed to take metal inserts which aren’t hard to do, and now assuming you’ve done it right is almost exactly as good as buying the actual thing.
If you know a little 3D modeling you can make a much better frame in terms of ergonomics as it’ll be a custom fit for your hands. Things like changing grip profile, adding a beaver tail, integrating a pedal, custom stippling, etc. Any number of things can be changed outside of rails width, where the trigger group sits and where the magazine interacts with the mag release and magwell.
You can print AR Lower recievers, suppressors, binary triggers, on and on and on. There’s no stopping that.
Gun control needs to focus on the manufacturing at the company level. There needs to be a licensure process with necessary training, liability insurance if you want to daily carry. These are where gun control can actually benefit society.
Change gun culture not what the definition of a gun is. But that’s not going to happen in America anytime soon. The gun lobby and the fear mongering NRA are dead set against it. They want ghost gun legislation as it allows them to further profit off of fear and paranoia.