Justice Department officials are turning to the 3D-printing industry to help stop the proliferation of tiny pieces of plastic transforming semi-automatic weapons into illegal homemade machine guns on streets across America.
Archived version: https://archive.is/FzBzV
Good luck with that, it’s basically impossible. The best they could hope to do is have commercial printing services watch for and refuse to print the devices. Anyone can look up the patent for a Glock switch and design and print one themselves. It can’t be blocked on the printer level because that would require the printer to be a lot smarter than they currently are, and any such blocking could be bypassed by building a printer from scratch (not easy, but totally doable).
And it would require all printers to be closed-source, else people would just patch out the “is this a glock switch?” check.
The anti-counterfeiting EURion constellation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation) works because most printers are made by a handful of established companies. 3D printers, on the other hand, are made by dozens of tiny companies, many of whom are Chinese companies buying similar source parts and adding their own touches, and those companies don’t give a shit about American law beyond the bare minimum to make a sale.
Plus it’s not like fully automatic is really all that useful, as the military can attest.
They don’t even use full auto on the standard issue rifles - at most there’s a burst option, because full auto is inaccurate.
Full auto, because it’s inaccurate, is mostly useful for suppressive fire. I’ve shot full auto 7mm and 223. 7mm is just spray and pray, 223 slightly more controllable, but still you’d have to be an exceptional operator to be accurate. The recoil of 7mm for a single round is staggering, let alone full auto.
So the question then becomes - if they want to prevent full auto conversion (something of questionable usability), why?
Oh, that’s right. It’s about surveillance and control.
If your goal is to dump as many mags as possible into a crowd then your aim and recoil don’t matter that much.
I think the concern is about a shooter firing into a dense crowd (like the Las Vegas attack) which is generally an application that would not come up during military use.
While I agree that it’s completely impractical for accuracy, there have been many crimes committed with a switch and 30 round mags. It’s not accurate, but it will 100% be an efficient killing device in a crowd. Which has happened.