The Dems are acting like any thug on the street can afford to buy one of those machines and the materials, I'm guessing because they're banking on the ignorance of their constituents. Those machines are super expensive, and it's not like guns aren't readily available to them for a much cheaper price.
3D Printers sure ... but one can finish an 80% lower for an AR-15 with Jig and a Drill Press .....
its like going after AR-15s demonize something to scare people ... criminals are ALWAYS going to find away.
https://www.motherjones.com/politic...s-in-their-homes-driving-a-new-kind-of-crime/
Yet DIY guns are not exclusively built by the hobbyists and gun enthusiasts that helped me back then. The appeal of these guns is, in part, the enjoyment that comes from the build. But for some people, it’s also that they bear no serial numbers, and are, as a result, completely untraceable. No database and certainly no cop will ever know about them. That’s why this class of firearms is commonly referred to as “ghost guns.” And now, it’s becoming more and more clear that ghost guns also provide an avenue for criminals and individuals with mental illness or who are otherwise prohibited from owning guns to get them, undetected. Just last month, for instance, Kevin Janson Neal massacred five people and wounded nine others in Tehama County, California, using two semi-automatic rifles he built himself. A criminal protective order and a separate restraining order that had been placed on Neal in January—he was charged with assault with a deadly weapon after allegedly stabbing and beating two neighbors he held at gunpoint—meant Neal wouldn’t have passed a background check if he’d tried.
[clip]
Under federal law, building an unserialized gun is legal so long as it is intended for personal use and is not sold. And now building one is truly easier than ever; what once required hulking and expensive machinery and expertise can be accomplished with relative ease and on the cheap using tabletop mills and 3D printers. Everything a person would need can be freely purchased and sold online, no questions asked. And since the only part of a gun that does require a background check is the receiver, the companies that sell them have created workarounds by offering partially completed receivers. Known as “80 percent” lowers, or unfinished receivers, they don’t require checks or serial numbers, and they are manufactured so that all a person has to do is drill a few holes, make a few cuts and, depending on the type of gun, bend it into shape for it to be completed. What’s more, some milling machines, small enough to fit on the top of a desk, can now churn out unserialized receivers with just the push of a button.
In the scope of firearms-related crime, the percent committed using ghost guns still remain a statistical outlier, according to Tallman, also an adjunct professor at Colorado State University-Pueblo’s Center for the Study of Homeland Security. “Since 2008,” he says, “trace reports involving DIY crime guns have increased several fold, but the total number is still less than one percent of all gun crimes that are traced.” Tallman warns, though, that the problem is growing; crime connected to ghost guns “has become an increasing factor in the United States, and certainly other countries.”
While so far there have only been a few glaring, high-profile cases involving these firearms in the United States, each of them has resulted in a shocking massacre. In addition to Neal, in 2013, 23-year-old John Zawahri, who had been kept from purchasing a gun years earlier, used a homebuilt AR-15-style semi-automatic rifle in a rampage in Santa Monica, California, that left five dead. Meanwhile, authorities continue to find ghost guns when busting up trafficking rings. In September 2015, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman called ghost guns “the new frontier of illegal firearms trafficking.”