Landmark Legal Shift Opens Pandora’s Box for DIY Guns is the apt title of a recent article by Andy Greenburg on WIRED.com. DIY stands for “do it yourself”.  It is possible for anyone with a 3D printer to download the software needed to create a gun at home.

“Five years ago, 25-year-old radical libertarian Cody Wilson stood on a remote central Texas gun range and pulled the trigger on the world’s first fully 3-D-printed gun. When, to his relief, his plastic invention fired a .380-caliber bullet into a berm of dirt without jamming or exploding in his hands, he drove back to Austin and uploaded the blueprints for the pistol to his website, Defcad.com.

He’d launched the site months earlier along with an anarchist video manifesto, declaring that gun control would never be the same in an era when anyone can download and print their own firearm with a few clicks. In the days after that first test-firing, his gun was downloaded more than 100,000 times.”
Landmark Legal Shift Opens Pandora’s Box for DIY Guns

https://youtu.be/xwRtll3jjU4

The article describes the legal battle between Wilson and the Justice Department.

“Two months ago, the Department of Justice quietly offered Wilson a settlement to end a lawsuit he and a group of co-plaintiffs have pursued since 2015 against the United States government. Wilson and his team of lawyers focused their legal argument on a free speech claim: They pointed out that by forbidding Wilson from posting his 3-D-printable data, the State Department was not only violating his right to bear arms but his right to freely share information. By blurring the line between a gun and a digital file, Wilson had also successfully blurred the lines between the Second Amendment and the First.” (from the article above)

Related article also by Andy Greenburg:  I Made an Untraceable AR-15 ‘Ghost Gun’ in My Office—and It Was Easy.

These developments would seem to thwart efforts to do things like ban assault weapons. Even if an assault weapons ban was passed, anyone with these tools would be able to make their own weapon, one that did not have a serial number or would not be registered.

I don’t see anyway to regulate this, do you?