3D Printed Guns

>>I have a feeling though that the printed gun is going to cause someone to look--REALLY LOOK--at the whole concept of the gun and figure out a "work-around" that prevents guns from exploding when fired.<<

That's entirely possible. It has happened numerous times over the history of weaponsmithing. Certainly, one could find safer designs. But I don't think it's possible to get the frequency down to zero, simply because chemical propellant guns are based on the principle of a directed explosion. There's always a chance for containment failure with that. And when you move up to things like energy guns, then again you have a very potent energy source for which uncontrolled release would be very bad.

>> Bullets are something else that could stand a re-work if your one goal in using them is to kill someone. <<

That's true. The concept is simple, but the physics get much more complex. That's because doctors can't agree on what "really" kills gunshot victims. Some say it's the force wave, that is, higher-powered bullets do more damage. Some say it's the size of the hole, that is, bigger bullets do more damage. Some say it's the nature of the injury, that is, fragmenting or deforming bullets do more damage than round or pointed ones that go right through. All of these are true to some extent.

It also depends on where you hit. High-penetration bullets will kill with a head shot much more reliably than lower velocity, spreading, or small ones. But if you put that through someone's gut, meh, they'll be fine if they get to a doctor sometime soonish. A tumbler in the gut can do so much tissue damage that it can't be fixed without a transplant, and resources for that are scarce.

>> A bullet with a little payload of a toxin or a poison would NOT need to do much more than penetrate someone's SKIN in order to kill them. (Think snakes' fangs.)
Such a bullet need not be fired at a high velocity in order to do its job and especially not if you're standing less than say twenty feet away from the person you're shooting. <<

That's true, but it would have to be either a fast-acting poison or one without an antidote or other effective treatment. There are more slow poisons than fast ones, and a victim who makes it to medical help is likely to survive.

However, not all effective adulterants are poisons per se. Many drugs have disabling or even fatal effects, and people who peddle drugs typically carry guns. A fatal batch of drugs is a bad idea to sell to users (you can't milk a dead cow) but quite useful as arsenal.

Then of course, the U.S. military already uses depleted uranium bullets, primarily for armor-piercing qualities, but their tendency to vaporize on impact and contaminate the entire landscape is an unspoken subsidiary advantage. Hard for the enemy to muster effective resistance if their rate of birth defects undermines their ability to find healthy soldiers. That a significant number of U.S. troops using such weapons have come home with similar problems is an unfortunate side effect, but doesn't seem to dissuade the military from using it. This is one of the rare times I've seen that type of ammo used outside a post-apocalyptic scenario. Guys, what makes sense after the world goes kablooey is not necessarily a good idea before that happens. 0_o

>>The Viet Cong dipped their trap-darts in fresh human shit, which caused horrific infections out in the jungle - it wouldn't be so effective in civilization, where people who got shot with a dart would go straight to a doctor.<<

That was decades ago in the heydey of effective antibiotics. Such is no longer the case. Many germs are now resistant to drugs. A few germs are immune to everything we have. Now I would not recommend loosing the latter, but some of the former are quite readily available through such locales as open-air manure pools at factory farms or any sink drain at a medical facility. Even if you don't kill your enemy, he will be too busy not dying to bother you for some weeks.

But don't limit yourself to poisons or germs. Consider things like lead or mercury. It takes very little of that to do lasting damage, and they're difficult or impossible to remove once inside the body. You'd need a form suited to quick dispersal, such as a liquid or fine powder, but it's doable.

Of course, there's a challenge to firing a loaded projectile -- it has to withstand the launch force yet still break or otherwise deliver its payload on impact. In the absence of tippers such as arrow poison, I'd probably look for inspiration from paintball guns.

Close, but not quite. The core goal of a weapon is stopping power. You want the person to quit bothering you. One way to accomplish that is to kill him, as in the "double tap center mass, follow with a shot to the head" philosophy. Under some circumstances this is an excellent plan. In many it is excessive.

If you shoot out his legs, he will be unable to pursue at more than a slow crawl. So long as you're faster than that and he hasn't got a projectile weapon, that's good enough.

If you shoot out his arms, he can't use a weapon even if he has one.

Severe pain can make an excellent deterrent, but doesn't work on some drug addicts. However, they do still need bones in order to move. Break the long bones and they aren't going anywhere.

Shorting out someone's whole nervous system works. Of course, it occasionally kills people. But that's why tasers have some popularity.

Drugs and poisons are interesting because they don't necessarily have to kill instantly to disable an opponent. Tear gas, for instance, isn't deadly except to people like asthmatics or fetuses but it's effective enough as a deterrent that it's popular. So is pepper spray. Now imagine loading a bullet with capsicum and putting it into someone's upper chest near the brachial plexus. Unless your opponent is on quite a lot of PCP, his nerves will tell him that a quarter of his body is on fire. He will almost certain stop bothering you even if you haven't punctured a lung.

Frag rounds to the lower torso or crotch area will generally make an opponent stop bothering you in favor of checking to see if his junk is intact and trying to plug up the leaks.

In fact, any injury to large blood vessels will usually make someone abandon other plans to cork up the blood, unless the person is A) combat-crazy or B) really high. If he keeps moving, well, stay out of reach for a few minutes until the moron bleeds out.

It depends on what kind of weapon you want to carry, how good your aim is (which is a factor of physique and practice), how combat-capable you are, and whether you're comfortable killing someone or would prefer a disabling shot to a kill shot. The more powerful you are, the better you can afford what amounts to a warning. The less powerful you are, the more essential it becomes to kill someone instantly. You can see why this makes me think very little of policemen who empty 60 rounds into one unarmed victim.

It's basically not much different than the potential of building a gun in a machine shop, which anyone with the relevant equipment and a moderate amount of skill can do.

I mean heck, a friend and I once made a mortar with a metal pipe, a hacksaw (to cut off a suitable length), and several bricks (to prop the pipe at launching angle). The fireworks we bought had come with a cardboard tube for launching the 1" shells, and a great big fuck no to that. So we built a mortar, and it worked great. Light the wick, drop it in ... SHOOONK ... POW ... YAAAAYYY!

The main difference is that a 3D printer substitutes a minimum requirement of computer skill for what used to be a minimum requirement of manual skill. A slightly different subset of yahoos will now be able to make guns, but it is almost certainly a small number. Most people are not excited by the prospect of blowing their hands off.

Which reminds me of an easy solution the government could use to undermine interest, but yaknow, I'm not going to mention that one. Let 'em do their own damn homework.