alt Hacker News> You basically just need a metal tube, and well... a pipe from home depot does that much better than trying to 3d print something much less reliable.
Why would you buy a pipe at Home Depot? A gun barrel is not a firearm, and is not required to be registered or serialized. You can drive to Arizona or Nevada and buy an actual barrel, with rifling, manufactured to meet well-known specifications, without showing an ID. Until this year, you could have a barrel shipped to your California residence without an ID. There's no need to build the Shinzo Abe contraption.
> So my assumption is immediately that some relatively large lobbying group feels threatened by 3d printing, and is using this as a driver to try to control access and limit business impact.
Occam's razor. This isn't a shadowy manufacturing cabal, threatened by 3D printing. Gun control lobbyists are trying to prevent the printing of handgun frames and Glock switches, because they're the easiest parts to print.
> Either way, this is bad legislation.
California legislators haven't met a bad gun law that they don't like.
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For the adventurous, there may be a desire for all-plastic construction. Print a cylinder in high-temp filament, wrap it in CF tow, ream to size.
Like everything in the United States, it’s actually gun manufacturers that want to clamp down on this cottage industry which threatens their profits. I don’t buy for a second that this is some gun control attempt.
The device the parent is describing has a long history, and they're known as 'zip guns'. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Improvised_firearm