I'm having this online conversation with 3D gun advocates. Advocates, not just people who are talking about it. I guess one of them is an advocate who's doing 3D gun making. And the conversation online on Twitter goes like this. Guy says, "I can totally make a gun with my 3D printer." Somebody else says, "No you can't. That's not a thing. You fire it a few times and it'll melt down and it can't take it." Then the guy who says I can make a gun with my 3D printer posts a video of him shooting one of the many guns he's made on his 3D printer and it looks like it works pretty well.

Now when I say 3D printed gun, apparently there's still some components which you have to get a different way. Some people say you have to get a barrel separately. Some people say you can for certain rounds maybe you don't need that. So there's a technical argument about what is and is not possible. But I'll tell you, if you ever get in an argument with somebody who says 3D guns can't be made, a good way to end that argument is to post a video of you shooting your 3D gun a lot of rounds. So there's definitely such a thing as 3D guns.

Now here's the card reversal part which I have injected into the conversation. What I say is that in the future, because it will be too dangerous to have people printing off their own guns, I've argued that the government will restrict the 3D printers from printing guns or possibly the companies themselves. You know it doesn't have to be the government, it could be the company themselves.

Now I'm seeing it right here. So people are saying BS, BS, you cannot restrict, meaning that there would not be technically possible to restrict what you make on a 3D printer. I would argue that the only people who think that you can't restrict the type of designs on a 3D printer are people who do not have experience with technology. Meaning that they're not people who've ever worked in software development, not anybody who's ever worked in that realm. Anybody who has worked in the software development realm can quite easily see how it could be done. Let me explain how.

The first thing you need to realize is that 3D printers in the future will not be exactly like they are now, just you know maybe more capable. I'm not saying that. I'm saying that the 3D printers that exist now, yeah you probably couldn't restrict anything. They can just get a pattern, put it in the machine, print it. But I almost guarantee that where we're going with this, and somebody's screaming but you can hack it, I'll get to you. I'll get to your bad opinion about hacking in a moment. No way to control it, can't be done. Let me explain how it can be done.

Have you heard of the iPhone? Probably you have. Have you heard of the app store? Probably you have. Somebody says quit attacking the Second Amendment. I'm gonna block you for putting an opinion into my acting as though that's my opinion when it's not. All right, have you ever, do you know anybody who has illegal apps on their iPhone? Some of you are gonna say yes I do but not many, right? Now compare that to how many people have illegal music. You probably know a lot of people who have downloaded illegal music. Probably you've done it too, right?

So people said to me, have you never heard of Metallica? You can try to prevent people from downloading things to their 3D printer but Scott, Scott, Scott you can't do it. Look at Metallica, look at music piracy, can't stop it. Apple did. Apple stopped it all. You have to do the same thing. Now why is it that music couldn't be stopped but Apple can totally stop you from having an illegal app for most of you? Some of you might be a high-end techie who can do a jailbreak. You've got some little weird app you're running. I'm not saying it can't be done. I'm saying do you know anybody, do any of your friends have apps on their iPhone that didn't come from Apple? No.

Here's the difference. Music does not contain code. Music cannot change the device it's playing on, right? You download music and put it on whatever device you're playing it on. All the device can do is play it. The device has not changed by the introduction of the music. It simply plays it. That's different than an app. An app is software. If you download software to a device, whether it's a phone or any other device, that software tells the device what it can and cannot do.

So here's what the future almost certainly looks like. It looks like an app store for designs for your printer. And chances are you will only be able to efficiently, I'm not saying that a hacker can't break it, but if the only people who can make a 3D gun are very highly incented hackers, I'm not too worried about 3D guns because there's always somebody who can hack anything but there aren't many of them. Just like I don't even know anybody who has an illegal app on their phone. I don't know anybody. Chances are I will never know anybody who personally used a 3D printer to hack it. So I didn't need to use just the special designs that come from the manufacturer and made a gun. Guaranteed it's gonna happen.

But if you don't understand how friction works, I don't know how you understand your world. And you see this argument in every realm. Somebody will say walls don't work because there was that one guy who climbed over a wall one time. To which I say I'm pretty sure walls work in the sense that it makes it harder to get over the wall and sometimes that's all you need. You know how about gun control? Does gun control make it impossible to get a gun? No. But it has some friction and that friction could reduce some amount of damage possibly, potentially. Don't know. It's hard to measure.

As somebody says it's pretty easy to build your own 3D printer. Okay that is just ridiculous. It depends what you mean by pretty easy. I will acknowledge this. Somebody with hacker-like skills could put together a 3D printer and find their own designs somehow, put it in there and make a gun. It just isn't going to be common. So that's my argument that the 3D printers, and let me put it this way, in all likelihood the printers that will be the good ones are going to be made by companies like Apple, right? Sooner or later the 3D printer industry will consolidate just like tech always does. There might be three major printers and you're gonna say to yourself, you know I could make my own and it will be about 20% as good as the one I could buy from Apple. If I want a 3D printer for general purposes I've got to get the Apple 3D printer. It will restrict me from making a gun. I'll be okay with that, right?

If I'm a hacker I'm gonna have the crappy printer probably. It's gonna be lower quality. It's gonna break after a few uses. It might require a special kind of you know whatever the goop is that gets printed. You can have a lot of problems with your hacked 3D printer. So I'm not worried about it.