At first glance, the prospect of people creating firearms at home is frightening, especially with the CAD file to recreate the Liberator widely available on the internet. However, according to The Atlantic, it isn’t as simple as pressing “print” on a computer, either. The process is slow, not cheap, and according to David Kennedy, the director of the Center for Crime Prevention and Control at John Jay College in New York, not worth the effort. “The panic that this is causing is completely unfounded. It’s not that hard to build a crude, working firearm,” he said. “It is a lot easier and would be a lot easier to fabricate something with existing materials than it would be to set up a printer and build one of these things. Home manufactured firearms are a next-to-nonexistent problem anywhere.”

Besides the effort involved in creating a 3D printed firearm, there are some ethically gray areas in regard to home-printed weapons, but not legally. According to the Undetectable Firearms Act of 1998, a legal firearm must contain at least one piece of metal, so that they can be picked up by a metal detector (via The Atlantic). After several years of legal wrangling by Cody Wilson to avoid the metal standard in homemade weapons, 3D printed firearms became legal in 2018 after President Trump signed legislation decriminalizing them, with one important exception, however. According to The Trace, it is legal to print firearms as long as they include a metal component noted in the Undetectable Firearms Act. So, while the information to create a firearm is out there, much like everything else, it likely takes too much time, money, and effort to actually follow through.