Nov 30, 2013 3 min read

A week from Monday, a 1988 law outlawing the manufacture of guns that cannot be discovered by metal detectors is set to expire.

Ten years ago, the Undetectable Firearms Act was reauthorized unanimously by Congress.

“It would be unfathomable to me if we are not able to renew this law right now,” Steve Israel, a congressman from New York, told The Washington Post.

Unfortunately, the prospect of the law not being renewed is all too fathomable. We have a Congress that is not only prone to thumb-twiddling, but is also increasingly in thrall to a fire-breathing, anything-goes gun lobby. But given the clear threat posed by a potential proliferation of plastic guns – they would be able to slip through security into schools, courthouses, airports and scores of other sensitive public places – the need to renew the law is obvious and urgent.

In addition to reauthorizing the law, some members of Congress are looking to update it to take advances in 3-D printing technology into account. Through the use of a 3-D printer, which uses polymers and prints objects layer by layer, much like the ink-jet printers attached to computers in our homes and workplaces, anyone with $1,000 in their wallet and an Internet connection can make a plastic gun.

And that four-figure price will surely slip deeper into three figures as the technology becomes more widely available.

The lifespan of these weapons is relatively limited, but they, of course, would have the potential to cause great harm in the time they can be deployed.

According to some reports, the House of Representatives seems likely to extend the law when members return to Washington, D.C. from their holiday recess this week, but its fate is uncertain in the upper chamber, as senators haggle over whether to include language that would outlaw weapons produced by 3-D printers.

So far, the National Rifle Association has stayed mum about the extension of the law, but the Gun Owners of America, a gun-advocacy group that pulls off the rare feat of making the NRA look reasonable in comparison, has weighed in against both extending the law and including any new language that would prohibit weapons made by 3-D printers. Larry Pratt, the organization’s executive director, offered this feeble rationale to The New York Times: “…They can’t fire many rounds. It’s just not something that we’re going to be dealing with anytime soon.”

So it’s better that we sit on our hands until we have a significant body count on our hands? Yeah, that’s smart.

Law enforcement officials are adopting a less sanguine posture.

Earlier this year, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives ordered that details on how to make a gun with a 3-D printer be removed from a website, but the information was downloaded somewhere in the neighborhood of 100,000 times before action was taken.

The bureau’s assistant director, Richard Marianos, said, “There are ways that this can potentially create a huge problem for the American public … It does create a public-safety concern for the American public because it can defeat metal detection.”

Renewing this law appears to be simple common sense. But we shouldn’t discount the ability of lawmakers on Capitol Hill to defy logic, reason and common sense when it comes to guns.