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Order a 3D printer and the wrong prefab parts, and the Feds and the State will beat a path to your door. They're tracking all of this.
The last time this came up, the proof was a case where a guy in NYC bought a printer and the parts, assembled firearms, took pictures of those firearms, and then posted those pictures on twitter; IIRC he also tagged anti-gun politicians with those photos. There is a big difference between "they can drop the hammer on people who openly advertise defiance of the law in one of the deepest-Blue enclaves in the country" and "they can drop the hammer on this activity in general."
I can entirely believe that the federal government is tracking correlated printer and gun purchases; they should not be doing this, and their power to do this should be destroyed. But they have not, in fact, demonstrated a capacity to substantially impinge on DIY production of effective firearms. Based on my own knowledge, they can't. It's not a matter of political impracticality, but rather physical impossibility. DIY tech isn't a potential-maybe-someday thing that might or might not happen at some point in the future; it's multiple decades of technological overhang that is already in freefall, only the first pebbles of which have hit the ground in a way that most people have noticed, because most people have not spent five minutes with a piece of paper and a pencil thinking about the matter.
DIY firearms weren't practically stoppable once metalworking tools became widespread; what John Browning and Mikhail Kalashnikov could invent, many lesser men could copy. CNC milling machines and 3D printers have made them even more so, though in earlier days when more of the population could work metal, maybe more people could make them. DIY ammunition, on the other hand, remains a problem. Possibly not insurmountable given the success of meth cookery, but both brass and primers are a real problem. But probably not in the quantities necessary, and messing around with it is a good way to get a trip to Club Fed. By tracking the easy ways (like the NYC guy was using -- a 3D printer + uncontrolled parts), they can prevent any significant illegal arming by people who have to care about the law until shit happens.
You don't need metal. You don't even need plastic. You don't need a printer, cnc machine or lathe. You don't need brass or primers. You don't even need powder. Firearms themselves are entirely unnecessary; you certainly don't need "significant illegal arming" in the sense you are using the term. In fact, I'm convinced it is possible to shift the probabilities toward collapse of centralized authority by a two-digit percentage through the exclusively legal, entirely private and secret actions of between two and five individual people committing to a year or two of dedicated effort. This is speculative only in the weakest sense of the word; there are no pieces of the puzzle actually missing, they are all evidently on the table waiting to be assembled. We do not need to rummage around for a ball of sufficient greyness; it has already been drawn from from the urn. Gibson was correct: the future is here, it just isn't evenly distributed yet.
Maybe it won't have to be, but I don't see a plausible ending where Blue Tribe continues to advance without triggering distribution. The hope is that the fever breaks before that distribution is triggered. It is not an entirely unreasonable hope.
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Ammunition reloading is a sufficiently common red tribe hobby, and the supply chain is sufficiently red, that a scenario where the reds hit ‘defect’ en masse is one in which the wildcat production of ammunition is unstoppable.
The propellant and primer supply chain has ATF throughly up their rear end, and ATF is blue as it comes. Reloading preserves brass (and there's a lot of it out there already) but doesn't help with powder or primers.
The government is phenomenally bad at controlling chemicals, and ‘mass defections’ kind of makes it hard for the ATF to do their job.
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Ever since various intermittent supply chain issues (real and anticipated; starting well well before the most recent ones) it's safe to say that this issue has been... noted well in the enthusiast community. Whether for reasons of price inflation or fear of total unavailability, it's safe to say that there are now sufficient primers in hands both private and unsympathetic to the ATF to supply a serious black market or decent sized army.
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