Is this a real question? Legally buying guns in the US come with registration of serial numbers, names, and addresses. Printing a gun does not. Printing a gun also does not need to wait for a multi-day delay from a background check. Depending on the printer, it could just take multiple days to print.
Asking why someone would want to do this is just not trying very hard in the conversation is actually pretty myopic.
> Legally buying guns in the US come with registration of serial numbers, names, and addresses.
It is illegal for the government to make a registry of gun owners. There is an electronic check to clear you as a legal gun owner but there is no registry.
It’s only theoretically non searchable, IIRC each submitted document has to be OCRed every time a search is ran on the documents, and this is enough of a legal fig leaf to qualify it as not a registry. A sizeable GPU farm would make this basically a moot point.
Oh I agree. It is very likely that the electronic checks are recorded and could be used as a non-official registry of gun owners. I removed my comment to that effect because it is speculation. But, electronic records are so easily recorded that I have little doubt that the electronic checks are in fact an illegal registry.
can the police not use a found weapon's serial number to determine its owner? how can they do that if there's no registry with that info?
Seven states have required gun registries. It is not illegal for a state to have a registry. It is illegal for the federal government to have a gun registry with exceptions for NFA controlled arms.
https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IF12057