With the rise of rapid prototyping, the prospect of easy home-made pistols of some reasonable quality is rising. However, it has always seemed to me that the hardest part of making a decent pistol was making a rifled barrel. Most of the home-made pistols you’re likey to see tend to be smooth bore for the simple fact that that’s a whole lot easier than rifled. But as it turns out, rifling a pistol barrel seems to be a lot easier than you might suspect. This guy shows how to go about making a simple rifled barrel using nothing much more than a cheap drill press, a Dremel tool and a hydraulic car jack. Couple a barrel like this with the easy-to-manufacture parts of the rest of a pistol, and making guns at home becomes something virtually any amateur can do. And, perhaps, something any amateur *should* do, especially in uncivilized places where such things are legally frowned upon.
If you want better, cleaner rifling, more complex machines can be made. Even so, this should be well within the capability of a decent machinist.
These are two wholly different manufacturing methods to create the same thing. Both are, int he grand scheme of things, quite simple and straightforward. Certainly simpler than laws that pretend to ban firearms.