The world's first gun assembled completely from plastic components made with a 3-D printer was recently fired successfully at a remote firing range outside Austin, Texas. Made by a company called Defense Distributed, "The Liberator" fires a standard .380 handgun round and can be equipped with a silencer. And since Defense Distributed put the designs on its website free of charge yesterday, it's been downloaded at least 50,000 times. Eat your heart out, free shotgun guy!
The gun's creation and the distribution of the designs has sparked considerable alarm, and the company's founder, anarchist Cody Wilson, has received numerous death threats. But the University of Texas law student tells Forbes he doesn't mean any harm: "This is about enabling individuals to create their own sovereign space. The government will increasingly be on the sidelines, saying 'hey, wait.' It’s about creating the new order in the crumbling shell of the old order."
Officials, of course, are calling for new laws restricting the technology, if that's even possible. Right now the greatest barrier to the guns' manufacture is the cost of the printing machines—Wilson's was produced on an $8,000 second-hand Stratasys Dimension SST 3D printer. But he hopes to make the designs work with printers that cost half that much. "It’s something that obviously is a concern,” NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly told reporters yesterday. “It’s something that the federal government should look at.”
Rep. Steve Israel, a Long Island Democrat, is writing legislation that would prohibit the production of printable guns. Senator Chuck Schumer is also pushing legislation that would make it illegal to manufacture the weapons. "This is a reckless and irresponsible thing to do, and it puts Americans at increased risk of violence from criminals and even terrorists,’’ Schumer said of Defense Distributed.
The designs, which were mostly downloaded in Spain, consist of 16 printed parts and one nonprinted component, an ordinary nail used as a firing pin. To comply with the Undetectable Firearms Act, the gun also requires a six-ounce piece of steel to make it visible to metal detectors. Other than that, you're good to go. As Schumer says, all you need is a “computer and a little over $1,000 [for the printer]. And you don’t even have to leave your house.”
And that's exactly Wilson's point. His company's website declares, "If we truly believe information should be free, that the internet is the last bastion of freedom and knowledge, and that societies that share are superior to societies that censor and withhold, then why not guns?... This project might change the way we think about gun control and consumption. How do governments behave if they must one day operate on the assumption that any and every citizen has near instant access to a firearm through the Internet? Let’s find out."
