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Defense Distributed Has 3D-Printed an Entire Gun
Daniel_Stuckey writes with this snippet from Motherboard with an update on Cody Wilson's Defense Distributed project: "On Friday morning, Forbes's Andy Greenberg published photos of the world's first completely 3D-printed gun. It has a 3D-printed handle, a 3D-printed trigger, a 3D-printed body and a 3D-printed barrel, all made of polymer. It's not completely plastic, though. So as not to violate the Undetectable Firearms Act and guarantee it would get spotted by a metal detector, Wilson and friends embedded a six-ounce hunk of steel inside the gun. They're calling it 'The Liberator.'" (A name I'm sure that Wilson didn't come up with accidentally.)
The NRA thinks more guns are the answer. Looks like we'll find out if that's true when when we can put a gun in the hands of everyone, rich or poor.
They're calling it 'The Liberator.'" (A name I'm sure that Wilson didn't come up with accidentally.)
Given that the FP-45 was an absolutely *shitty* gun, that might not be a good connotation. The "original" Liberator was literally designed to be a gun you use to shoot someone else and then take their gun. Reloading (after the single shot) required about a minute and a small wooden rod or pencil.
Even during WW2, they went almost unused. They were supposed to be distributed amongst insurgency (the Polish and French resistances, mainly), but very few of those produced actually made it to continental Europe.
I suppose the intended connotation was "dirt-cheap gun". The Liberator did cost only a few dollars to produce. But I think, like the actual Liberator, I'd trust this all-plastic gun about as far as I can throw it.
My kid will be five soon, and I thought it would be a great present!!!
Right, the 'smuggling' angle is just to instill fear into citizens to supporting more laws against firearms in this country. Our founderd never stipulated that a 'arm' had to be 'detectable' and in fact, would fully support such a concept if it was possible.
Are you suggesting that wouldn't happen if not for the gun printing efforts? Power lies with the means of production. Democratizing the means of production undermines those who hold power and there will thus always be efforts to resist--in this case to regulate--such democratization.
Especially considering that it's not particularly difficult to manufacture a gun out of metal using more conventional technologies. It's not some kind of space-age, 21st-century device; guns have been produced for something like 700 years. Instead of a 3d printer, why not get a CNC mill?
The answer, I suspect, is that we're dealing with a gun-nut libertarian desperate to get press for their TECHNO-LIBERATION concept.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Especially considering that it's not particularly difficult to manufacture a gun out of metal using more conventional technologies. It's not some kind of space-age, 21st-century device; guns have been produced for something like 700 years. Instead of a 3d printer, why not get a CNC mill?
The answer, I suspect, is that we're dealing with a gun-nut libertarian desperate to get press for their TECHNO-LIBERATION concept.
Because most people can't afford a CNC mill and you can now buy a 3-D printer at Staples?
No... they really can't.
Lead is used because it is dense and keeps its shape under 20k + PSI, but still malleable enough to engage the rifling in a barrel. Soft clay will come apart. Dried clay will shatter in the barrel. Glass will probably shatter and obstruct the bore and blow up the gun.
What, that it's a billion dollar operation that's mostly about entertainment and gossip?
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Calm down. Long ago, when "zip guns" were being made out of a stolen car antenna, a rubber band, a clothespin, and a rimfire .22 bullet, and teen gangs started threatening each other with them, nobody banned antennas or clothespins.
John
A surprising number of 3d printing projects seem to have been born of the fact that the gutting of domestic blue-collar production means that we currently have a massive glut of geeks who want to make things; but who never had wood shop(and certainly not metal shop, heaven forfend!) in school, and whose fathers pushed paper for a living and weren't in a position to teach them anything about manufacturing...
There are, undoubtedly, applications for which 3d printed materials cannot be matched by any conventional technique(some of the 'sure, let's just print a highly detailed collagen matrix to build a replacement organ' stuff, or some of the single-piece geometry you can get, along with anything that rewards rapid turnaround on very small runs); but there are a lot of 3d printed objects that are essentially really bad plastic versions of something that could have been knocked together with the machine tools of 50 years ago, never mind fancy CNC gear.
(And lest anybody think that I'm criticizing from the outside, I'm actually in a pretty similar boat. My grandfather was a mechanical engineer, did it at work, had a pretty serious setup in his basement. We didn't live at all close to that side of the family, so I only really saw it when doing logistics after the funeral. Dad was mostly a white-collar numbers guy, with a little bit of hobby carpentry that tapered off after he had kids. My own education was strictly college prep, and my only machine-tool time was through a university, plus the online services.)
... You're just hurting the world of 3d-printing.
Taking bets on when 3d printers and other 'manufacturing devices' get on the board to be regulated somehow... It's comming. Bet. Bet money. Bet MY money.
...Seriously guys, you're not helping. Stop it. Or at least keep it to yourselves.
Should we blame these people for inciting others to action?
I don't think that's right. We should put the blame where it rightly belongs, which is with whatever regulation agency decides to ban things.
Also, should we worry about repercussions before there actually *are* repercussions? Aren't we guessing an extreme consequence here? I mean, do we want to be the "game over, man" guy from that Aliens movie?
And finally, should we be calling people morons and dictating their actions in a dismissive tone on the subject of gun control? There are reasoned arguments on both sides - the percentage spread between pro and con arguments is not totally convincing one way or another - certainly not at the p<0.05 confidence level we typically use. We may disagree with their position, but can we say without reservation that their position has no merit?
Personally, I'm against dictating the actions of others in the first place. I like to hold people responsible for their actions, and these people have done nothing that harms others. The sophistry "they're enabling others to kill" is just that - an emotional narrative with no basis used to sway an argument. If (and that's a big if) others are enabled by these acts, then the others would be responsible, not these people.
My kid will be five soon, and I thought it would be a great present!!!
I don't what to think when a post like this gets modded up funny.
A young boy in Kentucky has accidentally shot his two-year-old sister in the chest, killing her. He was playing with a rifle he got for his birthday. The shooting happened in Burkesville, Kentucky as the boy was playing with the 22-calibre 'youth model' gun when it was not realised that the gun was loaded. The children's uncle, David Mann, described the accident as 'something you can't prepare for'
Five-year-old shoots and kills toddler sister with birthday present rifle --- video [May 3]
Here's How the Rifle That Just Killed a 2-Year-Old Girl Is Marketed for Kids
The Crickett website is down.
"I'm afraid I can't let you do that, Dave..."
Americas relationship with guns simply seems CRAZY to me.
Notice how we didn't ask you about it.
Unlike Europe and Asia, this country was not founded by a conquering king. It was founded on the abuse of authority; we won our freedom because the civilians had guns and formed militias. For a while after that, we kept our freedom because the politicians were afraid that if they abused their authority that the citizenry would not be afraid to use them again. Quotes by people like James Madison sum it up better than I can: "The Constitution preserves the advantage of being armed which Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation where the governments are afraid to trust the people with arms." "I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments by those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations." "The means of defense against foreign danger historically have become the instruments of tyranny at home." Of course, members of our government don't feel quite as threatened today, or if they do they don't mention it.
We also don't have to look back too far in history to see what tyrannical governments have done to unarmed civilians. Germany and Russia in the last century, of course; but Cuba and North Korea still run roughshod over their civilians. We say to ourselves, "we'd never let that happen here", and we mean it.
When some group says "we have guns because we have the right to hunt, or we need to defend ourselves from crime", they're being disingenuous. We have guns because we want our government to be nervous. We want our police officers to be polite and cautious. The 3AM knock on the door to haul away a political dissident will not be allowed to become commonplace here, because we don't even track the law abiding citizens that have guns.
Unfortunately, the price we pay is very steep. If it my child were killed in a school shooting, I'm sure I'd feel differently.
Are you suggesting that wouldn't happen if not for the gun printing efforts? Power lies with the means of production. Democratizing the means of production undermines those who hold power and there will thus always be efforts to resist--in this case to regulate--such democratization.
It will happen no matter what, but they need an excuse and this is a great one. If you notice how our privacy has been eroded, it generally comes in jumps after big some traumatic event hits the news. Kind of the same way a boa constrictor suffocates you, by tightening each time you exhale. Getting people in a lather about printed firearms being smuggled aboard aircraft or into secure areas would be the opportunity to tighten.
This. Guns are incredibly easy to make, and the plastic gun that comes out of a printer is only going to be good for a few rounds before it breaks. Anybody who actually wants to make a gun would do well just to skip the 3D printer and hop on the internet.
The project is interesting in that someday it might be possible to produce something better. I'm skeptical, though, given the materials involved.
Don't be so negative. Imagine a bright future where you can 3d-print your own Darwin Award, wouldn't that be nice?
"I'm not much interested in interoperability. I want substitutability. I want to be able to throw your software out."
You dont need a CNC mill. Let me guess, you think you need a supercomputer to write iphone apps? You can make a gun with rudimentary tools that are in many people's garages. How do you think gun smiths in the 1800's did things? You think they fired up their CNC mill and had their horse program the computer to start cutting?
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Not anymore and probably never again.. Have you seen the prices of AK's recently? Like most guns & ammo the price on AK's has gone way up. Parts kits are getting scarce and expensive and barrels can no longer be imported. The days of $99 Romanian parts kits and $299 AK's is over. I think that is one of the points of the 3d printing. Right now we depend on supply chains for parts that can dry up at any time but with 3d printing (at least if it continues to improve) we may be able to print out most parts we need. Designs will also evolve to utilize the new materials.
I'm confused... do you think Americans have a love of guns because Smith & Wesson, Remington, Lugar, Glock, etc all advertise heavily on tv, radio, billboards, bus benches, magazines, etc and that said advertising is so effective that (some) people rush into gun stores in order to buy?
With the exception of a few hunting or firearm related channels or magazines... I see far more advertising for beer or cigarettes on an average day than I do for firearms.
For the most part, firearms sales in this country have been pretty healthy for quite some time... they only spike in response to external stimuli (such as our currently slightly diminished push for additional 'gun control')... we see the same thing in plenty of other areas... grocery and home improvement stores tend to see pretty healthy sales though the year... then when there is news of an impending storm... both are cleaned out of supplies that people think they won't be able to get afterwards.
Again the reason for the current uptick (which went up since December, but has still been elevated since late 2008) was not because of marketing on the part of the NRA or firearm manufacturers... but because mostly rational people understood that something they wanted to buy may not be available latter... so buying now is preferred than risking not being able to later.
Personally speaking... I have a 'personal arsenals costing thousands of dollars'
I'd estimate that 80% of the firearms I own... are older than I am.. a few by more than a century.
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
No, but I do think they did it with a lot more skill and time than it would take me to push a button on a box I just picked up at Staples. And, with a less strict landlord than mine. If I had a workshop and the time to learn the skills, it would be awesome. But, in an urban apartment I will never learn how to make a gun by hand no matter how low-tech the process may be. And if I did, I'd never be sure if I got one wrong until I tried it and I checked to see if it blew up when I fired it. When it's a purely automated system making the parts, you can have a lot of confidence in the consistency.
I find this all very weird because as a physicist, I ended up having to learn machining. Loved it, very useful. But on the other hand, it's very clear (and often complained-about) that there are no young professional machinists out there -- every decent machinist is old and near retirement. While the demand for it is drying up, there's enough that there's some pretty serious risk of having a shortage of skilled machinists in the future.
I think that lawyers share at least some of the blame for what you describe. After all, can you imagine something as "dangerous" as a machine shop in a high school anymore? Of course not! Why, little Johnny might lose his fingers in the band saw or crush his hand in the drill press. It's easy to see how the pervasive liability culture that's been unfolding since at least the 1960s here in the United States has effectively ruined many of what might once have been considered "classic" activities for boys growing up and it's not just shop class that has suffered but the chemistry lab and even the sorts of activities that were once enjoyed at summer camps. Remember the rope courses and rifle ranges? Yeah, the attorneys and the insurance companies put the kabosh on those too. But the icing on the cake today is the big lie that everyone who goes to college, no matter how much debt they take on to do it, has the ticket to a good job and a bright future. Some of them don't figure it out until after they graduate and end up waiting tables or working the espresso machine while wondering what the hell happened to that bright future they were promised. If my kid wants to become a certified mechanic or skilled tradesman rather than becoming yet another liberal arts washout I think that I would actually be fine with that.
I am not worried about Americans. They have enough not printed guns so that a few more printed ones do not matter. They are a spit in the ocean. I am worried what this will do in countries with sane weapon laws. And I am worried what this will do to 3D printers.
And yet you're letting it happen there, with civil liberties being trampled in the name of protecting against "terrorists", including children who bite a cookie into the shape of a gun or school girls who have bottles of dran cleaners.
Guns aren't helping the US retain freedom in the face of politicians who remove it at every opportunity.
It raises an interesting point on the concept of supply and demand. Historically, machinists have been quite low paid, as it was a blue collar profession with a large number of skilled practitioners. I'd be willing to bet that historically the skilled machinists working for your lab were paid less than the physicists. However now machining is not considered a desirable profession, and for low pay will not attract many new trainees.
So as the supply of machinists dries up, so too will their value. You might reach a point where the machinist is considered a highly valuable employee who needs to be paid a lot of money to retain. That might be the only way to attract people into it as a career.
One day, the machinists in your lab might be the best paid people in there!
Good, you found some data. Why don't you copy it into your favorite spreadsheet and plot gun ownership vs homicide rates across all nations, or across OECD, and you'll see that there is no correlation.
Of course only an American would think that they are unique in overthrowing tyranny. Whilst it is true that America was founded as a direct result of this you ARE NOT unique and special. For example we here in Britain; The English Civil War, wich actually resulted in the execution of our king in an attempt to curtail tyranny. Perhaps you forgot about that one. We also find some sections of the American populace self centered, selfish. Perhaps reason you have so many troubles is this idea of Libertarianism, essentially the idea of, "my rights first, fuck everybody else's rights". I honestly think your founding fathers is they could see what you have become as a nation would disown you. This idea that an unarmed populace couldn't fight a tyrannical government is pretty weak to be honest. For every example that you give I can give a counter. For example The Spanish Civil War. Unarmed civilians very quickly organised into armed "militia". So your populace is having to endure slaughter, innocent kids etc... Because you as a nation seem to have this paranoid belief that the jack boots are going to kick your doors down at "3AM" and arming yourselves to the teeth with little of no regulation ("My rights, me, me, me") is the answer. It obviously isn't working. Time to evolve and change?
And the gunsmiths of the Khyber Pass have been making real, metal firearms on a completely amateur basis since before CNC mills existed. Not single-shot proofs-of-concept either, working copies of Lee Enfields and the like. No high-tech of any sort required.
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
He never said we were unique. He only said that in comparison to Europe and Asia, our country was not founded by a conquering king. You hold up Great Britain as an example of a country that's thrown off tyranny, but I suspect you never quite passed your A-levels in history. Queen Elizabeth II is a direct descendant of William I, after all, a guy better known to history as William the Conqueror. So, no, I'm not going to accept Great Britain as an example of a country that avoided being founded by a conquering king, given a conquering king is in the direct ancestry of your current monarch.
I'd be quite surprised if you didn't. In a nation of over 300 million people there are going to be large portions of it that you don't like. There are large portions I don't particularly like, either.
Of course they would. "Wait, you gave the vote to women, people without property, and the darkies?!"
In the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C., one of Jefferson's finest writings is engraved on the wall in huge letters for the world to see.
"I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and constitutions, but laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors."
So, yes, we would definitely be disowned by the Founding Fathers. But that's okay. Thomas Jefferson himself gave us permission to improve upon the model they left us. The Framers were horribly flawed human beings. Their great triumph was not that they gave us a Constitution, but they gave us a process: not a law fixed and unchanging for all time, but a means by which we could gradually make our country a shining beacon upon the hill. Rather beautiful, really.
Ah, I see. You were actually meaning to imply they'd be ashamed of how we conduct ourselves because we don't happen to agree with you? Well. Speaking as a Virginian, which is to say a member of one of the original Colonies that rebelled against George III, let me give you the traditional Virginian response to foreigners who want to tell us how we should rule ourselves: go away.
Maybe our system is correct, maybe it's not. Either way, we're not going to pay your opinion about how we should live the slightest tinker's dam of attention. Instead we'll talk with each other, our communities, our neighbors, and we'll fumble our way forward into the future together.
I'm sorry, I couldn't hear you over the death-knells of the millions of oppressed North Koreans, over the conflagration of the Jews and the Romany and the homosexuals and the dissenters in German-occupied Poland, over the cries of hunger of the one million Ukrainians who died in the Holodomor, the terrorized shrieks of the Armenians who were pursued by the Turks. We can go back even to the Mongol era, where the great Khan put large parts of Asia and Europe to the sword and unleashed a campaign of rape and terror the world had never seen before.
If you really think that an unarmed populace can quickly organize to resist an armed oppressor, then you are living in a state of utter delusion. In the K
I think that the real motives of the NRA has more to do with the liberty of companies to sell guns than with the liberty of people to own them.
If it ever come to the point were guns sales plummet 50% because people are 3D Printing them for a few dollars instead of purchasing them from gun manufacturers for a few 100s... I would be curious to see the NRA's reaction.
Just sayin...