What 3-D Printing Means for Gun Rights
Cutting-edge technology meets the right to keep and bear arms.
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Although his web site’s manifesto is full of quotes explicitly about weapons, he talks readily about inspiration from Michel Foucault and Alain Badiou and says that his project is really about the “liberation of information” from what “I perceive as reactionary institutional regimes." While amused by Rep. Israel, he points out the only real problems his project have faced have come not from the public sector, but the private, like Indiegogo and Stratasys.
Anything about guns can always be counted on to excite at least a dedicated minority, and guns continue to make news on both the personal and policy level. Just yesterday, a man in Oregon made national news by using a gun to kill two people and himself at a mall. The same day, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit decided that Second Amendment rights applied outside the home as well as in it. Despite the occasional bursts of limited mania such stories elicit—and that the 3D printing of guns story has elicited—for the most part Americans seem to have come to peace with the fact that guns exist, lots of people have them, and the law can’t stop that—and doesn’t need to.
The 3D gun printing story is a characteristic postmodern brouhaha, with everyone correct from their perspective. Rep. Israel is correct that home 3D printing endangers the regime of control he represents and serves. The hearty old school Maker is right that 3D printing is a change in convenience, not in kind; that people always had both the means and to some degree the legal right to arm themselves with homemade weapons. Wilson in a video on the Wiki Weapons site offered the metaphor of the printing press; it’s apt. People could always write things down, and the printing press just made it easier. Some kinds of easier, though, deposit you in a new world entirely, even if someone who customarily uses CNC routers to make things in their warehouse might think it’s no big deal.
That said, those cynical about triumphalist Maker ideology are correct that industrial civilization already supplies us with plentiful and affordable guns even before we all became decentralized information age self-driven manufacturing plants, or whatever the latest 3D printing rhetoric claims, and such regular products are still more affordable than current 3D printer tech, which might never be able to build a completely usable gun.
Wilson may be doing something others have done, but he seems to realize technologies need their ideological snake oil salesmen, playing his game of media, style, and self-consciously dangerous ideas. He sees himself and his team as beyond politics, merely “children of the ‘Net” dramatizing the fact that information wanting to be free now has physical implications that can’t be denied or stopped. He promises new 3D printing approaches to making lower receivers for weapons will be coming from Wiki Weapons within the week.
Lawmakers such as Israel will keep fighting rearguard actions based on fear of the alarming but unstoppable changes wrought by this new technology. With 3D printing, ideas are manifest in the material world with unprecedented ease. Thus, the idea of keeping guns out of anyone’s hands is becoming an immaterial phantasm.
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Is the gun in the pic from the Clint Eastwood movie In the Line of Fire?
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Yes.
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the Clint Eastwood movie In the Line of Fire
Thank goodness that government employee jumped in front of that bullet shot by a government employee to save another government employee.
Real nail biter that movie was.
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which picture you are mentioning, in this whole post i did not find any picture to analysis for such gun.
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I'll just leave this here for interested parties:
Building Your Own 3D Printer
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Anyone with a drill press could make the one shot gun like the one in the picture.
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Anyone with a dremel and a pair of pliers can make a submachine gun.
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Anyone with a potato and some foil can make a bong.
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Anyone with an apple can make a pipe.
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Anyone with a uterus can make a baby.
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No, you gotta have ovaries.
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That said, those cynical about triumphalist Maker ideology are correct that industrial civilization already supplies us with plentiful and affordable guns[...]
Remember the U.K., 1997.Don't fucking fool yourself.
[...] and such regular products are still more affordable than current 3D printer tech, which might never be able to build a completely usable gun.
The point is to show that the anti-gun regulations that purport to disarm the population are rapidly becoming irrelevant. Besides, what makes you think 3D printing tech is not able to pass the hurdle of price competition against settled industries? Those industries are still big targets for big, intrusive government, whereas guerrilla manufacturing is almost impossible to detect and control. -
You can already make an AK receiver out of an old shovel.
The easiest thing to make would be a full-auto sten-type submachine gun.
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That's very impressive; thanks for the link.
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That was cool.
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Please, Rep Israel, make (or have someone competent make for you) a derringer chambered in .45 and fire it. Then we can call you Stumpy.
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Thanks. You said it with fewer words and more effectively illustrated.
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I have built stuff with a 3D printer, and I have a hard time believing that a gun made with a 3D printer will be useful for much more than shooting buckshot.
There are inherent physical properties of plastic that make plastic guns not terribly likely to handle a high speed bullet.
Worse, 3D printed plastic has seams since it is printed in layers rather than in a mold. Any shear force along the grain of the printed material is likely to make cracks.
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I've gone on record that the idea of 3D printing of guns is complete bullshit. Yet, everyone, from Congress to the imbeciles at the Foreign Policy Association is convinced otherwise. I guess you'd have to actually have played with the technology to understand why it is baloney for this purpose.
http://scottlocklin.wordpress......g-of-guns/ -
Israel should 3D print a dildo to stick up his ass.
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Uh, wouldn't a person seeking to abuse such an undetectable firearm also need undetectable ammo? That's going to be hard too.
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Plus, you know, it is already legal in most states to walk down the street with a gun concealed (undetectble) anyway.
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Half way there: Mythbusters #84
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Ceramic bullets?
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Unless, of course, they could shatter...!
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In the grand scheme of things this is more about the threat to the "establishment" by local, small-batch manufacturing utilizing inexpensive 3D printing technology and very basic raw materials (e.g. plastic or metal powder) than it is about a threat to "Security Theater".
Positioning it as a "GUNS / WHAT ABOUT THE CHILDREN?" issue is just a tried and true way to get all the bandwagon-jumping do-gooders and nanny-staters emotionally invested and regurgitating the talking points.
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A firearm has to be made of high-melting point materials. Unless you are going to keep a blast furnace in your house, that is a huge barrier to making an assault rifle at home.
I'm thinking that a 3D printer would have to come with a 3D carver that made metal gun parts out of blocks of steel.
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The first and second amendments use the same language and both can be construed as either an individual or collectivist right, depending on the politics of the person construing them. More people have been killed with the misapplication of knowledge than the misapplication of bullets throughout history.
If it is constitutional to prohibit someone from keeping and bearing a weapon outside of their homes unless they are active militia, then it is equally constitutional to prohibit someone from expressing themselves outside of the home unless actively employed as a reporter.
The latter is absurd. Why do people consider the former not to be?
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Computer, print me up an 1860 Henry and an 1866 Winchester Yellowboy.
Because leverguns rule.
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6Px6RSL9Ac
This might not be the video I wanted to show you guys, but it still illustrates the point that 3d printing isn't just about plastic. 3d metal printing, if made widely available and better overall, could easily provide cheap and plentiful firearms.
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No, in fact, it couldn't. Not even a little bit.
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he says. And after publicizing his intent to use a leased 3D printer from Stratasys to print weapons, the company repossessed its http://www.cheapbeatsbydreonau.com/ machine.
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The photos, for example, portray Levinson in an orange jumpsuit like those worn by detainees at the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay. The family received them via email in April 2011. In each photo, he held a http://www.cheapbeatsbydretrad.....dio-1.html sign bearing a different message.