Cody Wilson Defends 3D-Printing Guns at SXSW

It's worth doing just because the government doesn't like it

AUSTIN, TEX.—If you came to Cody Wilson's talk on "gun printing" at South by Southwest Interactive on Monday evening expecting to be confronted by some camo-wearing nutjob fresh out of his walled compound in the desert, you were sorely disappointed.

Wilson, one of the founders of the controversial group Defense Distributed, hardly fits the stereotype of a firearms enthusiast. He's a clean-cut, fiercely intelligent and rather likeable law student at the University of Texas in Austin who just happens to have a passion for, as he puts it, "demonstrating practical anarchy"—a passion that has, over the past year, gained him international notoriety as one of the architects of the "Wiki Weapons" project, which aspires to make working firearms created using 3D-printing technology accessible to any and all interested parties with the simple click of a mouse.