http://defcad.org/liberator

http://defcad.org/wp-content/plugins/download-monitor/downlo...

The ATF has actually said in Forbes that it is legal in the US to download and 3D print this file for personal use. Be careful to remain compliant with your local laws, however. Note that the name of this gun ("The Liberator") is a direct reference to the FP-45 Liberator, from World War II:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FP-45_Liberator

  The proposed intent was to air-drop these single-shot 
  weapons at concentration camps where internees would pick 
  up these weapons, overcome Nazi Guards, and hopefully 
  liberate the camp. ...

  The weapon was valued as much for its psychological warfare 
  effect as its actual field performance. It was believed 
  that if vast quantities of these weapons could be delivered 
  into Axis-occupied territory, it would have a devastating 
  effect on the morale of occupying troops. The plan was to 
  drop the weapon in such great quantities that occupying 
  forces could never capture or recover all the weapons. It 
  was hoped that the thought of thousands of these 
  unrecovered weapons potentially in the hands of the 
  citizens of occupied countries would have a deleterious 
  effect on enemy morale.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/05/05/meet-th...

A CNC requires specialised skill. Downloading and printing 3d doesn't.

Building guns with a CNC requires a lot of labour. Whereas you can imagine having a lab full of 3d printers being operated by a single pensioner.

3d printers look like they'll be generic and mass-produced. If so, in ten years there will be 3d printers everywhere. People sitting in refugee camps on the edge of hotzones won't have have difficulty getting access to them. At some time in the near future there will be a good-enough equivalent to the assault rifle that can be 3d printed. And drones. And other things.

The US has avoided pouring arms into Syria partly out of concern for the mess that it will leave behind afterwards. Also, they're wanting to avoid arming people hostile to the west. These arguments are valid now, but we can see the end of it.

I am sorry but really - people in a refugee camp, with no sanitation, insufficient food and clean water, and yet working 3D printers with plentiful supplies of plastic dust?

Refugee camps are by defintion, walkable from the worlds worst trouble spots, Access to weapons in the worlds worst trouble spots is not hard (http://www.the-star.co.ke/news/article-43343/police-recover-...).

3d printing of guns is a "first world problem" and will remain so forever. By the time a refugee camp has turned into a place that worries about 3d printing of anything, it has become a suburban utopia and the soccer mums can deal with the 3d printing labs.

So, while I agree that 3D Printing of guns is likely, for the near future to be a "First world problem" - I don't think I would make that prediction 30 years out, and certainly would never be so bold to say "Forever". I can certainly see a future in which Refugee Camps don't have Water, Food, or Sanitation, but do have a broad array of 3D Printers and base printing material.

Now if you can 3d-print a reliable rifle like an AK-47, that could get interesting.

    Now if you can 3d-print a reliable rifle like an AK-47,
    that could get interesting.

That's why I thought this was news. First they made the lower-receiver of a powerful gun. Now they've also succeeded in producing all the parts of a not-powerful gun. As I see it, they've got a piece of string over the chasm and will iterate from here to build a bridge.

I expect the barrel will be difficult (need a big machine and the rifling is probably tricky as you get to the top). The gas-reloading mechanism will take some work. But the lower-receiver is where most of the pressures where you might have doubt that plastic would work, and that's the bit they've already done.

And that's just reimplementing an existing gun with a design that was optimised for metalwork. After that we'll see a bunch of development in designs that are optimised for plastics and printing. That'll be your AK-47 equivalent.

As far as I understand it, the lower receiver on an AR-15 is actually a pretty trivial housing component, subject to almost no operational pressures, but interesting legally because it's where the gun's serial number happens to be stamped. (But I should note I don't really know much about AR-15s, just stuff I've read.)

The newness comes from being able to have an unskilled user setup a 3d printer, buy some ABS plastic to feed into it, download a file from the internet and begin producing guns. I don't know if this is a good or bad thing, but it's something to watch carefully.

I could imagine a future where it's almost like the wild west again, so many people who would harm you have guns that everyone carries one in a holster, and it's just considered normal, like wearing a sword all the time was normal for the samurai. This may end up being a likely future in the USA since the 2nd amendment is impossible to repeal.

Anyone who can afford a 3D printer and the material can already afford a cheap rifle that will work infinitely better.

extremely detailed paper: http://www.smallarmssurvey.org/fileadmin/docs/B-Occasional-p...

for something a little less dry and with pics of the guns see: http://www.vice.com/read/port-moresbys-little-raskols

the 3d printer angle is interesting from a tec perspective, but i cant help feel that this is more about a guy building himself in to the linus of guns then gun policy.

Convenience turns out to be a pretty big contributing factor in how many people do something!

My uncle built a similar cannon from some pipe and shot holes through sheet metal with it.

Doctorow's 'Makers'[2] is another, at a similar level.

Programmable molecular assemblers, if they're even possible (see: the various critics of Drexler), are so far beyond our current tech as to have almost unimaginable potential consequences, socially and otherwise.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Rule-34-Charles-Stross/dp/1937007669

[2] http://craphound.com/makers/

Could someone who had a printer and the downloaded file skip that part? Yes. But they could possibly be fined and jailed for up to 5 years.

http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/STATUTE-102/pdf/STATUTE-102-Pg3...

> “Everyone’s seen the movie ‘In The Line of Fire,’ where one of the great bad guys, [played by] John Malkovich, labored at making a gun out of plastic and wood so it could get through metal detectors and he could assassinate the president,” US Senator Charles Schumer said yesterday.

Besides, what non-authoritarian country considers cryptography to be ammunition?

Edit: Looked it up, if you got a license (for either hunting or a shooting club) you can legally have and buy weapons and munition.

Varies from state to state and even county to county. In NYC and many other places, if you're caught with bullets for a gun you aren't permitted to possess, you can be charged with felony possession of ammunition. This is particularly used against those with prior arrests and/or convictions on their record.

But, you know... I am not a lawyer.

Most states, assume 40+, and most of the population, say, 2/3rds+, don't live under such insane restrictions. Looking at the top states by population, California is #1, in the middle of the 8 worst for gun owners, and I'm pretty sure doesn't do this. Don't remember Illinois doing it either. New Jersey, maybe.

To finish, the Feds allow ammo by mail order, the only restriction is the usual "Stick an ORD-M label on the package" and ship by ground. That's about as unregulated as you can get except for the usual age limit.

As the saying goes: Hydrogen bombs don't kill people, people do.

The only country that's ever had a problem getting their first nuke to go boom as expected is North Korea (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_North_Korean_nuclear_test), and they may have gotten their act together in their second try 3 years later (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_North_Korean_Nuclear_Test; the lack of detected radionuclides after it makes one wonder).

I just don't understand what good these types of articles play or what practice purpose they serve, other than to just strike fear into the lay persons mind.

I think the intention of the article is to say: 'Look at this. What happens when we can 3D print anything we need? What happens then?' - A gun would be one of the hardest things to print due to the strength needed.

That you can print a gun is simply a byproduct of the fact that you can print anything, and it makes for a more compelling story than "3D printing is still improving".

Whereas individual gun owners, 5 million, a million more than before Newton, are the ones who belong to the NRA, and who, along with the gun owners who listen to us, are the ones who give it such political heft. Hatred towards "the NRA" is hatred towards the most politically active 1/20th of the nation's gun owners .

ADDED: Such as me, my father, my brothers, my oldest nephew, etc. You'll have to pardon us if we take this a bit personally.

Anyway, confusion over something so basic as who are the major players on the pro-RKBA side is one reason we don't pay much attention to ... negative sentiments such as you express.

The sole purpose of the NRA is to protect corporate profit: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mike-weisser/open-letter-to-wa...

OK, it was a bit complicated when there were large stocks of military surplus still to be liquidated, the NRA supported both the GCA of '68 but also the later relaxation of imports of military surplus. On the other hand, do you really think the members of the NRA find it damning that one of the Nominating Committee members is "a timber company executive in Alabama" like Mother Jones does??? You think we're a hot bed of hatred towards free enterprise?

Very curious that the NRA put George Kollitides on the Nominating Committee because of his history, but it's hardly out of whack to have one manufacturer and one dealer member each; in fact, that sounds about right.

Your claim that it having 2 out of 9 members from the industry means they "dominate" the NRA leadership does not stand up to examination. Heck, even the Atlantic article you cite says "the corporate-front theory is still probably too simplistic" and "It's very hard to disentagle the interests of the gun industry from the views of gun rights purists."

Indeed: no gun or ammo manufactures rather obviously means no guns and ammo for us to shoot. We've very interested in their health, we're in the same boat, attack them, you attack us. And the NSSF does quite a bit for gun owners in a whole range of areas including the political, although their focus is of course on the industry.

As for "sole purpose", I didn't bother to read the cited article, but do you mean the NRA's gun safety efforts, largely credited with decreasing the absolute number of fatal gun accidents by 1/4 at the same time the population and number of guns owned has increased by 1/2, was solely done to protect "corporate profit"? Sorry, I'm not that cynical.

http://www.smith-wesson.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/Produc...

But most people just use Duracoat: http://www.lauerweaponry.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=category.d...

As in the famous, and very real and functioning California legal Hello Kitty AR-15: https://www.google.com/search?q=hello+kitty+ar-15&tbm=is...

Or see this curated list: http://www.kittyhell.com/category/hello-kitty-guns/

To my eyes, most of these guns look to be real.

If your mind isn't completely closed, you might take a gander at: http://women.nra.org/

As for your more general point, since the members of the NRA don't agree with your positions on the consequences of an armed polity, we are indeed very much in alignment with the firearms industry.

Granted, we might be wrong, but you can't blithely substitute your opinion for the opinions of NRA members and then legitimately come to your overall opinion. Ah, it also goes without saying that we don't believe in the concept of false consciousness. We don't think anything is wrong with Kansas (especially now that it's under conservative state government for the first time ever and going even more pro-gun).

While you're taking a utilitarian vs. moral approach to this, its reminiscent of this definition which continues the theme of my last reply:

"Gun Control: the theory that a woman found dead in an alley, raped and strangled with her own panty hose, is somehow morally superior to a woman explaining to police how her attacker got that fatal bullet wound."

Or in mirror this variant I like on an old saying, "God created men and women, and Samuel Colt made them equal."

And it should go without saying that no friend of mine would call me a "dim bulb." Patronizing, I'd say, which continues the theme, per Wiktionary, the etymology is: "Old English patron (reborrowed from Latin patronus, derived from Latin pater (“father”)) +‎ -ize (“(verb ending)”)."

Haha, strangled with her own panty hose huh? Listen, I don't know what gun people get off to, but alley-way rape occurs about as frequently as mass shootings. Almost all sexual assaults are perpetrated by known acquaintances of the victim. Adding a gun to the mix is only going to make things worse.

And you are being a bit disingenuous. The overwhelming majority of gun owners are males. It is 100% an image thing, just like driving a big truck or getting a "badass" tattoo.

All I'm saying is, if you don't think corporations are above profiting hugely off of hysteria and fear, you've never watched the nightly news.

According to Wikipedia according to the Department of Justice, 26% of rapes are by strangers, which doesn't fit my definition of the inverse of "almost all".

And while most guns may be technically owned by men, that hardly matters if they're available for the women in the household to use in self-defense.

And again with the profit; can you not understand that the vast majority of us just don't give a damn that the firearms industry makes a healthy profit? This is an argument that has weight with gun grabbers, not gun owners.

As ... Massad Ayoob, I think, put it, we're talking about the equivalent of visiting the hospital, noticing a complete stranger who needs a lot of money for treatment, and writing a check for $250,000 plus or minus and putting it in his pocket. I'm only willing to do it for "me and mine", i.e. my friends and blood relatives, especially since I don't have the sort of money that's required for a competent defense against a serious felony charge, no matter how bogus it might be.

And you might want to re-read the above, an ideal, if it comes to it, is "a woman explaining to police how her attacker got that fatal bullet wound" (better if the attacker is not killed), not a Good Samaritan explaining. We're all ultimately responsible for our own self-protection.

Guns aren't, and never have been, the thing that you need to regulate to keep down gun crime.

Bullets are.

If you have a gun, you have a gun for life. But if you don't have a never-ending supply of bullets, you might as well have a paperweight.

Bullets are harder to get and harder to make than guns will ever be. Being able to make your own gun means nothing unless you have something to put in it.

https://www.google.com/search?q=bullet+mold&rls=com.micr...

You might have meant "cartridges". But they are not hard either, or even necessary. Black powder is pretty easy too. Primers are a bit harder (still easier than a gun, just need to know how), but you can make rifles that fire without primers (google "matchlock" or "flintlock").

Furthermore, bullets are much harder to regulate than guns. Plenty of people have access to bullets and can make 50 of them disappear, claiming they shot them.

"But if you don't have a never-ending supply of bullets,"

Why a never-ending supply? You only need 5 bullets at most for each robbery or murder you commit. A box of 50 can last a criminal career.

Can you?

The reason guns work so well for robbing is because they work really well at threatening. This is why you can rob a store with an airsoft gun or with children's toys with the orange bit removed. Toys that look like guns work great, but guns that look like toys? Not so much

The fact that it seems incredibly unlikely that they will become more than single-shot anytime soon basically means that even firing the gun during the robbery isn't going to be a very good way to rob a store.

The best you could manage is to fire your single round into the ceiling to demonstrate that what you had was a gun, and then hope the clerk doesn't realize that you can't fire any more shots. Meanwhile if you do that then you have just blown any chance at your robbery being uneventful and unnoticed.

You would honestly have better luck trying to rob a store with a jacket and your index finger. Considering the availability of jackets and index fingers, you would have to be a complete idiot to choose the printed gun instead of your index finger.

For robberies "looks like a gun" is what is important, unless your goal is to actually murder as well. "looks like a gun" has been something you could always print and it has yet to become a problem for society.

No, I'd be more tempted by a good old service revolver, actually.

3D printing the parts only slightly increases the convenience from using a drill press and an '80%' receiver.

I am against control in general because it limits creativity and innovation but I am not sure it is in everyone's interest to let weapons flow freely and without any possible limitation.

Some forms of DRM (XBOX360, for example) are tricky enough that it prevents a few people from bothering. Some forms of DRM are so obnoxious that they encourage people to pirate so they can make use of the content.

I can't see 3D-Printer-Controls being anything but cumbersome, easily circumvented, annoyances.

It's important to note that people who want guns can easily make bad guns already (or, with a bit of decent machinery, they can make good guns) or they can buy illegal guns.This is true even in the UK with our strict laws.

Controls on 3d printers may just shift the problem somewhere else. Scanners and photocopiers have controls about scanning / copying money. This makes it tricky to copy banknotes. A photocopied / laser printed bank note is a lousy forgery. It's really obviously fake. And criminals in England tend to forge £1 coins - about 2% of these coins are forged. Some of them are obvious slugs, coloured tin. Others are better quality - using the same planchets and thus they work in machines.