The World’s First Fully 3D Printed Gun: The Liberator

The advent of 3D printing technology are one of the many major manifestations of the deepening information age or the digital economy.

Meet the world’s first entirely 3D Printed Gun: the Liberator

Writes Andy Greenberg at the Forbes

Eight months ago, Cody Wilson set out to create the world’s first entirely 3D-printable handgun.

Now he has.

Early next week, Wilson, a 25-year-old University of Texas law student and founder of the non-profit group Defense Distributed, plans to release the 3D-printable CAD files for a gun he calls “the Liberator,” pictured in its initial form above. He’s agreed to let me document the process of the gun’s creation, so long as I don’t publish details of its mechanics or its testing until it’s been proven to work reliably and the file has been uploaded to Defense Distributed’s online collection of printable gun blueprints at Defcad.org.

Update: Here’s my full account of Defense Distributed’s first test-firings of the Liberator, including firing it by hand.

All sixteen pieces of the Liberator prototype were printed in ABS plastic with a Dimension SST printer from 3D printing company Stratasys, with the exception of a single nail that’s used as a firing pin. The gun is designed to fire standard handgun rounds, using interchangeable barrels for different calibers of ammunition.

Technically, Defense Distributed’s gun has one other non-printed component: the group added a six ounce chunk of steel into the body to make it detectable by metal detectors in order to comply with the Undetectable Firearms Act. In March, the group also obtained a federal firearms license, making it a legal gun manufacturer.

The 3D printing technology continues to evolve. From simple tools, 3D printers have now covered complex products such as guns, guitars or even cars. 3D will increasingly make many tools “homemade”. Even healthcare trends will be influenced by 3D, I pointed to jawbone replacement and lately 3D technology has enabled printed lab grown human livers. 

The widening diffusion of 3D printers will reconfigure today’s economic system.

Notice that the current trend of technological innovation leads to decentralization, or bottom-up or niche markets. Such trend basically represents a diametrical opposite of the industrial age platform based on centralization, or top down or mass markets. Yet policymakers have been forcing upon the public, centralized policies that contradicts the direction of markets. So naturally, the struggle for domination will mean social frictions from these antipodal forces.

Take 3D printed guns; 3D will enable the public to autonomously design and manufacture their own guns even at home. So many if not all of the gun control regulations may be rendered “obsolete” by sheer technicalities. This comes even as the media passionately debates on them. 

With the proliferation of 3D printed guns, the next step governments will likely take is to regulate 3D. Such applies also to various vested interest groups, particularly manufacturing and other sectors that will be threatened by the 3D technology.

But since 3D printing or additive manufacturing, as the Wikipedia.org explains represents “a process of making a three-dimensional solid object of virtually any shape from a digital model” implementing social controls on a non-specific module would make such controls ambiguous and or ineffective. So technology will run rings around old industrial era statutes.

In short, the trend of technology advancements and politics have been in a collision course. There will be a winner and a loser.