Ahead of writing up this brief report the best I can promise is that I will try REALLY hard to stay objective …..
So in the last few hours this link has been sent to me ‘a few’ times. It’s getting, and will get, a great deal of attention over the next week or two, because what it reveals is that Cody Wilson, controversial person #1 in 3DP land and founder of Defense Distributed, is one step away from completing his stated mission of producing a fully 3D printed hand gun. Fully that is, with one tiny exception, the firing pin, which is made of metal.
According to Greenberg the last step this coming week involves some final testing to prove it will “work reliably” [biting tongue so hard I think it’s bleeding!] and the files are then subsequently uploaded to Defcad.org.
The gun is called, wait for it, “the Liberator” [biting even harder] and comprises 16 3D printed parts plus the pin. Apparently it also contains a wad of metal in its body but this is only to comply with the Undetectable Firearms Act that Wilson has to meet as a legal gun manufacturer with a federal firearms license and has nothing whatsoever to do with the operation or function of the gun itself.
Greenberg also outlines the 8 month development, controversy and outright opposition that Wilson has faced since founding Defense Distributed. While there is a great deal of opposition, there are others that defend what he is doing to the hilt, take for example Jason Doege, who submitted this comment to 3DPI a couple of days ago in response to one of Mike’s articles that suggested Wilson was making the world a scarier place with his project: “I don’t think what people like Cody are doing is making the world a scarier place. What they are doing is exposing how scary the world really is to improve the quality of discourse. Cody is doing what most anyone could do if they were so inclined. What he is “really” doing is doing what he is doing in the light of day, in clear sight of us all, so we can better understand some of the ramifications of 3D printing technology.”
This is going to rumble on, and on ……
Source & Image credit: Forbes
