The Future of Gun Ownership
Field & Stream’s Gun Nuts blog has been covering (here and here) the recent story of Defense Distributed, a group seeking to create the first 3-D printable gun. Defense Distributed has coined this project the ‘WikiWeapon” and it is outlined in the video embedded in this post. Simply put, the goal is to create a 3-D printable gun which would safely fire one round of .22LR ammunition. The designs for this gun would then be spread through free file sharing around the world.
Defense Distributed has libertarian goals in mind with this project. They believe their work is helping to break down one of the last frontiers of tyranny i.e. the control of manufacturing. A recent twist in the story was the revocation of their lease of a 3-D printer from it’s manufacturer.
In a letter to (Defense Distributed Founder Cody) Wilson dated Sept. 26, the legal counsel for Stratasys Inc. informed Wilson that it was cancelling his lease of the company’s uPrint SE printer. “It is the policy of Stratasys not to knowingly allow its printers to be used for illegal purposes,” the company wrote, noting that Wilson lacked a federal license for manufacturing firearms.
Wilson has maintained that he doesn’t need a license, because he’s not planning to sell the weapon. But Stratasys was not impressed. Wired’s Danger Room blog reports that the company’s representatives showed up at his door to seize the device. Now he’ll have to find another printer—and according to Danger Room, he’s considering obtaining a manufacturing license even though he doesn’t believe it’s legally required. Meanwhile, his group has posted Stratasys’ letter online with the caption, “Imagine if your biggest part in the human drama was to stand in the way of an innovation.”
As a believer that the public ownership of guns is indeed a check against government tyranny, my inclination is to support a project like this. The WikiWeapon has been compared to the Liberator Guns of WWII, designed to be air-dropped to insurgent forces and used to kill occupying soldiers and acquire their weapons.
With Liberator pistols the goal was to create morale problems for troops in occupied countries who would know that thousands of these could be in the hand of the population. This was a real concern in WWII but of course the problem in the most unstable parts of the world today is too many guns.
Beyond guns, it’s interesting to speculate how much power the public would have if this type of manufacturing could become more diverse. The first item that comes to my mind is medicine. Imagine how the world would change if access to medicine was as cheap as buying certain chemicals in bulk and having a friend safely whip up your meds in his basement? Technology is an amazing thing.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=AQ6Q3BfbVBU#!]
I don’t think it’s the manufacturing costs that are keeping drug prices high. The issue being patents and such. Which, of course, is what makes 3D printing the real wild west. Do design patents become as hard to enforce as artistic copyright? If so, what does that mean?Report
It’s one thing to replicated a movie or a song; consequence if a couple of the frames/notes/bits are out of place. It’s quite another to replicate an object; a nut, a bolt, a drug, a gun…
Of course I don’t want anyone to get hurt, but I already know I’m going to get a lovely feeling of schadenfreude when these things start blowing up in people’s faces.Report
Between here and Star Trek Replicators are these things.
There are several other things between here and Star Trek Replicators, of course… but this is one of the early ones.Report
It’s a racket.Report
So’s marine surveyorship, but you still need it to get insurance.Report
It’s only partially a racket. I have to shepherd my companies products through safety testing. Most the safety regulations have their basis on trying to solve real problems that at one point resulted in killing someone. The biggest problem with the system is that it costs a lot to get your product tested. For large run items it’s easy to spread that cost out. But for smaller run things it can add significant cost. This puts any small company that is competing against big ones at a significant disadvantage.Report
Jaybird, you might enjoy this essay on the economics of Star Trek and anti-Star-Trek.
http://www.peterfrase.com/2010/12/anti-star-trek-a-theory-of-posterity/Report
Given that markets are a great way to distribute scarce resources, it pretty much follows that engineering scarcity to maintain markets is… like, the least free market solution evah.Report
But not necessarily unappealing, to those with a certain frame of mind. You know how a lot of people say they’re “pro-market”, but in reality are “pro-business”? This would hypothetically be one of those cases.Report
More likely we’ll end up with the ‘Makers’ from Transmetropolitan – too busy synthesizing drugs to alter their own AI consciousnesses to be of much use to us.Report
At least some drugs are actually really expensive because of manufacturing costs and/or the lack of synthetic precursors. The lack of a good total syntheis for taxol for instance, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paclitaxel_total_synthesis
makes it so that each saline bag for a chemo round comes out to 1000-2000 dollars.
(which as a complete aside, makes the whole ‘we may find the cure for cancer in the rainforest’ meme so annoying. It does us no good if can only be found the rainforest in small quantities.)Report
There are plenty that are cheap to manufacture, though…like meth.Report
Mike, Cory Doctorow wrote a really fascinating piece about the way that technology like this could dramatically reshape ideological coalitions across the board, and how different reactions to it could play out. He called it “The Coming Civil War over general purpose computing”, and I’d suggest you check it out.Report
Forget these hi-tek 3-D printer thingummies. I’ve seen weapons made with my own eyes, in Peshawar, in Pakistan. Using technology out of the 19th century, these smiths can forge up a 20th century gun, a far more robust weapon out of scrap metal.
The problem isn’t the weapon. It’s the munition. The world is chock full of weapons. Reliable bullets, different story.Report
Reliable bullets can be made at home – but definitely not by a 3D printer.
This whole thing is a farce. They’re talking about producing a *single shot* weapon. (If you’re lucky – any small void or resin bubble in the printing process gets a gun likely to burst in your hand). Spending over $9000 for a printer to make something like that strikes me as ridiculous.Report
If you can buy powder and primers, sure you can make bullets. OK, perhaps you could manage the powder, with a little chemistry background or going off an internet recipe (black powder if not smokeless). But if you think you can make primers in your basement, you’re a more daring chemist than I.Report
They also mention on their site that they are hoping with time to create a blunderbuss-type design that would only require gunpowder and could be filled with whatever is on hand. Also, those could probably rely on a basic metal pipe for the barrel.
The point is, obviously the technology is tricky, but I never underestimate the ability of people to design amazing things these days.Report
Just gunpowder, no primer; we’re talking basically about a flintlock here? I have no doubt you could build a flintlock (and ammo for it) in your basement, if that’s what you’re going for. People have done THAT well before the invention of 3d printing, although I suppose 3d printing might make a few of the fiddly bits easier.Report
Call me an snob and but I would probably never trust a drug that someone made in their basement while following a patent application.
Unless said friend also had a PhD in biochem, nanotech, phramacology, etc. And even then I would be cautious. At least if a pharma-drug is defective, you can sue the company that made it. You can’t recover as much from Bob’s basement drugs.Report
Who do you buy your weed from?Report
Honestly, no one.
I’ve smoked in the past but not that often and it usually does not do anything for me.
My preferred intoxicants are beer and wine. Largely for taste reasons.Report
You don’t need to actually synthesize the THC in marijuana. Marijuana is a plant.Report
ND,
The thinking from my end would be that if we got to the point where we could manufacture drugs at home the technology would be equivelant to professional manufacturing.Report
I think that will be a long-time coming. Drugs are a lot more complicated to produce than firearms and a 3-D printer won’t cut it.
Though I am surprised at what the 3-D printers can do.Report
I participated in a few of the Occupy protests here in LA.
In several of them, we were facing off against the LAPD riot squads with their nightsticks, body armor, shotguns, tear gas, and helicopters.
I kept thinking to myself- “y’know what would level the playing field here? A single shot .22 caliber homemade gun!”
Then I shouted “WOLVEREEEEEENS!”
Which was cool, except then a few of the other people started whispering and edging away from me.
Quislings.Report
A single-shot .22 caliber homemade gun against riot police in a faceoff… bad idea.
100,000 single-shot .22 caliber homemade guns in the hands of a populace who really wants to kill 1,000 members of the Stasi?
Everybody takes off their armor when the go home.Report
Have you watched the movie “The Lives Of Others”?
I still wonder why there weren’t more people found in ditches with rags in their mouths.Report
Love that movie.Report
Let’s hope they don’t also want to kill 1,000 Tutsis. Sadly one cannot rely on a mob to remain nobly liberal.Report
Hell, if they only kill 1,000 Tutsis that’s a order of magnitude less damage than they do with machetes.Report
Does having a gun printer preclude you from having a machete as well? Is there something I’m missing?Report
Nah, you’ll be able to print machetes too 🙂Report
Whew!Report
Provided you only want to cut butter with them. 😉Report
Hey, when I make toast around here, I go BIG.Report
Pass legislation keeping these printers out of the hands of the Tutsis and call that a victory for human rights.Report
I kid, I kid.
Actually I am a firm proponent of the idea that citizens should own weapons, for the very reason Mike Dwyer mentions. (I still retain traces of my Republican self).
I don’t for a moment think that armed citizens are a serious match for the US Army, but I have seen that merely being willing and able to inflict losses causes even a vastly superior army to pause and consider negotiations.Report
Remember that a lot of those armed citizens are experienced hunters & US Army & USMC veterans with rifles that are a good deal more powerful than an M-16.
The US Army going against it’s own citizens would be a whole different battle than what they face in Iraq & Afghanistan.Report
Everybody takes off their armor when the go home.
Fortunately, this is precisely what’s happened in Syria.Report
Or less snarkily, people always seem to forget that when there are a bunch of armed people who are against those in power, there are always a bunch of armed people who are with those in power. Usually, the latter outnumber (or at least outgun) the former.
In America in particular, there seems to be a strange notion that when the revolution comes, every citizen with a gun will be on the same side.Report
The Syrian civilian population was considerably less armed than the Iraqi general population.
The rate of private gun ownership in Syria is 3.92 firearms per 100 people
The rate of private gun ownership in the United Kingdom is 6.72 firearms per 100 people
The rate of private gun ownership in Libya is 15.52 firearms per 100 people
The rate of private gun ownership in France is 31.22 firearms per 100 people
The rate of private gun ownership in Iraq is 34.22 firearms per 100 people
The rate of private gun ownership in the United States is 88.82 firearms per 100 people
Syria is about as disarmed as any nation can be, lower than the U.K. (still more than Japan, granted).
That old saw about dictators disarming their populace isn’t quite universally true, but Syria is a good case for seeing it in action.Report
Yeah, I was being snarky, but it remains true that when the civilians started shooting, the security forces didn’t run away (or if they ran away, it was just to their howitzers).
Libya is another good example of what I mean: sure, sometimes it turns out that the protesters have guns. Usually, so do the people they’re protesting against. And often, so do the counter-protesters as well.
1000 guns against riot police usually just means civil war.Report
One thing about dictators, they still know what the phrase “total war” means.
About the only thing you can do in total war is die, and hope that eventually enough guys on the offense wind up killing their buddy’s grandma that they get tired of it.Report
True ’nuff.Report
“1000 guns against riot police usually just means civil war.”
Sure. but 1,000 guns in the hands of people who don’t mind putting a bullet in the back of the police’s heads on a quiet street… that’s something totally different. These aren’t meant for direct confrontation. in the Liberator pistol model they are meant for assasination and acquisition of heavier firepower.Report
I’m not sure how that’s going to work, but even if it did, it still remains that there will be plenty of folks with Liberator pistols who are killing the liberators with a bullet in the back of the head on a quiet street.
My point is, when things get to the point of armed insurrection, things have gotten to the point where both sides have armed citizens. Hence, civil war.Report
Wikipedia seems to think that the Liberator pistols, in the end, never saw more than limited distribution, and that there isn’t any evidence that it provided to be an effective tool for resistance/insurgency purposes.
I’m not sure how well the scenario you’re imagining will match reality. Police officers walk alone or in small numbers down quiet streets in a relatively low state of alertness now, to be sure. But police in a liberal democracy with a functioning civic society act rather differently than those in an oppressive tyranny with a large chunk of the population engaged in active, violent resistance to their presence. Not that an armed populace is useless, or that it’s by any means impossible to kill them under those circumstances, but it seems one might be better off thinking along the lines of “Improvised Explosive Device” rather than “Single Shot Small Caliber Pistol”.Report
Like I said above, big difference between a rebel who first held a rifle 2 weeks ago, and one who has been hunting his whole life, or who is a military vet.Report
That old saw about dictators disarming their populace isn’t quite universally true, but Syria is a good case for seeing it in action.
What about the old saw that when push comes to shove armed civilians will win a Glorious Revolution against their governmental oppressors here in the US, the most heavily armed government in history?
Does anyone really believe that private gun ownership is a check on the expansion of governmental power? If anything, it seems to me to act as an accelerant.Report
If you’re concerned about government overreach, I’m curious as to how many more guns per capita you need to slow the thing down, yes. More than 100 per 100 citizens? I dunno.
We’re certainly a whole lot more armed than anybody else. Hell, we have almost twice as many guns as the Swiss.Report
If the government is in an arms race with it’s citizens, I think that says something about the government.
And about the citizens…
And none of it is good…Report
The problem is, regardless of what the government does, the citizens are going to end up in an arm’s race with other citizens. And the citizens who side with the government will, in most cases, be better armed, unless another government comes in and arms the citizens against the government.
Like I said above, there’s a fantasy I see any time the idea of having guns to protect against tyranny comes up, that involves the belief that when citizens use their guns against the government, all of the citizens with guns will be on the same side. They won’t. It doesn’t work that way. It never does. Unless the government is an occupying power (say, France in Algeria), one man’s revolution is always another man’s civil war.Report
This seems exactly right to me. When I see the kinds of yahoos on the internet who talk about how important guns are, I am incredibly thankful that the government maintains a massive advantage in the firearms department. The easiest way to get me to hand over more power to the state is to tell me rednecks are manufacturing guns at home.Report
Ryan,
Doesn’t that assume that the government will use their guns more responsibly than the rednecks?
And for the record (since several people seem to be missing the point here), this project is designed for insurgent groups in places where it is hard to get weapons. Fortunately that isn’t a problem for American citizens.Report
A) Yeah, it does assume that. That may be wrong, and there are good libertarian reasons not to EVER trust the state with guns, but I grew up a smart, liberal, orientation-ambiguous kid in a fairly redneck town, and I know for a fact that these are some truly awful people. I’m not a snob because I’ve never seen the heartland; I’m a snob because I grew up there.
B) I guess I also missed the point. It’s not particularly clear, as I look back over the post, that that’s what these guns are intended for. As someone who does his level best to avoid gun culture, I have little to no context for this kind of thing.Report
When you say ‘these are some truly awful people’ – I assume you know this is a gross stereotype, right? Most of my friends could easily be classified as rednecks and if my wife is to be believed, I also fit the bill.
There are indeed ‘truly awful’ rednecks, but at least around here we have another word for them. There are also ‘truly awful’ white collar folks, as I’m sure you know. Having hunted public land for 20 years and visited many a gun club, I’ve actually had more problems with the doctors and lawyers and guns than I have ever had with rednecks and guns.Report
+1. I run into poachers a lot. They aren’t nearly the dangerous shit on wheels that a man using a gun as a substitute penis is.Report
Ryan,
Okay, you grew up in somewhat assholeville.
I’ve seen true assholeville
And there are plenty of places that are NOT assholeville(vermont?)
… and they’re all redneck.
Your experiences do not generalize here. I can certainly sympathize, but, please!Report
Now now. Be fair to Ryan. Everyone knows that rural folk are despicable assholes, and not to be trusted. Especially if they are poor and under-educated.Report
I’m not sure if everyone knows that. I know that.Report
3-D printed guns aren’t nearly as socially destabilizing as 3-D printed cat toys.Report
Neither are as socially disruptive as 3-D printed real dollsReport
Ugh….Report
The first item that comes to my mind is medicine. Imagine how the world would change if access to medicine was as cheap as buying certain chemicals in bulk and having a friend safely whip up your meds in his basement?
It would be disastrous, as there would be no incentive to fund the development of new drugs.Report
Sure there would.
There would just not be an economic incentive. If there is no scarcity, the whole underlying premise of markets is gonzo. You can’t build things off of economic incentives if there is no material anything to be gained, because you already can have everything you want.
Well, except illicit things, I suppose.Report
In a truly post-scarcity world, sure. I didn’t realize that was the hypothetical, though.Report
We’re part-way there already!Report
Bad link.
Bad link, very bad! No link-y treats for you!Report
” Imagine how the world would change if access to medicine was as cheap as buying certain chemicals in bulk and having a friend safely whip up your meds in his basement? ”
I thought meth labs were a BAD idea?
(I see that Dan Miller already mentioned meth, but not quite the same way)Report
Okay this is ridiculous. Yes, there are composite guns. Even very big ones. Do you know why they work? Because they are made with FIBER REINFORCED plastic using high-tech long fibers wrapped around the barrel at carefully engineered angles (and even then there are some metallic parts).
Now, it may be possible to make a single shot weapon out of ABS thermoplastic, but it would require a lot of material to meet the pressure requirements for a gun barrel, even for a single use with .22 cal. And making it out of 3-D printed thermoplastic? With all the weak seam lines oriented so any little flaw will lead to catastrophic failure? I would NOT try using this gun (other than maybe to throw at someone if no rocks were handy).Report
Just as an FYI, I believe that the idea behind the Defense Distributed project is not to print the ENTIRE gun from a 3D printer, but rather just the lower receiver. In the US, the lower receiver is the part of the gun which is considered to be the “firearm” and is the legally regulated part (and the part with the serial number). The rest of the gun is supposed to be made with unregulated aftermarket parts.Report
Interesting distinction.
“The rest of the gun is supposed to be made with unregulated aftermarket parts”
Ah, amateurs assembling firearms from plastic and after market parts. Can’t imagine what could go wrong there…Report
True, and I think that if the government really wanted to crack down on private gun ownership they would find a way to prevent folks from buying such things as barrels, magazines, hammers, etc. However, I could also envision a scenario where there exist gunsmiths who aren’t amatuers but are also not official, say, Remington employees, who could reliably assemble a gun using a printed reciever and mail order parts. But that’s the overly earnest engineer in me talking. 🙂Report
And you think that, if 3d printed lower receivers become plausible, the government can’t start regulating the rest of it, too?Report
The true radical nature of technology is rarely grasped at first, because the technology is usually intended to mimic existing stuff more cheaply, rather than redefine it.
Which is to say that the true impact of 3d printing, I think will be staggering. I just don’t know that it is visible at this point.
Something tells me, though, guns can already be made pretty cheaply and easily; most gun prohibitions are astounding failures.
I am thinking more in the direction of- we buy millions of tons of stuff from the 3rd world, where manufacturing labor is cheap enough to overcome the high cost of fuel to ship it.
Will 3d printing turn mass production on its head and allow decentralized production of small runs of individulized items?
I don’t know, honestly.
But cool to imagine.Report
3D printing has a lot of potential. It allows protoypes to be scaled up automatically for certain types of products or even just models of products.
It could easily be used for small runs of cool items. For instance, ABS thermoplastic is what they use to make Legos. Image getting to design your own Lego model of nearly anything – including special non-standard pieces – and then just uploading the parts spec to a computer and entering your payment method. A week later, Bingo! The whole set is delivered to your doorstep.
If you ask me, that’s a much more compelling business plan than Defense Distributed’s.Report
Why delivered?
At first, Xerox machines replaced armies of typists, and a local copier place could deliver reams of letters a day after you dropped off the original.
Today every office allows us to print the same right at the source.
Maybe we all have cheap home printers, making simple stuff (I need a replacement knob for my oven so I order the file from the mfr., download it and print it);
But maybe a corner fabricator has a big commercial quality printer, and he can make anything you can order- and there are websites like Google Sketchup where you can find free 3d models.
http://www.google.com/intl/en/sketchup/3dwh/
This is where 1 is as cheap as 1,000, defeating the scale advantage of mass production. Sort of like how there is a cottage industry of artists now using graphics programs to create individual art, without the middle man of salons and art dealers.
In my dreams, William Morris’ and the Bauhaus’ dream of melding craft and design is realized.Report
Eventually the price of these printers will probably reach the point that most middle class folk can own one, but its not there yet. And right now buying the cartridges for it isn’t quite as easy as getting ink or paper. (Nor will dealing with printer jams be anywhere near as easy for most people).
If there is a fabricator on the corner, you could obviously use that. However a lot of us don’t live that close to even small downtowns where might set up. Until there is a countrywide network, if I were setting up the ‘Maek Your Legos’ website, I’d do it like Amazon and have product shipped from the closest facility in my organization. Eventually that might turn into the affiliate seller thing where a local outlet is a source option, but the infrastructure has to develop.Report
As in I’ve seen one of 12 on the east coast. (bitchin’ lab our Veterans Hospital’s got, by the way!)Report
Yeah, fucking great, we get medicine out of the deal.
You wouldn’t be cheering the ability to fabricate a nuclear weapon this way, so why in GOD’s NAME are you cheering the ability to fabricate medical equipment?
Bioterrorism is fucking scary shit.Report
I’d like to note a few things. The liberator gun was caliber 45. It’s a big bullet, the same one that the GIs used in their 1911 semi automatic pistols. Defense Distributed is still a long way from “printing” a weapon that could handle the pressure of a .45 cal round. Frankly, in a test between 1,000 folks holding a single shot .22 pistol vs. a bunch of riot cops in body armor, polycarb shields, tear gas, rubber bullets, etc., I’d bet on the cops. It’d be a bit different it the 1,000 protestors had a single shot .45. That being said, the PURPOSE of the liberator was to provide a means for the resistance to kill a solder and take his better weapon.Report
Damon – You are indeed corect on the caliber and the limitations there. I would note a few things though:
– The gun could be designed to work with a few readily-available metal parts. A short length of metal pipe for the barrel. A short piece of metal added to the receiver. Etc.
– During the Seige of Boonesborough in 1778 the defenders fashioned a cannon out of a hollow-out log re-enforced with metal bands. They were able to successfully fire it once before it exploded.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Boonesborough#Siege
It’s important to rememer we’re talking one shot, not a multi-use weapon. Also, it would be ridiculous to use these against riot police in a direct confrontation. They are designed for assasination and covert kills. Here’s a good video on the subject.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwjyQt_fvzIReport
I agree Mike.Report
A bucket of gasoline and a match can overcome a fully armed soldier in body armor. There are some dangerous folks out there who would never bother to build a gun.Report