3D gun printing advocate Defense Distributed has emerged triumphant in a legal battle to freely publish online blueprints that could allow users to manufacture firearms.
That didn't take long -- just days after its first test fire, the Liberator, a 3D-printed pistol designed by Defense Distributed founder Cody Wilson, has caught the attention of the federal government. It's hardly a surprise: the arm's blueprints were downloaded more than 100,000 times since going live on DefCAD this week. It's not the amount of downloads that's causing trouble, though, it's who is downloading them. In a letter from the US State Department, Wilson was told that it's a violation of the International Traffic in Arms Regulations to "export any defense article or technical data for which a license or written approval is required without first obtaining the required authorization from the DDTC (Directorate of Defense Trade Controls)."
The letter goes on to explain that these downloads legally count as exports under the law, telling Wilson to remove the plans from public access immediately. "That might be an impossible standard," Wilson told Forbes. "But we'll do our part to remove it from our servers." As it turns out, most of the gun's downloads were served via Mega, making full removal near impossible. Still, Wilson seems optimistic about the situation, explaining to Forbes that conversation will help mold the discussion on 3D printed weaponry. "Is this a workable regulatory regime? Can there be defense trade control in the era of the internet and 3D printing?" We're looking forward to discovering the answer ourselves.
Filed under: Misc
Via: Vice
Source: Forbes
The (almost) all-plastic 3D-printed Liberator pistol was announced by Defense Distributed late last week, but with the gun's blueprints and construction details now live on the company's own DefCAD design site, it's also released a video taken during its testing. In front of a Forbes onlooker, the clip apparently shows a .380 caliber bullet being fired by the Liberator.
The only non-plastic part of the design is a common nail, which acts as the firing pin. Defense Distributed's founder Cody Wilson has worked over a year on the project, apparently citing the one-shot pistols that were designed to be air-dropped over France during World War II as inspiration -- also called the Liberator. This modern version is, however, formed of 15 components made inside a Stratasys Dimension SST 3D printer. The video of the test shot and more details are right after the break.
Source: Defense Distributed (YouTube), Forbes, DefCAD