5 ms·

The guy making it easy to 3D print yourself a real gun

63 points by steven 12y ago

JoeAltmaier 12y ago
Good for him. Little different from open-source radicals that want every bit of software available to anybody.
- nothrabannosir 12y ago
  Very different, given what a member of the group "anybody" can do with open-source software, compared to what they can do with a gun. Both to themselves and to other people. Both the advantages and the disadvantages.
  - Mtinie 12y ago
    I can envision multitudes of scenarios where the free proliferation of source software to "anybody" with an Internet connection can be far more deadly.
    - GhotiFish 12y ago
      I assume you are referring to scenarios where there is security through obscurity.
    - tonyarkles 12y ago
      Eg metasploit
  - JoeAltmaier 12y ago
    Right, with a gun you can hurt maybe a dozen people around you. With hacking tools etc you can hurt thousands or millions.
JohnLen 12y ago
Awesome
Crito 12y ago
Cody Wilson is a very interesting activist. Manufacturing your own guns at home has been trivial for about as long as hardware stores have been selling standardized metal parts, but many people seem to be unable to wrap their minds around it, or consider the implications of it. What Cody Wilson has done is realize the political potential of 3d printing. It's not a very good way to make a gun, but it seems to be an excellent way to get people talking about making guns.
- nsxwolf 12y ago
  There's an analogy to computers here. Anyone could build a computer at home in 1975. You can also build one in 2015, and it is a whole lot easier and can be done by a lot more people.
  - Crito 12y ago
    The issue is that it is easier to do it the old-fashion way than to dick around with a 3d printer. The result will be far superior as well. For the 3d printed lowers: drilling out your own 80% lower will give you a superior result with far less equipment. For the 3d printed "Liberators": a quick trip to your local Home Depot's plumbing and hardware departments will let you throw together a shotgun, not a dinky little pistol, that probably won't blow up in your hand (still possible if you choose the wrong pipe I suppose, but compared to the plastic gun?....) There are videos on youtube of teenagers in the Appalachians doing exactly this just for the hell of it. It doesn't require any real manufacturing skill.
- DennisP 12y ago
  He's not just doing 3D printing anymore. From the article: "In October 2014 Wilson revealed his biggest project to date: the Ghost Gunner, a miniaturized CNC milling machine small enough to sit on a desktop. It’s thousands of dollars cheaper than big CNC mills—computer-programmable industrial tools for cutting away material—and capable of producing aluminum lower receivers compatible with the AR-15 rifle."
  - Crito 12y ago
pxlpshr 12y ago
As an Austinite, startup guy, gun owner, and libertarian... his demeanor is going to make the already-difficult fight, that much harder. Be bold but be tactful about it.
pzxc 12y ago
Without getting too much into the politics of the Second Amendment, let me say that he seems like quite a character, he made me laugh, and I like him. A little sad to see Stripe being a stumblingblock for innovation in this case. But undoubtedly there's legal risk that makes it difficult for anyone to provide service to him. (similar to the burgeoning cannabis industry)
jboggan 12y ago
I really want more clarification on the first paragraph. From the author's awkward lingo ("safety key") I get the impression that they do not grasp the technical or legal differences between a semi-automatic AR-15 clone and a fully-automatic M-16. I have a hard time believing that Wilson manufactured a functional M-16 lower, assembled it with a full-auto bolt carrier and had a journalist fire it. That is an unequivocal violation of federal law (since no new machine guns have been allowed for Form 1 manufacture since May of 1986) as opposed to constructing a semi-automatic firearm for personal use. Such confusion in the opening paragraph makes me heavily discount the rest of the article.
- Crito 12y ago
  According to wikipedia, Cody Wilson has a Type 7 FFL. If he then acquired Class 2 SOT status, he personally would be able to manufacture his own machine guns (but not transfer ownership of them to the general public). According to this article from March 2013 (http://www.solidsmack.com/cad-design-news/click-print-gun-watch-the-full-documentary-on-cody-wilson-and-3d-printed-weapon-manufacturing-video/ http://www.solidsmack.com/cad-design-news/click-print-gun-wa...), he was seeking Class 2 SOT status at the time and anticipated getting it in early April 2013. I don't know what the outcome of that was. However considering journalists' reputations for gun knowledge, I am skeptical as well. (I'm also not an expert on gun law, so anyone please correct me if I am mistaken.)
  - jboggan 12y ago
    That is a very helpful clarification - I was aware of this tax exemption but didn't realize that Wilson was jumping through the hoops to obtain one. That's something that would be rather germane to the article, especially dramatically opening with a "university dropout" showing off the "M-16" he manufactured. If Wilson has the special occupational taxpayer status then that makes the article even more misrepresentative.
- seanflyon 12y ago
  I have seen a semi-automatic AR-15 clone malfunction an spontaneously become fully automatic. They are not so different from a technical perspective.
yodsanklai 12y ago
I wonder if we'll be able to 3D print WMD or very dangerous things one day. Viruses for instance?
- Crito 12y ago
  The ability to synthesize arbitrary chemicals is unlikely to come from 3d printers. Significant developments there will be seen coming a long way off in university laboratories, with equipment advertised in places like Nature.
- toomuchtodo 12y ago
  That's what is so silly about this. Anyone soon will be able to SLS (laser sinter) guns at home. How many people can you kill with a gun? 50? 100? 200? What happens when I'm able to build viruses and bacteria at home with openly available DNA sequences?
  - bbcbasic 12y ago
    So normally law abiding people suddenly become murderers because a 3D printer can produce a gun?
    - toomuchtodo 12y ago
      No, that risk is an inherent part of being alive, and that restrictions crafted should carefully be considered.
- rcpt 12y ago
  Somewhat related is the recent controversy about whether or not to publish a paper that shows how easy it is to produce a variant of avian H5N1 influenza that can spread between mammals: http://www.nature.com/news/mutant-flu-paper-published-1.10551 http://www.nature.com/news/mutant-flu-paper-published-1.1055...
- A_COMPUTER 12y ago
  http://openpcr.org/ http://openpcr.org/ You can replicate DNA with this.
TomGullen 12y ago
What a nice young man, virtuously punching forwards in his quest to allow everyone to make guns. The biproduct of his quest to "defend the human and civil right to keep and bear arms as guaranteed by the United States Constitution" is that countries that aren't the USA all get to benefit from his wonderful innovations. I guess it's inevitable that new and interesting creative technology such as 3D printing would be used in such a way, but always sad to see so much support for it. I don't even understand why there is demand for this home gun manufacturing in the USA, libertarian cheer leading aside. I'm under the impression it's damn easy to get hold of weapons in the USA. And I'm pretty sure a purchased weapon will have orders of magnitude less chance of blowing your hand off in a misfire that a plastic counterpart.
- Sovietaced 12y ago
  I worked for cody for 6 months. He is brilliant and his real cause is a political one. You can gather this by watching his talks and even observing his videos. He just happens to like guns and understands that the gun is an excellent catalyst for his political ideas because of how much attention it grabs.
- CamperBob2 12y ago
  HN is not the best place for political arguments. Suffice it to say that not everyone agrees that the police and government -- especially not our police and government -- should have a monopoly on weaponry. (Sovietaced, your reply is [dead] for some reason, not clear why.)
  - 15155 12y ago
    This is an unusually bad place for this particular category of argument, too. HN is inundated with people living in CA, NY, the UK - All places where the right to own and bear firearms is non-existent or substantially impeded.
    - anu_gupta 12y ago
      > All places where the right to own and bear firearms is non-existent or substantially impeded. And very happily so. We all seem to manage to get by without them
xasos 12y ago
I believe he was also the creator of Darkcoin. This was in the news a few months ago, but I guess the hype around 3D printing in gone, because I don't really hear about it too much.
- jMyles 12y ago
  No. He's working on Dark Wallet - a completely different technology.
  - xasos 12y ago
    Thanks for the correction. They are different, but the premise of both platforms are virtually the same (private digital transactions)
- A_COMPUTER 12y ago
  You're thinking of darkwallet, https://www.darkwallet.is/ https://www.darkwallet.is/ a browser-based bitcoin wallet that uses coinjoin to obscure transactions, rather than darkcoin, which is an altcoin that has built in obfuscation based on coinjoin so it happens by default.
  - xasos 12y ago
    Ah yes, thanks for the correction
giech 12y ago
Setting aside legality and technical issues for a second, in some respects this seems similar to regular printing of currency bills: I find it very likely that the (any?) government would require that 3D printers refuse to print "crucial" parts of a weapon either at the software or at the firmware level. Of course, with the more DIY and open nature of 3D printers this might be difficult to enforce, but not impossible, at least for the average user.
- MichaelGG 12y ago
  Currency blocking is fairly straightforward though. A banned set of images, perhaps some blocked color values or whatnot. But there's a huge space of possible gun designs. Don't we need a large advance in technology to be able to determine something is a gun? Especially if we don't accept a lot of false positives?
- DrStalker 12y ago
  Special features in currency make it relatively easy the detect when an image is of currency; there's no such equivalent for detecting weapon parts and even if there was you could just 3D print a version lacking those features since your goal isn't forgery, it's functionality.
- wongarsu 12y ago
  With the small difference that printing currency bills can be made very hard for individuals. A regular Euro note is made of special paper, has raised print, a watermark, a security thread, a hologram, micro-perforations, colour-changing numbers, microprint and magnetic ink. You can't make mashining an assault rifle out of a block of metal artificially harder as tools get better.
  - giech 12y ago
    That's not what I was referring to though. I was talking about how detecting the EURion constellation causes Photoshop and printers to not work. I do not know how guns are manufactured, but from the comments in this and earlier discussions of the story, I assumed that there are parts with common characteristics. As a result, and unless the resulting 3D models are too many, or if they would result in false positives with legitimate applications, you could require that 3D printers and CAD software refuse to work with them. Based on the couple of comments below, however, it seems that my assumption that there is a sufficiently common part among firearms is wrong, so I'll leave further comments to the experts.
rdl 12y ago
I'm curious when these will actually ship (the "Ghost Gunner" mill; I ordered one of the first ones, promised for delivery by the end of 2014, and no signs it will actually be here in Q1).
jMyles 12y ago
Cody is a solid human being. I have enjoyed my every contact with him. Some of you may have been in the audience when I moderated a panel in which he was a participant at NHLF last year. It was a great experience and made me realize that, while I have mixed feelings about his cause, he acts from the heart and has a lot of hope for the world.
jheriko 12y ago
i really don't understand the love of guns in the US. the rest of the civilised world has gun control, and with it experience of enforcing it in an environment where guns were formally unrestricted. there is also a whole bunch of data showing that death of children by guns, and spree shootings are almost uniquely a phenomenon of countries without any real effort at gun control. i don't see any good argument against 'less people dying horribly' gun control doesn't mean banning guns outright. it means introducing a serious effort to keep them out of the hands of the worst of society.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
  - anu_gupta 12y ago
    You do realise that first list shows 24 school shootings in Europe, since 1913, don't you? 24 in over one hundred years. Here's the list for the US: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_the_United_States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_the...
- maratd 12y ago
  > i really don't understand the love of guns in the US. I assume you're in Europe? Europe historically doesn't mind tyranny, dictators, oppressive governments and the like. I understand the current period is a bit of an aberration. You can thank the US and the USSR later. But based on your comments, if things swung back to their historical norm ... you would what? File a legal complaint? The US government has done some horrible things in the past. It will do so again in the future. That is the nature of governments. If enough becomes enough, it is the peoples' right to choose to defend themselves against tyranny. That's at the very foundation of our country. It's how it was born. It's how we were able to fight off European tyranny and gain independence.
  - jheriko 12y ago
    its not just europe... its a pretty global phenomenon. you might have some nice philosophical argument here, but i have data and experiments on my side. i do appreciate your point about self defence in a harsh environment, but that is not day-to-day life in a world with gun control, or even in most places without it. i however resent the implication that i can not defend myself and am merely going to write an angry letter in complaint. i can assure you that i am just as capable as the next man of dealing death, even without guns, but its a skill i'd rather not exercise...
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

63 points by steven 12y ago

JoeAltmaier 12y ago

Good for him. Little different from open-source radicals that want every bit of software available to anybody.

nothrabannosir 12y ago
Very different, given what a member of the group "anybody" can do with open-source software, compared to what they can do with a gun. Both to themselves and to other people. Both the advantages and the disadvantages.
- Mtinie 12y ago
  I can envision multitudes of scenarios where the free proliferation of source software to "anybody" with an Internet connection can be far more deadly.
  - GhotiFish 12y ago
    I assume you are referring to scenarios where there is security through obscurity.
  - tonyarkles 12y ago
    Eg metasploit
- JoeAltmaier 12y ago
  Right, with a gun you can hurt maybe a dozen people around you. With hacking tools etc you can hurt thousands or millions.

JohnLen 12y ago

Awesome

Crito 12y ago

Cody Wilson is a very interesting activist. Manufacturing your own guns at home has been trivial for about as long as hardware stores have been selling standardized metal parts, but many people seem to be unable to wrap their minds around it, or consider the implications of it. What Cody Wilson has done is realize the political potential of 3d printing. It's not a very good way to make a gun, but it seems to be an excellent way to get people talking about making guns.

nsxwolf 12y ago
There's an analogy to computers here. Anyone could build a computer at home in 1975. You can also build one in 2015, and it is a whole lot easier and can be done by a lot more people.
- Crito 12y ago
  The issue is that it is easier to do it the old-fashion way than to dick around with a 3d printer. The result will be far superior as well. For the 3d printed lowers: drilling out your own 80% lower will give you a superior result with far less equipment. For the 3d printed "Liberators": a quick trip to your local Home Depot's plumbing and hardware departments will let you throw together a shotgun, not a dinky little pistol, that probably won't blow up in your hand (still possible if you choose the wrong pipe I suppose, but compared to the plastic gun?....) There are videos on youtube of teenagers in the Appalachians doing exactly this just for the hell of it. It doesn't require any real manufacturing skill.
DennisP 12y ago
He's not just doing 3D printing anymore. From the article: "In October 2014 Wilson revealed his biggest project to date: the Ghost Gunner, a miniaturized CNC milling machine small enough to sit on a desktop. It’s thousands of dollars cheaper than big CNC mills—computer-programmable industrial tools for cutting away material—and capable of producing aluminum lower receivers compatible with the AR-15 rifle."
- Crito 12y ago

pxlpshr 12y ago

As an Austinite, startup guy, gun owner, and libertarian... his demeanor is going to make the already-difficult fight, that much harder. Be bold but be tactful about it.

pzxc 12y ago

Without getting too much into the politics of the Second Amendment, let me say that he seems like quite a character, he made me laugh, and I like him. A little sad to see Stripe being a stumblingblock for innovation in this case. But undoubtedly there's legal risk that makes it difficult for anyone to provide service to him. (similar to the burgeoning cannabis industry)

jboggan 12y ago

I really want more clarification on the first paragraph. From the author's awkward lingo ("safety key") I get the impression that they do not grasp the technical or legal differences between a semi-automatic AR-15 clone and a fully-automatic M-16. I have a hard time believing that Wilson manufactured a functional M-16 lower, assembled it with a full-auto bolt carrier and had a journalist fire it. That is an unequivocal violation of federal law (since no new machine guns have been allowed for Form 1 manufacture since May of 1986) as opposed to constructing a semi-automatic firearm for personal use. Such confusion in the opening paragraph makes me heavily discount the rest of the article.

Crito 12y ago
According to wikipedia, Cody Wilson has a Type 7 FFL. If he then acquired Class 2 SOT status, he personally would be able to manufacture his own machine guns (but not transfer ownership of them to the general public). According to this article from March 2013 (http://www.solidsmack.com/cad-design-news/click-print-gun-watch-the-full-documentary-on-cody-wilson-and-3d-printed-weapon-manufacturing-video/ http://www.solidsmack.com/cad-design-news/click-print-gun-wa...), he was seeking Class 2 SOT status at the time and anticipated getting it in early April 2013. I don't know what the outcome of that was. However considering journalists' reputations for gun knowledge, I am skeptical as well. (I'm also not an expert on gun law, so anyone please correct me if I am mistaken.)
- jboggan 12y ago
  That is a very helpful clarification - I was aware of this tax exemption but didn't realize that Wilson was jumping through the hoops to obtain one. That's something that would be rather germane to the article, especially dramatically opening with a "university dropout" showing off the "M-16" he manufactured. If Wilson has the special occupational taxpayer status then that makes the article even more misrepresentative.
seanflyon 12y ago
I have seen a semi-automatic AR-15 clone malfunction an spontaneously become fully automatic. They are not so different from a technical perspective.

yodsanklai 12y ago

I wonder if we'll be able to 3D print WMD or very dangerous things one day. Viruses for instance?

Crito 12y ago
The ability to synthesize arbitrary chemicals is unlikely to come from 3d printers. Significant developments there will be seen coming a long way off in university laboratories, with equipment advertised in places like Nature.
toomuchtodo 12y ago
That's what is so silly about this. Anyone soon will be able to SLS (laser sinter) guns at home. How many people can you kill with a gun? 50? 100? 200? What happens when I'm able to build viruses and bacteria at home with openly available DNA sequences?
- bbcbasic 12y ago
  So normally law abiding people suddenly become murderers because a 3D printer can produce a gun?
  - toomuchtodo 12y ago
    No, that risk is an inherent part of being alive, and that restrictions crafted should carefully be considered.
rcpt 12y ago
Somewhat related is the recent controversy about whether or not to publish a paper that shows how easy it is to produce a variant of avian H5N1 influenza that can spread between mammals: http://www.nature.com/news/mutant-flu-paper-published-1.10551 http://www.nature.com/news/mutant-flu-paper-published-1.1055...
A_COMPUTER 12y ago
http://openpcr.org/ http://openpcr.org/ You can replicate DNA with this.

TomGullen 12y ago

What a nice young man, virtuously punching forwards in his quest to allow everyone to make guns. The biproduct of his quest to "defend the human and civil right to keep and bear arms as guaranteed by the United States Constitution" is that countries that aren't the USA all get to benefit from his wonderful innovations. I guess it's inevitable that new and interesting creative technology such as 3D printing would be used in such a way, but always sad to see so much support for it. I don't even understand why there is demand for this home gun manufacturing in the USA, libertarian cheer leading aside. I'm under the impression it's damn easy to get hold of weapons in the USA. And I'm pretty sure a purchased weapon will have orders of magnitude less chance of blowing your hand off in a misfire that a plastic counterpart.

Sovietaced 12y ago
I worked for cody for 6 months. He is brilliant and his real cause is a political one. You can gather this by watching his talks and even observing his videos. He just happens to like guns and understands that the gun is an excellent catalyst for his political ideas because of how much attention it grabs.
CamperBob2 12y ago
HN is not the best place for political arguments. Suffice it to say that not everyone agrees that the police and government -- especially not our police and government -- should have a monopoly on weaponry. (Sovietaced, your reply is [dead] for some reason, not clear why.)
- 15155 12y ago
  This is an unusually bad place for this particular category of argument, too. HN is inundated with people living in CA, NY, the UK - All places where the right to own and bear firearms is non-existent or substantially impeded.
  - anu_gupta 12y ago
    > All places where the right to own and bear firearms is non-existent or substantially impeded. And very happily so. We all seem to manage to get by without them

xasos 12y ago

I believe he was also the creator of Darkcoin. This was in the news a few months ago, but I guess the hype around 3D printing in gone, because I don't really hear about it too much.

jMyles 12y ago
No. He's working on Dark Wallet - a completely different technology.
- xasos 12y ago
  Thanks for the correction. They are different, but the premise of both platforms are virtually the same (private digital transactions)
A_COMPUTER 12y ago
You're thinking of darkwallet, https://www.darkwallet.is/ https://www.darkwallet.is/ a browser-based bitcoin wallet that uses coinjoin to obscure transactions, rather than darkcoin, which is an altcoin that has built in obfuscation based on coinjoin so it happens by default.
- xasos 12y ago
  Ah yes, thanks for the correction

giech 12y ago

Setting aside legality and technical issues for a second, in some respects this seems similar to regular printing of currency bills: I find it very likely that the (any?) government would require that 3D printers refuse to print "crucial" parts of a weapon either at the software or at the firmware level. Of course, with the more DIY and open nature of 3D printers this might be difficult to enforce, but not impossible, at least for the average user.

MichaelGG 12y ago
Currency blocking is fairly straightforward though. A banned set of images, perhaps some blocked color values or whatnot. But there's a huge space of possible gun designs. Don't we need a large advance in technology to be able to determine something is a gun? Especially if we don't accept a lot of false positives?
DrStalker 12y ago
Special features in currency make it relatively easy the detect when an image is of currency; there's no such equivalent for detecting weapon parts and even if there was you could just 3D print a version lacking those features since your goal isn't forgery, it's functionality.
wongarsu 12y ago
With the small difference that printing currency bills can be made very hard for individuals. A regular Euro note is made of special paper, has raised print, a watermark, a security thread, a hologram, micro-perforations, colour-changing numbers, microprint and magnetic ink. You can't make mashining an assault rifle out of a block of metal artificially harder as tools get better.
- giech 12y ago
  That's not what I was referring to though. I was talking about how detecting the EURion constellation causes Photoshop and printers to not work. I do not know how guns are manufactured, but from the comments in this and earlier discussions of the story, I assumed that there are parts with common characteristics. As a result, and unless the resulting 3D models are too many, or if they would result in false positives with legitimate applications, you could require that 3D printers and CAD software refuse to work with them. Based on the couple of comments below, however, it seems that my assumption that there is a sufficiently common part among firearms is wrong, so I'll leave further comments to the experts.

rdl 12y ago

I'm curious when these will actually ship (the "Ghost Gunner" mill; I ordered one of the first ones, promised for delivery by the end of 2014, and no signs it will actually be here in Q1).

jMyles 12y ago

Cody is a solid human being. I have enjoyed my every contact with him. Some of you may have been in the audience when I moderated a panel in which he was a participant at NHLF last year. It was a great experience and made me realize that, while I have mixed feelings about his cause, he acts from the heart and has a lot of hope for the world.

jheriko 12y ago

i really don't understand the love of guns in the US. the rest of the civilised world has gun control, and with it experience of enforcing it in an environment where guns were formally unrestricted. there is also a whole bunch of data showing that death of children by guns, and spree shootings are almost uniquely a phenomenon of countries without any real effort at gun control. i don't see any good argument against 'less people dying horribly' gun control doesn't mean banning guns outright. it means introducing a serious effort to keep them out of the hands of the worst of society.

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
- anu_gupta 12y ago
  You do realise that first list shows 24 school shootings in Europe, since 1913, don't you? 24 in over one hundred years. Here's the list for the US: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_the_United_States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_the...
maratd 12y ago
> i really don't understand the love of guns in the US. I assume you're in Europe? Europe historically doesn't mind tyranny, dictators, oppressive governments and the like. I understand the current period is a bit of an aberration. You can thank the US and the USSR later. But based on your comments, if things swung back to their historical norm ... you would what? File a legal complaint? The US government has done some horrible things in the past. It will do so again in the future. That is the nature of governments. If enough becomes enough, it is the peoples' right to choose to defend themselves against tyranny. That's at the very foundation of our country. It's how it was born. It's how we were able to fight off European tyranny and gain independence.
- jheriko 12y ago
  its not just europe... its a pretty global phenomenon. you might have some nice philosophical argument here, but i have data and experiments on my side. i do appreciate your point about self defence in a harsh environment, but that is not day-to-day life in a world with gun control, or even in most places without it. i however resent the implication that i can not defend myself and am merely going to write an angry letter in complaint. i can assure you that i am just as capable as the next man of dealing death, even without guns, but its a skill i'd rather not exercise...

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]