Remember all the hubbub about 3D printed guns? No? Not even when the U.S. government gave a firearms licence to Defense Distributed, the biggest name in renderable firearms? This past week was another huge one for DD, as it printed and tested the new Liberator gun, an all plastic gun that only needs the addition of a nail to serve as a firing pin.
Defense Distributed has now run afoul of not just the ATF, but of the State Department, who have demanded that DD remove the CAD files needed to print the Liberator from the company’s site. Why is State wigging out? It may have something to do with the fact that the Liberator’s design was downloaded over a million times in just 48 hours. Those numbers come from the official site. Beyond that, the Liberator designs have already spread to filesharing sites such as ThePirateBay, where it is now the number one downloaded file.
Sorry, Game of Thrones.
Defense Distributed has complied — complete with a snarky note reading, “DEFCAD files are being removed from public access at the request of the US Department of Defense Trade Controls. Until further notice, the United States government claims control of the information.” However, this is absolutely a case of far too little, too late. As noted above, the files are in the wild. True, you can’t use a $1,300 3D printer from Staples and the sheer amount of ABS plastic needed isn’t exactly cheap, but when someone gets over the initial costs, there is now a cheap, almost untraceable weapon in the wild.
Clearly, what we need now is nail control.
I dunno, if you know anything about firearms, you know this is whole thing is pretty stupid. Defense Distributed wants attention, to talk about how dumb gun control is. Media gives them attention, either from a scary place or from a place perhaps agreeing that gun control is stupid.
Meanwhile, anyone who knows much about firearms understands that these guns are pretty useless. They’re just, in theory, easier to manufacture Zip Guns. Except, the printer that made this costs $8000 and the company who made the printer decided to take it away from Defense Distributed once they learned what they were doing with it.
It’s the wrong kind of hype and is basically just link bait.