
The guy making it easy to 3D print yourself a real gun - steven
https://medium.com/backchannel/cody-wilson-wants-to-destroy-your-world-ad121c8b0a6
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jboggan
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
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-wa...](http://www.solidsmack.com/cad-design-
news/click-print-gun-watch-the-full-documentary-on-cody-wilson-and-3d-printed-
weapon-manufacturing-video/)), 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
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.

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TomGullen
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.

~~~
jboggan
I understand the perspective that more guns correlates positively with more
deaths, therefore this use of 3d printing technology is a bad thing. However,
consider historical contexts where a minority group has been incrementally and
systematically deprived of the legal ability to own firearms and consequently
subject to the depredations of the majority. Imagine a Warsaw Ghetto uprising
but with 3D printers and these sorts of freely available prototypes. Then you
get into theoretical tradeoffs - do I prefer to hypothetically reduce the
number of children killed in Chicago this year versus a slaughtered
neighborhood of <$localized_outgroup> in some civil conflict? Good arguments
can be made on both sides.

The demand for home gun manufacturing in the USA is very much related to a
sizable portion of the populace looking at the changing political climate of
the country and extrapolating their self defense rights meeting the y-axis at
some point in their lifetime. The potential commonality of such technology
makes any sort of future outright ban completely untenable. Do we not ban
books anymore because our governments and societies are so much more
enlightened or because the internet makes it completely useless?

The lower receiver is not a component bearing serious loads during firing and
isn't really where catastrophic failures in the weapon originate.

~~~
shard972
> I understand the perspective that more guns correlates positively with more
> deaths

Thats incorrect, see switzerland, they have a lot of guns there, maybe even
more than america per person but their gun deaths are very low.

~~~
tjradcliffe
As well as being a data point raised in an attempt to refute a distribution
(which never works), there is a radical ambiguity you are leaning on: "they
have lots of guns there" when applied to Switzerland does not mean anything
similar to "they have lots of guns there" as applied to the US.

In Switzerland guns are mostly long guns that are heavily regulated and are
under very tight storage restrictions. In the US guns are mostly hand guns
that are unregulated and under no very tight storage restrictions.

So if you want to make an argument from Switzerland, it would necessarily be
of the form: "To reduce gun deaths in the US we should pretty much eliminate
handgun ownership and require that all long guns be stored under lock and key
in a specified manner, only to taken out on state-permitted occasions for
military use."

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Crito
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.

~~~
DennisP
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
Yeah, that is a pretty neat idea, and a great deal more practical than his
printer ideas, but you don't exactly need a big CNC mill to make a lower
receiver from an 80% receiver (80% because 80% of the machining is already
done for you when you get it in the mail.) You can finish them out with the
sort of 1950's era drill press you might find in any highschool's shop
classroom.

If I wanted to make my own lower, and those Ghost Gunners were being sold and
shipped today, I'd _personally_ still go the traditional 80% route.

The real part of all of this that makes me unconcerned is that these things
are really only interesting for somebody who is intent on staying _within_ the
bounds of the law. If you don't care about the law, fucking around with all of
this home manufacture stuff doesn't make much sense. Just find a non-felon
criminally minded buddy to purchase a complete gun for you (or just do it
yourself if you are not a felon). If you live in a country where that isn't
possible, will it really be feasible to get the rest of the parts after you've
milled your lower? Does the UK allow you to purchase all non-lower receiver
parts of an AR-15? Would they allow you to receive the specialized mill in the
mail in the first place? I honestly don't know.

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pzxc
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)

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

~~~
nothrabannosir
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
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
I assume you are referring to scenarios where there is security through
obscurity.

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jheriko
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.

~~~
maratd
> 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
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...

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

~~~
toomuchtodo
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
So normally law abiding people suddenly become murderers because a 3D printer
can produce a gun?

~~~
toomuchtodo
No, that risk is an inherent part of being alive, and that restrictions
crafted should carefully be considered.

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rdl
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).

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pxlpshr
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.

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giech
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.

~~~
wongarsu
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
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.

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jMyles
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.

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xasos
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.

~~~
A_COMPUTER
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
Ah yes, thanks for the correction

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JohnLen
Awesome

