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The $1,200 Machine That Lets Anyone Make a Metal Gun at Home

posted by LaminatorX on Thursday October 02 2014, @03:31AM   Printer-friendly
from the gun-without-a-bang dept.

AnonTechie writes:

When Cody Wilson revealed the world’s first fully 3-D printed gun last year, he showed that the “maker” movement has enabled anyone to create a working, lethal firearm with a click in the privacy of his or her garage. Now he’s moved on to a new form of digital DIY gunsmithing. And this time the results aren’t made of plastic.

Wilson’s latest radically libertarian project is a PC-connected milling machine he calls the Ghost Gunner. Like any computer-numerically-controlled (or CNC) mill, the one-foot-cubed black box uses a drill bit mounted on a head that moves in three dimensions to automatically carve digitally-modeled shapes into polymer, wood or aluminum. But this CNC mill, sold by Wilson’s organization known as Defense Distributed for $1,200, is designed to create one object in particular: the component of an AR-15 rifle known as its lower receiver.

That simple chunk of metal has become the epicenter of a gun control firestorm. A lower receiver is the body of the gun that connects its stock, barrel, magazine and other parts. As such, it’s also the rifle’s most regulated element. Mill your own lower receiver at home, however, and you can order the rest of the parts from online gun shops, creating a semi-automatic weapon with no serial number, obtained with no background check, no waiting period or other regulatory hurdles.
http://www.wired.com/2014/10/cody-wilson-ghost-gunner/

 
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  • (Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 02 2014, @07:10AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 02 2014, @07:10AM (#100842)

    > Try again.

    http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/05/09/state-department-demands-takedown-of-3d-printable-gun-for-possible-export-control-violation/ [forbes.com]

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  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday October 02 2014, @08:06AM

    by takyon (881) <takyonNO@SPAMsoylentnews.org> on Thursday October 02 2014, @08:06AM (#100860) Journal

    US government seizes 3D-printed gun files, but still shared elsewhere [wired.co.uk]

    That design was put online on 7 May, and since then more than 100,000 downloads have taken place.

    Pirate Bay Takes Over Distribution of Censored 3D Printable Gun [torrentfreak.com]
    Browse Other > Physibles [thepiratebay.se]

    September 20, 2013: DEFCAD Launches 'The Pirate Bay' of 3D Printing [torrentfreak.com]

    The worldwide release of the prints did not sit well with the State Department’s Office of Defense Trade Controls who kindly requested that DEFCAD remove the availability of the 3D printable gun documents, citing a possible violation of International Traffic in Arms Regulations.

    The files in question were removed, but at the same time DEFCAD was already working on a new project that would be harder to censor. Defense Distributed founder Cody Wilson had started to raise funds for a separate meta-search engine, the first to focus on 3D print models.

    “In March of this year, seeing an opportunity to expand the DEFCAD concept to fight the prevailing ideas about intellectual property in the entire physible space, I split Defense Distributed and DEFCAD and turned the latter into another company,” Wilson tells TorrentFreak.

    “The idea was to move away from direct hosting to employ the first amendment victories won by Google in the courts and become a meta-search engine as a more robust way of spreading and preserving physibles. We hope to build a piece of infrastructure to help stem the next wave of the IP wars in advance, if you will.”

    DEFCAD raised a significant amount of funds and has now quietly rolled out the meta-search engine to the public on DEFCAD.com. While still labeled as an Alpha release the site already indexes more than 74,000 files, all stored on external sites.

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  • (Score: 2) by cafebabe on Thursday October 02 2014, @12:59PM

    by cafebabe (894) on Thursday October 02 2014, @12:59PM (#100919) Journal

    There are two responses to weapon CAD files being export violations. The first is Bernstein v. United States [1995] [wikipedia.org] and the second is Arkell v. Pressdram [1971] [wikipedia.org].

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