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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/
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Saturday October 04 2014, @03:41AM
Evidently you never faced a fully-automatic, Remotely-operated, and Highly-Lethal Lemon Gun. You have heard of spud guns? Imagine the same thing, of slightly lesser caliber for the most part, but with the projectiles filled with citric acid!!!! Especially just after you have cut yourself on some paper! And auto-reload and fire (that is what "auto" means, all you ammosexuals out there, not just a "fire once" type of thing which is good enough for most people, but that "sticking it back in and going again!" Like many times per seconds. If that happened with lemon-rounds. . .. ) That could burn your house down, especially if there was an Tequila involved.
And I just want to say, yes, anyone could jerry-rig some kind of zip gun, single use, throw away, more likely to kill the user than the target: But that is not important now. What if ISIS gets ahold of lemons? What if it is a lot a lemons? And what if they obtain Lemonator technology? We are all doomed, I say! And this has nothing to do with systemd or Ebola breaking out in third world countries like Texas!