DIY Firearms Makers Are Already Replicating And Remixing The 3D-Printed Gun (Photos)

May 19, 2013

A photo of a 3D-printed Liberator pistol posted on Twitter by the New Hampshire group the Free State Project.

Just a week after the release of blueprints for the world’s first fully 3D-printable gun, the firearm known as the Liberator is already reproducing–and evolving.

Photos floating around Twitter and sent to me by readers show the DIY weapon created by the high-tech gunsmithing group Defense Distributed beginning to fulfill its promise: To allow anyone to create a handgun at home with an Internet connection and a 3D printer, potentially circumventing all gun control laws. And the State Department’s legal move late last week to remove those blueprints from Defense Distributed’s website, Defcad.org, may have only made the group’s fans more eager to print their own plastic gun in defiance of the government’s takedown.

A version of the gun printed by Maryland software engineer Travis Lerol
with a printed barrel. He says he's also experimenting with metal-reinforced
and epoxy-cast barrels as well as different calibers of ammunition.

Travis Lerol, a 30-year-old former military software engineer in Glen Burnie, Maryland, printed his Liberator (shown at right) within days of its appearing online. Unlike the original printed gun, he says he’s altered his to have a rifled barrel, a move designed to avoid the National Firearms Act, which regulates improvised and altered weapons and has a provision covering “smooth-bored” pistols. He’s also built another version of the barrel for .22 ammunition that uses a metal insert for reinforcement, instead of the entirely-plastic barrel for .380 rounds used in Defense Distributed’s original. And he’s cast versions of the Liberator’s barrel in epoxy that take .380 and .45 ammunition, a design he argues will be more durable than the pure ABS plastic Defense Distributed tested.

“When the Liberator came out, I was pretty curious and also surprised that the barrel hadn’t exploded when they fired it,” says Lerol. “I want to progress it from the entry level it’s at now to something more advanced, and then put that information back up to share.”

A Liberator printed on a $1,725 Lulzbot 3D printer.

Another DIY gunsmith and engineer, who asked that I call him only “Joe” to protect his anonymity, printed his version of the Liberator (shown at right) over the last weekend on a $1,725 Lulzbot AO-101, a 3D-printer that costs a small fraction of the industrial Stratasys Dimension SST printer that Defense Distributed bought for $8,000 secondhand and used to create its prototype. Joe, who also rifled and extended the gun’s barrel, added metal hardware to hold his gun together rather than the plastic printed pins in the original.

He hasn’t tested his more affordable version of the weapon yet, but he says he’s confident it can fire a .380 round just as well as the gun Defense Distributed printed on its higher-end printer. “I’m an avid gunsmith, and I’m about one hundred percent sure it’s going to work,” he says.

And why print his own gun? Partly defiance of the State Department’s attempt to suppress the gun’s blueprint and partly “just for the hell of it,” he says. “I’m a big believer that information should be free. You can’t ban things outright just because they scare some people,” he says. “Also, it’s a neat concept that hasn’t been done before, and I have the perfect skills to make it happen.”

By all appearances, the State Department’s efforts to take the CAD file for the Liberator offline for possible export control violations have done more to generate interest in the printable gun than to prevent its spread. In just the two days before the government’s takedown letter to Defense Distributed, the gun was downloaded more than 100,000 times. It’s also been uploaded at least a dozen times to the Pirate Bay, and more than four thousand users are now making the file available on their computers for download via bittorrent, compared with just a handful early last week.

The Liberator printed on a Stratasys 3D printer
by Michael Guslick.

Downloading the gun’s blueprints has become a kind of “Streisand effect” says Michael Guslick, a hobbyist gunsmith and one of the first engineers to write about his experiments in printing and testing 3D-printable firearm components. Guslick printed his own Liberator using a printer similar to Defense Distributed’s (shown above) and has been searching for others who have printed the gun over the last week.

He says he’s found that only a small fraction of those who download the gun’s blueprints are actually putting them to use. But he compares the weapon’s CAD file to the encryption program PGP, the first strong cryptographic software available to non-government users, which like the Liberator became the target of a State Department investigation for export control violations after it was released online in 1993. “ A lot of people downloaded [PGP's] source code, but very few compiled it,” says Guslick. “It became an act of passive rebellion.”

By the time the State Department decided not to indict PGP’s creator Philip Zimmermann, three years later, his tool had already spread around the world and helped to inspire a cypherpunk movement that created everything from WikiLeaks to Bitcoin. If the backlash against the Liberator’s takedown follows a similar path, the evolution of the 3D-printed gun may be just beginning.


source: forbes