GUN CONTROL - New Technology Threatens Citizen Safety and U.S. Security

"Texas Law Student Creates Plastic Gun That Fires Real Bullet From 3-D Printer" (Part-1) PBS Newshour 5/6/2013

RAY SUAREZ (Newshour):  Now to a new wrinkle in the gun debate tied to ever-speeding advances in technology.

For the first time, this weekend, a plastic gun created by a 3-D printer successfully fired a real bullet.  That success, starring on its own promotional video, has stirred up many questions and concerns about its potential impact.

The world's first fully functioning 3-D printable handgun is the brainchild of Cody Wilson, a University of Texas law student.  Dubbed the “Liberator,” it's fashioned from 15 plastic parts created on an $8,000 dollar three-dimensional printer.  The technology is already commonly used in various industries.

A printer lays down melted polymer filaments layer by layer according to precise digital blueprints to form solid plastic objects.  That means the Liberator would be undetectable to airport security screeners and therefore illegal.  The only metal in the gun is the common household nail used as a firing pin and a six-ounce piece of metal added to ensure the weapon is detectable to comply with current law.

But there are other questions.  Wilson's nonprofit gunned advocate group, Defense Distributed, is publishing the design files online, so anyone in the world can download the blueprints and print a Liberator, all of this without a background check or any serial number.

The group is also developing 3-D printable components for high-capacity automatic weapons.  It posted video of test-firings earlier this year.

"New Printable Handgun Raises Concerns for Undetectability, Universal Access" (Part-2) PBS Newshour 5/6/2013

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  Cody Wilson, a law student from Texas, has made the first fully functioning plastic pistol from a 3-D printer, sparking questions and concerns about legal and safety implications.  Ray Suarez talks with with Forbes magazine's Andy Greenberg about how the homemade gun known as "the Liberator" figures in a broader national debate.

Significant excerpt

RAY SUAREZ:  So, what exactly is his motivation?  You touched on it briefly, but does he want more people to have guns?  Is his problem really with the attempt to know who has them and who doesn't?  Where does he come from?

ANDY GREENBERG, Forbes:  I think that Cody would be happy to see more guns in Americans' hands.

But his ultimate goal, I believe, and he has told me, is the dissolution of the U.S. government and governments around the world.  He's an anarchist and a radical libertarian.  And I think he sees this exercise of making a gun printable as kind of a demonstration of ways that the technology can circumvent the law, can circumvent -- to make the government irrelevant, until it just kind of disappears, or at least kind of he wants to carve out a kind of space where technology prevents the states' hands from controlling what people do.