Hey man, love your gun - can you print me a copy?

[c1ue]

Re: Hey man, love your gun - can you print me a copy?

Unless you can print out bullets - not really sure what the benefit of this publicity stunt is.

And if you're just setting off a bullet, you can do that without spending thousands of dollars for device + feedstock:

[radon]

Re: Hey man, love your gun - can you print me a copy?

Unless you can print out bullets - not really sure what the benefit of this publicity stunt is.

And if you're just setting off a bullet, you can do that without spending thousands of dollars for device + feedstock:

Maybe, but shotgun shells are easy to make. They are just a paper, or plastic, tube with a charge, wadding, and what ever you want to go flying out of the business end. There used to be a couple of brands that were entirely plastic, but they didn't sell well. I agree that printing them would be a waste. The only part that might be hard to come by is the primer, but you can skip that using an alternative design.

[don]

Re: Hey man, love your gun - can you print me a copy?

State Department orders firm to remove 3D-printed guns web blueprints

Defense Distributed tweeted on Thursday that 'Liberator' project had 'gone dark' at the request of government officials



The US government has blocked a Texas-based company from distributing details online of how to make a plastic gun using a 3-D printer.

The ban, by the State Department citing international arms control law, comes just days after the world's first such gun was successfully fired.

Defense Distributed, the company that made the prototype, stated on Twitter that its project had "gone dark" at the instigation of the government.

The company is run by Cody Wilson, a 25-year-old University of Texas law student who has said the idea for freely distributing details about how to produce the guns online was inspired by 19th century anarchist writing. Wilson argues everyone should have access to guns.

A State Department spokesman said: "Although we do not comment on whether we have individual ongoing compliance matters, we can confirm that the department has been in communication with the company."

The action came too late to prevent widespread distribution of the files: Defense Distributed told Forbes that the files have already been downloaded more than 100,000 times in the two days since they were uploaded. The largest number of downloads initially were to addresses in Spain, followed by the US, Brazil, Germany and the UK.

Fifteen of the gun's 16 pieces are constructed on the $8,000 Stratasys Dimension SST 3D printer, Forbes said. The final piece is a common nail, used as a firing pin, that can be found in a hardware store.

Betabeat posted a copy of the letter reportedly sent by the Department of State to Wilson. The department said the blueprints had to be taken offline because they may contain data regulated by the State Department. The departement said it would review the files.

"I immediately complied and I've taken down the files," Wilson told Betabeat. "But this is a much bigger deal than guns. It has implications for the freedom of the web."

Defense Distributed does not host the files in the US; instead it has uploaded them to the Mega website run by the internet entrepreneur Kim Dotcom, based in New Zealand, and where user information – including who has logged into the site and downloaded files – is encrypted.

The files have also been uploaded to the Pirate Bay file-sharing site, where they have proved a popular download.

The gun blueprints take the form of computer-aided design files, which have to be read by specialist software which can then be used by industrial 3D printers to build up the hair-thin layers, one by one, to create the finished parts.

On Thursday, a British expert in 3D printing and a ballistics expert separately warned that building a gun from the parts could be lethal to the user, because the physics involved in firing a bullet – with pressures in the gun chamber of more than 1,000 atmospheres, and temperatures of over 200C – could put catastrophic stresses on the plastics used it its construction.

Even so, two British newspapers are understood to have asked 3D printing companies to try to build the gun for them.

In the US, a reporter who downloaded the file found that companies with sufficient 3D printing capability refused to produce the device, citing laws against the production of such weapons – or asking prices that were substantially higher than those for high-quality rifles available in shops.

Wilson has been on a public mission to create a 3D printed gun since September 2012. He initially attempted to fund the project using crowdsourcing site Indiegogo, but the site removed his pitch for breaching the company's rules. Wilson then raised $20,000 in Bitcoins for the project but Stratasys repossessed his printer.

He has since gained access to a second Stratasys printer which was presumably used to create the gun fired over the weekend.

Wilson unsuccessfully applied for a federal firearms license from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and has said he wants to create the gun legally. On Sunday, New York senator Charles Schumer said that legislation should be created to prevent people from making 3D printed guns.

[radon]

Re: Hey man, love your gun - can you print me a copy?

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/...-violate-inte/

Oops, an arms export violation means possible jail time. Maybe he could give Phil Zimmerman a call for some pointers.

From Wikipedia:

Zimmermann challenged these regulations in a curious way. He published the entire source code of PGP in a hardback book,^[13] via MIT Press, which was distributed and sold widely. Anybody wishing to build their own copy of PGP could buy the $60 book, cut off the covers, separate the pages, and scan them using an OCR program, creating a set of source code text files. One could then build the application using the freely available GNU Compiler Collection. PGP would thus be available anywhere in the world. The claimed principle was simple: export of munitions—guns, bombs, planes, and software—was (and remains) restricted; but the export of books is protected by the First Amendment. The question was never tested in court with respect to PGP.

[c1ue]

Re: Hey man, love your gun - can you print me a copy?

It seems the Liberator is about as useful and dangerous (to its owner) as the home made zip guns are:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/05...ophic_failure/

The New South Wales Police Force, guardians of Australia's most-populous state, have gotten themselves into a panic over the Liberator, the 3D-printable pistol.
The Force's Commissioner Andrew Schipione today appeared at a press conference to denounce the Liberator and urge residents of the State not to download plans for the gun.

Schipione offered this advice after the Force's ballistics team acquired a 3D printer, downloaded plans for the Liberator and assembled a pair of the pistols.

One, when fired into a resin block said to simulate human flesh, is said to have penetrated to a depth of 17 fatal-injury-inducing centimetres.

The other experienced “catastrophic failure”, as we predicted a couple of weeks ago.
Here's the Force's video, complete with shots of the Liberator firing, and falling apart. The good stuff starts at about the 44 second mark.
{video in link above}

That failure didn't stop Schipione declaring the Liberator a threat to public safety.

To understand why, you need to know that NSW has of late experienced gun violence at rather unusual levels by Australian standards (which means over a year all of Sydney had about half an episode's worth of gun violence on The Wire). That spate of shootings has led to Operation UNIFICATION, an effort kicking off this weekend that encourages Australians to rat out strike a blow for public safety by informing Police about illegal guns.

Pointing out the deadly menace of guns that arrive in Australia by internet, can't be spotted by metal detectors and are assembled in back yards fits nicely with that narrative. And a public safety warning about an unsafe device is always welcome.
But the decision to talk about the Liberator in such a public forum is also a little odd, as the weapon has not had a lot of exposure beyond Australia's technology press. On a slow Friday, chances are it'll be on the television news tonight.

Here in Vulture South we'd also love to know if the Force downloaded the plans before or after the US State Department asked they be removed from the web on May 9th. The files promptly made it to BitTorrent, a network with lots of legitimate uses but also a tool it must be fun to get working inside a Police firewall.

Whatever the timeline and intentions behind the warning, Fox News reports the US Department of Homeland Security has issued a bulletin to other law enforcement agencies declaring the Liberator “impossible” to stop and a source of “public safety risks”.