Click, Print, Gun: The Inside Story of the 3D Printed Gun Movement

With the recent mass shootings that have plagued our country in the recent years gun control has taken center stage in the recent topics of debate. With the government trying to crack down on the possession of "assault weapons" and remove them from society a new technology is going to change gun control forever.. I put "assault weapons" in quotations because the idea of saying that one gun is more deadly than an other just doesn't really make sense to me. A gun is a weapon no matter how many rounds it is able to fire so deeming one more dangerous than another is absurd. Anyway Cody R. Wilson is 25-year-old law student that is working to build semiautomatic weapons using 3D printers. In order to own an semiautomatic weapon you have to be registered with the federal government for a permit and the gun its self has to have a valid serial number on it. It's against the law to own one with out a serial number but there is nothing in that law that says you can not make the bottom receiver for your own personal use. The bottom receiver is essentially the gun it's self, it houses the trigger, the magazine, and the firing mechanism. The gun that he makes the bottom receivers for is the AR-15 which is a highly interchangeable gun, if you have the bottom receiver than you can make the gun look like anything you want. Wilson uses CAD files to create the receivers that his company Defense Distributed makes. All the other parts to the guns can be purchases online. His company also focus's on printing 30-round magazine clips in anticipation of Senator Dianne Feinstein's assult weapon ban bill that will limit the magazine size. Wilson goes on to say that whatever your thoughts are about gun control you can't deny that the 3D-printed gun movement is something that doesn't fin into the current legal framework. It's either excitign or scary, or maybe both, it's also interesting that you can go on his website and download the 3D blueprints of his gun parts and others for free. That is the beauty and the most frightening thing about this, as 3D printers become more readily available more and more people could be printing out their own gun parts. Just recently Cody received his license from the government to be able to sell his 3D printed gun parts but he says he won't.