If you thought the whole 3-D-printed gun thing got contentious earlier this year, just wait. The next generation of 3-D-printed guns will be easier to produce, sturdier, and unlike the firearms that come out of printers today, these homemade guns will be made of metal.
Printing metal with additive technologies is a very new process. This is believed to be the world's first commercially available 3-D-printed gun component:
The Auxetik, a muzzle brake for pistols and rifles that was made available by Michigan-based Sintercore LLC last week. A muzzle brake is a device that reduces the recoil of a weapon when it's fired.
What's different about Auxetik, compared to previously printed gun parts, is that instead of using one of the standard plastic-producing 3-D printers we're all used to seeing, it's built using a technology called direct metal laser sintering (DMLS), a technique already being used by some hobbyists to make homemade rockets.
The DMLS process turns metal powder into solid metal by melting it with a fiber optic laser. Like plastic printers, it takes blueprints from CAD files and turns them into physical objects, tiny layer by tiny layer. The chief difference, of course, is that the output is made of metal.
Why does this matter? It's the first step toward a reality in which real, metal guns can be easily manufactured by anybody with access to the right kind of 3-D printer and the proper design blueprints. The plastic guns and gun components printed by projects like Defense Distributed work, but they're cheap-looking and not particularly durable. In fact, police in Australia (where all guns are banned) have warned that 3-D-printed plastic guns can be dangerous to use, given their fragile construction.
Sintercore isn't providing access to the CAD blueprints for the Auxetik, but rather selling the component itself. Still, what Sintercore is doing gives us a glimpse at what's possible when high-powered lasers meet metal powder to form an object that was designed explicitly for destruction. No matter how you feel about the existence of 3-D-printed guns or the regulation thereof, it's hard to argue that the innovation isn't a big deal. As the music industry knows all too well, the sudden widespread availability of a certain filetype over this globe-spanning network we call the Internet can have a very dramatic impact.
The whole thing also stands as a reminder of how primitive 3-D printing is. Sure, those complex, colorful plastic widgets getting spit out of MakerBots and bigger 3-D printers are really cool, but it's only the beginning of this impending revolution in the way things are made. Plastic prototypes will be joined by hard metal and even a brand new type of flexible, self-healing metal. Houses. Food. Human tissue. The list of what will soon be printable seems to grow by the week.
To many, the advent of 3-D-printed guns represents a scary new frontier in which regulating who has access to deadly weapons becomes virtually impossible. To others, it's all about empowering citizens with expansion of constitutionally promised rights. Whichever it is, it's hard to argue things will ever be the same.
Tracking: Inside 3-D Printing's Weird, Illicit, Dangerous Fringe
Our ability to print things in three dimensions is, they say, the future. It's been around for several years, but this transformative technology is now getting cheap and fast enough for everyday consumers to utilize. The potential is undeniably enormous.
Yet for all the magical potential of 3-D printing, it also raises strange, illicit, and potentially troubling issues. The most obvious example is the 3-D-printed-gun controversy, which we'll follow closely as it heats up. There are also concerns over copyright infringement, a contentious issue that's only beginning to rear its head in the world of rapid 3-D prototyping. What happens when millions of people are slowly granted the ability to produce 3-D objects at will? It's not unlike the Internet: Lots of awesome, radically transformative things will happen. Along with it, we'll get plenty of weirdness.
In this story tracker, we'll touch on everything from 3-D-printed food to sex toys and look at the social, legal, and ethical issues raised by this rapidly blossoming technology.
Previous Updates
June 18, 2013
Cue The Battle To (Somehow) Regulate 3-D-Printed Guns
Well, this should make for a debate that’s as contentious as possible. Nearly a year after Defense Distributed first grabbed headlines with its plans to build a 3-D-printed gun, lawmakers are starting to freak out. Last week, a New York City council member introduced a law that aims to outlaw the printing of any gun component unless one is a registered gunsmith. Under the law, any guns that are printed would need to be registered with authorities within 72 hours. The proposal comes a few weeks after a similar one was introduced in the New York state assembly. This is undoubtedly just the beginning.
The impossible-sounding nature of these laws highlights precisely why this issue is at once so terrifying and exciting to different camps of people. The same networks that empower everyday people to become publishers and share music freely now permit people to exchange blueprints for deadly weapons. To some, it’s an expansion of liberty. To others, it sends us down a dark and dangerous path. Like the sharing of MP3s, restricting this kind of activity will prove difficult, if not downright impossible. The quest to do so only grows more urgent as 3-D printing becomes more ubiquitous.
For those who haven’t followed the story, it broke into the mainstream last summer when Forbescovered Defense Distributed, an organization dedicated to creating a 3-D-printable gun and making its CAD design blueprints freely available online. To do so, the organization launched a crowdfunding campaign to raise the money needed to buy a 3-D printer. They succeeded, but Stratasys, the 3-D printer manufacturer, quickly repossessed the device, citing concerns over the legality of its intended use.
Cody Wilson, the 25-year-old founder of Defense Distributed, proceeded to develop the world’s first fully 3-D-printable gun anyway. A video of Wilson successfully firing his printable pistol, dubbed “The Liberator” were posted online in May, as were the CAD files needed for others to print the gun. The State Department demanded that Wilson remove the files, which he did, but not before 100,000 people had downloaded them. From here on out, limiting the spread of these files online will be about as easy as scrubbing the leak of Kanye West’s new album from the Internet. Indeed, as an intelligence memo from the Department of Homeland Security said of 3-D-gun blueprints, “limiting access may be impossible.”
[Image: Flickr user Electric-Eye]