The Future, The Present, and printing guns

  The shape of the world got a bit more spacey-agey on Friday, as Cody Wilson of Defense Distributed debuted the world's first 3D printed firearm, the Liberator. The intentionally provocative name references the FP-45 Liberator, a weapon designed by the US in WWII to distribute to resistance fighters in occupied territories. I'll pick up that thread later. 
  
  Anyway, in a twenty-eight second YouTube video (resplendent with swelling classical music and footage of B-24 Liberator bombers), we get to see the cutting edge of a new kind of distributed firearms manufacturing economy. The Liberator is made of printed ABS plastic with a metal firing pin, and a steel shank that brings it into compliance with the Undetectable Firearms Act of 1988 (a measure enacted in 1988 to address things like all plastic pistols, in the wake of the introduction of the Glock 17 - the first production pistol to feature a large number of plastic composite components). It's chambered in .380 ACP and is a single shot. 

  There's been a fair bit of hand-wringing and wailing and gnashing of teeth over this development, but I don't see this as a great leap forward. It's a logical development and one that Defense Distributed has been expressly pursuing. I don't believe that this is going to lead to a plague of the Twenty-First Century's version of the Saturday Night Special. 

  Currently, the equipment needed to print the Liberator (plans are available from the link above) is expensive, making it much more effective for someone of criminal inclinations to just deal in already-stolen arms, or build a zip gun.  At this time, I can walk into any hardware store on the planet and walk out with the parts to build an improvised gun that would be pretty much as effective as the Liberator, for somewhere around $20.

  Similarly, it's completely legal in the US to make your own firearm, as long as it doesn't fall afoul of other laws (no crafting automatic weapons or short-barreled shotguns). You don't need a license or a stamp or any kind of registration. You can't sell it, but you can make it and use it. 

  So, the Liberator doesn't exactly break new ground on that frontier. It IS a new technique for creating guns, but there's a framework in place in US law to cover about 98% of use cases. To me, this doesn't represent a large threat to the vast majority of us. There is not going to be a splinter cell of pick-a-cause-any-cause extremists tooling up printing facilities to help them carry out terrorist activities.

  That being said, I do have a problem with this (told you I'd pick up the thread again).

  The group responsible for the development, manufacturing and testing of the Liberator emanates this sense that they are some kind of real-world Avi Halaby, one of the main characters from Neal Stephenson's 1999 thriller "Cryptonomicon." In the book, one of Avi's revealed goals is to create something called a HEAP - Holocaust Education and Avoidance Pod. The HEAP is an archive of information aimed at supporting populations at-risk of genocide. The HEAP contains all manner of information, from historical and editorial, to technical (specifically how to build zip guns). 

  Reading the press from Defense Distributed themselves, they see their role as heroic protectors who are standing firm in the face of a maelstrom of hostility and oppression. If it weren't for the brave, brave souls at DefDis, why, we'd all be on our knees in shackles by now. 

  In reality, they're asshats and trolls. They designed and released plans for a high capacity magazine and called it the Feinstein. Why that name? Because FUCK YOU, that's why. 

  I am endlessly glad that they acquired a valid Federal Firearms License for firearms manufacturing before proceeding. That at least means they're at the very least paying lip service to the law. Laws which, I'd like to point out, they think are unconstitutional and should be stricken. This group aims for, in addition to the design and release into the wild of an entire wiki's worth of gun patterns, the total and complete revocation of all firearms laws in the United States. It's not explicitly stated on their website, of course (we have to maintain a veneer of playing nice), but the lines are quite easy to read between.

  The first 3D printed firearm should not have come from them. Firearms from 3D printers have been a scifi trope for a generation now, ever since the idea of printing more than letters became a possibility. Someone was going to do it at some point. It looked like it might happen 30 years ago, which is why we have the Undetectable Firearms Act. With the development in the mid-to-late eighties of durable composite materials and high-temp/high-strength ceramics, it suddenly didn't seem like space-age scifi to have a gun that could travel through a metal detector without setting off a single alarm. Much has been made since then about how RIDICULOUS it is that we have such a law, because it doesn't solve a real-world problem. Well, it did actually address a real-world problem and I believe that it is something we still need. 

  As stated before, I don't have a problem with printed guns, or open-source plans. I'm a fan of the open source movement. I believe that we have some work to do culturally to come to terms with the technological capacity we've developed, but I believe that's true outside of firearms culture as well as inside it. 

  My only problem is that I don't believe that the DefDis is a responsible actor. One of the biggest problems that we in the firearms community have is of the way we're perceived by people who are not gun people. When a news event of this magnitude comes along it's important for us to act like a goddamned community and put our best foot forward. A manufacturer who publicly states that they want to see what happens when an oppressive government meets a fully armed populace, and who names components after their perceived enemies is NOT our best face.