“Download this gun”: 3D-printed semi-automatic fires over 600 rounds

And the Department of Justice says there's nothing illegal about it, either.

by Cyrus Farivar - Mar 1 2013

Ars Technica

The white portion of this AR-15, known as the "lower," was manufactured using 3D printing.

Defense Distributed

Cody Wilson, like many of his Texan forebears, is fast-talkin’ and fast-shootin’—but unlike his predecessors in the Lone Star State, he’s got 3D printing technology to further his agenda.

Wilson’s non-profit organization, Defense Distributed, released a video this week showing a gun firing off over 600 rounds—illustrating what is likely to be the first wave of semi-automatic and automatic weapons produced by the additive manufacturing process.

Last year, his group famously demonstrated that they could use a 3D-printed “lower” for an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle—but the gun failed after six rounds. Now, after some re-tooling, Defense Distributed has shown that it has fixed the design flaws and can seemingly fire for quite awhile. (The AR-15 is the civilian version of the military M16 rifle.)

The “lower,” or lower receiver part of a firearm, is the crucial part that contains all the gun's operating parts, including the trigger group, and the magazine port. (Under American law, the lower is what's defined as the firearm itself.) The AR is designed to be modular, meaning it can receive different types of “uppers” (barrels) as well as different-sized magazines.

“This is the first publicly printed AR lower demonstrated to withstand a large volume of .223 without structural degradation or failure,” Wilson wrote on Wednesday. “The actual count was 660+ on day 1 with the SLA lower. The test ended when we ran out of ammunition, but this lower could easily withstand 1,000 rounds.”

Already, he says, over 10,000 people have downloaded the lower CAD file, with more on BitTorrent.

"I just made an AK-47 magazine—I’ve got it printing as we speak"

While it may be easy to paint Wilson as a 2nd Amendment-touting conservative, the 25-year-old second-year law student at the Univeristy of Texas, Austin told Ars on Thursday that he’s actually a “crypto-anarchist.”

“I believe in evading and disintermediating the state,” he said.

“It seemed to be something we could build an organization around. Just like Bitcoin can circumvent financial mechanisms. This means you can make something that is contentious and politically important—not just a multicolored cookie cutter—but something important. It’s more about disintermediating some of these control schemes entirely and there’s increasingly little that you can do about it. That’s no longer a valid answer.”

He added, “The message is in what we’re doing—the message is: download this gun.”

And he practices what he preaches: the group’s entire set of design files are made available, for free, on DEFCAD, an online library for everything from grips to lowers to magazines.

“I just made an AK-47 magazine—I’ve got it printing as we speak,” he added. “[I’ve got a] Glock 17, we got a bunch coming, man. We’ve got a library of magazines.”

Wilson’s group was founded last year on similar principles:

The specific purposes for which this corporation is organized are: To defend the civil liberty of popular access to arms as guaranteed by the United States Constitution and affirmed by the United States Supreme Court, through facilitating global access to, and the collaborative production of, information and knowledge related to the 3D printing of arms; and to publish and distribute, at no cost to the public, such information and knowledge in promotion of the public interest.

Here are .223 Remington bullets loaded into a 3D-printed magazine.

Defense Distributed

Totally legal

So that raises the question: is this legal? For now, it would appear so.

“There are no restrictions on an individual manufacturing a firearm for personal use,” a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) spokesperson told Ars. “However, if the individual is engaged in business as a firearms manufacturer, that person must obtain a manufacturing license.”

Wilson said that he’s applied for a federal firearms license in his own name with the ATF in October, and expects to hear a response “any day now.” The ATF did not respond to our request for confirmation of Wilson’s claims.

Specifically, Wilson said he's looking eventually to become a Class 2 Special Occupational Taxpayer, as licensed under federal law (PDF), which would allow him to become a dealer under the National Firearms Act.

The law student said that anyone with the same type of 3D printer (“SLA resin and P400 ABS on a used Dimension”) could replicate his efforts with “9 to 12 hours” of print time, and “$150 to $200” in parts, adding that “we’ve proven that you can build one for $50,” presuming the builder is using lower quality materials. (Dimensions typically sell in the $30,000 range—but Wilson says his results could be duplicated using the less-expensive Ultimaker ($1500) or Reprap.”

Assuming Defense Distributed’s AR-15 lower costs around $150 to print, it likely wouldn’t end up being price-competitive with other, commercially-available polymer AR-15 lowers—a few minutes of Google searching turned up options priced at $135 to $170, depending on the manufacturer.

Of course, lots of 3D printing enthusiasts extol the fact that the price of the technology is rapidly falling—as we reported previously, a California company announced a $600 model last year.

Some experts who have been following the world of 3D printing for a while say that from a policy perspective, not much has changed in terms of firearm production, even if is cheaper to make.

“When you're thinking about it from a policy standpoint [the question is]: was this possible before 3D printing? If the answer is yes, what was the existing policy response?” said Michael Weinberg, a staff attorney at Public Knowledge.

“Has this fundamentally changed the dynamic in a way that we need to revisit the response? The answer strikes me as no—it's amazing. You can imagine a world where the 3D printer is accessible to people—I am not convinced that we need a 3D printing-specific solution.”

An earlier model of the 3D-printed AR-15 lower resulted in a crack by the rear takedown pin.

Defense Distributed

"The guns that will be"

Since December 2012, Wilson and his team have been hard at work on two problems. The first was the fact that the lower’s “buffer tower” (the circular ring part jutting upward that the “upper” fits into) kept breaking—that’s what caused the initial failure that prevented the gun from firing more than six rounds of 5.7x28FN bullets.

So to fix that, the group re-engineered the buffer tower so that it had increased exterior thickness. “We doubled or tripled the thickness,” Wilson said.

With that fix under their belt, the modern gunsmiths tried firing with .223 Remington bullets (standard in an AR-15), which raised the firing range to about 20 rounds before a failure—but that wasn’t good enough.

By the end of the month, there was a different failure, this time on the “rear takedown pin,” where a metal pin fits between the upper and the lower, connecting them together solidly. There, the 3D-printed plastic was cracking around the pin, making the gun less safe to use.

“There was so much force concentrating around it that that was the failure place,” Wilson said. “At first we started using bigger bosses and using longer pins, and realized that it’s still a cross-sectional area. We changed the dimensions of the rear takedown pins.”

He explained that they’ve changed pin design entirely, adding “more surface area around these pins,” as well as an “internal” 90-degree angle, along with various curves and “steps and risers,” that would take advantage of the fact that the housing was made of plastic, not metal.

“The thing was still built like it would be made out of metal,” he said. “This is about plastic and everything needs to be curves, it has to act like more of a spring.”

And that, he points out, is the ultimate lesson in gun manufacture.

“The idea is not to print components for guns that are, but the guns that will be,” he said.

For now though, Wilson said that Defense Distributed has essentially taken over the bulk of his time, and he’s effectively become a part-time amateur engineer.

“I don’t go to [law school] class, but I do pass the exams—here’s looking at you [American Bar Association]!” he told Ars.

Defense Distributed, Wilson says, receives “around $100” in daily donations and has an operating budget of about $2,400 monthly. He says that the next phase will be to publish “primers” teaching people specifically how to make such weapons.

“I don’t consider myself a tech guy, but I do consider myself a crypto-anarchist,” he said.

“I mean the philosophy that Tim May expressed, he predicted WikiLeaks and digital currency. [What I mean is] that the Internet and cryptography are these anarchic tools that can allow for the expanse of citizen action. We like the idea of the market becoming completely black and starving the nation-state from all the money they claim.”

(Thanks to Ars editor Sean Gallagher, a Navy veteran, for helping me with all my gun questions.)

Wall Street Banks Secretly Build The World’s Largest Private Army

Posted on May 16, 2012 by Admin
Alexander Higgins
 
Wall Street banks have secretly taken over US firearms and ammunition manufacturers and the world’s largest mercenary firms in a stealth build up private military force.

A Daily KOs article reveals that Wall Street banks have used private equity firms to acquire and launch a massive stealth takeover of private security firms, US ammo and gun manufacturers, uniforms, silencers and an army of mercenaries to build what amounts to the world’s largest private army.


At the same time the private mercenary companies they now control, which include the likes of  Dynacorp and the notorious name changing Blackwater/Xe Services/Academi,  have been authorized under Department of Defense DIRECTIVE NUMBER 3025.18 to actually conduct policing operations inside the United States.

The article reveals CitiBank, Bank of America, Barclays, and Deutsche Bank have provided huge amounts of funding to two private Wall Street equity firms, Cerebus and Veritas Equity, which in turn have used umbrella companies such as Freedom Corp., to engage in stealth takeovers and weapons stockpiling which has consumed the likes of  several gun manufacturers and ammunition manufacturers including Remington, Cobbs, H&R, Marlin, Dakota, and Bushmaker.

Furthermore, the same private equity firms have taken over companies involved in the “crowd control industry”.

One such example is CPI which manufacturers microwave and radio frequency crowd control pain inducers similar to the US Military’s heat gun which has been mentioned for deployment to control Occupy protestors.

All of this comes following news that the Department of Homeland Security has purchased 450 million rounds of ammunition banned by the Geneva Convention which is coupled with reports that feds are buying up all surplus ammo and even ordering stores to cease sales to civilians.

At the same time a DHS informant says that the DHS is preparing for a civil war and recently leaked army manuals reveal mass military detention centers are being prepared inside the US for a War On Terror ‘strategy shift‘.

Medical-pot users fuming over ATF’s gun-sale ban

By Valerie Richardson

The Washington Times

Thursday, October 6, 2011 

DENVER — You can have your gun, or you can have your medical marijuana. But the Obama administration now says you can’t have both.

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives is in the crosshairs for a recent memo prohibiting gun merchants from selling firearms to anyone who uses marijuana, including those with state-issued medical-marijuana cards.

An open letter dated Sept. 21 from Arthur Herbert, ATF assistant director for Enforcement Programs and Services, said that, “any person who uses or is addicted to marijuana, regardless of whether his or her State has passed legislation authorizing marijuana use for medicinal purposes, is an unlawful user of or addicted to a controlled substance, and is prohibited by Federal law from possessing firearms or ammunition.”

That didn’t sit well with Montana Attorney General Steve Bullock, who fired off a letter this week to Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. saying that the policy raises “serious legal issues under the Second Amendment, and the Equal Protection and Due Process clauses of the Fifth Amendment.”

The conflict illustrates the contradictory state of affairs between the states and federal government on the subject of medical marijuana. Sixteen states and the District of Columbia have passed medical-marijuana laws, a situation the Justice Department has agreed to tolerate despite continuing to enforce federal laws banning marijuana use.

Where the agency draws the line is often a source of confusion. The Sept. 21 letter was issued in response to gun sellers who asked the agency for guidance because buyers were showing them medical-marijuana cards as identification.

Mr. Bullock blasted the ATF for failing to consult with state officials before issuing the directive, saying a cooperative approach “would be much better than the type of unilateral proclamation represented by the ATF letter.”

Critics contend that the law unfairly discriminates against marijuana users because patients who take other controlled substances, such as OxyContin, have no such restrictions. In his letter, Mr. Bullock pointed out federal law allows those who are prescribed controlled substances by a physician to possess or buy firearms and ammunition.

“The ATF letter does not take this into account,” said Mr. Bullock, who called on the department to work with the states in “exploring a reasonable solution to the problems created by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives letter.”

Mr. Herbert states in his letter that marijuana, as a Schedule 1 controlled substance, cannot be prescribed under federal law, “even if such use is sanctioned by state law.”

The policy puts gun dealers in a difficult position, say critics.

Potential gun buyers must state on an ATF form whether they use marijuana at the time of sale. If they answer “yes,” they are denied the purchase, but even if they answer “no,” the seller cannot complete the sale if there is “‘reasonable cause to believe’ that the person is an unlawful user of or addicted to a controlled substance,” according to the directive.

“The dealers have no way of knowing whether someone smokes pot unless they come in toking,” said Gun Owners of America executive director Larry Pratt. “It’s just one more way to aggravate the dealers and play ‘gotcha’ with the dealers. They [the ATF] are totally out of control.”

In an editorial this week, the Denver Post blasted the directive, calling it an “assault on constitutional rights.” Colorado voters legalized medical marijuana in 2000.

“[U]sers of medical marijuana are faced with two choices: pass on gun ownership or illegally lie about their use of marijuana,” the Post said. “Unbelievable.”

Morgan Fox, spokesman for the Marijuana Policy Project, said his organization is drafting a letter asking the ATF to use its discretion “to be more compassionate toward medical-marijuana patients.”

“The ATF said their hands were tied, but that’s not the case,” Mr. Fox said. “This is just another way to single out and harass medical-marijuana patients.”

Montana voters legalized medical marijuana in 2004, but its use exploded after the Justice Department’s 2009 memorandum saying federal authorities would not target marijuana users as long as they comply with state law, Montana Justice Department spokesman John Doran said.

“We went from 3,000 to 30,000 medical-marijuana cardholders in the space of about a year,” he said. “We also saw an increase in the number of types of businesses.”

Those included so-called “cannibis caravans,” which traveled throughout the state signing up people for medical-marijuana cards. Often there was no doctor on site, but rather a doctor from another state who spoke with patients via computer, Mr. Doran said.

The Montana legislature cracked down on the industry earlier this year with a bill that repealed the voter-passed initiative and replaced it with tighter restrictions. In response, advocates gathered enough signatures to place the more liberal version on the November 2012 ballot.

“States, including Montana, have acted to address problems and explore workable solutions,” Mr. Bullock said. “In doing so, however, we also face issues that are, candidly, created or exacerbated by federal actions and policies that do not always reflect the kind of careful approach and appropriate accommodation that should be accorded the states.”