I’ve been following this with what could fairly be described as fascination. Remember the old myth about Allied airmen dropping single-shot weapons from planes over occupied France?
Why go to all that trouble when you can sent them through telephone lines?
I wonder how close to real it really is? And what the price of 3-D printers will come down to?
They say that Louis XIV had the inscription Ultima Ratio Regum cast into all the cannon of the French Army. It means “The Ultimate Argument of Kings,” and that always struck me as one of the most honest and up-front things any ruler or would-be ruler ever said. “We can dress it up prettier than this, but when it comes down to the unvarnished truth this is what it’s about: You’ll do as I say or I’ll send my goons to kill you.”
I thought about that for a long time. If there’s an ultimate argument, it seems only logical that there must be an ultimate answer. For years I thought the ultimate answer must be the bullets in my rifle, but it never seemed quite right. I’ve got bullets – he’s got frigging Cannon Balls. I mean, if there were three hundred million rifles throwing bullets at him, then maybe. But we all know that’s not going to happen. So if there’s an ultimate answer to his ultimate argument, it sure as hell ain’t bullets.
It finally came to me – and that’s when I abandoned the city and most of my stuff, and gave all that was behind me a good stiff Randian Shrug.
The ultimate answer to kings is not a bullet, but a belly laugh.
Little Bear 2009-2018
Laddie the Amazing Torso Boy 2011-2020
"Freedom Outlaw. It’s not what you do; it’s how you do it. It’s an attitude — from which actions always follow. It’s a do-it-yourself occupation. And a lifetime vocation."
- Claire Wolfe, Backwoods Home Companion, 6-07-10
I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite.
- G. K. Chesterton
"If every Jewish and anti-Nazi family in Germany had owned a Mauser rifle and twenty rounds of ammunition and the will to use it, Adolf Hitler would be a little-known footnote to the history of the Weimar Republic."
- Aaron Zelman
"Authority should derive from the consent of the governed, not from the threat of force."
- Barbie
"Never underestimate the ability of shit to find a fan."
- F. Paul Wilson
"You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs." The sophistry of villains - Bah!
- Robert A. Heinlein, Double Star
“Truth is, I’m not specifically interested in an armed society. What I want is a free society.”
- George Potter
I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself
A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough without ever having felt sorry for itself.
- D. H. Lawrence
Aristippus passed Diogenes as he was washing lentils.
He said, “If you could but learn to flatter the king, you would not have to live on lentils.”
Diogenes said, “And if you could learn to live on lentils, you would not have to flatter the king.”
Sandy Hook was a Gun Free Zone. So was the Westroads Mall. And the Aurora Theater. And Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. Should I go on? They were all Gun Free Zones.
– Reality
“Political tags — such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth — are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire. The former are idealists acting from highest motives for the greatest good of the greatest number. The latter are surly curmudgeons, suspicious and lacking in altruism. But they are more comfortable neighbors than the other sort.”
- Robert A. Heinlein
"Civilization is the process of setting man free from men."
- Ayn Rand
If ever a man should ask you
For your business or your name
Tell him to go and fuck himself
Tell his friends to do the same.
For a man who'd trade his liberty
For a safe and dreamless sleep
Doesn't deserve the both of them
And neither shall he keep.
- Frank Turner
Don't be afraid to try something big, just because you're an amateur. The Ark was built by amateurs. The Titanic was built by professionals.
- Anon
"Nothing scares a police officer more than the threat of being treated the way that they treat people every day."
- Anon
"Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everybody you meet."
- Gen. James Mattis
"Lust for power is the most flagrant of all the passions."
- Tacitus
"The man who knows what freedom means will find a way to be free."
- F.A. "Baldy" Harper
"The greatest discovery of any generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitude."
- William James
We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms -- to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.
- Viktor Frankl
The free man will ask neither what his country can do for him nor what he can do for his country.
- Milton Friedman
“We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it.”
- William Faulkner
There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self.
- Ernest Hemingway
"Everything the State says is a lie, and everything it has it has stolen."
- Friedrich Nietzsche
John Moses Browning - The most badass Mormon who ever lived.
"The nine most terrifying words in the English language are 'I'm from the government, and I'm here to help.'"
- Ronald Reagan
The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.
- James A. Baldwin
"It is better to be a warrior in a garden than to be a gardener in a war."
- Anon
“I tried to live in such a way that, when dying, I would rather feel happy than scared.”
– Witold Pilecki
Few men desire liberty; most men wish only for a just master.
- Sallust
"Place your clothes and weapons where you can find them in the dark."
- Lazarus Long
Read, every day, something no one else is reading.
Think, every day, something no one else is thinking.
Do, every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do.
It is bad for the mind to continually be part of unanimity.
– Christopher Morley
“I have found that, to make a contented slave, it is necessary to make a thoughtless one. It is necessary to darken his moral and mental vision, and, as far as possible, to annihilate the power of reason. He must be able to detect no inconsistencies in slavery; he must be made to feel that slavery is right; and he can be brought to that only when he ceases to be a man.”
-Frederick Douglass
ESSE QUAM VIDERI –
To be, rather than to seem
– Marcus Tullius Cicero
“A Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every black home, and it should be used for that protection which the law refuses to give.”
– Ida B. Wells
Do what thy manhood bid thee do; from none but self expect applause.
He noblest lives and noblest dies, who makes and keeps his self made laws
– Sir Richard Burton
Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.
– Winston Churchill
“Happiness is a journey, not a destination. Dance as though no one is watching you. Love as though you have never been hurt before. Sing as though no one can hear you. Live as though heaven is on earth.”
― Father Alfred d’Souza
Hear that? That’s the sound of a paradigm shifting. Sarah Brady kiss my ass.
You might want to look at these…
http://www.solidoodle.com/
http://www.cncguns.com/downloads.html
The Liberator pistol isn’t exactly a myth. A hell of a lot were manufactured. I was under the impression that none had actually been distributed though, but Wikipedia claims a handful got passed out in the Philippines. Very few Liberators still exist since the government decided that a single-shot “disposable” gun intended to resist governments is too dangeroud and destroyed all they could get their paws on.
The wiki weapon is an interesting concept, but if I had ten grand laying around, I’d probably just buy a hell of a lot of conventional firearms and ammunition.
From a technical standpoint… Well, I can’t access most of their site, so criticizing the technical issues is going to be tough. All I can tell is that they plan to build something chambered in .22LR, completely in thermosetting plastic. Presumably it’ll be a single-shot, or the thermosetting barrel would melt and wear (although one site comment suggests that they think .22LR doesn’t generate heat). In which case, there are a lot of simpler, cheaper, less-obvious-to-the-authorities options already available. Think zipgun. The old DF! magazine had an article on how to build a single-shot 12 ga. shotgun from rolled up magazines.
If you’re going to spend thousands of dollars so you can whip out a computer-generated gun instead of having one on hand (and how do they plAn to “print” ammo?), why not go with CNC…
Ah, I see MJR kindly provided a link to CNC files for real firearms. Point made.
Basically, these guys don’t really look serious. They’re just getting folks to fund their hobby. More power to ’em.
Bear, I think you are missing the point somewhat. As I see it, this is a research and development project. At some point 3D printers will probably be able to use high strength materials. Jumping straight from a concept to finished project is nice if you can do it but usually there are intermediate steps. I remember the first PC hard drive I encountered. All of 10 mb! A terabyte was so inconceivable one would have been ridiculed for even dreaming about it.
I see 3D printing as the next great thing to come down the technology pipeline. The first functional printed firearm will certainly be crude by later standards. I’m betting there will be amazing things come out of research into 3D printing. Hold on tight, I feel that paradigm starting to shift!
@Anon 11:12,
I’m not missing the point. From what I can tell from their web site (maybe it works better in Internet Exploder, but Firefox couldn’t load much more than their… [pardon the term] _FAQ_), they don’t seem to know much about firearms, ammunition, or the _already existing_ pro-level 3D printers using ceramic and metallic dusts, which are much likely to produce a firearm that won’t blow up in your hand (https://www.google.com/search?q=3d+printing+with+ceramic+dust), ior even already existing CNC. For that matter, they don’t seem to know that people have been making real repeating firearms _by hand_ for rather a long time.
The specified ABSplus polymer they want to use would probably be good for producing “lost wax” castings for gun parts, but not for anything much sturdier than a cellblock zipgun. In which case, they might want to experiment with making those castings using low melting point metals that folks can scrape up in their homes and cast without the usual metal shop tools (I do a little of that myself, and would rather fire a gun made from some of my zinc alloy stuff than a fused-particle thermosetting plastic… and I’ve seen some scary-cheap-but-commercially-manufactured pot metal handguns already).
Repeat: These guys are just hobbyists looking for someone to _voluntarily_ fund their hobby. Nothing wrong with that. I wish I’d had as much luck as them.
3D printing is already important. It will become more so. But by the time most folks have a 3D printer on their desks to routine print household items, any files these guys produce for thermoplastic will be next to useless for real guns. I’d expect CNC files (meant for metals) to port over better.
Barring some ridiculous and unfortunately likely legislation I think those is doable. Probably more so if someone starts passing laws. Some people just love to rub the politicos noses in the shit that pass. Applauded in advance. There’s already the one guy who printed an AR receiver and hooked up the .22lr upper. There’s another guy on youtube with a CNC milled Derlin (Delrin?) lower he says she has fired using a .22lr upper.
I can’t imagine it would be too hard to make all manner of firearms out of this technology. How the hell would regulators stop it?
Screw it all anyway. I want a laser like they have on the Mars Rover.
Damn. Joel, you beat me to it. I have an email in to the fellow to clear up a couple basic questions first before I post it to Forgotten Weapons (like, what is the yield strength of the ABS?)
Carl, I think you’re missing a big part of the point. It’s only partly about the gun, and as much about the free speech principle of making this sort of ready-to-use data freely and universally accessible.
Yeah. The way I see it, if 3-D printers become even slightly as ubiquitous (and cheap?) as computer printers, guns will be about as impossible to ban as kittens. You can always make more!
Also, I’m aware the Liberator isn’t a myth because I’ve seen one. The story that they were actually spread through the Third Reich is a myth.
I see this as a grand opportunity, possibly mated with some basic CNC machines to produce some of the weapons we’ve seen on Forgotten Weapons. Maybe the TRW Low Maintenance Rifle, or one of the Polish subgun designs. The Mauser last ditch pistol posted a day or two ago could be a prime example.
(Damn it, Joel. Your host is screwing with my posting again.)
Ian: “Carl, I think you’re missing a big part of the point. It’s only partly about the gun, and as much about the free speech principle of making this sort of ready-to-use data freely and universally accessible.”
See MJR’s link to the already-existing _free_ CNC data files. The _information_ is already out there, and more every day.
Right now, saying that ABS 3D printing of firearms or any other banned device is about free speech is… let me find a good example.
There was a time when a common SF theme was that _television_ would make universal education and information disemination possible. That turned out not to be the case because television is a centralized (and thus controllable– just ask the FCC) media. Instead, an entirely different technology is doing the trick: the Internet; particularly with people creating open wifi nodes and do-it-yourself Internet backbones (https://www.google.com/search?q=how+to+convert+a+router+for+internet+links). Similar claims were made for pirate broadcast radio; while people did it for quite a while, it just isn’t the preferred mode for reaching a lot of people anymore.
3D printing is still pretty new. But ABS plastic printers aren’t the technology that will really do the job. It’s good for a few things that don’t require much strength, prototyping stuff dimensionally, or creating lost wax casting molds. The printers that will eventually let you print a gun (or working cell phone) will inject streams of multiple elements at higher temperatures. Those printers (we’re seeing the beginnings already with the ceramic/metallic dust commercial models) will bear the same resemblance to today’s ABS plastic printers as a Android smart phone does to the telegraph. Any files designed for a hobbyist plastic printer will be about as useful to the future printers as using Skype to call a bud on his smart phone to say, “dah-dah, di-di-dit, da-di-dah.*” Or building a modern web site by plugging old Compuserve 8 bit GIFs into an interactive Flash presentation. You _could_, but why, other than as a curiosity?
Current 3D printing is cool. It can do neat stuff. I wish I had one. But it isn’t the technology that’s going to save the world from tyranny, unless you want to consider the telegraph the same tech as wifi’d Internet.
RE: ABS strength. I’ll keep an eye on your site to see what the guy tells you. While I understand commercial ceramic models have successfully printed engine blocks, the base material there is stronger and fused at much higher temperatures (and assembled with a different technique — dust blown into an aerogel matrix, I think). Last time I looked into this, the ABS units essentially sinter thermosetting plastic powder, giving a mass with less structural strength than blow-molded HDPE (a thought which brings back old — unpleasant — memories of working the factory floor).
I sort of get more excited by the computer-driven laser cutters. You want a gun? Cut out the sections (ala L.Neil Smith’s _Pallas_ Ngu Departure) and screw them together. Thinking on old welded-bar cannon, I suspect you _might_ even be able to build your barrel that way.
(* I don’t know code. If that actually means anything, I’ll be as astonished as you.)
Those CNC files are helpful and generous, but they are simply blueprints. A printable gun data file would be machine code ready to go, I presume. With a CNC solid model, you still have to build your jigs, determine cutting tools, speeds, and feeds, and program tool paths into your machine (not a trivial set of tasks for a novice). They are a very helpful first step for a machine operator, but not a plug-n-play solution for the untrained person.
I just read an article last week where someone’s working on plans (i.e. – raising funds – I’m sure) to build houses with 3-D printer methods – on site, to scale – minus windows and doors and internals like plumbing, electrical, HVAC.
Me – I’ll stick with the shipping containers for now!