NYPD Commissioner Raymond Kelly said, “It’s something that obviously is a concern.”Laughing at death, laughing at the government, it's 3D-printed-gun designer Cody Wilson — who's also a law student (at the University of Texas).
To Wilson, they merely prove his point: The “great thinkers in nanny state-ism” will do anything to maintain power.
He also bristles when gun victims — like the families of the Sandy Hook school victims — lobby government.
“I’m unhappy they were able to leverage their victimhood for the reduction of liberties of their fellow citizens,” Wilson said.
“They’re playing small ball,” added Wilson. “We’re playing a much bigger game.”
He’s such a passionate believer in his plastic gun that he laughs at the notion of someone killing him with it.
“That would be so ironic,” he said. “Even in death, it would be hilarious.”
Wilson has not merely designed a 3D-printable gun, he's 3D-printed himself as a character on the national scene. Nice creative work, Wilson!
Now, will he become a lawyer?
Another law student in the news is John Cochran, who just won $1 million on "Survivor." He too designed himself as a fabulous character:
The first time, I went into [the game] so anxious that people are going to perceive me as a nerd, a socially awkward freak. And I'm formally still the same socially awkward, freaky, nerd guy. But the difference is that instead of those eccentricities and quirks being a source of embarrassment or anxiety for me, I've just accepted it as a reality of my existence... And that's immensely liberating because I got to focus on the game this time instead of how I'm perceived, which ruined my game the first time. Being able to focus on the game I've loved for half my life was a dream come true.Nice creative work, Cochran! Cochran was asked — by Jeff Probst — whether he was going to go on to be a lawyer, and he said he didn't think so. He said he'd like to be a writer. He said he wrote a paper on the "Survivor" jury system when he was at Harvard, so I expect some cool books analyzing "Survivor."
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48 comments:
It was indeed extremely upsetting to the power-that-be when Wilson undercut two hundred years of effort to undermine the glorious 2nd Amendment with a single shot. Naturally, he will be dealt with.
All he's done is given politicians reason to revisit gun control and try to take away even more liberties. They might even be able to galvanize the base and convince millions of low information voters that information itself is dangerous and must be controlled. After all, they are low information voters, so what do they care?
For a lot less than $8000, you can buy computerized machine tools that will allow you to build far more sophisticated firearms. The Liberator pistol mentioned in the article would be a simple build for a machinist. A Sten gun or M-3 Grease Gun wouldn't be very difficult, either.
Haha. Althouse is so desperate for us to talk about these stupid TV shows that most of us just don't care about.
Hook'em, Wilson.
This Wilson guy is shooting himself in the foot, pardon the pun.
Larry J is correct. There are illiterate goat-herders in Afghanistan who earn a living making home made rifles and make them without the benefit of computer aided machinery.
Is that plastic gun of Wilson's any more functional as a firearm than the "gun" the John Malkovich character made for himself in "In the Line of Fire"?
I'll confirm Larry's comment about the M3 Greasegun.
It has perhaps 5 core parts.
1. barrel
2. receiver
3. Buffer spring
4. trigger
5. bolt
Operations cycle
1. hold trigger down
2. spring pushes bolt forward within the receiver stripping a cartridge off and firing the cartridge at the forward end of the bolt travel.
3. bullet exits barrel and recoil pushes bolt back against buffer spring.
repeat 2-3 until trigger is released catching bolt or all cartridges are expended.
It is some time ago, but did not street gangs - like in "West Side Story" - use to make "zip-guns" for themselves from junk they found around the "hood?
"To Wilson, they merely prove his point: The “great thinkers in nanny state-ism” will do anything to maintain power.
He also bristles when gun victims — like the families of the Sandy Hook school victims — lobby government.
“I’m unhappy they were able to leverage their victimhood for the reduction of liberties of their fellow citizens,” Wilson said."
He better watch his mouth, or he will easily fail the fitness exam for the bar.
Hagar said...
"Is that plastic gun of Wilson's any more functional as a firearm than the "gun" the John Malkovich character made for himself in "In the Line of Fire"?"
Must be or our ruling fascists wouldn't have banned it, right?
In WWII, the British dropped printed instructions for building Sten-guns into the occupied countries. Supposedly, any reasonably talented farm smith could make one.
And I don't think it is so much the Sandy Hook victim's families lobbying the government as that the Government is scooping up the families and coaching them on how to pose for the press to pressure Congress in the Administration's favor.
Hagar,
I was never convinced that the Line of Fire gun would work. Those springs looked weak. The printed gun apparently does...
Larry J said...
For a lot less than $8000, you can buy computerized machine tools that will allow you to build far more sophisticated firearms. The Liberator pistol mentioned in the article would be a simple build for a machinist. A Sten gun or M-3 Grease Gun wouldn't be very difficult, either.
The criteria for both weapons was to build a platform for less than $5.00 or 3 British pounds. It worked.
I have and have helped others build DIY CNC machine tools.
I have a small Harbor Freight milling machine that I rescued from the scrap pile and converted to CNC for less than $700 including ball screws. It holds + or - .001 all day long.
It would be just a matter of reverse engineering a receiver of my choice and programming the machine to remove excess material. If I were so inclined.
Shooting range operators can make their own ammo, providing the ammo to their customer as part of the service they are providing without actually selling the ammo to the customer. This enables them to bypass the demofascists at homeland security who are trying to dry up the ammo supply by buying it all.
There is no way the government will be able to control all this technology to keep weapons out of the hands of citizens.
“I’m unhappy they were able to leverage their victimhood for the reduction of liberties of their fellow citizens,” Wilson said.
Well yeah, but the media-Dem apparatus disagree. So shut up.
Steve, I'd call that "assembling ammo", rather than making IMHO.
The normal powders are beyond the reach of any simple lab and the percussion caps require some seriod QA as well...
so they still are dependent on the same supply chain...
Sen. Chuck Schumer, a proponent for expanding gun background checks, spoke out about Wilson's experiment. 'Anyone, a terrorist, someone who is mentally ill, a spousal abuser, a felon, can essentially open a gun factory in their garage,' he said.
Making a gun a day with expensive equipment? Maybe, if the government had succeeded in getting rid of all guns.
BDNYC said...
"All he's done is given politicians reason to revisit gun control and try to take away even more liberties. They might even be able to galvanize the base and convince millions of low information voters that information itself is dangerous and must be controlled. After all, they are low information voters, so what do they care?"
You may be a bit demmified. Calling somebody a low information voter is just a nice way of saying they are stupid. These dem voters are mostly sheep who will do whatever they are told, i.e. no galvanizing needed. The dem dictators who dictate what dem voters are to think are already working as hard as they can to take our guns so Wilson's action won't make any difference to them.
Wilson is a patriot who did a great thing.
Considering that there must be billions of rounds of ammo squirreled away in the closets and garages of America I don't think that's a huge concern. None of these homemade guns strike me as plinkers.
The Drill SGT said...
Steve, I'd call that "assembling ammo", rather than making IMHO.
The normal powders are beyond the reach of any simple lab and the percussion caps require some seriod QA as well...
so they still are dependent on the same supply chain...
5/13/13, 8:23 AM
These are technical glitches. They too can be overcome.
On the Survivor "game" --
What was electrifying the first couple seasons, as instituted by the gay naked guy who didn't pay his taxes, has destroyed any possible interest in Survivor. For too long it has not been about actually physically surviving and is instead about some boring MTV soap opera crap.
Make it really worth watching. Stick them out in the middle of the wilderness, 200 miles from anything, with no food, no food rewards, the only equipment you might find in a crashed airplane, and that's it. And if they want to live, they have to navigate and walk the 200 miles to find civilization and rescue.
Ironically, the more anarchists you have like Wilson, the more authoritarians you tend to have rising up to contain them in a loop.
Which came first?
The flip side to the youth abandoning the traditional values and customs and duties for extreme anarchist and even more run of the mill libertarian tendencies tends to be more authoritarians.
Just as Ann has pointed out that the feminists, decrying traditional morality and moral convention, return to a kind of chaste secular moralism, and just as 60's cool has become boomer convention among the the gray ponytail crowd, beats and hippies have moved to hipster), so too does human nature little change.
After the idealism settles down, a strict moral seriousness sets in, now hung upon the ideas that drove the idealists.
Good to see Schumer get his, but a little troubling to see where we could drifting with some of our yutes.
That settles it. The UN guys next push will be on eliminating ammunition. Then the resistance's plastic guns will have to shoot Zell Miller spitballs.
The war is a foot. The resistance seems to be centered in a small area called Texas. What the Federalized UN Army needs now is an SS type unit that disarms the American soldiers...or doesn't that already happen when units return from deployments overseas?
Sometimes even slow cooking frogs start jumping out of the hotter water.
Here is an interesting and extraordinarily detailed article about the economics and details of reloading ammo. Because the article is long, I only copy part of it to show the flavor of the article.
http://cheaperthandirt.com/blog/?p=20785
"Handloading Your Own Ammunition: A Long Term Investment"
"The cost of ammunition is rising and availability is dwindling, but I still want to keep shooting. I’ve decided to invest in a reloading setup because I think it will save money, and allow me to keep a flow of ammunition going in times when certain calibers are hard to come by at any price...Let’s price out a sturdy pickup truck of a reloading setup for one of my favorite calibers, the .223 Remington...
A great place to start is with a Lee Reloading Starter Kit. For $113.13, you get a basic single stage press with a priming system, a mechanical scale, a powder measure, a powder funnel, and some case preparation tools. For the money, it is an unbeatable combination. I personally stepped up to a Lee 3-hole turret press which is still a great value, but if you do that you’ll have to buy all that other stuff separately.
You will need a way to clean up fired casings that you will be re-using. I went with the Lyman 1200 Classic tumbler for $82.04, and some cleaning media, which is gritty polishy stuff that goes in the tumbler, for $14.04.
We need some .223 Remington dies to go in that press. Again, Lee gets the call. Their $28.60 Pacesetter Die Set comes with three dies to go in the press. The first one resizes our casings, the second one puts the bullet in the casings, and the third one crimps the casing around the bullet to hold it where we want. If you’re reloading for a bolt-action gun, you can sometimes get by without crimping your ammo, but for a semi-auto like my AR-15, you need a crimp die. We also need a can of Hornady One-Shot lubricant to make sure we do not get our casings stuck in that resizing die. Cans go for $7.51...
Since we’re reloading for a rifle caliber, our casings will stretch when we fire them. We need to trim them back to a consistent length to ensure accuracy...a basic Lyman AccuTrimmer will get the job done fast enough for most of us. It is still a $51.20 investment but they never wear out...
Let’s add up the initial start-up costs of our basic reloading setup:
Lee Starter Kit: $113.13
Lyman 1200 tumbler: $82.04
Lyman cleaning media: $14.04
.223 die set: $28.60
Hornady One-Shot: $7.51
Lyman Accutrimmer: $51.20
TOTAL: $296.52
...
For only a few bucks more, you can get a thousand rounds of quality, brass cased .223 ammo from PMC, currently going for $311 per case...
So a thousand rounds worth of components is going to cost us:
Primers: $25
Powder: $90
.223 FMJ Bullets: $134.10
Casings: FREE! My back hurts a little from bending over to pick them all up though.
TOTAL: $249.10
Bender,
I enjoy shows like "Survivor Man" where the guy is plunked down somewhere remote and he has to make do with whatever he has to survive. You learn a lot of interesting survival techniques from watching these shows.
Once the technology was out there, it was going to be adapted.
Next up, a 3D-printable atom bomb, just a fissile material.
Ann Althouse said...
Now, will he become a lawyer?
No, he'll become the 21st century's answer to Steve jobs and Samuel Colt.
Hagar said...
It is some time ago, but did not street gangs - like in "West Side Story" - use to make "zip-guns" for themselves from junk they found around the "hood?
The zip gun and the switchblade were the two great hallmarks of life on the street 50 years ago.
In Special Forces, I believe Light Weapons Leaders are still taught to make them.
s/b add fissile material.
I sure hope Wilson's taxes are in order...
The thing isn't that he can make a gun. The thing is with some specialized training and some knowledge of material strength anyone can make anything.
But the same thing could be said of the technology it took to make a file. Then to make a lathe. Then to make a shaper(precurser of the milling machine-google it) etc.
It's the information that is valuable.
Damnation, Althouse! Would it kill you to put in a spoiler alert for those of us who aren't chained to broadcast schedules?
Rusty said...
"The thing isn't that he can make a gun. The thing is with some specialized training and some knowledge of material strength anyone can make anything.
But the same thing could be said of the technology it took to make a file. Then to make a lathe. Then to make a shaper(precurser of the milling machine-google it) etc.
It's the information that is valuable."
Going beyond that, let's assume that a team of people, with various specialized skills, decide to produce a product via a process similar to the way that open source software is produced. They get together to specify, design, purchase materials, implement, test, and document such a product. The product development process can be time consuming and expensive and require expensive, talented people to do it right. But once that arduous process has been completed, the detailed knowledge of how to produce this product with a programmable device such as a 3D printer can be released via the internet so that anyone can produce that product. This makes it much tougher to restrict access to that product because it no longer needs to be sold.
The barefoot hippie is a million times more interesting than the bores that were on Survivor too many times until I stopped watching.
And I get really annoyed with the whiny "I can't do it" folks who go on Amazing Race. Why are you even on the damn show if you are going to give up?
Steve Koch,
For only a few bucks more, you can get a thousand rounds of quality, brass cased .223 ammo from PMC, currently going for $311 per case...
Where did you see this price? Since Sandy Hook the lowest price I've seen (when ammo is even available) on .223/5.56 ammo is $0.66/round, with the average being close to $.90/round. In October, cheaperthandirt had a 1000 round case for ~$350, which now sells for ~$1000. I went to PMC's website and didn't see a listing for price anywhere.
It shows the stupidity of the 2nd amendment critics and gun control advocates. The single-shot gun came AFTER he created the receiver for the AR15. That was truly disruptive. The fact they got so upset over a single-shot plastic gun over the earlier semi-automatic weapon is evidence of this.
Ken,
I guess you missed these sentences at the start of the same post:
"Here is an interesting and extraordinarily detailed article about the economics and details of reloading ammo. Because the article is long, I only copy part of it to show the flavor of the article.
http://cheaperthandirt.com/blog/?p=20785
"Handloading Your Own Ammunition: A Long Term Investment"
Damn it, Ann. Give a spoiler alert if you're going to talk about the conclusion of a TV show within 24 hours of it being aired!
Honestly?
I'm amazed that someone younger than myself is an actual hero to me.
The kid's got balls, moxie and he stands by what he believes in.
If only we could get that from the older generation.
Honestly?
I'm amazed that someone younger than myself is an actual hero to me.
The kid's got balls, moxie and he stands by what he believes in.
If only we could get that from the older generation.
It is very true that one can make better firearms with CNC (computer numerical control) machines. One can even make better zip guns with garage tools.
But those require skill.
The point of this plastic gun is that it requires only skills that the user already possesses - download a song from the internet and play it on a machine.
Then assemble Legos.
Done.
"Sen. Chuck Schumer, a proponent for expanding gun background checks, spoke out about Wilson's experiment. 'Anyone, a terrorist, someone who is mentally ill, a spousal abuser, a felon, can essentially open a gun factory in their garage,' he said."
The only thing this does is make this truth undeniable.
Anyone... a terrorists or someone who is mentally ill, a spousal abuser, a felon... anyone can open a gun factory in their garage. This was true before. It's true now.
Other than needing some more experience in machining, my husband has all the tools needed to have a gun factory just on the other side of the wall where I'm sitting. He's got a mill... he's got a lathe... he's got a CNC machine. He's into the "computer control" part of it all.
He doesn't have a 3-D printer yet.
The fantasy that firearms can be controlled, that we can get guns out of the hands of terrorists or the mentally ill or abusers or felons by *controlling* them somehow, by taking guns away from law abiding sorts... that's always been a fantasy.
The 3-D printed "Liberator" does nothing at all but make it harder to play make-believe.
Why do people think that the "old" way to make guns involved CNC machines? Most of the workers at, say, Winchester before WW1 used files and loads of good ol' elbow grease. The vast majority of old guns floating around today were made during the World Wars. They still shoot, and they shoot modern ammo. And all without CNC. Huge numbers were even made by women. And pretty well made, too.
Then as now, the tough part was the barrel rifling. But it's only relatively recently (late 1800s) that power tools were routinely used for that.
Steve,
Good info, but:
"You do not need a way to clean up fired casings that you will be re-using."
FIFY. In most cases, polishing is cosmetic only and does not affect the performance of the loaded rounds.
And Steve. There is no way in the world they can stop it.
Drill SGT says,
Steve, I'd call that "assembling ammo", rather than making IMHO.
The normal powders are beyond the reach of any simple lab and the percussion caps require some seriod QA as well...
I'm not convinced - modern (late 20th century) powder would be hard for a kitchen chemist to produce, but if the supply chain collapsed or was interdicted, a competent tinkerer should be able to product cordite, at least. Not as predictable or precise maybe, but it would would work well enough for handload rounds in modern firearms. Same for primers - you probably couldn't manufacture modern primer explosive, but with a little luck you could produce fulminate of mercury without blowing yourself up. Not something you'd want to do if you had any other options, but not beyond the realm of practicality either.
" fulminate of mercury"
Ahh, jeez, then I'd have to clean the guns every time I shot them...
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