[LINK] "Controlled by Guns"

[rfmcdonald]

Quiet Babylon's Tim Maly writes about the consequences of the Liberator, the first gun made by 3-D printer. In the near future, it won't be necessary to go to a store to buy a gun. All that you'll have to do is download a file (a directory, at most) to your nearest 3-D printer. What will happen?

The hack that Defense Distributed have committed is a social one. Like many before, they have found and exploited the notoriously unpatched hole in the press’ defences—a vulnerability to sensational headlines. The science fiction promise of 3D printers (remember, Makerbot had the temerity to call their latest line of machines Replicators, after Captain Pickard’s miraculous tea provider) blurs with the Matter Battle reality. So the press will spend a few days collectively wringing their hands and debunking the wringing of hands around crude plastic guns when all around us very good guns can be bought or made using older more proven tools.

As materials scientist Deb Chachra once said, if they ever make a thing capable of making a truly great 3D printed gun, the least interesting thing about it will be that it can print guns. The truly interesting thing will be all the other machines and devices that can come out of it.

In the interim, Defense Distributed’s hack is interesting as a provocation. They’ve taken the world’s categories and grabbed and twisted the kaleidoscope. Suddenly, Maker movement adherents finds themselves uncomfortably on the side of gun owners, which is a place I suspect few of them wanted to be or realized they were in the first place. Sales people and advocates for 3D printers promising that these new machines will let us make anything are learning that weapons are things. Now they find themselves standing shoulder to shoulder with gun enthusiasts arguing that a tool is just a tool and you can’t ban a thing just because of a few bad apples.

The resulting parallels and analogies are instructive. Consider that one of the arguments I used to show that the Liberator wasn’t that big a deal was the ubiquity of mass-produced weapons. This is the exact same argument used by those who seek to downplay the coming impact of 3D printing in general. “Who cares that you can make a cup when there are millions of cups coming from China?”

If you think that 3D printing is going to be a big deal—if you think that there is reason for any enthusiasm about rapid prototyping, desktop manufacturing and the galaxy of tools and devices that lower the barriers of entry to small scale production runs—when someone points out that the global supply chain does it better, you smile and say, “Wait and see”.

So does Defense Distributed. They announced they’d made a plastic receiver and we said it wasn’t a big deal, since it broke after 6 shots. Then they made a reinforced version that lasted for 660. The current fully plastic gun isn’t a great weapon but it’s the first. Any objections to it being a big deal because of how crude or clumsy it is, is kind of like looking at the Wright Brothers’ Flyer and saying it doesn matter because no one is going to want to fly 120 feet. Wait and see.