Will printed guns be game changers? If anybody with the money can buy, lease or otherwise gain access to a 3-D printer, raw materials and the proper "blueprints" via open-source software, will any gun laws be enforceable anywhere? Some gun parts have in the past been printed. But until a fully functional firearm was produced, all those questions were just hypothetical. But now such a gun has been printed and tested. Elias Groll introduces us to
Cody Wilson, the anarchist behind the world's first 3-D printed gun:
"I like Camus, man."
That's how Cody Wilson, the man behind the first fully functional 3-D printed gun, replied when asked by the right-wing radio host Alex Jones to describe his political heroes. This past week, Wilson's company, Defense Distributed,announced that it had created a functioning handgun produced by a 3-D printer -- a device that creates products from electronic blueprints by layering plastic -- and that it planned to make the schematics freely available online.
Everything in this gun except the metal in the
firing pin and a six-ounce weight required
for detection was manufactured out of plastic
on a 3D printer.
So far, Wilson's effort has largely been portrayed in the media in two ways: as a dangerous way to circumvent gun-control statutes and as a tech story about how an innovative manufacturing technology is being harnessed for unanticipated ends. But there's a political story here, too.
While it's easy to caricature Wilson, a 25-year-old law student at the University of Texas, as a right-wing nut hell bent on defending his Second Amendment rights, a common thread of anarchist thinking runs through nearly all Wilson's public statements. This isn't just a guy who loves his guns — this is a political project. Or at least it purports to be.
"Now that we have a [federal license to manufacture guns] we can ... develop something like a single-shot completely printable plastic gun," he said on Alex Jones's show back in March. "Yes, it's undetectable, but more importantly it's unobservable by institutions and countries and sovereigns. ... This might be a politically important object."
Wilson is the rare gun-rights advocate who drops names like Michel Foucault, Albert Camus, and John Milton in his interviews, and the worldview he's selling has more in common with hacktivist collectives like Anonymous than bearded woodsmen preparing for the endtimes. […]
[Says Wilson:] "But what this project's really about, fuck your laws, you know what I'm saying? It's stepping up, it's being able to go, you know what, I don't like this legal regime I neatly step outside of it. Now what, you know?" […]
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Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2009—FL-Sen: Conservative Base Looking To Sink Crist:
Democratic odds of winning the open Senate seat in Florida go up significantly if the Republican nominee is not Gov. Charlie Crist.
Florida House Speaker Marco Rubio is also in the race, and preparing to run to the right of Crist, who is what passes for a moderate in today's Republican Party. And Florida establishment conservatives are already lining up behind Rubio, including one of the state's most prominent politicians, Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen.
Apparently, the "successful" conservative torpedoing of Arlen Specter is serving as a model for would-be Crist-beaters:
"Specter has not changed on social issues for his entire career, and Pennsylvania Republican primary voters were OK with that; but the last straw was the stimulus vote," Navarro said. "I think Charlie has greatly misjudged the incredible damage of his fawning support of the stimulus package."
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Tweet of the Day:
Saxby Chambliss career highlights: 1) hole-in-one; 2) defeating a multi-amputee Vietnam hero Senator by implying he sides w/terrorists
— @delrayser via Twitter for Android
On today's
Kagro in the Morning show,
Greg Dworkin's round up on the flu, the revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the implosion of the Howard Kurtz brand, and follow-up on the shooting in Kentucky. We also read Jill Lawrence's "The Most Bogus Argument Against New Gun Laws," and Josh Marshall's gun mash-up, "When Stories Collide." The week in Congress, featuring some good coverage from our own
Mark E Anderson of the so-called Working Families Flexibility Act, and Jonathan Bernstein on the socio-political (and everything else-o) lesson of the Marketplace Fairness Act.
High Impact Posts. Top Comments.