This man may have ushered in the age of “downloadable guns”
In summer 2012, Cody Wilson hung around J&J, a car-repair shop run by two “goofy” guys in their late 20s. The Austin warehouse was crowded with engine blocks, car parts and Pelican boxes that never seemed to have been opened, but the 24year-old came as he pleased, with access to shop machinery.
He had spent the larger part of his second year at the University of Texas Law School learning how to operate a 3-D printer. Familiar with the robust gun culture of the South from his Boy Scout years in Arkansas, he soon began to wonder whether he could create the first fully 3-D-printed, functional firearm.
Wilson was not confident it was feasible. The technology was new, and printable materials were brittle and plastic. But Wilson was motivated by curiosity, hypothesizing that he could design a printable weapon and build a platform for users to download gun blueprints without government regulation.
“Even I was glamoured by the magic of 3-D printing,” he said, recalling when he removed the first functional plastic piece from the printer. “It had an unusual polymer, fleshy feel and a silicate structure about it that had to be washed off. All the trappings of some kind of alien birth.”
Wilson admired the object. The screw, buffer tower, the grip face. They all had perfect resolution, he said. “That’s the devilry of this technology. They can do things that have machine quality.”
Wilson drove to west Texas and learned to assemble a gun, swapping in his printed
part a green lower receiver. He shot the low-powered AR-15 into the dirt five or six times before it broke. Wilson showcased the accomplishment on YouTube.
Convincing Americans that 3-D-printing guns was a worthwhile endeavor proved to be a challenge, said Wilson, who had begun fundraising. His bleak investor base was mostly 3-D printer enthusiasts with several straggling gun-rights advocates. Gun owners could already own many guns. Why did they need new ones printed?
Inspired by Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, Wilson and his friends set out to create an open-source platform.
“We wanted to be the wiki for guns,” Wilson said. Defcad.com, an unregulated file-sharing website, launched, birthing what became the first 3-D-printing gun community.
Testing of the “Liberator,” his first fully printed pistol, finished in late April 2013, during his sec- ond-year exams. He dropped out of the program the same week and uploaded his design files for ghost guns, firearms without serial numbers. In a few days, there were more than 100,000 downloads. Then he was stopped by the feds.
In May, Wilson told Infowars’ Alex Jones, who has promoted various conspiracy theories, that the State Department emailed him demanding the files be taken down. The department alleged that by uploading a weapon blueprint, which constituted an export under the International Traffic in Arms Regulations, Wilson was violating federal law. With 30 days to respond to government demands, Wilson removed the files from defcad.com then filed suit against the U.S. government for violating his First Amendment right to free speech.
What frustrated Wilson was that the government was attempting to stop him from giving knowledge away.
“It’s not that I’m a nihilist about it. I know that I can’t control it moving forward, but that’s the utopia of the present,” Wilson said, calling himself a political romantic. “Good, something might happen that I can’t anticipate! That’s what inspires a bunch of burnouts like me.”
He understood the knowledge could be used for radical purposes. Still, he said, there was no way to “violate” his idea. In the public domain, the designs were “equally everyone’s and no one’s.”
At the time it was a pipe dream, but he hoped he had a case.
Joined by the Second Amendment Foundation, Wilson spent five years in litigation. In an unlikely turn of events, on June 22, the federal government settled. It was a narrow victory for First Amendment fans, coming under an administration usually perceived as hostile to free speech.
Second Amendment Foundation founder Alan Gottlieb, surprised the government settled after years of battle, said that the victory cemented gun-ownership law. “The government can no longer effectively ban guns in America because anyone can download the code and make a gun in their own home,” he said.
Weapon manufacturing, however, is moving away from 3-D printing. According to Adrian Bowyer, a retired engineer, 3-D printers aren’t a suitable technology for weapon-making. The key component of a firearm is that it’s cylindrical and rotationally symmetric. 3-D printers are restricted to available materials, and the ones that work with metals don’t provide the best results.
Bowyer said that if he had an interest in making weapons, he would make them with conventional tools, like a lathe. But when printing technology becomes more reliable and affordable, some critics say, it will have dangerous consequences for public safety.
Wilson’s website is scheduled to go back online Aug. 1. Throughout the litigation, he developed a trove of other 3-D-printable weapon blueprints, including Assembly AR-15s and AR-10s.