New York Congressman Steve Israel responded to Defense Distributed's work by renewing his call for a revamp of the Undetectable Firearms Act, which bans any firearm that doesn't set off a metal detector. 'There's a lot of work to be done.'Īnd the most significant test of the Wiki Weapon was still to come, a moment of truth that may have been looming in Wilson's mind after watching his first prototype explode into plastic shrapnel: Firing the Liberator by hand.īy Friday at noon, photographs of the world's first 3D-printed gun published on this site set off a new round of controversy in a story that has shoved one of the most hyped trends in technology into one of the most contentious crossfires in American politics. “I feel no sense of achievement,' he told me. He fixated on its misfiring and brooded about the tight deadline he'd given himself to work out its kinks before sharing the design on the Web. On the ride back to Austin after that first test-fire, Wilson seemed less than satisfied with the relative success of his 3D printed creation. Update: Defense Distributed's CAD file for the Liberator and its video introducing the gun are now online. mechanism and a nail used as its firing pin. The sixteen pieces of Defense Distributed's printed handgun, including spiral springs for its hammer.

A day later, that gun was tested on a remote private shooting range an hour's drive from Austin, Texas, whose exact location Wilson asked me not to reveal. On May 1st, Wilson assembled the 3D-printed pieces of his Liberator for the first time, and agreed to let a Forbes photographer take pictures of the unproven device. “Anywhere there’s a computer and an Internet connection, there would be the promise of a gun.” It’s kind of scary, but that’s what we’re aiming to show,” Wilson told me at the time. The digital blueprints for that so-called Wiki Weapon, as Wilson imagined it, could be uploaded to the Web and downloaded by anyone, anywhere in the world, hamstringing attempts at gun control and blurring the line between firearm regulation and information censorship. Last August, Wilson, a law student at the University of Texas and a radical libertarian and anarchist, announced the creation of an Austin-based non-profit group called Defense Distributed, with the intention of creating a firearm anyone could fabricate using only a 3D printer. “I think we did it,” he says, a little incredulous.

Wilson scrutinizes his creation for a few more seconds, then stands up again. Despite the explosion that just occurred inside of it, both the barrel and the body of the gun seem entirely unscathed. Wilson crouches over the gun and pulls out the barrel, which was printed over the course of four hours earlier the same morning.

Gun jam with blast