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United States News Title: Bitcoin helps fund world’s first 3D-printed gun, now test fired and available for download Cody Wilson decided to do what Presidents and hacks in Washington like to talk about hes gone and tried to create a few manufacturing jobs in the USA, through the 3D printing revolution. 3-D printing holds a lot of promise to future generations, not least of all the liberation from the tyranny of the transnational corporate globalist manufacturing web slavery. Then Cody went and tried to make a gun, and all hell is beginning to break loose
Already, New Yorks Senator Charles Schumer and Congressman Steve Israel want to shut down the progenitor of the first 3-D printed gun, Cody Wilson and his tech garage non-profit start-up Defense Distributed. Angry liberals online are already unhappy with the small Texas entrepeneur, with some calling for Cody and his partner to be prosecuted for terrorism charges because plans for this particular plastic gun might fall into the hands of terrorists. Clearly, there are still some people who cannot handle to release of any new technology, let alone a blueprint for a gun. Definitely there are issues to face for manufacturing any lethal weapon but expect the governments worldwide to use the divisive gun issue in order to manipulate and control the 3D printing industry keeping it out of the hands of individuals and into the hands of a corporate monopoly they can more easily deal with ($#$). Now that this particular cat is out of the bag, will Biden, Dianne Feinstein and the gang begin campaign to make 3-D printing illegal in America? Will it become another national security issue? And their start-up efforts have been funded by
the Bitcoin community (99% of Defense Distributed assets are held in Bitcoins). Now, how about that! Will politicians like Dianne Feinstein call to seize and ban Bitcoin too? Forbes Alright. One
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Before three arrives, a shot reverberates across the overcast central Texas landscape. A tall, sandy blond engineer named John has just pulled a twenty-foot length of yellow string tied to a trigger, which has successfully fired the worlds first entirely 3D-printed gun for the very first time, rocketing a .380 caliber bullet into a berm of dirt and prairie brush. F****n A! yells John, who has asked me not to publish his full name. He hurries over to examine the firearm bolted to an aluminum frame. But the first to get there is Cody Wilson, a square-jawed and stubbled 25 year-old in a polo shirt and baseball cap. John may have pulled the trigger, but the gun is Wilsons brainchild. Hes spent more than a year dreaming of its creation, and dubbed it the Liberator in an homage to the cheap, one-shot pistols designed to be air-dropped by the Allies over France during its Nazi occupation in The Second World War. Unlike the original, steel Liberator, though, Wilsons weapon is almost entirely plastic: Fifteen of its 16 pieces have been created inside an $8,000 second-hand Stratasys Dimension SST 3D printer, a machine that lays down threads of melted polymer that add up to precisely-shaped solid objects just as easily as a traditional printer lays ink on a page. The only non-printed piece is a common hardware store nail used as its firing pin. Wilson crouches over the gun and pulls out the barrel, which was printed over the course of four hours earlier the same morning. Despite the explosion that just occurred inside of it, both the barrel and the body of the gun seem entirely unscathed. Wilson scrutinizes his creation for a few more seconds, then stands up again. I think we did it, he says, a little incredulous. 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. 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. You can print a lethal device. Its kind of scary, but thats what were aiming to show, Wilson told me at the time. Anywhere theres a computer and an Internet connection, there would be the promise of a gun. 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. A day later, that gun was tested on a remote private shooting range an hours drive from Austin, Texas, whose exact location Wilson asked me not to reveal. The verdict: it worked. The Liberator fired a standard .380 handgun round without visible damage, though it also misfired on another occasion when the firing pin failed to hit the primer cap in the loaded cartridge due a misalignment in the hammer body, resulting in an anti-climactic thunk. The printed gun seems limited, for now, to certain calibers of ammunition. After the handgun round, Wilson switched out the Liberators barrel for a higher-charge 5.7×28 rifle cartridge. He and John retreated to a safe distance, and John pulled his yellow string again. This time the gun exploded, sending shards of white ABS plastic flying into the weeds and bringing the Liberators first field trial to an abrupt end. 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. He fixated on its misfiring and brooded about the tight deadline hed given himself to work out its kinks before sharing the design on the Web. I feel no sense of achievement, he told me. Theres a lot of work to be done. And the most significant test of the Wiki Weapon was still to come, a moment of truth that may have been looming in Wilsons mind after watching his first prototype explode into plastic shrapnel: Firing the Liberator by hand. *** By Friday at noon, photographs of the worlds 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. New York Congressman Steve Israel responded to Defense Distributeds work by renewing his call for a revamp of the Undetectable Firearms Act, which bans any firearm that doesnt set off a metal detector. Security checkpoints, background checks, and gun regulations will do little good if criminals can print plastic firearms at home and bring those firearms through metal detectors with no one the wiser, read a statement sent to me and other reporters. Update: On Sunday, New York Senator Charles Schumer echoed (Steve) Israels call for that new legislation to ban 3D-printable guns. A terrorist, someone whos mentally ill, a spousal abuser, a felon can essentially open a gun factory in their garage, Schumer said in a press conference. Israel and Schumer are hardly the first to oppose Wilsons gun-printing mission. Last August, Defense Distributeds fundraising campaign was booted from the crowdfunding platform Indiegogo. In October, 3D printer maker Stratasys seized a printer leased to the group after it found out how the machine was being used. And Wilson says hes lost access to two workshop spaces after those renting to him learned about his mission. Instead, Defense Distributed has had to move its workshop to a 38-square-foot room at the southern edge of Austin thats about the size of a walk-in closet, hardly larger than the refrigerator-sized 3D printer it houses. The second-hand Stratasys Dimension SST that Defense Distributed used to print the Liberator. It fills close to half of the groups tiny 38-square-foot workshop space. (Click to enlarge) But at each roadblock, the group has found a detour. Its raised funds from donors through the digital currency Bitcoin, which thanks to that crypto-currencys rising value now accounts for 99% of Defense Distributeds assets, according to Wilson. In March it received a federal license to manufacture firearms, which Wilson has framed and posted on the wall of the groups miniscule workshop. And its complied with the Undetectable Firearms Act by inserting a six ounce chunk of non-functional steel into the body of the Liberator, which makes it detectable with a metal detectorWilson spent $400 on a walk-through model that hes installed at the workshops door for testing. Our strategy is overcompliance, he says. (Theres no guarantee, of course, that anyone who downloads and prints the Liberator will insert the same chunk of detectable steel.) Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread Top Page Up Full Thread Page Down Bottom/Latest
#1. To: A K A Stone (#0)
Including for all practical purposes,the end of all factory manufacturing jobs. This is going to be a game-changer that makes the Industrial Revolution look like a hiccup. not least of all the liberation from the tyranny of the transnational corporate globalist manufacturing web slavery. Karl Marx would be proud to have fathered that sentence. Already, New Yorks Senator Charles Schumer and Congressman Steve Israel want to shut down the progenitor of the first 3-D printed gun, Cody Wilson and his tech garage non-profit start-up Defense Distributed. Two Jews,once again working together to disarm everybody so they will willingly walk into the new death camps while counting on the government to not kill or harm anybody if "we just obey orders." How'd that work out for your relatives in Europe in the 30's and 40's,comrades? I guess they think that this time it's going to be like it was in the Soviet Union of the 20's and 30's,and it will be the Jews establishing the secret police and the death camps,and ordering everybody ELSE to go there. Somebody should ask them if they have any idea why their ancestors fled the USSR after helping set it up. Not that they will face up to the truth. They are so arrogant that everything negative that happens to Jews is always everyone else's fault,not theirs. In March it received a federal license to manufacture firearms, which Wilson has framed and posted on the wall of the groups miniscule workshop. I think that is the most amazing part of this story. Somebody was caught napping,and is getting fired over that one.
Why is democracy held in such high esteem when its the enemy of the minority and makes all rights relative to the dictates of the majority? (Ron Paul,2012)
I doubt that very much. There will still be plenty of jobs assembling the printed components, quality control, etc. Skilled machinist jobs however might become harder to find.
Trained monkey work. I saw the same thing happening in the last machine shop I worked it. They were hiring guys that literally didn't even know how to read a scale and who had never even seen a mic as "machine operators" for the CAD machines. They had one guy per shift who actually knew how to set them up,and these guys would teach the new employees how to use "go"and "no go" gauges and then scream for help to adjust the tooling if something went wrong. There were a few guys like me doing non-production or low-production work on engine lathes and mills,but most of the workforce were "trained monkeys".
Why is democracy held in such high esteem when its the enemy of the minority and makes all rights relative to the dictates of the majority? (Ron Paul,2012)
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