Last week, Defense Distributed designed and developed the world’s first 3D printed gun, a story which made news headlines when the first 3D printed gun was fired in Texas last week. The company had also obtained a license from the United States Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives in order to carry out their plan to distribute the blueprint of the gun online. But what the company had not anticipated was that downloads would reach the 100,000 mark in a such a short period of time.

The download rate has spurred the US government to demand the blueprints be removed from the Internet. It is highly unlikely that the removal of the blueprints after they have been downloaded 100,000 times will be of any use, as the files have already been uploaded to file-sharing site, Pirate Bay.

Founder of Defense Distributed, Cody Wilson was emailed by the the Office of Defense Trade Controls Compliance and ordered to remove the designs from “public access”. Distributing the gun design online may also be a violation of arms-control regulations, laws which Wilson will need to prove he has not broken. Wilson is of the opinion that he has not broken the law as his company has complied with the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR).

Our gun operations were registered with ITAR.

The Liberator, as the gun is known, is made out of plastic using an industrial 3D printer which costs R70,000, allowing the gun to withstand the explosive force when firing a bullet. These industrial printers are used by engineering firms to test the prototype before they produce the product on a larger scale.

It is not likely that the 100,000 downloaders have access to equipment of this nature to be able to reproduce the 3D printed gun.

[Source: BBC News]