Editor’s note: This article was first published in May 2013, and reports news from 3 May 2013, days before the Liberator files were released. The legal situation of 3D-printed guns and their blueprints has changed a lot since, including a US takedown order, lawsuits and new laws in several countries.
When we published everything we could do with 3D printers, some of you may have been a little skeptical, but they’re already here. A group of people calling themselves “Defense Distributed” have designed, and will make available to everyone, the first handgun that fires real ammunition and would be undetectable, according to Forbes.
The group has named its pistol “the Liberator”, and it is going to upload the blueprints to the internet so that anyone with a 3D printer can download them and build the gun at home.
The pistol is made of 16 plastic parts, except for a single nail or screw that acts as the firing pin. It can use bullets of different calibers, since the gun’s barrel is interchangeable.
Since it is illegal to make a gun that can’t be picked up by metal detectors, the group says that in the blueprints it uploads, one part of the gun will include a metal strip so that it can’t be slipped through an airport. Of course, as Forbes’s Greenberg points out, that would be pointless, since the user can simply choose to leave out the metal strip.
As we can see, technological advances can turn into great dangers: a gun like this could travel in carry-on luggage on a plane, or quite simply, before long any 14-year-old could be selling these “little pistols” at school.
Featured image: Vvzvlad, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
