Free Talk Live

Cody Wilson, like many Texan gunsmiths, is fast-talkin’ and fast-shootin’—but unlike his predecessors in the Lone Star State, he’s got 3D printing to help him with his craft. Wilson’s nonprofit organization, Defense Distributed, released a video this week showing a gun firing off over 600 rounds—illustrating what is likely to be the first wave of semi-automatic and automatic weapons produced by the additive manufacturing process. Last year, his group famously demonstrated that it could use a 3D-printed “lower” for an AR-15—but the gun failed after six rounds.

Defense Distributed (http://PrintableGun.com) is engaged in an earnest effort to produce and freely distribute through the internet a CAD file for a small, unrifled, completely 3D printable .22. They're encouraging libertarians and anarchists from across the internet to participate in the democratization of this project. They believe the existence of such a file alone will crash the current statist paradigm.

VICE's documentary on 3D Printed Guns. It follows Cody R Wilson of Austin Texas of defense distributed.

Teaser:
Even if you dial down the scare rhetoric, 3D printing at the very least seems like it could disrupt the idea that a government can regulate guns or their manufacture. Defense Distributed outright claims that kind of disruption among its goals.

Mere days after the first 3D-printed nonmetallic firearm shot its first rounds, Congressman Steve Israel (a would-be political superhero) is calling for a ban on the "wiki weapons" because their manufacture is untraceable and they cannot be detected via normal screening. It'll be fun to watch Congress try to stuff this genie back into its bottle.

Hackers in Germany have published thousands of copies of the fingerprints of German minister Wolfgang Schauble, a loud advocate of fingerprint biometrics. Hackers from the Chaos Computer Club lifted a fingerprint from the Interior Minister, printed it on plastic, and distributed it by the thousands with their magazine for anyone who wants to impersonate the Minister at a biometric checkpoint.

A towing company w/ a very sketchy history finally got what it deserved. After crossing the path of one pro-active kid, it has now lost half of its commercial accounts, and is in threat of going out of business all b/c they tried to claim the kid didn't have a parking permit, when in fact they scraped it off the car's windshield and tried to claim it wasn't there in the first place. The kid started a facebook group w/ past customers receiving the same dishonest dis-service, and now the company is literally paying the price.

The company Planetary Resources plans to develop and launch a series of robotic systems and unmanned spacecraft, starting with its Arkyd-100 Earth-orbiting space telescopes that it hopes to launch by the end of 2013 to identify candidate near-Earth asteroids containing natural resources. A single 500-meter platinum-rich asteroid would have the equivalent of all the platinum-group metals ever mined on Earth, the company said. And the right 80-meter asteroid would have more than $100 billion worth of materials, Anderson said.

The web domain for Defense Distributed was recently seized, and a notice was placed on the home page stating that individuals involved with the website are being indicted under a grand jury investigation for violating various gun control and intellectual property regulations.