>> Speaker 1: [NOISE] What’s that?
>> Speaker 2: This is a plastic, 3-D printing gun.
>> Speaker 1: What is it?
>> Speaker 2: A 3-D printed plastic gun >> Speaker 1: Plastic gun?
>> Speaker 2: Yeah.
>> Speaker 1: That you made?
>> Speaker 2: Yes. [SOUND]
It might work, it may not.
Hence, we're out here.
>> Speaker 1: It may fail, if you made it please, don't shoot it here.
>> Speaker 2: Okay.
>> [MUSIC]
>> Speaker 2: My name's
Cody Wilson.
I'm the Director of Defense Distributed, and
we print gun components with 3D printers.
>> [SOUND] >> Speaker 2: And
one day we want to print guns.
[LAUGH] Well, in the United States, it's always been legal
to make your own gun, and always been.
People don't do it because, well what's the last thing you made for yourself?
You go buy them, and it's still legal to make your own gun, outside of commerce.
Literally, all the things that these people are afraid of, we're already legal,
we're just providing you a direct way to do it and saying, yes, why not?
We really don't think politics is possible, in a traditional sense,
a real sense anymore, after the Cold War.
It's boring, it's not possible to do anything any more.
[INAUDIBLE] Events have stopped.
[LAUGH] So we're always looking for something just [SOUND].
Not only to fulfill us, but just to feel like okay, you know what?
The world isn't such a terrible place, events can happen again.
And we came up with okay, you can print a gun, that's a cool concept.
But it's much cooler when you give it away.
When you take a page out of open source and the hacker and
maker movements, you make it political, you stir it up, right?
And you've got a potent little mixture here.
And it's something the world thought was potent as well, I suppose.
>> [MUSIC]
>> Speaker 3: All right, this is the basic Liberator.
You got your receiver right here, barrel.
Internals and handle.
I normally use plastic pins to put them all together, I've been using metal ones,
since that makes them a little bit more reliable,
I don't have to worry about those as much.
My name's Travis Lerol, I'm a 30 year old, prior AirForce software engineer.
And just got into all this stuff because it seemed fascinating.
815 lower.
815 magazine.
TARDIS with a drawer system that I grabbed off Shapeways and started messing with.
It's from Doctor Who.
When 3D printing was in its infancy,
I mean, printing a single monostatic piece was very easy.
It doesn't have to work with anything else, so if the size is a bit off,
it doesn't really matter.
But as this got better, people really want to see how far they can push it.
Guns had that mix of controversy and
challenge that I think attracted a lot of people to them.
I used the cube.
It costs be about $1,300.
The whole Liberator took about two days to print.
Probably $20, $30.
I got it directly from Defcan.
Pretty much right after it was released, so
the whole [INAUDIBLE] hadn't been an issue yet.
>> Speaker 2: So I'm a law student, right?
A lot of the research was, can we do this the way we want to do this?
And what is the legal way of doing this?
And we've only just begun to crack some of these legal problems, but
right now we want at least a shot at it, so we have to comply.
>> Speaker 5: I'll take some spare
in case I break them.
>> [MUSIC]
>> Speaker 4: We're off the gun range to give the Liberator its first test.
Maybe it'll fire, maybe it won't.
But as long as it doesn't take my hand off, that's the important part.
>> Speaker 2: Part of the project is at least demonstrating, okay,
that the law is in places, not this grand encapsulation that it was thought to be.
And built up through the whole 20th century, right?
Post Sandy it was like, we're almost there,
if we can just take the semi-autos away.
[LAUGH] To find that actually the back door is getting blown off and, in fact,
you have a whole bigger problem heading your way.
>> Speaker 4: Literally, millions of people, I think,
at this point have downloaded it.
So the amount of files that are out there is so
large that it's accessible to anyone who wants it.
>> Speaker 2: I'm not willing to go all the way to say I'm
providing you with a gun.
We're blending,
to use the pirate based terminology there's a feasible quality to this.
So it's more than information, right?
But it's less than an object, it straddles the line.
>> [NOISE] >> Speaker 6: If you want to shoot it
off once or twice, I'll walk back.
>> Speaker 1: Okay, that's entirely fair, I'll let you know before I shoot it then.
3-D printers are often subtly different.
So, if you get a model from somebody else, it may not print in your printer at all,
or it might require modification to print correctly.
There’s definitely a learning curve to it, yeah.
>> [SOUND] >> Speaker 1: It
is not firing, so I think I'm done with it.
>> Speaker 6: All right, good.
So, you're done, right?
>> Speaker 1: Yes.
>> Speaker 6: All right, good.
>> Speaker 1: I tried it a few times.
It was dinging the primer.
but,it's not going off.
It looks like the,
the primer is not taking enough force to actually explode the lively.
So, I think I'm gonna improve the firing mechanism,
and replace it with a more traditional like cylinder striking pin.
Should be the basic shape.
That's the process.
It's never perfect the first time, you are making a new one, give that another shot.
Just keep killing till it gets better.
>> Speaker 1: I think that we can definitely do it.
Being familiar with computers certainly helped me.
But it wasn't specifically a programming task, so
I feel like anyone could do what I've done.
>> Speaker 2: One of the things I worry about the most,
is that people actually enjoy pleasurable modes of subservience
that they get from watching TV and watching politics as a spectator sport.
They don't actually want to be political.
They don't wanna have control over their affairs.
It's easier to have everything organized for you.
And if I've given you the means to produce a gun for yourself, while that might sound
revolutionary, it's in fact not very interesting to most people.
So for me, it's not well, what's the future of 3D printing?
For me it's, can I activate someone politically?
How can I do this, and what's the most potent, symbolic way of delivering
what I think is an essential message, which is that you know what?
Okay, human liberty is something that you have, too.
>> [SOUND] >> Speaker 7: Defense Distributed,
Austin, Texas.
>> Speaker 1: The Liberator itself probably
won't have a huge effect,
because it's a very early gunning test.
But I imagine that I'll see future designs built off the Liberator
that will be better in many different ways.
You put enough minds to work on something, and
someone's gonna come up with something interesting.
>> Speaker 2: There's no stress failure point here anymore,
there's just nowhere for it to fail in this set up.
>> Speaker 1: Right.
I don't have an endgame.
I don't know where this project ends.
Some people can have this information.
Some people can't.
That's interesting.
Why is that so?
Do we really believe that?
Is that just, is that equitable?
Not as just and equitable as it could be.
And that's
defense's truth.
>> [MUSIC]