The end of gun control: Wiki Weapon Project advances

In a move that will likely spell the end of gun control as we know it, a group is working with designers to put firearm designs into the public domain on the Internet which will allow anyone with a 3-D printer to “print” their own firearm.

Workable models have already been made, but designers are refining designs to make them better.

This morning, Cody Wilson from the University of Texas sent me an email to let me know they had reached a critical milestone: the $20,000 they were seeking to advance his “Wiki Weapon” project to the next step.

Forbes has a story about it as well. The money will be used to hold a design competition to make a 21st century version of a “zip” gun, a single-shot .22.

public-penna-pistola-gunpen1 — Here’s a nicely machined “zip” gun. Many are nowhere near this nice, but they still are equally lethal.

Also, as technologies and 3-D printers get better, someday soon you will be able to “print” guns at home that may work remarkably well for occasional use.

This surely has people like the Brady Bunch upset and “concerned”.

3D-Printable Gun Project Hits Its Fundraising Goal Despite Being Booted Off Indiegogo

(Forbes) – A firearm anyone can download and print in their own home may be the most controversial application yet of consumer 3D printing. But some gun lovers, it seems, want to see it happen badly enough to put their wallets behind it.

This week, the so-called Wiki Weapon Project, an initiative that aims to design and build the world’s first entirely 3D-printable handgun, met its goal of raising $20,000 from Internet donors…

The Wiki Weapon Project, hosted by a group that calls itself Defense Distributed, set out in July with the goal of raising enough money to hold a design competition among 3D-printable software models for a working gun capable of firing at least a single .22 caliber bullet that can be printed on a relatively cheap RepRap 3D printer.

“We want to show this principle: That a handgun is printable,” Wilson told me last month. “You don’t need to be able to put 200 rounds through it…It only has to fire once. But even if the design is a little unworkable, it doesn’t matter, as long as it has that guarantee of lethality.”