I read with interest, recent reports of a 3-D printed hand gun, created by Defense Distributed, being test-fired at a gun range just south of Austin, Texas. Defense Distributed, whose website bills itself as “The Home of the Wiki Weapons Project,” fired the gun in front of an observer from Forbes, and you can view the gun, named The Liberator, being test-fired in a video taken during the test and posted on YouTube. Defense Distributed also announced it would post the gun’s blueprints and construction details on the company’s own DefCAD design site. For you history buffs, the “Liberator” was also the name of a single-shot pistol designed to be distributed by dropping them from airplanes flying over France during World War II.
The gun isn’t completely plastic – the firing pin is a common metal nail that can be purchased at a hardware store and can be detected by metal detectors – and that single metal nail apparently makes it legal under U.S. law (the Undetectable Firearms Act of 1988; Pub.L. 100–649, H.R. 4445, 102 Stat. 3816). The 3-D printer used to make the rest of the plastic components is a Dimension SST 3D printer made by Stratasys, which apparently now has a U.S. federal license to manufacture firearms.
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