Tag Archives: Cody Wilson

About those 3D guns…

In May 2013, Cody Wilson, through his Austin-based company Defense Distributed, created the Liberator, a nearly entirely 3-D printed, single-shot .380 ACP pistol for which he freely shared the plans for online. In the first two days, the files were downloaded nearly 100,000 times. Then the federal government, specifically the State Department under John Kerry, demanded the plans for the Liberator be pulled from the website until further notice under international arms regulations, citing “the United States government claims control of the information.”

Wilson, allied with the Second Amendment Foundation, challenged that logic in court and won the settlement announced this week that will see DefDist once again post 3-D gun files starting Aug. 1 via Defcad.com. “The age of the downloadable gun begins.”

And they aren’t just about the Liberator anymore:

More in my column at Guns.com.

When the 3D printed guns get tough, the Anarchist printers get going

I saw this interesting interview with Cody Wilson of DefDist doing an update to his case in federal court over the State Department’s arguments his Liberator 3D printed pistol plans were, once they hit the internet, unregulated arms information leaking out past the country’s borders, which on its face is kinda laughable. I’ve spoken with Wilson several times in months and years past with Guns.com and he is an interesting guy.

‘This is my ghost gun…there are many like it, but this one is mine’

I’ve written extensively about the controversy with Cody Wilson and his Ghost Gunner device– a desktop CNC milling machine that you insert an 80 percent lower into and about four hours later have a finished lower ready to assemble. Well Wired managed to get their hands on one (I’m still on the waiting list 🙁 ) and went about crafting one. Better yet, they compared the finished result to one they tried to make on a drill press and a second 3D printed lower made on a desktop replicator and took the lowers to a gunsmith for his inspection.

This is my ghost gun. To quote the rifleman’s creed, there are many like it, but this one is mine. It’s called a “ghost gun”—a term popularized by gun control advocates but increasingly adopted by gun lovers too—because it’s an untraceable semiautomatic rifle with no serial number, existing beyond law enforcement’s knowledge and control. And if I feel a strangely personal connection to this lethal, libertarian weapon, it’s because I made it myself, in a back room of WIRED’s downtown San Francisco office on a cloudy afternoon…

GhostGun-02-1024x683

Kinda long but really neat article here

Where the Second Amendment meets the Black Flag

photo-by-come-and-take-it-texas

Had a chance to correspond back and forth with Cody Wilson, the modern crypto-anarchist who gave the world the open-sourced 3D printed gun. Once the genie is out of the bottle so to speak…

It seems his latest invention, a desktop portable CNC milling machine set up to drill the right holes in an 80 percent AR-15 lower, deemed the Ghost Gunner as an ode to Calif State Sen. Kevin de Leon, was used by a 2A group at the Texas state capitol this week to make two functional lowers on site.

Interesting conversation over at Guns.com