Update On the Printable Gun

A few days ago, I mentioned that there's now such a thing as a printable gun. Buy yourself a $1,700 3D printer, download the instructions to the device, wait 27 hours while the thing prints, and then you have yourself a working gun, capable of firing a .380 caliber bullet with enough velocity to seriously injure or kill.

Now, however, the police force in New South Wales, Australia, have determined that the gun can actually explode once fired, seriously injuring the user. After downloading the instructions, printing the gun, and firing it a test subject (a block of gelatin called "ballistic soap"), the gun exploded into several pieces. Luckily, it was attached to a firing rig and no one was hurt in the demonstration. 

I'm a bit of a skeptic, so I have to wonder if this experiment was all fabricated to deter people away from trying to print their own gun. Even though the instructions for the gun have been downloaded over 100,000 times (and that total was just as of the time that I wrote the last article; it's likely much more at this point), they've only been seen in public a handful of times. This new test and the results that have been reported might just be a ploy to keep more people from attempting to create their own firearm. That's just my own speculation, but I have to think that someone might see that result and determine that it's just not worth putting themselves at risk in order to print off an illegal, possibly defective gun. 

Either way, this thing is dangerous. I still stand behind my initial point that 3D printers are amazing, and they have remarkable potential to help people. In fact, scientists have begun using the device to print food for astronauts, using a powder cartridges containing "sugars, complex carbohydrates, protein or some other basic building block" to print edible wafers. The powdered ingredients can last up to 30 years, illustrating the potential for long-term storage on those extended missions to Mars that everyone's clamoring for. And speaking of printing food: they could even be used to print food in places where food resources are scarce or none-existent. Pack up a printer and a few dozen powder containers, and you could feed a village in the middle of the desert for a week. 

Obviously, this technology has wonderful potential. However, like everything else in this world, there is no black and white with this thing, no way to separate the good potential from the opportunity for it to be used maliciously. So, unless there is some sort of restriction put on the creation of the Liberator, this could cause an unfortunate precedent of unrestricted use that could end in lots of injury and heartache.

It seems like it all boils down to censorship and personal rights. So, it's basically the same argument that people have always had, but with new ammunition (no pun intended).

-JJ