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3D-printed guns are back, and this time they are unstoppable

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A decentralised network of gun-printing advocates is mobilising online, they're anonymously sharing blueprints, advice and building a community. There's no easy way they can be halted

A new network of 3D-printed gun advocates is growing in America – and this time things are different. Unlike previous attempts to popularise 3D-printed guns, this operation is entirely decentralised. There’s no headquarters, no trademarks, and no real leader. The people behind it reckon that this means they can’t be stopped by governments.

“If they [the government] were to come after me, they’d first have to find my identity,” says Ivan the Troll, a member of the group. “I’m one of many, many like-minded individuals who’re doing this sort of work. ”

Known only by his online moniker, Ivan the Troll is the de facto spokesman of an underground wave of 3D-printing gunsmiths. Ivan says he knows of at least 100 people who are actively developing 3D-printed gun technology, and he claims there are thousands taking part in the network. This loose-knit community spans across the whole world.

They communicate across several digital platforms, including Signal, Twitter, IRC, and Discord. They critique each other's work, exchange 3D gun CAD files, offer advice, talk theory, and collaborate on future blueprints. These 3D-printed gun enthusiasts – who share similar ideas and political viewpoints on gun control – mostly found each other online via gun control subreddits and forums.

Ivan is just one small part of this network. He says he is from Illinois, and is of “college age”, but otherwise he remains mostly anonymous, to lie low. At the same time though, he’s launched bombastic PR videos demonstrating the new 3D-printed gun parts he’s created in his garage, including a Glock 17 handgun frame.

One of his most recent videos shows the polymer Glock 17 frame in various stages of production in his workshop. The footage is set to fast-paced synthwave music and is run through a trendy VHS filter – the aesthetics are important. Toward the end, Ivan fires several rounds with the fully built handgun, as text flashes up saying “ANYONE CAN MAKE IT”, “LIVE FREE OR DIE”, and “GO AHEAD TRY TO STOP THIS YOU FILTHY STATISTS”. He’s also uploaded the complete CAD reference model designs for a 3D-printed AR-15 assault rifle to his file-sharing space online. It’s clear Ivan is trying to provoke his detractors as much as possible.

In February of this year, Ivan and his group decided to name themselves “Deterrence Dispensed”, which is a tongue-in-cheek nod to the notorious Defence Distributed – a 3D-printing gun company formerly run by Texan crypto-anarchist Cody Wilson.

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In September 2018, Wilson, 30, was arrested and charged with sexual assault against a minor. He is alleged to have paid $500 to have sex with a 16-year-old girl in his home city of Austin, Texas. Needless to say, this arrest effectively took Wilson out of the 3D-printed gun world entirely. Many of the people who looked up to him were either disgusted or realised that his time was up. He stepped down from Defence Distributed, which was before seen as the driving force behind 3D-printed guns since it launched in 2012. Wilson was released on a $150,000 bail, but has remained silent since.

Defence Distributed has many other ongoing legal battles. Attorney generals from more than 20 US states are currently in the process of suing the company – which has countersued – in a bid to reverse a court win that momentarily allowed Defence Distributed to upload and share 3D-printed gun blueprints online. Their headaches are long, drawn out, and ongoing. (New York State has just passed a law to ban 3D-printed guns).

For Ivan’s group, Deterrence Dispensed, none of this is relevant. They’re uploading these files individually on services such as Spee.ch, a media-hosting site underpinned by the LBRY blockchain, and they aren’t waiting for anyone to give them permission. They’ve made their own 3D-printed gun designs, modified old ones, and are keeping all the Defence Distributed ones available for free too.

“Even if there was no government telling me I couldn’t do this, I think that I would still do it,” Ivan says. “Some people get a kick out of video games, I like spending hours and hours drawing stuff on CAD.”

Ivan isn’t just “drawing stuff on CAD” though. He’s providing free files to help anyone with a half-decent FDM (Fused Deposition Modeling) 3D printer and some hand tools to make a workable handgun. Once the CAD file is downloaded, it’s opened in a “slicer” program that translates the CAD files into instructions that the 3D printer can understand. Once the 3D-printed gun parts are ready, they can be assembled into a fully workable gun.

The CAD gun designs put out by Deterrence Dispensed are so well-made, according to Ivan, that they’re not just “workable”, but superior. “Our AR15 CAD model is the best in the public domain without a doubt,” says Ivan.

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Despite being overtly antagonistic Ivan has had no real run-ins with the authorities so far. His Twitter account was permanently suspended after New Jersey state senator Bob Menendez lobbied for it to be taken down, but as far as the government and law enforcement goes, things have been mostly quiet.

Ivan sees himself, and other radical 3D-printing gun groups such as FOSSCAD (another decentralised group of 3D-printing enthusiasts who focus on firearms), simply as hobbyists who’ve chosen the “wrong” thing to build. He sees 3D-printed guns as somewhat of a paper tiger. He points out that while 3D-printed gun parts can be built to kill people, zip guns (homemade firearms built from crude materials) have been around for decades and are arguably more deadly. The hysteria and backlash, to Ivan at least, is completely misplaced.

“Take it from me as someone who’s printed a gun. Making a slam-fire shotgun is 100 times easier, 100 times quicker, and about 100 times cheaper than printing a [regular] gun. For eight dollars I can pop down to Home Depot and build a shotgun.”

Already in 2019, 156 people have already been killed in US mass shootings, and gun-related deaths are at a 20-year high. In March, a terrorist armed with two semi-automatic rifles and two shotguns killed 51 people in an anti-muslim attack in Christchurch, New Zealand. In such circumstances, do the US (and the world) really need more guns – zip gun, 3D-printed, or otherwise? Ivan thinks yes.

“The cops killed more people alone last year than all active shooter incidents in the last ten years,” he says. “We live in a society, in America, where you run the risk of a cop blowing your ass up for no specific reason. You don’t even have to present a threat to them. A cop can kill you and get away with it just because he really wanted to do it.”

He then went on to cite the many police shootings of unarmed black men in American, specifically mentioning Stephon Clark. Clark, 22, was shot to death by police in his own back garden while holding nothing but a mobile phone. “I believe it is inherently important that … you should be able to own a gun,” Ivan continued. “You should be able to own the same legal force that the cops are using to control you.”

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But the facts are clear. The majority of gun deaths around the world come from just six countries – one of which is the US. And analysis from Harvard University shows where there are more guns, more murders happen.

Anti-gun campaigners, obviously, disagree with the notion of a downloadable gun. Avery Gardiner, the co-president of the Brady Campaign, has said 3D-printed guns present a "supreme threat to our safety and security". Speaking after a court decision in August Gardiner said: "Already, there have been a wave of dangerous actors seeking to illegally post the blueprints online".

A mix of a libertarian attitude and the rewarding hobby aspect of designing and creating something is often what drives members of these decentralised 3D-printed gun networks to do what they do – that is, uploading schematics, sharing them, improving designs, and making 3D-printed gun work more easily accessible while remaining largely under the radar. Ivan claims he does this for a love of freedom and “radical” belief in the US first and second amendment: free speech and the right to bear arms.

He takes this to such a radical degree though, that he even theorises he should technically be able to have his own Tomahawk Missiles, saying that they would be safer in his hands than in those of the US Military and its allies – given the country's track record for accidentally targeting civilians, including a wedding party in Afghanistan and a school bus in Yemen.

Referring to the mounting list of civilian killings carried about by US forces in foreign wars, Ivan sounds at times more like a radical leftist than the right wing “gun nut” many in America label him as. He claims not to have any specific ideology though, saying: “I get to be my own special snowflake.”

As of now, Ivan the Troll, Deterrence Dispensed, and the thousands many more 3D-printed gun enthusiasts connected to each other worldwide, have essentially let the cat out the bag. There is no way to stop the anonymous file sharing of 3D-printed guns online. Whether they’re just pretending to be doing this for reasons of liberty or otherwise, their message is clear: it’s already too late to stop.

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V&A · The Liberator – The World's First 3 D Printed Handgun

Technologies often develop faster than the laws that govern them. When libertarians (those that uphold liberty as a core principle) in Texas exploited 3D printing technology to make their own gun – and especially when they started sharing the files to make it – it unleashed a panic about unregulated design. It was also the day that 3D printing lost its innocence.

The Liberator, 3D printed hand gun, Cody Wilson/Defense Distributed, May 2013, Texas, US. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Cody Wilson, a former law student from Austin, Texas founded Defense Distributed in 2012, to defend the civil liberty of popular access to arms. On 6 May 2013, Wilson took a crucial step in his crusade for popular access to guns when, on a private shooting range in Austin and in the presence of BBC3, he fired the world's first 3D printed gun. The next day, he released the design drawings of the gun online, open source. In the first two days of their release, 100,000 people across the world downloaded the drawings. The invention of this so-called wiki weapon sparked intense debate. It transforms the way we think about new manufacturing technologies and the unregulated sharing of designs online.

The Liberator, first fired 3D printed prototype hand gun, Cody Wilson/Defense Distributed, May 2013, Texas US. Museum no. CD.40:1-3-2014. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Wilson's motivation is a sincere, but very literal and libertarian interpretation of the US Constitution's Second Amendment: the right to bear arms. The ultimate moral and legal authority of that document, for Wilson, justified his actions. He christened the gun 'The Liberator'. Wilson says of his work that he "never thought of it in terms of design" – the design and distribution of the Liberator is for him a political act.

The Liberator is made of fifteen parts of ABS (Acrylonitrile Butadiene Styrene) plastic, printed individually on an industrial grade Stratasys Dimension SST 3D printer. The printing process takes around 20 hours, and the pieces can then be assembled to make a fully functioning firearm with the addition of a single metal component: a standard nail for the ring pin.

The Liberator, 3D printed hand gun, designed by Cody Wilson/Defence Distributed, manufactured by Digits2Widgets, 2013, US. Museum no. CD.1:1 to 16-2013. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

The Liberator STL files were made freely available on Wilson's own search engine for 3D-printable models, DEFCAD. In Wilson's view the Liberator, in its robustness, strength, and refinement, showcases "everything that is great about 3D printing in this one design; the great tour of what is possible in 3D printing".

On 8 May 2013, Wilson and Defense Distributed were ordered by the US Government to remove a number of files from DEFCAD. The Department of State began investigating whether Wilson had willfully violated the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR). These regulations implement the provisions of the Arms Export Control Act (AECA). According to a letter issued by the State Department, by allowing the download of the design files for the Liberator, Wilson could have been contravening US export regulations by "transferring technical data to a foreign person, whether in the United States or abroad".

DEFCAD was ordered to cease hosting and distributing the STL files for the Liberator and a number of other designs. Wilson was not breaking any laws in the production of the firearms themselves. Wilson is fully licensed to manufacture both Title One (rifles, shotguns and handguns) and Title Two weapons (improvised weapons and machine guns). But suspicion revolved around Defense Distributed operating a not-for-profit exchange of information – one of the problems was that Wilson was not seeking to monetise the Liberator.

The potential punishment enforced by ITAR for each violation of the AECA is a ten-year prison sentence. If only 0.1 percent of the 100,000 downloads were to non-US citizens, Wilson was looking at spending the rest of his life in prison. The gun he designed has come to exemplify what Wilson calls an 'empty space in the law'.

The V&A has acquired three Liberators as part of it's Rapid Response Collection: one in its component parts, one assembled, and one that had been fired by Wilson. We have also acquired the CAD files and some 3D printed AK47 and AR15 lower receivers and magazines that show the development of Wilson's thinking from making replacement parts for existing semi-automatic rifles, to the development of the Liberator itself.

This article is an edited extract from '3D Printing an Empty Space in the Law' by Louise Shannon, and was originally published in Volume 38: The Shape of Law, January 2014.

Background image: The Liberator, 3D printed hand gun, designed by Cody Wilson/Defence Distributed, manufactured by Digits2Widgets, 2013, US. Museum no. CD.1:1 to 16-2013. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Stay away from 3D printers! or How the fight against 3D printed weapons is going

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The United States has banned 3D printing of firearms.

Again, you say? Not again, but again: first banned, then allowed, and immediately banned again because of fears about the growth of crime. We tell you what is happening, and why, despite all the anti-hype, 3D printers have nothing to do with it.

Let's start from the beginning: in 2013, American gun enthusiast and ardent defender of the second constitutional amendment, Cody Wilson, made the drawings of a homemade Liberator pistol publicly available, backing up the gift with a demonstration of firing from a sample printed on a Stratasys Dimension 3D printer. And it started: just at that time, 3D printers were on everyone's lips, and therefore certain segments of the public cried out about the inevitable end of the world. They say that now everyone will print pistols, and the whole world will drown in blood. Wired magazine even listed Cody as one of the fifteen "Most Dangerous People in the World." The publication of drawings and the manufacture of 3D printed weapons in the United States was immediately banned, and the posted 3D models were required to be deleted.

Five years have passed. So far, no change. Blueprints are still circulating on the web, there is no pandemic of 3D printed weapons, and the media continues to add fuel to the fire according to an already hackneyed manual, especially when there is another shootout at a school, church or somewhere else. The fact that 3D-printed firearms were not used in any of these cases does not bother anyone. Cody, meanwhile, also did not sit idly by: in 2015, he and his supporters sued the US State Department, and if earlier Cody demanded compliance with the second constitutional amendment guaranteeing the right to own weapons, this time he went on the attack with the first amendment guaranteeing freedom of speech. And so, on July 10 of this year, Wilson won the lawsuit, and the Thingiverse platform, well known to our readers, was immediately filled with 3D models of all kinds of firearm crafts.

Of course, the public reacted immediately and in different ways. One user named PeterNX left the following comment: “I am a Thingiverse member from Germany and fortunately these weapons are not allowed in my country. Please find a way to ensure that it is only available in countries where it is allowed. By the way, my view on this kind of thing is this: most 3D printers are used by creative people. This means that they like to create, not to destroy or kill. Creativity is our hobby, and we should fight for the right to create, not the right to create destructive things.”

The Democratic Party, meanwhile, decided to hype and, according to the good old habit, put all the responsibility on Trump:

“Wait at the local theater, wait at the local school, wait at the local stadium—any public place. This “ghost weapon” will turn into a new wave of violence in the United States,” Senator Richard Blumenthal minted, tapping his finger on the image of an AR-15 assault rifle.
“Donald Trump will be responsible for every 3D printed plastic AR-15 on the streets of our cities. Starting next midnight, bad people will be able to go to Instagram and get instagan, ”Senator Edward Markey echoed him.

We'll come back to the "ghost weapon" later, and "instaghan" is a play on words, something like "instant cannon". That is, instantly printed. Real printers here will grin and shake their heads, but that's not all: is it worth explaining that after such an enchanting pearl, T-shirts with the Instagan logo went on sale literally the next day?

However, they achieved their goal. Trump immediately denied the court's decision, out of habit informing the public through his beloved Twitter in his characteristic manner: “I deal with the sale of 3D-printed weapons to the public. Already talked to the NRA ( US National Rifle Association - approx. ed. ), this is some kind of nonsense! And just the day before yesterday, a federal court imposed a new ban on the distribution of digital models of weapons. From Thingiverse, the models were immediately removed.

But let us return for a moment to the poster in the hands of the senators. Politicians chose AR-15 not by chance, because these carbines are increasingly mentioned in criminal reports. There are only a few small nuances that senators prefer to keep silent about:

  • First of all, neither Wilson nor anyone else has ever made blueprints for a rifle publicly available, and if anyone did, it was only to print harmless cosplay replicas. Wilson published only a 3D model of the lower part of the receiver. Store models don't count, it's just to save money. The reason for this is simple: a serial number is stamped on the receiver. In fact, it is this detail that is recorded, and Cody and his associates advocate a literal interpretation of the second constitutional amendment, that is, unlimited, free possession of weapons without the intervention of any regulatory authorities. All other parts - from the butt to the barrel - and so you can safely buy in any American gun shop without any permits or checks.
  • Secondly, printing the same plastic barrel is not just nonsense, but also a guarantee of early disability retirement or even a nomination for a Darwin award, especially when it comes to an assault rifle with a fairly high-impulse cartridge. The "Liberator" is a "little thing" designed for a low-powered .22 LR cartridge, and this does not give any guarantee that the gun will not explode in the hand. You can only get out of it into the sky, and even then point-blank. Yes, it is theoretically possible to print a rifle from metal, but such a 3D printer will cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. This is the most expensive category of additive hardware. The game is simply not worth the candle.
  • Thirdly, what's the point of risking your own health and printing AR-15 when anyone can buy it, whether on the white or black market? In addition, the Americans already have between five and ten million rifles of this type in their hands, not counting other models, but the crime wave, they say, will begin now that affordable 3D printers have appeared, on which only suicides or complete amateurs will print a rifle?

Actually, this public association of 3D printing with firearms is designed for amateurs. Emphasizing the availability of technology, opponents of the legalization of firearms seek prohibitive measures, but in reality this does not give any positive results. Only the reputation of the additive industry suffers, and suffers quite unfairly. What's even worse is that it can even come to state regulation of the additive industry, and we don't mean GOSTs anymore.

And now let's throw the last stone into the garden of hype-eaters: do you know how Cody Wilson earns? He sells branded Ghost Gunner CNC machines to amateur gunsmiths. Remember the senator's words about the "ghost weapon"? This is the machine he had in mind. It turns out that the person, because of whom the whole world is being intimidated by 3D printed barrels, does not rely on 3D printing himself. He prefers the good old routers. So it goes.

And finally, we remind you that in the Russian Federation handicraft production, as well as the distribution and storage of unregistered weapons, are prosecuted by law. We have warned you. Regarding the publication of the drawings on the Internet, an appeal hearing is scheduled for August 10.

Do you have interesting news? Share your developments with us, and we will tell the whole world about them! We are waiting for your ideas at [email protected].

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