Lawmakers in the US are fighting to keep blueprints for 3D-printed guns off the internet – but how worried should we be about untraceable plastic firearms?
In 2013, law student Cody Wilson unveiled the Liberator, a plastic handgun produced on a 3D printer that could fire conventional ammunition. He posted the files online so that anybody could download them and, in theory, print their own pistol.
Soon afterwards, he added a second design that would allow people to mill a rifle part called a lower receiver from a block of aluminium. These parts are controlled under US gun regulations and stamped with identifying serial numbers.
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By releasing plans for an untraceable weapon that could be produced at home, Wilson was cutting authorities out of the loop, making effective gun regulation impossible. The US Department of State demanded Wilson remove the files from the internet. They had already been downloaded more than 100,000 times.
Legal battle
Wilson sued the Department of State in response. It relented last month, following a lengthy legal battle, and quietly gave permission for the files to go online from 1 August. Eight US states in turn sued the Department of State and got a temporary restraining order issued to block the release of the files. A hearing on 10 August will decide what happens next.
In amongst all this legal wrangling, a key question seems to have gone unanswered: are these weapons actually a threat to the public? The prospect of roving gangs armed with 3D-printed guns is slim. The Liberator is a clunky and ineffective weapon that can only be fired a few times before the plastic barrel splits. Equally, building your own gun is not illegal in the US, and anyone with the required skills is free to create their own lower receiver on a milling machine if they wish.
And while untraceable firearms sound particularly scary, the US is full of them. Regulations designed to enforce US gun rights prevent the government from creating a searchable computerised database of gun store sales. Instead, the  which must be painstakingly searched by hand. In many states, private sales are unmonitored.
Behind the hysterics over new technology, the crux of the debate lies in whether the government should control access to firearms. Wilson’s files pose a direct challenge to the established order by providing a system for gun production that intentionally excludes government regulators.
As a risk to citizens, the Liberator is underwhelming; it poses a much greater threat to the authority of the US government. An age of easily shareable digital files and reliable fabrication offers resistance to what Wilson called “the collectivisation of manufacture”, putting it outside the control of authorities.
Ultimately, the fate of 3D-printed guns is a distraction from the US’s much larger gun problem – the public health crisis of the tens of thousands of people who die each year as a result of gun violence.
Since 2013, when Wilson first released his plans for the Liberator, no one has been killed by a 3D-printed gun. According to the , an organisation that launched in the same year to collate statistics on gun violence, 65,310 people in the US have been killed by guns since 2014. What’s more, that doesn’t include the roughly 22,000 gun suicides that take place in the US each year. The US has a gun problem – but 3D-printing has nothing to do with it.
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