There’s a lot of talk out there about the 3D printed gun, much of it hysteria. Daniel Terdiman of C|Net likewise thinks this issue is overblown, and I tend to agree, at least from a technological perspective. A few people have sent me this example of a zip gun, to show how much the concept of a homemade gun can be improved upon just using a little ingenuity and some handiness. If you can’t print, you can always freehand.
While zip guns have been around for a while, I think the hysteria over Defense Distributed’s liberator is more over what it portends than what it actually is. While it’s always been easy to make single shot zip guns, a lot of people uninitiated to firearms wouldn’t ever think they could make one, and probably don’t realize it’s stupidly easy. But most people by now are familiar with printing from computers, and a technology that promises to be as easy as that, but make things like guns, is quite astonishing. While the truth is making a printed gun is not that easy, and making an improvised zip gun not that hard, in the rhetorical debate, it’s easier for the average low-information voter to see the connection between this technology and the obsolescence of gun control in a way that handiwork could never accomplish. I think that’s why the reaction is so strong. The idea of printing a gun floats a “you could do this to” meme that scares the hell out of those in power, and those who aspire to control power.