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It may be true this pistol was a piece of junk. But for its size - only 5 inches long & weighing a pound, this single-shot pistol was conceived as an instrument of chaos in the darkest times of World War II. THE FP-45 PISTOL was inexpensive by design. Constructed mostly of welded, stamped sheet metal parts with a die-cast zinc cocking piece, each gun cost the federal government a bit over $2, boxed for delivery with 10 rounds of .45 ACP ammunition. Only 5 inches long and weighing a pound, this single-shot pistol was conceived as an instrument of...

Amazon banned the sale of a gun book on Wednesday night for an unexplained violation of the company's rules. The listing for The Liberator Code Book: An Exercise in Freedom of Speech, which had been available on Amazon since Aug. 1, was removed from Amazon's website. The web address where the book had previously been listed now redirects to an error page. The web address where a Kindle book titled The Liberator: An .STL File Published as a Book also now redirects to an error page. Both books had been published through Amazon's self-publication services. Amazon told the Washington Free...

There is a long history of banning books both here in the United States and abroad. Books that come to mind are D. H. Lawerence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, and a whole host of others. In more recent times, the Supreme Court has rejected efforts to ban books just because someone didn't like it. See Island Trees School District v. Pico (1982) Here is a book that you need to buy that many in the gun control industry would like to see banned. It is called The Liberator Code Book: An Exercise in Free Speech. The book...

A 3D printing hobbyist, Yoshitomo Imura, was arrested in Japan for suspicion of possessing crude guns that had been printed from plans available on the Internet.  He had posted videos on the Internet showing him demonstrating the items.  They appear to be firing crude blanks, or perhaps homemade ammunition of some kind.  The recoil in the video is suspiciously straight back, with virtually no rotation, indicating that it may be simulated. .   From thebangladeshtoday.com: Mr Imura reportedly said he had not realised printing the guns was illegal. No ammunition was found for the crude, plastic guns.    At...

Cody Wilson holds the Liberator, a fully-functional firearm that can be created using a 3D-printer. After setting the Internet abuzz with a blueprint for a functional 3D-printable firearm, Cody Wilson recently signed a book deal to chronicle his journey, and in his spare time the “dark web” aficionado is placing the finishing touches on a Bitcoin anonymizer project. Wilson, 25, has been busy to say the least. Last spring he uploaded the blueprint for his 3D-printable gun dubbed the Liberator, and within two days the file was downloaded over 100,000 times. He pitched his story as a non-fiction book and...

The world's first printable gun has been deemed a serious safety and security concern after a gun printed by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms exploded before it was even fired. This danger is matched by the problem with fully-functioning 3-D printed guns - they work all too well. The blueprint for the 3-D gun known as the Liberator was made available online six months ago by the group Defense Distributed with the aim of enabling anyone to print a gun with a 3-D printer six months ago. The State Department demanded the design be taken offline but not...

Image from Defense Distributed The DEFCAD community has released an upgraded version of the Defense Distributed Liberator 3D printed pistol. As they are individuals on the Internet and not an organization, they have never received a letter from any government entity asking them not to distribute computer files.Improvements include barrels for the .25 ACP cartridge and for the .45 ACP cartridge. No information was supplied to determine if any test firing of these cartridges has been done. I suspect that the .25 ACP version would work, but I have doubts about the .45 ACP barrel. While the working pressures are...

Image from Defense DistributedAustralian police in New South Wales have printed out two versions of the liberator 3D printed pistol and tested them to destruction. No technical details of the testing were released, just videos of the guns blowing up. The video does not show any cartridges used, nor does it detail the type of plastic used. These are critical elements for anyone trying to actually understand what happened. Without this information, the video is just political theater, propaganda designed to frighten timid people away from this technology. Compare the test fire shown in the New South Wales video with...

This video was found at Defense Distributed. It shows the test firing of the Lulz Liberator, a $25 3D printed pistol. It is only 30 seconds long, so it has been edited to only show the firing. The video loads quickly. Defense Distributed labels it as "For Australia". Link to Gun Watch and Video

Brazil is the No. 1 emerging market in search for blueprints for the Liberator, the 3D printable handgun reported on here at Forbes on May 5. Brazil is third behind the United States and Spain in the number of internet users currently in a mad rush to download the blueprints to the Liberator, the world’s first printable hand gun, the Liberator’s creators at Defense Distributed said.Between Monday and Thursday alone, the blueprints were downloaded by more than 100,000 people from the website Mega.com.nz, run by Kim Dotcom, considered by U.S. authorities as public enemy No. 1 when it comes to...

Found this over on DefDist’s twitter feed, and it appears to be a Liberator printed in New Hampshire. The first of many, I’d bet.

Nobody gets the crowds rocking harder than the Motor City Madman, and his appearance at the NRA Convention on Sunday was no exception. This experience, however, began a little different than the others. Sure there was talk of guns and politics and the spirit of the hunt, but that soon gave way to a more somber moment. The moment when the Nuge revealed one of his darkest secrets. "I've got to admit something right here. I feel guilty. You know it's hard to find ammo. I'm sorry … I've got it all. "I'm really sorry about that. I've got...

Will these 3D printed guns be used in the commission of crime? Undoubtedly. But will they also be used for self-defense? Equally surely. If you ban 3D printed guns, how does this change? With law-abiding citizens obeying the law, only criminals will be the ones who get these relatively inexpensive guns. Is this a civil liberties issue? To me this is a way to lower the cost of people obtaining guns -- a big benefit given that it is poor minorities who live in high crime urban areas who benefit the most from owning guns. Yet, it looks as if...

A few days after the blueprints for the world’s first printable gun were published online, Defense Distributed has been asked by the State Department to pull them down, citing possible arms trafficking violations. The blueprints, however, are still available on The Pirate Bay and many other file-sharing sites, which adds a 3D chapter to the IP enforcement debate.The Pirate Bay says it welcomes the blueprints and has no intention of taking the files down. Enter DEFCAD, a site dedicated to hosting designs that have been banned at Thingiverse. Namely, the entirely printable 3D gun design which clocked up more than...

If gun control advocates hoped to prevent blueprints for the world’s first fully 3D-printable gun from spreading online, that horse has now left the barn about a hundred thousand times. That’s the number of downloads of the 3D-printable file for the so-called “Liberator” gun that the high-tech gunsmithing group Defense Distributed has seen in just the last two days, a member of the group tells me. The gun’s CAD files have been ten times more popular than any component the group has previously made available, parts that have included the body of an AR-15 and the magazine for an AK-47.”This...

Sen. Charles Schumer said Monday he is putting his full support behind legislation aimed at stopping the production of undetectable plastic guns that can be made using relatively cheap 3-D printers. A Texas-based libertarian group has successfully been able to produce a functioning plastic handgun using a 3-D printer that anyone could purchase, Schumer said. He said the group plans to post on the Internet how to go about making this cheap, but functioning weapon that could pass through metal detectors at airports and elsewhere. Schumer (D-N.Y.) said he is joining Rep. Steve Israel (D-Huntington) who has pushed for new...

(snip) Similarly, honest citizens should not have a general obligation to disclose to the government what firearms they’ve built or bought, provided they are for honest purposes. An honest person may wish to keep this information private to avoid becoming the target of thieves or unwanted political attacks. A desire for private firearms ownership is not proof of “criminal intent.” And if the government has a specific concern that someone is planning a crime with a gun (or any other tool), the burden of proof should be on the government prior to any search or other invasion of his privacy....

St. Louis Gun Rights Examiner has been avidly following the "Wiki Weapon" project, by Defense Distributed, to design a "printed" gun, that could be entirely made on a consumer grade 3-D printer. Even this correspondent, though, did not really believe that that goal was realistic in any near term time frame. Printable "high capacity" magazines and printable lower receivers for AR-15 "assault weapons," still requiring commercially manufactured metal parts to function as a complete firearm, seemed ambitious enough. The forcible citizen disarmament lobby certainly seems to have thought so.As it turns out, though, I should have had more faith...

Michael Thad Carter for ForbesRemember when Defense Distributed's Cody Wilson promised to unveil an entirely 3D-printed handgun made of ABS plastic with the firing pin its only metal part? Well, he's apparently done it. Forbes's Andy Greenberg was given a sneak peek of the result, and it looks and appears to be quite an achievement. If all goes well, the plans will be unveiled at Defcad.org next week.Writes Greenberg: Eight months ago, Cody Wilson set out to create the world’s first entirely 3D-printable handgun.Now he has.Early next week, Wilson, a 25-year University of Texas law student and founder of the...

In this YouTube video, more details are revealed about the first pistol to be completely produced by a 3D printer. There is one metal part, but it is made from a common nail, and is so ubiquitous that it does not offer any impediment to the creation of these pistols. Interesting details in this video include how the pistol is loaded. As I thought previously, the .380 ACP, 9x17, 9mm Kurtz, or 9mm Corto, all different designations for the same cartridge, is pushed into the chamber of the barrel by hand, then the barrel is simply snapped into place in...