I.
What kind of man decides to 3D print a gun?
Come and Take It: The Gun Printer's Guide to Thinking Free is Cody Wilson's story about developing the Liberator pistol, the first widely available 3D printed firearm.
The book is not an engineering guide — he censors the technical details of the Liberator, supposedly by demand of the State Department. [1] It's not a political manifesto, at least, not explicitly. To the extent that he has an enemy, it's the boomers; to the extent that he has a specific grievance, it seems to be about being terrorized by the threat of too much protection.
Wilson looks at the West and sees a sick system. The media? There’s no real journalism anymore. Corporations? Collusive engines of public policy. The government? Corrupt. Powerful enough to ruin your life, but incapable of handling new problems as they arise.
At first, I tried to infer Wilson’s ideology — something, something crypto-anarchism — but now, I think it’s better described as an impulse. Some people see a broken system and feel the need to reform it. Others feel the need to tear it down.
Wilson sees a system that needs to be trolled.
For what it’s worth, I think he’s pretty good at it.
II.
A core idea underlying Wilson's thinking seems to be that you cannot directly challenge a powerful consensus. There's no single target, and your own resources are too small. But perhaps you can create a situation that causes the system to turn against itself. Wilson describes trying to create a toxic super-PAC in 2011:
Pick House races with the least amount of spending, then buy up as much of the airwaves as possible for terrible ads.
Turn people completely off to the electoral and political process. It was a fun thought experiment. I'd always had the trickster sensibility and this approach appealed to that part of me. Play by the rules, but ruin the game to show the absurdity of it all.
He filed with the Federal Election Commission, tried to raise funds, and started developing a relationship with a DC consultant. But later, he wondered why he had even bothered:
...we had nothing to be proud of. Sure, we might have gotten lucky at some point in some race and made a little name for ourselves. But the best-case scenario was we’d have just pulled off a kind of prank, a joke. You can be snide and cynical about the electoral process, but that isn’t truly a way of undermining it. Your participation, however ironic, is even a reinforcement of the values you hope to change.
Wilson credits his friend, Benjamin Denio, with giving him the idea for 3D printed guns. At first, he isn't sure if it's even possible. And given the state of 3D printing technology in the 2010s, trying to build such a gun is questionable, at best.
The Liberator is kind of terrible. It can fire one shot before reloading. Built correctly, it has a lifespan of perhaps a dozen shots. Built incorrectly, and it will explode the first time you use it. As a gun, it is strictly worse than guns that could already, legally be made with a few shop tools and a trip to your local hardware store. [2]
Another wrinkle is that, in at least one important sense, the Liberator isn't the world's first 3D printed gun. Michael Guslik, a hobbyist gunsmith, beat Wilson to the punch, printing an AR-15 lower receiver in ABS plastic in 2012. [3] A “lower receiver” is just one part of a rifle that happens to contain the trigger mechanism. By itself, it can't fire bullets.
A 3D printed lower receiver in white plastic (Source: Come and Take It)
But the 3D printed lower receiver is a neat legal hack. There's a Sorites paradox kind of problem: how many gun parts do you need to put together before the assemblage becomes a gun? According to US law, the lower receiver is the gun, the only part that is legally controlled. Everything else you can buy at your local gun shop, or online with a credit card, no questions asked.
In true Hansonian fashion: 3D printed guns are not about guns! In 2012, the popular perception was that information could flow freely, but guns could be kept under control. The quality of the Liberator doesn't matter: its mere existence sends the ideas of freedom of information and gun control on a collision course.
Sure, make the guns with a printer, I thought. But if we could do it, anyone could. The political opportunity wasn’t in manufacturing, then. It was in publishing. In one moment it solidified for me: we could produce a gun with the most widely available 3D printing technology and then freely distribute the plans over the Internet. We’d share the designs as open-source software. Go for the brass ring of system failure. Ben had given us WikiLeaks for guns.
Defense Distributed was born.
III.
Wilson’s rhetoric can be kind of fun, but irritatingly light on some of the details. How did he think that a 3D printed gun would change the world? He never says, explicitly, but I think I can infer his mental model.
Improvised firearms are not particularly difficult to make, but they are perceived as difficult to make. This perception supports gun control legislation in a perception/reality feedback loop: Guns are perceived as controllable, which supports passing laws to control guns, which results in fewer people attempting to acquire guns. Fewer gun owners means fewer gun makers means fewer guns, reinforcing the perception that guns are controllable.
The idea of a 3D printed gun unwinds this. 3D printed guns might be more difficult to make, but are perceived as trivial: just download the file. So, the public perception is that controlling 3D printed guns requires controlling digital files, which are perceived as uncontrollable (“The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it”). This renders gun control less practical, more people are able to acquire guns, and more gun ownership makes legislation less popular.
All of this only has a tenuous connection to physical reality. The idea of a 3D printed gun is doing all of the heavy lifting. The actual 3D printed gun is just there to make the idea convincing. Very postmodern.
An exercise for the intrepid reader: map the pieces of this reasoning onto the Simulacra definitions. Unsurprisingly, Wilson is a fan of Baudrillard.
IV.
Wilson did not grow up in a family where guns were around. He didn't have his finger on the pulse of American gun culture. When he started, he didn't know anything about engineering, ballistics or plastics. If you're trying to build a new kind of gun to troll the world, where do you start?
How about 4chan?
After a summer of nights spent more often than not trolling the Internet imageboards for interest in the project, it was time to get more serious about fund-raising. Already, as I looked around my place, I pictured a pattern of expedition and privation. I was at UT on scholarship, but that didn’t cover the rent, let alone the cost of the supplies and the printer we would eventually need. We’d estimated it would cost eighteen grand all told. I’d pick up any other expenses with my credit cards, if it came to that.
Wilson needed time and money. Time is easy – stop going to class. [4] Money is harder. He bought a camera from Best Buy, shot a pitch video in a closet, and uploaded it to Indiegogo.
And then he returned the camera for a refund because, again, Defense Distributed had almost no money.
For twenty-two days I wrote pitch emails and letters. I watched the Indiegogo progress bar eke past one thousand dollars. At night I reread the crowdfunding site’s terms of service.
“How much money have you got today?” my father would ask.
“Almost two thousand now.”
He laughed with a shrug of disbelief.
Defense Distributed’s first real media attention comes from an interview with Forbes writer Andy Greenberg. Almost immediately afterwards, the Indiegogo campaign is flagged for violating their terms of service.
Fortunately, there’s this other weird project that had launched just a few years earlier. Its adherents talk about currency the way that Wilson talks about guns: the ultimate goal is to forever place them outside of state structures.
Defense Distributed starts taking donations in Bitcoin.
V.
To start printing, Wilson leases a Stratasys printer. The lease is almost immediately canceled. Stratasys claims that manufacturing guns without a license is illegal. Wilson claims that he’s making prototypes for personal study, an activity which does not require any license.
Stratasys isn’t having any of it. There’s a clause in the lease that prohibits using the printer in any way that could damage the business's image. They also report Wilson to the ATF, but he manages to avoid any criminal charges.
This becomes a recurring problem for Defense Distributed: corporations act to protect their public image and, even at this early stage, Wilson was developing a reputation as a dangerous subversive. Being named one of the 15 Most Dangerous People in the World by Wired magazine probably didn't help.
In startup language, Wilson is a non-technical founder: promoting the company, fundraising, recruiting engineering talent, and just generally trying to keep the whole operation from collapsing. Of course, Defense Distributed isn't organized like any typical startup:
I sat half-naked in my office chair, and into the early hours worked through stacks of state and federal forms. Proud and embittered, by then I had started calling DD a hydra. Behold a money company, a gun manufacturer, a publishing corporation. Not only would Defense Distributed do it, not only was there no possible legal or political mechanism to prevent or deter it, but I could find in this slurry of codes and federal regulations a way to make gun printing tax-exempt. We were educational, scientific; we even lessened the burden of some obscure government obligation. An antihumanist charity. I printed triplicates of certifications and copied my penned signature. Not only would the event happen, I’d get it subsidized.
“Remember when I said it was a million dollar idea?” I texted Ben. “It meant we’d have to spend a million.”
Wilson finds sympathetic small business 3D printers to work with. He shoots a video of Michael Guslik's AR-15 lower receiver, even though the first one only lasts 6 rounds before cracking. And he publishes 3D printed magazines, [5] named after politicians who try to legislate a cap on the maximum number of bullets that you can load into a gun: “In a generation or two, no one would remember the fifty-sixth governor of New York, but someone would be working on or printing out a Cuomo mag.”
Most importantly for the Liberator's development, he meets John, an engineer who answered a call for more help on Twitter. Wilson explains Defense Distributed's strategy, to the extent that there is one:
“If the goal has been a plastic pistol, my only intuition is that we create this illusion of progress while we figure out how the hell to do it. At least I know this much is working. Each of these pieces we’re making, they’re like talismans. More powerful props by which we operate in the media. If every week the printed AR shoots twenty more rounds, it drives this terrible, impossible narrative against the state-sanctioned ‘progress’ of technology.”
“You want to make a printed handgun,” John interjected.
“I want the whole gun, though."
While John and other volunteers work on the Liberator, Wilson is busy fundraising. Some of the public engagements are obvious: he gives speeches to libertarian clubs and meets with Mike, a “black, gay libertarian who ran the only gun store to make it into the Austin city limits after 1975.” Bitcoin developer Amir Taaki invites him to speak at an Open Source conference and, later, to anarchists associated with the Occupy movement. But, for the most part, European anarchists aren’t interested in guns. His only significant donor is a mysterious Swiss man, who's motivations not even Wilson understands:
We talked of enemies then, and stakes. I told him I thought when I was done it would be the moment of my greatest contempt. A way to throw the Makers, Statesmen, and startup cheerleaders into disarray. He was unimpressed.
In that mountain air we took a walk, talked about immortal palms, and he asked me to peek a bit beyond good and evil. “Think of the world as doomed to this. Or of us as doomed to this world—not the world as we imagine it will be, but the world as it is.”
Maybe we were past ideology with this work, I admitted. But I couldn’t follow him in that moment. I was unsettled. And not too long thereafter I packed up to leave.
Wilson is also invited to the Bay Area. Varol, a venture capitalist, thinks there’s a great company to fund:
It was going to be a search engine built as enterprise software and sold to military bases.
“Like it or not, we’re talking about Department of Defense here,” Varol said, adding “Dee-oh-Dee.”
“Otherwise,” he went on, “the best you can be is like the Jimmy Wales of the gun movement,” referring to the co-founder and promoter of Wikipedia.
“Which is something,” Varol continued. “But come on! That’s not what you’re looking for.”
It’s a strange relationship. Cody admits to liking the Bay Area Libertarians, but doesn’t agree with their vision. They might bend the rules — at this point, AirBnB and Uber are only a few years old, and still butting heads with regulators — but success means making a few million or billion dollars and then becoming part of the system.
Curtis Yarvin, back when he was only known as “Moldbug” online, shows up too:
Moldbug congratulated me. “By the way, bravo on your stupendous media-whoring. I hope you’ll get over the anarchism talk soon enough, though. I think you’ll find most libertarianism is just born of a frustrated will to power.”
I laughed at the point, well made.
Varol tells Wilson that he can get him a convertible note for a million dollars — a serious seed funding round in 2012 — but it doesn’t go through. It’s not clear if the prospective investors backed out, or if Wilson just didn’t want to take it. One way or another, Varol, Yarvin and the rest of the “Carlyle Club” aren’t transgressive enough for Defense Distributed.
VI.
As they get closer to finishing the Liberator, Defense Distributed starts getting surveilled by government agents. Remarkably, no one knows if it's legal or not. Wilson reviews the Undetectable Firearms Act with a University of Texas professor who remembered him from his first year in law school:
“It seems that Congress has allowed a safe harbor for manufacturers to test guns that might violate the law to see if they do in fact meet the standards in the law. I read that these rules would have protected prototyping as well. But the secretary never made the rules, and then neither did Justice when the ATF was folded into them. So, my question is, in the absence of those rules, is this whole provision void?”
“Well, that’s the right question,” Professor Berman replied, after a moment’s pause. “If the law says ‘Justice shall determine,’ and then Justice does not determine, does that mean DOJ has nullified the safe harbor provision?
The law had existed for over twenty years, but no one had ever made the rules. Somehow, it feels appropriate. Wilson had no idea what he was getting into when he started Defense Distributed. But, as it turns out, neither did anyone else.
Defense Distributed dropped the Liberator on May 6, 2013.
“Come and take it”, indeed.
The Liberator pistol (Source: Come and Take It)
VII.
Did it work?
Literally, yes. The Liberator is a functional, almost completely 3D printed gun (it requires a nail as a firing pin) and, despite some legal challenges after it was first released, it is still available for download today. A later design, the FGC-9, is a practical weapon, and has been reported being used by rebels in Myanmar. [6]
But how seriously should we take Wilson’s claim, “I barely put a million bucks into this and I got you the Second Amendment forever”?
The obvious comparison of Cody Wilson and the Liberator is to Phil Zimmermann and PGP. There was a time when the US regulated cryptography as a munition — it was illegal to export cryptography software that had a key size of more than 40 bits, i.e., weak enough to be easily cracked by the US government. To many engineers, this is ridiculous. Cryptography is math! You’re gonna outlaw math?
Zimmermann’s legal hack was to publish a book: PGP Source Code and Internals. Munitions may be restricted, but publishing a book is guaranteed under the First Amendment. Anyone with the book can scan the pages with an OCR program and compile the source code into working cryptography software. The case against Zimmerman never went to court, and cryptography is no longer subject to export control.
The debate over cryptography may not be over, but it was forever changed. Simply “banning cryptography” is no longer perceived as a viable option.
Unlike PGP, the Liberator has been the subject of several court cases. The FGC-9, a more effective 3D printed firearm, has not. The gun control debate may not be over, but it seems to have faded into the background. People are still making guns, and the will to stop them appears to have dissipated.
Build something that cannot be ignored, and you can change the nature of a policy debate forever. That's Come and Take It. The rest is just commentary.
VIII.
Wilson talks about his book deal in a 2014 interview with ReasonTV:
“I'm much more interested in the storytelling in a kind of Baudrillardian, postmodern visual sense where everything takes on historical poetics. I mean, it’s extremely pretentious.” (Cody Wilson)
“And the hope is what? To inspire the next generation of Cody Wilsons?” (Todd Krainin)
“Mostly to tell a really good story, man. I hope it's worthy of the title of literature.” (Cody Wilson)
Extremely pretentious, hopefully a good story. I can’t think of a better review than that.
[1] In the e-book version, you can still read the censored text by highlighting it.
[2] Not legal advice!
[3] “‘The same plastic used to make Legos,’ Guslick had said. Now tell me the man wasn’t a subversive.”
[4] The following semester, Wilson would learn that he only managed to get a B in his Second Amendment class.
[5] Magazines load bullets into the gun. Clips load bullets into a magazine. Getting this right is a gun culture shibboleth.
[6] The FGC-9 Mk2 was designed by JStark1809, 3socksandcrocs and Ivan the Troll. The “GC” in “FGC-9” stands for “gun control”.
