Printing a Gun

And uh? And why are people concerned? And what are the various things we need to take into account. But before we get into all of that, I think it benefits us to talk a little bit about three D printing in general, just in case you aren't familiar with the concept. Right and now, Jonathan and Chris did an episode on three D printing way back in two thou nine. Yeah, that was shortly after printing itself was invented. Um before that, we just communicated by banging rocks together. No one was

alive then, yeah, well there was no no life. We were alive, but anyway, no, no, no, no, no. We did an episode on three D printing back in two thousand nine, which was funny because at that point I had never actually seen one in person. Now we have one in the ophant, we have one in the office. Now. Yeah, we actually have a three D printer here that's very very tiny and we can only print small stuff with it. But it's mostly green because we haven't changed out the plastic.

But what three D printers do. They print stuff in three dimensions and they it's called additive manufacturing, yes, and it's this is different from subtractive manufacturing. Subtractive would be where you take a hunk of stuff and carve away all the stuff you don't want. It's Michael Angelo's David exactly. Yeah, you're you're you cut away everything that doesn't look like David. Right. That's that's the sculpt sculpting point of view. You know, to sculpt an elephant, you cut all the stuff away

that doesn't look like an elephant. But that's very wasteful. It means that all that material you cut away you potentially waste. By using editor of manufacturing, you're printing material. In most cases, in consumer cases at any rate, plastics in very thin layers uh in in in a predetermined design exactly, and these layers can be a micron thick or thinner if you've got very precise three D printing technology, and you do this layer by layer by layer until

finally you have a full object. And it's doing this with plastic and a binding agents so that the plastic sticks together properly. Otherwise it would just fall apart and crumble in your hands. But not not so useful. Useful. It would be very pretty until you try to pick it up. But the but the finished product winds up being a single piece of plastic in this case. Yeah, and we've got other there are other types of three D printers out there. They're not for consumers that can

print in other materials. And we expect then the future we're going to be able to do things like print and metal, even to the point where we can print circuit boards or human organs. Human organs using biological material we can print it maybe glass, anything that would allow you to print using a liquid. Uh, it would it would all be potentially possible using this method. If you're interested in that. We uh. In our other show, Forward Thinking, we talked a little bit about that, So so look

that one up if you want to. Yeah, it's a lot of fun. That was one of the earliest episodes I had a lot of fun talking about that. So what's the big deal with three D printing? Well, it's it's an incredibly disruptive technology. Uh. And I don't necessarily mean that in a negative way, but it does mean that three D printers have the potential to really shake up the way the world works in many ways, like manufacturing and distribution in particular would be very much affected

by three D printers. If you get to the point where a three D printer is within the purchasing range of your average computer user, then that computer user can go out by a three D printer, bring it home by the materials you need to be able to build whatever, and then you can start constructing stuff out of your home. You could download plans from the internet and build things. And those things could be furniture, it could be toys,

it could be tools. Uh. And so that means that you've got these manufacturers out there who design and build stuff that suddenly have to worry about, well, is there going to even be a market for my stuff anymore? Or do I do I change my business models? So instead of selling stuff, I start selling plans for stuff. Right, you start worrying a lot more about the intellectual copyright of of the shape of a table, which is kind of crazy, right, Like, you're no longer thinking I need

to make sure no one shoplifts this thing. You're thinking, I need to make sure no one builds a plan that allows them to to print the same as this thing. Right. So, there are a lot of intellectual property concerns that come up because of three D printing, and some of them are concerns that we never would have thought about before, like how do you copyright a table? You know, but

that's a thing now. So one of the other questions that came up pretty early on when three D printers were starting to become uh, something that the general public was becoming aware of was what happens when someone prints a weapon using one of these things. And for a long time, a lot of people are going like, oh, that's years off, we don't need to worry about it. Yeah. Maybe back in two thousand nine Chris and I were saying that, but two thirteen, hey, we're years off now

and someone has done that. Ye as of as of May four, Star Wars Day, Star Wars Day, it was what a what a bummer? Yeah, that's a nice choice of words. There, Lauren, I could see you like going through your list. What word am I going to use? Uh? Excellent choice. I agree. So we have a fellow by the name of Cody Wilson who describes himself as a co founder and chief evangelist of a group called Defense Distributed.

Very clever. Yeah, it's a nonprofit organization. Yeah, And he he designed a gun that could be created using a three D printer and a common naw uh from a hardware store. And the gun is has sixteen pieces total, one of those pieces being the nail. The other fifteen are all printed by a three D printer, a consumer grade. I think he got it for eight thousand bucks on eBay. Yeah, it was the Stratusist Dimension s ST three D printer, which you could probably buy for a round ten thousand dollars.

He got a secondhand for eight thousand. And we'll get more into the whole story of Stratisis and and it's involvement in this, because it's an interesting part of the story, but we'll save that for a bit later. So he printed out these fifteen pieces. He got the nail to be the sixteenth piece. The nail acted as the firing pin. Now this is the part of a gun that strikes the primer on cartridge so that it ignites, and then the gases from the cartridge are what propelled the bullet

out of the barrel of the gun. Now it doesn't technically need to be metal but um, but the kind of plastic that they use is just a little bit too off to to strike it without deforming. Right. So essentially what would happen is the instead of igniting the gas, the firing pin was just sort of bending. So instead of using that, he decided to use a nail uh

and uh and putting it all together. He wasn't even sure if it was going to hold together or not, but he assembled the gun using the pieces that he had designed um. And he strapped it up to a pole as I recall, and an aluminum a little bit of scaffolding I think, okay, and uh, And he tied a string to it and instead as far away as possible, right, and used the string to pull the trigger uh and had a successful test. It actually fired the bullet uh

and was and it remained intact. Um. That's one of the things that was a big concern was that if you have a gun that's essentially made out of plastic, would it be able to withstand the the forces that a gun experiences when you fire a bullet, And in the case of this one, it seemed to do that. And he also eventually tested it by firing it by hand. Um, you know, it took some took some working up to get to that part, right right. Yeah, during the initial test,

I believe they had a couple of successful firings. But um, but then it it misfired, um, due to a misalignment issue. And uh yeah yeah. Now they point out that the gun that as it's designed, you could actually remove the barrel and replace it with a new barrel. So uh, if there were parts that were that would break down, you could actually replace those parts just by printing out new ones. But the gun itself wouldn't last for more

than a few shots. In fact, one expert I saw said that, in his opinion, if you were using the best kind of plastic possible, you might be able to get between ten and twenty shots. Before it just was an unusable machine. Yeah, although, yeah, it is designed so that you can snap parts in and out right, so you just replace the ones that are not working anymore, and then you could continue to fire, and it's supposed

to be relatively quickly to switch those parts out too. Uh. Well, what Wilson also did was he ended up uploading the design to Mega, which is kim dot COM's file sharing It's really like a locker service where you can store files. They're encrypted so that no one can see what it is that you are doing. Um. He uploaded that and made it freely available to anyone who wanted to get hold of this. Within two days, ten thousand people had downloaded it, and as of the recording of this podcast,

we're recording this on May nine. Forbes reported this morning that it had been downloaded more than one hundred thousand times. Now, keep in mind, not everyone who downloaded that has access to a three D printer. All Right, I'm sure that a lot of that is curiosity. There has been so much buzz about it on the Internet that I'm sure that a lot of people were just looking at it because they could. Yeah, I'm sure there's a percentage of that.

That's just the press that we need to have access to this so we can take a look at it. But uh, and if you're curious about what kind of bullet it fired, it was a thirty eight caliber bullet. Uh and uh he they I've read that they've designed the gun in such a way that you could change out the chamber and barrel, which you could fire different caliber bullets depending upon which ones you were using. But thirty eight was what they used for their tests. Yeah, yeah, yeah,

they're for their successful tests. According to a Forbes Andy Greenberg, who was on the scene for some of these tests and has a couple of really great articles that we did drawn extensively for for this podcast. Um, they switched the barrel out for a rifle cartridge that made the entire thing explode into trapnel. Now what was the name of this gun? They're calling it the Liberator? Yeah, this this might be something that history buffs recognized from World

War Two. Um. During World War Two, the Allies, specifically the United States, I believe, Yeah, they manufactured these one shot forty five. There were one shot pistols, meaning that you could fire them once and then that's it. It's

just not designed to shoot more than one time. And the whole the whole purpose of this was to drop these forty five behind enemy lines and occupied territories occupied France, right the idea being that that the French population would suddenly have access to weapons, but you can only fire at once. It really wasn't a practical weapon. In fact, I don't think that the Allies ever considered it to be something that would allow a real tied to turn.

It was more of an attempt to demoralize the Access powers rather than to actually foment some form of revolution. And propaganda was was a really interesting technology that was used in World War Two. Yeah, so this is one of those examples of propaganda that don't doesn't involve like a song or a poster or a movie. It was actually an act, and in this case, it was an act of distributing uh, weapons of limited use to an

occupied country. And from what I understand, and it doesn't look like it doesn't look like all of them or even most of them were ever actually distributed. It was a little bit of contention about whether or not they were and to whom and when and how many, but and from why I understand most of them without every But anyway, Wilson apparently wanted to to take that name, and uh, it kind of goes along with his philosophy.

But his philosophy is interesting We will cover that in this episode, but I think we're going to save that for the end because it's it's pretty it's pretty dynamic. It is dynamic. It's intense, is what it is. So yeah, a hundred thousand folks around or at least a hundred thousand people have downloaded these plans as of the recruding this podcast. By the time this publishes, I'm sure that number will be way bigger. YEA. Yeah, well, I mean it's you could have everyone just lose interest, but I

don't think that's going to happen with this particular product. So, uh, that's that's where the actual logistics are. That's you know what the state of the gun is. This gun, by the way, if you ever have if you haven't seen a picture of it, it looks really clunky and it has to be because that plastic has to be pretty thick to withstand the pressures. And we'll talk more about what those actually are in the in the next section. But um, it's not a sleek weapon by any means.

It is not, no, no, and I mean you know the kind of plastics that are that are being used are Um, it's it's a B S which is a chrylum nitrial bet to dyeing styrene um. It's a it's a thermoplastic blend. It's used in lots of everyday items like like molded tool handles, electric shavers, lego bricks are made of this stuff. So wow, And we'll talk a little bit about why that causes a concern, you know,

the materials used. But before we really get into the concerns and and you know, the philosophy of of Cody Wilson and other elements and the response that we've seen so far, and these are early days when we're recording this, I think we need to take a quick break. Oh, getting back into the subject at hand. There are a lot of concerns that come up with this idea of

being able to print a gun at home. Some of these you might think of as knee jerk responses that that don't take everything into account, But I think there are some concerns that are you can't just dismiss easily. One is that if you're talking about a plastic gun, let's say that a plastic gun is being used in a crime. Uh, the concern is that you wouldn't really

be able to trace that gun back. You know, guns right now have these grooves that are in the barrels so that when you fire the bullet, it makes the bullets start to spin, giving it more stability, but it also ends up carving uh into the specific pattern. Yeah, and so by looking at the pattern, you can identify, depending on how what shape the bullets in, you can identify the type of firearm that fired that bullet. If you're talking about a smooth barreled plastic gun, there's no

way of telling. And even if it had some sort of grooves in it, you could design those in such a way where it's unique to your gun, but without anyone being able to tell. But it could be designed. It could be literally unique to your gun. No one would know where to even start looking for that, because if it's all just a file on your computer, how would how would anyone know unless they're already watching you.

I'm not even gonna get into that because I think that's what fuels the whole Liberator in the first place. But the you know, that's that's the concerns that if it was used in a crime, it would be very difficult, if not impossible, to trace back. Uh. They're also undetectable, meaning that if you only have a tiny amount of metal in them and you go through a metal detector, the metal detector may not it might not pick up

that mail. Yeah. Now, now, in this case, Cody Wilson was actually very careful about following the letter, if not at all the spirit of the law in the creation of this he um uh. He took his company to the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives in order to get a federal license to manufacture and distribute firearms, and furthermore, put a small metal cube at completely non functional six ounds metal cube into the gun to make

it detectable by metal detectors. Right, because the US Undetectable Firearms Act makes it illegal to manufacture any sort of undetectable weapon. Because this this isn't the first time that a potentially undetectable weapon has been made. You can. They're guns that use ceramic. There are other plastic weapons as well that have used molded plastic as opposed to three D printed plastic. But uh, that was a big concern.

So now he followed the rules. Wilson did. His His version of the gun, in fact, had that metal in it, so it was not undetectable. But here's but nothing saying that someone who downloads that would still have the same Yeah, follow the same rules. If you download the blueprint and printed it out yourself, you could be you could just say, well, I'm not I'm not going to put the metal slug in there, and therefore it is going to be virtually

undetectable by a metal detector. And however, we should mention that that those three D scanners that they've put in a lot of airports would pick the gun up. It would be able to recognize it on on your person, right, So so if if you're using a three D scanner, it's still going to pick these things up. If you are using just metal detectors, it wouldn't. So that that's

raised some security concerns obviously. Um and uh, you know, Wilson, I think he took some perverse joy and the fact that he was following the law while creating something that is potentially incredibly disruptive. Absolutely, he's are we getting into. But I think it's fair to say that he took some pleasure. And they did. They did install a metal detector or walk through metal detector in their workshop for testing to make sure that that that met those requirements.

Uh and uh So to get to other concerns, beyond the fact that you can't trace it, you can't necessarily detect it. Um. Another concerns there's there's no background check, right if you download those plans, there's no control there about who gets access to that gun. So in the United States, convicts can't you know, people who have been convicted of a felony, they can't buy a gun legally in the United States. I mean, they could buy it illegally,

but you can't go through any legal means of buying it. Um. That's what the whole background check thing is supposed to protect against in the United States. So this bypasses it. If you are able, if you have the means or the access to a three D printer, and you have a criminal record and you otherwise could not legally buy a firearm, you could make one yourself this way. And that's something that a lot of critics have pointed out,

saying you have just invalidated this whole part of the system. Wilson, for his part, not a big fan of gun control, that doesn't seem to be very concerned about that so much though that in March he released a video of UM a three D print aple UM a R fifteen lower receiver, which is the part that's regulated. UM. The rest of the parts you can purchase without without all that much trouble and UM and that hypothetically could lock

into these these other purchasable parts and uh. And thus you know, like again bypassed by passing that whole problem, or what at what he saw as a problem. Uh. Other things that you have to keep in mind. Remember we were talking about that plastic earlier, about how how strong it was, and the type of plastic used and

the type of printer being used. Uh. Jonathan Rally, who's a three D printing expert UM, said in The Guardian that that you have to be really careful because not everyone out there has access to the same sort of three D printers, were the same sort of raw materials being used. And just because one printed gun was able to withstand the pressure and force that a that this that the liberator did in the initial tests, it doesn't mean that something that you print using a different kind

of printer could do the same thing. UM. It may be that the material you print is weaker than the one that that Wilson used, and Wilson. Wilson also did treat the plastics after they were printed in order to make them stronger, So you could potentially end up with a device that could explode in your hand and cause you huge amounts of damage, if not even kill you

right out, you know, out right. In fact, he said that it's far more likely someone will be injured by a failing weapon before anyone is ever deliberately shot by so uh that that was his big concern was not only is it something that could potentially, you know, one person could potentially used to kill someone else, it's something that someone who's just curious about it could end up severely injuring themselves because the materials they are using just

can't hold up to the pressures and even even unit to unit um uh you know, and any anything that you've printed like that could be misaligned, uh, you know, on a relatively small scale that you might not be able to see from the outside of the right. Yeah, if you if your printer does not have the same level of precision, then that could also be a problem. Things could not be things might not be in the right alignment because or if just something glorps into the

wrong place. That's you know that that could be warping is an issue. There's also the problem that there could be uh nylon plastic powder within the barrel itself, which can be flammable and could actually cause an explosion in your hand because you know, you're talking about this intense heat and pressure. In fact, let's talk about that for

a second. According to the Guardian, the pressure inside a gun typically reaches about a thousand atmospheres and temperatures exceed two hundred degrees celsius when you fire off a gun. So the gun the bullets flying out because of the expanding gas that is created when the primary ignites and gets the propellant going right. So this expanding gas is what pushes that bullet out. According again, according to the Guardian, about of that energy from the expanded gas transfers to

the bullet. Another thirty percent of the energy transfers to the barrel in the form of heat, and heat tends to weaken plastic. So if you aren't using heat treated plastic, or you're using a weaker kind of plastic, that might be enough for that gun to show are in your hands or otherwise fail in a way that could cause

you some pretty serious injury. And uh, Philip Boyce, who was an expert with Forensic Scientific he's the one who said that with a really good plastic gun, you might get off as many as ten to twenty shots before it failed. So beyond that, these guns aren't necessarily that accurate. You know, if it's a smooth barrel gun, Uh, it's not necessarily going to guide the bullet in any way.

That's yeah. It would be one of those things where you know, the closer you are, obviously are to whatever the target is the d're aiming at, the more likely you'll hit it. But you might wind up just being a you know, a stormtrooper. Yeah, lots of you pew very little actually, and when you've only got you know, up to ten bullets, that's not yeah. So so this is prompted many politicians and law enforcement officials to come out and criticize this whole idea of three D printed guns.

It's not a big surprise, you know. I mentioned earlier that the printer that Wilson used was purchased the Stratusis Dimension S S T three D printer. Uh, they actually were using a least one originally from the company. Yeah, they leased it from Stratusis, but as of October Stratusis figured out what they were doing and seized their property back and said no thanks. Yeah, And you might say,

why would why do they care? They care because three D printer companies, the companies that are designing these things for consumers, Uh, they don't want the government to come in and start regulating and legislating the stuff they make because that's going to affect their business. So it could get really expensive, it could get to be a huge just licensing issue. Right. Uh, you guys might not be aware of this, but three ds are not three D scanners,

but color scanners. Color scanners have have technology built into them that will prevent them from doing things like copying and reproducing current. See it's a form of DRM. Yeah, it's really yeah, it really kind of is. It's it's this idea of protecting it so that, you know, counterfeiters can't just sit there at home and scan and print money because once scanner's got to be that specific, that became an issue. So you build that into the device itself where it will not uh copy and print that

kind of thing. The same sort of thing may be true with three D printers. Politicians might say, you have to find a way to prevent people from printing this particular type of peace and then suddenly they have to implement that. That drives up production costs for the three D printer side. It drives up the consumer costs for three D printers. That hurts the whole industry. That's that's the viewpoint of the manufacturers and why they would not be so keen on having their own materials made to

build something like a gun. So uh, So you had the concern from the companies there as far as the politicians and law enforcement goes. Law enforcement in the UK, the Metropolitan Police pointed out that making or own being a gun like this would be illegal unless you were a registered firearms dealer with the proper credentials and quote unquote authorities. Otherwise it would just owning a gun like this in the UK would be considered illegal. Um. If you used in a in any way, then that would

get you a pretty stiff penalty. Uh. In the United States, there were senators from California, Senators and congress people, i should say, uh, and council members in one case from California Washington, d C. And New York who have all expressed concern about three D printing gun printed guns, and UH talked about getting coming up with legislation that can prevent it, helping helping to revamp that Undetectable Firearms Act

that we were talking about earlier. This makes it complicated because there's really only so much that you can do from a legal perspective, like how do you how do you prevent something that the cats already out of the bag. You know, a hundred thousand people have downloaded this as of today when we're recording this, so it's you know, it's kind of hard to say, let's stop this from happening now. It's we all know that once something's on the internet, for Internet is forever. Yeah, So I did

want to mention that on the private side. Other there were other roadblocks to the actual creation of this thing. UH. Wilson had his crowdfunding campaign campaign through indie go Go shut down um in August UM also to workshop spaces that he had been using denied him access after learning what he was up to. And furthermore, he originally had some of these files up on thing verse by maker

Butt and down took it down. Yeah, the three D printing community in general is reacting to this in very much the same sort of way, saying that you know, now you're bringing unwanted attention to our our our industry

or our hobby. Uh. You know, they've always said there's going to be a disruptive kind of technology, but they never thought of it in the terms of they didn't frame it in the terms of disruptive being potentially violent, which is not what Wilson is saying, although he also really deflects any kind of criticism that even wanders towards

the violence question. Uh, to the point where, Uh, there are times where I was reading some of his responses when I'm thinking, like this guy took notes in the second Matrix movie and said, how can I talk more like the architect where I say a lot but don't really say anything, or at least don't answer any questions. I think that's fair. You know, I've read it's it's harsh, it's hard criticism that. But yeah, we've the two of us both have probably read a lot of things that

that Wilson said. Well, not only that what he said, but what he wouldn't say, Like if anyone confronted him directly with questions about, well, what about folks who uh, you know, like convicts, are you saying that convicts should have access to weapons? And instead of answering that question, he would deflect it into something else philosophical. So he

he just refuses to answer those sort of things. Um, so he may very well have coherent and uh and and a good strong argument for that sort of case, but he's not presenting it. So the recording of this podcast right right, maybe maybe by this afternoon he said something that completely addresses my concerns. But he's described himself as a cryptoanarchist, which that already should kind of raise alarm flags for certain people. Anarchy is a tough position

to really defend. I think it is, and that this is getting into into a personal personal philosophy here and uh and and Jonathan and I are are a little bit more touchy feely, We're okay. So the way I view it is that he's taken a particular stance where uh, he's really put a lot of value on the individual, which I don't disagree with. I think, you know, individuality

is very important. Individual freedoms are very important, and of course, there's you know, all the different arguments you can make about how if you trade liberty for security, then you don't really have either. I've heard all these arguments before. Um, but uh, you know, there he seems very dismissive of the idea of governments in general, so essentially saying that the system is broken, and not only is it broken,

but it cannot be fixed. That at this point the government system is completely beholden to special interests and corporations, it does not truly represent people, it's doing more harm than good, it's getting more and more intrusive in our daily lives, and and and there's no way to fix it,

and that therefore it must be destroyed from the inside. Yeah, or at least at least ignored, right right, Really, he doesn't so much stepped outside of and said, yeah, he's he's not necessarily condoning that we all rise up against our tyrannical overlords, but necessarily more like, let's just not

pay attention to them anymore. Which, yeah, there's there's there's a quote on the website of Defense Distributed where it says, how did government's behave if they must one day operate on the assumption that any and every citizen has near instant access to a firearm through the Internet. Let's find out. Yeah, so I mean here, here's here's my view. The three D printing of guns was something that was going to happen. It was bound to happen, uh, sooner or later. It

just happened to happen in uh. And there is going to have to be a reaction to that, Like, what's the right way of handling this? The cavalier attitude of Cody Wilson seems specifically geared to get a rise out

of people. Absolutely, and and you know, like and he's and he's so intelligently and he quotes these these really great philosophers when he's talking about all of these the you know, he talks about for co and how liberty is under siege from the vast machine of the ruling class control and and about you know, Milton and how in order to be truly good you must be presented with the freedom to be evil. Um. Right, We're getting

into some clockwork orange type stuff at this point. And it's and it's that kind of thing that you know, is intellectually delightful to discuss. But but when when you get into practical matters. Uh, some problems rise up, right, right. So, if we lived in a storybook world where governments were the evil stepmother and we're all the perky little protagonist who the poor orphan, who's who's pure of heart and has the best of intentions, that's one thing, right, that's

of course you want the protagonist to win. But reality is way more murky. I wouldn't go so far as to say government is inherently evil, nor would I go so far as to say individuals are inherently good. There's so much shade of gray on all sides, of sides. Yeah, And it's it's really people that make up a government. Some people are good, some people are not so good.

And and that's true within the population. We're within the ruling class, and some systems maybe they are Maybe they favor the people who are not so good over the ones that are good. And that just means to me that you have to fix the system. Now to Wilson, it seems to mean you should abandon the system altogether.

I just don't understand what replaces it. Uh. And one of his quotes was it seemed very tongue in cheek to me, but it was and I'm paraphrasing here, but he was essentially saying that he was he would imagine a future where, uh, the the individual citizen is making everything that they need using things like three D printers, and meanwhile, government funded drones are flying overheads searching out all the dissidents, and that he's eager to see this

future come to pass. And I'm thinking, I don't want to live in the road warrior world. I look really bad in spiky shoulder paths. I don't I don't want to go to Bartertown. Master Blaster scares me so anyway. But that's that's kind of like his his philosophy, and um, you know, I'm not gonna go any further about what my own personal philosophy is. I think it's fairly clear already from what I've said, but I only I definitely

find it troubling. But I mean, now it's a fact of life, So now we do have to deal with it, and we were gonna have to deal with it sometime or other. So it's not like I'm not going to get too angry at Wilson for doing this because someone was going to right the way he's done it is a little more snarky than I would have cared for, but you know, that's that's life. Um. So it'll be interesting to see how this, how this plays out, whether or not, uh, it ends up even being a big deal.

It's completely possible that this ends up being far more fuss than what it it's worth, right, especially for another few years, you know, before before people have I mean, you know, right now, this kind of technology costs about ten grand to get access to. It's way easier to

go ahead and get a gun, even illegally money. Yeah, yeah, or I'm you know, like hypothetically you could make one yourself for under ten grand if I mean, that's you know, it's a lot of knowledge that you have to bend to that to you know, you know, file all the metal into all the everything, you had to machine the parts and everything. But um, but I mean, you know,

people have been making their own firearms for what four years? Yeah, and it's and it's even legal to make your own firearms under a very specific criteria in several countries and clean the United States. But so really, when you when you look at that level, it's not like, um, it's not like this is the most unheard of thing in

the world. It's new, which is part of why it's a little and it's it's digital, which which a lot of people get kind of titchy about, right, same sort of thing that you know, the music industry, moving industry, television industry, they all got worried because it meant that you could distribute something on a much wider scale than before.

But uh, yeah, we're not quite to the point where everyone's going to be printing out their own guns, especially with ones that are going to be reliable and not just blow up, and the reliable enough to to actually want to use. But it's it's an interesting step, it's an interesting day, and I'm really curious to see how it turns out. Uh it's is uh something that will

keep our eyes on. Well, we'll definitely, I'm sure we'll do another episode related to this in the future and revisit the topic once things have really kind of shaken out, because you know, I know that it's going to be legislation proposed about this, and how that turns out we'll all depend upon, uh you know, which politicians are the ones suggesting it, and however all the different lobbies follow suit. It'll be. It'll be interesting and a little bit scary

to watch. Yep, but that's the world we live in, folks, Interesting and a little bit scary. Not all rainbows and ukuleles. Well it isn't my house, but well because I've got a ukulele rainbow collection at home. So al right, guys, Well that that wraps up this discussion on tech stuff. If you guys have any suggestions for future topics, I recommend you get in touch with us. We have an email address It's tech stuff at Discovery dot com, or

drop us a line on Facebook or Twitter. Our handle at both those locations is tech Stuff, H. S. W and Lauren and I will talk to you again really soon for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com