Download the files for free to 3-D print a gun.
Self-described crypto-anarchist and Defense Distributed founder and director Cody Wilson has created technology that could upend the gun control conversation utterly.
Wilson, 29, is fast making global access to unserialized, and therefore untraceable, firearms at the click of a button a reality with projects like the 3D printed gun and a computer-controlled milling machine called the Ghost Gunner. Proliferation of such technology could eventually render current gun control measures, like background checks, waiting periods, or even bans, obsolete.
The Arkansas native, listed as one of the “15 most dangerous men in the world,” first burst onto the scene in 2013. Wilson, then a law student with no engineering experience, created technology which allowed for the downloading and 3D printing of the first untraceable plastic gun dubbed “the Liberator” — a so-called “Wiki Weapon.”
Wilson says that he is not some gun enthusiast looking to mainstream his hobby, but rather is open about his contempt for the government and his pro-anarchy and anti-state agenda.
“I always thought of it as WikiLeaks for guns,” Wilson told The Daily Wire of his original intent. “We were gripped by the possibility of the internet and the politics of it all. We went for the gun, because, okay, that’s a very significant political movement, and we developed the vocabulary and all the rhetoric as we went … eventually locating it in a strand of libertarian philosophy.”
Adhering to Defense Distributed’s ethos and seemingly engineering a sought-after conflict with the federal government, the millennial dropped his blueprints online at his site DEFCAD.org for the world’s free access.