Printing Me, Printing Guns

In preparation for their October exhibition "3D: Printing the Future", this week the Science Museum were offering the opportunity to come and get yourself 3D scanned by the guys from Digital Native Academy, so they could use your printed figurine in their upcoming displays.

Being a man of some leisure at the moment, it sounded pretty cool, so I paid them a visit. Hopefully, I should be getting a copy of my very own CAD file (or whatever format) of me too, so I'll be able to get a copy of myself printed!

It's amazing what you can do with an X-Box Kinect, lights, a big beast of a computer and custom made turntable.

Here's the results:

They wanted us to strike a pose, so I went for "Why, God, Why?!". Kind of like that bit from the end of Platoon.

Also at the Science Museum, they've got a copy of the "Liberator" 3D printed gun, famously created by Defense Distributed. If you haven't seen the ridiculous promo video for the Liberator on their website, you should definitely check it out. The only non-printed part is the metal firing pin.

Anyway, this particular model was apparently downloaded and printed by a Finnish journalist, was fired under supervision and, as you can see, didn't survive the first shot.   

3D printed guns sounds scary but at present actually creating your own copy of the Liberator isn't as easy as the media tends to make out - today's home printers just aren't up to the task yet so you'd either have to convince a company with industrial printers to make one for you, or buy your own industrial printer, which of course is far more expensive that just buying an actual gun.

That said, technology isn't a stationary thing, so 3D printed guns may soon become a everyday possibility, but they're not the only potential bad thing technologies like this may enable. There's a good article here by Cory Doctorow talking about some of the issues in regulation.

For me though, it's also worth remembering that Defense Distributed chose to release the Liberator at the height of the recent US debate on gun controls, in the wake of the Sandy Hook shootings. My view is that in doing so, they wanted to influence the debate to say "you want to take away our guns, but look, we can make our own anyway" and hence support the continuation of America's current rather lax gun controls. As their website says, their sole aim is to "defend the civil liberty of popular access to arms as guaranteed by the United States Constitution and affirmed by the United States Supreme Court".

Lastly, I was amused to see that one of the objects someone at the Science Museum had scanned was one of Games Workshops' Space Marine figures. I'm not sure Games Workshop would have approved...