Abstract
In May 2013, a video was released of a man firing a single shot. Save one nail, his gun was fully produced on a 3D printer. Several days later, the digital designs of the gun were released online, and were downloaded over 100,000 times before the United States’ authorities could close the official website down. This constituted the culmination of a series of events that started almost two years earlier, with the promise of using 3D printer technology to manufacture deadly weapons outside of regular (and regulated) industrial channels. In this chapter, Van Vugt analyses the online debates and the events leading up to the printable gun. He uses a broad and semi-structured tracing method to investigate in detail the different positions in the debate on 3D-printed weapons, and the various steps that led to the creation of the first 3D-printed gun. This method involves the use of a wide variety of new media sources, including blog posts, comments from forums and online communities, images, YouTube videos and so forth.
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Notes
- 1.
Savage 2009.
- 2.
- 3.
Geertz 1994.
- 4.
- 5.
- 6.
Comment in Watson 2012.
- 7.
The uploaded file was deleted from the Thingiverse database before I could obtain it. The supposed description and picture were taken from http://boingboing.net/2011/09/20/3d-printed-ar-15-parts-challenge-firearm-regulation.html.
- 8.
Comment in Doctorow 2011.
- 9.
CNC Gunsmithing 2013.
- 10.
Smith 2011.
- 11.
Pettis, quoted in Biggs 2011.
- 12.
Thingiverse Terms of Use 2012.
- 13.
Guslick 2012.
- 14.
Gibbs 2012.
- 15.
Steele 2013.
- 16.
- 17.
Public Safety and Recreational Firearms Use Protection Act 1993, pp. 202–3.
- 18.
DXLiberty 2012. The original Indiegogo campaign page has been removed; the video is still available on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQ6Q3BfbVBU (Accessed 10 February 2015).
- 19.
Wilson in DXLiberty 2012.
- 20.
Ibid.
- 21.
Ibid.
- 22.
Greenberg 2012b.
- 23.
Estes 2012.
- 24.
Martinez 2012.
- 25.
Cf. Beckhusen 2012.
- 26.
Biggs 2012.
- 27.
Greenberg 2012a.
- 28.
CBS News 2012.
- 29.
Cf. Kaplan 2013.
- 30.
- 31.
Greenberg 2013a.
- 32.
BBC News 2013.
- 33.
The WikiWep DevBlog can be found on: http://defdist.tumblr.com/.
- 34.
Morozov 2013.
- 35.
Wilson 2013.
- 36.
Greenberg 2013b.
- 37.
Ernesto 2013.
- 38.
Wilson 2013.
- 39.
CNN 2013.
- 40.
Doctorow 2012.
- 41.
Daly 2013.
- 42.
Greenberg 2012b.
- 43.
Michael 2013, pp. 17–18.
- 44.
O’Neil 2013, p. 6.
- 45.
Cf. Zittrain 2008.
- 46.
- 47.
Orlikowski 2007.
- 48.
Cf. Bump, 2013.
- 49.
Carr 2013.
- 50.
Vogel 2013.
- 51.
Terms of Use 3D Hubs, n.d.
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van Vugt, G. (2016). The Killer Idea: How Some Gunslinging Anarchists Held Freedom of Speech at Gunpoint. In: van den Berg, B., van der Hof, S., Kosta, E. (eds) 3D Printing. Information Technology and Law Series, vol 26. T.M.C. Asser Press, The Hague. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-6265-096-1_7
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