Orange Tips
They called it the “replicator” on Star Trek. It was the device they went to for food and drink, and for spare parts for the ship. It was a box in the wall, and all you had to do was say “Saurian Brandy” and a glass with the liquid appeared. Mr. Scott was pleased.
Back then it was in some distant future. Now you can buy one on Amazon, ranging in price from a couple hundred to several thousand dollars. 3D printers that can “replicate” devices in a plastic form are here (though we haven’t gotten to Saurian Brandy yet.) At first it was a “model” builder: turning two-dimensional architectural plans into full models.
Like every item “of the future” it has both positives and negatives. The cell phone, only thirty years ago a big box, is now our life in our pocket. It’s a computer, camera, social life, calendar, email, pulse recorder, entertainment, text contact; and oh yeah, the way to call someone. It’s made our life more convenient, and mobile, and made it incredibly difficult to “disconnect” from the rest of the world, or be “in the moment.” 3D Printers have similar ups and downs.
This week’s crisis, buried under all the Russiagate noise made by the President, is about 3D printers. They make whatever a computer “blueprint” can be designed to make, and this week we found that Cody Walker and his company in Texas have designed blueprints for multiple styles of guns: from hand guns to fully automatic assault weapons (they don’t claim the fully automatic part, but in their videos they show one.) The entire gun is made from plastic, piece by piece created by a 3D printer.
In 1988, President Reagan and Congress passed a law requiring any “plastic” gun to have identifiable metallic pieces in the structure, in order to be detectable to security scanners. The new “3D” guns have those pieces as well, but they are simply non-functional additions specifically to meet the laws requirements. You don’t need the metal parts to fire the gun.
So we now are arguing whether the company should be allowed to market their blueprints on the internet, downloadable for immediate gun making use. These guns will be untraceable (no serial numbers) and undetectable by any security device other than actual hand or visual searches. Every part of the gun is plastic, including the magazine. The only metal needed: the bullets.
The NRA has tacitly given its blessing to this, which struck me as strange. The NRA is widely supported by the gun making industry; at first glance the 3D guns would seem to be competition they don’t need. But a statement by Cody Wilson, the blueprint developer, revealed the NRA’s reasoning. Wilson said that; “gun control is undead.” With the publication of his blueprints, everyone can now have a gun, undetectable or traceable. He, and I suspect the NRA, believe they have fundamentally changed the argument.
Wilson believes that his blueprints resolve the gun control debate, making it “dead.” In an interview on CBS This Morning, he stated:
“What’s going to make me comfortable… is when people stop coming into this office and acting like there’s a debate about it. The debate is over,” Wilson said, adding, “The guns are downloadable. The files are in the public domain. You cannot take them back. You can adjust your politics to this reality. You will not ask me to adjust mine.”
A Federal judge has blocked further publication of the blueprints, but the files are out there. And the Trump Administration, who settled a federal lawsuit that was blocking the blueprint release, are sitting on their hands.
So the future is here. Cody Wilson has made the decision for all of us. And while the Federal Courts and the State Attorney Generals will fight a rear-guard action to try to put the “genie back in the bottle,” the reality is that plastic guns that fire real lead bullets are with us. Security will now have to find a new way to detect guns – maybe full body searches at the airport will be standard. Or maybe, like the toy guns they resemble, we can legislate that real plastic guns need orange tips. That way we can tell.
