Chuck Schumer Wants to Stop You From Printing a Gun at Home. Good Luck.

The New York senator’s push to crack down on Wiki Weapons doesn’t get at the source of the problem.

Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.)Ron Sachs/DPA/ZumaPress.com

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


After leading the Senate’s unsuccessful push for background check legislation, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) has a new target: “Wiki Weapons.” At his usual Sunday press conference, Schumer announced his support for legislation that would criminalize the production of firearms made from 3-D printers (which can replicate or “print” plastic objects using digital files).

The bill was introduced in April by Rep. Steve Israel (D-N.Y.) in response to the boasts of University of Texas law student Cody Wilson, who last fall launched a company called Defense Distributed to manufacture the plastic guns. On Monday, Wilson unveiled the first fully-operational prototype, a handgun he calls “the Liberator.” The file has already been downloaded 50,000 times.

But there’s a problem with Schumer’s pitch: The legislation in question would not stop the guns from being made. Israel’s bill is mostly a reauthorization of the Undetectable Firearms Act of 1988, which was originally written to combat the anticipated onslaught of fully plastic Glocks. (It was an onslaught, Bloomberg Businessweek‘s Paul Barrett explained, that never really materialized.) It’s not especially controversial, and part of the reason is that it doesn’t take many significant steps to stop 3-D-printed weapons from being printed.

Israel’s spokeswoman, Samantha Slater, made clear when I interviewed her for a story on the subject in December that the legislation would not regulate 3-D printers themselves. That’s important, because each 3-D printer, sold for as little as $1,000 apiece, currently has the capacity to function as a mini weapons plant. As Schumer put it, “We’re facing a situation where anyone—a felon, a terrorist—can open a gun factory in their garage and the weapons they make will be undetectable. It’s stomach-churning.”

But the proposed bill makes no attempt to regulate who can and cannot purchase said gun factory; 3-D printers are still available for anyone to use. Likewise, while the guns are printed from files that are posted online, there is no restriction in the bill on what kind of 3-D printer files you can post online. (Thingiverse, the internet’s preeminent database of downloadable 3-D printer files, banned Wilson from posting his Defense Distributed instructions, but in response he simply set up his own website, DEFCAD, which he calls, “the island of misfit objects.”)

Israel’s legislation does make a couple of major additions to the original Undetectable Firearms Act. His bill requires the gun’s magazine to adhere to the detectability standard, by including “1 ounce of material type 17-4 PH stainless steel, in a shape resembling an ammunition magazine.” That would render Wilson’s fully plastic “Feinstein” AK-47 magazine and the AR-15 “Cuomo” magazine illegal. It also mandates that any “major component” of the gun “generate an image that accurately depicts the shape of the component.”

Defense Distributed

That would seem to put the Liberator in jeopardy. Wilson’s recipe for printing a gun calls for inserting a six-inch steel firing pin into the receiver of device early on in the process, and then building the rest of the weapon around it. That makes it “detectable” under current law but not under Israel’s version, because he expands the requirements to include all “major components” of the weapon. The detectability is mostly superficial: There’s really no way to stop someone from simply replacing the metal rod with something else.

But Wilson has an easy out. Specifically, the law exempts licensed firearms manufacturers, allowing them to develop plastic firearm prototypes for the purposes of testing their detectability. In March, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, which enforces the Undetectable Firearms Act, granted Wilson a license to do just that. As long as he has that, he can continue building and testing guns, and he can continue to post the results of his tests for anyone to see—he just can’t sell anything.

The larger problem facing Schumer isn’t the legislation’s loopholes, though; it’s gun control writ large. As Wilson himself points out, there are already upwards of 300 million nonplastic firearms currently in circulation in the United States, and they’re pretty easy to get a hold of. (It’s also already perfectly legal to make your gun from normal materials.)

At his press conference, Schumer warned that the Wiki Weapon would be particularly dangerous in the hands of a violent felon who is otherwise prohibited from obtaining firearms. But as the Atlantic Wire‘s Philip Bump documented, that would be kind of a pain, not to mention pretty expensive. Alternatively, given the absence of background checks for private sales and the preponderance of straw purchasing, it’s already pretty easy for felons and other prohibited persons from obtaining ready-made firearms.

Wilson’s Liberator is a breakthrough for a certain kind of techno-anarchist, the kind of person who likes to buy firearms accessories from websites that also hawk copies of Bitcoin Magazine. It is futuristic. But that doesn’t make it the future.

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate