“Federal officials have determined that a 3D gun printed from blueprints available online qualifies as a deadly weapon and worry it could evade metal detectors at courthouses, schools and other public places,” huffingtonpost.com huffs. Wait. A gun is a deadly weapon? Who knew? “The ATF’s testing showed that the weapon, while not quite as powerful as most guns, could penetrate several inches of soft flesh as well as a human skull. The Liberator can only fire one shot before it must be reloaded, but ATF officials said that’s all a determined assassin needs.” Yeah, yeah. So what up with the exploding Liberator? Well . . .
Testing found that the type of material used in the 3D printing was critical to whether the weapon would function properly. The ATF produced several versions of the weapon, some using plastic produced by the company Visijet and others using acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS) plastic material. The Visijet version actually exploded during the test, as seen in the video above.
I bet Visijet wasn’t all that happy about that. Or maybe they were. Government contracts and all. Still, that exploding Liberator thing kinda runs against the government meme that undetectable GLOCKs, I mean Liberators are A REAL DANGER. So they’ve amped-up the hype.
ATF chief of ATF’s firearms technology branch Earl Griffith said he believed ABS material could be used to create an automatic weapon down the line.
“It is something that we’ve never seen before,” said Richard Marianos, an assistant director at ATF. “It can defeat metal detection, and that’s something we’re concerned about.”
And so they should be, in a lot of different ways. Just sayin’ . . .